He kind of left the Left

A Marxist was disturbed re: my contention that bioregionalism will be characterized by diversity in regard to all aspects of life, including economic relations. He wrote:

> are there to be no limits to this “diversity in economic relations”?
> On what basis can you exclude plunder of nature, exploitation of labor,
> and extreme concentration of wealth?

I answered:

The dominant modern polities (and corporations, of course) are too large, not conducive to any kind of substantive democracy. Their governments are too remote. I think the era of the mega-states and mega-institutions will eventually be a historical oddity.

There will be a devolution back to regionalism. Then . . .

We leftists can hope for democratic, egalitarian, and ecologically responsible norms in a world of thousands of smaller sovereignties, but we can’t mandate such and there is sure to be variety. Circumcision will be the norm in some societies, abjured in others. Social ownership of the means of production will be the norm in some commonwealths. Private ownership will predominate in some polities.

Socialists make a mistake to think in terms of universalistic ways of handling issues of human lifeways.

I do hope there will be a few generally-learned lessons in the wake of what Jacques Camatte called our sorry “wandering through history.” For instance: to disdain all things hypertrophied, like empires, mega-institutions, and weapons of mass destruction. Hopefully those become verboten throughout human culture. But I’m sure aberrations will occur. When such monstrosities rear their ugly heads I hope they will be shunned to death, sanctioned to death.

Nonetheless, few ways or norms are likely to be universally accepted or practiced. What one group of people views as exploitation or oppression is not much of an issue to another group. One group sees compulsory education as totalitarian and oppressive. The United States mandates it and not many complain.

After devolution into bioregions, leftists can work within our sovereignties for a vision of justice. Advocate far and wide. We can’t mandate universals. So we ought to lower our expectations. The natural thing, the likely future way, is a world of cultural diversity. Kirkpatrick Sale kind of left the Left when he came to his bioregionalist conclusions:

(from his 1983 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture)

“I must add here a note that may be painful for many social changers having a progressive vision: Bioregional diversity means exactly that. It does not mean that every region, every polity or commonwealth, will build upon the values of democracy, equality, liberty, freedom, justice, and other suchlike desiderata. It means rather that truly autonomous bioregions will likely go their own separate ways and end up with quite disparate values, beliefs, standards, and customs; diverse economic and political systems — some direct democracies, some representative democracies, yet, also, undoubtedly, all kinds of aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, principalities, duchies, and palatinates as well.

“We must cultivate systems which allow people to be people in all their variety, to be wrong upon occasion and errant and bad and even evil, to commit the crimes that as near as we know have always been committed — brutality, subjugation, conflict — and yet systems in which all social and civil structures will work to minimize such errancies and, what is even more important, hold them within strict bounds should they occur.

“Bioregionalism, properly conceived, is such a construct, for it provides a scale at which misconduct is likely to be mitigated because bonds of community are strong, and material and social needs for the most part fulfilled; a scale at which the consequences of individual and regional actions are visible and unconcealable, and violence can be seen to be a transgression against the environment and its people in defiance of basic ecological common sense; a scale at which even error and iniquity, should they happen, will not do irreparable damage beyond the narrow regional limits and will not send their poisons coursing through the veins of entire continents and the world itself. Bioregionalism, properly conceived, not merely tolerates but thrives upon the diversities of human behavior and the varieties of political and social arrangements those give rise to, even if at times they may stem from the baser rather than the more noble motives.”