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The Case for Community Power
by Sean Donahue
I believe that we must act; positive action is the only option left to
us. Communities have the same rights as individuals. We must seize back
control of our community.
Sam Lovejoy
farmer, environmentalist
The people of Seabrook, New Hampshire and the surrounding communities
never wanted a nuclear power plant. In March of 1976, by a margin of
768 to 732, the people of Seabrook voted against the plant. Yet, state
and federal officials allowed the construction of the plant. In the
years that followed, people throughout southern New Hampshire and
northeastern Massachusetts passed town meeting resolutions, filed
lawsuits, testified at public hearings, picketed, wrote letters,
circulated petitions, and took part in acts of civil disobedience in an
effort to protect their own health and the health of generations to
come. Yet, in 1990, ignoring fourteen years of protest and resistance,
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted Seabrook Station a full-power
operating license
The licensing of the Seabrook nuclear power plant over the objections
of the people who will have to live with the effects of its radiation
for the rest of their lives was not merely an isolated travesty of
justice, it was yet another symptom of a problem that has gripped our
entire nation and our entire society: the decline and slow death of
grassroots democracy. Our government has grown too big and too
centralized to meet the needs of its people, and has grown so close to
business and industry that it has no desire to do so.
Beyond a certain point, growth becomes a disease. As Kirkpatrick Sale
pointed out in his brilliant study of the role of institutional size in
the modern American political and economic experience The Human Scale,
once a system grows beyond a certain point , it loses efficiency.
Mosquitoes, polar bears, and people are the size they are because that
is the best size for them to be. A fifty foot tall mosquito would be
crushed under its own weight. The same rule holds true for nations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the American
economy began when each system became to large to sustain itself.
But size is not the only factor in the failure of the present system
to meet the needs of individuals and communities. Small governments
often fail their people as well. As Murray Bookchin has pointed out in
his ground-breaking work on community-based government, the replacement
of the face-to-face politics of the Greek polis and the New England
town meeting with a representative government has done much to diminish
the voice of the individual in the policy-formulation process. 5
A community of neighbors has a sense of its own identity and a basic
sense of the needs of its members. On the other hand, a large
government or corporation, however progressive it may be, can't really
have a good understanding of the individual needs of its citizens or
employees for the simple reason that it must deal with millions of them
at a time. Thus, in the eyes of the corporation or the state, the
individual is merely another statistic. No one in her or his right mind
would place a dioxin dump next to someoneUs house. Yet, itUs easy for
a bureaucrat to place a dioxin dump next to lot 24-A, which just
happens to be the site of the home of a family of four. The bureaucrat
or the corporate executive isn't necessarily callous, she or he just
can't see the trees for the forest.
Transferring policy decisions to the hands of small citizen assemblies
would serve as part of a larger confederation of similar assemblies,
as Bookchin suggests, would do much to put power back into the hands of
the people. A single national or global economy with a multitude of
smaller, self-sufficient, communal economies linked together in a
similar confederation7 based on their need to exchange resources. This
would force people and communities to consider the impact of their
decisions on others, leading them to put people and the planet before
profits. For, as Bookchin points out in his essay, Market Economy or
Moral Economy, our present lack of economic justice stems largely from
the fact that the market economy depersonalizes economic transactions
making them not a personal exchange between human beings, but a
transfer of commodities from manufacturer to retailer, from retailer to
consumer. The result is a completely amoral economy. Just as it was
easier for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington to allow a
power plant to be built in Seabrook over the townspeople's objections
than it would have been for the town's government to do so, it is far
easier for a multi-national corporation with a warehouse full of unused
grain to allow a nation to starve than it is for a farmer with a silo
full of corn to allow her/his neighbors to starve. In an economy based
on community ownership or resources and means of productions, the needs
of the community will always come first, and in a small community, the
needs of the community tend to coincide with the needs of the
individual. When the domination of one person over another inherent in
capitalism is eliminated, the human desire to dominate the earth will
soon fade as well.
The confederation could also place a check on the actions of
individual communities. If Squashville were to mistreat its own people
or its neighbors, the other communities could cut off trade with
Squashville, perhaps depriving themselves of squash, but also depriving
Squashville of beets, tomatoes, onions, carrots, hemp, rice, and
soybeans. Squashville would soon be forced to change its ways.
The creation of self-sufficient communities would also help to stem
the problem of rootlessness in America. The quasi-nomadic lifestyle
People working in a self-sufficient economy will never be transferred
or be forced to move elsewhere in search of work. Thus, both
financially and emotionally they will have more invested in the
community. This kind of permanence tends to lengthen the range of one's
vision. Someone who is planning on living in a town for fifty years is
far less likely to support the construction of a toxic landfill that
will leak in twenty years than is someone who plans on moving in five
years. Nor will that person be as likely to assume that if she or he
produces the waste in the first place someone else will take care of it
later on.
Certainly the transition to this kind of community can't and won't
take place overnight. But anarchism has never been a goal-oriented
philosophy. Rather, as Noam Chomsky points out in Notes on
Anarchism, it is a historical trend, the tendency to move towards a
world which is freer, less violent, and more just. It is not an axis
on a graph, but rather a tangent line forever approaching the point of
perfection. The vision of libertarian Municipalism, thus, is one of a
living revolution of people living the values of simplicity,
non-violence, ecology, equality, and democracy. We can begin taking
back control of our lives and our communities from the government and
the corporations right now by building a new society within the shell
of the old through building alternative institutions such as
newspapers, food co-ops, communes, and artists collectives, and by
advocating for home rule for communities and justice for oppressed
peoples. The revolution begins here and now, and we cannot afford to
let it fail.
A previous version of this article appeared in The Merrimack Valley
Progressive (Lawrence, MA) in September of 1992.
Notes
1. Quoted in Harvey Wasserman, Energy War: Reports from the Front.
Westport (CT): Lawrence Hill & Company, 1979. p.29 (?)
2. Bob Dylan. Subterranean Home Sick Blues on Bob Dylan's Greatest
Hits. New York: CBS Records, 1967
3. Seabrook Chronology. The Boston Globe. March 2, 1990. p.12
4. Murray Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview Green
Perspectives: A Social Ecology Publication (Institute for Social
Ecology, Burlington, VT) October 1992.
Bookchin Ecology, Anarchism , and Green Politics Burlington (VT): Left
Green Network/ Minneapolis: Youth Greens, 1990
Bookchin The Modern Crisis Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986
Bookchin Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future Boston: South
End Press, 1990
Bookchin and Dave Foreman Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between
Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman Boston: South End Press, 1991
Bookchin. Post -Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley: The Ramparts Press, 1971
5.Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism.
6.ibid.
7.ibid
8. Bookchin. The Modern Crisis. pp.77-97.
9. Bookchin. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. pp.31-55
10. See Notes on Anarchism in Noam Chomsky. For Reasons of State. New
York:
Pantheon: 1973