Libertarian Eco-Socialism

Joe Corbett has a new article at Integral World, "Libertarian Eco-Socialism." It's a good read highlighting many of the things we've explored in the IPS forum thread "Integral Anti-Capitalism." I like his following description:

"A low fossil-fuel permaculture based society organized around self-managed decentralized local communities of direct democracy federated into regional, national, and global governing bodies. Local communities would be much more energy generating and autonomous than they are today, and the people themselves would decide directly how they would live among themselves, not mediated by representatives "under the influence" of big money or far removed from the lives of the citizenry, but through the independent municipalities where they live and work in citizens' assemblies, workers councils, trade unions, and peer-2-peer cooperatives. So it's not that there wouldn't be a city, state, and national structure under an organizational mode of libertarian eco-socialism (a post-postmodern integral society), but how that structure operated within and between the parts would be vastly different.


"Small business practices could be encouraged between local communities, while local communities would decide for themselves the laws and regulations they would follow. State and national governing bodies couldn't come in and raid your marijuana garden, for instance, but if a community wanted to burn coal or burn witches at the stake the larger governing bodies could intervene, as well as deliberate over the larger projects of a collective humanity for the purposes of common safety, sustainability, and civilizational advancement. So there would be much greater freedom and diversity at the local level, but at the same time an integrated vision of the common good, hence, libertarian yet socialist. Of course, the many details of self-governance cannot be planned in advance or dictated to posterity but can only be worked-out by the people themselves in dialogical participation in a flex-flow self-governing mode of being and consciousness, which is also the pre-condition for human development to yellow post-postmodernism."