The Case for Community Power by Sean Donahue I believe that we must act; positive action is the only option left to us. Communities have the same rights as individuals. We must seize back control of our community. Sam Lovejoy farmer, environmentalist The people of Seabrook, New Hampshire and the surrounding communities never wanted a nuclear power plant. In March of 1976, by a margin of 768 to 732, the people of Seabrook voted against the plant. Yet, state and federal officials allowed the construction of the plant. In the years that followed, people throughout southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts passed town meeting resolutions, filed lawsuits, testified at public hearings, picketed, wrote letters, circulated petitions, and took part in acts of civil disobedience in an effort to protect their own health and the health of generations to come. Yet, in 1990, ignoring fourteen years of protest and resistance, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted Seabrook Station a full-power operating license The licensing of the Seabrook nuclear power plant over the objections of the people who will have to live with the effects of its radiation for the rest of their lives was not merely an isolated travesty of justice, it was yet another symptom of a problem that has gripped our entire nation and our entire society: the decline and slow death of grassroots democracy. Our government has grown too big and too centralized to meet the needs of its people, and has grown so close to business and industry that it has no desire to do so. Beyond a certain point, growth becomes a disease. As Kirkpatrick Sale pointed out in his brilliant study of the role of institutional size in the modern American political and economic experience The Human Scale, once a system grows beyond a certain point , it loses efficiency. Mosquitoes, polar bears, and people are the size they are because that is the best size for them to be. A fifty foot tall mosquito would be crushed under its own weight. The same rule holds true for nations. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the American economy began when each system became to large to sustain itself. But size is not the only factor in the failure of the present system to meet the needs of individuals and communities. Small governments often fail their people as well. As Murray Bookchin has pointed out in his ground-breaking work on community-based government, the replacement of the face-to-face politics of the Greek polis and the New England town meeting with a representative government has done much to diminish the voice of the individual in the policy-formulation process. 5 A community of neighbors has a sense of its own identity and a basic sense of the needs of its members. On the other hand, a large government or corporation, however progressive it may be, can't really have a good understanding of the individual needs of its citizens or employees for the simple reason that it must deal with millions of them at a time. Thus, in the eyes of the corporation or the state, the individual is merely another statistic. No one in her or his right mind would place a dioxin dump next to someoneUs house. Yet, itUs easy for a bureaucrat to place a dioxin dump next to lot 24-A, which just happens to be the site of the home of a family of four. The bureaucrat or the corporate executive isn't necessarily callous, she or he just can't see the trees for the forest. Transferring policy decisions to the hands of small citizen assemblies would serve as part of a larger confederation of similar assemblies, as Bookchin suggests, would do much to put power back into the hands of the people. A single national or global economy with a multitude of smaller, self-sufficient, communal economies linked together in a similar confederation7 based on their need to exchange resources. This would force people and communities to consider the impact of their decisions on others, leading them to put people and the planet before profits. For, as Bookchin points out in his essay, Market Economy or Moral Economy, our present lack of economic justice stems largely from the fact that the market economy depersonalizes economic transactions making them not a personal exchange between human beings, but a transfer of commodities from manufacturer to retailer, from retailer to consumer. The result is a completely amoral economy. Just as it was easier for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington to allow a power plant to be built in Seabrook over the townspeople's objections than it would have been for the town's government to do so, it is far easier for a multi-national corporation with a warehouse full of unused grain to allow a nation to starve than it is for a farmer with a silo full of corn to allow her/his neighbors to starve. In an economy based on community ownership or resources and means of productions, the needs of the community will always come first, and in a small community, the needs of the community tend to coincide with the needs of the individual. When the domination of one person over another inherent in capitalism is eliminated, the human desire to dominate the earth will soon fade as well. The confederation could also place a check on the actions of individual communities. If Squashville were to mistreat its own people or its neighbors, the other communities could cut off trade with Squashville, perhaps depriving themselves of squash, but also depriving Squashville of beets, tomatoes, onions, carrots, hemp, rice, and soybeans. Squashville would soon be forced to change its ways. The creation of self-sufficient communities would also help to stem the problem of rootlessness in America. The quasi-nomadic lifestyle People working in a self-sufficient economy will never be transferred or be forced to move elsewhere in search of work. Thus, both financially and emotionally they will have more invested in the community. This kind of permanence tends to lengthen the range of one's vision. Someone who is planning on living in a town for fifty years is far less likely to support the construction of a toxic landfill that will leak in twenty years than is someone who plans on moving in five years. Nor will that person be as likely to assume that if she or he produces the waste in the first place someone else will take care of it later on. Certainly the transition to this kind of community can't and won't take place overnight. But anarchism has never been a goal-oriented philosophy. Rather, as Noam Chomsky points out in Notes on Anarchism, it is a historical trend, the tendency to move towards a world which is freer, less violent, and more just. It is not an axis on a graph, but rather a tangent line forever approaching the point of perfection. The vision of libertarian Municipalism, thus, is one of a living revolution of people living the values of simplicity, non-violence, ecology, equality, and democracy. We can begin taking back control of our lives and our communities from the government and the corporations right now by building a new society within the shell of the old through building alternative institutions such as newspapers, food co-ops, communes, and artists collectives, and by advocating for home rule for communities and justice for oppressed peoples. The revolution begins here and now, and we cannot afford to let it fail. A previous version of this article appeared in The Merrimack Valley Progressive (Lawrence, MA) in September of 1992. Notes 1. Quoted in Harvey Wasserman, Energy War: Reports from the Front. Westport (CT): Lawrence Hill & Company, 1979. p.29 (?) 2. Bob Dylan. Subterranean Home Sick Blues on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. New York: CBS Records, 1967 3. Seabrook Chronology. The Boston Globe. March 2, 1990. p.12 4. Murray Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview Green Perspectives: A Social Ecology Publication (Institute for Social Ecology, Burlington, VT) October 1992. Bookchin Ecology, Anarchism , and Green Politics Burlington (VT): Left Green Network/ Minneapolis: Youth Greens, 1990 Bookchin The Modern Crisis Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986 Bookchin Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future Boston: South End Press, 1990 Bookchin and Dave Foreman Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman Boston: South End Press, 1991 Bookchin. Post -Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley: The Ramparts Press, 1971 5.Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism. 6.ibid. 7.ibid 8. Bookchin. The Modern Crisis. pp.77-97. 9. Bookchin. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. pp.31-55 10. See Notes on Anarchism in Noam Chomsky. For Reasons of State. New York: Pantheon: 1973