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

• Author: Hawkins, Howie
• Position: Review

A 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.

Michael Shuman focuses on what communities can do now to begin creating community-based economies. He suggests that rather than trying to directly take on American's ideological commitment to capitalism's supposed virtues, we should start by taking concrete steps to increase community self-reliance, in particular by anchoring wealth in communities with new ownership structures that limit capital's mobility. These steps are not fully socialist, but they do impinge on one of capitalism's key conditions.

Since the early 1970s, decisions by corporations to move operations to another state or abroad have cost US workers and communities some 75 million jobs. Most of these jobs were in the better paid manufacturing sector, with the bulk of the remaining jobs lost being backroom operations that support service and retail firms. Capital mobility is thus a major reason why 80% of US households have seen their incomes stagnate or decline over this same period.

Going Local is a manifesto for communities that want to take on corporate mobility and corporate power generally through community action and municipal political power. The author, Michael Shuman, is co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank based in Washington, DC. For Greens in, or aspiring to, local public office, this book is essential reading.

Shuman's, platform for creating self-reliant communities can be summed up in three planks:

1. Import Substitution--Increase the share of the local economy based on local production for local use;

2. Community Corporations--Replace corporate absentee ownership with local ownership and community control of investment; and

3. Power, Not Pork--Demand general revenue sharing from the federal government, not more dependence-creating federal grants programs.

Although all three planks are critical to Shuman's platform, I am going to focus on the second plank: anchoring wealth to communities through community corporations.

Community Corporations

As Shuman defines community corporations, their ownership and control is institutionally bound to local people. Not surprisingly, Shuman includes municipal public enterprises, worker and consumer cooperatives, credit unions, and community-based non-profits in the category of community corporations. What is more novel is his advocacy of an other type of community corporation: the for-profit corporation with a residential restriction on stock ownership. This locally-owned for-profit community corporation is one where voting shares are, restricted to local residents and where no one interest can own more than a small...