The forms of living politics explored in this book are quests for alternative values: both alternative values in the ethical sense and different ways of thinking about economic value. On the surface, these quests may look like mere nostalgia or attempts to return to imagined, and economically unrealistic, “good old days;” but a closer look suggests a more fundamental questioning of a particular economic and ethical regime: a regime that is all too often taken for granted. French pioneer of research on social memory Maurice Halbwachs, many decades ago, highlighted the limitations of the mechanical explanation of economic value in terms of laws of supply and demand. Demand itself is a product of memory, history, and custom. The relative values that we attach to things are the (often unconscious) product of centuries of social negotiation and conflict over the meaning of human happiness and prosperity and the proper way of organizing society.Footnote 1 So value is inescapably built on values.

Exchange Beyond Profit Seeking

Ever-expanding commercial exchange has come to dominate people’s economic life and imagination of social relationships globally. Yet a multitude of other forms of exchange still exist and play a crucial role in many communities, particularly (though not exclusively) in rural areas. Behind many efforts to preserve and create alternative exchange systems lie local communities’ resistance to a corporate market ideology that reduces complex social relations in quantifiable figures.

If one adopts a different way of performing the calculation and defining values, it becomes clear that what is commonly regarded as “market efficiency” may be a source of massive social “deficiency” or even catastrophe. Waste products, pollution, crime, and violence generated by certain modes of production, for example, are not factored into cost.Footnote 2 Long-term effects on human relationships, community ties, and local environment are neglected.

What is commonly called “the market economy” in contemporary discourse is (as Karl Polanyi, Karatani Kojin, and others have observed) in fact just one kind of market economy: a form of market that relies on the relentless conversion of life into commodities, in order to generate profits that fuel endless expansion. What is distinctive about the dominant economic system is not the fact that it is based on market exchange, but rather “its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion.”Footnote 3 Underlying this expansion, Polanyi argued, is the process of subordinating labour and land to the market: turning them into commodities. But labour and land are only “fictitious commodities,” because they are created by forces outside the logic of the commodity economy. Conscripting these unique dimensions of nature and human life into the commodity system, and assuming that they behave in the same way as real commodities, is ultimately a recipe for social and environmental disaster.Footnote 4

This market, based on the commodification of human work and the natural environment, pursues its unending search for profit, not just by expanding outwards geographically, but also by expanding inwards, into areas of health, child care, aged care, human and national security, and even the genetic make-up of the body. This inward expansion is the process that Hardt and Negri call “intensification.” As geographical limits are reached, “capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive.”Footnote 5 Contemporary intensification is just the latest phase in a very long process that goes back at least to the commercial and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. With the rise of the commodity economy, people came to rely on the market for a growing share of the goods they had once produced at home. During the twentieth century, the market extended still further into daily life. Not only were more and more goods commercially exchanged, corporations now also created a growing range of entirely new commodities for which they had to create a need. The new science of marketing was used to stimulate demand for this range of products—things like radios, refrigerators, automobiles, hair dryers, televisions, computers, mobile phones, and so on. In the words of novelist Shirley Hazzard, “invention was the mother of necessity.”Footnote 6 As Timothy Mitchell points out, the market is a cultural construction: not simply a reflection of the real necessity, but an artefact strongly influenced by the culture of consumption.Footnote 7 More recently, technologies such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence have taken the process of intensification one step further, blurring the distinction between machine and living organism, and deepening the commodification of nature, life, and the human mind. So the expanding commodity economy reaches ever more deeply into all areas of everyday life, with profound consequences for our social relationships and our sense of self.

Urbanization, by separating people from land and nature, helps to subjugate humanity to the rule of market. German sociologist Georg Simmel described modern, urbanized life as a world of relentless calculation. He attributed this mentality to the concentration of commercial transactions in large cities and believed that the growth of the metropolis fostered the development of an impersonal rationality at the expense of the emotional ties of life in the countryside and small towns. In smaller circles, he argued, knowledge of individual characteristics and an emotional tone in conduct are inevitable, since human interactions go “beyond the mere objective weighing of tasks performed and payments made.” Footnote 8

Tradition as Innovation

The endless expansion of the market is a deeply ambivalent process. As its advocates proclaim, it has indeed created enormously increased material wealth. With this have come many undeniable benefits—throughout vast regions of the world, infant death rates have fallen dramatically and life expectancy has been prolonged. Even if it were possible, few of us would seriously choose to go back in toto to the lifestyles of our ancestors in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In many ways, indeed, the choice of a return to past ways of life is itself foreclosed, for we have become inescapably dependent on the material systems created by the corporate market economy. These systems sustain a human population far greater than any that has existed before. The world population today is about 10 times greater than it was at the start of the eighteenth century. Most people in richer countries of the world have become utterly dependent upon the systems of transport, communications, and commerce created by the corporate market, and many people in poorer countries genuinely aspire to share in the material life created by those systems.

Despite our dependence on the system though, we remain able to see how that ever-deepening dependence on the commodity market erodes freedom and damages human health and happiness. At the same time, we are forced to confront a problem so large that it threatens to overwhelm our powers of choice and decision, leaving us feeling disempowered and politically numb. Can the growth of the market be tamed, channelled, or brought to a gradual end in a way that does not produce global catastrophe? If so, how? Where can those who suffer the injuries of the market’s relentless growth start to intervene to gain some control over this process? These are questions that underlie many experiments in living politics, including the experiments that we will explore in this section.

The dichotomy between commodity and humanity reflects the fundamental difference in how the world should be perceived: whether the development of human society should be seen as a process to maximize profit, or a way to achieve a balance; whether human relationships are defined by competition, against one another and against nature, or by shared responsibility and mutually connected interests. The market emphasizes the former group of values. As E.F. Schumacher argued, the market “is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.”Footnote 9 The atomization of individuals pushes for the drive to maximize one’s own interest at the cost of others. Alternative economies, like those examined in the chapters that follow, serve to return individuals to the community and create new ways of exchange that strive to achieve balance within communities and with nature.

Robert Weller points out that all economies require social capital to function; they cannot afford to erase all ties that are larger than the individual but smaller than the state.Footnote 10 The alternative value systems explored here draw on and deepen resources of social capital, combining the exchange of goods and services with the strengthening of other forms of human interconnection. The natural environment and non-human species, which are excluded from the calculations of the dominant market system, are included in their consideration of cost and gain. They emphasize cycle and balance, and consider them as defining mode of social relations. Therefore, instead of perceiving the individual as an atomized entity in a society, participants in these communities tend to perceive themselves as part of a small-scale cosmos integrating nature and social community. The ultimate goal is not to maximize, but to achieve a long-term balance. Producers are responsible not only for themselves, but also for the local ecology. Cooperation rather than competition is the norm that defines one’s social relationship.

Although tensions and conflicts do, of course, occur in these communities, the desire for social harmony and consensus is strong especially for a small community linked by a shared commitment to a place. Behind their efforts is their impulse to resist rule by numbers, to preserve values suppressed by the dominant capitalist culture, and to return meaning to human aspects of social life that do not easily fit into the calculation of profits. It is essentially a struggle for a different world view, an effort to free human and nature from the bondage of profit seeking.

The Networks of Value Creation

In the previous section of this book, we examined the crucial role that networks play in informal life politics. These networks often span regional and social divisions, bringing together people from town and countryside, and from very diverse occupations. The traditional lenses of class and ideology which have formed the core of political analysis provide little guidance in understanding the way these networks form, function, and grow. Practitioners of informal life politics are often flexible in terms of how people link with each other. While traditional relationships such as kinship, social relations in schools, work place, and neighbourhood may still play important roles, networks of informal life politics are much broader, and generally much looser, than formal political movements.

In his book The Structure of World History, Karatani Kojin analyses the development of human society from the perspective of exchange rather than production. He suggests four modes of exchange: mode A is based on the principle of reciprocity; mode B is established through plunder and redistribution; mode C focuses on commodity exchange; and mode D, which includes multiple social formations, is a return of mode A in a higher dimension. All modes of exchange coexist in contemporary society, yet only one is in a dominant position which determines the political systems and power distributions. Karatani identifies a resonance between exchange modes A and D, which suggest people’s recognition of the importance of reciprocity as well as the moral values it represents.

The two chapters in this section explore examples which illustrate the way in which people from varied social backgrounds—some from urban areas and some from rural communities—find common ground in the search for a type of “exchange mode D” that goes beyond the dominance of the commodity form. The participants in this quest share a common understanding of the importance of resisting the power of the expansionist market and acknowledging values beyond market calculation; but they acquire this common understanding through different life experiences. While the rural people tend to identify themselves with traditional values as a result of bodily engagement with a local environment and long-term immersion in a local cultural context, participants from urban backgrounds develop an attachment to alternative values through frustration with the commercial culture they have experienced. When locals lack the confidence to express traditional values, considering them as “backward” or “outdated” ideas, urban people who rediscover and reinvent “traditional” values after experiencing “advanced” modes of exchange and life style can offer new understandings of the local ways. Their attention and engagement in local affairs therefore help boost locals’ confidence in their way of life.

However, it is not easy for the urban intellectuals to gain local trust. The search for alternative values as an antidote to the ills of the expanding commodity economy does not mean an accurate replication of ancient local traditions. It is often a revision or re-invention, which involves compromise as well as creations. This creative process can also generate its own new tensions.

Chapter 7 has highlighted the way in which the division between “insider” and “outsider” may come to the fore in defining the motivations or authority of individual participants in the network. An insider, according to Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage, is someone who “belongs” and is mentally and physically attuned to a specific socio-cultural space; someone whose mental and physical dispositions—habitus—have been acquired within and thus fit into a specific space; and someone who identifies with the “order of things” within such a space, regardless of whether this “order” takes the form of a formal set of laws or an informal “the way things are done around here.”Footnote 11 Two dimensions are involved in considering one’s identity with the locality: physical affiliation and mental commitment. Although the two are mutually inclusive, they may not always correlate with each other. As we saw in Chapter 4 and will see again in the following chapter, a person who has no history in the local area may in some respects be more committed to the local order of things than those who are born there but do not care; and the very meaning of “the local way” may be understood in multiple ways by various “locals” themselves.

Incomers to a local community who commit themselves to local issues may be seen as “embedded outsiders.” They may not meet the physical requirement of being an insider, in the sense of being born and raised in the local place or registered as a local villager, and yet feel strongly committed to the local value systems because of their long-time engagement with the local community or deep connection to them.

In the chapters that follow, we explore two further examples of alternative value creation in two contrasted social settings. “The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley” examines the efforts of a group of intellectuals and farmers in Gongliao district, Taiwan, to challenge the dominant and monolithic market system. This case shows how urban intellectuals are drawn into the local value systems and work with locals to preserve and revitalize their alternative values. Instead of waiting for society to change, they start to create a living space governed by values which they derive from local tradition. This is a battle of mutuality versus competition; quality of life versus quantity of products; the sense of limit versus infinite maximization; and the attitude of respecting nature versus the desire to harness it. While issues of rural development are often analysed through the framework of class struggleFootnote 12 or in terms of the political relationship between central and local government,Footnote 13 this case study instead focuses on the way that a struggle of values and ideas is conducted by and within an informal life politics network.

The second example, discussed in “The Neverending Story,” moves the focus to the semi-rural, semi-urban setting of the small regional city of Ueda, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture. In this case, a group made up of locals and “incomers,” who have moved to the region in search of a better way of life, mobilize imported ideas to revitalize community relationships and practices. In Ueda, an alternative currency and exchange system has become the core of a broader array of social activities which are centred on core shared values, but which still allow for a diversity of personal opinions within the group. The experimental, open-ended approach of the Ueda group may indeed be described as an effort to experiment with the “politics of the apolitical.” Both these cases raise questions about the way in which ideas and practices are transmitted from one generation to another, and about the way in which we assess the success or failure of informal life politics: questions to which we shall return in the book’s concluding chapter.