This series explores the outlines of democratic socialism...um, snooooooozzzze...too academic, too dry, and relevance, please. "G, your planned series needs a makeover and fast." Well, resilient people are good at troubleshooting, so here goes.

Would you like to find ways to make your local community more resilient, more viable, more self-sufficient? Have you thought about how to develop your local community more organically? Consider banning the corporation within your local jurisdiction. Seriously :=)> More below.

Might as well listen to Jack Johnson, eh.

If you'd like to see a town that has transitioned to democratic socialism, see Totnes, a small market town in Devon, England, the town that created the Transition Town movement:
http://caucus99percent.com/content/local-resilience-transition-town-totn...
http://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/

A critical section of the people of town of Totnes came to understand what corporatism had done to it's centuries-old self-sufficiency and resilience. They came to this through the emerging green movement and/or through the emerging democratic socialism movement. The turnaround of totness was based on principles of this blend of red and green (ahem, shameless, completely off-topic plug for the Red Green Show. "Quack, quack!" :=)

My understanding of democratic socialism comes from a famous book that came out when a young Bernie Sanders was forming his economic philosophy: Small Is Beautiful (1973), by the post-WWII British economist E.F. Schumacher. It is subtitled "Economics As If People Mattered." It is not a textbook, there's no technical language, or math (or any Marx), but a book of popular economics aimed at the general readership.

It is filled with gold nuggets, but they're encased in now-irrelevant 1970s material. I would recommend reading it only if you have enough knowledge of economics to help you separate the gold from the 70's rock ("G, you just couldn't resist, eh?" :=) I have read it a number of times and have made a summary, mostly in Schumacher's words, there's lots of excerpts. I cut out the 70's rock...

I posted two such essays of a planned series of four. The first sank without little trace :=) In the second, I tried to add excerpts from Bernie's socio-economic plans from his campaign site. On the Boring scale, that made it worse :=) After some troubleshooting, here's an, ahem, test run.

Part Three deals with the matter of development in the emerging world. Why would the emerging world be important for our towns' becoming more resilient? Because the lessons from corporatist failure in global "development" apply also to our towns. Because since the 70s, corporatist globalists have "developed" our local communities in exactly the same way they distorted towns in the emerging world. In chapter eleven, Schumacher addresses the underlying problems with corporatist "development."

Eleven - Development

Schumacher notes the great failures of the engagement of the rich world with the emerging world. (We've covered ourselves with glory there since then, of course.) He looks to first principles for the reasons.

He notes that our scientists have shown that evolution is how the world has developed; massive amounts of minute adaptations over long periods of time.
Yet with development we still tend towards central planning:

Could it be that the relative failure of aid, or at least our disappointment with the effectiveness of aid, has something to do with our materialist philosophy which makes us liable to overlook the most important preconditions of success, which are generally invisible?

Or if we do not entirely overlook them, we tend to treat them just as we treat material things - things that can be planned and scheduled and purchased with money according to some all- comprehensive development plan.

In other words, we tend to think of development, not in terms of evolution, but in terms of creation.
When developers try to tackle poverty, they tend to look first to the material factors - lack of natural wealth, capital, infrastructure, etc. But the immaterial factors are vastly more important.

Schumacher highlights 3 such "immaterial" (psyco-social civic fabric) factors:

• deficiencies in education,
• organization, and
• discipline.

After the devastation of the Second World War, the countries with a high level of these three factors all produced economic miracles. So development in the undeveloped parts of the world is a matter of the removal of these obstacles. But this is why development cannot be an act of creation.

Education requires evolutionary growth, so does organization and discipline, none of them are able to "jump" forward. Development work must be aimed at speeding this evolution.

To focus on the material factors is simply to enrich those already rich.

He notes that if new economic development is introduced which depends on special education, special organization, special discipline, it will remain a foreign body in a society incapable of assimilating it.

Consider your neighbourhood, suburb, village, or town. Corporatist capitalism "developed" villages, suburbs, towns, cities along the same lines as they "developed" the emerging world. The franchize economy is a clear example of Schumacher's "foreign body" economic development.

Let's think of Mom & Pop stores.

Remember how our neighbourhoods used to have Mom & Pop stores everywhere? There were convenience stores, corner grocery stores, gas stations, laundromats, small hardware stores, burger joints, pizza joints, etc. After 45 years of corporatist assault and rule, however, few Mom & Pops can compete with international franchises.

You understand the benefits and advantages of Mom & Pop stores for the local economy and civic social fabric.
They keep local money circulating in the local economy and capturing outside money for the local circulations.
They pay decent wages, and all other factors being even, they treat workers like human beings.
They sponsor pee-wee teams and work in their local community - from the Lions Club to the food bank and the local festivals.

Franchise outlets destroy Mom & Pop stores for all the reasons now in the news. Then they give nothing back to the local economy, except tokenist PR campaigns run from faraway HQs. They hoover up local money and send it off to faraway financial centres. They externalize their costs by:

• sourcing cheap goods from afar,
• paying zero taxes,
• provide little training and none that would help the workers to find good jobs,
• paying low wages and no benefits - thus forcing the local government and local community to provide health care, food assistance, child care, etc.,
• forcing local governments to except them from local regulations and civic duties,
• yada-yada, endless more squeezing local communities dry.

So nowadays our "developed" local communities are as helplessly enslaved to corporatist rule and life as the "developing" local communities are in the emerging world. The foreign body franchizes are viruses that destroy local economies and suck their money out and sends it to faraway, treasonous financial centres.
The way to freedom and real, organic growth in our local communities is through teaching local citizens, organizations and governments about democratic socialist ideals, principles, and mechanisms. And then removing obstacles to growth and enable real, organic development in all facets of the socio-economic fabric of local communities.

For example, I am firmly convinced that our local communities must ban the corporation as legal business vehicle within their jurisdiction. All local business should be conducted in the legal vehicles of single ownership, partnerships, and cooperatives. (I'll bring out some of my stuff on cooperatives in a next series.) A specific instance: if you want to bank in our town, you have to use the legal form of a credit union.
(More on the superiority of credit unions for local economies in the next series.)

Our village could do that easily: we already have a branch of DesJardins, a credit union that operates in francophone towns. Other towns would first need to start or attract a credit union. That's not really difficult.

It would involve all three of Schumacher's principles of democratic socialist development:

• 1. educating critical sectors (people and organizations) of the village or town about the democratic socialist advantage of credit unions over banks,
• 2. organizing, within an alliance of stakeholders, for a campaign, a clear plan - goals, strategy, tactics, feedbacks, outcomes (remember Joe Hill: "Don't mourn; organize" - from The Long Memory (TY, JaeRay and the Hellraisers Journal) of progressives,
• 3. discipline: communication, coordination, feedbacks, flexibility, adaptations, leadership, foresight, action, etc.

Here's a suggestion for a thought experiment. Think out, yourself or over a drink with friends, what it could look like to transition your local community from capitalist banking - using the corporation as legal banking vehicle, to democratic socialist banking - using the credit union as legal banking vehicle.

I would love to hear form you about what this could look like.

I can't recommend highly enough the three short video clips in Martha's essay yesterday:
http://caucus99percent.com/content/resilience-local-communities-dismantl...
It is highly instructive on dismantling corporate rule in local communities.
The videos come from the Community environmental Legal Defense Fund: http://celdf.org/
Another resource: https://ilsr.org/ The Institute For Local Self-Reliance

Also, please let me know if this presentation of a component of democratic socialism works better :=)
Peace be with us, if we learn and adapt,
gerrit

Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered
In 1973, British economist E.F. Schumacher published Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered, a book that offered a vision of an economy driven by a desire for harmony, not greed; a local economy based on community and ecological values, not global financial derivatives. In the 1970s, “Small is Beautiful” helped launch a back-to-the-land movement that is the ancestor to the Local Food Revolution of today and the global Transition Network.

Here's where the series is situated in the book. Small Is Beautiful is comprised of four parts:
1. The Modern World http://caucus99percent.com/content/local-resilience-democratic-socialism...
2. Resources http://caucus99percent.com/content/local-resilience-democratic-socialism...
3. The Third World (now called the emerging world: this essay and the next)
4. Organization & Ownership (the best for last :=)

Don't buy books new. You can find the text online.
Please don't search with gargle: try www.duckduckgo.com instead.