some Practical Measures

Neighborhood based urban production can mitigate people's cash expenses and help them eat better at the same time. Community gardens, food banks, and post-prison projects can be grass-roots venues for work such as this.

Biointensive, permaculture, and organic methods which economize on land and capital as opposed to labor are most feasible in these circumstances. Oft-times, these various batteries of techniques describe themselves almost as self-contained ideologies. My mixing of gardening and politics is more traditional.

Such enterprises would have to be small or medium-sized in order to fit with the inside or edge of a contemporary urban zone, and of necessity would probably be producing only vegetables. My personal ideal would be a vegan world, but it seems I have to keep one foot in the farming world as it presently exists.

Food and shelter rate pretty close together as categories of human need, and both lead finally to questions of land tenure and land use. Although my major interest and experience lies with food production, I believe grass-roots struggles over land tenure and use in the industrialized societies will originate most readily from housing struggles and that the securing of land for food will emerge in close association with the securing of land for shelter.

There are hints of this in the joint Wood Street project carried out in Trenton NJ by Philadelphia Landed Interests and Isles, an umbrella community gardening organization. Although the Wood Street project does well to associate food and shelter, it leaves the housing units in the hands of for-profit landlords instead of residents.

A group I have been involved with in Bloomington, Indiana, Citizens Acting Together for Cooperative Housing ( CATCH), focuses on securing real estate for use in cooperative housing controlled by residents. One struggle recently won in Bloomington was the creation of a municipal housing trust fund with mandated permanent affordability covenant-and-deed restrictions. CATCH does not wish to see the future affordability of trust-fund housing stock eroded through the effect of upscaling market forces.

By separating housing stock from the market, CATCH attempts to suppress the practices of speculation and rent much as farmland is in many places being protected from the market under conservation land trusts.

Many life-support and resistance projects, such as cooperative health care, child care, mutual housing arrangements and so forth, could be integrated with an urban land trust that would separate economically comatose property from the market and place it under community control. A land trust, or federation of them, could also be a resource for founding new enterprises and a forum for communication and action between them, serving as a unifier for change of all sorts.

Rent, even among bourgeois economists, is widely understood to be unearned income (payment in excess of minimum supply price). Any user fees or payments in such projects should flow back to the land trust for operations and ventures. This resembles the single-tax proposal advocated by Leo Tolstoy under inspiration from Henry George, ie that all public revenue should come from nothing but a single tax on the rental value of land. I could never figure out how Tolstoy reconciled taxation with his abhorrence of government, but maybe a land trust could also be a public works trust.

The other major worry apart from land is capital. There needs to be some type of community trust for handling capital or credit in the same way as the land trust holds and administers land.

Eventually, I would like to see the comprehensive integration of agricultural and built-up areas, and the blurring of the "rural-urban" dichotomy as such. This may help me crack the nut of how to combine my interest in draft animals with city-based production, which is unthinkable in the present scheme of things. Architect Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language, calls for land to be organized in built-over ribbons of no more than a mile in width to be interlaced with farm and woodland ribbons of no less than a mile in width. Farming and urban growth generally compete for the same type of land (something flat near a water source). Collocation is technically feasible, but a market-governed economy is stacked against it because taxes on land with assessed development potential are usually higher than what the farm can afford, so it sells out. Under the present regime urban problem-solving is the domain of capital, and use-driven solutions are generally inapplicable.

In order to build the new society in the shell of the old, we must locate that shell, or shells. I think cities in decline are the most realistic sites for this.

Chicago, Berkeley, and Indianapolis exemplify American cities that are thriving economically, by which I do not mean there are no poor people, but that there is sufficient investment money for real estate to be held in a tight fist. St. Louis and Detroit, on the other hand, are full of abandoned lots and buildings asking to be homesteaded. Parts of the property structure are falling through the cracks.

There are more people active in Chicago, but in the long run, St. Louis would be a better place for action. I used to think this problem pertained only to the anarchist world, but I saw the magnitude when I learned about the Alinsky legacy in Chicago, and that it's the most heavily "community-organized" city in the US.

A "movement" has its own gravity of drawing individuals but there is no functioning collective process for deciding where the "movement"should be applying itself, indeed no running discourse on it. (The ACORN-style practice of local haymaking for national manuevering does not count.)

I believe one reason for the typical inefficacy of modern radicals is an inability to strategize winnable fights. The legacy of narrow individualism and humanitarianism is that defensive actions have almost totally displaced assaultive actions.

In pursuit of some balance, we come again to the idea of multi-functional organization. There are some community organizers that see this. The best of their tactical work should be combined with anarchist and revolutionary understandings of the workings and possibilities of the world. Although we have to build grass-roots responses to present conditions and maintain accountability to the oppressed, we must also determine to strike where capital itself is weak and not merely where its victims are weak. This does not even force a choice, really. The victims are everywhere.