To: editor@jacobinmag.com … Re: “No, Small Isn’t Beautiful”

In response to:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/small-business-monopoly-socialism-collective-ownership

Many Greens say small is beautiful. But we’re not talking about replacing big business with smaller units within the extant industrial capitalist system.

We’re talking about moving toward a downscaled world where all aspects of life are conducive to a participatory form of democracy and a communitarian sensibility. That’s utterly imposible within the modern industrial Leviathan.

One way that Greens have distinguished themselves from all the old ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism) has been by making the issue of scale a primary consideration. Socialists ought to do likewise. This is just one among many areas where Marx was very off-base in his thinking (he was a modernist, a centralist, a pro-industrialism progressivist).

Our ultimate vision of a sane society should be bioregionalist. I do agree that it will take a period of ecosocialism to de-fang capitalism and open pathways toward the greening of society. But it’s unrealistic and utopian in the worst sense of the word to advocate social ownership as a universalistic principle. Bioregionalism implies diversity of lifeways, including diversity in regard to economic relations.

Rather than the “main contradiction” being private ownership vs. social ownership, bioregionalist Greens understand it to be community vs. empire. Political and economic empires are an inherent characteristic of industrial-statist modernity (as are plutocracy and developmentalism) whether ownership of productive assets is private or collective. History has shown this to be the case. The paradigm shift underlying Green politics is based on a communitarian, rather than socialist, worldview.

For reference:

https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v03sb-02.pdf

https://medium.com/@stevenwelzer/on-leftism-and-leftists-reds-and-greens-109cac414a4e