The Reconstruction of Community Meaning
by Gar Alperovitz
Copyright 1996 Institute for Labor and Mental Health
Tikkun (May/June 1996) Vol. 11, No. 3: 13-16, 19.

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In recent years we have begun a national discussion of the implications of America's prevailing corporate ethos: There is a growing public awareness of the degree to which corporate decision-making not only causes employment to rise and fall, but also shreds the social fabric, precipitates the disintegration of local culture, and unravels community. Yet most Americans rarely - if ever - face the positive, even more fundamental question at the heart of Buber's argument: With communities and individuals regularly uprooted by wave upon wave of dislocation, can there be any real hope of developing a serious process of positive long-term political-economic change without first creating the underlying economic institutions that foster, nurture, and sustain the experience that "We're all in it together"?

Almost certainly, the answer is no; important as they are, republican philosophy and civic associations are no match for corporate power and insecure individualism. The critical question, then, becomes how an economic-institutional rebuilding might ever be accomplished. Like many today, Buber was aware of the enormous difficulties facing a society in stalemate. He wrote sympathetically of the nineteenth-century French utopian Pierre Joseph Prodhoun's lament:

All the traditions are worn out, all the creeds abolished but the new programme is not yet ready .... Hence what I call the dissolution. This is the cruellest moment in the life of societies...

Buber's fundamental strategic judgment was that a slow, steady and long-term "reconstruction" of underlying institutions was the only way to move through the stalemate; it was also the social precondition of future political change. This required - could not be achieved without - the evolutionary, organic build-up of new community economic institutions.

"However long it may take the Full Co-operative to become the cell of the new society," he urged, "it is vitally important for it to start building itself up now as a far-reaching complex of interlocking, magnetic loci."

A "reconstructive" process differs in its basic thrust both from traditional liberal reform, on the one hand, and from "revolution" on the other. Reform, of course, mainly emphasizes politics and legislation within the existing institutional framework (e.g., regulate the corporations, don't try to replace or eliminate them). Buber was in no way opposed to what he called "the political principle." But he thought it inadequate to the crisis, believing that reform would inevitably falter unless and until underlying social experiences and institutions were changed.

"Revolution" does assume the necessity of fundamental institutional change - specifically (for socialists) the elimination of the corporation for there to be serious progress. But Buber believed "revolution" could only produce what he called a "pseudo-socialism, where the real life of man is but little changed.... We see more or less from the Russian attempt at realization that human relationships remain essentially unchanged when they are geared to a socialist-centralist hegemony which rules the life of individuals and the life of the natural social groups."

Although the specific form Buber termed a "Full Cooperative" may no longer be of central relevance, a number of perceptive writers have begun to reach toward practical strategies that recall Buber's concept of a slow "reconstructive" developmental path between reform and revolution. The sociologist Charles Derber, for instance, has urged the concept of a "social market" with a strong "cooperativist" component. Derber's essentially Buberian judgment is that the "prospects for massive public investment are dim and ... the cooperativist movement may be closer at hand." He points to the success of the Mondragon community-based economic and social cooperatives in Spain as an example of what might be possible over time.

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