THE OCTOBER 1990 ISSUE of Sojourners carried several thoughtful responses to my long article, "Building a Living Democracy" (July 1990). A number of the questions are of fundamental importance -- and point to far broader issues which many readers have undoubtedly wondered about. These reflections are directed both to the responses and to the broader concerns, with the hope that they may advance a much wider dialogue on how to build an alternative vision and strategy for America's future.
In "Building a Living Democracy," I argued that progressives must confront the need to develop a coherent vision of what, specifically, we affirm if we reject both traditional socialism and traditional capitalism -- and that this question is now of overriding importance for political, moral, and spiritual reasons. It is not enough to urge "justice," for instance, but decline to say what this requires in terms of the structures and system that establish the larger terms of reference for our common life.
The structural proposals I sketched -- "elements" of a possible alternative vision -- center around a dual notion of radical decentralization to nurture community values and individual liberty, combined with sufficient (largely regional) planning, to make this and ecological sanity a realistic possibility.
Considered from this perspective, the responses were both heartening and (in several instances) problematic. They were heartening because each of the respondents added important insights, ideas, perspectives, and creative suggestions that can help us develop a more richly developed vision.
They were problematic because only a few came to terms, directly, with what I believe to be an inescapable problem: how to define a concrete set of proposals as the historic system of socialism collapses and the historic system of capitalism falters.
I strongly agree, for instance, with the emphasis urged by Jan Love and Delores S. Williams that the effort to build a meaningful vision must take full account of America's historic discrimination and repression of minorities and women, and that a new society must radically alter this legacy. I regret that given my assignment, I was able to develop only a few ideas related to such crucial aspects of equality. I was especially pleased that Love saw the framework I proposed as one that might permit, and with careful work enhance, racial equality -- especially if augmented, as she wrote, by "mechanisms for rectifying any potential inequalities among communities."
So, too, I think Cornel West is right in holding that "liberalism, social democracy, and feminism have all failed to generate the kind of wide-spread committed energy necessary to undergird meaning" -- and that these have also been insufficient to inspire a long-term transformation. West is correct, I think, that "the prophetic elements of religious traditions that sustain communities, preserve universal values, and project international visions may well constitute the most credible agents for progressive political hope in the new epoch."
THIS, INDEED, IS WHY I responded so enthusiastically to the invitation of the editors of Sojourners. If the debate is left only to academic and secular journals and audiences, I believe we will be in great difficulty. The question of how to nurture the values we affirm in a new alternative system must be taken up in serious dialogue with the broader moral and philosophical elements of the prophetic tradition.
Frances Moore Lappe's response helps us move forward in a different way -- above all because she so clearly and forthrightly took issue with several basic points. First, Lappe directly challenged the stress I placed on equality (and, implicitly, Jan Love's argument that "an emphasis on the category of equality is essential" and Cornel West's even broader affirmation of a moral tradition that affirms "universalist" values). Lappe wrote, "If we progressives continue to focus on end-goal values such as equality ... we will continue to be seen as intent on foisting our ultimate plan on others."
Although I agree with Lappe when she urges a vigorous process of community politics, her almost exclusive emphasis comes perilously close to an abandonment of any commitment to such fundamental values -- lest we be thought of (as she put it) as trying to "sell" our values to others. Lappe also clarified another major issue we all must debate by strongly stating her opposition to the serious exploration of long-term vision (lest we "blind ourselves to the here-and-now renewal of citizen politics").
In my review of the history of 20th-century social protest, community organizing, and political strategizing in the United States, I stressed two blunt and dismal statistical facts:
1. There is little evidence throughout the century that the process of "politics" and "organizing" (as we commonly understand the meaning of those terms) has had any significant capacity to move America forward, positively, toward greater economic equality. Wars and the collapse of the economic system have mildly improved the distribution of income, but absent these, what we call politics and organizing has been unable to do more than slow down trends of growing relative and absolute inequality. This is true not only for the last decade but, I repeat, for the entire century.
2. Any serious vision of democracy must assume some degree of equal capacity to participate. If people have radically different education, personal security, jobs, income, skills, and free time, it is absurd to expect them to have anything like the equality of decision-making responsibility implied by the very idea of democracy. To protest and organize are important. Things would be far worse in the absence of continuing struggle. But the fact is the deeper trends continue to worsen irrespective of this process: The poor grow poorer and the rich grow richer. The ineffectiveness of politics in general is also, I believe, one of the main reasons voting participation continues to decline and apathy and cynicism grow on all sides.
Since the long trends are structural -- inherent in the capitalist system -- and since the traditional socialist alternative provides no answer, either we will develop a longer-term set of ideas and strategies to inform an alternative pattern of institutions (a vision and a different process which might one day achieve it) or the decaying trends are likely to persist.
Period.
They will persist until the violence they will certainly engender calls forth its own new forms of repression.
Progressives therefore must openly debate the premise clarified by Lappe's criticism of efforts to develop a new vision (a criticism that I believe is implicitly shared, even if not explicitly stated, by many others): Is the tradition of community organizing on its own sufficient? Should those who urge the importance of a meaningful long-term vision which might one day resolve the deeper issues we all face be rejected and implicitly disparaged (as she suggests) as "experts" trying simply to "preach" their own program?
Or, as the end of the 20th century nears, must we all -- as I believe -- come to terms with the structural and systemic issues posed by the collapse of the two great systems that have defined the alternatives we have faced for so long? If so, I believe the "reconstructive" buildup of new institutions, step by step, must also be part and parcel of a new approach. Politics and an open-ended commitment to the general process of community organizing -- though both are vital -- are insufficient.
THE "POPULIST" LECTURE AND organizing approach at the end of the 19th century offers a home-grown American illustration of one down-to-earth attempt to link serious thought on larger issues with serious activism. In Texas, Industrial Areas Foundation, organizing under the leadership of Ernesto Cortes, has for several years shown that serious intellectual and activist work can and must be integrated, not separated. And the environmental community in general has also begun a serious debate about long-term vision.
Christopher Lasch probably echoed the sentiments of a number of readers in writing that he agreed "with almost everything" I proposed, yet yearned for a vision more poetic and compelling in its informing thematic. He also urged worker-owned firms as a central structural element in a new vision, and as a way to reassert a morally powerful sense of initiative. His is clearly a yearning we all share.
In the end, however, all general ideals confront the need to develop specific institutions that can nurture the affirmed values in everyday life. We are back to the structural issue. I agree with Lasch that worker-owned firms are important. However, it is important to understand that they do not deal with many problems that confront any proposed alternative system: They reproduce equality as between firms and workers in the general community, they tend to impose environmental and ecological costs on the larger community, and they either must operate in an open market (and then often become capitalist in practice) or they must be sustained by planning.
This returns us to the issue of community institutions. Do we believe a structure of inclusive community ownership (local, regional, national) should be one important counterweight to both private corporations and worker-owned firms? Do we believe in any form of planning? How, over the long term, can we sustain community ecological rationality, and a new culture of community, without ongoing institutional support?
Some safeguards to counteract the ravages and instabilities of the market are essential. If so, how do we build in enough equality of money, security, and skills to make democratic control of the necessary (sharply focused and limited) forms of planning workable?
While I admire Hazel Henderson's argument, I believe she throws out the living baby of important thought at the core of such questions when she tosses out the bathwater of "economics" in general. We cannot avoid economics. I agree that its concerns are narrow and conservative, and that they need to be radically altered. That we need to subordinate economics to larger considerations is precisely the argument I would urge. In proposing a form of democratic, community-based management, I had hoped I was illustrating Henderson's main point: "Democracy provides an ... essential feedback loop" to control "economics" narrowly conceived. But democracy itself now requires new structures that can nurture substantial equality of capacity for each to participate.
FINALLY, WHAT OF POLITICS in the most immediate sense? Harold Cruse urged that any long-term structural vision must assume a new politics. He urged a third party "coalition of the outcast minorities, led by committed segments of African Americans." Perhaps. And perhaps in some localities and some states and some regions. And perhaps in different ways (and by different leadership groups) in each, because the Midwest, Northeast, Southwest, South, and West are all different.
Whether a third party makes sense over the long haul is a crucial question we must begin to confront head-on, and the sooner the better. I frankly do not know the answer, but I have a hunch the answer will lead us toward a different regional conception of longer term political strategy.
And, as Larry Rasmussen emphasized, it is the long term -- "a task for generations" -- that we must contemplate as we ponder even the most immediate priorities. "It requires 'revolutionary patience' (Dorothee Soelle)," he writes.
Rasmussen agrees that "the emerging shape of our era challenges democracy's marriage to an impervious, even rapacious capitalism" -- and that a new vision based on community is critical. He posed an even more profound question: Given the demands of the ecological crisis -- demands that challenge people to make decisions affecting their interests which may impact the long, long future -- as well as long global spans of geography -- the question may indeed be "whether human nature is up to the task."
Ironically, as the radical historian William Appleman Williams once wrote, the personal maxim affirmed by Napoleon Bonaparte provides the best (and perhaps the only) answer any of us can give to this question -- and to the larger problem of how to build a new long-term vision and strategy. In both senses of Napoleon's meaning: "You commit yourself, and then you see."
Gar Alperovitz was president of the National Center for Economic Alternatives and a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC when this article appeared.
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