In the words of David Fleming, “Most of human history had been bred, fed and watered by another sort of economy.”

In Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy, a posthumously published work by Shaun Chamberlin’s mentor David Fleming, we are reminded just how unusual today’s ‘ordinary’ is, and how profoundly unrealistic it is to pin our hopes on market capitalism – an economic system that has existed for less than 1% of human history and is already not only destroying its own foundations, but those of life on Earth. 

In the twelfth century, when a just price was the rule and usury was outlawed, there was a rational regional trading system, with staples – food, drink and clothing – produced at home: “Subsistence goods they grew, or bred, or brewed, or wove, or span for themselves” (Peters).

Even today, an Indian colleague wrote: the formerly widespread practice of barter (slow-loading link) survives in some Indian farming and fishing communities. Surplus grains, firewood, and building material are bartered by the farming community (Kunbees) in exchange for dry fish from the fishing community (Kharvis & Bhois), both communities receiving much more in goods than the monetary value.

Within living memory, many goods, food and services were still produced within a few miles’ radius

The nearest image to the village as remembered is the main street in the Black Country Museum, Dudley, UK  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blackcountrystreet.jpg

One reader remembers that in two roads in Appley Bridge, a small one-road ‘industrial’ village where she lived as a child, there were grocery, shoe, cycle and electrical repair shops, a surgery, mission church, post office, railway station, school and printing press – all on a small scale.

A greengrocer’s van travelled round offering a selection of locally grown fruit and vegetables, there was a reliable bus service to the nearest town and a canal with barges carrying heavy loads through the region. A little further away, within walking distance, was a farm which supplied the butter, cheese and bacon to the shop and larger workplaces: a lino works, a quarry, and two factories, making bricks and glue.

The value of the paid or unpaid work a person did was recognised – including the most uncoveted job done by Mr Smith, who shovelled human excrement into a lorry for removal.

She reflects that we now depend on imported food and goods. State generation and delivery of energy has been handed over, in many cases, to foreign corporations.

Those village shops and services have now gone. Green spaces have been crammed with houses and mains drainage is universal, but people there no longer know many of those around them. In a place where heads were once shaken over the notorious one or two who got drunk – but only at the weekend – one now hears tales of drug addiction, crime and imprisonment.

In towns solid terraced housing was demolished, leaving many marooned in high-rise flats, and then came Tebbit’s injunction to ‘get on your bike’ and work at a distance, further breaking up family and neighbourhood circles – all in the interests of serving a system of production that has greatly enriched a few.

Because of these changes, our youngsters are growing up in a world which has no use or place for them unless their academic attainment reaches a certain level. Whereas earlier few of the poor and unemployed turned to crime, television now repeatedly imprints on young hearts and minds images of an expensive, status-offering ‘good life’, which they cannot hope to get by legal means.

How many of us, growing up with such lack of hope for the future, would resist the temptation to escape into a drug-soothed world or to take what we cannot earn?

As Shaun Chamberlin writes:

“Let us consider what we face. An economy so violently contrary to our human instincts and desires that it leaves epidemics of depression, loneliness and suicide everywhere it goes. That uses mass media and financial stress to hollow our souls and seize control of both our days and our hearts, sparking not only economic and environmental devastation, but cultural and spiritual annihilation”. Realists of a larger reality – Dark Optimism

Time for change!