Alperovitz gets it (as Welzer never gets over it)
You know me, I’ll never get over my amazement re: how the premise of socialism seems so simple and straightforward — social rather than private ownership of society’s major productive assets — yet how the achievement of such, the implementation of such, has seemed to be all but impossible; how the movement for such has been frustrated for two hundred years, re-thinking and re-thinking, forever re-starting and re-conceptualizing.
But there is hope. Check out:
In that article Gar Alperovitz discusses how socialization via state ownership has been majorly problematic and how, therefore, many in the new New Left have posited an alternative of “worker-self-directed enterprises” (essentially cooperatives). After questioning this solution, Alperovitz concludes:
. . . a third model is to locate primary ownership of significant scale capital in communities rather than either the state or specific groups of workers — i.e. in geographic communities and in political structures that are inclusive of all the people in the community. (By definition geographic communities inherently include not only the workers who at any moment in time may only include half the population, but also stay-at-home, child-rearing males or females, the elderly, the infirm, children and young people in school — in short the entire community.)
Communitarian models also inherently ‘internalize externalities’ — meaning that unlike private enterprise or even worker-owned companies that may have a financial interest in lowering costs by not cleaning up environmentally destructive practices, community-owned firms are in a different position: If the community chooses to continue such practices, it is polluting itself, a choice it can then examine from a comprehensive perspective — and in a framework that does not inherently pose the interests of the firm against community-wide interests.
— “The Question of Socialism (and Beyond!) Is About to Open Up in These United States”
Notice that with this perspective we stop thinking along the lines of “the proletariat” or “the working class” as the agency and beneficiary of social change. People are the agency and the beneficiary.
There are two additional things to say:
1) “Community” is a vague term. Some people have a communitarian sensibility about the nation-state of which they are a citizen. That’s kind of absurd, yet it’s common … “we the people of the United States of America.” As if. On the other hand, an ecovillage is certainly a real community, but an ecovillage is too small to constitute a full economic realm. The answer is to regionalize. So when working toward community-based economics, the “community” domain in that sense should mean a bioregion. A bioregional commonwealth can, indeed, support a full-needs-satisfying economy.
2) But a bioregion can’t support an industrial economy. The scales of industrial enterprise, institutional and technological, are too large and too complex. So either we accept a world dominated by the mega-scale or we accept living more simply and more locally.
Try the latter. It’s good for ya.
