Letters.

• Author: Palmer, Paul
• Position: Letter to the editor

To the editor:

A recent email discussion with Don Fitz revealed an important issue we thought it would be valuable to air. Don thinks that the transition strategy I argue for in my The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World is of the "change your lifestyle variety, and therefore fails to acknowledge the need to focus on the traditional radical left concern with taking state power, confronting the capitalist class and ending their domination, and replacing the basic structures of capitalist society. Here's a brief indication of how I think this apparent difference in view is resolved.

The first 250 pages of the book detail the claim that we are entering a historically unique situation in which the 300-year obsession with increasing industrialization, trade, investment, wealth and GDP will cease. We have already gone through the limits to growth. There is no possibility of rich world "living standards" being kept up for much longer, let alone of being extended to all the world's people.

Therefore, the only possible solution is dramatic reduction in levels of resource consumption, via transition to some form of Simpler Way, i.e., a society based on mostly highly self-sufficient cooperative and participatory and zero-growth local economies geared to meeting needs, and based on frugal, nonmaterial values and satisfactions. The coming era of intense and irremediable scarcity will force us in this direction whether we like it or not (but that does not mean we will inevitably develop sensible new societies).

Few if any previous theories of social transformation are based on an understanding of the historically novel situation we are in. It completely recasts thinking about transition strategy. There is, for instance, no point in trying to take state power to replace capitalist control of the moribund industrial/affluence/growth system with socialist control of it. The goal has to be largely self-governing local economies run by their citizens, and states can't make that happen. The transition strategy problem then becomes, "What can we do here and now to start moving to that goal?"

Chapter 12 of the book argues that by far the most important action for activists to take today is to join in the efforts to build things like community gardens, farmers markets, skill banks, etc., in the suburbs where we live. We should, in other words, plunge into the Transition Towns movement. But we should do this not primarily in order to have more community gardens, etc. We should do it in order to be in the best possible position to get our friends and neighbors to realize the need to go beyond these purposes to embrace the big, radical structural change goals, such as scrapping this economy. In other words, the initial focus on what Don sees as "lifestyle changes" is only a subgoal, and my argument is that it is the best path to developing the awareness that will eventually enable achievement of the big, radical structural change he and I want to see.

It is very important here for traditional left people to think about the very limited relevance of the state in the coming revolution. As noted above, the goal is a basic social form best described as political anarchism. In conditions of severe scarcity, requiring very high levels of local self-sufficiency, satisfactory communities can only be run by intensely participatory and cooperative processes. People in consumer society are a very long way from having the required skills, attitudes or dispositions.

The remarkable achievements of the Spanish anarchist collectives in the 1930s would not have been possible had these qualities not been developed over many previous years. As Kropotkin and tolstoy realized, getting state power is of little or no relevance in building them. The only way to do it, if it can be done given the damage consumer society has caused, is via ordinary people gradually coming to grapple with the actual process of building increasing levels of self-sufficiency and self-government where they live. As the Anarchists say, we have to "prefigure" here and now the kind of structures and systems and world views that will characterize the post-capitalist...