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NATURAL RESOURCES
Poltical Transformation
The technology used should be appropriate and simple. Production should be mainly from local materials and for local use, not for exports to rich consumers; it should provide a community which is in harmony with nature and which is self-sufficient.
Such no-growth economics cannot be achieved without revolutionary political transformation involving the demise of power groups with vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Today, the lives of millions of people are being controlled, deformed and destroyed by decisions made by their governments, by transnational corporations, by agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and by big power summits like GATT.
The alternative can only be made possible if there is grassroots democracy, economic decentralization and regional and local self-sufficiency.
Democracy originally meant the empowerment of the people. However, to many people it has taken on a facade of "legitimate government" which disguises state terror and repression to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. For indigenous peoples and other minorities, democracy has become the ideology of "tyranny of the majority". Democracy must deliver justice to the global majority, the oppressed people of the world.
Governments cannot be relied upon to rescue us from the mess they have put us in.
It is the transborder political actions of people, resisting the power of global capitalism, and rejecting the lunacy of unlimited growth economics, that will produce the necessary changes.