Community Organising - What does it mean and is it a Progressive Concept?
Written By: Bob Briton
I was prompted to write this after reading a very thought-provoking statement by our Party President in connection with a potential ACP housing campaign. The quote is given below:
“As mentioned in the Program the ways in which we need to build ties with working people is by building strong ties with unions, communities and other working-class organisations, a massive hurdle to building these ties is the lack of communities that already exist. One of the biggest reasons why they don’t exist is because of the insecurity of the housing market with the typical timeframe of people staying in one place ranging from 6 months to 18 months before they have to pack up and move somewhere else. This uncertainty does not allow us to organise and build ties with communities. This is why a housing campaign is essential, to build community while also establishing ties with the community.”
A recent CUDL street kitchen in the south east Melbourne suburb of Dandenong
The reason it caught my attention was the use of the word “community” and the implicit argument that we need to integrate ourselves into communities and defend and build them. It begs the question as to what, exactly, is a community and how do we deepen our connections with them and inject a spirit of resistance into them. A first port of call in pursuing such questions is a dictionary. The following is a typical sample definition from the Cambridge Dictionary:
“The people living in one particular area or people who are considered as a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality.”
All of the definitions I found listed locality as the main defining characteristic. So, it is makes sense to speak of the “Port Adelaide community” given their shared location. But why is it less useful to advance the idea of an “Adelaide community”? It is because Adelaide is home to people of widely divergent socio-economic standing, lifestyle and expectations. The fact they live within a certain geographical radius doesn’t suffice to make all those people a community. The people of Port Adelaide still share their relative economic disadvantage, though this is changing. More on this later.
So, crudely speaking, a community is a group that shares a postcode and a role in the relations of production. It would take some time to develop the idea, but ordinary working-class people are more clearly identifiable as a community that wealthier people who have chosen their residential address not for its proximity to (often low-paid) work but for the harbour views or the investment potential of their property.
But then there are communities based on a “common interest”. This interest could be that they all came from Italy or Sudan and have a common struggle to adjust to the new society and combat home sickness. We have, therefore, Adelaide’s Italian community or even Australia’s Italian community. These ties are more tenuous, and their unstable nature can be seen over the generations as the children and grandchildren of immigrants identify less and less with the “old country”. Another factor is that class divides grow within these “communities”, weakening the original bonds between them.
There is an Aboriginal community based not so much on location anymore but shared historic experience of dispossession, ongoing hostility from governments and their agencies, racism from much of the broader community and a need simply to survive with their families intact. The LGBTQI+ community is a similar oppressed example though among Aboriginal and LGBTQI+ communities there are class divides challenging the notion of common interest or experience in the definition. The concept of a single Aboriginal community is also weakened by the presence of different national and linguistic origins and even family bonds. Though there is little or no organisation present, it makes some sense to speak of a homeless community.
“Casual jobs and short or zero-hour contracts interspersed with stretches of unemployment mean that people are often chasing cheaper, sometimes even more far-flung accommodation”
There is now reference to the “gaming community”, the “sporting shooter community” and so on. There is even a “western community of nations” and, more formally, a “European Economic Community”. These aren’t very useful or genuine uses of the term community, in my opinion. The most useful application of the term is to people living in a location with an authentic reason – a better, more secure life for themselves and their families, however we define that term. The word community comes from the same background as the word the people. Though the original meaning is blurred, the term refers to the common people, the toiling masses. In languages like Italian, this distinction remains sound. “Il Popolo” and “la gente” would still never be used to include the ruling class whether they hold Italian citizenship or not.
Where does that leave us with our objective of uniting with and defending the community? It means that we integrate ourselves closely with the lives of working and other disadvantaged people in localities or, perhaps in less practical ways, with groups of people sharing experience of deprivation or oppression.
Our President points out a recent and very confronting problem. In the same way that workers are less likely to remain and be organised in a workplace for any substantial period (presenting major challenges for the industrial community formed within trade unions), there is the related problem that people are shifting where they live with increasing frequency. There is a growing problem of a lack of identity with locality beyond the already existing issue of suburban anonymity in countries like Australia. Casual jobs and short or zero-hour contracts interspersed with stretches of unemployment mean that people are often chasing cheaper, sometimes even more far-flung accommodation. How is a sense of community created let alone defended in these circumstances?
There is a theoretical challenge in all of this for dialectical and historical materialists, too. The working class’ circumstances are dictated by developments in the economy. This is not the first time major dislocation has occurred due to trends within capitalism. With the decline of feudalism, working families in countries like England found themselves occupying cottages on small parcels of land on the “common”. They subsisted by growing small amounts of food for sale and by carrying on a “cottage industry”, finishing clothing items or similar for local markets.
The centres of new mechanised industry needed masses of workers, male and female, young and mature to work the factories. The common land was enclosed (privatised), and manufactured goods destroyed the market for homemade items. Conditions for workers forced into the towns were horrendous. Life expectancy plummeted with death caused by disease, injury and sheer overwork. The Luddites resisted by smashing machines, which to this day has been presented as an irrational response to technological progress. But that’s not the whole story. In any case, the cause of the Luddites was crushed.
French utopian socialist/anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was outraged by this drive in capitalism and came up with a program that insisted every worker must have a cottage and a plot of land to continue their former, more or less stable and adequate lifestyle. Every rent payment would be counted as a down payment on their small property and the sale of their goods on local (monopoly-free) markets would ensure he/she would receive the “full value of their labour” and people would live happily ever after.
Engels showed in The Housing Question that every sentence of this program was nonsense and reactionary. It could never solve the housing problems of the time (or since) and would condemn society to achieve only “one nine hundred and ninety ninth” (1/999th) of its productive capacity. We wouldn’t have a modern proletariat brought together, organised and discipled by its exploiter who, unconsciously, had brought its grave digger into being. The political outlooked of the small producers so dear to Proudhon’s heart is narrow, selfish and conservative.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the destruction that accompanied the birth of modern capitalism but also foresaw its more important positive consequences. New communities and organisations (trade unions, friendly societies and cooperatives) were created. They were under constant attack, but their defence instilled a spirit of resistance and socialism. Working class districts sometimes became bastions of working-class militancy and culture. This still exists in some parts of the world while in most they have succumbed to the forces described by our President and the toxic influence of drugs and related criminality.
Difficult questions arise out of all of this. If the current trends in social development are driven by seemingly inevitable changes in capitalism, deepening globalisation and de-industrialisation for example, is the original concept of locality-based “community” doomed? Are we left with only the notional, common interest based “communities”? Are we latter-day Luddites trying to resist this trend? If we don’t resist it and, in some ways, hope it plays out to some “logical” conclusion, where will we wind up?
“The fight to preserve communities is an unavoidable fight for survival, not a utopian notion”
Some would say that if life becomes intolerable, as it is for the substantial section of the working class engaged in the gig economy and moving house with tiring regularity, that their anger will boil over at some stage. Where is the evidence of this? Maybe it is a factor in the intensity of some movements such as Black Lives Matter and the protests in Santiago’s Plaza de la Dignidad but it is far from general and it has not given rise to a coherent program with a path to socialism. This doubtless a consequence of the lack of a Communist party up to the task and we must take note of the lessons in all of this.
An important observation to be made about the situation in Santiago is the persistence of a sense of community. The Communist Party obviously had a role in this in its earlier, more coherent days but there are other reasons. Many working-class districts in the city were originally established informally on unwanted land. The residents had to defend their communities physically from the encroachment of “development” as economic interests discovered uses for the land the workers occupied. The sense of unity and struggle that springs from such a history is remarkable, precious and difficult to replicate in less dire circumstances. But something like it must be done.
The bigger question for us is if we are able to intervene to prevent the mega-trend towards the destruction of local communities due to transience, etc. I believe it is not Luddism to do this because while Proudhon was aiming to preserve an obsolete way of life against the potentially progressive onset of capitalism in its ascendency, we are seeking to defend basic survival structures for the working-class during capitalism’s long descent into barbarity. We see features of Fascism in this process which has been described as the open terroristic dictatorship of the worst elements of finance capital. It is also said to be capitalism against the wall of its own contradictions and in decay. The fight to preserve communities is an unavoidable fight for survival, not a utopian notion.