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Community Development

6 May, 2015 - 14:35

A community’s complex of economic relations are basic to all social life: notably, the ways in which people interact with the natural world, especially through using natural resources. Society emerges out of the natural world and is sustained by it, yet most people are now alienated from elemental natural relations. The origins of alienation lie in pre-capitalist societies with their monarchical, agrarian and craft hierarchies that gave way to the social divisions and economics of mass production. We now live with its consequences of global consumerism present in every niche of social life. If we go further back in social evolution from the 18th century, human social behaviour is seen as a continuation of the evolution of the rest of nature. The big question of ‘sustainability’ is whether our social nature can adapt to the fact that no other society can ever reach the level of the North American way of life, because our planet will not survive the necessary sevenfold increase in the day to day use of materials and energy by the rest of the world.

Changes are therefore necessary in a social-ecological future organised for sustainability, at an environmental level, a personal level, and a communal level. Appropriate institutional frameworks and an ethical vision are necessary. According to Peter Staudenmaier we must turn our attention to the social structures that might make free nature and a free society more likely. Instead of handing over decision-making power to experts, professionals, representatives, or bureaucrats, social ecology he foresees all people participating directly in the self-management of their communal affairs. This has to take place as an historical process in which communities move smoothly from their past to the present. Local history in this context is a stabilising force for future change. Murry Bookchin expressed it this way:

 

We are thus in a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of history,” in which a banal succession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or to move on to a path toward the true making of history, in which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in a position to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the catastrophic nuclear oblivion of history itself, and history’s rational fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in an aesthetically crafted environment.