Self-reliant communities: local responses to global challenges
Creators: name: Fredericks, Richard Mark
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: In recent years, a great deal of interest has arisen with respect to the somewhat mysterious process of globalization. All matter of claims are made by our political and economic leaders in its defense. Presumably, globalization is the de facto and globally defining process toward which we all must bow. It is touted as being an inevitable and evolutionary development toward a one-world economy and a one-world consumer culture which, while possessing a few short-term, negative side-effects, promises to raise the quality of living for the world's people. Globalization is characterized by a newly developed and extreme mobility of capital. Recent advancements in computer and telecommunications technologies have allowed transnational corporations to manage far-flung corporate empires, and to move at a moment's notice to wherever operating expenses promise to be the least, and profits the most. These same technological advancements have given powerful impetus to the international investment community, who can now virtually instantaneously transfer truly massive sums in a ceaseless, 24-hour-a-day speculative frenzy. Globalization can be conceptualized as comprising three important sub-trends: i) economic consolidation, as more and more economic power is concentrated into the hands of a tiny coterie of transnational corporations and the powerful and newly arisen international investment community; ii) disintegration, as extremes in capital mobility confer on corporations and investors the ability to maximize gain regardless of the costs to communities, workplaces, and the environment — anything fixed in time and space; and iii) re-localization, as groups everywhere struggle to break free from the spell of globalization and chart their own course. Globalized capital now knows no allegiance to anything but itself, and in its ceaseless drive to maximize gain it often leaves in its wake plundered communities and ecosystems. Relocalization represents a growing impulse to survive or thwart the relentless pursuits of globalization. While re-localization can take any of several forms — ethnic conflict, tribalism, Balkanization, and the rise in the U.S. of gated communities complete with armed guards — its most positive expression is identified herein as the Community Self-Reliance (CS-R) movement. The CS-R movement represents a departure from current understandings of new social movements in that it is a composite movement, really a social movement of new social movements, all orbiting around the goal of self-reliant communities as a means to stave off or survive the deleterious effects of globalization. Of the virtually innumerable constituent movements and individual strategies or initiatives that comprise the CS-R movement, I examine several of the more noteworthy in the following study. The Community Economic Development movement is a particularly key player in the CS-R movement, particularly through its bid to democratize the economy. I examine, in particular, the cooperative phenomenon, including marketing, consumer and workers' cooperatives. As well, community currency schemes are examined, with emphasis on the Massachusetts Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy (SHARE) and B.C.'s highly successful Local Employment and Trade System (LETS). With respect to regaining access to and democratizing control over farmland and agriculture potential, particularly in the face of especially aggressive agribusinesses determined to cement their control over the world's food supply, I examine the rapidly growing Community Supported Agriculture movement along with Community Land Trusts. The Intentional Community movement, along with its subsidiary co-housing movement, represent powerful strains within the overarching CS-R movement which are determined to redefine the manner in which we live. In today's fragmented and individualized world, many people are waking up to a profound sense of social alienation and are joining with others to create unique and innovative ways of living. Finally, I examine a proposed model for the alternative, de-centralized polity. Known as the shire system, its fullest articulation is by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry who apply the model to the state of Vermont. In all, I attempt to establish the veracity and validity of the community self-reliance movement, both conceptually as a composite movement and as a bonafide opponent and option to global economic consolidation and social and ecological disintegration.