Anarchism in Local Governance by Condit Stephen;

Author:Condit, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

The Intimidating Prospect of Community

The concepts and ethics of communality are contested, and so too its diverse realities. The ideal of community often emerges as a critique of liberalism for both reactionary and progressive, authoritarian and libertarian purposes. A common theme is Walzer’s claim that communalism, or communitarianism, as a celebration of community contains fundamental truths of society, hence expressing an essential potentiality of the human condition, which is to participate effectively in the causal processes of social order (Walzer 1995, 52–70). Community is its irreducible minimum, without which social order can only be held together by coercive force. This ideal challenges liberalism by its insistence that liberalism’s notions of individualism are inadequate at best and socially divisive at worst. Although no community can be trusted to restrain its tendencies to absorb excessively individual persons into its own needs, the necessary self-constitution and self-governance of each person must occur through it. For this reason, I have favoured the notion of communality. It better expresses individual causality and responsibility, and the idealism of striving for more inclusive right and good. It also declares our refusal to allow any actual community to occupy us wholly. But because Bookchin employs the concept of community to characterise his ideal, in much of the following commentary I do the same, save when the distinction between real community and prefiguring communality is too essential to disregard.

Perfect community is never realisable. Real communities are perpetually unstable and usually tend to whatever kinds of authoritarianism their constitutive conditions encourage. But their failures, Walzer and many communitarians insist, must be met by improved communalism and imaginative exercises in increasingly diverse forms and purposes of community. Individual resistance to oppressive community is necessarily communalist. This process can be seen in the proliferation of communal experiments in self-empowerment inspired not by individual pursuit of pleasure but by intentional and mutually reaffirmed commitment to social action (Jones 2015, 35–39). The innate communal need for some procedures of compliance may seem frightening to persons who cleave to the forms of individuality which contemporary society permits. Yet communal action may engage a more profound experience of individuality because it immerses us in elemental social realities and potentialities.

This is the impetus of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, which shares similar notions of social realities, potentialities and causalities with other doctrines of community. Fowler emphasises community as an ideal of unrealised and suppressed capabilities to which we can aspire if we articulate and practice them with others, and direct the self-constitution of our character to that end (Fowler 1996, 88–95). Lest this seem too optimistic and potentially totalitarian, which is indeed a possible undercurrent of communalism, Wolfe stresses the fragility of real human communities and the consequent need to conceive of human nature as a manifold sociability which cannot be subservient to any particular community or kind of communalism (Wolfe 1996, 127–40). The implicit ethical discipline is the judgement that any community which does not continuously emerge from and guarantee the causal participation of its members is not justifiable and will not endure in any case.

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