Social Change for What?

by Raven

I’ve frequently talked about communities being “laboratories for social change.”  But what kind of social change?  What sort of society are we working to create?

It’s easy to talk about what’s wrong with this society (the many varieties of oppression–often intersecting, climate change, environmental destruction, militarism and violence and war, etc, etc–I could spell it all out, but that would be more than a whole post in itself and lots of people have spelled it out elsewhere). What I want to look at is the question of what kind of society do we want? Just what are we trying to replace this whole mess with?

Obviously, I want something that’s kinder to people (all people!) as well as to the environment/ecology/earth.  I also want something with a lot less inequity.  Beyond that?  I want to see a world that delights in diversity, and that creates abundance, not scarcity.  As adrienne maree brown put it as the final element of her Emergent Strategy, we need to be “Creating More Possibilities”.  David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture, talks about twelve basic principles.  “Use and Value Diversity” is number ten.  Another permaculturist, Ben Falk, at one point listed seventy-two ‘directives’, one of which is “Increase Diversity, Don’t Reduce It.”  I have also written that I am more interested in a diversity of communities than having diversity within a community.

Yes, this blog is devoted to income-sharing communities, but I strongly support co-op housing and cohousing, ecovillages and hybrid communities, and many other different kinds of secular and spiritual communities, especially communities which support cultures beyond mainstream middle and upper class white culture as well as those that support a variety of marginalized people.  I’d like to see more of all of these in the future–but I also think that the future needs to also include people living alone, or in couples, or in a great variety of families.

So why am I pushing communes/income-sharing communities here?  Why don’t I at least feature other kinds of communities in this blog?  Two reasons.  First, there are lots of other places with articles about and information on various kinds of communities.  The Foundation for Intentional Community is a good place to start if that’s what you’re looking for.  The second reason has to do with the Overton Window.

The Overton Window is about public opinion and how it shifts over time.  The concept has been used to explain how politicians decide what policies to pursue but what it really looks at is what people think is good, acceptable, or just too far out there–or what they are aware of at all.  The point is that this window shifts over time and people with extreme positions can shift it–not to where they are but by increasing the awareness of their positions, they can change the opinion of what’s moderate.

A real life example (from politics) is someone I knew well who actually ran for governor while espousing some fairly radical positions and was covered in the media.  She didn’t get elected but some folks claimed that the fairly progressive person who did get elected owed it to her, because what she put out made his positions seem moderate.  

In a similar way, pushing the extreme end of the communal/sharing continuum, and making it clear that this is a real possibility, makes all the other community experiments all the more possible.  If a community like Twin Oaks can succeed using radical sharing, then your co-op, cohousing, or ecovillage should certainly be possible.  

On a daily basis on Facebook, we publish accounts of income-sharing communities and ideas, many of which are successful. Hopefully, the more awareness there is of these communal experiences, the more folks will begin to consider what they want and how they can achieve it.  Also, the income-sharing communities that we do publicize here are far from identical.  Each of them is unique in their own way, and I want to encourage folks (maybe even you!) to figure out what it is that you want and try to imagine that you might be able to get it.  If it’s a diverse future that we want, we will have to build it together.