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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There has also been an evolution of state and local policies in aid of such efforts. For instance:

• Many municipalities give preferences to community-based firms in bidding for local government contracts. New York City, for instance, has bestowed government contracts on the Bedford-Stuyvesant CDC and assisted in the financial arrangements transferring an I.B.M. plant in Brooklyn to Advanced Technological Solutions, the largest predominantly minority worker-owned firm in the country. (The company has expanded from 180 to 270 employees and to annual revenues of $ 25 million; it is planning to open a plant employing fifty-five people in a depressed minority neighborhood in South Dallas.)
  
• Innovative forms of municipal ownership also are on the rise; these include such local public enterprises as cable television companies, land development, and methane recovery systems. (The community-owned Green Bay Packers football franchise is a widely cited precedent.) In San Bruno, California, the city-owned cable television company - one of roughly fifty nationwide - returns some $ 400,000 in profits annually (out of gross revenues of $ 4 million). Riverview, Michigan, operates a methane recovery system that converts emissions from landfills into energy sources.
  
• A number of local experiments also aim to improve the "local community multiplier" through various "buy local," "import substitution, and "local dollar" mechanisms that increase the turnover of money circulating in the community economy. An aggressive energy-saving program initiated by Osage, Iowa's city-owned utility, for example, keeps some $ 1.2 million annually (more than $ 900 per family) in town by preventing money from being spent to "import" gas and electricity.
  
  
• In some states, larger geographical "multiplier-enhancing" efforts are also underway. "Oregon Marketplace," a state-operated network that links local suppliers and buyers, was responsible for brokering nearly $ 25 million in new local contracts annually in the early 1990s. Through the "multiplier" effect, this in turn is estimated to have increased economic activity in Oregon by another $ 35-40 million per year.

A number of policies suggest themselves as obvious extensions of such approaches to helping stabilize the local community environment. Planning the location of significant-scale public institutions with the specific goal of achieving greater community stability is a likely next-step strategy.

Relatively speaking, in most states the state capital and its many operating agencies are reasonably stable; they provide an economic anchor for communities in which they are located. State universities and extension systems can also serve such purposes, as can prisons. The targeting of contracts for such publicly important goods as mass transit equipment and renewable-energy technologies could also provide additional stability to localities.

In the long run, of course, such strategies begin to define the policy outlines of community-oriented economic planning arrangements, the goal of which is local stability and reconstruction of local community economies.

Were such a supportive structure ever fully developed, it would probably require considerable decentralization - and probably, in the American context, a certain regionalist vision.

Ultimately, larger-scale economic activities might also include regional public enterprises - and a "reconstructed" mixed economy along the lines of the early vision of the "grass-roots" regional structure that once inspired the Tennessee Valley Authority before it was abandoned during World War II.

As impressive as some of the economic efforts are, the reconstructive trend is clearly only beginning to gather steam. Moreover, small, fragile local economic institutions are commonly buffeted back and forth in declining local economies. Also, most worker-owned firms are neither democratically controlled nor participatory (and this defines a critical area of internal "reconstructive" challenge for the future.) Nonetheless - and above all because traditional economics and traditional reform are failing - the process of reconstructive development is almost certain to continue to gain momentum over time.

The late British cultural historian Raymond Williams held that the "making of a community is always an exploration, for consciousness cannot precede creation, and there is no formula for unknown experience. It is, in practice ... a long conversion of the habitual elements of denial; a slow and deep personal acceptance of extending community. The institutions of cynicism, of denial and of division will perhaps only be thrown down when they are recognized for what they are: the deposits of practical failures to live."

In a similar vein, Martin Buber emphasized that real change requires a conscious existential choice - a decision to move in a new direction. The reconstruction of community is important not simply because it might ultimately be the precondition of slowly - even agonizingly - resolving our growing economic and social difficulties. It is important because at its core is the question of how human culture and human meaning might ultimately be transformed. What is at stake is the political-economic precondition of community - and a process of re-knitting the vital relationships between individuals and between groups without which a different consciousness, a different vision, a different philosophy, and a different meaning are all but impossible to imagine.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt once urged that we pay dose attention to the "odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet."

"In history," Arendt urged, "these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth." In such contexts, new possibilities can occur - "erupt" - even amidst widespread cynicism (even, in part, because of it). Despite all the obstacles, it is dearly important to press forward with traditional progressive reforms to the extent this is feasible.

Yet we also know that in the past quite new social movements have developed "out of nowhere" - movements sufficiently powerful to challenge extraordinarily imposing institutional structures: the modern civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement - all seemed to be facing overwhelming odds at the outset. So, too, few predicted the collapse of communism or the enormously rapid demise of apartheid once the walls began to crumble.

Just possibly what is happening at the deep grass roots of America's communities might one day become the basis of something quite extraordinary - something which might conceivably even take us, as Buber urged, past the limits of our own present-hobbled ideas of what is possible.

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