Communautarianism
Incidence
The strength of communautarianism, under whatever name, is already powerfully felt in the anti-growth policies of a great and growing number of local governments throughout the industrialized world. It is felt even more decisively in the continued spread and intensification of environmentalist resistance to virtually all interference with nature.
Claim
Communautarianism would stop the capitalist market from treating nature as an array of potential commodities to be bought and sold, and it would oppose the ceaseless change caused by capitalist competition because it disrupts established communications and stable social relations. The communautarians who oppose the workings of the market do not usually acknowledge, or indeed recognize, that to oppose the market is to oppose democratic capitalism as a whole, including all its democratic processes. The communautarian vanguard is prepared to impose its preferences on majorities too backward to appreciate the superior merits of such processes.