Page 14 RAIN September/October 1985 be lost with what he has to offer being isolated. And, the folk society that he is living among is itself at a disadvantage unless it has interaction with educated, progressive people like himself. There needs to be a parallel development in which people like him have a conscious recognition of their responsibility, their role, their function in relation to folk society—to strengthen and reinforce it—and in which the folk society recognizes the need for these people who are coming in. Of course, all of this must be done in an atmosphere of mutual respect instead of mutual exploitation. When communities become isolated they die. We have to have mutual reinforcement. We have to have a community of communities all over the country. We need folk colleges—people's colleges—in such places. Not just for intellectuals or whites, but to do what Highlander College has done for Appalachia and the South. If we had folk colleges to which the working class and rural people from across a region could come and have association with the intellectuals—then return to their local communities with the strength and conviction of their own culture—these different groups of the common people could reinforce each other. We can't hold things together—and I think the Marxists are right here—we can't get to first base with intentional communities, with the middle class and intellectuals, however competent they are in economics and technology, if we've left the common people out of consideration. And yet the Marxists are all haywire in so many ways. They have no economy that works right. They're essentially authoritarian. It tends to be state capitalism, which is not a real socialist model. I think one of our major contributions here at Community Service has been the understanding that capitalism is not the market system. Capitalism is death to the market system. The market system is what characterizes healthy folk societies all over the world. People have practically no understanding of why these healthy economies were wiped out by capitalism. They don't know how an economy comes to be dominated by capital. Community Economy Ames: Why does the concept of "community economy" seem like such an unapproachable one to most people? Morgan: Alfred North Whitehead said the history of civilization is the history of the countless generations it takes to get people turned on to very simple but fundamental ideas. Take, for example, the resistance to new approaches in science. Scientists for the most part are ' absolutely incapable of even recognizing laboratory demonstrations of what they think is not so. When Arthur Koestler got turned on to a different view of reality, he went to orie of the prominent physicists he'd known as a young man and told him what he had experienced and understood. He said the fellow went white. "Is that so?! All my life is gone!" It's terribly upsetting. I gave a copy of my essay "The Simplicity of Economic Reality" to the professor of Marxian economics at Antioch. He had it for quite awhile and then I invited him to come speak with my class. He came and ranted and raved for an hour. A student asked him if he had read the essay and he said, "Well, I glanced at it. It's utopian, it's counter-revolutionary, it's reformist, it's impossible." The students couldn't make heads nor tails of what he was saying. He was simply upset. Ames: The larger economic system continues to destroy small towns and rural America, supplanting local economies, yet people cling to the idea that this is somehow good for them. Morgan: I anticipate the breakdown of our economy in this society. My hope is that we will be ready enough for that breakdown—that we can get something moving that will work in its stead. Ames: How can that happen when the cultural basis for a more decentralized society is being destroyed by the larger system, with its homogenization of peoples and total integration of communication? Morgan: This happened in ancient Greece and in the ancient world many times. Matthew Arnold spoke to this subject a hundred years ago. He described this breakdown and some of the characteristics of those societies in the past. He said that when the Hebrews and Greeks were going through this process of breakdown, they had the doctrine of the remnant: that out of the mass society there would be a very small group of people who would hold themselves together enough to maintain and develop an alternative way. But, he said that it was often such a small population that spoke the same language, in very limited communication, that they did a poor job of it. Arnold anticipated that what had happened to past civilizations would happen to the United States. The Future of America But there is one major difference today. There are now so many people speaking one language, with the capacity for communication, that the remnant will be large enough to do much more than they ever have in the past. So the very fact of homogenization of our society gives an opportunity for a larger remnant to do better. We will have a larger critical mass, and more places where it can become established. I've seen the other process again and again. A community gets started way off in the wilderness, thinking that they're going to do things. But they become so isolated that they die. We have to have mutual reinforcement. We have to have a community of communities all
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