Ethan Miller writes an inspiring article for Yes Magazine entitled: Independence from the Corporate Global Economy. In it, he confirms that we don’t have to depend on big corporations to survive, we can take back the economy and create community. Ethan highlights the alternatives available to us:
Suppose we try a different story: instead of defining the economy as a market system, let’s define it as the diverse array of activities by which humans generate livelihoods in relation to each other and to the Earth. Extending far beyond the workings of the capitalist market, economic activity includes all of the ways we sustain and support ourselves, our families, and our communities. Peeling away the dominant economic story of competition and accumulation, we see that other economies are alive below the surface, nourishing us like roots. These are not the economies of the stock-brokers and the economists. They are the economies of mutual care and cooperation—community economies, local economies.
Many are familiar to us, though rarely acknowledged. They include:
Household Economies—meeting our needs with our own skills and work: raising children, offering advice or comfort, teaching life skills, cooking, cleaning, building, balancing the checkbook, fixing the car, growing food and medicine, raising animals. Much of this work has been rendered invisible or devalued as “women’s work.”
Gift Economies—built on shared circles of generosity: volunteer fire companies, food banks, giving rides to hitch-hikers, donating to community organizations, sharing food.
Barter Economies—trading services with friends or neighbors, swapping one useful thing for another: returning a favor, exchanging plants or seeds, time-based local currencies.
Gathering Economies—living on the abundance of Earth’s gift economy: hunting, fishing, and foraging. Also re-directing the wastestream—salvaging from demolition sites, gleaning from already-harvested farm fields, dumpster-diving.
Cooperative Economies—based on common ownership and/or control of resources: worker-owned and -run businesses, collective housing, intentional communities, health care cooperatives, community land trusts.
Community Market Economies—networks of exchange built from small businesses and cooperatives that are accountable to their communities through social ties, innovative ownership models, and mutual support. Such economies are not created to make large profits, but to provide healthy, modest livelihoods to their participants, and services to the larger community.