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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Communalism
  • Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:58:22 -0500

On 1/24/2013 2:23 AM, Frances and David wrote:
a friend that I discuss these issues with pointed out one distinction:
whether or not the 'collectivism' is voluntary or forced.

"It is at least theoretically possible for a federation of communes to include communes which do not practice communalist rules of property, which is to say, that the overall national government may be a federation of communes, but that private property rather than communalist property is the order within each such commune."

A lot was not clear in the Wikipedia article; I think they assumed you had done some prior reading
and were informed on the subject. What originally interested me was the survival mode migration to some sort of makeshift
governance/management system that the Ukrainians used when faced with the growing power of Lenin/Stalin/Red Army, all of which threatened their quality of life, even existence. They seem to have come up with some sort of communalism and overall collectivism to serve their needs, that of a rural agrarian society
comprised of homesteads, hamlets, villages, towns. This provided a way to exchange goods and provide for all; of by and for the people who lived there. Don't forget that the Ukraine was considered the breadbasket of a vast region that included Russia. Some of the land involved was part of the Black Earth region that extended from Ukraine to Siberia.
Somehow the Social Democrats in Germany and Russia were supportive of local efforts to achieve self sufficiency, autonomy, sovereignty, independence. I guess these were seen as the original Marxist Communists though locally they may have been in essence socialists/collectivists/communalists, i.e. roll your own. Of course Lenin and Stalin and the Red Army completely eradicated the original communists, assumed their name, coopted their movement and converted it to a totalitarian military dictatorship retaining the so called collectivism in order to enslave everyone involved in any kind of production of goods to serve the party elite and their friends. My knowledge of this is laughable but the interest is there.

As for your question, just talking off the top of my head, collectivism was achieved by consensus as a way to organize and create infrastructure amongst local agricultural zones, naturally formed out of need for exchange of goods and equipment between farms and villages in close proximity to one another, i.e. those groups participating in a communalist system wherein personal property ownership was observed, according to tradition. The collectivist part was simply a means to organize all the zones operating under a communalist system to create an economically and socially effective whole, serving the needs of all the people, connecting one communalist zone to all the others for supply of goods and services throughout.
This overall system of governance or management would be mandatory but flexible, i.e. it could be altered, augmented or reduced according to the needs of the people in the regions involved. This system served the people; Stalin's Soviet system eliminated private ownership of property and forced national distribution of locally produced goods, complete with its corrupt elements,; everyone worked for The State, not for themselves and their countrymen. Here's something a friend emailed me on this topic:

Re-read this from Wikipedia which makes things a lot clearer:

"However, in practice, many experiments in utopian socialism did implement internal rules of communalist property
ownership in the context of federated communalism. It is at least
theoretically possible for a federation of communes to include communes
which do not practice communalist rules of property, which is to say,
that the overall national government may be a federation of communes,
but that private property rather than communalist property is the order
within each such commune."

Murray Bookchin:

"While originally conceived as a form of social anarchism, he later
developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what
he saw as the most beneficial elements of left anarchism, Marxism,
syndicalism, and radical ecology. Politically, Communalists advocate a
stateless, classless, decentralized society consisting of a network of
directly democratic citizens' assemblies in individual
communities/cities organized in a confederal fashion."

"This primary method used to achieve this is called libertarian
municipalism which involves the establishment of face-to-face democratic
institutions which are to grow and expand confederally with the goal of
eventually replacing the nation-state."

In present day context I suggest that the only workable way forward is to establish highly functional communes, communities (like the Amish, Shakers, Mennonites, Anabaptists), eco/perma/intentional/green communities that ally themselves with:
"face-to-face democratic institutions which are to grow and expand confederally'.

My plan for a distributed national and international product and services production, marketing and distribution network would help all of this along significantly. Private property ownership and personal sovereignty are mandatory. Empowering a collectivist system of management of communalist nodes to function as designed would also be mandatory, again to serve the immediate and long range needs of the people.

LL




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