Commentary on Webs of Power

Louis Eisenberg

I like Starhawk’s message about respecting nature and how we don’t have to live in conflict with it, but I have a lot of trouble accepting her claim that there is something inherently good and necessary about self-sufficiency. She says: “The whole ideology of ‘efficiency’ and ‘integration’ is aimed at shoring up an economic system in which no region is self-sufficient, in which the resources of the entire globe are available without restraint to corporations that wish to exploit them, and in which the entire world is one huge market open to all” (165). Corporations exploiting resources doesn’t sound so attractive, but what’s wrong with the world being one huge market? Why does efficiency entail exploitation of the land? That’s not a problem with globalization or economic theory -- it’s a problem with the misvaluation of our environmental resources. If corporations are exploiting people or poisoning the land, that’s because the wrong incentives are driving people’s actions. But ignoring the evils of globalization for a moment, isn’t there at least something inherently good about trade, even if it leads to interdependence, the opposite of self-sufficiency? If A and B can make an exchange and both be better off, they should do it.

Starhawk might say that she doesn’t mean that the desirability of self-sufficiency is an absolute truth, but rather that it’s something that makes a lot of sense given the current state of the world. As an area gives up its self-sufficiency and becomes more enmeshed in the network of the global economy, establishing links of interdependence, the idea of its removing itself from that network becomes increasingly infeasible. It becomes trapped. I think Starhawk might approve of interdependence if it was between parties of equal strength -- something like the affinity groups that compose her spokescouncil. But I don’t think she’s too fond of scale-free networks where the nature of the structure is that some nodes have much greater influence than others.