
          The Need to Pierce Self-Serving Veils of Economic 'Expertise.'
          Reviewed by Howland, JacobJacob Howland
          Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 21-23
          
          Communities in Economic Crisis: Appalachia and the
South. Edited by John Gaventa, Barbara Ellen Smith, and Alex
Willingham (Temple University Press, 1990. xiii, 301 pp.).
          Where should economic policy originate? Whom should it serve? What
are its proper goals? The needs of any community include food,
clothing, shelter, health care, a clean environment, and a good
primary and secondary education for everyone as well as reasonable
prospects for decent employment and a rewarding career for those who
enter the job market. For many people throughout our nation, however,
these basic needs are not being met. Why? Communities
in Economic Crisis, which brings together sixteen case studies
documenting instances of crisis and response in areas across the
South, consistently tells a dismal story of negligence and foolishness
(and sometimes worse) on the part of local, state, and federal
governments. These studies show that in the current national and
global economic environment, communities in the South can no longer
place their welfare wholly in the hands of federal representatives and
agencies, governors, mayors, development boards, and chambers of
commerce.
          Perhaps the book's most important message is that ordinary citizens
must penetrate the generally self-serving veil of economic "expertise"
claimed by these authorities by providing themselves with a basic
understanding of the economy and themselves taking a leading role in
the formulation of economic policy. Communities in
Economic Crisis offers proof that this essentially democratic
education is both possible and politically effective. In addition, the
book itself constitutes a substantial contribution to this process of
education. This collection of essays is a detailed study of our
democracy in action, and while it lays bare its past and present
failures it also offers us hope for its future success.
          The editors (respectively, a sociologist and MacArthur Fellow, a
former research coordinator of the Southeast Women's Employment
Coalition, and a political scientist) have assembled contributions
from a diverse group of community activists and academicians, many of
whom played key roles in the political, economic, or environmental
struggles they describe. The book's Introduction summarizes the
general economic crisis confronting the 

South (particularly the rural
South, with the book is especially concerned). Regions dependent on
traditional industries like coal, textiles, and tobacco have been hurt
by diminishing markets, technological innovations, and competition
with cheaper foreign labor.
          During the 1970s, northern manufacturers came to the
"smokestack-chasing" South in search of cheap, nonunion labor, but
many of these firms have since shifted their plants overseas for the
same reason.
          So-called "service" industries have been unable to take up the
slack, since they can provide neither the quantity nor the quality of
employment offered by even low-paying manufacturing jobs: in depressed
rural areas, service employment means waiting on tables, washing
dishes, and the like. The result is a widespread climate of
desperation and fear, in which employers regularly use "economic
blackmail"--the threat of individual dismissal or plant relocation--to
force workers to accept low-paying, hazardous, dead-end jobs.
          Communities in Economic Crisis shows that
southern states have regularly been prepared to sell themselves short
in order to retain existing industries and attract potential
employers. Kentucky, for example, did not allow local governments and
school districts to tax mineral wealth as property until 1988, and had
only a token state property tax on minerals. The mineral
owners--mostly absentee corporations--paid little or no property tax,
and as a result the impoverished communities of eastern Kentucky have
been unable to afford decent schools and roads, and often lack public
water systems and libraries.
          Similarly, the state of Tennessee, Maury County, and the town of
Spring Hill gave General Motors the equivalent of hundreds of millions
of dollars in tax breaks, job training, and the like in order to
entice GM to locate its new Saturn plant in Spring Hill. (Thirty-eight
states had courted GM for this plant some offering over a billion
dollars in inducements.) Tennesseans were shocked when GM announced
that most of the 3,000 jobs at the plant would in fact be filled by
out-of-state technicians. In attracting Saturn, Tennessee paid a high
price for the mere image of economic recovery.
          The book is divided into two parts: "Case Studies of Crisis and
Struggle" and "Visions for the Future." The latter includes essays
contrasting development by corporate design with alternative,
community-based avenues of economic development. The case studies
combine generally careful investigation and research with a
documentary style that often lets us hear the voices of those
afflicted by hardship and involved in the struggle for change.
          The book also includes a number of photographs and two poems
arranged from interviews with a miner and a mine-workers' union
organizer. A coalminer tells us what it is like to be a safety
inspector in a small, non-union mine, a weaver tells us about employer
harassment arising from her support of a union, an illiterate
pharmaceutical worker tells us how it felt to be terminated without
worker's compensation benefits after injury on the job. We also hear
the voices of those who have successfully defended their communities,
like the members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an organization
which helped pass laws imposing property taxes on mineral owners,
forbidding strip-mining without the surface-owner's, consent, and

allowing local governments to ban toxic waste plants. The editors have
included in an appendix an annotated list of community-based
organizations like KFTC.
          The contributors are especially concerned with the plight of women
and minorities. We learn that if present trends continue, almost all
families in poverty by the turn of the century will be women and their
children. Women earn far less than men, and tend to be excluded from
all but dead-end, non-unionized jobs without unemployment
compensation. are articles focusing on women's attempts to break into
coal mining and highway construction and maintenance and on organizing
women for local economic development. The latter strategy seems
especially promising, since it keeps revenues in the community, and
since most new jobs across the nation are being created by small
businesses, not large corporations. There is for example, a chapter on
the Mayhaw Tree, a model business started by women in Miller County,
Georgia, which uses the fruit of local trees to produce gourmet
jelly.
          Southern blacks are especially subject to economic
blackmail. Because they lack the political and economic resources of
their white neighbors, black communities in the South have been
favorite targets for the location of toxic waste dumps, hazardous
industries, and municipal waste-disposal facilities. A chapter
entitled "Environmentalism, Economic Blackmail, and Civil Rights"
documents this trend, as well as "the emergence of a small but
growing cadre of blacks who see environmental issues as civil rights
issues."
          Another chapter concerns women and blacks who have been injured in
unsafe workplaces and terminated before they were able to collect
worker's compensation or unemployment benefits. Many of the case
studies give damning evidence of declining standards in occupational
safety and environmental protection during the Reagan years.
          As one author suggests, the case studies can help teach how not to pursue regional economic development. While
many lessons are drawn in the studies themselves, these are organized
and extended in the book's second part. The essays in this section
focus on demystifying and redefining traditional notions of economy
and development. These are somewhat uneven. One author, for example,
wrongly argues that it was only with the advent of capitalist
industrialization that "women alone began to take on child rearing
and homemaking as their primary roles." On the other hand, there
are strong pieces, such as a beautifully written chapter which allows
us to look at ourselves and our land from the fresh perspective of
Creole tradition. Inevitably, the essays return to the questions with
which this review began. Concrete answers to these questions,
summarized in an "economic bill-of rights," may provide a common set
of goals for citizens' groups across the nation as well as in the
South.
          Communities in Economic Crisis is an important
book of impressive breadth. One especially hopes it will be read by
those who claim to represent the welfare of communities that have
fallen on hard times. Among its many virtues, it provides ample proof
that economics need not be a dismal science, but can, and must, become
a democratic and humane one.
          
            Jacob Howland is on the philosophy faculty at the
University of Tulsa.
          
        