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Just a thought

As much as GrowLocal can be used to exchange produce, plants, seeds, etc, its ultimate concern lies in facilitating a shift in our everyday relations from those defined by consumer want satisfaction. As our market orientated way of life has for the most part reduced our everyday interaction with others to this notion of self interest, it has left open the disburdening consequences of our rampant consumerism as we have substituted meaningful relationships for an occupation with things and their acquisition. When self interest is understood solely in terms of goods and services, our everyday relations become subject to redundancy as servicing this end predominates. This is because the good we attribute to our self interest supersedes the world in which it is given as we individualise the pursuit of the good life as an object of consumption. This divide, or severing between the private and the public allows the nexus of the political and the economy to be effectuated under the rubric of an impoverished sense of publicness as space is primarily orientated to commercial considerations. Our political culture tacitly supports the disburdening consequences of our consumption as it is dependent on the divide the reduction of our everyday relations to the question of want allows as it is dependent on the means we use to substantiate this reduction each and every day.

For Government to tout growth, and economic activity as the standard of our Democracy is to give credence to a way of life that impoverishes the sense of self people share and so perpetuate 'the art of the possible' through the self interest money comes to symbolise, in no way can it facilitate the questioning of this way of life as it is presupposed within its world view. Yet if we were to understand our economic activity creates the grounds of reducing our everyday relations to the question of want then we would be in a position outside the self politics takes as a given to see how any undertaking that actively counters this reduction would undermine the rational for the supplementary “site” of politics that is predicated on this divide. By showing how the passion for food can be a galvanising agent in fostering relationships that are not based on want, GrowLocal hopes to show how localising an aspect of the economy can give a mode of publicness to the creation of a world where the use of money is not a given and so publicise a way of life that casts the unsurpassablity of our political economy into serious doubt. To localise the economy as an issue of our everyday relations is an act of political autonomy, its significance lies in the participatory nature of its engendering as it is dependent on how we act each and every day.
 
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