JOHAN GALTUNG be to try to produce it from local factors rather than getting it in exchange for some factor held to be available in excess quantities (labor, raw materials) or in exchange for some locally produced product. ln so thinking, and acting, there is no doubt that self-reliance is profoundly anti-capitalist, for capitalism is based on mobility of factors and products in world-encompassing cycles. Capitalism generates trade, which ln turn is good for. the traders. 12 If it had also been good for development ail over the world that would have shown up already for there has been an enormous increase in world trade during the last centuries. Hence the theory is that self-reliance will serve the purpose of development better, for reasons to be given below. But what happens if the product needed cannot be produced locally, from local factors, in a federation of villages with no industrial experience or base in the conventional sense? One does what people do in times of crisis, trying to find some new ways of using raw materials so as to get the product nevertheless (the Cuban use of sugar-cane as general raw material for a vast variety of products), or one changes the product so that it still serves the purpose but makes better use of local factors (the Chinese use of hydro-electric energy for tractors in some regions). • * • However, there are obvious limits to this, glven the asymmetries in the world economic geography, and they are numerous indeed; the most important one probably being the asymmetry of water-distribution. Canals can be dug by people rather than by machines, but pumps are among the best devices made by man, and one should not necessarily wait till the industrial base for making pumps has been developed. The problem is where to go to get the pumps when they are indispensable and cannot be produced locally. And this is where the principle of concentric clrcles enters: start the search for a partner in this type of cooperatlon with another community at the same level in the same district; if that does not work have the district coo11 lhls 1s probably one of the few absolutely safa statements one can make about-capltaMsm, from whlch lt follows that capltallst patterns wlll be malntalned not necessarily only by countrles wlth a dominant prlvate sector, but by countrles that base thelr economies to ,a large extent on trade, whether most of the economy is ln the prlvate or pu!illc sectors. 56
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