To confront the oligarchy, we need to build power at the community level

Seeking a human-scale future

Credit: @katiepatrickhello

9 minute read

Wrong way world

A consistent theme through my life has been to understand our world, to assemble a comprehensive picture the best I can, respecting the world’s boggling complexity and the limits of any one mind to grasp it all. What has long been clear to me is that our world is on a systematically wrong way path. Three trends are in the foreground – the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ecological overshoot and increasing economic disparity. Together they shape what many have called the polycrisis.

From the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis with its nuclear war close call, which happened around my 10^th birthday, the insanity of piling up weapons of mass destruction has recurrently come to the foreground. That was only one of many close brushes with nuclear extermination. At no time has this madness been more apparent than now, with the rise in great power tensions thrusting nuclear powers against each other in conflicts, some very hot. When our technologies to destroy each other are improving all the time, the logic is pursuit of peaceful relations. The world is moving in the opposite direction.

From the Limits to Growth studies in the 1970s to the emergence of the ever intensifying climate crisis and documented breaching of multiple planetary boundaries, it has long been obvious that the human species is ecologically overshooting the limits of our planetary home. We have had warnings for decades, but continue to roll down this dead-end road. It is hard to envision a future where we do not confront deep disruption of natural and social ecosystems.

The 1980s saw the rise of neoliberalism under Reagan and Thatcher, reversing a long-term trend toward greater economic equality, spurring the emergence of the billionaire class and the widest economic gap in modern history. In 2020 one individual possessed over $100 billion in net worth. Now there are 16. Over that time U.S. billionaire wealth has increased 88% . The role of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as a kind of shadow president under the incoming Trump Administration is a bold underscore for the consolidating power of oligarchy.

Another side of that picture is the increasing concentration of corporate power due to mergers that have placed industry after industry under the control of a handful or less of corporate giants. Food, energy, media, finance, healthcare, “defense,” to name just a few. This piece contains an alarming rundown. Multiple studies show the connection between booming corporate profits and inflation. The term “greedflation” has been coined to describe the phenomenon.

The common thread that runs through the polycrisis is the increasing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Massive economic and political institutions and super-wealthy individuals are amassing more and more power unto themselves, serving their own interests at the expense of the common good, leaving most of us out and throwing more under the bus all the time. The rise of AI and robotics furthers this concentration of power with the replacement of people by machines.

People powerlessness

Most of us sense we have little power in the system. This was validated by a study published in 2014 that looked at 1,779 policy issues which rose over 30 years.

Researchers Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University wrote, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence . . . When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

Those of us who have struggled against the fossil fuel industry to turn around the climate crisis, or against the health insurance industry for universal health care, or for an arms embargo on Israel to stop the Gaza genocide, to name just a few instances, are not surprised at this finding. So how can people have power in such a system? How can we surmount the global polycrisis threatening to consume us all?

The decentralist vision

Many of us have regarded all these trends and difficulties as inherent to a system that centralizes power, and have sought more decentralized alternatives that turn power away from corporations and nation-states and back to communities and places. This is a rich tradition of which I have often written.

Leopold Kohr, one of its progenitors, wrote about the badness of bigness in works such as The Breakdown of Nations. Kohr illustrated how large states with power disproportionate to others cause wars and inevitably become authoritarian no matter what the ideological patina. He argued for a world of small states. Lewis Mumford critiqued a mechanized world in which concentrated power serves its own ends at the expense of human values. He called for a more regionalized world in his many works such as The City In History. I wrote a series on his thinking beginning here.

Building on such work, E.F. Schumacher wrote the influential classic Small is Beautiful, published in 1973, which called for appropriate technologies closer to community scale. Kirkpatrick Sale wrote Human Scale, published in 1980, making the case for a decentralist future. In his 1985 book, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, Sale wrote about the movement to place-based communities which emerged in the 1970s. In their 1977 essay, Reinhabiting California, Peter Berg and Raymond Dassman defined the bioregional concept as one of reinhabitation, living in place.

“Living-in-place means following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site. A society which practices living-in-place keeps a balance with its region of support through links between human lives, other living things, and the processes of the planet — seasons, weather, water cycles — as revealed by the place itself.

“Living in-place is an age-old way of existence, disrupted in some parts of the world a few millennia ago by the rise of exploitative civilization, and more generally during the past two centuries by the spread of industrial civilization. It is not, however, to be thought of as antagonistic to civilization, in the more humane sense of that word, but may be the only way in which a truly civilized existence can be maintained.”

The bioregional movement is seeing a revival in recent years, as evidenced by sites such as this one serving my home region of Cascadia. The theme of The Raven, building the future in place, is informed by bioregional and decentralist perspectives.

Building power in place

The increasing power of oligarchs and the corporations they own, the consolidation of oligarchic control never stronger than under the incoming Trump Administration, and the relative powerlessness of ordinary people and advocacy groups to have much impact, all point to the need for building power in the communities and places where we live. Truly, we must resist the injustices and abuses of centralized power in every way we can. But we need more than a politics of protest. We must also create alternatives more in line with a human-scale society. We must create community-based institutions and economies that move beyond the madness of what Mumford called the megamachine, with its relentless drive to accumulate power for power’s sake. We must build power for purpose, to serve the needs of human and natural communities.

For that, we must find new ways to come together in the places where we live. Especially in cities, where populations with progressive values are concentrated and the political ground is most fertile. In coming times, when a far right government prevails at the national level, the cities are where we are strongest and have the greatest potential to build alternatives. That ramifies up to the state level. The bluest states are the ones with progressive metropolitan centers.

In any city or state, there are a plethora of groups working on issues across a wide range – affordable housing and homelessness, transportation options beyond the auto, improved greenspaces, justice for lower-income groups and people of color, healthcare access – to name just a few. These efforts are forwarded by nonprofit groups, civic institutions, churches and other non-governmental groups, a social array generally described as civil society. Though coalitions are sometimes formed, often these efforts take place in separate siloes. With harsh winds blowing at the national level, we need to break down those barriers and find ways to come together at local and state levels, to join our forces with a comprehensive vision and agenda for the kind of places we want to build. We need to build a community base of power.

Here the concept of the community assembly comes into play. Convening gatherings where members of various civil society organizations can sit down at a common table to discuss their various issues and explore how they can be merged in a common agenda. And then how a common infrastructure can be created to forward it. This has to be more than a talkfest creating yet another wish list. There has to be a strategic plan that includes development of staff to coordinate efforts and a campaign/communications structure to further them. That includes creation of independent media, crucial to build support among the public.

Assemblies are most naturally convened in local communities. But they can create a network of broader assemblies at state and bioregional levels. In reality, the most practical course is to leverage local and state governments as the existing institutions purposed to serve the common good. At the same time, a parallel creation of bioregional institutions can take place through the development of watershed councils. Here, rural and urban interests can merge to create a common vision of the bioregional future and agenda to reach it.

Much depends on the development of better public policies at local and state levels. But purely voluntaristic efforts to create alternatives such as ecovillages and community food networks are also important. The challenge is often limited resources to secure basics such as land. In The Raven I’ve been forwarding a paradigm that employs public institutions to promote growth of community-based efforts. A two-part scenario begins here. The key is gaining control of money through creation of public banking and other community financing tools. These can fund development of cooperative housing, worker coops, local food networks, circular economies, community energy installations, and other alternative economic and social models. The central proposition is to build models that move beyond purely bottom line considerations to serve the needs of people and nature.

The need to come together

There are plenty of obstacles to this vision including local business interests determined to perpetuate existing power structures, and the tendency of civil society groups to narrowly focus on their own issues and support bases at the expense of broader alignments. But the situations confronting us, promising increasing crises while the institutions of national government become less effective in dealing with them, indeed helping to create them, will drive us together.

We must find ways to work together where we can, in our cities and states, communities and bioregions, to build the kind of future we want. Otherwise we are at the mercy of forces that will overwhelm us. The concentrated power of oligarchy is driving us down a bad road. We need to build community power to overcome concentrated power. Realizing that the more the latter shows its teeth, the more it validates the many critiques by thinkers such as Kohr, Mumford, Sale and Schumacher. Breakdowns at national and global levels give us an opportunity to build the kind of decentralized, human-scaled communities they envisioned. Indeed, the crises coming upon us make this a survival necessity.

No matter what is coming, building stronger communities in the places where we live is a strategy for all seasons. If progressive forces can rally at the national level with an economic populist agenda that reverses the trend toward oligarchic concentration of wealth, then what we do in our communities can create models to inform efforts at broader levels. As well, building power at a community level can only help further a more widespread turnaround. If social, economic, ecological and political breakdowns intensify, we will have created strong communities capable of weathering the storms. We cannot know if this will be enough. What we can know is that we will be pursuing the kind of future that leads to a world more in tune with the needs of people and nature. We have to try.

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