Giving Communities, in Theory and Practice

Okay, absolutely just one last Milbank-related post.

Months ago, I said I was going to review Gar Alperovitz's wonderful and incisive book, America Beyond Capitalism. I still haven't, obviously, though maybe I still will one of these days. Alperovitz's work is important because he insists that a thorough response to poverty, inequality, and the ways such both sustains and is caused by neoliberal globalization, cannot simply be restricted to the economic: the way in which we practice politics, constitute communities, and value work has to be re-assessed if any kind of egalitarianism is going to survive, much less flourish. And so he turns away from the usual nostrums of liberal egalitarianism and redistribution, and talks about the production and nature of wealth. He examines of a "pluralist commonwealth," wherein smaller, locally empowering cooperative businesses can make a niche for themselves and their workers in the midst of global competition. He calls his program "Twenty-First-Century Populism," and that's an accurate title, but of course it's also much more than that.

To encounter an argument focused upon the democratization of wealth, the challenge of technological abundance, and the need to break up de facto private monopolies of what ought to be publicly owned and managed resources and industries, is to assume that you're reading some kind of socialist argument; the fact that the title of the book containing this argument assumes a movement "beyond capitalism" would seem further evidence of this fact. And Alperovitz very tentatively allows for this label, though next to nothing about Marx or any other socialist thinker appears anywhere in the text. Quoting Ebenezer Howard, Alperovitz suggests that the kind of "socialism" he has mind simply means "a condition of life in which the well-being of the community is safeguarded, and in which the collective spirit is manifested by a wide extension of the area of municipal effort." This language has almost nothing in common with John Milbank's--except, of course, that they are talking about, in practice, exactly the same thing: the establishment of socio-economic arrangements which allow polities to become fully empowering of the individuals they shelter, by taking the natural gift-giving, wealth-building efforts of individuals and making them central to a participatory social and economic work that presumes a common good, a moral point, to their own communities and ways of life.

I was reminded of Alperovitz's work when I received an e-mail from a new website, Community Wealth.Org. Peter Levine, a thoughtful scholar and blogger (and someone that ought to be read regularly by anybody interested in deliberative democracy and egalitarian economic reforms) is one of those responsible for putting the site together, and thereby making available a lot of valuable information about how in America and abroad participatory principles of community work and wealth-creation are making a difference in people's lives. Alperovitz is also one of the contributors to the site. Levine's particular interest is in finding alternatives to "the standard business corporation," which of course are (to bring Milbank in again) one of the primary obstacles to individuals being able to orient their economic activities along lines other than those dictated by interests larger, removed from and more powerful than their own communities. He summarizes:

One of the biggest weaknesses of democracy today is the mobility of capital. As Alperovitz notes . . . . a corporation can influence political decisions in multiple ways, including the "implicit or explicit threat of withdrawing its plants, equipment, and jobs from specific locations." Besides, "in the absence of an alternative, the economy as a whole depends on the viability and success of its most important economic actor--a reality that commonly forces citizen and politician alike to respond to corporate demands." If there is no alternative to the standard corporation, then democracies really must do what firms want. Trying to restrict capital flows simply violates the laws of the market and will impose steep costs. In the market we have, it is not corrupt when democracies favor corporations; it's just realistic. However, Alperovitz and his colleagues are showing that there is an alternative to the corporation. It's possible to increase the wealth of people in poor communities by creating economically efficient organizations that are tied to places.

"Tied to places"--I like that, a lot. Obviously, given my interests and training, my focus is and probably always will be much more on the various philosophical and theological arguments and ideas which situate theories such as these. But it's good to be reminded, after writing a couple of lengthy posts on ontological matters, that one can point to actual, viable political reforms and actions which can be understood as flowing from such, rather than having to (as political theorists often must) weakly assume that such possibilities must be out there, somewhere.