Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age.

• Author: Hawkins, Howie
• Position: Review

A Further Political Analysis of Michael H. Shuman's Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, 1998. 309 pages. New York: Free Press, $19.

Community-based eco-socialism is not lacking in a convincing analysis of capitalism's inherent antihuman and anti-ecological dynamic. Nor is it lacking for visions for how an alternative would work. Its biggest problem is developing a viable strategy for getting there. Michael Shuman's Going Local suggests many ways to begin. The book is a manifesto for community-based economics that all Greens engaged in local politics should read, study, and debate.

I argued in the first part of this review (S/R 22) that one of the ways Shuman suggests, the community corporation, illustrates the inherent radicalism of community-based economics. By tying ownership to communities--whether through cooperatives, municipals, or simply residential restrictions on stock ownership in otherwise conventional capitalist firms--community corporations undermine one of capitalism's key conditions: capital mobility.

The community corporation is just one of the ways Shuman suggests for building community self-reliance in the face of corporate globalization. I want to focus in this second part of the review on some of the other planks in Shuman's platform for community-based economics.

Import Substitution

The conventional wisdom in the economics profession is that increasing trade benefits everyone because of the theory of comparative advantage. This theory holds that if each locality and country makes the products they are most efficient at producing, then each locality and country will enjoy the cheapest prices for all goods.

In reality, the gaps between rich and poor regions and countries has grown as trade has expanded over the last few centuries. When he originated the theory of comparative advantage in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo assumed that capital would be locally owned. But in practice, capital has been mobile, moving production to the cheapest labor markets and reinvesting the profits anywhere in the world to get the highest returns. Thus free trade with capital mobility systematically produces economic polarization between a few wealth centers and poverty for the vast majority.

Furthermore, as Shuman puts it, the theory of comparative advantage "has a very specific meaning given to the term efficiency--the ability of a firm to maximize its profits....the bottom...