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Communitarian Transformation
Remembering where we started Honoring Family and Community bonds
Healing the Earth and ourselves
Sharing - - the Key to Peace, Prosperity, and Happiness
Eutopia: the Good Place,
the goal of
Communitarian Transformation
Without radical social change, civilization will fall apart. Free market capitalism has exhausted available natural resources and polluted the entire planet with garbage down to the molecular level. Mass extinction of species is literally staring us in the face, pandemics showing the instability and inability of the capitalist system to cope with social reality as it really needs to function to survive let alone prosper in a globally linked world. Looking backward as many do here in America in order to avoid their social responsibility only means future generations will have that much worse social and environmental conditions to deal with. We must act now while it's still possible to get our nations together, unified by common need, cooperate or perish, truer now than ever.
Communitarian Transformation involves establishing communitarian government, communitarian social structures, communitarian economic structures, and communitarian cultural values in replacement of capitalist social dysfunctional ability to provide health and well-being to all citizens without prejudice. Social dysfunction is brought about by capitalism's inherent inability to create stable social-economic infrastructure. With capitalism's exaltation of human greed and creating a socio-economic system where citizens prey upon one another it become impossible for capitalists to ever empathize with the many social problems created by capitalism's victims, those least able to produce profit for the capitalist exploiter. America just experienced a President who opened up American citizenry to as much corporate preying as possible. Capitalism has been killing the American Dream ever since American government embraced private ownership of services and production that is vital to individual and community well-being. Socialism is the answer to Capitalism of course and Communitarian Socialism is the workable non-violent Socialist Solution that militant State Socialism has always failed to deliver.
I was going to organize my old communitarian notes as historical documents because I thought most of my communitarian ideas and experiences trying to implement them were out-of-date, passé, history. I'm 78 as of this writing in 2022 and I was actually looking forward to retiring from social change activism and getting back into art, developing my new texture style to re-launch my art career. But no, the endless visionary brain says, why there's potential social change up the yin-yang in those old notes. But that you will have to judge for yourselves. I'm a communitarian and a believer so I'm already there and have been most of my activist life. But I'm not going to try to sell you a dead horse if that's what communitarian or any kind of radical social change means to you. But then again you might just want to check out the Communergy Club proposal as new basis to change the world.
Meanwhile, the index below lists most of my history of communitarian ideas and communitarian activist adventures before I finally arrived at Communergy Club as the best social change vehicle for promoting Communitarian Socialist replacement of some of the most foul of the new Corporate Capitalist Feudal System where aristocratic social position is measured in money. For a critical look at American society that produced counterculture communitarian activists like me, that's in these chapters too. I would have been content to be part of American history but instead I'm still trying to make it. Well, if Joan Baez can claim she is history and I was once married to a woman who knew Joan and could out-sing her ..., yes, that's right, my second wife, God rest her soul, had a better voice than Joan Baez but she never recorded, never sought fame which is a shame and a loss to folk singing history. But I'm in that boat too, not seeking fame and fortune, which is why I'm making up for not really publicizing my activist work nor promoting my spiritual work either, content to let history find me, probably poshumorously. I just wanted to live a half-way normal life without people bothering me all the time. And I do think that by avoiding fame it's allowed me to develop my ideas and projects without being subjected to public scrutiny every time I turned around or published something new.
Communitarian Transformation
Index
Past
My head hurts..
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My Communitarian Journey started when I became radicalized around 1965 when I became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Losing all my legal appeals fighting the Draft on conscientious grounds when only membership in pacifist religions like Jehovah's Witness or Quakers was allowable defense, I realized American society was unfit for survival as is; it would fall apart because capitalism could not deal with the social and environmental problems American Life had produced. It had to be changed. Not wanting to be part of the loathsome "Art World" of money corrupted art dealers and their rich clients I dropped out of my promising art career to devote my life to changing America and My Communitarian Journey had begun.
Present
Official gear for the Communitarian Activist
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There's a Problem in the activist community in the U.S. It showed up in Humboldt County during the 1980's, 90's and the first decade of the new millennium. This was the time I lived there and was an environmental activist myself, working alone because joining radical environmental activist groups wasn't an option. I was coming from a Communitarian organizing background and radical environmental activists weren't interested in creating new eco-community models, they wanted to make war with corporations. I couldn't do that. I knew "our side" was doing just as bad if not far worse eco-destruction. From my p.o.v. these activists were corrupted with collective pathological narcissism and they corrupted the whole environmental protection movement in Humboldt County for twenty years by posturing as revolutionary wannabes fighting their Great Satan, virtually one timber company. By sucking up available environmental protection energy and directing into their phony Timber War real environmental protection for Humboldt watersheds and watercourses was lost for two decades until the U.S.A. EPA confirmed by a sediment study of the South Fork of the Eel River in 1997 what I had been saying all along; the major environmental destruction in Humboldt County was not being done by timber companies but by homestead development and homesteaders, the very people funding the radical environmental activists.
I post this example because I experienced it personally but the lessons learned in how to change society should be considered by future community organizers. Communitarian Activism provides several more examples of local community organizing and lessons learned. We have to move beyond Protest Politics. Radically wrong activists corrupted the Counterculture Revolution by injecting militant Leftist ideology into the Peace, Love, and Harmony generation's overthrow of nationalized pathological narcissism that created the world's Only truly classless society: Hippies. Leftist ideologues corrupted the anti-War movement with militant crazies like the SLA and they corrupted the environmental movement by substituting Leftist ideology in place of ecological facts and principles. Radically wrong activists have frozen the counterculture revolution at the protest level instead of going beyond protest to the development truly workable cooperative community alternatives to the corporate capitalist system. Communitarian activism is cooperative community based and has no need to make enemies of fellow citizens. We're all in this together. Let's act like we know this.
An Eco-Castle Green Hotel
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Communiversities, the Communitarian Village Proposal, the Communergy System, the World Community Land Trust, Gardenville, Chateau Marmoset, etc, are all various cooperative community concepts I have proposed and often engaged in as a community organizer in past years. They are only models for new communitarian social structures and not blueprints for reproducing exact replicas, e.g. the Communiversity model morphed into the Communitarian Village project under communal input. Time and circumstances determine the appropriate communitarian systems. But I believe they are good beginning models and present new ways of organizing our communities.
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Communergy Club is my latest social change organizing project. We didn't have the Internet back in 1972 when we created Communities Magazine as an outreach periodical for communitarians to organize themselves into various co-operative community groups and ventures. We didn't have Facebook or Amazon and when I remember what we were trying to do with our annual Communities Commune Directory, how we tried to organize communitarian social change by putting communitarian lifestyle interested people in touch with each other, well, the thought did come to mind, "Why not revive my old Communergy System project and expand it?"
Expand it from its computer centered operation and combine it with our original Communities Magazine Affinity Matching service to create a Communitarian alternative to both Facebook and Amazon by creating Communergy Club that includes a Big Box CO-0P Buying Club with the ability to work with tribal enterprise ability to competitively import and supply Communergy Club product needs cheaper than Amazon can. Tribal-Communitarian enterprise is possible. I know this from experience organizing it with the Heartlands Trust Company efforts. Imagine Communergy Club as an Employee/Member owned and operated holistic social change vehicle that Replaces, not fights, corporate capitalist enterprise with co-operative community alternative. Capitalism creates a nation of economic predators. Communitarian Socialism creates a nation of Sharers. Communergy Club can be done! Check it out if you want to replace Amazon and Facebook in your life and stop feeding the Super Rich plutocracy and its anti-Life on Earth political-economic system's control over America and the world.
Future
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Communitarian Socialism: It's different
While the Conservative Right, the Republican Party, being the corporate capitalist's political errand boy, always tries to scare citizens away from socialist government ideas the reality is modern societies eventually push back against the capitalists and begin to demand a say in the management and equable sharing of economic and social power of shared resources under the ownership of all U.S. citizens, not the ownership of a wealthy few.
Eventual nationalization of such resources occurs as privatized ownership historically destroys them. Huge gaps between a wealthy Few and Many poor never last as sooner or later social transformation occurs, either by democratic vote or by revolution and force of arms. Government services deemed vital to community functioning also become subject of change so they are no longer under the control of a wealthy few, be they aristocrats in a feudal society or plutocrats in our corporate capitalist society. It's a simple idea, really; democratic societies composed of citizens who govern themselves and are not governed by plutocrats using their wealth to compromise lawmakers by getting them to legislate laws benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor, a formula that actually destroys building a strong middleclass, the backbone of every sustainable society. |
Climax Civilization will be as varied as there are differing eco-regions of our planet. What will distinguish Climax Civilization societies will be their long-term sustainability and adaptability to changing environmental conditions. In the natural world climax communities go through a usually set series of species determined community/environmental conditions with the ending set of species the ones that will last as is, at least until some cyclic disaster wipes the environmental board and everyone starts from scratch again. Lasting disasters, like our current Global Warming, drastically change species population counts and eventually species forms. It is our generations challenge to meet our most serious environmental changes to come since the last Ice Age. Only Climax consciousness, what was known to Native Americans as looking Seven Generations down the line and seeing the patterns that persist and determine the best course of action, will save our species from civilization collapse and a return to human society ruled by terror as it used to be all over the world until we went through the Climax Civilization steps to reach this point of critical choice.
The whole idea behind
Creating Climax Civilization is conscientious human adaptation to the ecological needs of our planet. Human communities can no longer avoid adaptation to existing eco-systems because when these eco-systems fail, they take with them human community sustainability. We need every existing plant and animal eco-community on the planet as healthy as possible for the sustaining of human life as well as the Life of the Land, and Sea.
