The Localist Manifesto
section 9
jobs and work
Nowhere is the imperative to move defiantly into uncharted territory more pressing than in the way we approach work. By what standard of practicality can one justify taking down an entire industry and deliberately destroying jobs? Answering this question requires that we break decisively with ordinary ways of thinking about social well-being. If we can do that, we position ourselves to carry out a revolution unlike any that has yet occurred.
In a corporate economy, a job is how most of the 99% acquire a claim on the good things in life. Corporation officials locate a place well-suited to making money (a steady supply of the right kind of workers, low taxes, a river nearby for free waste disposal, and so on) and build an office or plant there. They surround it with an asphalt parking lot. Politicians use our taxes to build roads to it and supply it with access to utilities. Then they announce that jobs are available for the local workforce. Those lucky enough to get and keep such a job must buy, maintain, fuel, and insure an automobile, spend a big part of each day sitting in it, take orders and follow instructions while on the job, and at quitting time drive home to an apartment or house that costs (on average, per monthly payment) a third to a half of their monthly income. We must also be willing to uproot our families from kinship networks and ancestral homes, from well-loved lands and gathering sites, and move to wherever jobs at that moment happen to be available. We must, in short, submit without question to yet another heartless abstraction (the “labor market”) and then find meaning and pleasure in whatever a rootless individual might purchase from a faithless corporation. If we are willing to live like that, then we can make ends meet and have a little left over to spend as we please. As long as we put money in the pockets of banks, real estate companies, auto companies, oil companies, and insurance companies – and if we are working obediently on the job to create wealth for our employer – then we are entitled to live comfortably during the hours we are not at work. To enjoy those comforts is to enjoy freedom as the 1% have always been happy to define it, since we only gain such freedom by putting ourselves at their beck and call.
The prosperity of such an economy and our well-being within it hinge on its capacity to expand – without pause and by any means necessary. No growth, no jobs. The fortunes of the 99% are thus tied to the performance of the 1% as traders and investors. Our access to the good things in life is controlled by people who are indifferent to our well-being: the 1% is responsive to market conditions. These markets are not in any meaningful sense “free” but managed and manipulated by de facto monopolies in league with the regulatory agencies of the government. When these manipulations go awry, the same government steps in to bail out corporate and banking monopolies with money it has collected, as taxes, from the 99%. The process whereby jobs are created and destroyed is controlled by banks and corporations – we have no say whatsoever in investment decisions. Should citizens concerned about a particular danger or injustice in the system – environmental degradation, health or safety issues, income inequality, climate change – mobilize to challenge the prerogatives of the 1%, we are told that jobs are at stake. Along with the usual cast of servile legislators and commentators, activists then find themselves facing off against fellow 99%ers fighting to maintain their only access to the good life.
It is quite an arrangement. The means devised by chiefs, lords, kings, and parliaments since the dawn of human history to control a subject population are many and wondrous, but none have worked more reliably than this one. The jobs/growth order has proven particularly effective in securing the allegiance of people who, should they view their situation from any standpoint outside that framework, would readily see that they are being screwed. Consider the period of greatest affluence in the most prosperous of the jobs/growth economies – the U.S. from 1945 to 1975. With all its major competitors in ruins after the war, the U.S. economy grew steadily for three decades. This growth allowed millions of Americans to taste affluence, but at a cost that we are only now being compelled to calculate. The entire landscape was redesigned to accommodate automobiles: humans were condemned to waste time in them, die in them when they crashed, and draw into their lungs with every breath the toxins they release into the atmosphere. Over 80,000 synthetic chemicals, the vast majority untested, were introduced into the environment. Cancer, respiratory and immune system disorders, obesity and diabetes, birth defects and hormonal imbalances – a whole array of maladies became more common as pollution levels rose and chemicals seeped into every corner of daily life. A system of agriculture that only functions with heavy loads of debt and massive inputs of chemicals was developed by corporation-serving scientists and imposed on farmers as a matter of government policy. Debt ruined most of the farmers. The chemicals are killing the rivers – fewer than half of America’s rivers can now support life. Other scientists, meanwhile, were busy designing food to nourish bank accounts rather than bodies. Psychologists were put to work creating ads that would dupe consumers into buying food that weakened and sickened them. We handed over our children to a military charged with policing the phases of the jobs/growth process that are consummated in other lands. Generals commanded them to drop napalm and bombs on entire populations and lay waste to civilizations. They were trained to be marauders, killers, torturers, and bureaucrats. And through it all, we worked, worked, worked – 40 hours, sometimes 60 hours a week, handing over nearly everything we earned to the government, a bank, or a corporation for the privilege of keeping a roof over our head and raising a family in modest comfort.
That is what a jobs/growth economy gets you when it is working well. Since the mid-70s, that economy has faltered. Lately it has not been working well at all. Those who control the economy hope to revive it by intensifying the assault on the environment, making war a permanent state of affairs, and reducing the number of jobs that provide access to the good life. They are anticipating unrest and have prepared for it – attack dogs and SWAT teams along the pipelines, the criminalization of independent journalism and dissent, the militarization of police agencies, a swarm of drones released into the air to monitor the movement of bodies, surveillance of internet and phone communications to keep tabs on minds, the tireless fomenting of mistrust and animosity among people in varying racial and ethnic communities so that systemic injustices can be perpetuated with impunity. All of these outrages have been perpetrated with a fully bipartisan, haughtily self-righteous, y’all-can-jest-eat-shit-and-die kind of swagger.
That is what a jobs/growth economy looks like when it no longer works well enough to secure allegiance in the old way. It should look familiar – we have seen it before. There is a word for a system that drains all the wealth out of a territory with no regard for the well-being of the natives, the land, or for any rights that the natives might claim as inhabitants of the land – colonialism. Two-and-a-half centuries after throwing off the subjugation of a foreign power we have become colonists again, subjects now of a homegrown empire that is far more vicious and desperate than the one headed up by a powdered monarch. As indignities go, a tax on tea and the quartering of a few insolent redcoats are pretty meager when compared to the methods used currently to bleed us dry and keep us down. John Lennon was right – however clever or free we might imagine ourselves to be, we are still peasants in the eyes of the overlords who now dictate what kinds of jobs need doing and how our natural wealth is to be used.
Robin 99 will not create any jobs. He has no plans for growing the economy. The jobs/growth model of economic development is the problem, not the solution. Instead of demanding more jobs in a corporate economy we will be providing more work in our local economies. This work would be out the door, down the block, a walk or bike ride away through a neighborhood hospitable to walkers and bikers. It would not require that you surrender your rights and dignity to a corporate employer. You would not have to maintain an automobile unless you chose to. More of us could work in ways that foster the acquisition of craft and skill and that stimulate an affectionate, dutiful communion with our fellows and the patch of ground that we occupy together. We would not have to work so damn hard and so damn long. With free housing, reduced transportation needs, and goods and services now being provided by people whose expenses have been similarly reduced (and thus are in a position to sell goods and services more cheaply and have a time-tested moral incentive – good neighborliness – for doing so), we could unwind a bit, slow down a bit, enjoy each moment as it passes in a place that we govern and develop together.
None of this is possible unless we get big banks, big corporations, and big governments off our backs. We can only do that if the good things in life are made available in a manner that doesn’t require big banks, big corporations, and big governments. The good life must become something that we create locally, by our own efforts. We should seek it directly in voluntary consort with friends and neighbors rather than by chasing riches as self-interested individuals hoping to buy our way to happiness.
Finally, the transition from a jobs/growth economy to local self-sufficiency offers the best, maybe the only, opportunity we have for facing up to the environmental crisis at hand. A jobs/growth economy steers us inexorably towards wholesale ecological collapse and robs us of the freedom and initiative we need to enforce a change of direction. A resettling of the land to encourage small enterprise and neighborhood autonomy brings within reach solutions to many of our problems. It will allow us to end the division between place of residence and place of work and, with it, our overuse of automobiles. Some neighborhoods might decide to remove cars altogether from residential areas and park the ones they need for traveling purposes in lots on the perimeter. They could tear up the streets and fill the areas surrounding their homes with walkways, gardens, and commons – a permanent block party. The revival of small farming would allow us to raise crops more responsibly and thus without the chemical runoff that is poisoning rivers and seas. It would also allow us to liberate cows, pigs, and chickens from the horrendous misery inflicted upon them by industrial methods of raising and slaughtering animals. These animals could be brought home to small farmers or working groups devoted to animal husbandry and incorporated into the daily lives – the routines and the recipes – of people who want to work with them and care for them as kindred beings. Children especially would have their moral sensibilities and their self-confidence invigorated by cultivating relationships of care and duty with animals who are not pets or zoo inmates. Local manure would replace petroleum as fertilizer for tomatoes and beans. The end of real estate development would dramatically slow deforestation, clear-cutting, and whole species extinction around the world – a demand-side revolution with immediate planetary ramifications. A local economy would concern itself with repairing things, mending things, making things to last. It would not treat every vacant lot or run-down building as an invitation to order up tons of concrete, plywood, and two-by-fours so that some fat-cat developer and his buddies at Chase or Wells Fargo can throw up another revenue generator. It would not build malls, skyscrapers, or more bloated mansions for the rich. It would drastically scale back our need for energy delivered by centralized uranium-, fossil fuel-, or solar-powered grids. It would not produce the waste endemic to a global jobs/growth economy – of food and water, of fuel and packaging material, and of the human effort required to manufacture, sell, and transport enormous quantities of needless junk. Make more things locally and you can shut down coal-fired factories in other countries without consulting the authoritarians who run them. The “jobs” rationale for continuing to extract fossil fuels will lose force as local communities assume responsibility for the livelihood that those jobs now provide. The strategy of pitting workers against environmentalists would no longer be effective, as meaningful work and environmental stewardship are both folded into the day-to-day doings of resettled communities. The 1% will be hard-pressed to find a serviceable replacement.
These are solutions appropriate to the 99% – the people who will bear the brunt of such disasters as environmental degradation and climate chaos bring in tow. The regime of banks and corporations offers solutions – carbon capture, cap and trade, “clean” or “green” this and that – that leave the jobs/growth order intact. These solutions solve nothing. They are designed to lull us to sleep while the 1% carry on as they please. Their solutions to the environmental crisis are yet more ways they play us for fools and, for as long as we vote for Democrats or Republicans, continue to get away with it.
The jobs/growth system of economic development will collapse – it is only a matter of time. That spectacle will make for some bone-chilling evening news. While the 1% uses the armed might at its command to control whatever is left of fuel resources, arable land, and potable water, the job-holding part of the 99% will be invited to find refuge behind whatever bulwarks of affluence are still standing and feel relieved that they, at least, are safe for now. That sentiment will stifle the outrage they would otherwise feel as they watch millions of the less fortunate lose their homes, their livelihoods, and their lives. The quandary posed by the holocaust – how could we let such a thing happen? – will rear its head again. Centuries from now, historians will discuss genocide and ecocide in the same chapter, as two phases of a single outbreak of civilized madness. The dates that the afflicted civilizations collapsed will be commemorated as holidays, replete with fireworks, block parties, and somber speeches reminding celebrants of the perils of ignorance and submissiveness.
We need to find a way into a different future. The rebuilding by free men and women of local, ecologically-attuned economies provides such a way. This strategy allows us to proceed peacefully, equitably, and on our own terms – as befits a people sufficiently secure in our homes and in our right to self-governance that we can show compassion and generosity in our dealings with the world beyond. But we need to get started, before the land becomes too poisoned and militarized to salvage and before the people we need to enlist in our efforts grow so full of fear that they embrace the protection of toxin racketeers, war-hungry generals, and power-hungry politicians. The allegiance shown by millions of Americans to the most heartless and hateful of these suggests that we are closer than we might think to that point of no return.
Occupy the Hearth 