How To Dismantle an Empire

Go read the book already

Executive summary: the title of this post is also the title of a book by Tereza Coraggio. Stop reading now, and go buy the book here. It will cost less than a nice meal at a restaurant, and will feed your brain for considerably longer than that nice meal.

Back already? If you’ve taken my advice and bought the book, you can skip the rest of this post, which is mostly a long ramble about my experience living in a rural environment for the last 14 years.

When I moved to Vermont in 2009, after living in the San Francisco Bay Area (and the nearby Monterey Bay Area) for 54 years, the first thing I noticed about my new home town (pop. 1200) was that the sense of community was much stronger here. More than that, it was not just a sense, but a reality that was expressed in tangible ways. I also lived in a slightly larger neighboring town for a few years, and the feeling was the same.

I believe (but do not know for sure) that this community-mindedness is at least in part the result of geography and weather. Vermont is mostly made up of small towns that are isolated from each other by the very hilly terrain and the harsh winters. So people in these towns are very dependent on each other for mutual aid and support. Your neighbor may be on the other end of the political spectrum from you, but you’ll help each other out in times of extreme weather, or when you need help in other areas (repairing farm equipment, building a house, and so on).

This community-mindedness is exemplified by the town meetings that happen all over Vermont in early March. This phenomenon appears to be the last vestige of direct democracy in this country. It’s not a perfect system (I’m uncomfortable with the voice votes that tend to discourage dissent from group-think). But it does provide a way to have some say in the future of one’s home town that is largely free of party politics.

When one moves up the political chain, this type of direct democracy disappears almost instantly. The state government is controlled by party politics and coalitions (the supposedly “Progressive” party is really just a sheepdog for the Democrat party), and by supposed “progressive” business interests, like makers of solar panel and wind turbine “farms”, or Big Pharma companies that make supposedly live-saving Glorious Goos. State house representatives might politely listen to you, but they’ll go ahead and and vote against your interests anyway.

So at least here in Vermont, the only political power citizens have is strictly local. I saw this when I lived in the neighboring town, which was busy recovering from the mismanagement of Tropical Storm Irene by the corrupt old boys’ network who made up the selectboard. We voted out the old boys as their terms of office expired, and brought in new selectboard members who actually cared about the future of the town. We then successfully fought off an attempt by Dollar General to build a new store outside of the town center, on swampland across from the local school on a busy highway.

The Dollar General example brings us to the subject of How To Dismantle an Empire: how can communities ensure that the local economy thrives and doesn’t have its lifeblood sucked away by large parasitical corporations? In the towns in my area, you can see some efforts in this area. For a while, an organization called BALE (Build a Local Economy) was trying to drum up some interest, but it has apparently devolved into a presenter of occasional unrelated talks on “progressive” ideas. You can also see street signs saying “Buy Local”. But exhortations can do little when the economic ship of state is headed ever more towards globalism. It’s hard to get people to buy local tomatoes when the ones grown in Ecuador are cheaper and available all year.

Clearly, the solution has to involve some kind of system that allows economic power to be returned to communities. That’s the topic addressed in How to Dismantle an Empire. But this book isn’t a manifesto for an “ism” to compete with or replace capitalism. It describes a way to work within that system to strengthen the vitality of communities. The ideas presented in this book revolve around several things, including public banks and local currencies. These are not new ideas, and the book presents a lengthy history of how these ideas have worked in practice.

But rather than trying to summarize these ideas inadequately, I advise you to buy the book for yourself. It’s not always an easy read, especially if you, like me, are not a trained economist or an enthusiastic supporter of a particular economic “ism”. But it will exercise your brain, which is a Good Thing in my view.

(Note: the links provided above are not Affiliate links. I don’t make any money from Amazon. In fact, I discourage people from using Amazon as much as possible, but as far as I can tell, Amazon is the only place where this book can be purchased.)