While Marx often shows enthusiasm for the potentiality of enhanced forms of human cooperation enabled by globalizing production, already in the nineteenth century, he observed an antagonistic separation of town and country and suggested that production chains were overstretched and wasting resources. Today, lessening the spatial disjuncture between production and consumption must be an explicit feature and aim of sustainable and just transition and, in this context, calls on the left for partial deglobalization, including the shortening of commodity chains, have merit and are quite consistent with Marx’s analysis. In a process of partial deglobalization, production for local and domestic needs—rather than production for export—would again become the center of gravity of the economy. A move away from the export orientation of domestic corporations and a process of renationalization could also allow enterprises to begin to develop their own strategies, moving away from the whims of the global market and choices taken by corporate controllers.
Such transformation could enable spaces for independent development in the Global South. To do so, they could focus on shifting agrarian systems, orienting their production away from agro-export (which is a source of tremendous ecological irrationality and unequal exchange) toward food sovereignty. Such shifts would need to be accompanied by simultaneous, coordinated shifts toward enhanced local and domestic food production in Global North, alongside a move from high-input agriculture to agroecology, and, in settler colonial contexts, enhanced Indigenous sovereignty. Within domestic spaces or regions, efforts must simultaneously be made to mend a rift between the city and the country. For a model of the environmentalist city, one could look to Havana for inspiration. During Cuba’s Special Period in the 1990s, organic, low-input agriculture was developed both in the countryside, as well as in the island’s capital through urban farms. Urban agriculture is here not niche or small-scale—it covers large expanses within and at the outskirts of the city, where rich land is located. In the transition to renewables, energy production should also be localized as much as possible. This is a potentiality inherent in renewable energy “flow,” in contrast to concentrated energy “stock,” or fossil fuels.
While lessening the spatial disjuncture between production and consumption is part of developing ecologically rational production, this aim should be recognized to be in some tension with economic planning (at least in the longer term), insofar as expansive planning is potentiated by the socialization of production. Thus, calls for localization of production imply a diminishment in productive association across firms and regions and the potential to plan such interconnections.
Practically, it is important to recognize that such a process confronts material interdependencies, as existing productive networks and infrastructural configurations support and sustain huge swaths of human life. Different regions and cities also have different specializations and different ecological capacities. In an existing world of evolved economic interdependencies, the reproductive needs of various communities require continued global resource flows. Climate change also creates severe survival and livelihood challenges on a highly uneven basis, and global trade and divisions of labor can act as safeguards against issues such as pandemics related to water-supply failures and reduced agricultural yields. More broadly, we should carefully consider Marx’s suggestion that well-organized territorial divisions of labor are collective powers and can be a part of collaboration in human affairs. This extends to territorial specialization, which, consciously organized, could involve a collaborative partitioning of resources and capacities.
