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Community-Based Economics
By Brent McMillan
A healthy middle class is essential to democracy, as it's the middle class that tends to hold politicians accountable. Today we are witnessing a liquidation of the middle class. Wealth is being concentrated into the hands of fewer people.
As empire builders battle for world domination, more and more people are being dropped from basic services. World food production peaked in 1995 and is now in decline as our ecosystems continue to deteriorate. Two billion young people alive today will need jobs. Yet, the number of jobs worldwide is expected to drop by 2 percent by the year 2000. It's not a matter of "jobs vs. the environment"; it's jobs in decline as the environment deteriorates.
The corporate market system is based on a competitive struggle to exploit people and nature for growth and profit. It's ecologically unsustainable. Many people in the U.S. don't realize that the Federal Reserve, which controls the flow of cash in and out of communities, is privately run. A certain level of unemployment is considered healthy in order to keep wages low.
Capital today is tied less and less to local communities. Downsizing has become common in the last two decades, as corporate assets have been raided by CEOs (pirates). Many communities have been devastated when a large employer moved its operation to another country with less regulation and lower wages. In many cases this backfired on corporations because their bean counters underestimated the skill levels of the company's (former) workers.
Greens advocate an ecological economic system based on democratic, decentralized, cooperative and public forms of ownership and control (including small business). We promote alternative economic structures that put human needs and environmental protection ahead of profits, and that are accountable to local communities.
We advocate organizing consumer and worker cooperatives; forming land trusts and housing co-ops to broaden access to land and housing; practicing ecologically sound personal lifestyles; organizing cooperative banks and credit unions; creating community-controlled economic devolvement corporations; organizing barter systems; supporting investment instruments that use social and ecological as well as financial criteria; and supporting worker control over pension funds.
Many examples of such economic alternatives already exist in the Seattle area (PCC, Evergreen Land Trust, Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program, Cascadia Revolving Fund, Fremont Time, et al), demonstrating that we can begin to create alternatives even before the public policies we advocate are enacted (though policies less favorable to transnational megacorporations would certainly help these smaller scaled experiments proliferate).
If more goods and services were removed from the money economy, and if the work week were reduced, people would be able to reclaim time for informal household and community production and distribution, those areas of life that the market has been colonizing. People would be free and secure enough to undertake these activities for their own sake, for creative expression, for pleasure, and for social solidarity
Ultimately, Greens envision substantial reduction of the money-dominated market economy, as production and consumption become a natural aspect of living in self-governing ecological communities and bioregions.
(Note: Many ideas in this article are drawn from the program of The Greens/Green Party USA.)