The Localist Manifesto
section 4
getting started – the local festival
The Robin 99 campaign begins wherever and whenever there are enough people who like the idea to get something going locally. Our primary means of gaining support and generating excitement will be the local festival. These festivals will be free, informational, and … festive. Local organizers will try to assemble the kinds of people we will need if we are going to create prosperous local economies: family/small market farmers; appropriate technology and clean energy specialists; permaculturalists and gardeners of all kinds; anyone with any good ideas about dealing, at the neighborhood and regional level, with waste, pollution, and carbon emissions; artisans who can build greenhouses from recycled windshields; brewers of beer and bakers of bread; practitioners of street medicine and partisans of free, just-down-the-block health care; local currency and slow city advocates; visionaries in the causes of transition, resilience, and regeneration; booksellers and librarians; musicians, poets, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, magicians, sculptors, whittlers … you get the picture. Some items on food and beverage tables can be displayed under a sign that says “free,” others will be wearing price tags. The choice between them might then be compared with the choice, confronted on election day, between Robin 99 and a tagged politician.
With one exception, Robin 99 campaigners will do no fund-raising. We will not take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. We will not bend the knee to the moneychangers. We have no use for a staff or an office. We do not intend to create a national organization. Local organizers will, however, need to raise money for the festivals. Farmers in particular should be fairly compensated for showing up with their food and their knowhow. If you set up a booth and need cash for travel or supplies, you should get it. The 99% is a broad, diverse social grouping – many of us have some money to spare. Money donated to local festivals stays local and helps nurture the new ideas and relationships being cultivated there. The festivals are live, locally funded advertisements for the way of life we can begin to create together once we stop voting for servants of the 1%. They are arguments-in-action for what we can achieve if enough of us vote for Robin 99.
They will also serve as training grounds where we might find a workable balance between a locality’s need for solidarity and its members’ right to think and do as they please. Festivals and fairs throw people from diverse backgrounds into a shared experience of commerce and pleasure-seeking. The benefits of trade and the joys of revelry, when jointly pursued in a setting where everyone might reasonably expect to attain them, overpower the mutual suspicions that in ordinary times impede the development of cooperation and fellow-feeling across the usual lines (race, class, gender, creed) of separation. Participants in a festival do not suddenly abandon their differences; they do not have to agree with trading or dancing partners to enjoy the fruits of trade or the pleasures of dance. But they do have to resist any compulsion to impose their beliefs on other festival participants. Intolerance destroys the conditions which allow mutual respect and trust to flourish. When the monotheists showed up in ancient times brandishing their jealous God, the first targets they selected for heaven-sanctioned retribution were the myriad pagan idols brought along and displayed by festival participants to sanctify their negotiations and celebrations. Pagans understood that without toleration there could be no festivals, and without festivals they would likely endure a woeful depletion of material comforts and bodily delights. Monotheists outlawed the festivals with the idols, leaving the individual to stand naked before a wrathful God and a market stripped of the warm adornment of ritual and thus impervious to local standards of fair dealing. By returning festivals to the center of community life, we re-insert the market into a network of mutually acknowledged obligations and time-honored traditions. The healthier that network, the more immunity a locality will enjoy from corrosive intolerance.
Festivals create mundane opportunities for people to work and unwind together while respecting everyone’s right to believe what they will. Bigotry and hatred cannot be outlawed. Laws and speech codes do not reach deeply held convictions. Coercive measures do nothing to bring people into contact with one another, yet physical proximity looks to be the only solvent of hardened prejudice that has ever worked. Working and sweating together, negotiating together at the produce stand, breaking bread and drinking wine, singing and making merry into the midnight hour – these activities remind us how much of what makes life meaningful and enjoyable can be shared by people who might not share a cultural identity, sexual orientation, or ideological perspective.
Finally, local festivals provide a proper field of exercise for a movement that intends to operate exclusively at the grassroots. Organizers can erect a Robin 99 tent where people who want to do campaign work can assemble and make plans. Our campaign will be creative, honest, and transparent – no hidden agendas, no secret donors, no gilded falsehoods. We will need to figure out exactly how we are going to acquaint our fellow citizens with Robin 99 and convince them to vote for him rather than for a Democrat or a Republican. Given the disdain with which many Americans now view the two major parties, it does not take a heroic leap of faith to imagine this task being accomplished. Nor is it hard to appreciate how dramatically the landscape of political possibilities in this country would shift should Americans begin to withdraw their loyalty from these parties and invest it instead in the place where they live – the primary goal, when all is said and done, of the Robin 99 campaign.
We have, all appearances to the contrary, a strong wind at our backs. Many people here and abroad are already engaged in grassroots campaigns for smaller, more sustainable methods of food and energy production, more equitable means of producing and exchanging goods. There are many good ideas already out there and at work in the world. We can also count on routine events to make our vision of local self-determination and ecological responsibility appear increasingly attractive to anyone who gives a damn about the prospects of future generations on this planet. Pipelines will continue to break, wells and rail cars will continue to explode, something will again malfunction on a deep-water oil rig, fracking and other hazardous extraction processes will continue to endanger and diminish the water supply, the growing of food will become an ever more toxic and precarious undertaking, the oceans will become increasingly barren of fish and inhospitable to life of any kind, CO2 levels in the atmosphere will continue to rise, extreme weather events will produce escalating numbers of casualties. The big banks and global corporations will continue to pursue their interests regardless of the costs in human misery and ecological devastation. The reputability of institutions like the United States Congress, deservedly low already, will continue to plummet as politicians beholden to banks and corporations must prove their worth by implementing policies that turn much of the planet into a wasteland and most of its inhabitants into either instruments or victims of pillage and war. Just maybe, in the face of all this, we will finally stop voting for the bastards.
Occupy the Hearth 