| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Jennifer Sumner, Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Era of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005)

THE DUST JACKET and introductory chapter of this book promise a theoretical analysis of the contested concept of "sustainability" and a utopian vision for sustainable rural communities struggling for their survival in the current round of neoliberal globalization. These are both attractive projects. Reading this book has further convinced me that they are important projects that deserve academic attention, in part because the conceptual and political problems that should be tackled here are either not tackled well or are not tackled at all.

The meaning of "sustainability" was initially framed in terms of the "limits to growth" discourse of the 1970s. There has since been a greater recognition of the power of technological substitution to overcome the constraints of finite resources. For some economists "sustainability" is used to mean "long-term economic viability" with little or no reference to ecological constraints. Sumner rightly rejects this sort of definition but not for ecological reasons. In fact she leaves us uncertain where she stands on the ecological implications of the term. Without being articulated to some clear ecological analysis, the term "sustainability" means little more than "viability," and can be co-opted to any project of maintaining a status quo— the viability of economic growth (as in "sustainable growth") or the viability of rural communities (as in "sustainable rural communities"). The key here is that conceptual vagueness allows the aroma of environmental virtue to linger (we after all still expect the term to carry it) even while its source is unclear.

Sustainability needs to be reconceptualized within the context of the ecological crises of the 21st century which are not so much about limits as about the uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable proliferation of possibilities. Climate change (curiously never once mentioned in this text) is the defining challenge both for sustainable strategies and for conceptualizations of sustainability. Climate change condemns us to radical social change. We must either revolutionize our greenhouse gas generating systems or face an increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather "environment" that will have revolutionizing effects on all rural communities that depend upon extraction from "nature." Biotechnology will increasingly be touted as a technological fix for environmentally stressed agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Biotechnology has the potential to revolutionize food and fibre production, allowing it to be further restructured on an industrial, spatially indifferent model and, in this way, further calling into question the very notion of the "rural." These issues are apparently not on Sumner's radar.

Sumner's strength is the simplicity and single-mindedness of her moral vision. It is a vision that, at least in the abstract, few on the left will quarrel with. It also proves to be a weakness when it comes to the kind of conceptual analysis that I think needs to be done. Sumner abstracts the moral content from Gramsci's analysis of hegemony and Habermas's schema of dialogic versus monologic communication. From these she fashions two continua of virtue: counter-hegemony is good, and hegemony bad; dialogic is good, monologic bad. These can be mapped in two dimensions creating a square of virtue in one corner of the map. To these she adds a third moral dimension taken from McMurtry who distinguishes between a "money code of value" and a "life code of value." Mapping the third dimension creates a box in the corner of a three-dimensional moral space (the figure is on page 74). Let us call it "the moral box." Once she has constructed the box, Sumner's analysis consists of seeing whether things — social reality, social projects, conceptual constructs—will, or will not fit into the box. This is how she rejects the economistic conception of sustainability. It is too monologic and favours the money code of value.

Her moral contrasts are drawn too starkly and she applies them in ways that are often incoherent. For instance commodification, as an expression of the money code of value, is bad. Uncommodified household labour, Sumner tells us, is good for the family farm (no analysis of patriarchal exploitation here). However, she also wants to point out the injustice of rural women assuming the burden of providing services abandoned by the state. She seems oblivious to the fact that in (rightly) championing paid labour in this context she is abandoning her neat moral dualism. Sumner's affection for the welfare state — indeed it is central to her vision of utopia — is difficult to square with her moral theory. The welfare state and rural cooperatives are for her consummate examples of the "civil commons," that she, quoting McMurtry, defines as "the vast social fabric of unpriced goods, protecting and enabling life." The term encompasses common property traditions plus mutual aid. She gives no rationale for favouring examples of the civil commons t h a t are clearly organized on a commodified basis over traditions of uncommodified mutual aid admired by other utopians including Marx and the anarchists. Nor does she seem aware of neo-Marxist analyses of the welfare state (as well as of cooperatives) as implicated in projects of (capitalist) hegemony and as expert-driven, monologic forms of social administration. Politically, she favours the nation-state without acknowledging debates within the utopian tradition on decentralized structures of power.

The welfare state is necessary in Sumner's utopia in order to subsidize North American rural communities. Low density residential patterns in the countryside cost more per person to provide with physical infrastructure and social services. (They also result in significantly more greenhouse gases per person than dense urban patterns.) States in the developed world have subsidized not only these residential patterns but also rural economic pursuits with amenities like government wharves, agricultural marketing boards, and tariffs. Were Sumner really serious about taking a global perspective and including voices of the "majority world" in her dialogic utopian future, she would have at least to consider the fact that those who speak for farmers in the South oppose agricultural subsidies in the North. The North's hypocrisy in asking the South to eliminate tariffs while refusing to reduce their own massive agricultural subsidies is one of the main reasons for developing nations' resistance to the World Trade Organization. Sumner is silent on this issue as well as the related issue of her utopian ideal for world trade. Does she favour localism in agricultural production? If not how does she deal with the ecological cost of long distance shipping? If so, how does she address the putative economic costs to rural communities?

Sumner too easily assumes that North American rural communities are worth preserving in their current state. She includes in this preservationist embrace communities that are busily mining coal, overharvesting f o r e s t s , planting monocultures, and spraying biocides. It will simply not do to pretend that these are recent deviations under pressure from economic globalization. Complaints about Canadian farmers and foresters "mining the land" and despoiling nature to supply international markets reach back at least to the early 20th century. Rural economic pursuits are organized capitalistically, and rural communities often develop "cultures of complicity" to legitimate their roles in resource exploitation. Urban migrants to these communities seeking "nature" or a romantic countryside ideal increasingly challenge these cultures of exploitation. What is Sumner's take on this? "Inmigrants" create tensions and undermine rural community solidarity and are therefore one of the modern threats to rural communities. A more productive approach would be to focus on actual communities struggling towards ecological sustainability (often informed by creative ideas from urban newcomers) and ask what lessons others could learn or what policies might sustain these and similar initiatives.

Sumner also promises a solution to the problem that all utopians face of how we get from here to there. She is hampered here by a weak analysis of power. Apart from vague and sunny references to the existence of "globalization from below" building the civil commons, we are given very little to go on. Perhaps we are meant to close our eyes and believe: "This new understanding of sustainability, allied with the cooperative human construct of the civil commons, depends on feedback, evolves through negotiation, adapts to change, includes social learning, encompasses reflexivity, builds diversity, respects equity, encourages cooperation, and thrives in participatory democracy."


Rod Bantjes St. Francis Xavier University

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