FINDING COMMON GROUND: mappings of community and activism

For Generation Rent this disjuncture take on an especially acute form.[i]  What cause for optimism  can  there be for this post-student generation, given that they  have usually internalised  career as a  middle class life story  grammar at a time  when its structures of professional opportunity  have all but disappeared  except for  the largely privately educated offspring of a professional  and governing elite. Those  whose aspirations to join the salariat  are blocked, now find themselves having to explore the other sense of career, as a period of careering about, yet one which is no longer about a transient period of sowing wild adolescent oats before settling down to a secure job and home  but  continued dependence on family support and  employment  in forms of contingent  or  free lance labour  that, however redescribed in the idiom of vocation, (ie as an inner  quest   for an authentic  self),  can all too easily harden into the chronic  life long insecurities of the precariat. They are indeed trapped  in a frozen or deferred transition between dependence on a world of the past that is no longer effective – the chronic prematurity of a precocious childhood, and a world of the future  that is out of reach, a state of adult autonomy. In that sense this  generational predicament   dramatises the organic  crisis  of late modernity, caught between a  dying culture of  progressivism   and the advent of a  new world waiting to be born.

Under these circumstances  looking back and looking forward can be a painful business. The Left and the labour movement in Britain  has always been  better  at retrospect than prospect – it has largely advanced into the future looking back over its shoulder at the wreckage of its dreams like Benjamin’s Angel of History,  which  let us not forget was inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. This   was painted in 1920 at a moment when the political future of Germany was poised between two rival Utopias  of modernity : communism and fascism. Klee was part of what has been called the ‘lost’  Weimar generation, young people who felt trapped between looking back  to a pre-war world that had vanished for ever in the horror of mechanised warfare  and looking forward to a world in which the application of science and technology promised  emancipation  from poverty and drudgery yet  was seen as prefiguring new forms of alienation and subservience.  Klee had long been fascinated by the biblical figure of the Angel of Death, with its dual aspect  as a harbinger of doom and an instrument of  deliverance and hope. In this painting he depicts the angel as a fragile figure poised between two different kinds of flight – his  gaze   drawn in fascination to  something  we are not shown, but his eyes  also averted as if what is seen is too horrible to contemplate.

The British Left and labour movement’s attitude to modernity has  been similarly ambivalent, if for more mundane reasons.Modernisation has so often  undermined collective  bargaining power of workforces, has brought deskilling or redundancy,  while for the working class as  consumers it has meant  a more less magical liberation in terms of leisure and life style from the petty constraints and indignities  of wage labour.  This ambivalence is part of a wider attitude to the present, past and future, an oscillation between a proto-modernism that  identifies  modernity with progressive historical forces whether located in science, technology or  the working class movement itself,   and  a retro- modernity which  regards the condition of modernity not as something to be aimed at or achieved  but as something that has never quite happened, is possibly unachievable,  probably undesirable  and in any case can only be grasped as a kind of retro-fit…….

Today the art and science of looking forward  to the future, with its implicit optimism of the will- no one after all is likely to say that they are looking forward to  illness, unemployment, or poverty-   has increasingly  become the prerogative of global capitalism. Corporate visionaries, armed with their mission statements which promise to deliver the best of all possible worlds,  evangelical property developers  and  urban imagineers with their techno-utopias of the smart city, professional futurologists   with their big data sets showing that, global warming to the contrary, life is  getting better and better for most of humanity,   these are  the  poets and  prophets  of New Dawn. It is precisely because we are living in  such a globally unstable economy, because the routines and rhythms of everyday life, not mention life plans  are increasingly disturbed by unpredictable events, because  we find ourselves trapped in a  space time compressed system of chaotic synchronicity, that these road maps to the future have such a seductive appeal.

There is, of course, another sense in which the party really is  over. The crisis of Social Democratic parties across Europe  stems from the fact they have been unable to mount a coherent challenge to neo-liberal policies, have failed to find a mode of address  that connects with the concerns of the salariat and the precariat and have instead presided  over the dismantling or hollowing out of the institutions, agencies and narratives of collective aspiration  which hitherto enabled working class communities to   sustain struggles of long duration, and remain resilient in the face of set backs and defeats.   With Labour’s long forward march seemingly permanently halted  well this side of the New Jerusalem, the sense of belonging to a community that survives your own death, and whose continued existence  guarantees some kind of posthumous identity, some place in the collective remembrance of struggle has increasingly been lost. No amount of oral historicising and memoryscaping  by the Left heritage industry, however valuable as an antidote to the selective amnesia of mainstream popular culture, can create a living legacy of struggle once the material and cultural  links between growing up, working and class have been  broken. I will come back to the implications of this for current forms of working class politics  and community activism, but for the moment I want to consider its impact  on the Left intelligentsia and on  the way we currently understand and practice  our relation to class, culture and community.

In the early 1990’s in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, and  the collapse of  Communist parties both east and west, Jean-Luc Nancy,a philosopher  formed in the  intellectual hothouse  of Parisian  post structuralism, wrote an influential essay entitled ‘The Inoperative Community’ which  was recently the basis of an interesting exhibition at the Raven Row gallery in London[ii].

In an early passage of this text  he wrote:

‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (…) is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.  Communism, as Sartre said, is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’… … if in fact it no longer is such a horizon, this is not because we have passed beyond any horizon. Rather, everything is inflected by resignation, as if the new unsurpassable horizon took form around the disappearance, the impossibility, or the condemnation of communism’. (Nancy 1991, 8)

Nancy is describing  communism, or more precisely the French Communist Party as both a community of political activists, of working class militants, and as an intellectual community, a community of scholar activists. The memoirs of this generation, and more especially of their children bear eloquent testimony  to just how much of a home from home these parties were  for   those  who  were formed within their orbit[iii]. Comradeship, before it became a corpse in the mouth, had the sweet taste of fellowship.  It was this existential sense of belonging  and the principle of collective hope afforded by membership of these parties, and  also, by mass social democratic parties,  that enabled  their members to turn a blind eye to their flagrant  lack of internal democracy, and their  legitimation of policies and actions which ignored, traduced,or simply suppressed  popular democratic  struggles of every kind. Nancy draws a radical conclusion from  the death of communism and the hope it represented in these terms:

‘Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the State have imagined their death reabsorbed in a community yet to come,. But  now we have nothing more than the bitter consciousness of the increasing remoteness of such a community, be it the people, the nation, or the society of producers. The communion to come does not grow distant, it is not deferred: it was never to come; it would be incapable of coming about or forming a future. What forms a future, and consequently what truly comes about, is always the singular death …’

Klee’s Angel of Death here trumps Benjamin’s Angel of History, pessimism of the intellect over rides and destroys optimism of the will. Now this is perhaps  a necessary response to the reverse effect of which we have seen so many terrible examples in the history of the 20^th century; where optimism of the will  triumphs over pessimism of the intellect, it becomes  totalitarian, enshrined  in norms of  happiness and the common good imposed by the state  whether in the name of the nation as an imagined community  of citizens or the dictatorship of the proletariat,    this lethal subsumption of civic and market economies of worth under the iron heel of political economy  depends on marginalising or extinguishing  intellectual pessimism and  all forms of popular dissent whether by means of terror, incarceration and mass murder or simply through the administered spectacle of mass contentment  and consumerism.

Yet once these two halves of Gramsci’s formula are split apart, we may find ourselves in the worst of all possible  worlds. On one side an intellectual  culture of endless  solipsism,  reflexivity and immanent critique, which puts in doubt its own heuristic procedures and  knowledge claims  and disconnects  itself  from anything outside itself. Whether it opts for a form of dialectical idealism or transcendental materialism, this culture remains imprisoned within its own  academic devices,   its specialised jargons and scholastic protocols. What underlies this culture is a profound pessimism of the will, the belief that  now there are no teleologies, no laws of history or evolutionary logics to guarantee  a progressive outcome  there is nothing to be done except  to observe  struggles from the sidelines.  And by a curious twist, this recognition of political impotence, leads to a style of  armchair  or rather desk top theorising  which  transforms itself  into an omniscient optimism of the intellect, a  belief that  by keeping the pure flame of critical theory alive in the Academy,  by separating  a totalising analysis  from the messy, compromising, contradictory  particularisms of  actual  struggles,  a potential space   is created  which at some future point,  when somehow or other  the tide of history turns, may serve as map or guide to revolutionary social transformation.

When  this  culture of subtle dialectics  tries to come down from   performing headstands on the high wire of  theory and ground itself in the real world, it tends to produce a vacuous jargon of pseudo- radicalism which, at least in its post modernist idiom, fetishises subversive  affect and  ‘transgressive’ body politics,  often focussing on aesthetic strategies which as one such advocate of this new avant garde puts it,  aims ‘  to affect the contemporary political sensorium by refunctioning aural mediation, giving voice to contemporary performances of political intimacy,authenticity and resistence’ [iv].  Bookloads of  kind of gobbledegook have been produced over the last decade by a generation of would-be scholar activists, radicalised by the contingent labour they are forced to perform within the Academy but desperate to secure a foothold within its career structure and hence to defer to its protocols.

This pervasive theoreticism  has in turn provoked a reaction in the growth of a culture of hyper-activism, which   takes its lead from its own lived experience of struggle, its experiments in direct democracy, and its grounding in a moral economy of community and  everyday  cultures of mutual aid, what David Graeber has rather mischievously called ‘actually existing communism’[v]. However necessary a corrective, this move tends to replace  subtle dialectics with crude  thoughts. A premium is placed on  sloganised and  reductive analyses and the ritual invocation of ideological catechisms : it is always capitalism, racism or patriarchy what dunnit. There is always a risk that the militant concentration  of energies on a single issue or campaign, results in tunnel vision and what begins by trying to widen the range of political voices  ends  all on one note. As Kate Tempest puts it, if all you are is  a hammer everything looks like a nail, to which we might add  that even if you are hitting it on its head, the nail in question is often being banged into a  rather large coffin marked  ‘Democracy RIP’.

So the cold and warm currents  of the alternative political culture, the cool objective analysis of  structures  and  passionate  engagement in the struggle to transform them   are no longer dialectically linked at they are in Gramsci and Bloch[vi].  There are of course many  attempts to bridge that gap, which I will discuss shortly  but for the moment I just want to note that in my experience  these projects  often run up against  the phantasmagoric relation of the Left intelligentsia to the working classes. This is   a relationship  made up largely of idealisations and projective identifications  which have placed a heavy burden of representation on the shoulders of a putative proletariat,  as the bearer of middle class    hopes and dreams   of social transformation. Then when they fail to live up these   expectations, working class organisations find  themselves the    object of disenchantment, if not outright repudiation, condemned for their reformism  etc. From being seen as the major part of the solution  they are now regarded as  the problem.  And so we arrive at the current low estimation on much of the Left  of the de-industrialised working class as irredeemably  racist, sexist,  homophonic bigots and worse still- Ukippers.

The persecutory nature of political reality  is  an objective  fact; and just because it is, it  also  gives rise to conspiracy theories,   and other phantasy constructs which provide a rationale for continual defeats without leading to defeatism or even the abandonment of belief in ultimate victory.  For example  there is  ‘The Great Boot in the sky’  ( a favourite narrative in  Trotskyite groupuscules).  Every time the workers raise their banners high, a great boot, belonging  to capitalists, and their trade union lackeys, comes down and crushes or betrays their hopes.

This brings me to the second part of my argument. The split perceptions of working class community, as a force for progressive change and as a reactionary obstacle to it, has a long   history  rooted both in  material circumstances, in actual social and cultural divisions within the class, but also in how these have been represented. I haven’t time to go into this in any detail or depth, but let us say just recall  that many years ago,   Edward Thompson argued that what was unique about the English working class was that it was present at its own making.[viii] England had the first industrial revolution, and hence the first industrial proletariat. There were no historical precedents, no narrative templates laid down for how this social force should be represented, either politically, culturally, or aesthetically. The historical prematurity of its birth meant that the class had to invent its own myths of origins to explain how it had come into being, and what its destiny was to be.

One way this was done was by appealing to imagery and language that gave the emergent class a heroic, Promethean, and largely pre-industrial provenance.[ix] Elementary–or rather elemental–forms of labour, labour that worked with the elements of fire, water, earth, and air in various combinations, to transform nature into a productive force came to be regarded as occupying a special position in the ontology of labour power. Workers whose labour embodied these principles: miners, navvies, blacksmiths, farm workers, fishermen, foresters, mariners, dockers, foundrymen, and more recently,  ‘roughnecks’ or ‘roustabouts’ working on oil rigs, steel erectors, and tunnellers–these all became privileged icons of a heroic form of working class masculinity,  hailed as the backbone of the nation. At the same time the physical degradation  and abject poverty associated with many categories of manual labour lead to  their associated communities  being treated as a race apart  including by other sections of the labour movement as something of a ‘race apart’. [x]

Labour’s two bodies, promethean and abject, were not mutually exclusive. They could be two sides of the same story.  The history of some social categories can  be traced as a progression from one position to the other–and then perhaps back again. Cockneys, for example, started out life as an alien underclass whose moral physiognomy was compared invidiously to that of ‘hottentots’, but then turned themselves into music hall performers singing popular patriotic songs and cracking cheerful-chappie jokes, until by the 1940s they emerge as national heroes of the Blitz, only to fall from grace once more in the multicultural 1990s when thanks to Alf Garnett and the Pub Landlord they become a byword for in-your-face chauvinistic attitudes, or, alternatively, the sentimental ‘knees up mother brown’ schlockney of Chas and Dave.

My argument is that these distinctions were internalised and transformed within working class communities in a multiplicity of ways. Groups  treated  as a race apart tended to develop an ethnic nationalism of the neighbourhood, where  prides of place  were asserted through strong forms of territoriality, based on factory, street or home in a way that gave a positive value to their  cultural and physical distinctiveness.  Such attachments reinforced social insularity, the closure of solidarities around kith and kin and ‘ethnic’ loyalties and they also  supported the growth of dense networks of mutual aid  and  shared resource. These labourhoods provided their inhabitants with a refuge from some of the more destructive  forces of  modernity, and  supported a strategy of community stakeholding based on what  Robert Putnam, in his theory of social capital,  has called  bonding,  the capacity to   claim privileged  access and symbolic ownership over public amenities and resource by exercising   customary entitlements. Community activism within this frame is primarily reactive and defensive, in a word NIMBYism.

In contrast working class communities  that come to see themselves as the backbone of the nation, develop a sense of place identity based on civic not ethnic entitlement. These labourhoods offer a prospect on the world as a field of social opportunity and  engagement, based on what Putnam calls bridging, the capacity to build  alliances  or partnerships with other groups in pursuit of political goals. These communities are in a stronger position to minimise  the social costs of modernity, and maximise its benefits, and  to correlate  their own incremental gains  ( viz in living standards) with wider  progressive causes and forces in society.  Their prides of place are much less dependent on rituals of territoriality, and rest on norms of public propriety, of what is  in or out of order belonging to a distinctively working class, rather than petty bourgeois moral economy. Within this frame community activism is pro-active, not reactive.

To summarise these ideal types of labour’s two body politics:
Abject                                         Promethean

Race apart                              Backbone of the nation

Ethnic nationalism                     Civic nationalism

Strong territoriality                    Weak territoriality

Refuge                                            Prospect

Bonders                                         Bridgers

Retro-modernity                          Proto-modernity

Reactive                                         Proactive

Some  of  these distinctions can, of course, subsume  more familiar ones  like rough/respectable  but others  cut across them; far from being fixed features they are continually being negotiated and redistributed.  They pivot on the relation of class  formation to its Other, i.e.  to non-class signifiers, in particular race. Cultural identities  are always eccentric to themselves, in the sense being formed in relation to the Other Within: other class, other sex, other race.  Inside every proletarian there is a bourgeois struggling to get out. Inside every meritocrat, an aristocrat. And vice versa. The Marxist formula according to which each class- in- itself has a mission to become a class- for- itself, radically misrecognises the relationality of class consciousness, its psychological dimensions of projective and introjective (dis) identification. That is why those who live on the other side of the tracks are such an ambivalent object of fear and fascination.

By the same token the Other Within becomes an uncanny figure, at once familiar and strange, and an object of both  political and personal envy or  desire.  Freud grasped this psycho-dynamic far better than Marx. In his essay on the family romance, he shows how children create imaginary genealogies for themselves, inventing biographies in which  they are   ‘in reality’ (i.e. in fantasy) offspring of the rich and famous, and have suffered  the misfortune of being   kidnapped by the utterly worthless  people who happen to be their actual parents and  impose regimes  which  restrict their freedom by insisting they brush their teeth and go to bed by 9pm[xi]. Equally those who actually occupy exalted positions in society often fantasise about the simpler and  more authentic lives  of  the ‘common people’ and engage in a variety of practice, from slumming to  transvestism  to vicariously  experience  ‘how the other half lives’.

What has upset these games of trading places is the fact that the places themselves have become destabilised  along with the communities of affiliation which hitherto gave them their anchorage in a moral anatomy of fixed class distinction. So for example the precariat is an agglomeration of  disparate  interest groups defined by a set of different  insecurities : ontological, economic and social. The majority long for the  security  associated with the salariat : a steady, reasonably paid job with some element of progression;  affordable housing with security of tenure; sufficient assets ,including pensions to withstand the vicissitudes of the life course. As for the salariat,  their individualistic ambitions are plagued by the fear of failure,  and  they sublimate their desire for a more challenging, creative  (and precarious)  existence in a variety of subcultural activities. These are class formations which are simultaneously to and from themselves  and are defined by their trajectories of relative im/mobility, not by membership of communities forged in struggle.

At the very  least looking at the relation between forms of community and patterns of activism in this way helps  to put the current disconnect between the political class  and the electorate, and more specifically between labour party   and  its  traditional  constituencies of support, in  some kind of broader perspective. But first there are other forms of community engagement, outside and sometimes against the culture of political activism, which we have to consider, whether originating from the Academy, public and private philanthropy and, not least, the Welfare State.

Whatever intrinsic  value some of the projects funded under this initiative might have, there is a general consensus that the overall impact  was at best uneven, and the sum of  its parts  certainly did not add up  to a holistic approach to community studies, but simply provided a platform for a diversity of  viewpoints and narratives. In that sense it simply amplified  the  problematic status of community within British social science.

The first major  attempt to construct a coherent  framework for community studies was undertaken over half a century  ago by  Ronald Frankenberg  in his book Communities in Britain[xii]. The book  was an attempt  to  codify  the approach of British social anthropology as developed at Manchester, under the direction of Max Gluckman; it  drew on the work of classical sociology and anthropology to construct  a system of  binary oppositions  for characterising   forms of sociality associated with  the transition to modernity:

FORMS OF SOCIALITY

PRE-MODERN      MODERN

Status                     Contract  (Maine)

Ascribed status     Achieved status (Weber/Parsons)

Community            Association (Tonnies)

Mechanical             Organic solidarity  (Durkheim)

Concentrated          Distributed network  (Granovetter)

For Frankenberg these  are ideal types which exist empirically  in a variety of weak and strong combinations and have definite spatial correlations. As a Marxist, the transition to a modern capitalist society  was for him a case of uneven and combined development  of these forms,  full of tension and contradiction, reversals and displacements. Yet the schema is still inscribed in a teleology. And the terms of the binaries are mutually exclusive. The affirmation of community is the negation of modernity. And vice versa.

It was  in the work of the Institute of Community Studies  that this one way ticket to modernity  became established on the  sociological map. In a series of research publications, centred on the post war transformation of the East End of London, the replacement of  the slums with their close knit neighbourhoods  by high rise tower blocks, and the move out into the suburbs was represented as a loss of community  rather than a gain of amenity[xiii]. A rosy picture of  family and kinship in the old Bethnal Green  was contrasted unfavourably with the social alienation  produced by modernist  architecture  and  planning. It was not a feminist analysis, but still it counteracted  the overwhelmingly  masculinist perceptions of  working class community that still prevailed.

One important insight from this work  was the emphasis on women’s role in sustaining social networks outside the workplace. In particular the strong mother/daughter bond created a matri-local geography,  with married daughters living close by their parents, and children being brought up within an extended three generational family  network. However the  relations between workplace, street, neighbourhood and domestic  life were  treated as  separate self enclosed worlds,  the workplace  as  largely  the province of men, the street  corner  as the province of  male youth and  the great indoors as where women and girls rule OK. The fact is that however separately they are experienced in terms of gender and generation, these sites of community are structurally linked in the reproduction of labour power  and constitute what I have come to  call a labourhood, a habitus in which the dispositions that link growing up, working and class are transmitted and acquired..

The work of the Institute of Community Studies is  perhaps best understood as  belonging  within the tradition of settlement sociology,  and grounded in attempts by reformers of various persuasions to investigate the social conditions of the poor so as to provide evidence for policies and practices designed  to ameliorate them, whether at work, home, or leisure.  It is easy to parody the settlements as  civilising missions, staffed by wealthy upper class do-gooders whose aim was to intervene  and inculcate their values of muscular Christianity. There certainly were  some like that, but it is not the whole story.  Settlements in  the East End  pioneered community work and many of the early settlement workers were socialists as well as Christians;  some  like Beatrice Webb at Toynbee Hall  were engaged  in developing a form of participant observation within a framework of sociological enquiry. The reforms in work and housing conditions  for which they campaigned  were often espoused by the labour movement and the Left: they  were about social justice not moral reclamation[xiv].

If  the strong point of settlement sociology was its locally grounded theorisations of class and community, today its moral impulse finds expression within a globalised knowledge economy in the form of Public Sociology and the  Citizen Social Science. This can  typically involve  the use of  digital information technologies to  crowd source and validate  locally situated knowledge,  and/or create platforms for participatory  community mapping using a  variety of creative media. The aim is  both to generate   situated   accounts, whether  from big or small data sets, to investigate for example of the local effects of  environmental   pollution or  gentrification  and, secondly,  in and through the research process,  to  facilitate and empower communities of resistance to these effects. One thing CSS does is to blur the distinction between amateur and professional  social scientist,  the real challenge being not how to train up amateurs so they think and behave more like professionals, but how to get professional social scientists to  recognise that they are first and foremost amateurs of the social, fascinated by its relays between things not themselves social.  Whether CSS  is genuinely redistributive of intellectual  capital, or  just a more subtle and democratic way of extracting information  without paying for it  remains to be seen.

The recent emergence of public sociology, of which the Connected Communities initiative is a rather weak example,   seeks to validate the situated knowledge of marginalised communities, on the grounds that their very marginality, their lack of implication in power structures, gives them privileged access or insight into its workings[xv]. So we have seen community studies based on  standpoint epistemologies linked to identity politics of gender, race and class, and aiming to  provide  these groups with a space of representation  in which they can gain  confidence and trust in their own ability to articulate their viewpoint without  needing intermediaries. Yet if only the wearer knows where and how  the shoe pinches, the actual pain of ‘feeling the pinch’ and the struggle for day to day survival can inhibit the capacity to gain the critical knowledge required to know why the shoe is made  that way and  what alternatives to ‘one size fits all ‘ policies  might be possible. The well springs of the sociological imagination are not automatically nurtured by conditions of poverty  and oppression. Political education,  not propaganda for a particular cause, but shifting  the grounds of common sense so that an accessible  space for democratic politics and debate opens up, is  a vital aspect of public sociology.

Running like a red thread through all these  approaches  is a concern with establishing a moral economy of knowledge, undermining  its hierarchisation and fragmentation in the academic division of labour.   This  can take the form of developing  a strategic inter-disciplinarity. Not just an intellectual mash up but  the  collaborative production of concepts and methods which   accomplish a paradigm shift  in the way  a problem is addressed, both as a research topic and as focus of political intervention.

Alongside this  there is a trend  to  create  some kind of  intellectual commons   by building a more  inclusive  community of  research practice  and skilling informants so that they become more or less fully fledged members of it. These are almost always ethnographic projects because critical ethnographers have been at the forefront of  attempts to create more participatory  modes of research. The moral economy of knowledge   certainly has implications for how  community studies are done  For example the voices of community informants have to be presented  live, whether in audio or video, so that the full texture of their statements  is made  available  for discussion.  All too often ethnographers report  using indirect speech  to convey the gist of informant’s stories, merging or submerging their own interpretations  in the flow whilst also substituting their voice for the informants.  And then they talk about this kind of research as empowerment! The research stories we tell about the stories we collect, the interpretative meta-narrative   we weave around  the ethnographic data  to  give it a  wider contextual meaning ( for example in relation to a particular theory of community  in the human sciences )  has to be clearly distinguished  from the primary source material. The best way to do this is to create parallel texts, so that a   dialogue between the  informants interpretation of their world, and the community ethnographer’s  becomes possible.

If community work began as an adjunct to settlement sociology, it quickly developed its own professional momentum in the post war period as a branch of the welfare state. In fact throughout the 1960’s and 70s community development projects became a favoured platform for delivering key public  services in  deprived working class areas, especially those which were undergoing rapid  de-industrialisation. The most radical and embedded of these programmes brought  trade unionists, community activists  and urbanists together within a framework of popular planning  to devise strategies to address structural unemployment, especially amongst young people,  and create a form of economic  regeneration  that was at least partially appropriate  to the existing skills  base.

In the arts too, ‘community  outreach’  became increasingly  mandatory. In the long boom years from 1994 – 2006  there was an explosion of community arts festivals in towns and cities across Britain, linked, of course, to the growth of creative industries  and capitalism’s cultural turn. Much of this activity was carried out by professional artists, with a mixture or public and private funding  and despite all the talk about ‘capacity building’ it seems to have done little to enhance the social and cultural capital of the most deprived populations. It was, predictably enough the usual suspects, the  bridgers not bonders who  made the most of these opportunities.

As with community arts so with politics. Community action  became professionalised and developed its own theoretical practice.Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals, subtitled ‘A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals’  became the bible for many community organisers, including one Barack Obama, with its heady mix of  populism, real politik   and common sense  prescription.

As a result of all these developments ‘ community’ became an ever more inflated and confused concept. It was used interchangeably with ‘local ’, was applied indiscriminately to an ever  wider range of interest groups,  and even became a synonym for civil society as a whole. As a portmanteau word, which could mean all things to all people what it gained in currency it lost in strategic application. ‘Community’ became both sentimentalised,  reduced to any shared structure of feeling, and de-politicised as a moral, aesthetic or cultural good in its own right.  This inevitably produced a counter-movement which sought to re-politicise  community and make it into a platform for a new and different kind of  agenda.

The Tories communitarian turn, which coalesced around the Big Society initiative,  was part of a wider strategy to dismantle the welfare state and put in its place  voluntary action  supported by private philanthropy[xvi]. It was also an attempt to strengthen the bonds of civil society which were seen to  be weakened by the new social and economic insecurities, and,just as importantly, to  dissolve the residual forms of resistance provoked by them.

The Big  Society programme  drew theoretically  on the work of Amitai Etzioni in the USA.  Etzioni was concerned that social bonds  under capitalism  were simply  impersonal relations between strangers  regulated by state or market[xvii].  He wanted to transform the social bond from a purely instrumental device into  an expression of common values, a new kind of social contract which balanced civic rights and responsibilities. But he ignored the double edged aspect  of the  ‘bond’  which is implicit in its etymology – it is a promissory note which is a  performative statement  of trust (my word is my bond) and it is about externally imposed  social  constraint. Within the framework of capitalist exchange what connects people and frees them from their narcissism is also  what imprisons them  in  relations of  subordination[xviii]. Etzioni only considers the bond from its good side.

The Big Society rhetoric borrowed the language of mutualism and moral economy in order to rationalise  the marketisation of both and accomplish the withering away of the State. The so called Red Tories tried to pass themselves off   as born again Guild Socialists, but this was at best an opportunistic  manoeuvre.   Firstly the move was  to split off  the Guild’s organic model of the body politic  from the class solidarities in which it was  embedded and then re-insert it in a  model of community  based on the principle of Concordia Discors, or Order in Variety, first enunciated as an aesthetic principle by Alexander Pope in the 18^th Century:

Not chaos like together crushed and bruised

But as the world harmoniously confused,

Where order in variety we see

And where, tho all things differ, all agree.

Concordia Discors was transposed into a principle of governance in which  the political  class provide the   order, the over arching framework of representation  and the others – other classes and  ethnicities,  the variety[xix]. It provided a single principle  of   social  and political integration. There might be differences in cultural values  and  political ideology, but they were to be contained within a broader consensus ( an unwritten constitution) and parliamentary democracy.

However Left Communitarianism has its roots not only in the very  home grown  tradition of  Guild Socialism, but in  Council Communism and anarcho-syndicalism which emerged in opposition to  European Social Democracy in the early 20^th century[xx]. Common to both was the aim was to develop the direct  democracies of  the labourhood,  and disseminate them as a generic principle of   self governance for  civil society as a whole. An altogether different approach to the withering away of the state. Now that the social architecture of the labourhood has all but disappeared, the move is to build new practices of direct democracy through the   forms of dispersed sociality  that have emerged in   and  against the deregulated city: communities of life style and leisure as well as  livelihood, virtual communities of interest and affiliation  as well as face to face  and place to place.[xxi]  Community becomes re-defined in and as a pop up moral economy centred  on the gift, celebrating the symbolic value of the relationship between people in the act of exchange rather than abstract commensurability of the commodity; it is   a figure of transience not stability, liminality rather than cohesion, a site of bonding but not bondage ( unless you happen to be a member of the gay S/M community in which case bondage is bonding).  This is a vision of community in which cultural order emerges in and through variety rather than being imposed upon it. In a word community as commons.

This version of community has a complex structure, and contains it own internal tensions. There is a pull toward communitas or communion, to construct liminal spaces of ecstatic conviviality, in which people experience  an oceanic feeling of oneness with one another and world. Think rave culture. Or mass street demonstrations. Or a football crowd. One for all and all for one. The workers united will never be defeated.  Then there is the pull towards the natural symbolisms of imagined community  and its neo-tribalisms, whether of  nation,  class, ethnicity,  gender  or   generation,  common humanity or the  wretched of the earth: rallying cries to either celebrate or  over ride internal difference. So here community is largely a site of projective and introjective identifications which may well promote a culture of inactivism. If community is simply a rhetorical construct or reference group  then to claim membership does not require you to do anything. It is enough to   performatively state your claim. Finally there is the pull to the more grounded realities of communities of practice, in which people are apprenticed  into shared zones of learning, interaction and experience by peers who happen to be  old hands at this game. Their function is to  enable the novitiate to master specific skills and techniques, whether of work or play[xxii].Think skateboarding.  This version of community has lead to a  whole new array of activisms: for example in the field of environmental activism we have bands of guerrilla gardeners, eco-warriors, place hackers,do-it -yourself urbanists, squatters, housing campaigners,  co-operative farmers and time bankers.

It is easy to see how these different forms of collectivity, real, imaginary and symbolic, might variously reinforce or undermine one another. The intense ‘high’ of communitas cannot be directly  reproduced in organisational forms and practices,  but nevertheless  faith communities, whether religious or political,  need to generate and contain ecstatic moments. Otherwise congregation dissolves into mere aggregation. Processionals and demonstrations both serve these purposes in suspending differences of internal status and power between leaders and followers,  and magically transforming them into relations of reciprocity and equality between peers, whether under the sign of spiritual fellowship or political comradeship.

Intentional communities, like the hippy communes that emerged in the 1960’s are built  from  affinity groups, but develop their own rituals of initiation and  myths of origin to articulate  the introjected identifications which compose their collective vision. There are also unintentional  communities, people thrown together by circumstances, often by a disaster or some other unexpected occurrence. Funerals, for example, often bring together a very disparate group  of family, friends and colleagues, many of whom have never met or even been aware of each other’s existence  but who come together in shared grief at their individual  loss.  The more attenuated and dispersed social networks become, the more  unintended community.

The tragedy of the contemporary commons is not about how the ruthless pursuit of self interest destroys shared amenity but the fact  that in order to be sustainable within a global rather than local economy the commons require abundance and even surplus, there has to be more than enough to go round; however in situations where scarcity obtains, and these are contexts  where the privatisation of public  assets is today taking place on  an immense scale, the struggle to  defend the commons as a democratic project of social  inclusion  founders on the need to protect exclusive  rights over shared resource. Under these circumstances one group’s commons becomes another’s no go area.

So we  need to think about the limits and conditions of the left libertarian vision of community. For example how far does it  work to de-construct the local as an immovable object pitted against the irresistible force of globalisation ? Does its emphasis on collective self expression  simply represent a shift   from inner directed to other directed narcissism, a culture  whose motto might  be ‘ I before me except after we’? The mobilisation of community is frequently associated with processes of polarisation, Us against Them, but it can also be an occasion for what Freud somewhat ironically called ‘the narcissism of minor difference’ ( he was referring to the rise of anti-Semitism spurred on  by the Nazi’s Volkish ideology), so that smallest  differences in ideology  produce splits  within the political movement.

Equally   the just- in -time production of community, with its flexible accumulation of social, cultural and intellectual capital would seems to belong firmly within the pop up moral economy   of the precariat, and by the same token  to have less to offer the salariat.  How far do the new forms of   apprenticeship  offers a viable  alternative to the self- possessed individualism of the political vocation  (   amd the charismatic quest for the Ideal Society) ) or  the competitive individualism of the political careerist  (and  mastery of  the machinery of spin) ?

The projects involved school children, residents, artists and researchers, and produced a rich diversity of maps, many addressing issues of redevelopment, environmental stress, pollution and traffic, and  social/demographic change. It is certainly the case that  a   NIMBY  strain  can be detected  in some of the  maps. After all  these are largely rural communities  who want to preserve  the countryside and  village life   against the destructive impact of   globalised modernity.   They  do not want to be part of London’s commuter belt and lose their local identity. But are they proto or retro modernists or simply anti- modernity as such ?

In terms of cartographic models the project went back to the  early 16^th and 17^th century  topographic maps  of the English countryside which featured little paintings  of buildings and physical features as well as heraldic figures from local folklore and myth. The early maps depicted customary usages of space and place, they show a world of  the commons prior to the enclosure movement, and offer an alternative to the cadastral maps which simply plotted  landownership and private property. As such they offered a source of inspiration that looks forward to popular democratic struggles over access to  the countryside in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The edges of the Sussex Millennial maps often draw on this iconographic device  for  commentary or contextual interpretation.

In quite a few cases both proto and retro modernist  elements are mingled in the same map. Perhaps the most interesting map in this respect and certainly the one which has aroused most comment was  produced by the people of Copthorne. The village is  on the borders of Surrey and Sussex and even more importantly is  close to Gatwick airport. Copthorne’s oldest farmhouse has been converted into a luxury hotel to accommodate high flying business executives on their way  to and from  the airport. It is owned by the conglomerate corporate entertainment company Copthorne –Millenium which owns a global network of hotels and casinos. So in effect the village has become a dormitory for the international jet set. No trace of this impact is however allowed to intrude into the composition of the map which shows an oak tree, made up of roads and paths, and chosen not only because of its role as a natural symbol of Englishness, but because ‘colthorpe’ mean  a pollarded tree. The intertwined roots of the tree are composed of all the names of the villagers, and the acorns contain images of  the local community organisations. A map of  organic community then, of  roots, not routes,  although as Sue Clifford notes Copthorne has certainly travelled across the world – there is a Copthorne Orchard in Penang and a Copthorne Anzac Avenue  in Auckland, but again these links are not registered on the map.

Taken as a whole the Sussex atlas exhibits a strong preference for   iconography  that  air brushes  council houses, and   other ‘inorganic’  -i.e. modernist-  features  out  of the picture. This is a defence of the commons that is inevitably   A properly critical cartography   requires a different approach.  We need a map  that shows the relationships between the picturesque English countryside ( and country houses) and the  forms of wealth  creation linked to the colonies and the exploitation of native populations. Franco Moretii’s world map of the novel shows the location of colonial sources of wealth  featured in English sentimental novels ( viz Africa India and the South China seas) [xxiv]. We need to trace the intricate networks of trade and exploitation that  connect consumers in the affluent West to producers in the impoverished East. This is what Rebecca Solnit does in some of the  maps  in her San Francisco Atlas[xxv]. And which Caroline Knowles does in her ethnographic account of globalisation from below.[xxvi]  Frederick Jamieson was wrong to think  that these links are unmappable from the vantage point of everyday perceptions [xxvii]. They are not only grist to the mill of radical cartographers, they have become common knowledge in  many diasporic communities[xxviii].

Certainly it was Sue Clifford’s intention to make these kind of translocal links, but choosing the Parish as the unit of reference, as she did, while it was meant to simply signify the scale, inevitably over determined the scope, and encouraged a mono-cultural perspective. Her project was also rather defeated by the demographic of the areas she chose –  the villages and market towns of Sussex are not  exactly hot spots of multiculturalism!  If the project had been located in  hyper diverse inner city neighbourhoods, or in the new multi- ethnic suburbs  it would have told s a very different story. There is nothing in the methodology  itself which pre-empts this – quite the contrary and we are currently building on this approach in a  participatory mapping project   which will be working  with groups in areas of London on the front lines of re generation and gentrification in the next ten years  but which have no tradition of community activism.[xxix]

In contrast a Living Labour party would  locate technical and social innovation within  the moral economies of workplace  and community, in the forms of co-operation and mutual aid through which the collective aspiration and creativity of working people have always been expressed. This would mean that political capital would be accumulated by those who could combine bonding and bridging, the former through involvement in local community campaigns,  the latter through building coalitions  around specific policy agendas, within and across  social movements. As for the culture of internal democracy   and policy making, debates  should indeed be ‘harmoniously confused’, and governed according to the principle that ’ tho  all differ, all agree’  so that minority opinions do not find themselves ‘crushed and   bruised’ in the name of party unity and members do not find themselves in the invidious position of being  mere cogs in the machine if they toe the party line, or else throwing spanners in the works, if they do not. The importance of social media in this context is that their use as discussion forums and mobilising devices weakens the tendency of political affinity groups to harden into sectarian groupuscules. While there is always the risk of ‘pop up’ activism, i.e short term enthusiasms that melts away as soon as more sustained commitment is required, it is less dangerous in my view than the sclerotic self justifying  cultures of the far left sects.

As a simple but concrete example of the approach I am suggesting consider how a Living Labour Party might have intervened in last year’s  celebrations of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. In contrast to the official approach, which simply iterated  a safe message about law and property being  the foundation of civil liberty, an alternative reading  would  focus on the struggles for enfranchisement and empowerment that have used Magna Carta  as  a rhetorical reference point.[xxx]  Working in collaboration with local artists, the WEA, schools, youth projects, senior citizens, civil liberties and campaign groups  plus a wide range of community organisations the aim would be for each constituency area to produce its own  pictorial/narrative  map of liberties and commons, past, present and future, incorporating local  places and events  associated with  popular democratic  struggles. Carta is after all Latin for  map! Whether in the form of a physical or digital map, a tapestry or banner, each constituency  would add its own distinctive features  to a deep cartography of the limits and conditions of Popular Democracy.  Not only would this activity bring together different elements of  the precariat in a common project with members of the salariat, but it c ould provide a platform for a nationwide public debate about the relation of civil society and the state,  creating   the grass roots conditions for the formulation of a new constitutional  settlement enshrined in  a bill of rights. Evidently  the Labour party which Corbyn has inherited is currently in no state  to launch a  Great Chartist movement, but there will be enough opportunities in the coming  years to engage in this kind of  venture, and to transform Dead Labour into Living Labour, without the need  for any second coming of Blair Brown. That, I think, is a cause for hope. So Happy  2016.