It is likely that many people agree with the kinds of criticisms argued in previous chapters but believe that there is no realistic alternative to the present economy, despite its faults. The task taken up in this chapter is to persuade readers that a viable and attractive alternative can be imagined, and that it would not only defuse the global problems now threatening to destroy us but would greatly improve our quality of life. Before outlining it there are a few preliminary issues to deal with.
A basic dilemma running through previous chapters has been the opposition in the economic domain between freedom and regulation. The argument has been that a satisfactory economy must involve a considerable amount of regulation, that is, restraining, redirecting or preventing the freedom to produce, purchase and invest. This means that in some way “society” needs to influence or make various important economic decisions. There must, in other words, be a considerable amount of “socialism”. All economies presently have a lot of it, even the most enthusiastically capitalist ones. All governments regulate the economy to some extent. Our problem is to work out a form that is acceptable given the state of the world now, which clearly requires a great deal of social control over economic affairs.
Socialism locates the required control in the state. Most Socialists say much of the economy can be left to market forces operating within guidelines but they insist on a predominantly centralised arrangement. This could be quite democratic whereby the control is exercised by an elected government, thus avoiding the totalitarian version of socialism usually identified with Stalin or North Korea. However, it will be argued below that because the global situation we are in rules out an affluent society and requires highly localised and self-sufficient economies, centralised control cannot be the right model. Some functions will need to be coordinated centrally but power, initiative and action cannot be centralised and must remain down at the local level. This point is of the utmost importance; in an era when lifestyles cannot be sustainable and just as well as being affluent, economies have to be small, localised and run by local citizens. The reasons will be spelled out below.
Is “communism” an option? The term is very ambiguous and some take it to mean things that others reject. One common idea is that productive (as distinct from private) property should be collectively, publicly, owned and not privately owned. However, in the economy to be advocated much and possibly most productive property would be privately owned, in the form of small family and cooperative farms and firms, although all large-scale operations would be public in some form. But the small private firms would have to conform to guidelines that prohibited anti-social or ecologically damaging behaviour (such as no one gets an income without contributing.)
You would agree of course that everyone would, or should agree with Marx’s definition of communism. He thought that the fundamental element in a good post-capitalist society would be that all would contribute as much as they were able, so a strong or talented person would contribute more than a less able person, but at the end of the day each would receive according to their differing needs. The best example of his version of a communist economy is the typical family.
Obviously Marx’s vision has nothing to do with the system most people associate with the term communism, wherein state power is in the hands of a single authoritarian party which makes all the important decisions and forces everyone to conform. There are many reasons why this is not what we want but the main one is again that the kind of economy explained below will not work if power is located in a centralised state apparatus, let alone one with totalitarian power.
That means the answer is not socialism or communism…it is anarchism. Again, unfortunately the term is highly ambiguous and some people mean by it arrangements that are not being endorsed below. The essential feature of the version of anarchism to be detailed involves locating control in the hands of all citizens, and might best be thought of as thoroughly participatory democracy. The detail follows.
It is of the utmost importance to recognise that we are not playing a game of preferences here; we are not in the business of constructing a wish list of items to go into our preferred model or ideal. Our global situation, confronting us with savage limits to growth and gross injustice, determines that we have no choice about the basic nature of a viable future economy. Chapter 2 explained that when the limits to growth are understood, the key constraints have to be:
It has to be an economic system which cuts rich-world resource per capita consumption and ecological impact by something like 80%, and which is stable, i.e., with no growth at all.
Therefore lifestyles and systems must be far simpler than they are in the present economy, in terms of material consumption and infrastructures etc.
These things can only be done if the most common settlement is the small-scale, highly self-sufficient and self-governing community that is running its largely cooperative and self-sufficient local economy in order to meet needs. This includes the things that are necessary to provide everyone with a high quality of life.
It must have a high degree of equality and all must be provided for.
There must be a high level of collectivism. People must seek arrangements that prioritise what’s best for the town. There must be attitudes and values which predispose people to want to help everyone to thrive. There must be strong solidarity and community. Without these elements the town will not work well.
The economy cannot be driven by market forces or the profit motive. There could still be a place for both, carrying out minor functions, but the needs of the town must determine what is done. The town must set up the rules, cooperatives, committees and working-bees to build and run the projects it needs.
None of this can be done unless there is enormous cultural change. The new system cannot be established by force. It can only be adopted voluntarily and willingly, by people who understand that it is necessary and who see it as attractive. The goal cannot be wealth acquisition; the driving concern must be to enjoy a high quality of life through frugal ways and non-material sources of satisfaction. People must be content with what is materially sufficient for a life that is spiritually rich, in the sense of being meaningful, enjoyable and inspiring. Town leisure committees would work on enriching life through activities and sources of enjoyment that do not involve material consumption.
Let us think about what makes for a high quality of life. Here again is the list of factors given above.
Adequate good quality food, shelter and clothing.
Good health.
Friends, soul mates.
Having meaning and purpose, interesting things to do.
Belonging to, and being involved in, a supportive community concerned for the welfare of all.
Being valued, appreciated and respected, especially for making a contribution to one’s community.
Feeling secure from avoidable adversity such as unemployment, poverty, social breakdown.
Freedom from chronic stress, including insufficient income, overwork, isolation and loneliness, depression, unpleasant living places, traffic.
Not having to work hard or struggle; a relaxed pace, time.
Opportunity to do creative things, craft, art, writing, to think, converse, recreate, grow “spiritually”.
Freedom and autonomy over one’s life and work.
Closeness to nature. Living in a beautiful environment.
Having sources of regeneration and “battery charging”, such as gardening, hobbies, convivial company, landscape.
Having a sense of place, a home.
Familiarity and stability; freedom from threat of disruption, especially due to “development” and economic recession.
Pride in one’s family, town, society, institutions, nation; recognition that our ways are basically admirable. We care, we try to minimise competition, selfishness, disadvantage, inequality and winner-take-all ways. The way we think and discuss is rational, respectful and mature.
Peace of mind. Some degree of capacity to feel alright about things, oneself, one’s society, the planet. Reasons to be optimistic.
To repeat, the extremely important point about this list is that, perhaps apart from health, none of the items requires material wealth or affluent lifestyles or complex industrial systems or a high GDP. All require no more than sensible social and economic arrangements. All can be enjoyed in very materially poor communities via quite simple technical systems. The key material concept must be sufficiency. The central paradox is that material simplicity actually enables “spiritual” wealth, primarily by liberating us from the precarious and can’t-win rat-race struggle imposed by the present economy.
Chapter 3 explained that the global sustainability predicament cannot be solved unless there is transition to a very different kind of society. There must be an integrated mixture of new social, geographical, political, cultural and economic elements. It is not possible to discuss the economic system separately from all the others. The new economy involves and cannot work without new kinds of settlements, political processes, ideas and values. So the following discussion is about how a whole new social system must function; it is not just about economics as is usually conceived.
It is now necessary to begin providing some detail on these elements. This should be taken as broad-brush, indicating the kinds of arrangements needed while recognising that the detail is open to debate. However, the core elements are not.
The Simpler Way is a vision of a sustainable and just society that enables a high quality of life for all based on acceptance of the need for very low levels of resource consumption, that is acceptance of much simpler lifestyles and systems. The focal point here must be not the national economy, let alone the global economy, but the local economy: the neighbourhood, town or suburb. The basic unit has to be the small, highly self-sufficient, self-governing and cooperative community, with an economy which never grows. This cannot exist unless there is a very different culture, one in which people understand and accept the new ideas, values and dispositions explained above, and find the new ways intrinsically attractive and rewarding. (See thesimplerway.info.)
The fact that present society is nowhere near such an outlook and that there is a low probability that we might ever achieve it is irrelevant here. The point is that a sustainable and just society enabling all to live well in a world of severely limited resources has to be some kind of Simpler Way. The reference below is mostly to the small town, but it also applies to the neighbourhoods and suburbs of (small) cities.
Living more simply does not mean deprivation or hardship. It means being content with what is sufficient for comfort, hygiene, efficiency, etc. Most of our basic needs can be met by quite simple and resource-cheap devices and ways, compared with those taken for granted and idolised in consumer society. How many pairs of shoes would suffice? How big a house would be quite adequate? There is no hardship in wearing old and patched clothes most of the time, or keeping an old bike going.
The goal is to get to the stage in which people find life satisfaction in non-material pursuits, such as gardening, arts and crafts, making things and learning things, personal development, enjoying practising a valued livelihood and participating in community affairs.
Living in materially simple ways can greatly reduce the amount of money a person needs to earn. The above discussion of housing makes the point. The average home buyer pays at least ten times too much for a house (excluding land.) This indicates how the Simpler Way will liberate people from having to earn large amounts of money, enabling most of their time to be put into more fulfilling activities. Various advocates of simplicity throughout history, such as Henry David Thoreau, realised the importance of liberating oneself from the enslavement of pursuing wealth and status, thereby giving oneself a lot of time and resources to do rewarding things.
Living in ways that minimise resource use should not be seen as an irksome effort that must be made in order to save the planet. These ways can be important sources of life satisfaction. There can be great enjoyment in activities such as growing food, “husbanding” resources, making rather than buying, recycling, composting, repairing, bottling fruit, making things last, and running a relatively self-sufficient household economy. In addition, there are the enjoyable activities undertaken with others, such as helping on working-bees and committees and in the drama club, giving a sense of contributing to the richness of community life.
In the new society the household, neighbourhood and the local small community will be at the centre of most people’s lives. Most people will only need to go to paid work one or two days a week. There will be many interesting skills to use in productive and leisure activities around the house, garden and neighbourhood, and in a well-organised community there will be many festivals, concerts, working-bees, art and craft groups and other activities to participate in. The education and leisure committee will be one of the most important groups helping to make the town a great place to live in.
So the Simpler Way is actually the richer way, in terms of life satisfactions. It aligns with the Buddhist goal of a life “simple in means but rich in ends.”
We must develop as much self-sufficiency as we reasonably can at the national level (meaning far less global trade), at the household level, and especially at the neighbourhood, suburban, town and local regional levels. Most importantly we need to convert our presently barren city neighbourhoods and suburbs into thriving local economies which produce much of what they need from local resources.
Households can again become significant producers of vegetables, fruit, poultry, preserves, fish, repairs, clothing, furniture, R&D, entertainment and leisure activities, and community service and support.
Neighbourhoods would contain many small businesses such as the local bakery. Many of us could get to work by bicycle or on foot. Most of the basic goods and services would come from within a few kilometres of where we live, so there would be far less need for transport, or for cars to get to work. Therefore, we could dig up many roads, greatly increasing the land area available for community gardens, workshops, ponds, animals and forests in cities. Leisure and entertainment will also be mostly localised, further reducing car use.
Households, backyard businesses and community co-operatives engaged in craft and hobby production could provide most of our honey, clothing, crockery, preserves, vegetables, furniture, construction, fruit, fish and poultry. It is much more satisfying to produce most things in craft ways rather than in industrial factories. However, we would retain some but few larger mass production factories and sources of materials, such as mines, steel works and railways. It is explained below that there would obviously still be (some) complex factories, universities, hospitals and other socially valuable high-tech ways.
Almost all food could come from within a few hundred metres of where we live, most of it from right within existing towns and suburbs. The sources would be: a) intensive home gardens, b) community gardens and cooperatives, such as for poultry, orchards and fish production (using ponds, aquaculture tanks, streams and lakes), c) many small market gardens and farms located within and close to suburbs and towns, d) extensive development of commons, especially for animal grazing and production of fruit, nuts, fish, poultry, herbs, and many materials such as bamboo, clay and timber. Horses could do some of the work, especially carting produce to town stores and taking food scraps back to the farms. Many people could work on these nearby farms, and they would also be leisure and holiday resources.
The scope for food self-sufficiency within households and small communities is extremely high. It takes about 1,000 square metres to feed one Australian via agribusiness (after excluding exports and not including the large non-improved grazing areas.) My Remaking Settlements study (Trainer, 2019) estimated that less than one third of this area would be needed using alternative ways. Blazey (1999) documents the capacity for a family of three to meet its vegetable needs from less than one backyard, via intensive home gardening, high-yield seeds, multi-cropping, nutrient recycling, and eating mostly plant foods. Blazey also documents production of 1000 times as much food from each square metre of home gardening as can come from the same area devoted to standard beef production in Australia.
Most of your neighbourhood could become a Permaculture jungle, an “edible landscape” crammed with long-lived, largely self-maintaining productive plants, especially on the public spaces, parks, footpaths and the roads that have been dug up. Much food would be free, growing beside roads and in parks. Food production would involve little or no fuel use, ploughing, packaging, storage, refrigeration, pesticides, marketing, waste dumping or transport. Having food produced close to where people live would enable all nutrients to be recycled back to the soil through compost heaps, animals, composting toilets and methane gas digesters. Therefore, there would be no need for garbage trucks, sewers, pumping stations or treatment works and there would be no need for the fertiliser industry. All nutrients would cycle through kitchens, toilets, animal pens, compost heaps and methane gas digesters back to garden soils. This is crucial; a sustainable society must have complete nutrient recycling, and therefore it must have a local agriculture.
The local food committee would research what useful plants from around the world thrive in your local conditions, and investigate the development of food, materials, chemical and medicinal products from these. Synthetics including paints, glues and plastics would be derived primarily from plant materials. Our town landscapes would be full of these resources. For instance, salad greens, timber, fruit, fibres, oils, medicinal herbs and craft materials would be growing wild as “weeds” on the commons throughout your neighbourhood.
Meat consumption would be greatly reduced as we moved to eating more plant foods, but many small animals such as poultry, rabbits and fish could be kept in small pens and ponds spread throughout our settlements. The animals could be fed largely on kitchen and garden scraps, and by free-ranging on commons, while providing manure and adding to the aesthetic and leisure resources of our settlements. Some wool, milk and leather could come from sheep and goats grazing meadows within and close to settlements. The animals would help to recycle all nutrients from households back to soils.
The commons would be of great economic and social value. They would include woodlots, bamboo patches, orchards, herb gardens, ponds, meadows, sheds, clay pits, machinery, workshops, windmills, water wheels, bicycles, vehicles for hire, buildings for craft groups, drama clubs, etc. All would be owned and operated by the community, via committees and working-bees. The most important one would be the community centre, including workshops, craft rooms, library, meeting rooms, art gallery, recycling racks, theatre, museum, surplus exchange and a café. Petrol stations no longer needed can be converted into these centres. Commons can be located in parks, beside railway lines, on abandoned factory sites, and on the many roads that will no longer be needed for transport. They would be maintained by voluntary working-bees and committees and would provide many free goods.
Settlement design will focus on basic Permaculture principles, such as the intensive use of all food-producing niches within a space (“stacking”), complex ecosystems (not monocultures), multiple cropping and overlapping functions, for example poultry provide meat, eggs, feathers, pest control, cultivation, fertiliser and leisure resources. Rooftops and walls can be garden spaces. These techniques will enable huge reductions in the present land area and energy costs for the provision of food and materials. They will replace the present global agribusiness food supply system which is extremely resource-intensive and ecologically destructive.
It will not be necessary for everyone to be involved in agricultural activities. Providing food now takes perhaps one-fifth of work time, when transport, packaging and marketing are added to the farm work. That’s about eight hours a week per worker. Intensive home gardening might require only about four person-hours per week per household, so averaged across the town and including food production on nearby small farms it would probably require well below the present amount of time going into food production. The difference derives from the much greater productivity of home gardens and small farms than big agribusiness farms achieve, and the elimination of much intermediary work such as transport and packaging (and producing all those trucks etc.) In addition, much food production would be a leisure activity.
Most of the above discussion does not include local small farm food production. Chris Smaje’s detailed analysis (2020) estimates (making very cautious assumptions) that Britain, currently a large-scale food importer, could be fed by small farms employing about 10% of the workforce. Small farms are in fact more efficient even in narrow monetary terms than big agribusiness farms, and far better when ecological and resource costs are taken into account.
There is great scope for a high level of community self-sufficiency in many areas in addition to food, notably entertainment, infrastructure maintenance, services, health and aged care, education, building and repairs. By developing these capacities we can dramatically reduce overall resource use, cutting travel, transport packaging and waste treatment costs, and the need to build freeways, ships and airports.
The significance of these ways of getting national resource demands down is easily underestimated. Here is an impressive illustration of the magnitude of the reductions that can be achieved. As noted above, our study of egg supply (Trainer, Malik and Lenzen, 2019) found that the dollar and energy cost of eggs produced via the normal agribusiness-supermarket path was more than fifty times those of eggs produced in backyards and co-operatives.
The supermarket path requires trucks, distant agribusiness farms and fishing fleets and factories to produce poultry feed and chemicals, gigantic factory farm sheds, electricity, packaging, supermarkets, managerial and marketing systems, computers and removal of manures and packaging “wastes”. Agribusiness feed production mines the soil of nutrients, which can’t be returned. Manures become a waste problem because they are contaminated with chemicals and anyway are far from the distant soils they came from. Artificial fertilisers must be trucked to the fields producing the chicken feed, damaging soils and waterways. Chemicals are needed to control disease in the crammed sheds.
The alternative way enables nutrients in manures to go to nearby gardens and methane digesters. The chickens can clean up slugs while cultivating garden beds and free-ranging to find much of their own food. They can be housed in small mud brick sheds using little steel. They reproduce themselves, they provide meat and are a source of diversity and entertainment. There is no need for vast armies of expensive professionals in suits operating computers. And backyard chickens are happy while factory farm chickens are not.
The same very large savings can be achieved in many other domains via systems which involve small scale and therefore short distances between things, and easy integration of sub-systems (e.g., manure and household “waste” recycling with gardens, animals with methane production) and drawing on unpaid “work” for management and maintenance. Consider locating facilities for the care of aged and unwell people in the middle of town beside the main community garden enabling the people in them to observe, join in conversation and be involved in the activities. The gardeners would benefit from the experience of older people who would feel they still have a valued role. The need for expensive professional “carers” would be reduced while greatly improving the experience of older people. In a caring community where people only have to work for money a few days a week, many will have time to drop in to help out and chat, and to enable old people to remain in their own homes longer.
Similarly, as is explained below, very low cost and resource-cheap humble owner-built housing can be the norm. The scope for low-impact leisure and holiday activities is also elaborated below. Most of these achievements are only possible in small towns.
The Remaking Settlements study (Trainer, 2019) estimated the scope for self-sufficiency within an outer Sydney suburb. It found that energy and resource costs might be cut by 90%, while greatly increasing social and quality of life benefits. The Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri achieve these levels. (Lockyer, 2019.) If people only gave three hours a week to community activities within the Sydney suburb, 6,000 person-hours a week would be going into public works in an area about two kilometres across, equal to having 150 full-time council workers there! That might be thousands of times the attention the suburb gets from its council now.
We would be on various voluntary rosters, committees and working-bees to carry out most of the windmill maintenance, construction of public works, child minding, nursing, basic educating and care of aged and disadvantaged people in our area. These would perform most of the functions councils now carried out for us, such as maintaining our parks and streets. In addition, working-bees and committees would maintain the many commons. We would therefore need far fewer bureaucrats and professionals, reducing the amount of income we would have to earn to pay taxes to fund big government. When we contribute to working-bees we are paying some of our tax, by giving to the town.
Our life experience will mainly be enriched not by our personal wealth or talents, but by having access to public assets such as a beautiful landscape containing many forests, ponds, animals, herb patches, bamboo clumps, clay pits, little farms and firms, leisure opportunities close to home, a neighbourhood workshop, familiar people ready to advise or assist, many cultural and artistic groups and skilled people to learn from, community festivals and celebrations and a thriving and supportive community. It is therefore not surprising that eco-villages rate highly on community and quality of life. (Grinde, et al. 2017 and Lockyer 2017.)
However, towns and suburbs will also need to import a small quantity of goods and materials that they cannot produce for themselves, such as radios, boots, kitchen appliances, chicken wire, tools, cement, irrigation pumps and pipes, and light steel products. Some of these will come from regional factories near towns, within bicycling distance for workers. Others, such as steel and cement might come from large factories much further away, distributed by rail. Towns near the steel works would pay for their imports from other factories and regions by contributing to the steel exports to those other towns. This points to the very important role for the (remnant) state bureaucracies. There will have to be careful national organisation of the distribution of these intra-national export opportunities, such that all towns can contribute to the production of a few exports to the national economy via factories located nearby. This would enable them to earn enough to pay for the importation of that small volume of goods and materials they need. This too would involve elaborate state-level planning, implementation and restructuring (but not state power, see below.)
These simpler lifestyles and systems would dramatically cut the demand for energy and materials. Lifestyles would involve far less consumption, and because it would be a stable economy few resources would be going into construction. Just about all “wastes” would be easily recycled and reused at the town level without trucks, roads and sewers. There would be benefits from overlaps and synergisms, for instance keeping ducks would eliminate the need to produce snail-killing chemicals.
The large reductions in energy demand need little explanation. In general, solar passive building design using earth would greatly reduce the need for space heating and cooling. Almost no (non-human) energy would be needed for food production. Most cooking would be by wood, gas produced from biomass wastes and electricity from local renewable sources. Only a little energy would be needed for pumping clean and waste water, as these would be collected and dealt with locally. There would be little need for vast systems to pump water in and pump sewage out over long distances. The need for transport, refrigeration, packaging and marketing would be greatly reduced. Most leisure needs would be met within the settlement at little energy cost. Industrial production would be greatly reduced, and most of it would take place in small local enterprises operating in more labour-intensive and craft ways. Only a little heavy industry would be needed, e.g., to provide basic light steel, railway equipment, buses, etc. Therefore mining, chemical and timber industries will be small. Because nations would be highly self-sufficient there would be very little need for shipping or air transport.
Leisure and entertainment are major dollar and resource cost items in consumer society. At present leisure time is mostly spent in the passive consumption of experience produced by corporations or professionals, especially via TV and IT, in travel or consuming goods and services. The quality of most of this material is dubious, evident in the mindless TV soap operas, game shows and crime dramas, and especially the violence and destruction in computer “games”. Much leisure time and expenditure at present goes into purchasing; shopping is a major form of entertainment.
Simpler Way settlements and lifestyles are very leisure-rich. They surround people with activities, working-bees, expert artists and craftsmen, friends to chat to and a landscape full of craft centres, beautiful gardens, little firms and farms, familiar people, and many other leisure resources. Any town or suburb includes many talented musicians, singers, storytellers, actors, comedians and playwrights, presently unable to do their thing because the globalised entertainment industry only needs a few super-stars. These people will thrive, having several days a week to practise their art and being appreciated for their (usually unpaid) contributions to the many local gatherings, concerts and festivals.
Much more leisure time will be spent in creative and social activities, as distinct from the increasingly private computerised leisure pursuits today. In addition, much leisure time will be spent in productive activities, such as gardening, making things, and arts and crafts. And much will be spent reading, thinking and learning, and doing formal courses. We will have the time to put into pursuits that are important to our personal development.
The community would be a spontaneous leisure resource. A walk around the town would involve one in conversations, observations of activities in familiar firms, farms and mini-factories, contact with animals, and the enjoyment of a beautifully gardened landscape. Contributing to working-bees would usually be like having a party. Then there would be the festivals, celebrations, concerts, visits, field days, and the mystery tours organised by the leisure committee.
In these new enriched physical and cultural landscapes there would be far less interest in the purchase of resource-intensive leisure and entertainment services and far less desire to travel for holidays.
The political situation would be quite different compared with today. The “governing” of most of the activities that are important for everyday living would (have to) take place at the town and neighbourhood level, where there would (have to) be thoroughly participatory democracy. The locality is where the most important decisions must be made. The involvement of all would be made workable by the smallness of scale. Big centralised governments cannot run our small communities. That can only be done by the people who live there because they are the only ones who understand the ecosystem, who know what will grow best there, how often frosts occur, how people there think and what they want, what the history and traditions are, and therefore what arrangements will and won’t work there.
There would still be some functions for state and national governments, but relatively few, and there would still be some need for national governments and international agencies and arrangements. But most economic and political activity affecting ordinary people would be down at the town and local region because that’s where most of the thinking and decisions must take place. Some projects and policies would be drafted by our unpaid committees, but we would all vote on the important decisions concerning our small area at regular town meetings.
Big social institutions, such as states, can only be run by a very few people with immense power. These then tend to become arrogant and secretive, and are easily seduced, bought or fooled by the richest and most powerful groups in society. The smallness of scale we would be forced to adopt by resource scarcity would largely liberate us from rule by centralised governments, and from representative democracy (to practise participatory democracy.)
Our intense dependence on our ecosystems and social systems would radically transform politics towards collectivism, responsible citizenship and local power. We would (have to) practise participatory democracy, as distinct from having interest groups in zero-sum competition to get what they want from a central state. Our fate would depend on how well the town functions, not on our personal wealth and capacity to buy. We would therefore be keen to work things out and do whatever will contribute to town solidarity and cohesion. The town will work best if there is a minimum of discontent, conflict, inequality or perceived injustice, so all will recognise the need to work out conflicts and make sure all are provided for. The situation of dependence on our ecosystems and on each other would require and reinforce concern for the public good, a more collectivist outlook, taking responsibility, involvement, and thinking about what’s best for the town.
The core governing institutions would be voluntary committees, town meetings, direct votes on issues, and especially informal public discussion in everyday situations. In a sound self-governing community, the fundamental political processes take place through discussions in cafes, kitchens and town squares, because this is where the issues can be considered and thought about until the best solutions come to be generally recognised. The chances of a policy working out well depend on how content everyone is with it. Consensus and commitment are best achieved through a slow and sometimes clumsy process of formal and informal consideration in which the real decision-making work is done long before the meeting when a vote is taken. Usually votes would not need to occur. Their main function would be to show how close we were to agreeing on a policy. If the vote is split it means we have a lot more talking to do. With a question such as what to plant when the old parking lot is dug up the aim is to work out what is best for the town and this is usually a technical question that more evidence and discussion will clarify. In general, the aim would be to avoid a decision that suits one group and disadvantages another.
Thus the nature of politics would be transformed. At present it is an arena in which individuals and groups fight to win outcomes favouring themselves. Often it ends in a 51/49 vote that forces many to go along with the majority, suffering a loss while the others gain. The battles are zero-sum; one party gets what it wants and the other loses what it wants. Instead the new goal is not just a win-win outcome but one that improves things for everyone. Politics will again become participatory and part of the citizen’s everyday life. Note that this is not optional; we must do things in these participatory and inclusive ways or the right decisions for the town will not be made.
The political situation described is in fact classical anarchism. In general, people at the local level would be equals governing themselves via informal discussion, referenda and town meetings. We would not be governed by centralised authoritarian states and bureaucracies, nor by representatives. At present representatives are elected and then they govern us.
Governing the town would involve a lot of constant monitoring, reviewing, researching and administering. Most of this could be carried out by voluntary committees. The process would include watching quality of life indices, ecological footprints, resource use, etc. and how things were being done in other towns and sites around the world. We would note formal and informal evidence on indicators of town morale, citizen participation, problems and general contentment with how things were going. The approach would be helpful, not negatively critical, i.e., the point would be to enable us to see where our local systems and firms could be improved, and what adjustments or assistance they need.
A small number of paid bureaucrats and experts would probably still be needed, but people would have a lot of time to volunteer for public activities. Especially important is the fact that most of the systems would be technically simple (e.g., running town waste-water to orchards and ponds.) The remarkable citizen-run government carried out by the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s involved much monitoring and record keeping of needs, resources and production, by ordinary citizens, not paid bureaucrats. (See Trainer, 2018.) There are now moves to use citizen juries to make important decisions concerning large city budgets.
It is also important to understand that the people would not just participate in making the decisions; they would also do the work to implement them. In the coming era of scarcity, councils and corporations will not be able to do so much for us. More importantly, we will do the job best, and enjoy the control over developing and running our town.
Most issues would be local, not national, but there would be some tasks left for state and national governments involving professional experts and administrators, such as coordinating national steel and railway industries, and especially working out how to distributing industries to enable all towns to earn some income by exporting to other towns. But the decisions would not be made by centralised authorities which have power over us. The classical anarchist procedure involves delegates from all the local communities coming to conferences to work out what seems to be the best decision for all concerned, and then taking these recommendations back to the communities where everyone has a vote on what is to be done. Note again that there would be far fewer issues that concern large regions or whole nations, there would be far less “development” to be pushed through despite resistance, and so politics would have little to do with struggles for wealth and power.
Because it will be a stable economy many political issues will have been eliminated, such as conflicts over new developments, re-zonings, freeway construction, more mining or logging leases, and especially those to do with trade, foreign investment and finance. Many current problems such as unemployment would not exist (because towns would make sure everyone has a livelihood) and many such as aged care would be handled at the local level, again greatly decreasing the need for centralised decision making, professionals or bureaucracy.
In the longer term issues to do with national “security” and “defence” would fade and indeed disappear. Governments now devote much time and money to conflicts over national access to the resources of others and defence against the efforts of others to take our resources. This is central in our appalling record of imperialism and warfare and it is due to the determination to take more than our fair share of the world’s scarce resources. In the long run global peace cannot be achieved unless and until we all accept living via much simpler lifestyles and systems, and this will greatly reduce the need for top-down government. (See TSW: Peace.)
The revolutionary significance of the kind of “state” described here cannot be exaggerated. Throughout history a few central rulers have forced people to obey them but now we are in a situation where that model cannot work, where sustainable, cohesive communities can only function well if they control their own affairs (within national systems of law etc.) Equally profound is the order of events; it cannot be that the new form of “state” comes into being first and then establishes the new kinds of communities and culture. Communities determined to run their own affairs must emerge first and in time they would begin to demand radical restructuring of the present centralised state so that it supported and served the towns, and these make the decisions. (These questions of transition strategy and socialism vs. anarchism are taken up in Chapter 11.)
This is the most important and difficult aspect of the alternative vision. The Simpler Way cannot possibly work unless people hold ideas and values that are quite different to many of the fundamental elements in consumer-capitalist society. This is the main reason why many say the vision is unrealistic; it requires more saintly qualities than those that are most common today. However regardless of the difficulties we just have to work for the eventual adoption of these dispositions because there is no other option. It is not logically possible to have a good society without good citizens. It will be argued below that as scarcities and difficulties increase we will be pushed in the required direction. People will see that they must cooperate, share and build simpler self-sufficient local systems.
The three major value changes must be from competitive to cooperative, from individualistic to collectivist, and from acquisitive to willing acceptance of living frugally and gaining life satisfaction from non-material pursuits. These are deeply entrenched attitudes and commitments and will be difficult to shift.
Obviously in a thriving small community people would have to be conscientious, caring and responsible citizens, eager to come to working-bees, to think about social issues, and to participate in self-government. They must be sociologically sophisticated, aware of the crucial importance of cohesion, cooperation, conflict resolution, etc. They must have some sense of the long and tragic history of human society, the failure to get beyond childish squabbling for wealth and power and the associated injustice, squalor and wars. They must have a strong collectivist outlook. They must understand and care about the global situation, recognising for instance that the poorest countries cannot have a fair share of global resources unless we in rich countries live much more simply.
The biggest change is that gain must go. Given that the new economy must be zero-growth, eventually the value put on getting materially richer must be completely abandoned. Logically there cannot be a zero-growth economy if there remains any interest in getting richer, either on the part of individuals or nations. People must eventually be happy to enjoy stable and secure lives within caring communities which are rich in interesting and purposeful opportunities to derive satisfaction without any concern to acquire more property or monetary wealth. This means most of the finance industry would no longer exist.
The main orientation would have to be to cooperate in providing for the welfare of all. Everyone must realise that their own individual welfare depends on how well the town functions, not on their personal wealth or talents or efforts. There can still be much scope for individual differences and views but when problems arise people must want to work out what is best for everyone. This is a major reason why for instance we would prevent there being any unemployment, poverty or bankruptcy. There’s work to be done so it makes sense to organise so everyone can contribute somehow. If a business is struggling the town would have to work out how to get it into good shape or how to redeploy those resources to everyone’s satisfaction. Everyone must feel that it is a caring community with high levels of social cohesion, morale and pride.
The sensible way for humans to go about things is by cooperating. Competition is in general morally undesirable, and in most practical situations it is a silly way to organise things, a wasteful mistake which results in unfair outcomes. A competitive economy is obviously very productive and has powerful incentives for “efficiency” (narrowly defined), and innovation, but it has socially unacceptable consequences, often brutally destructive. The problem with competition is that someone wins…and then takes much more than their fair share. There is clear evidence that in many situations, including education and within organisations, competing is about the worst, most inefficient way to organise things. (Kohn, 1992.) When people compete, much of their energy goes into thwarting rivals, whereas if they cooperate all their energy can go into finding a mutually beneficial goal. When people compete, one gets the prize and the rest get disappointed and at times jealous and resentful. When competition is the mode, happy, mutually supportive attitudes are not well reinforced. But when people cooperate, goodness multiplies; there is synergism.
It is unfortunate that today few know of Kropotkin’s powerful analysis of the role of mutual aid in nature and especially in human society. (His book Mutual Aid was published in 1902.) He provided abundant documentation on its prevalence and importance. Humans have a strong drive to enjoy cooperating, helping and interacting with each other, and this has great evolutionary significance; it strengthens the capacity for the group or species to survive. The recent book Human Kind by Bregman (2020) provides lengthy and strong documentation for these claims.
It is not that everyone has to hold these values before we can save the planet. It is a matter of degree. There must only be a sufficient level of cooperation, responsibility, frugality and readiness to share and give, etc. It will not be necessary for all people to attend all working-bees, but there must be a considerable willingness to do such things. Many could be less than ideal citizens so long as the average commitment is good enough. This means that the town’s fate will not be undermined by those who do not pull their weight, so long as enough do. Those who do not pull their weight will not enjoy good reputations.
This much more collectivist ethos need not be any significant threat to individual freedom or privacy. We can still have our own private houses, property, values, religious views, interests and goals. And in my strong opinion we can also have our own small private firms and farms. Socialists insist that the means of production must be publicly owned, but this is not necessary to avoid the present undesirable consequences of them being privately owned. That simply requires that the firms are run to serve the public good and meet needs, provide livelihoods to all, avoid anyone receiving income without working, and prevent capital accumulation. Strict guidelines and vigilant citizens would maintain these arrangements. Savings can be accumulated, but in a frugal and stable economy investment could only go into maintaining or rearranging a constant amount of productive plant, and this would have to be managed via social decision, and not left to private capital owners out to derive unearned income from their investments. Admittedly this area involves difficult issues to be resolved.
More importantly, running the family’s farm or small business can be a major source of life satisfaction, giving the freedom to do it the way you wish. Making and growing things are art forms to be enjoyed. We don’t need a Ministry of Water Colours to tell us how to paint. Bookchin and others were appalled at the way Marxists were happy to get rid of capitalist bosses but then expect workers to be willing to obey socialist bosses, for example on Russian state farms.
Easily overlooked is the way the situation will reward the required new ideas and values. We will see that cooperating, sharing and helping are not only in our own best interests but are satisfying. Obviously there is no possibility of forcing people to cooperate, share or volunteer. The coming difficult conditions will prompt these actions but more importantly they will be seen as enjoyable.
This situation involving us in complex integrated relationships would be a powerful generator of social cohesion and solidarity, indeed of a sense of comradeship. Each of us would have many overlapping relationships with other people. In present society we tend to have only one weak connection with most of the people we deal with. For instance, you might know Mary only as the supermarket check-out lady. But in a village the person who bakes your bread could also be the wicket-keeper in your cricket team, the comedian at the concerts, chair of the fruit tree committee, the one who enticed your cat down from the roof last Easter, and your go-to man for bee hive advice. This is a multi-faceted familiarity involving a history of many connections and bonds with most of the people around you. It includes reputation and respect, reciprocity, moral debt and gratitude, friendships, trust, readiness to care and support, collective wisdom, community morale and resilience, sense of security and access to solutions to problems. These factors enable synergism to flourish in small communities. Goodness multiplies goodness. One consequence is that the presently huge dollar and psychological costs of social breakdown will probably be largely if not entirely avoided.
Of course, small communities can be oppressive too, but Eco-villages work on procedures and skills to make sure that discontents and problems are aired and dealt with sensibly, aiming at outcomes that maintain community cohesion and morale. Some have “village elders” with whom problems can be quietly discussed and who are good at resolving issues behind the scenes. This is a common practice in tribal societies.
It is easy to overlook the importance of the informal processes that make a community function well, as distinct from the explicit rules, structures, procedures and committees, and organised events such as assemblies and working-bees. Much of the action that gets things done and maintains systems in good order is undertaken spontaneously by all people as they go about their daily affairs. If you see a tap in the community orchard that needs a new washer you do something about it. If you hear that someone isn’t well today you drop in to see if you can help out. When you run into others you might chat about whether something needs a working-bee organised to deal with it, or how the drama club might best be gingered up or whether we need more for kids to do around here.
Much of the community decision making would slowly emerge as people engaged in informal discussions exchange ideas and explore options. Especially important is the maintenance of social solidarity though incidental expressions of care for the welfare of others and of the community. This kind of thought and action is spontaneously initiated by community-minded citizens, not by official agencies or authorities in charge of this or that (although committees would also be keeping an eye on their domains.) This is what happens in a good household; the welfare of all is the guiding principle and if you see something that needs doing, you do it.
In consumer-capitalist society there is a high level of dependence on fragile globalised systems beyond the control of ordinary people. We need experts to fix everything; we can’t repair our own cars. If one global bank fails it could trigger a global financial meltdown in which people around the world could lose their jobs and savings. If oil supply falters the supermarket shelves could be bare in a few days.
In highly self-sufficient Simpler Way communities technologies are mostly very simple, meaning that almost everyone can fix almost anything, supply chains are local and there is a lot of food growing all the time. There is, in other words, a great deal of redundancy, resilience and security. If the global economy were to self-destruct, we would still be able to provide ourselves with good food. If a fire wiped out an orchard there would be others nearby. There would be networks between the many villages and towns within the region, enabling rapid emergency responses. And there can still be national emergency services.
Very likely yes, and we’d still need some police and courts and jails. But not many. The situation would encourage kindness and conscientiousness because these behaviours would be automatically rewarded by smiles and gratitude. A powerful force for goodness would be reputation. You would want to be known as a caring and reliable citizen. You can’t buy or fake a good reputation. It can only be built through behaviour observed over long periods of time.
This is another of those difficult issues that we will have to work out as we go. A market system solves this kind of problem without us having to even think about it, but it usually gets the wrong solutions. In a satisfactory system the market might have a considerable role, but the main determinant must be deliberate, rational and collective decision making.
Many prices and incomes must be largely or solely set by the community, although we might agree on areas where no limits are set. We would have to think about questions such as what is a just and reasonable price given the effort that had to be put into producing carrots, houses, etc., what price will have desirable social effects, do we need to set maximum and minimum levels, should some prices be kept low by subsidies. Remember that interventions of this kind are common in capitalist societies. For instance, minimum wage levels are set, interest rates are regulated, and prices for travel on public transport are kept down by governments paying much of the cost. But in a desirable economy there would have to be much more social control than there is now.
In many areas to do with price there would probably be no significant difficulties, such as having a set price per kg for carrots, or for an hour’s work harvesting them. However there would have to be mechanisms for making and reviewing the decisions. The relevant committee could set out its reasoning in support of recommended values and changes so that everyone could grope towards agreement through public discussion. The major considerations for wages should be how much an average worker can produce per hour and how pleasant or unpleasant the work is. It would be necessary to think about whether doing this job was more pleasant than doing that job.
In general and maybe always, an increase in scarcity should not affect price. If it’s a bad year and carrots become scarce, who gets them should not be determined by who can pay more. The best solution might be some form of rationing.
Remember that much and possibly most of the work to be done would not involve monetary payment, because it would be voluntary and much of it would be done on working-bees. Some of these would be obligatory, as for instance is the case in those Ecovillages were all are required to put in a set number of hours a week on various community building or maintenance projects.
How should differences in skill or efficiency be taken into account? The more efficient farmer or dress maker will produce more per hour and thus earn more per hour so perhaps there would not be a problem there. Professionals such as doctors should all be on a nationally set salary. Their training should be totally free; if the society wants health services it should pay for them including the cost of staffing them with well-trained personnel. Students in training should pay no fees and should receive a reasonable income for the work they do in gaining skills. These arrangements would mean doctors would not be inclined to go into the profession primarily for the money. (Most Cuban doctors are on low salaries and the health system there is far superior and less costly than in the US; see Fitz, 2020.)
A town might choose to retain a small remnant market sector in which demand determined supply and price. For instance, the kind of bicycles on sale would probably not need to be regulated. However, the town should be ready to intervene anywhere and anytime if something seems to be going wrong. This would always be positive, intended to get things back into good shape, perhaps by providing the struggling baker with a loan, or assistance, or if there are too many bakers helping to restructure in ways that all are as happy as possible about. Keeping the town running well and keeping everyone as content as possible must be the overriding concerns.
Few big firms such as steel works or mass production factories would be needed and these would be owned and run by society to serve society. What would be the point of allowing them to be owned by a few rich people, given the arguments in Chapter 4 that in general private enterprise is not more efficient or socially beneficial than public ownership, and the argument against people being able to get money from investments? Certainly all public service utilities such as for water, power, roads, railways, medical and hospital services, banks, aged care and prisons must be run by public institutions not by private profit-driven firms. The elected boards and all deliberations would be visible and accountable to all, and they would be bound by publicly-set policy guidelines.
It was explained in Chapter 3 that the present money system has to be radically changed. The basic problem is that instead of money being seen just as a means of facilitating exchange and record keeping it is treated as a commodity, something that can be traded and lent at interest within a market. Because markets allow those with more wealth to get most of what is available, money is mostly lent to richer people who can pay the highest interest rates, and it is then invested in producing to maximise their income rather than in producing necessities. The nature and role of money in the alternative economy we need is quite different.
To begin with, banks should be publicly owned, not private firms. Consider the Bank of North Dakota, the only public bank in the US. On all indices of performance it beats all the other banks hands down. Brown (2016) reports that the bank “is more profitable even than Goldman Sachs, has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase, and has seen solid profit growth for almost 15 years. Its success is largely due to the fact that it does not pay bonuses, fees, or commissions, it has no high paid executives, does not speculate on risky derivatives, does not need to advertise, and does not have private shareholders seeking short-term profits. The profits return to the bank, which distributes them as dividends to the state.”
Especially at the town level we can form our own banks to serve community needs without wealth being siphoned out to shareholders. The people of Maleny, an Australian town, did this, electing a board of directors and voting on a charter. The rules stipulated that loans must be for projects that benefit the town. “Mutuals” operate like this, for instance when participants might deposit funds to be lent only to new home builders.
But we can go much further than those examples. Anyone or any town or nation can create as much money as they wish. Ridiculous? Let’s see.
The basic model for an alternative money system is the simple LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) arrangement. Imagine that that Fred grows vegetables and Mary bakes bread but neither has any money so they can’t buy and sell to each other. So Fred just writes an IOU for $2, the price they agree for a loaf of bread, and gives it to Mary who gives him a loaf she has baked. Mary then buys from Fred the amount of vegetables they agree is worth $2, by handing him the IOU as payment. They have enabled exchange by creating their own money.
A major virtue of LETS is that anyone and everyone can get and create money, that is can trade, buy and sell to others who have joined the local system. Their “credits” and “debts” are recorded in their accounts at the central registry. So money is not scarce. In the present system it is very scarce and therefore those who have it can charge a high price, high interest, when they lend it out. A major virtue of the alternative is that there is no place for interest; Fred didn’t have to borrow the $2 to buy that loaf of bread and pay it back with interest.
You can see that creating the money is not a problem, because you can write as many IOUs as you like. But if you use one to get something then you have to pay the supplier somehow, so you are not likely to issue them recklessly. Obviously the money, the bit of paper with IOU written on it, is not crucial here; what matters is whether you will be in a position to pay for the transaction later. The IOU is only the contract document that states the value you have undertaken to provide.
But the big limitation with a LETS is that it doesn’t help with the setting up of productive capacity, the establishment of firms to produce things to sell. Usually individual participants can’t buy much because there isn’t much they can produce to sell. To set up even a mini business there is usually a need to get hold of “capital” of some sort. Firstly, this problem is minimised when the focus is on meeting basic needs in low-tech and cooperative ways within a community focused on sufficiency, because much of the required “capital” can take a non-monetary form. For instance, if the community wants to build simple premises for its beekeeper it might need only a small amount of timber, mud bricks, expertise and labour, and it might get them from within the community without having to pay any money for them.
Secondly, where normal money is needed, for instance to pay for steel and cement, one way of getting it would be in the form of small “loans” from people who will be repaid later by access to whatever the venture is going to produce. One US restaurant got the normal US dollars it needed to set up by printing meal vouchers and selling them to people willing to spend them on a meal much later when the restaurant had opened. This is the way the town can build much bigger things such as a swimming pool that would produce necessities and employ people and enrich the town but can’t be built without buying things from the national economy,
Again these instances show that the money and its creation are not central here; the creation and use of the new money is just an accounting device whereby participants can exchange things and keep track of what amount of credit and debt they have. What matters greatly is enabling economic interaction, especially the setting up of operations that enable previously unemployed and poor people to start producing things they and other local people need. Just about every neighbourhood and town has lots of productive capacity sitting idle, especially unemployed people, that could be producing necessities and providing livelihoods. This is just a matter of organising, but often it is enabled by creating money in some form, and often we do not have to go near banks to get their kind of money.
Note again that in a new community we would need very little money to live well, because we would not be consuming lots of things and many needs would be met “free” from the commons.
But it is very important to make sure we create and use effective forms of money because there are forms and ways that are more or less useless. For instance the most popular form of alternative currency that has been adopted in some Transition Towns is not the kind we want. This is a “substitution currency”, the best known case being the Brixton Pound. It involves new notes being printed by the town and purchased by using old (national) money. The websites give no explanation of how this is supposed to improve anything. Just substituting one note for another can’t create or change any economic activity, let alone get unused resources and unemployed people into production. (Eisenstein calls these “proxy currencies” and sees that they can do little or nothing to improve a local economy: 2012, p. 303.) A study by Marshall and Oneil (2017) found that they make little or no difference.
It is claimed that because the new substituted money can only be spent within the town it gets people to buy local products, but anyone who understands the importance of buying locally will do so regardless of what currency they have. Anyone who doesn’t understand will buy what’s cheapest, which is typically an imported item. Obviously what matters here is getting people to understand why it’s important to buy local, and just issuing a substitute local currency is not likely to make much difference to this.
Similarly, some town councils print new money and get it into circulation by using it to pay (part of) the wages of its employees, who can use it to pay their council rates. This again just substitutes new money where old money was being used, and circulates it via rate payments, creating no new production, jobs or systems.
Another mistaken alternative approach is to adopt a currency which depreciates with time. This does little more than make people spend money faster than they would have. The idea is supposed to encourage people to spend, generating economic activity. But it’s wrong-headed to encourage spending; people should buy as little as they can, and any economy in which there is a need to consume in order to “create jobs” should be scrapped. In a sensible economy there would be only enough work, producing and spending and use of money as is necessary to ensure all have sufficient for a frugal but good quality of life.
Yet another approach is where “anchor institutions” like hospitals, which receive much of their income from the state, switch some of their purchasing from distant to local sources. This again involves substitution, putting people out of work in those distant places where the purchases used to be made.
None of these approaches produce a net increase in jobs, incomes or economic activity for people who are unemployed and impoverished.
Consider again the discussion of Modern Monetary Theory in Chapter 3. It was explained how a country’s government can create money, spend it into circulation to pay for some public works, or just give it to various people, thereby enabling more economic activity and reducing unemployment. It can print and spend or give as much as it wishes, although there are limits to sensible spending (for instance if more is created than is necessary to get idle resources into production then inflation will result.) It does not have to borrow money, or sell public assets to get money. Such a government can never “run out of money.” Note that the notion of debt is irrelevant here; when governments create money nothing has been borrowed, no debt has been created and nothing has to be paid back. Again, the creation is only a device for connecting unmet productive capacity with unmet need.
The constraints on economic activity are not set by the availability of money; they are set by the resources available that the money can be used to put into production. Nor do governments have to attract foreign investors to come in and finance the building of things, nor does the country have to export frantically to accumulate funds needed to do things, or sell off national assets to pay debt, or inflict austerity to divert scarce funds to paying interest. Above all, governments can throw off their fear of what the global capital markets will do to them if they adopt policies foreign investors don’t like. They can also tell the credit rating agencies to go jump.
However, these money creation options are only to do with getting into production resources that exist within the country and do not apply to things that come from outside it. These must be paid for in money the suppliers will accept, usually US dollars, and you can’t create them. So you minimise dependence on imports.
It is not commonly understood that governments frequently create money out of nothing. The “Quantitative Easing” resorted to after the GFC involved creating trillions of dollars and giving them to banks to lend. In Australia Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan saved Australia from the GFC by (among other things) using “helicopter money”, that is giving everyone $900. Yes, this does mean people are “getting something for nothing” but why worry about that? Who loses what? The Australian economy was saved…at what cost?
So when money is seen primarily as a means for connecting people capable of producing with people who need products, miracles can be organised just by creating as much of the stuff as you need to facilitate the connecting. The Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain provides an excellent example of how communities have done this. They have thousands of people producing and consuming necessities without using conventional money. Again, this is best thought of in terms of setting up, organising and connecting activities, simply by use of bits of paper that record contributions and who owes what to whom.
The new money system can coexist with the old dollar-based one. At first the new one will deal only with neglected necessities. Therefore we should think in terms of developing a needs-driven economy underneath the old profit-and-market-driven economy, which the new one will in time largely and maybe entirely replace.
In the early years of the transition, including the present, towns could continue to use mostly normal (national) money while separately issuing their own money to enable idle resources in the town to be activated. It is disturbing that so many suffer idleness and uselessness when there is vacant land on which they could be gardening and producing fruit, fish and poultry, repairing bikes and making furniture etc. All it needs is organising, and a way of recording the debts and credits participants create as they provide and acquire things.
The best approach might be for the town not to create and issue any new money but to enable this to be done by those of its people who it could benefit from creating their own sub-group currency. Imagine a town with problems such as unemployed people, lonely old people and bored teenagers. The point of implementing new money systems could be to solve these specific problems, rather than serving the whole town. The town could set up a coordinating group which links unemployed and homeless people into community gardens and cooperatives where they produce vegetables and other goods to sell within the new needs-driven-economy. Participants would be paid in LETS credits, perhaps at a flat rate per hour contributed. They could then spend these buying the system’s produce, be it vegetables, eggs, cleaning services, repairs, aged care, child minding, tutoring, etc. The coordinators would find out what skills participants have and set up the facilities they would need in order to start producing. They would attract participants and let the community know the benefits of getting involved. This is how the Catalan Integral Cooperative works, now with many subgroups and cooperatives involving thousands.
In time connections could be made with the normal market economy, for instance by selling vegetables to town restaurants. This would earn normal money income that could be used to buy things the needs-driven economy cannot produce, such as roofing for the new stores and sheds and wire netting for the poultry pens. Councils would be very wise to assist since the venture would surely reduce the problems it has in dealing with dumped people, but miracles could be achieved without any official assistance.
Later the nearby towns could combine their systems, enabling economic transactions in the new money throughout the region. That is, the alternative money your town uses could be exchanged for things produced in other towns.
Research and development are generally best carried out in public institutions, especially universities. There is no reason to think that salaried scientists perform better in private corporations. Most importantly, when the agencies are public, we can make sure they research important problems, as distinct from only those problems that will maximise corporate profits. Corporations typically ignore the most urgent human needs, such as drugs for diseases common in poor countries, because they can make more profit developing things like trivial cosmetics for rich countries.
The R&D focus would shift from capital-intensive, high tech, industrialised processes to developing the most effective resource-cheap local procedures for particular bioregions, and sharing findings globally. For instance, what varieties maximise plant robustness, flavour and pest resistance in our region? What plants enable production of paints, glues, medicines, building materials, medicines, dyes and preservatives?
In the alternative Simpler Way society being described there would be no need to reduce socially-useful R&D, or universities, or modern medical facilities, etc. We could in fact significantly increase these, when we stop wasting so many resources on unnecessary things.
It is important to re-think the concept of capital. For most of the important development no capital will need to be borrowed. Consider a town which wants to build a community hall, and has its own surrounding forests and clay pits and has its own skilled builders and labour via working-bees. It would make no sense to borrow a lot of money to hire contractors to supply these inputs and build the hall, then pay them back twice as much as was borrowed, when the townspeople could build the hall themselves using their own timber, mud and working-bees.
Obviously larger regions and nations are in an even better position to do this kind of thing as they have more resources within them to draw on. Therefore the present taken-for-granted dependence on banks, investors, the finance industry and money markets can be seen to be a serious mistake and a bonanza for the rich. It means that instead of organising to do many things for ourselves collectively without borrowing capital, we go to them and pay them maybe twice as much as the dollar cost of the job. To avoid that, all a cooperative or town or nation has to do is create its own money, that is, bits of paper or electronic records as a way of organising the venture and keeping the accounts.
In Chapter 3 it was argued that capitalist society has a strong tendency to impose an impoverished and stultifying mentality. Life for many is mostly about buying, striving to get wealth, property and possessions, and coping with the work, insecurity and worry needed to get by. Many are stressed and anxious. Depression is probably the main illness in this society. Even many of those coping are dissatisfied, not finding their lives very fulfilling.
In The Simpler Way people would experience conditions conducive to a very different outlook. Economic affairs would not be very important and certainly not problematic. We would all get everything we need for a good life with no difficulty, including a small but beautiful and cheap house, sufficient clothing, food and entertainment at very low cost. Everyone would be secure, with no fear of unemployment or poverty in a predominantly collectivist community that made sure all had a livelihood. There would be little work to be done, much of it would be via working-bees, and much if not all producing would be enjoyable gardening or craft. Producing goods and maintaining things for our community’s benefit would be sources of satisfaction. The pace would be relaxed. People running little farms, shops or workshop businesses would see these as their ways of enjoying contributing to their town through exercising rewarding skills. Life would be about enjoying community living, the town and nearby landscape, gardening, arts and crafts, the festivals and concerts and abundant leisure resources, and personal development, and just being rather than striving.
It has been explained that most farms and firms could and I believe should be privately owned, and there would be only a very small state, with no power because all decisions would be taken at the level of town assemblies. But there would be many public institutions and firms, some of them quite large such as national railway systems and steel mills. These would not be run by the state. They would be run by agencies funded by state-level taxation but operating as independent “statutory corporations.” The Australian Broadcasting Corporation provides a good example. It is a large organisation with almost 4,000 employees but it is set up to be independent of government. It is not a government agency and it is controlled by a charter, not by the government. From time to time there are public inquiries into its functioning. Government has no power to influence the content of its broadcasts and is often criticised by them. It is the most respected and trusted agency in Australia.
All of the few big firms needed could be organised this way. It would be extremely important to set up powerful monitoring agencies for them. These would constantly watch over the performance of firms, conduct inquiries, keep in touch with similar operations overseas, check on efficiency, and above all report regularly and scrupulously to the public. Like many public agencies they should be made up of panels of ordinary people serving like citizen juries for limited periods. They would have access to professional advice. Therefore, there need be no fear of Big Brother manipulating operations. As has been argued above, there is no good reason to think these public firms would be less efficient than privately owned firms, and none of the wealth they created would be siphoned out to shareholders.
No, it’s not. That ambiguous term stands for a wide variety of things, some terrible and some pretty good, such as the elected “Social Democratic” form of government in Scandinavian countries. Socialists get the main issue right, which is that capitalism must be replaced. But they want to replace it with a form of government that is quite unlike that described above. Their form is highly centralised, with power in the hands of a state which governs us, even if it is elected. More importantly, the typical socialist vision of the good society assumes that it will be industrialised, urbanised, resource-intensive and globalised, and that after the contradictions of capitalism have been removed the forces of production will be released to raise “living standards”. Above all, most socialists have accepted the desirability of limitless economic growth. Some recent proponents are adamant “Ecomodernists”, insisting that the goal can and should be ultra-high affluence enabled by dazzling technical advance. (Phillips 2014, Scharzar 2012, Bastini 2019.) But some eco-socialists realise the need for reduced resource demand. There is a long tradition of socialist disdain for anything resembling rural peasant ways. The socialist goal is to take control of the means of production from the capitalist class so that the throttles in the factories can be turned up to provide workers with abundance. This would rapidly destroy the ecosystems of the planet.
The most important issue here is to do with the role of power and the state. The argument above has been that the advent of limits to growth has radically changed the debate. It means that the predominant social form has to be thoroughly participatory, and this means power cannot be located at the centre. The argument has been that, given the severe resource constraints, the basic social form must be small, highly self-sufficient communities, which must be largely self-governing, and this means that they must practise a form of anarchism. That form is participatory democracy. This does not mean no “state” in the sense of centralised agencies, but it does mean that the small remnant “state” will have relatively few functions, and that it will have no power. All final decisions and policies will be arrived at via town assemblies and referenda.
Although socialists have long understood the power of ideology, they have given little attention to the fundamentally important role of cultural factors in a desirable society and in the transition to it. This is probably Marx’s biggest mistake. Avineri (1968) points out that Marx thought the revolution could proceed while workers retained the old mentality of obedience to bosses, work discipline, no control over the productive process, competition and desire for wealth. All that was needed on their part was the consciousness of being a “class-for-itself” that would support revolution led by the “vanguard party”. The change in mentality could be worked on slowly after power was taken, during the transition from socialism to communism. As Bookchin (1980) put it, the revolutionary role of the working class was to help get rid of one bunch of bosses and obey the next lot.
However, as has been explained above, The Simpler Way cannot possibly function unless there is a very different mentality. It requires thoughtful, caring, responsible, contented, empowered citizens who are not interested in monetary wealth and are eager to make the decisions and implement them, and are not disposed towards doing what bosses or rulers tell them.
This means that our revolution cannot get anywhere unless it is driven by the new Simpler Way world view. And it means that this world view must come first, that it is a serious mistake to focus on taking state power when the focal task here and now must be the slow and difficult building of the new understandings, values and dispositions discussed in this chapter. (See further on transition strategy below.)
Unfortunately this label stands for many different things and some of them are not what is being argued for here. The variety being endorsed is evident in the following list of elements to do with Simpler Way goals and means.
The defining principle of anarchism is avoidance of relations involving dominance or power over others. Simpler Way communities must practise thoroughly participatory self-government, whereby equals cooperate in running their local systems. This is the only way the right decisions for the town can be arrived at. More importantly this empowerment is crucial if towns are to have the strong cohesion, morale, collectivism, public spirit, social responsibility, and pride necessary for them to thrive and remain stable over time.
The relatively few centralised functions needed would not involve power over the town and suburban communities. Communities would send delegates to conferences etc. to work out possible policies but these would be taken back down to communities for decisions to be made. The remaining centralised bureaucracies would only facilitate this process and implement decisions.
Communities must be small in scale, enabling familiarity, communication, informal relations, mutual aid and spontaneity. Most of the time conscientious citizens would get together to work out mutually beneficial arrangements.
The key to system change is cultural. Little can be achieved unless there is significant change in ideas and values, whereby people come to want to adopt the new ways. Force and violence cannot achieve the goals.
The main strategy for transition is the anarchist notion of “prefiguring” the new ways, i.e., implementing them where possible here and now in order to spread awareness of their merits. (Discussed in Chapter 11.)
It should be said again that this chapter has not been a prediction about where we will go or what will happen. It has been an argument that the basic social form required to enable a sustainable and just society is inescapably given by the situation we are now in. If the limits to growth and the magnitude of the overshoot are grasped and the inadequacy of capitalism is recognised, then there is no alternative but to try to shift to something like the kind of society elaborated in this chapter. Also argued has been the claim that this would not be a matter of accepting deprivation and hardship in order to save the planet. It would be a liberation, bringing a marked increase in the quality of life.
This chapter should have made it clear that it is not possible to discuss economics separately from society. The nature and functioning of production, distribution, exchange and development in a satisfactory society requires many specific social, political, geographical, psychological and cultural conditions. The arrangements discussed in this chapter involve a geography of small-scale localised supply systems minimising transport and enabling nutrient recycling, a political system of participatory democracy, social arrangements involving collectivism, mutuality, sharing, volunteering and community, and ideas, values and dispositions including concern for the public good, non-material pursuits and willing acceptance of frugality. Unless all these elements are present and strong the economic processes described could not take place. There cannot be a good economy unless there is a good society. This shows the great complexity of “economic” phenomena and the absurdity of trying to discuss economics in terms of a single factor such as monetary transactions.