Who was really listening to Gandhi?

Wasn’t Gandhi’s ashram essentially what we would now call an ecovillage? Yes, of course it was.

The reason that I believe we won’t actually get to where we need to go through conscious and deliberate design is that the pathway has been explicated many times without much in the way of comprehension, engagement, or resonance. Erich Fromm started off reading Marx but ultimately arrived at what he termed ‘communitarian socialism.’ Do you hear anyone on the left now advocating a communitarian form of socialism? Gandhi said give up all illusions about Western-style development. Forget about it, salvation lies in village life, decentralization, regional economics. And, of course, nonviolence. After his assassination his comrades governed India implementing policies that led to centralized development and nuclear weapons.

Not only haven’t the Greens ever said very much about their most distinctive key value — Community-based Economics — many state parties even have replaced it with the leftist ‘Economic Justice.’ In other words, they couldn’t fathom and so dropped the communitarian aspect.

The Green parties of Europe started off during the ’80s talking about a decentralized conception called “Europe of the Regions.” That didn’t last long. They soon tended to become the staunchest defenders of the EU supra-state and their ideology reverted back to eco-liberalism.

We won’t go in a bioregionalist direction via electing a party espousing it as a program or via the guidance of a clear-sighted movement or via ardor for a sage like Gandhi. Bioregionalism/re-localization/radical decentralization is just too alternative for the modern sensibility.

Modernity will have to fail us big-time before we become appropriately dis-illusioned with it and settle back into village life.