[P2P-F] Fwd: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally? (GTN Discussion)

Wed Jul 3 15:13:33 CEST 2019

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From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 9:12 PM
Subject: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally? (GTN Discussion)
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

>From Brian Tokar [briant at pshift.com]
----------------------------------------------------------

*[Moderator's Note: This follows from Paul's note from yesterday. Brian
will be kicking the discussion off for us. I look forward to your
contributions. -- JC] *
Comment for GTN Forum

* Think Globally, Act Locally?*

Brian Tokar
7/1/2019

*The Promise and Pitfalls of Localism *

Today we are seeing an inspiring resurgence of progressive action at the
local level, even as reactionary nationalist movements in Europe and beyond
seek to position themselves as the true voices of a renewed localism. What
are the prospects for such locally centered political engagement in a time
of rising political polarization and conflict? How can local action help
advance personal liberation and social justice? More broadly, how can it
further our goals for global transformation?

The current upsurge of local action by both progressives and radical
municipalists is fueled by several complementary impulses. First, the
limitations of national politics and contemporary international
institutions have caused growing frustration. The  stranglehold of
corporate influences—from fossil fuel interests to the financial
sector—over national and transnational institutions often overwhelms
resistance, whether the focus is on the US government, the European Union,
or comparable structures around the world. For people seeking meaningful
action on the global climate crisis, rising economic inequality, or various
immediate threats to people’s health and well-being, local measures often
allow the most attainable initial steps toward the broader transformations
we seek. Frustration with the limitations of national or transnational
politics can thus be channeled toward a pragmatic pursuit of attainable
steps toward justice and community renewal.

Other motivating factors are more aspirational in nature. The aim to bring
important decisions closer to home reflects a desire for engagement over
anonymity, right relationship over polarizing conflict, and hope for a
meaningful role in decisions that affect our lives. The appeal of
“democracy begins at home” has deep historic roots, including the
participatory Town Meeting structures that shaped the colonial uprising
against British rule in late eighteenth-century North America. While
important choices about social, environmental, and technological policies
appear inherently global in character, the principle of
subsidiarity—enshrined in EU legal codes among others—speaks to the
widespread desire for decision-making as close to the local level as
possible.

At their best, local solutions to social and environmental problems may be
more amenable to an open and accessible democratic process, and their
implementation can remain more accountable to those most affected by the
outcomes. Local measures can help build closer relationships among
neighbors and strengthen the capacity for self-reliance in a time of
increasingly extreme climate-related disruptions. Local actions enable us
to see that the ruling institutions that often dominate our lives may be
far less essential than people tend to believe, and that we can effectively
challenge regressive policies at the national and supranational levels that
favor powerful outside interests. At the same time, local initiatives often
raise the question of how to spark a broader social transformation that can
offer a systemic change greater than the sum of its dispersed local
expressions.

Indeed, the rise of regressive, nostalgic, and profoundly reactionary forms
of populism around the world has served to illuminate the limitations of a
politics of localism for its own sake. Some years prior to initiating the
national campaign for “Brexit,”the reactionary UK Independence Party
proclaimed that “real decision-making should be given to local
communities”—only thinly veiling an agenda to marginalize immigrants and
oppose renewable energy, and even ban discussions of climate change in
local schools. Racist organizations in the US South have long hidden behind
localist rhetoric, as do the militia movement and other far right
neo-populist formations. Suburbanites in Detroit, as well as in southern US
cities, have established new local jurisdictions to exclude people of color
from decision-making and create newly segregated school districts. Wealthy
homeowners in major California cities have bankrolled efforts to halt an
increase in the housing supply through a statewide easing of zoning rules.
In the lead-up to the recent European Parliament elections, right-populist
formations came together in a new political grouping that called itself
“Freedom and Direct Democracy,” directly co-opting some of the most
advanced language of the emerging new radical municipalism.

How then can we steer clear of such cooptation—and best reap the benefits
of the liberatory potential of local action?

*Theories of Transformation*

>From Kurdish militants in Syria and Turkey to dynamic young organizers in
North America, many current activists cite social ecology as a central
underlying inspiration for their political outlook. Social ecology offers a
unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, historical and
anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy, and political
strategy.

The foundational texts of social ecology were written by the Vermont-based
social theorist Murray Bookchin between the 1970s and 1990s. Among the
first thinkers in the West to identify the growth imperative of capitalism
as a fundamental  threat to the integrity of living ecosystems, Bookchin
consistently argued that social and ecological concerns are fundamentally
inseparable. He described his distinct approach to political strategy as
libertarian (or confederal) municipalism, and sometimes as communalism,
highlighting the roots of key ideas in the legacy of the Paris Commune of
1871. Bookchin argued for liberated cities, towns, and neighborhoods,
governed by open popular assemblies, which actively confederate in order to
challenge parochialism, encourage interdependence, and build a genuine
counterpower to dominant institutions. [1] Social ecologists also believe
that the limits of local action and the problems of parochialism and
reactionary nationalism can be overcome through confederations of cities,
towns, and neighborhoods that join to advance a broad liberatory agenda.

While institutions of capitalism and the nation-state often tend to
heighten social stratification and exploit divisions among people, social
ecologists insist that the lived experience of direct democracy can foster
expression of a general social interest that strengthens human solidarity
and advances a transformative social and ecological agenda. “It is from the
municipality,” Bookchin wrote, “that people can reconstitute themselves
from isolated monads into a creative body politic and create an
existentially vital…civic life that has institutional form as well as civic
content: the block committees, assemblies, neighborhood organizations,
cooperatives, citizens’ action groups, and public arenas for discourse that
go beyond such episodic acts as demonstrations and retain a lived as well
as organized community.” [2] The act of civic engagement through
face-to-face deliberative structures can help transcend divisions and build
solidarity. Still, physical decentralization *per se* cannot guarantee
progressive social transformation in the absence of an inclusive civic
ethics, participatory self-governance, and a holistic ecological outlook.

For social ecologists, confederation and internal education through praxis
offer essential counterpoints to localist tendencies toward provincialism
and isolation. Organizers in urban neighborhoods can aim to rewrite city
charters and restructure municipal governance as a confederation of
directly democratic neighborhood assemblies. Then, like-minded
neighborhoods, cities, and regions can continue to confederate at wider
geographic levels to realize common projects, better satisfy essential
needs, and ultimately create a viable counterpower to today’s ruling
institutions.

Another core principle of today’s municipal movements is horizontalism, a
political practice that aims to equalize decision-making across various
sectors of society. The term (horizontalidad in Spanish) was first
articulated during the Argentine uprising in response to the economic
collapse of 2001, but has numerous historical antecedents. Prefigurative
practices aimed toward dissolving social hierarchies and elevating popular
voices have emerged in recent decades during periods of heightened social
contestation on nearly every continent.

Further clues to an expansive conceptual framework for “glocalism”may be
found in the legacy of bioregionalism. Peaking in  popularity during the
1980s and early 1990s, this movement helped ecologically minded activists
imagine how to transform governance so as to transcend the limits of state
and national boundaries and move toward a more Earth-centered vision.
Bioregionalism’s ideas of governance based on watersheds rather than
political boundaries have significantly shaped contemporary practice in
such domains as regional planning and water resource management.
Bioregionalists have also embraced a movement-of-movements approach, where
advocates for various spheres of social and ecological praxis formed
committees to draft proposals at biennial continental congresses, which
then came before the committee of the whole for final amendment and
adoption.

Finally, in an era of increasing nationalism, it is essential to heed the
warnings of prominent anthropologist Arturo Escobar. At the apex of the
worldwide global justice/alter-globalization movements in the early 2000s,
Escobar embraced the “defense of constructions of place” by social
movements that seek to advance ecological democracy, while firmly rejecting
the attitudes of essentialism, nostalgia and exclusion that can tend to
link “boundary making around places… to reactionary politics.” [3]

*Scaling Sideways and Up*

Dynamic, people-powered progressive grassroots movements are on the rise in
many parts of the world. Some confront corporate-driven threats to people’s
health and livelihoods, such as the expanding pace of fossil fuel
production due to fracking and other new technologies. Indigenous and other
land-based communities in the Global South actively resist the extraction
of timber and mineral resources, as well as misguided climate mitigation
measures, such as carbon sequestration schemes that substitute distant
bureaucratic management of forests for traditional commons regimes. In
France, rural workers have been in open revolt against tax policies that
favor the rich, filling the streets to denounce the extreme isolation of
national elites. An Irish citizens’ assembly, with delegates chosen at
random, launched the national referendum that ultimately voted down a
long-standing constitutional ban on abortions. Here in the US, towns in
some of the most conservative pockets of Pennsylvania and other states have
organized to assert community rights over corporate rights, and
successfully fought off expansion plans by polluting industries.

We see increasingly bold public expressions of human compassion, through
the creation of sanctuaries and “cities of refuge” to protect threatened
immigrants, offer direct aid, and sometimes grant local citizenship rights
in defiance of exclusionary national policies. Food and farm activists are
reinvigorating urban farming and regional food systems around the world,
demanding food sovereignty, and advancing local alternatives that save
energy and water, improve public health, empower marginalized communities,
and challenge the hegemony of global agribusiness. Visionary planners,
designers, and on-the-ground activists are working to reshape their cities
to reduce commuting and minimize energy use. An international alliance of
trade union representatives has launched a worldwide campaign to
democratize energy systems under increasing public ownership, and a
youth-initiated rebellion against rising transit fares in Sweden and other
Scandinavian countries helped spark a global network advocating free public
transportation, among countless other recent examples. [4]

More than 2,500 cities from Oslo to Sydney have submitted plans to the
United Nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, frequently in
defiance of their national governments’ far more cautious proposals; well
over 9,000 municipalities have joined a Global Covenant of Mayors to
reinforce their commitments to climate action. Some of these plans are
rather modest, drawing upon cities’ existing jurisdiction over matters such
as zoning, building codes, and local infrastructure, but some cities are
also moving to limit automobile use, expand public transportation, and
accelerate the transition to renewable energy.

Furthermore,we are seeing the emergence of a grassroots “municipalist”
movement that directly challenges national centers of power and raises the
potential for a more thoroughly transformed political order. In cities as
different as Barcelona in Spain, and Jackson in Mississippi, municipal
movements rooted in well-organized neighborhoods have elected radical
mayors and city councilors with a mandate to defend the rights of tenants,
strengthen the public sector of the economy, and implement transformative
approaches to community development.

In Jackson, an organization known as Cooperation Jackson established
neighborhood assemblies and successfully ran candidates for office on a
program emphasizing human rights, local democracy, and neighborhood-based
economic and ecological renewal. The project is rooted in the historic
legacy of Black Liberation struggles and celebrates their inspiration by
movements throughout the Global South. In the heart of the war-torn Middle
East, Kurdish activists along the border between Syria and Turkey have
adopted a unique model of municipal governance, with a focus on equity for
women and new models of ecological reconstruction. [5]

A youthful network known as Symbiosis now involves hundreds of individuals
and dozens of affiliated local groups. The network’s founders have
facilitated several major North American gatherings on municipal politics
over the past two years, and the group is now planning a congress of
directly democratic municipal movements. As Symbiosis’s founders explain,
“[W]e can’t actually make the necessarily large-scale changes without
taking control over the places where we live and creating the alternatives
necessary for a new system.” [6]

Progressive, locally rooted movements have long proven their ability to
influence wider social and political trends, whether by force of example,
concerted political pressure, or active resistance to centralized power.
The passage of landmark national environmental legislation in the US in the
early 1970s during the Republican administration of Richard Nixon was in
part a response to the proliferation of grassroots mobilizations leading to
local anti-pollution measures and lawsuits during the 1960s, with corporate
interests ultimately choosing uniform national regulations over a patchwork
of increasingly restrictive local measures. [7] Local measures to address
inequality, such as campaigns to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15, have
spread across the US, as have countless other innovative policies whose
feasibility has first been demonstrated at the local level. In other cases,
a heightened conflict between local values and centralized power structures
brings the potential for lasting change. The idea of confederated
democratic municipalities actively rebelling against centralized
authorities to create revolutionary institutions of dual power is central
to social ecology’s communalist political strategy and to the political
outlooks of several contemporary municipalist movements.

It seems clear that local action is often the best remedy for the failings
and excesses of the present system, and a proven approach to catalyzing
wider changes. But what about problems that are inherently global in
nature? How can locally based movements provide the underpinning for the
broader global transformations we seek? Can we envision networks of locally
rooted continental and perhaps global structures that reflect a
comprehensive vision of interdependent communities and simultaneously
embody a holistic, cosmopolitan outlook and a truly humanistic general
interest? How can confederations of municipally based movements begin to
address the needs to redistribute wealth, transform economic systems, or
manage the increasingly climate-driven crisis of migration around the
world? Can they, as Bookchin insisted, tackle the fundamental question of
where and with whom political power resides?

We need to strengthen forms of coordination that emerge from the municipal
context to support a growing network for change in synchrony with a global
resurgence of solidarity, democracy, and justice. The recent upsurge of
Green politics across Europe offers one source of hope, but many long-time
Green activists are aware of how an earlier generation of Green Party
functionaries in many countries succumbed to narrow electoral ambitions at
the expense of the organic links to communities and social movements
pointing to a more systemic alternative. [8] Confederations of democratic
communities and regions need to develop new continental and global
institutions that are no longer plagued by the global power politics of the
UN, the narrow commercial imperatives of the WTO, nor the technocratic
managerialism of the EU. Through creative experimentation, visionary forms
of action, and life-affirming political struggle, we can discover ways to
resist the tides of reaction and climate-driven collapse, and point the way
toward a different world.

Today’s increasingly severe climate disruptions are beginning to
universalize the sense of precariousness long experienced by the earth’s
most vulnerable peoples. If current trends continue, we face a grim future
of ever-diminishing returns and a capitalist race to the bottom, with
increasingly extreme deprivation on a global scale. But there is a better
path. The odds may be diminishing with each passing year of climate
inaction, but it is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that
humanity can unite to reject authoritarian false solutions to the climate
crisis and social inequities, embrace the potential for an enhanced quality
of life beyond fossil-fueled capitalism, and begin to realize the dream of
a liberated and truly interdependent global community of communities.

[1] These ideas are explored in detail in Murray Bookchin, *The Next
Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy*
(London: Verso, 2015).

[2] Bookchin, *Urbanization Without Cities* (Montreal :Black Rose Books,
1992), 283.

[3] Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places:Reflections on Globalism and
Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” *Political Geography* 20 (2001):
139, 149–150.

[4] See http://unionsforenergydemocracy.org and
https://freepublictransport.info/ .

[5] See, inter alia, Internationalist Commune of Rojava, *Make Rojava Green
Again* (London: Dog Section Press, 2018), and Meredith Tax, “The Revolution
in Rojava,” *Dissent*, April 22, 2015,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-revolution-in-rojava .

[6] Symbiosis Research Collective, “How Radical Municipalism Can Go Beyond
the Local,” *The Ecologist*, June 8, 2018,
https://theecologist.org/2018/jun/08/how-radical-municipalism-can-go-beyond-local
.See also https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org .

[7] This history is explained in Chapter 3 of my book *Earth for Sale:
Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash *(Boston: South End
Press, 1997).

[8] Seemy "The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in *Green
Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades*, edited by Frank Zelko and
Carolin Brinkmann (Washington,DC: Heinrich Böll Foundation of North
America, 2006).

****************************************************************************

Monday, July 1, 2019

>From PaulRaskin [praskin at tellus.org]
------------------------------
Dear GTN,

In May, we introduced a new format for the bimonthly GTN discussions.
Rather than focus on a formal essay, we asked you to comment on a broad
theme (the climate movement) and a structured set of associated topics.
This revised approach got
a thumbs up from many of you, so let’s stick with it.

Our July forum—*THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY?*—will zoom in from a global
panorama to the local scale in order to explore the scope for community
action to drive a Great Transition. Please organize your comments as
responses to one or more of the following topics:

*The Promise and Pitfalls of Localism*
Can bottom-up action and communitarian sensibility anchor a global
movement? Or is localism inherently limited by granularity, particularity,
and insularity?

*Theories of Transformation*
What conceptual frameworks provide effective guidance for a consequential
glocalism?

*Scaling Sideways and Up *
What prefigurative approaches are advancing replicable change in the
interstices of the dominant system? What new organizing initiatives and
coordinating structures are needed to catalyze a transformational movement
of local movements?

Brian Tokar, a writer-activist in the social ecology tradition, leads off
with his responses to each of these topics, available here
<https://greattransition.org/images/Tokar-Think-Globally-Act-Locally.pdf> .
What are yours? We welcome both succinct and extended comments (up to c.
1,200 words).

The internal GTN discussion will go through *Thursday, JULY 31*. Then we
will publish a curated selection of comments that samples a range of
perspectives.

Over to you,
Paul

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