From Don Flynn (Migrants Rights Network)

Thanks for this interesting paper Andy - I hope it's sparked off the discussion you want to see underway.

I entirely agree with your central argument - that the constellation of terms and concepts about 'community' and 'community cohesion' has given rise to a set of apolitical, bureaucratic practices which, at their worst, close down the space which might otherwise exist for actitivites which provide a critical apprasal of the real power structures which underpin concrete, actually existing communities. Where I think you might be creating a hostage to fortune is in centring so much of your criticisms on the word 'community' itself - almost to the point of suggesting that it be jetisoned in favour of another term, or group of terms, which better convey the fluctuating and contingent nature of actually existing communities. The problem is there isn't an obvious candidate for this role, wihch conveys what we know is relevant to this discussion, about those incidents where the features of geograpthical location or sectional interest do generate a sense of 'community' which is reasonably coherent and has the potentional to be self-critical and oppositional. The position of the mining communities in the mid-eighties is a case in point.

For me, the nub of the issue is what you describe as the need to see "the creation of community as an active and political process." The real setback of the last three decades has been the reduction of the capacites which had once existed for critical political appraisal of the processes of community formation. This loss is largely connected to the decline in working class organisation, which had once connected a sense of local otrganic solidarity with a wider consciousness of the place of class in the grand narrative of national, and sometimes international life. The practices generated around labour party and trade union branches, cultural associations (the WEA, etc), even chapels and church halls, had once provided local 'community' leaders with a mirror in which they were required to judge the reflection of the image they were cutting in the wider national, imagined, community of national and international life. The hollowing out of all of these organisations has led to this opportunity for critical reflection being lost, and for the grievances which initially motivated the formation of common identity to become a permanent howl of visceral protect against the lousy hand life had dealt them, with little or no capacity for moving beyond the sence of victimhood and injustice.

This decline in local politics has created the vacuum into which all the bureaucratic, professionalised forces of the social cohesion industry have rushed. Being bureaucratics, and not organically connected to the social forces that have produced dissonnance and tension, they thresh around looking for ways of acquiring traction in the array of problems they spread out before them, and that has tended to mean reifying categories which once where used in a fairly easy fashion into a hardened set of concepts which refer to hardened social facts. The problems for the poor old term 'community' is that it has suffered precisely this fate, and via the mechanistic thinking of functionalist sociology (of which communitarianism is just one species) has been reinvented as an iron law of social existence.

From our standpoint I think there is little we can do,for the time being, about the wretched state of organisation amngst the working class. I personally will proclaim my commitment to trade union activism and a democratic system based on mass membership political parties, but all of that is an investment for another day.

What can be usefully done in the here and now, I think, is to insist on the relevance of politics to the business of being activity in the domain of community action, regeneration, etc. The presumption that the task of building cohesive communities is essentially a technocratic one, involving the building of social capital and improving networks, has to be challenged and replaced by a stronger sense that activism, if it means anything, requires an assessment of the balances of power and interest which local societies into hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion, frank and open debate about the implications this has for policies and strategies, and the formation of commitment to one side or the other in battling forward with solutions. All of these things make politics the lynchpin of activity, rather than a rather embarasing fact of life that we try to push into the corner as much as possible.

So, the discussion I think we ought to be founding is one entitled 'the politics of community action', which requires the legions of officials and consultants to appraise the positions they occupy against the matrix of power relations, and to give a pulic account of themselves as people who are changing what; by which means; in collaboration with who; and to what ends?

Tha's my tuppennyworth. How are you planning to take this discussion forward? Looks like a Facebook community forum to me (sic).....

All the best,
Don