Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 18:44:11 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: M-I: community, etc.


At 4:48 PM 10/21/96, Justin Schwartz wrote:

>At the same time, capitalist internationalism is the greatest threat to
>community and a sense of place and belonging,w hich are real human needs
>as wella s conditions of democracy, in part because it's local interests
>one knows best and people one knows or whom those who whom one knows know
>whose qualifications as leaders one is best able to evaluate.

I hear this kind of talk so often, but rarely with any specifics attached.
It's as though "community" has become yet another fetishized commodity we
cultural shoppers are looking for. I liked Lou Proyect's point about the
dissolution of urban working class culture - but that working class
concentration was the product of capitalism, the result of a vast migration
>from farms to cities. That movement was of course bemoaned as the
destruction of rooted rural culture. I think we have to be a lot clearer
about just what kind of "community" we're talking about, if only to avoid
being trapped by communitarian appeals that are only the reassertion of old
hierarchies in warm fuzzy form.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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