With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority.

Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding.

Unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, and other climate disasters are overwhelming us. Inequality is at a historic high, with 3,000 billionaires shaping our political systems and civil societies. Our once open and vibrant democracies are mutating into dictatorships. Our economies, which were remarkably stable after World War II, continually careen between uncontrolled inflation and unemployment. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing.

But we also believe there is a clear path forward that has received little attention. And that solution is localism: a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies.

Around the world are exciting examples of localism’s success: communities increasingly able to feed themselves through greenhouses, vertical growing, and food sovereignty programs; urban organizations solving homelessness through tiny houses and community land trusts; cooperatives, nonprofits, and B Corps removing the walls between managers and workers; neighborhoods using cutting edge technologies to be self-reliant in energy and water. Localism is about accelerating the start-up, maturity, and spreading of these kinds of projects worldwide.

We believe that localism can not only provide a powerful new framework for solving our most pressing problems. It’s also a philosophy that offers a radically hopeful politics and opens new possibilities for cracking our calcified political systems, collaborating across ideological lines.

Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today—however imperfectly—in the federalist structures of countries like Canada, Germany, and the United States. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance.

  • hex_m_hell@slrpnk.net
    2·
    10 天前

    it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict.

    I don’t disagree, exactly, but I have a few thoughts on this. The first is just… “how is that different from now?” You’re just describing modern geopolitics. If we’re comparing two systems and they both have the same flaws but one has some benefits, then the flaws really don’t matter. This doesn’t put us any worse than we are now, and it actually makes things much better… which comes to the second point (not well addressed in the doc).

    I think this is where people tend to fundamentally misunderstand conflict. War is incredibly resource intensive. Carrying out war ultimately makes the warring society untenable, and we’ve seen this with the collapse of every empire. There’s a section in The Art of War (I can’t remember exactly) that discusses logistics. Sun Tzu essentially says that each soldier deployed requires seven people in the field (growing grain, harvesting, etc) to support. Soldiers and equipment have only become more expensive for offensive deployment. Meanwhile, asymmetric warfare has decreased the cost of defense and campaigns to destabilize empires. Ursula K le Guin’s Always Coming Home touches on this point at the end (not to spoil it, for anyone down to take on the challenge but she argues that under some cases defense may not even be necessary at all).

    A large empire may be able to maintain enough excess to support global oppression for decades or centuries, especially with complex financial manipulation. Bigger systems can just absorb more chaos without destabilizing quickly. I think of aquaponics, where the larger the tank the longer you have to adjust the system before critical failure: more water means more thermal mass, more oxygen in the water, more capacity to absorb waste before it becomes toxic. Small tanks can crash rapidly. A small leak can drain all the water. A broken pump can mean quickly running out of air or toxifying water. The system just doesn’t have room.

    A local economy is the same. Russia may be able to survive an almost total economic blockade for 6 years (by current estimates), but it will still collapse (perhaps quite soon). How long could Cleveland Ohio survive such a blockade? Most major cities would collapse in less than a week.

    So yes, this type of system requires federation and cooperation between localities but it doesn’t actually require a central authority. Which is a good thing, since we have no central authority now and we’ve never figured out how to have a top level central authority. There has never been a top level central authority globally. The best we’ve ever come up with were the League of Nations and the United Nations, and those both seem to have mostly failed for pretty much the same reasons.

    Edit: The original text does touch on sanctions and blockades, but yeah, I read it as being vaguely liberal and the liberal solution of “we need a central authority” always runs out of turtles somewhere.