Communitarian self-reliance as the main objective

It’s unjust when a community is marginalized or oppressed or exploited or discriminated against. We should protest and demonstrate against such. We should run for office to try to implement legislation that will correct injustices; enact social policies that will re-allocate resources toward oppressed communities. Or, at least, support candidates who run for office on progressive platforms having those goals.

We should employ all manner of pressure to shift public policy in that direction. We should never stop trying to effectuate social change via direct action and electoral methods.

But we should be realistic about the situation.

A certain kind of society invariably fosters marginalization, oppression, exploitation, discrimination. Calls for reforms or revolution have rung out for as long as such societies have existed. Reforms are sometimes won. They sometimes make a difference. Slavery was abolished. Wage-slavery is not quite as bad.

There are occasional waves of movement toward re-allocation of resources. There was one in this country circa 1935 to 1965. It resulted in some improvements for some people, but not an awful lot of improvement for an awful lot of people. And then there was a counter-wave circa 1980 to . . . now.

In order to attain welfare, justice, integrity, right livelihood, it’s not very realistic to rely on government at any level. Generation after generation, expectations of that kind just don’t pan out. It’s important to recognize that truth. Mass society inevitably fosters social (and ecological) irresponsibility. The mass just won’t, just can’t care enough about the “general welfare.” It’s too general. It’s too amorphous.

That’s why demonstrating and pushing for legislation doesn’t achieve nearly enough.

Again: We should keep demonstrating, running for office, advocating for reforms via legislation. But we should understand that governmental and institutional solutions are not likely to be enough . . . not reliable enough, responsible enough, healthy enough. In fact, governmental dependency, itself, has a problematic side.

The system is not likely to deliver enough. It usually “delivers” a lot of frustration. And so the main thing to do, the best thing to do, is to become self-reliant. Not individually. Justice and liberation won’t come from atomized individuals garnering more success. Our society is hyper-individualistic and that’s part of the problem. We are meant to live in collectives. We most fully thrive in communities.

That truth has been forgotten because mass society has obliterated communities. The motif of mass society is atomized individuals/families striving for personal success. Those who mega-succeed tend to extol and buttress the system. Those who succeed somewhat tend to get conservative about protecting their modest achievements. Most of the rest of the people are marginalized or oppressed or exploited or discriminated against.

So to generalize the thriving, local communities will have to be rejuvenated and they’ll have to make a good life for themselves. They need to participate in the governments and the wider system to some degree, but they shouldn’t have much faith in the extent of allocation of general resources that will be coming along for them.

Mostly focus locally. Forget about the affluence that the system makes possible for its most-successful minority. Let go of those standards. The goal, instead, should be to foster local interdependence and to self-provision the basics of life. That’s the path to integrity, relative equality, camaraderie, support, and generalized thriving. Such, by the way, was Gandhi’s message.

Don’t rely upon the system, its institutions, its governments. Trying to wrest justice from it yields very thin compensation. Give up illusions about generalized social justice, delusions about any new mass-based system. It’s very unlikely. Bernie, maybe we can effectuate a series of reforms and finally achieve social democracy here in America — and that would be great — but there will be no revolution. Note that the Europeans don’t find social democracy satisfactory enough. They still suffer from plenty of irresponsibility, marginalization, exploitation, discrimination. The foolish among them turn to nationalism.

It’s hard to know where to turn.

The answer is to “turn back.” Back to our own local hands and hearts. Re-establish humanly-scaled communities and bioregions. Re-cultivate sense of place. Renew communitarian commitment.

It seems to be impossible, utopian. It would require a lot of scaling down and simplification. Radical decentralization. Quite a bit of slowing down; listening to nature; letting go.

But what we’re doing is not working. Local self-reliance — creating the social infrastructure to straightforwardly enable sustaining ourselves together — should be our primary praxis. It should be the ultimate objective of Transition Towns, the most vital undertaking of our movement work for transformation. It’s really the only way to achieve the general greening of society.

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The vision: A world of communities within bioregions. It’s the natural way, and we’ll get back to it after the unsustainable monstrosity of developmentalist civilization collapses.

Then: When the communities are human-scale and locally-oriented, will they be just and egalitarian?

They will be different. Cultural diversity is the natural way. Is your conception of “just” universal? Of course not. You may be appalled by the lifeways prevalent within the bioregion next door. Human beings — and their cultures — generally speaking, are inherently neurotic. That’s a consequence of the burden of consciousness. Human life is stressful. People do all kinds of things and live in all kinds of ways.

At the human scale there is a chance for responsibility, sustainability, and democracy. There is no chance within the context of mass institutional-technological society. As the latter heads toward collapse it would be good to prefigure the eventual better way to live. It would be good to understand where we’ve been and where we need to go.