Community Based Economics: A Real Alternative to Eco-socialism?

• Author: Smith, Tom

Today, many Green "populists" are for "community-based economics." What does that mean? It does not mean the unregulated corporate capitalism we have today. But neither does it mean socialism. Populists, rightly, oppose the despotic pseudo-socialism which developed in the old Soviet Union. But they also oppose community-based, democratic eco-socialism. According to its supporters, such as myself, community-based socialism (CBS) would have room for small businesses (though none for corporations), and would be based primarily on small workers' cooperatives. But relations between these cooperatives and businesses would not be competitive, market relations. Instead, our economic relations would be democratically planned and controlled by the community as a whole. Populists, however, would argue that CBS is an oxymoron; that socialism will always lead to tremendous bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Community Based Economics (CBE) is based upon small businesses, and maybe cooperatives. But there are two important differences between CBS and CBE. CBE would allow for corporations, as long as they are government-regulated. Most importantly, CBE is a market-based rather than a democratically planned economy. Such a small business-based market economy would supposedly permit us to avoid the problems of corporate capitalism and bureaucratic socialism.

Green populists like Paul Hawken, writing in his The Ecology of Commerce, want to keep the market. They accept Adam Smith's idea that private property and competition for profit are natural and good. Hawken agrees with Smith that government cannot be substituted for or even interfere substantially with capitalist competition. Hawken writes, "When the guardian syndrome--governance-intrudes with its hierarchical, bureaucratic assumptions into the realm of commerce, it founders, because it is no match for business in quickness and creativity." Hawken claims that small business is the greatest locus "where new ideas and diversity arise and are processed into growth," and that small businesses must serve the public, because they can never be powerful enough to manipulate the public or control the government. But even "the monoculture of corporate capitalism," according to Hawken, is more creative than government.

In my opinion this is a fantasy. In the first place, it is a myth that competition is the source of innovation today. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the development of such things as personal computers, the internet, and a host of other innovations was too costly and required too much long-range planning to be left up to big, let alone, small, business. [1] Instead, these things were developed by government, chiefly by the Pentagon, which then handed over these innovations to private "innovators" like Bill Gates for a song. As a source for innovation and creativity, governmental planning, even bureaucratic planning by a capitalist government, has been far superior to market forces. [2]

Second, we do not need any more "growth." In fact, if we want to live in an ecologically sustainable society someday, and solve problems such as global warming and...