Community-Based Economics: Answers to Respondents.

• Author: Welzer, Steve

Italicized below are paraphrases of responses I received, via email and postal mail, to my article on Community-based Economics which appeared in S/R #21. I appreciate the quality of discussion that has ensued, and I hope the material below both contributes toward clarification and also provides further food for thought.

You seem to want to have it both ways: a little capitalism here, a little socialism there. But these systems are mutually exclusive. If profit and hiring of labor and interest on investments is allowed to exist at all, generalized capitalism will soon be the order of the day, not socialism or any kind of "third way."

First of all, some semantical issues have to be dealt with: People can have in mind different conceptions when they use the words "capitalism" and "socialism." Regarding the former, one person could just mean private enterprise while another is referring to a full-scale system of economic relations; a third person can mean the drive to accumulate wealth and power and a fourth can be focusing on the profit motive.

Capitalism as a generalized system of economic relations dates back about 500 to 700 years, while "private enterprise" has existed at least since the advent of private property following the Neolithic Revolution. Socialism, meanwhile, has existed only since the 19th century or since 1917 (or never at all), again depending upon an individual's conception of what "socialism" means.

When I talk about community-based economics as an alternative to capitalism and socialism, I am defining the latter two as modern large-scale economic systems. So, by this definition, primal communities that owned all things in common had not "instituted socialism," and merchants selling exotic spices during the time of the Roman Empire were not capitalists in the modern sense (they were engaging in private enterprise within the context of an economic system based on slave labor).

Capitalism as a system is characterized by a dynamic that drives toward pervasiveness (a dynamic we should actively resist). An ideological fallacy of the socialist movement was that "the socialist system" could, and hopefully would, replace the capitalist system--everywhere, over a period of time--with the idea that one system or the other would "win out" in a process of historical contention ("tis the final conflict, let each stand in their place"). This interpretation of history was fairly widespread during the early 20th century, but is rapidly...