From: w2lee@argo.acs.oakland.edu (Walter Lee)
Subject: Re: Community based economy?
Reply-To: w2lee@argo.acs.oakland.edu
Organization: Oakland University, Rochester, MI
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 01:39:12 GMT

In article <C08BAo.HAG@fiu.edu>, feathers@serss0 (Michael Feathers) writes:

>I can sit in my home and buy and sell stocks on overseas markets.  I can run
>a mail order business, converse with people half way around the world, form 
>alliances with people I've never met in person, get in my car and drive an
>hour to meet people that I know better than anyone in a five mile radius of my
>home.

Alliances??

>What then, would be a community-based economy in the modern world?  I can 
>dream up romanticised visions of Quakers fashioning wagon wheels in the 
>community barn, and agrarians gathering around the community well before
>the planting season, and I suspect that such visions dance through the heads 
>of communitarians, but I can not see how anyone would expect modern people
>to give up communication and transportation in order to severely curtail
>their choices to a particular geographical area.

Who said anything about giving up anything?  If community-based economics means
not being able to commute 25 miles to work, I don't want any part of it.  If it
means not having to, it's an improvement over my status quo.  I won't deprive
you of your car if you won't deprive me of my bus.

>In the United States, the idea of geographic community has become increasingly
>antiquated.  As an example, consider the application of "community standards"
>for obscene material.  Whose standards should apply?  The country of origin
>of a satellite feed?  The state in which a publisher resides?  The county
>of origin of a 976 number?

The people who march under the banner of "community standards" define their
communtiy ideologically, not geographically.  I doubt that any Green faction
has any use for "community standards" and other excuses for fascism.

>People no longer associate within their geographic community much because
>they have other options.  We are seeing a trend towards the development of
>housing associations in large metropolitan areas, not to 
>develop community but rather as a protective measure.  They tend to supply
>the protective services that large city governments can not provide to all.
>In 
>fact, I believe that they function as small towns themselves.

>  I leave the 
>problem of social justice in an area of real-estate based associations to the
>reader.  This is not purely a problem with "modern greedy people."  Minorities
>never fared well in small local municipalities before the advent of the car 
>and telephone.

Or after, as far as I can tell.

>Perhaps the environmental argument could be made that people should not have 
>cars.  That would force a degree of community.  But on the day that some form
>of environmentally neutral, individual, quick, long distance 
>transportation becomes available, the idyllic community is in jeopardy again
>for very practical reasons.  This isn't to say that it isn't possible to keep
>people from moving around when they want to.  In fact, Cuba has been able to
>protect the environment from cars and instill a degree of community by halting
>progress forceably.  That tactic seems to be the only one that can protect
>a Luddite vision from people's free will.

You seem to perceive "community" as some institution which is forced on people
through immobility, or a Luddite vision that melts away in the face of people's
free will.  I see "community" as a sane alternative to a paranoid worldview
that requires one to forge "alliances" in the jungle of commerce and isolate
oneself from social reality in patrolled subdivisions.

Try Paul and Percival Goodman's little book, "Communitas" ("community"). 
Ecologically sound.  Nothing low-tech or Luddite about it.  If you find you
like that, try some Murray Bookchin material.

Don't worry.  We aren't out to get you.  We aren't even out to get your car.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Walter Lee                                          w2lee@argo.acs.oakland.edu

"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?  It is
because we are not the person involved"
		-- Mark Twain
Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens