From: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens
Subject: Maintaining an bottom-up opposition
Date: 6 Jan 93 18:40:32 GMT
Organization: Precipitating Pendulums Postal Party Poopers

In article <JMC.93Jan5204248@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
>Is it possible that when a bottom up movement gains power, it cannot
>sustain its alleged bottom up character.  Read _Red Star over China_
>by Edgar Snow for its description of the alleged bottom up character
>of the way the Chinese communists did things.

I'm always happy when John starts to make lucid and cogent points once
again. I'd open up his point to a possibly more general one. Like most
protest groups throughout history, "Greens" (whatever that means) are
not immersed in a culture of political success. Their arguments, their
tactics and their own internal culture is that of an opposition group.

We can look to some vaguely "green" enterprises as examples of what
happens when this culture is faced with imminent change; one of my
favorites are food coops. If you live on the E. Coast, or in Europe,
most food coops that you might know are small, very "alternative"
organizations. They have memberships in the hundreds or low thousands,
and generally operate out of a single operation. Here on the W. Coast,
there have been at least two examples of very successful large food
coops: the Berkeley Coop (1935-1988) and Puget Consumer's Coop
(1972-present). I belong the the later, which has some 30,000 members
(about 22,000 active) and 7 stores.

Funny things start to happen when an "alternative" becomes
"mainstream". As you appeal to more and people, your ability to remain
"pure" is diminished. In food retail, that means instead of justing
selling whole grains and organic produce, you stock snack-size boxes
of raisins in triple wrappings, diet food, "healthy" candy bars,
cosmetics ("all-natural", of course) and so on. None of this is
necessarily bad, but it conflicts with the original culture of the
organization. This leads to internal conflicts, and if the
organization is expanding and financially strung-out on capital
expansion, like Berkeley apparently was, this can lead to its death.

I have come across no "green" organization that seems ready to me to
handle success in their acceptance of their ideas. This is largely
because instead of thinking about the validity of their ideas when
applied to large numbers of people, many of whom only loosely
subscribe to the underlying philosophies of their practices, they
generally consider only the mechanics of a society built of true
believers. This is naive, and extremely unrealistic. Just as most
participants in the US version of capitalism are not "true
capitalists", neither will most members of a large "green" society be
deep ecologists, or even just tree lovers. Instead, there will be
pressure for all kinds of compromises, all kinds of kludges, all kinds
of backpedalling. When a change in the structure of society is driven
by a group of people with strong feelings, these kinds of compromises
can lead to a complete stall in the process, and sometimes, its
termination (witness the 1960's/early 70s).

So, my observation is that not only can a bottom-up structure be hard
to maintain, a culture of opposition and change based on
firmly-held beliefs is almost impossible to sustain.

-- paul



-- 
hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean;    | Militant Agnostic
distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than| I Don't Know
articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult  |   and You Don't
unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. |   Know Either
Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens