Genesis of a bumpersticker

Years ago our state party distributed a bumpersticker . . .

It seems as if some of the social justice militants who have recently set out to transform the Green Party prioritize neither ecology nor community. I’ve even heard of suggestions that our original key value “Community-based Economics” be replaced by Economic Justice or something like that.

Justice. It’s totally important, but it doesn’t exactly distinguish Green politics as something new or vital. Looking at our Ten Key Values, we might notice that every socialist and left-liberal party espouses Social Justice . . . as well as Global Responsibility, Peace, Sustainability, Feminism, and Respect for Diversity. Every party in the world says they’re for Democracy!

It’s the other three key values that set us apart. Ecology. Decentralization (for the sake of a deeper form of democracy). Community-based Economics. Not only do I consider the latter to be somewhat special, but I think “community-based” should be a sentiment behind all our values and all our policies. Neither capitalism nor socialism ever prioritized the rejuvenation of local community life. Both have been all about industrial development, urban-centric progress, material affluence, etc.

Such preoccupations are the essence of modernism.

The “community-based” concept could be considered post-modern or even anti-modern. The institutions of modern mass society are too large and too remote to be conducive to a participatory form of democracy or a personally-felt ethos of social responsibility. Within the context of “MITS” (mass institutional-technological society) justice, tolerance, cooperation, peace — even ecology — all become too abstract.

It’s very recent that our “off the spectrum,” “new paradigm” Green perspective emerged, saying that the problem is not capitalism or socialism, the big issue is not private vs. public ownership of the means of production. The root problem is more fundamental — it’s the type of society that has resulted from a process that began with the ascendance of the “New Ways” five thousand years ago.

Gary Snyder notes that the Old Ways (tribal and village-based) were the basis of human existence for 99% of our species history, i.e., the millions of years prior to the Neolithic Revolution. The period ten thousand to five thousand years ago witnessed a turn toward the New Ways, characterized by the state (as the locus of Power and Domination), capital (the pursuit of more and more wealth via investment of wealth), the striving for empires (both political and economic), standing armies, productivity values, the development of a technosphere separate and above the ecosphere.

The misguided characteristics of the New Ways all add up to increasing human alienation from nature.

The culmination of this problematic development has been termed by various theorists:
. urban-industrialism / the artificial environment (Theodore Roszak)
. the surrogate world (Edward Goldsmith)
. the produced world (Karl Marx)
. the Technosphere (Barry Commoner)
. second nature / the synthetic environment (Murray Bookchin)
. the Megamachine (Lewis Mumford, David Watson)
. the Apparatus (Karl Jaspers)
. the power complex (Lewis Mumford)
. the Organized System (Paul Goodman)
. the cosmopolitan global economy (Helena Norberg-Hodge)
. the Industrial Goliath (Rudolf Bahro)
. the Leviathan (Fredy Perlman)

The term “MITS” (mass institutional-technological society) encapsulates all that. Put simply, modern mass society is the opposite of community. From an ideological standpoint, only the Greens say that life must again become “community-based.”

It’s those considerations that went into the formulation of the bumpersticker . . . “Ecology and Community: The Green Party.”

(that bumpersticker is out-of-print at this point, but I recently saw a t-shirt that uses the slogan in another context: https://teespring.com/ecovillage-sunflower)