COMMUNITARIANISM & THE LEFT

...They grow from detailed, mutually responsible work on issues, coupled with a rich, many-sided discussion of value and heritages...

...Most important, a movement that aims at the transformation of what is now a global corporate system must ultimately be guided by some broader vision of human possibility, a moral alternative to the way things are...

...This is not to suggest that social movements should be subordinated to the "instrumental interests" of political parties or the state...

...Citizens Fill Gaps," USA Today, Cover Story, June 20, 1983...

...Yet COPS leaders also make a clear distinction between their view of a public life that nourishes and respects the values of families, communities, and religious institutions, and what is defined as "public" in "the world as it is...

...Can neighborhood victories alone transform a society as large and diverse as that of the United States...

...It can be seen in many neighborhood and citizen efforts, whose rapid growth has recently been reported in the national media...

...Thus the interaction between social movements, electoral politics, and the state is more complicated than Boyte suggests here...

...Even in the best of electoral campaigns, the candidate is necessarily the focus—and American elections place a premium on candidate "packaging" and media imagery...

...The percentage of people agreeing that "the people running the country don't really care what happens" to ordinary citizens, 26 percent in 1966, stands today at 57 percent.' Conventional liberal-left approaches cannot speak to this sort of alienation because they draw too heavily on the vocabulary of the bureaucratic state system from which people feel estranged...

...14, 1983, pp...

...9-24...

...Against such a backdrop, the very definition of politics tends to become electoral reformism...

...Organizing that makes an affirmation of democratic values integral to its activity begins to repair bonds that have been gravely weakened by mass culture and economic pressures...

...The Senate Democratic Task Force on the economy now urges "abandonment" of the "tradition...

...6 The heritage of democratic socialism has much to contribute...

...such endeavors, hoping to gain credibility and visibility...

...Only when social movements are strong enough to vie for power can the democratic left have a major impact on the national political de478 bate...

...Schwartz and I agree—and disagree with many even in the best of local organizing—about the need for national "movement building...

...Black pulpits, freedom schools, songs, and other channels—not the mass media or the halls of Congress—were the instruments of cultural revitalization...

...Boyte has good reason to believe that electoral politics is alienating to many...

...Leaders in SFOP consistently remark on the depth and seriousness of the exchanges that result from combining value discussions with ongoing work on such issues as housing, jobs, pollution, crime, and the treatment of Central American refugees...

...Thus when the San Francisco tenants' movements recently mobilized in favor of a referendum measure to tax corporations for the social costs of downtown high-rises, the SFOP refused to join, arguing that they only engaged in direct action and not in electoral politics...

...The question I ask is not meant to be glib...

...The people" are an amalgam of individuals with diverse political, class, sexual, and racial identities...

...Surely the experience of the 1930s and 1960s demonstrates that a skillful coordination of electoral and nonelectoral struggles can result in significant reforms...

...Values are the glue of communities, evolving out of their history, purposes, and common life...

...These moments of militancy and reform came to an end partly because of revivals of the right but also because the left governments did not know how to proceed beyond the welfare state they had just constructed...

...On COPS's growing impact, see, for example, Paul Burka, "The Second Battle of the Alamo," Texas Monthly, December 1977, pp...

...Predominantly new class "organizers" hoped to "empower" community residents by "training" them in the skills of advocacy...

...But its very clarity of argument also demonstrates the left conundrum, for Schwartz does not even suggest a scenario for a majoritarian movement that might challenge "politics as usual...

...Antisocialism's major function in America is to serve as an ideological weapon of the right, and there are distinct limits to what nonsocialist popular movements can accomplish in the absence of recognizable and accepted socialist values...

...The Harris poll figures are from USA Today, March 17, 1983...

...But one crucial means for articulating an alternative ideology remains that of representative democracy and political parties...

...Tasks that democratic socialist and labor parties have historically performed will be essential in such a process...

...Sheldon Wolin, "The People's Two Bodies," democracy, January 1981, pp...

...And even when an occasional candidate adopts a more visionary idiom, electoral campaigns cannot build the sort of enduring community through which people actually begin to experience democratic modes of behavior...

...29, 1984...

...C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977...

...Local 277's Strike at Morse Cutting Tool," Labor Research Review, Fall 1982...

...For similar reasons, SFOP avoided media publicity in its early organizing stages...

...The feminization of poverty" and the dual oppression of women workers are the pivotal issues around which feminists, minorities, and trade unionists can be united in a new left of the 1980s...

...Religious values can sustain communities besieged by an oppressive state...

...COPS has transformed San Antonio politics and has also had effects across the state...

...477 out a rich and sophisticated intellectual life...

...But ultimately the understanding of power and democracy articulated by someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., was different...

...And the themes of progressive campaigns focus narrowly on what government (and the candidate) might do for particular constituencies...

...You make sure each person has an understanding of what we are going to do and why, and what their role is...

...The role of representative institutions in a pluralist democracy almost disappears...

...q 3. A Rebuttal by Harry C. Boyte Joe Schwartz's response to my piece is an articulate and interesting presentation that raises important issues...

...But multiplying resources now exist upon which to draw...

...480 formidable question whether democratic radicals should bother to cleanse the word socialism of the authoritarian muck that history (and socialists) heaped upon it...

...There is a sense that classic leftist approaches offer little prospect for mobilizing the passion and imagination that can significantly transform technological tyranny and political and economic centralization...

...It is ironic that amid a recent upsurge in progressive electoral politics, Boyte dismisses the role that parties can play in uniting constituencies and articulating a "transformative vision...

...Boyte reminds us that the fight for justice must be grounded in autonomous grass-roots movements...

...In 1984, the institutions of the liberal left have embarked upon a variety of voter registration efforts and other campaigns designed to defeat Ronald Reagan in the November election...

...But the point is that SFOP's avoidance of such a coalition is not simply a tactical decision...

...King's biblical perspective on power appreciated the transformative force of "redemptive suffering," the healing effects of love, the ambiguity in every community and individual...

...But precisely this loss of presence may have engendered an inordinate focus, by parts of the left, on community activism...

...It involves and promotes community leaders who are different from normal "activists": women, for instance, who frequently work behind the scenes to keep PTAs going, organize church activities, and maintain neighborhood networks...

...Organizations united in their demand for efficient garbage collection have divided bitterly when choosing among candidates who differ on whether affirmative action should be a consideration in hiring sanitation workers...

...The question is how to broaden our conception of "politics as usual," rediscover democratic resources in American cultural traditions that have been so gravely weakened in this most forgetful of societies, and develop a many-sided approach to the creation of a democratic movement...

...The democratic state, strikingly absent from Boyte's essay, is the institutional means for defining a community's political preferences and for mediating the tensions that arise among distinct communities...

...No broad democratic movement can emerge withInterview with Ernesto Cortes, San Antonio, July 14, 1983...

...When feminists, gays and lesbians, and people of color hear a romantic rendition of the virtues of "community" they are historically justified in asking, Does this include me...

...In his superb work German Social Democracy, Carl Schorske detailed the ways in which the party came to define its success more and more in terms of electoral gains and numbers of members in affiliated unions...

...A remarkable irony suggests an immense vacuum in American politics...

...He surely is aware that many democratic socialists have advanced alternative conceptions of a decentralized, participatory welfare state based on universal entitlements...

...Democratic socialists regularly invoke the vision of worker and community control (while rarely describing how to render such values concrete...

...so too the role political conflict plays in defining the values and membership of a "community...

...Black liberation in part depended on the weakening of traditional Southern agricultural communities and the mass migration of blacks into Northern industry (facilitated by government action in World War II...

...A complicated historical record belies Boyte's claim that "traditional socialist politics" inevitably leads to social demobilization...

...I respect Boyte's plea for embedding democratic practices in local institutions...

...The left and the unions were exhausted by the collapse of the Unione de la Gauche in the 1970s and by the sharp recession...

...Such a challenge, in turn, will require the rethinking of basic axioms on the left, the development of new, pluralist forms of radical democratic organization, and the articulation of an idiom of democratic change more varied and rooted in dissenting American traditions than "democratic socialism...

...Frequently this involves challenging a community to transform its notion of membership (as in the civil rights movement) or building coalitions among diverse communities...

...21-23...

...It is difficult to imagine how a sensibility like this (to paraphrase, "we have to call ourselves this because our adversaries will, though we realize there won't be much support because of the—partially self-induced—negative connotations of the word") could possibly generate enthusiasm...

...This sensibility has spread over the past decade through a range of local activity...

...Socialists join in ' Lawrence Goodwyn, "A Democratic Awakening," New Republic, March 14, 1981, p. 36...

...Thus the contemporary deactivation of much of the French left in the aftermath of the Mitterrand victory was presaged many years ago in the German Social Democratic party...

...Community organizations have used a wry and cynical idiom much like other forms of interest-group politics...

...Whether or how we move to a high-tech, predominantly information and service-oriented economy, without blighting the industrial heartland, is a question necessitating national debate and coordination...

...Mainstream Democrats have all but abandoned the tepidly critical stance of traditional liberalism toward corporate power...

...Skillful interventions in electoral politics and other public arenas are useful in this task...

...The life of complex communities easily becomes flattened and instrumentalized: people are turned into categories to be appealed to in "issue" terms—that is, terms of partial identities...

...A mobilized extraparliamentary left, while placing greater demands on the government, might have strengthened its position vis-à-vis the private sector...

...The civil rights movement had an impact on the political process and at times used it adroitly...

...Those who speak from democraticpopulist, religious, feminist, black, ethnic, democratic-utopian, and even anarchist perspectives need to be engaged by those who claim the legacy of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, and the dialogue must be informed by the actual "experiments in democracy" that have been taking shape across the nation in recent years, in the midst of great difficulties...

...The democratic movements that have wrought major changes in the contemporary world have drawn their inspiration from sources that differ from electoral politics and have found their major expression in different forums...

...And the pessimism that forms a background for contemporary political discussion is magnified by current developments—Reaganism, the deadly momentum of the arms race, and so on...

...Such activities are crucial for a democratic movement in America, whose first stirrings are visible but must spread far more widely if any significant challenge to centralized corporate and bureaucratic structures is to emerge...

...Such groups intervene in the political process using tools of coalition building, mass action, voter registration, and so forth...

...On the face of it, the problem facing the democratic left is simply stated...

...The evidence suggests, in fact overwhelmingly, that such an approach has potentially far more impact on politics...

...No matter how sensitive to "flag, faith, and family," if they attack corporate power they will be red-baited...

...that state power should be used to counterbalance corporate power" and 475 argues instead for "making government an ally of business...

...But a "politics" of the left that equates radicalism with electoral involvement is self-defeating...

...For a sampling of the recent, growing national media interest in grassroots citizen activism, see, for instance, John Herbers, "Grass-Roots Groups Go National," New York Times Magazine, September 4, 1983...

...It reproduces the tone of defensiveness now widespread in conventional liberal dicussion...

...q 2. A Response by Joseph Schwartz Harry Boyte has written a powerful critique of the bureaucratic state, the stalemate of the liberal imagination, and the candidate- and media-centric nature of American politics...

...power, but it lost its transformative dimension in the process...

...Given a modern industrial society, however, can we conceive of decentralizing economic and social life without some form of democratic national (not to mention international) planning...

...The problem is not an absence of vision but rather the difficulty of constructing democratic socialism in one export-oriented economy amidst an international recession...

...A movement for egalitarian "empowerment" would require a national, even international, redistribution of wealth...

...Deciding who can reside in your neighborhood is an exercise of local control...

...But they are no quickfix substitute for building such a left...

...481...

...Instead of imitating most other political theories and adopting the state as the primary structure and then adapting the activity of the citizen to the state, democratic thinking should renounce the state paradigm [and instead define] the citizen as a person whose existence is located in a particular place and draws its sustenance from circumscribed relationships: family, friends, church, neighborhood, workplace, community, town, city...

...If leftists endorse these tenets, they do so at their peril...

...The decline of the civil rights and antiwar movements and the crippling of the labor movement by stagflation in the 1970s have eroded the basis of both the "New Politics" and the New Deal coalition...

...The difference is indicated by Sonia Hernandez, current COPS president, when she discusses participation: "We never talk about people in terms of 'masses,' " she explains...

...When a community becomes conscious of its core values in a context of pluralist discussion, democratic and transformative possibilities are more likely to be realized...

...he lists a series of "minimal issues" of an electoral program, and he criticizes SFOP for staying out of a recent electoral coalition...

...1, 10-14...

...At their most skillful, labor-union campaigns against the corporate offensive have tapped this spirit...

...Downplaying participation in elections would mean that the arguments that shape our national political consciousness will continue to be determined by corporate PACs and image-oriented politicos...

...But his celebration of the communal borders on the apolitical...

...Nancy Shulins, "Backyard Rebellion: Neighborhoods Dig in and Fight City Hall," Associated Press feature, Jan...

...Predominantly parish-based community orga479 nizations, which Boyte is correct to cite as the most vibrant, can act in a sectarian manner toward broader political forces...

...Sensing the decline of these movements, many New Left veterans decided in the 1970s to organize at the community level around such issues as housing and energy...

...Boyte criticizes democratic socialism for its historic "equation of state expansion with social betterment...

...Public alienation is also charted in the Galluppoll figures, Minneapolis Tribune, Sept...

...I do not want to devalue the victories community organizations have won...

...How can we rein in corporate power without using state power (such as plant-closing legislation, right-to-know laws, restrictions on capital mobility...

...Yet the socialist tradition itself has also produced abundant evidence that the understandings of "politics" that are most characteristic of its history, like its predominating equation of state expansion with social betterment, erode the spirit and independence of democratic activity...

...Discussion of deep values or the possibility of qualitatively different ways of living is an extraordinary rarity...

...The company was forced on the defensive and eventually granted gains to the union.' Through this sort of grass-roots ferment, a different, older and more participatory understanding of "democracy" develops...

...When Gulf & Western sought to force concessions from the UE local in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1982, the union went on the offensive...

...An inordinate emphasis on the antidemocratic nature of economic modernization and state intervention also ignores the sociological underpinnings of the (all too limited) gains of blacks and women...

...This was Martin Luther King's alternative to both capitalism and Marxist notions of class struggle and statism, which he believed reduced the person to "a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state...

...such organizations will undoubtedly be a core element in reconstructing a broad democratic left...

...To counterpose "movement" activity to electoral politics is to forget that the most "transformative" periods in modern democracies have occurred when mass movements have profoundly affected electoral politics and state policy: the CIO and the New Deal, the mass left and the Popular Front government of Leon Blum, the civil rights movement and the Great Society...

...It was not the statist or electoral nature of socialism that demobilized popular movements...

...There is no prior blueprint for what should emerge...

...What is needed today is a much broader discussion that involves intellectuals, activists, and ordinary citizens out of a range of radical democratic traditions...

...Two major tenets of America's political culture serve as barriers to the reemergence of the American left: that the state is incapable of serving the general interest and that politics is inherently dominated by truly special interests and self-serving politicians...

...Sheldon Wolin, "Revolutionary Action Today," democracy, Fall 1982 We live in what historian Lawrence Goodwyn has called "an age of sophisticated despair...

...Interview with Sonia Hernandez, San Antonio, July 5, 1983...

...It is also visible in the community base of the new peace movement, in women's selfhelp projects, in cooperatives and other efforts...

...What democratic activists must accomplish is to unite these constituencies in favor of some minimal, unifying program...

...But this celebration of a communal democracy thwarted by an omnipotent state and rootless politicians gives pause to those who believe that democratic politics in a complex, industrial society must entail a contest for state power...

...And there is no small urgency for the process...

...But we must learn to distinguish between such activities—which at best pursue narrow instrumental goals—and the core values of the movement and society we seek to create...

...The New Bedford fight is described in Dan Swinney, "U.E...

...Movements rise, fall, revive, and disappear...

...But before we stress our antistatist credentials, we should remember that the major threat in the U.S...

...Better to be out in public struggling to redefine the socialist idea than to accept the psychic and political damage that hiding in the closet usually entails...

...it was the limited vision of social democratic and socialist governments...

...11,1983...

...Concern about the upcoming election is amply justified...

...without coordinated development of national programs and campaigns...

...Local candidates— Harold Washington in Chicago, John Lewis in Atlanta, Ruth Messinger and Al Vann in New York, Harry Britt in San Francisco, Mel King and Ray Flynn in Boston—have constructed more powerful coalitions among tenants, trade unionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, and minorities than have most of the grass-roots organizations...

...The party did gain a kind of The Jaures quote is from Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 89...

...Boyte believes that his "rethinking of conventional wisdom" will enable the democratic left to reestablish a national presence...

...I am more hopeful about such initiatives as the new effort to form an American "Green" movement— named Committees of Correspondence—that is, a populist-communitarian-ecological political force that is not a "third party" and draws on conservative as well as left-wing traditions...

...Pressed by nonelectoral movements, these governments implemented massive social reforms...

...I would hesitate, however, to see a community movement against integration as a manifestation of "substantive, communally grounded democracy...

...And power can be used for various ends...

...They sought to influence those in power through nonelectoral "direct action" on the part of previously disenfranchised constituencies...

...And it resurfaces today, in a variety of arenas...

...This sort of approach shifts the focus of conventional liberal or left-wing politics, which views people and groups in terms of stages of consciousness ("reactionary" versus "progressive," for instance, or conservative, liberal, or left-wing), to an emphasis on values...

...476 adapting participatory understanding of democracy to the dilemmas of modern culture by recognizing as problematic such terms as "community," "tradition," and "public life...

...It reflects an entirely different way of thinking about the process of organizing and the creation of relationships between diverse groups...

...But the vocabulary and categories of the normal left ("mainly secular movement," "mass," even "left" itself) will not be the basis for such a development...

...Community control of poverty is still poverty...

...And we should fear trends toward centralization and bureaucratization...

...In the process of giving such invisible leaders new skills and public recognition, the very definitions of leadership and public are changed...

...Relationships, in SFOP's perspective, are not built very deeply through electoral politics...

...Peter Skerry, "Neighborhood COPS," New Republic, Feb...

...You don't build strong friendships or relations by reading about them in the paper," explained Mike Miller...

...without channels and mechanisms for the mobilization of middle-class and professional resources in support of local campaigns...

...Indeed, it is estimated that COPS in San Antonio has redirected over $400 million in development funds into poor Mexican barrios over its ten-year history...

...Thus he points to politicians who in his view have achieved such an integration of movements...

...Recently some community organizations have hesitantly entered the electoral arena, confronting issues that their traditional focus on narrow economic concerns had previously led them to avoid...

...In Schwartz's schema, various separate "mass movements" exert pressure on office-holders and the state bureaucracy, but the electoral arena is the terrain on which they come together to discover their "common interests...

...But its concepts, themselves immensely diverse and often contradictory, cannot be seen as the determinative premises of movement building...

...That American parties do not stand for coherent programs and values is something to lament, but also to change...

...COPS, according to Ernesto Cortes, the group's first organizer, is "like a university where people come to learn about public policy, public discourse, and public life...

...Showing how the conglomerate had bought out the locally owned machine-tool plant for the sake of "bleeding off" profits and eventually shutting it down, the union mobilized an array of community institutions— churches, businesses, and civic groups— around a call for local self-determination and civic vitality...

...The real issue is whether those movements achieve institutionalized victories that transform society...

...Both the understanding of political agency (voting blocs and electoral coalitions) and the terminology of power become abstract and depersonalized...

...is not a bureaucratic welfare state but its severe attenuation...

...But recognition by a predominantly secular left that the church plays a democratic role in Poland and in the barrios of Latin America and East Los Angeles does not obliterate the fact that at other times churches have been an oppressive, parochial force...

...Yet in recent years such groups as the Communities Organized for Public Service in San Antonio, the San Francisco Organizing Project, the East Brooklyn Churches have stressed the need to link work on particular issues with extensive processes of community renewal, value discussion, and "citizenship education...

...The San Francisco Organizing Project, for example, using the valuebased approach pioneered by COPS, has brought together a great diversity of groups: black Pentecostals, Hispanic congregations, synagogues, trade-union locals, white ethnic parishes, churches with predominantly gay and lesbian memberships, and more...

...The Blum, Attlee, and second Roosevelt administrations all came to power riding a crest of militancy...

...Community control" is an elusive concept...

...I'm not sure, however, if he would agree that building a modest but visible democratic socialist movement is imperative for "the generation of longer-range vision, ideas, and strategies...

...Each is an individual and you address people as individuals...

...Is it so for the thousands of blacks activated in the Jackson campaign...

...On earlier participatory democratic views, see, for example, Charles Douglas Lummis, "The Radicalism of Democracy," democracy, Fall 1982, pp...

...This sharply poses the difference between communitarian values on the one hand—participation, the dignity of the person, reconciliation, identification with the powerless, justice—and the "values of the world" on the other—profit, unbridled individualism, glorification of technique...

...We don't think in terms simply of getting out numbers of people...

...Joanna Brown, "Saul Alinsky's Democratic Legacy," Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1983...

...The San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP) rarely works with nonchurch constituencies...

...Finally, Schwartz's espousal of "socialism" does have a defensive character, which illustrates the left dilemma...

...But voluntary associations inevitably become politicized as they try to influence those who hold state power...

...And because their religiously organized constituency is politically diverse they eschew electoral politics...

...Yet according to the Harris poll of March 1983, the number of Americans who believe "the rich get richer and the poor poorer" has steadily increased, rising to 79 percent in 1983...

...9-16...

...EDS...

...Democracy seems real only when ordinary people develop a sense of communal responsibility and engage in a continuing civic action, learning the skills and values of public life, building the tools to gain political power.' Moreover, what is often called "value-based" organizing has developed such insights further, Senate Task Force, quoted in Maurice Zeitlin, "Democratic Investment," democracy, April 1982, p. 70...

...Put very simply, the values of electoral politics are different from the values of substantive, communally grounded democracy...

...Traditionally, community organizing and citizen action have taken little notice of questions of value...

...Indeed, SFOP (which includes trade unions and community groups as well as congregations) rejects the "mass movement" notion itself, with the connotations of uprooted and interest-defined politics conveyed by the term...

...In Boyte's analysis, political parties are mistrusted because they fail to involve people intimately in efforts to transform their lives...

...In the process it has mounted a challenge to local political and economic elites that is unprecedented in recent years and inspired a number of similar groups...

...The acts leading up to the voting booth were the ones that constituted the most important forms of "democracy in action" through which people learned a "new sense of somebodyness" and the practical skills of democracy...

...The French socialist Jean Jaures noted the irony as early as 1904: "Between your apparent political power as it is measured from year to year in the growing number of your votes and mandates . . . and the real strength of influence and action, there is a contrast that appears the more while your electoral strength grows...

...Also, most local communities lack resources and power...

...Communities can be reactionary or progressive, traditional or modern...

...Boyte endorses Sheldon Wolin's call "to renounce the state paradigm...

...Without a state powerful enough to control concentrated corporate power, how can we envision meaningful community and worker participation...

...Boyte and I concur that in the immediate future the progressive movement will not be a socialist one...

...We need to reclaim, in a more positive vein, the old Socialist party's vocabulary, the vision of the commonwealth, incorporating the best of socialist traditions as well as religious, populist, native peoples' perspectives, and others...

...Unfortunately, I don't think we have much choice...

...6, 1984, pp...

...The exigencies of governing will inevitably lead politicians to be less visionary than such movements, but still, we must continue to press them...

...139-50...

...It abandons the intellectual and activist functions that have characterized the best moments of democratic radicalism: the generation of longer-range visions, ideas, and strategies for moving toward a more humane and democratic destination...

...In the civil rights struggle, for instance, the movement gained its power from religious and democratic values that came alive in hundreds of towns and cities where ordinary men and women acquired for periods of time a stunning solidarity through the transformation of their communities...

...Centralized corporate structures and the modern bureaucratic state acquire an eerie life of their own, take on autonomous power in much the same sense that Marx once described the machinery that defined the pace, rhythm, and structure of workers' lives...

...Affirmative action today demands that the state often intervene...

...Democratic socialists reject this "transmission belt" conception of politics, and I concur with Boyte that a richly democratic society should contain a plurality of voluntary associations...

...q • We will be glad to print succinct, brief comments from readers on the issues discussed in this exchange...

...It is a * Contrary to Boyte's analysis, one of Mitterrand's greatest problems is that he came to power not on a wave of social militancy but on a massive anti-Giscard vote...

...Geoffrey Rips, "New Politics in Texas: COPS Comes to Austin," Texas Observer, Jan...

...But any realistic politics must confront inherent tensions between planning and participation, centralization and decentralization, social movements and the state...

...Boyte's hostility to the state concurs with the antimodernist sentiments expressed by fellow communitarian Lawrence Goodwyn (in "Organized Democracy," democracy, January 1981): "It now seems possible to offer a direct counterpremise to the idea of progress: societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly more hierarchical over time...