Economics of the Local Community/Neighbourhood

Politically, power shall as much as possible be left in the hands of local community neighbourhood councils. Micro-local government shall be the norm, with direct democracy through town hall meetings replacing rule by professional politicians.

Note that we are talking here of very small structures indeed: just a few dozen, or a few hundreds, or at most a few thousands, of individuals, living around a single hamlet or village or city neighbourhood.

What would the economic structure of such communities be?

Money

Firstly, note that there is no need for money within such a local community. Everyone knows everyone else, can decide on the needs of the community, and can fairly assess the contribution of themselves and their neighbours to the common good.

Communities this small function like large households do within modern capitalism. Families do not charge their members calculated financial costs for food, childcare services, sexual services, domestic cleaning, house maintenance. Or at least – not often: all kinds of strange practices are spreading as capitalism takes deeper root. Individual households operate well today on a basis of moneyless communism. The cost of collecting and processing financial information on every activity of every family member would far outweigh any possible informational benefits for the household. The cost of enforcing payment – for example to prevent family members taking from the kitchen without payment – would outweigh any possible benefits from knowing (say) who was eating what. And that's to say nothing of the impact upon household peace and relationships.

Which is not to say that money, or something like it, could not still be used internally by a local community if it wished to do so. Some may make many goods and services free, but levy charges for certain luxury goods and services or for environmentally damaging goods. For example, Israeli Kibbutzim often kept everything free for their members except for electricity usage, due to a fear that people would over-use their domestic air conditioning without some kind of charging mechanism. Those types of consumption which are not easily observed by the rest of the community – such as air conditioning within individual domestic apartments – are the most likely candidates to be subjected to financial controls.

Those controls may though be by simple rationing rather than money per se.

Local

Secondly, note that a huge number of goods and (especially) services can be provided internally by the members of the community for their fellow members of the same community.

I envisage communities which, while still being extremely small, would be large enough to support their own – family doctor, community nurse, midwife, elementary schoolteacher, joiner, electrician, plumber, mechanic, hairdresser, cook, cleaner, community police officer, and so on. In rural areas they could grow their own food, and even in urban areas there would be gardens and allotments.

Included in the internal economy of the local community are the bulk of modern economic activity. Communities would mostly build their own houses, care for their own elderly and sick, educate their own children, and repair and maintain their own buildings and equipment. Almost all services, and many goods, would be provided internally by the community itself. That economic activity would be self managed by the community, in the form of direct participatory democracy in face to face meetings. Equality, or broad equality, within the community would be guaranteed. Each member of the community would be his brothers keeper: that is, he would provide for his neighbours when they were in need, and could rely on the assistance of his neighbours when he in his turn found himself in need. Unemployment within such a community would be unknown, since the required work could and would be shared out more or less equally amongst the available members of the community.

There would be no need for powerful and expensive government bureaucracies to allocate resources fairly: the members of the community would see to that themselves and without fuss.

External Federation

However not everything can be produced locally by small communities purely for their own use. Some goods needs be produced in workplaces that serve a large population. Individual communities must then import those goods.

The same is even true of some services. In healthcare, for example, there is a limit to what can be treated by family doctor and local nursing care. Major treatment, especially surgery must be carried out by specialist teams working from large hospitals. Specialist education and training also implies large area colleges.

If it were just a case of organising the provision of shared services such as surgery and higher education, then federations of communes could manage to come together and organise some kind of governing structure to provide those services jointly. A thousand individual communes, with a total population of one million, might jointly finance and organise a single hospital, for example.

There are difficulties with organising democratically across such a large area and population. In a small local commune of a few hundred neighbours, it is easy to organise on the basis of direct democracy. With millions of people in a large geographic area, democracy becomes much more difficult. Devices such as using recallable and mandated delegates in preference to representatives, and allowing for citizen ballot initiative referenda, and for holding elections at frequent intervals, and for reserving some positions for delegates of the specific workforce, will all help reduce the problem.

And as long as only those functions which cannot be organised otherwise are transferred away from local community control, then the amount of non local management will not become impossible for citizens to keep informed of and to seriously strive to control. What functions are we talking about? As well as surgical hospitals, services such as large scale energy generation and distribution, telecommunications infrastructure, long distance transport infrastructure, specialised education and training, and so on, must be provided in this way. The list is not huge, and it is possible for approximately democratic systems to be constructed to organise those. The list of services is much smaller than that currently undertaken by nation-state governments, and it is reasonable to imagine that current national governments could be made far more genuinely democratic than they are at present. That task will be much easier once most of their functions are transferred to the very local level of communities.

Modern Manufactures

That however applies for the relatively limited number of specialised centralised services. They can, easily and democratically, be produced by a federated group of local communities. But it is a different story with the full sweep of manufactured goods. It would be a mistake to imagine that they could be organised in the same way.

Simple manufactures, along with repairs and servicing, could and should be done by each local community internally. Craftsmanship, such as joinery and cabinet making and tailoring, works well at a local level. Goods can then be produced and designed for the individual community or citizen to their needs and specifications.

That covers an important segment of manufacturing and of consumer goods. But there is a much larger segment which cannot be produced locally. That segment must be produced for a regional area, perhaps for millions or even billions of people, similarly to the example of surgical hospitals, above.

The non-local goods require technologies and economies of scale that are only feasible when applied across a huge demand base. Some goods are even optimally produced only when produced planet wide.

It will be worthwhile to consider the types of goods to which this applies, which cannot effectively be produced locally internal to the commune. The list would include:

And so on – the above list is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that needs manufactured in a modern plant requires made outside the local commune, produced in volume for a large scale distribution.

It is obvious that attempting to organise society without these kinds of items is completely out of the question.

It should be equally obvious that the scale of difficulty in organising production and distribution of these items is much greater than the above issues with healthcare and other natural monopoly services.

In a small local commune it is possible to organise internal production and distribution from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. Everyone knows everyone else, just like in a current family / household, and scale is so small that reasonable understanding is possible even without money and accounting and relative prices and costs for all communal activities.

But across a federation of millions or billions of people, for a huge multitude of different goods and different production processes, the task becomes impossible without accurate information in the form of relative prices and costs.

We must therefore understand that different rules apply to production of mass manufactured goods, as do to the rest of human economic activity. It should always be born in mind though that critically important as modern mass manufactured goods are, they will typically only absorb a small proportion of the labour force – largely due to the substantial degree of automation and mechanization of their manufacturing processes. And the trend is for greater and greater mechanization of those processes, with fewer and fewer labourers required. That is a trend which we would aim to expand on in our ideal society, leaving even smaller a proportion of labour dedicated to that sector.



Vision

The vision of Murray Bookchin has been an inspiration for this section. For the title page of his 1980 book, Toward and Ecological Society, part of Diane Shatz's drawing “Visions of Ecotopia”, was reproduced. It is especially illustrative of the hoped for future empowered local communities that were briefly described above, and so is displayed below.