ABSTRACT
There is very little new about the solutions proposed in chapter 1 except the context in which they emerged. People in the United States have been creating forms of collective ownership and working toward the goal of local or community control for a long time. In order not to lose sight of the lessons of these histories, we need to explore them here. The histories of collective ownership, community development, and local/community control are varied and disparate, and it is the rather ambitious goal of this chapter to bring these histories together. For while these organizations, and, at times, movements, emerged at different times and in different places for different reasons, there are substantial relationships among them. Equally important, however, are the disjunctures that have existed, and which continue to exist. Beginning with the nineteenth-century American roots of collective ownership and community control, the chapter then shifts to the 1960s and discusses the emergence of the current community-development movement. It then presents the trajectory of this movement away from its organizing roots and toward greater degrees of institutionalization and professionalization. This professionalization has seen the goal of community control, and the radical politics that sometimes informed that goal, get lost in the process. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of this history.
