Richard Sennet in today's Guardian shows how the American Right has beguiled the working class with two "cultural substitutes" for real change - nationalism and nostalgia. This is also a common device of anti-progressive parties and movements in Europe and a whole gamut of concepts and ways of speaking are employed by them to achieve this effect. The term community could hardly be more dangerous in this respect as it is so often coopted by the Right to signify both of these aspects.

It is in this sense then that unquestioning use of the term "community" is often so dangerous and reactionary. We must move away from the notion that "community" is in itself an unalloyed "good thing". Many reactions to change or to outsiders by "communities" can be deeply xenophobic, parochial and conservative. Community responses to change are as likely to be defensive and dangerous - gangs, exclusive groups or clubs, (the BNP after all calls its activists "Community Champions") as they are to be open and progressive.

As I have argued elsewhere in this blog the term "community" is often used as a disguise for a kind of internal orientalism. "Community" is something applied to them (whether by class or race) rather than us. It actually fetishises difference rather than accentuating areas of reciprocity and mutuality (let alone solidarity). Ted Cantle's approach to the disturbances in a number of Northern towns posed the notion that there are two segregated "communities" (white working class and asian) that have been encouraged (by "multiculturalism") to lead entirely separate lives. Such an analysis presupposes that both of these "communities" are somehow homogenous and of course the very term "community" serves to delineate both this spurious internal "cohesion" and exacerbate the alleged "self segregation" between them

The well known and appalling book "The Arab Mind" which was published in the 1970's is still being used as a training manual by the US army and diplomatic elite in the Midle East. It asserts that Arabs only really recognise overwhelming and awe-inspiring force and this because they are ruled by a fear of shame and dishonour. Such clearly orientalist (indeed racist) conclusions about hundreds of millions of arabs from Morrocco to Sudan and Lebanon to Yemen are quite obviously both suspect and dangerous. They are only different in degree from some of the daily outpourings about Chavs, Muslims, Travellers and other "communities" in the right-wing British press - and sadly to a growing number of academics who ought to know better.