This article was recently published in the the Commoner Webjournal. Maria Rosa della Costa is also the author of essays in a new volume published by Autonomedia, "Revolutionary Writing".

Anonymous Comrade writes

"If we submit the world "locality" to the litmus test of
the word "hunger," we find that it is
valid for at least seven good reasons, which means
that it is impossible to face the problem of
hunger if we do not take into account the question of
"locality."

I have reflected for years on this issue, on this
constant creation of hunger and misery
which, produced primarily by land expropriation, has
characterized capitalist development since its
origins.

Today, in the Empire, there are 800 million people
who are hungry, and I billion and 200
million who are malnourished. Such an extensive and
relentless production of hunger must be at
the center of our reflection on "how to organize
against the Empire." This is especially true at a
time when this problem is being raised with urgency
and determination by many social movements
in the First as well as the Third World, looking for
ways to guarantee a material and spiritual life.

Without land to cultivate there is no nourishment.
Without nourishment there are no
bodies. The bodies die. We cannot engage in
bio-politics without confronting this problem; even in
the "exodus" we still will have to eat.
Thus, any importance given to society-creation and
political re-composition that looks at
the landing sites must always be coupled with the
giving of equal importance to society-creation,
cooperative production, and the construction of
bio-politics looking at the places of origin, without
fear that this may lend itself to nostalgic or romantic
positions. What would this mean, anyway?
Could we have such fears if, by a sudden diktat, we
were expelled from our apartments and
deprived, on top of it, from the possibility of getting
any food? Would we consider nostalgic and
romantic the will to resist and return to our previous
situation?

Thus, the importance given to the desire for mobility
of work must be coupled with an
equal concern for the right to resist, and cooperation
with those who have landed must be coupled
with cooperation with those who have never left and
resist the violence of uprooting and
displacement.

I consider now seven good reasons why we need to
insist on the concept of "locality,"
while "an Empire that is everywhere and nowhere"
seems to prospect, even among militants, the
indifference to locality as the only possible
dimension. Is this the only possible dimension or this
too must be coupled with its opposite, the
appreciation for the locality, depending on the issues
at
stake?

The first good reason to insist on the concept of
locality is that the broad interventions
on the land and the populations that have
characterized the origins of capitalist development
appear as constant and crucial components in the
politics of structural adjustment imposed by
the International Monetary Fund, during the last two
decades, on the governments of the South of
the world, and in the World Banks' projects which
constitute their complements. While these
politics, imposed in a particularly uncompromising
way since the 1980s, have more and more
lowered the standards of living of the population, the
World Bank's projects have always rooted the
maximization of profit on gigantic demolitions of the
fundamental means of social reproduction in
the contexts in which they have been applied.

The interventions to which I refer are, on one side,
the privatization and expropriation of
land and, on the other, the uprooting, expulsion, and
even fencing off, of the populations--fencing
off, first of all, in refugee camps and shelters for
immigrants or in more or less hidden
concentration camps in a war situation--just to
mention the first three example examples. Due to
the great war projects/enterprises, to the agricultural
modernization projects, exemplified by the
various phases of the Green Revolution (of which GM
seeds represents the last development),
due to investment projects, like the construction of
mega dams or roads, and to projects directly
aiming at the resettlement of populations (among the
most explicit being the Transmigrasi in
Indonesia), there are is a constant accumulation of
land, on one side, and expelled populations on
the other. By means of war, land is accumulated, and
populations are uprooted just by making the
land non-cultivable due to the presence in it of
war-ammunitions (an increasingly infinite damage,
for an infinite time, for an expulsion without return).

Starting from the 1980s, these interventions, coupled
with the policies typical of harsh
adjustment, have caused an unprecedented poverty
across the world. What we are witnessing is a
planetary master plan of underdevelopment of social
reproduction, finalized to the development of
the new neo-liberal global economy. It hardly needs
to be mentioned here that all of this has been
in response to the cycle of struggle of the 1960s and
1970s which, as Negri underlie in his Impero
e Controimpero, the topic of this debate-- blocked
the mechanisms of the reproduction of capitalist
society, founded on the fordist, or better, the
Keynesian compromise that had prevailed for about
thirty years.

From the recurrence and crucial role of these
interventions in the politics of the
organisms that regulate global finance and therefore
the modalities of development, we deduce
that in post-fordist accumulation as well --which
presumably accumulates information, social
relations and affections--what is being accumulated,
no less than five centuries ago, is first of all
land, on one side, and, on the other, impoverished
individuals expropriated from the means of
production and reproduction, starting with the land.

Thus land accumulation and the expulsion of
populations remain, together with war,
fundamental operations intended to reorganize the
world, give new foundations to class relations
and stratify labor.

It is evident that, if free cultivable lands are not
much available, nor are jobs, in a number
corresponding to the number of those expelled, and
citizenship rights are also not available, then
expulsion form the land is the equivalent for many of
a death sentence.

But if these interventions continue to be constant
and crucial factors from a capitalist
viewpoint, then, it is important that we also assume
their crucial character from the point of
view of the struggle against the Empire. Let's pay
attention then to the right to resist beside the
right to escape.

Precisely because the lesson taught by this type of
death sentence has been learned in
the remotest corners of the planet, the right to
resistance has resulted more and more in
numerous organizational efforts. This is the good
second reason to insist on the concept of
locality.

This implies the need to respect and cooperate with
the choices and decisions that
derive from the consciousness that it is
unconceivable to go anywhere else, because there is
often
not other place to go. Not surprisingly, the most
ephemeral aspect of the great dam projects is the
part concerning the resettlement of the populations
affected, because there are no other fields
available for cultivation in the area. Outside of that
cultivable area there is no possibility of exodus,
neither material nor interior. For the overwhelming
majority of the uprooted population there is only
the misery of the urban peripheries, where usury
vultures are waiting for them, to take their children
as slaves or to take them to the brothels, as well as
traffickers in human flesh, including human
organs.

In this context, the resistance of the tribal people of
the Narmada Valley (India), who
declare that they prefer to let themselves drown in
the water, if the works for the dam proceed,
rather than move, represents this consciousness,
beside the determination to continue to live in
their own economic and cultural environment, against
the violence of displacement and the
annihilation destiny imposed by the interests and
profits of the global economy.

A second example, even more significant because full
of further implications, is the
resistance of the Chikpo women on the slopes of the
Himalaya. International companies arrive
planning to install sawing outfits to cut down a good
part of the forest which, together with
agriculture and cattle raising, represents the food,
reproduction, and life system of these
communities. The companies try to entice the women
with the prospect of the money the family will
earn through the jobs that will open up for the men.
But the women refuse it and organize pickets,
hugging the trees in the night to prevent the loggers
from cutting them down. They explicitly refuse
the possibility of receiving money saying that they
don't need jobs to live. They already have what
they need to live. This reminds me of the protests
organized, five centuries ago, by the farmers in
England against the fencing off of the communal
lands. They too were saying that they did not
need to go to work in the manufacturing workshops to
be able to live. The story repeats itself, but
now it is globally understood. The Chikpo women also
refuse the determination of a gap between
the female and male conditions, between those who
have money and those who don't. But, above
all, they refuse to be enslaved by the money economy,
to commit one's life to the uncertainty of this
economy, the more so in its neo-liberal version. One
day, when the work will be finished, the
sawing machine will go and, then, neither the jobs nor
the forest--a guarantee of nourishment and
habitat--will be there, but, instead, there will be
displacement and hunger.

The old dilemma, whether the village was or was not
functional to the capitalist economy
because, after all, it absorbed the cost of the
reproduction of labor when this was not directly
engaged in the wage economy, has been resolved.
Capitalist development is destroying all the
villages. But the villages are organizing, more and
more, against capital and its Empire, defending
a sphere of life, a possibility of nourishment, and a
dwelling and social context that do not depend
exclusively on money.

For us here what are our villages, our forests, our
commons, and our alternative
economies to defend or to set up? What are our other
relationships that give us some guarantee
and which we do not want to see destroyed? This is
question to which I will return, when I discuss
the sixth and seventh "good reasons," together with
some answers that have already been
concretized.

The third good reason to continuo to
speak of the '"locality" is the most
notorious, perhaps, and this is the need to preserve
our bio-diversity, which is also a guarantee of
good nutrition and better food safety. In the variety
of species resides a multiplicity of nutritive
substances, so that if a species sickens others remain.
Bio-diversity characterizes one locality and
not another one, but to preserve it we must maintain
economic, social, and cultural network
supporting its survival and accessibility. By relying
on the natural abundance represented by bio-
diversity, and adopting biological methods of
cultivation, whose cost they could sustain, entire
populations, just a few decades ago, could be
self-sufficient. Instead, the Green Revolution, with
its need for large scale agriculture and chemical
inputs and, more recently, bio-technological (GM)
ones, has brought hunger not only to those expelled
from the land but also to those who have
remained on the land but at the dependence of the
agribusiness companies. Suffice to say that
over the last three years, in India, 20,000 farmers
have committed suicide because they could not
pay the debts they had contracted to buy seeds and
pesticides. Export oriented monocultures, at
the expense of other species that are destroyed by the
"advanced" farming methods, also
generates hunger, illness, and invalidity. It is famous
the case of the batua, a small plant rich in
vitamin A, whose elimination by herbicides is the
cause of the blindness of many children in India.

The fourth good reason consists in the right to
dwelling stability. Without it there is no
agriculture, insofar as activity and as knowledge
exchange between humanity and the land. And
without agriculture, as we said at the beginning, there
is no nourishment. The bodies die. Many
famines derive from population resettlements. This
is true also of the present famine in Angola,
where resettlements have been caused by war. Once
resettled in another area the farmers can no
longer sow nor harvest, nor perform any of the
intermediary activities.

But many other needs are included in the affirmation
of the right to dwelling stability, a
basic right and also the center of the network of
relations around which an essential part of our
material and immaterial reproduction is built. At
that address friends can find us or can send us a
letter. Not surprisingly, one of the most significant
struggles carried out by slum dwellers in
Bhopal, before being hit by the toxic cloud of the
Union Carbide was that to have an address. To
have a legally recognized address (the putta) meant
to have some title to the few square meters of
land on which the barrack in which one lived was
built. It meant having a means to defend
oneselves against slum demolitions, and to have a
guarantee, though often violated, against the
evictions decided by the government. It allowed
people to get a paper entitling tem to obtain some
basic goods sold at subsidized prices (similarly, in the
United States, you cannot receive a welfare
check or credit cards if you do not have an address).
For those uprooted from the villages, the
demand for an address affirmed, again, the right to be
rooted in a locality, this time in the
city.

The fifth good reason is that food resources
must be locally available at all levels--
"community, region, nation"--as numerous
organizations of women, coming from various
countries
of the South, are demanding. The denial of this right
is a key component of the politics of the
World Bank that, for decades, has been thwarting this
goal. The Sudanese knew very well how to
store food for times of famine. They preserved
grains, for decades, by keeping under mounds of
soil. This was true biotechnological wisdom! The
World Bank, instead, even today, is asking the
countries of the South to dismantle their public food
reserves, and let the markets deal with
emergencies. It claims that it is more convenient
(from whose viewpoint?) if the stronger countries,
that have food surpluses, take care of it. This means
that multinational companies will accumulate
more profits. Above all, aid will come, as usual, too
late, after a good part of the population will
already have been left to die, as it is still happening
now in Angola; (but this is a shortcut frequently
adopted to resolve the "demographic problem");
mistakes will be made as to who gets the food, the
"food aid" will hide genetically modified grains,
though they have already proven to be health
hazards (like those forbidden in the United States
and the European Union but recently sent to
Bolivia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua). And the aid will
be granted under heavy conditionalities, as is
often the case, and will further ruin the local
production and the local trade. The alternative to all
this absurdity takes us back to the locality, to local
production and trade (not, of course, the
production carried out by a multinational that has set
itself up there), as the source of the foodstuff
to be stored. It takes us back to the locality as the
place where to store the food, and to local
knowledge concerning the methods of storage. At the
very least, the local methods already
available and tested must represent the first means
of comparison if others have to be introduced.
Storing food under mounds of soil is certainly wiser
than setting up silos that melt in the desert.

Moreover, the first food reserve is obviously
represented by the possibility, on the side of
the farmers, of selecting, planting, maintaining, and
replanting, year after year, the seeds from the
previous crop, contrary to the claim of the big
agribusiness companies producers of GM, that force
the farmers to buy the seeds every years, persecute
them by accusing them of having illegally
used GM seeds, and carry our genetic mutations, so
that sterile seeds are generated (like
Terminator) to guarantee the purchase. The strategy
of the globalization of hunger has
reached its peak. It has produced the science of
sterility.

The last two reasons refer to the necessity to take
into account the organizational
efforts and networks that in the Third World as in the
First or, to put in other words, in the various
Souths and Norths of the world. have been built
starting from the food question, that is, the
question of "what is to be done" to avoid hunger and
to have a good nutrition. These networks, in
my view, have a double aspect. On one side, they aim
to defend the local context, territory, and
population, from the devastation and degradation
decreed by the global economy, as a premise for
displacement. In this sense, we could say that they
aim to relocalize development. On the other
side, precisely because of the alternative character of
the efforts that are being made, they
represent, in my view, the first level of a great
exodus. They are networks aiming to connect a set
of organizational realities which, in open challenge to
the "agricultural modernization" so far
implemented, the more so in its neo-liberal,
globalized version, are carrying on, with a great
capacity for connectedness, the project of a different
agriculture as the foundation for a different
social project. The various connected realities
articulate, in fact, their discourses around a set of
fundamental themes, starting from the right to keep
their food traditions and their cultures. There
are also community networks, developed in the
advanced countries, which guaranteeing, through

different economies and other relations, "spirit and
life," escape the despotism and the death
sentences, by despondence and isolation, decreed by
the various agents of the Empire. These
experiences that promote, meanwhile, a vast social
transformation concerning important matters,
are today increasingly interconnected with moments
of struggle, of which the case of Argentina is
one of the most significant.

A prerequisite, in fact, to be able to face, in the best
way, all the battles ahead, is to be
alive, to be strong, and to have eaten well.

The sixth good reason, then, why we should insist on
the concept of locality is that,
starting from the various Souths of the world, in the
1980s, the years of the drastic adjustment
and, consequently, the great bread riots, stretching
from Latin America to Asia and acquiring a new
vigor in the 1990s, a great movement has formed to
regain access to the land, and obviously
also to the water that runs in its veins and to its
resources. Access to the land means, first of all,
the possibility of having access to food. In this sense,
vast farmers' networks have formed, more
recently joined by fishermen's networks. These are
networks that, in my view, represent the best
novelty, one truly pregnant with a different future.
The Via Campesina, which appeared on the
scene in 1992 and formed in 1993, is among the most
significant and substantial among these
networks. The realities connected by it, 70
organizations, qualify it as a transcontinental network
where the issues raised by the organizations of the
South have soon found a correspondence with
those of the organizations of the North, which have
also become part of it. The overall discourse
that characterizes this "network of networks,"
adopted over the last years as a flag by the farmers'
movement, is that of food sovereignty. It is
articulated in a set of points all relating to the
question of locality. They are the foundation of the
universal right to food, to life, and the
quality of life. Access to land obviously means the
possibility to cultivate it for the subsistence of
the communities living on it. But stress is also placed
on the will to cultivate it according to
biological criteria, so that people can benefit from
the nutritional diversity that bio-diversity offers.

Thus, access to land means the right to produce one's
food in all the varieties that are
possible in that locality and context. It means variety
of food, no longer as an elite privilege but
as a right for all, and as the guarantee of a better
nutrition and a better health. It means
nutritional freedom as the other face of nutritional
democracy. Thus, it means different
discourses and practices with regard to agriculture,
food production, and trade, sustainable from an
economic, social, and environmental viewpoint.
These are the foundations of a different
nutritional project for a different life. They are
different economies against a global economy,
and against an imperial diktat that condemn us to a
nutritional homogeneization which, for the
majority, involves poor nutrition and poor health;
condemn us also to a purely industrial production
of food, likely to be exported or imported, but for
many impossible to acquire; and also condemn us
to the specialization of cultivations by geographical
areas in the neo-liberal internationalization of
the markets. Local economies and networks aiming,
instead, to safeguard the variety and physical
integrity of the various species against their
destruction and genetic manipulation, which are a
source of misery and risks for the population.
Networks that oppose the privatization of the
common goods, like water, seeds, that represent vital
resources for everybody. This, in my view,
are revolutionary positions because, by carrying an
alternative project, they oppose the
undermining and capitalization of the mechanisms
that reproduce life, which constitute the
most crucial terrain of the present capitalist strategy
of hunger, which, in turn, serves to give
new foundation to the class relation and stratify
work. On the other side, these underminings and
capitalizations constitute the crucial terrain for the
multitude, for here is the ground of struggle for
the possibility, quality, and freedom of human
reproduction. The basic tenets of these networks
are, in my view, the constitutive points for a different
project. On these matters, the most
revolutionary positions turn out to be truly the most
conservative.

The seventh good reason to say "locality" is the
emergence in the advanced countries
themselves, starting with the United States, the high
levels of the Empire, of networks which
represent a set of very broad experiences, these too
frequently originating from the 1980s, but
remarkably consolidated and widened in the
following decade, or born in the 1990s and usually
defined as "social
ecology,""bio-regionalism,""communitarian
economy."

In the United States, against the devastations
produced in the social fabric by the global
economy and a federal government that, in the
decades we mentioned, increasingly left its workers
in the street, without a roof, food, and assistance, a
movement has taken off. It consists of a set of
self-organizing initiatives intended to establish, first
of all, new relations among people and among
these and the land (for cultivation, habitation, and
public space), and trying, meanwhile, to
relocalize, to keep at the community level, or at the
region or city level, resources, goods,
capacities, professional abilities, and also money that
people did not want to see swallowed by the
uncontrollable kingdom of the global
economy/finance, at the expense of the possibility
and quality
of life of the local communities. This is why these
initiatives are also considered part of an overall
movement to relocalize development, which is meant
to strengthen and revitalize the economic
and social context of that locality, against the
alternative of abandoning to a destiny of degradation
and impoverishment, with the frequent corollary of
isolation and dislocation for its inhabitant.

I will briefly mention it, focussing above all on the
emergence of those networks which, in
the Unites States, have made of nutrition their battle
ground, similar in this to those we have
seen in the countries of the South. It is a very broad
movement, which was born to challenge the
consequences of the present model of agro-industrial
development and which tries, in the
meantime, to build alternative forms of life. This
movement has become increasingly important in
numerous American cities, many of which have been
struck by unemployment, with the
consequent flight of the supermarkets and the closing
of many shops. What characterizes it is that
it oriented towards a biological agriculture at the
local level in order to guarantee food to the
community and, above all, fresh and genuine food
(the European Union has authorized the
irradiation of food, which is a health hazard, in order
to preserve it, so that it looks fresh even if it is
not). From Binghamton to Detroit, the historic
capital of the car industry, and San Francisco, the
initiatives geared towards a good nutrition, by
opening a new relations between people and the
land, have become, at the same time, the engine for
the take off of different forms of farming and
for the mixing of different culture, promoting the
encounter and cooperation between different
sectors of the population that, prior to that, had been
estranged from each other as, for instance,
the citizens of Binghamton and the native Americans
residing in the nearby reservations. In san
Francisco, Mohammed Neru, the director of the San
Francisco League of Gardeners (SLUG),
argues that: We are dealing with the entire cycle, not
with one problem alone, meaning by "entire
cycle," the revitalizing of an impoverished community
which cannot rely upon the usual
reproduction infrastructures, like decent houses,
food, shops, public gardens. Thus, the self-
organization aimed at providing food, becomes the
engine for the self-organization of another
series of initiatives which, relying on local resources
and abilities, aim to redesign and re-articulate
the context in which people live, and recompose
different sectors of the population and different
work capacities. In the name of "food security for the
community," an idea that has begun to
take root both on the Atlantic and the Pacific coast
in the 1990s, the Community Food Security
Coalition has formed at an embryonically national
level, which has set up networks that ensure the
production of food that is fresh and genuine because
it is produced at the local level and according
to biological criteria as well as its distribution at low
cost destined above all to the local level. Also
the transport of the food is guaranteed at a low cost,
because many people, due to unemployment,
cannot afford a car, and there are no public transports
that take to the places where the food is
produced. The Coalition declares that it wants to set
up "a more democratic food system," and
ties together 125 groups connecting food banks,
networks of family farms, and organizations
against poverty which, generally, in the past, did not
work together. The programs of these
networks, that obviously function on the basis of the
concerns that tie together these people, put
into contact small rural or urban farmers, food banks,
soup kitchens for the poor and low income
communities. The scope and significance which these
initiatives have assumed in the 1990s
certainly represent a novelty. Among other things,
the self-production, distribution, and sale at
low cost of fresh and genuine food marks a turning
point with respect to the past, when people
contented themselves with the distribution of food
that welfare offered or with the coupon to
purchase food, which limited the quality and quantity
of the food that one could buy in the
supermarkets. They are a turning point from the
viewpoint of the capacity to gain good food
even in conditions of poverty. Those who participate
are citizens who do not want to abandon
their bodies to the degradation decreed by the global
economy.

But self-organization around food has become, in
many cases, as I said, the engine for
self-organization for an alternative, more
comprehensive production, for an alternative
exchange of work skills, professional abilities,
knowledge, so that all these resources may be
kept and preserved at the local level, to save and
strengthen the quality of life in that context. This
does not mean that they cannot be circulated and be
an example for other social contexts. On the
contrary, as we will see, this is what has happened.
What has been rejected, however, is that these
resources might be swallowed by the use and non-use
laws of capitalist economy against the
possibility of subsistence in that context. The same
can be said for the coining of an alternative
form of money to be used precisely in order to
maintain or to promote activities pertaining to a
local economy, these too aiming to strengthen the
possibility of life of the individuals who form the
community or the city. Let us mention, among these
forms of alternative money, the LETS (Local
employment and trading schemes), a system of local
money --"green dollars"-- that allows for
exchanges of services coordinated by telephone by a
central service. The same value is attributed
to the green dollar that is attributed to the US dollar.
In this case, the money does not circulate but
simply serves to calculate what people give and what
people have--every month people receive a
report about this, including a list with the names of
the other participants to the system, together
with the services they can offer. This system was set
up in 1983 in the Comox Valley (British
Columbia) by Michael Linton, a computer
programmer who had become unemployed and who,
realizing how many people were in the same
condition, developed a special interest in the
elaboration of "community economies." Beside the
United States, the LETS are very spread in
Canada, in Great Britain, and in Australia. We owe,
instead, to Paul Grower, an expert in
communitarian and ecological economy and author of
Los Angeles : A City of the Future, the
invention of the equally famous Ithaca Hours, a
currency whose unit corresponds to the value of
ten US dollars. In this case the money circulates but
can be used only in the town of Ithaca. It is
significant that in 1995, already 400 communities in
the 48 States of the USA had asked for the kit
to lean the modalities of application of the system
and were following in Ithaca's footsteps. There
are other forms of alternative money. Here we have
just cited the most significant examples.

Today, these forms of alternative self-organization
which concern the food question,
the production and exchange of goods, services,
professional skills and knowledge, as well
as other currency, we find them again as pillars of the
resistance and the struggles in the
crisis that is affecting Argentina. Self-organization
that is realized by coining an alternative money,
by occupying land to cultivate it even within Buenos
Aires, self-producing and organizing vast
networks of barter exchange to which already
participate million of people; and confronting,
together with the problem of food that of health, and
education. Obviously, the example has been
globalized producing an always broader Landactivism
and lifeactivism of the locality and of the
exodus. For building the possibility to escape the
despotism of the global economy and its Empire
allows us to continue to live, to defend a certain
quality of life, to begin to open new vistas while we
continue to produce and to struggle.

Notes

1. Intervention on the occasion of the debate Critical
Paths for a Second Cycle of Global Struggles. A
Discussion
starting from the books No Logo by Naomi Klein and
Empire by A. Negri and M.Hart, and the
presentation of the book
Counterempire by A. Negri et al. At the festival of
Radio Sherwood held in Padova on July 10, 2002.
http://www.thecommoner.org

Bibliography

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Native in Us the Land
We Belong to (paper presented at the meeting
"For Another Europe, the Europe of the Movements
and of the Class Autonomy" held in Turin the
30th of March 1996, also published: in Italian in Vis à
Vis n.5, 1997, and in A. Marucci Camminare
domandando, DeriveApprodi, 1999; in English in
Common Sense n.23, 1998.