The Natural Economy

Greg Bryant
August 15, 2022

It's easy to point out that the global export economy of 2022 is fragile, exploitative, extractive, imperialist, wasteful, destructive, increases poverty, and is rapidly making the planet unlivable. It should be carefully dismantled, and de-grown.

In a rational world, the global export economy would be stopped, existing only for emergencies. In fact, it is dying. Many countries, which have been abused to become net exporters, are now refusing to export, as the as the system is shown to be inefficient. But the people that benefit from it will not easily disappear or retire. They resist the obvious. And they will drag their dependents with them, down an increasingly unsustainable road.

That's why the other economy -- the Natural Economy -- the one that's primarily local, ecologically sustainable, equitable, directly democratic, community-driven, grassroots, sensitive, inclusive, genuinely rational, and humane -- needs to find purchase, and displace the bad economy.

Since its founding in 1974, on the heels of the enlightenment of the 1960s and the oil crises of 1973, RAIN has doggedly pursued this question. Community development, appropriate technology, direct consumer-producer relations, and investigations of how the world works, and how it can work better ... this research on community projects (combined with efforts to duplicate their successes) can help us to reinforce and foreground the natural economy, the one that actually works, and which can be mobilized to save humans and the biodiversity we depend on ... but which is constrained like a bonsai tree by the infrastructure of exploitation.

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List major points in articles from RAIN (upload them if not here, like wam kat's article about how people outside the economy do most of the work in a war ... and stuff about the same in corporations and institutions ... call that section 'beyond managerialist myths')