1.

4 Communities

- geographic level on which to work and analyse the global arena

 NGOs, IGOs most active, especially on local level
 Outside forces: IGOs, MNCs, UN – questioning viability of communities
- Cyberspace
 “virtual community”
 Communities without a territory, without a place
 The Internet creates an eqalitarian interactions
 Those without access to computer are forgotten
 Asset to those who are unable to connect with peers
 Can contribute to isolation – isolation from the physical
 Reality is inferior to perception, space over place (Mihalache)
- New definition
 Emphasize space over place
 Pronounced in developed countries
 Need for communities to socialize is diminished
 Communities continue to assert group identification and affiliation
 Independence movements, resurgence of cultural identities
 No need for face-to-face interaction
- Globalization
 Pressure on communities
 Conflicts among communities
 Loss of livelihood and sense of being, alienation of community members
 Exclusion of less developed countries
 Same argument used against identity politics
 Ignores the fact that communities are challenged rather then
legitimised
- Communities of exclusion
 Generated from conflict
 Changes in time and space – reaction to alienation, bureaucratization, and degradation
 Base for identification destroyed – individual alone – alienation
 Doubling of suicides in Italy due to unemployment – in India tribal people in
the Namanda valley are ready to die if work on a dam that destroys their land
continues
 Violence to maintain a past
 Stable communities have no need to exclude individuals and promote
genocide
 Community destruction – recent Europe and Africa

- From community to affiliation

 Geographic communities feed int othe wider networs
 Society comprises communities and individuals within them
 Communities as physical entities – communities of taste/taste cultures
 Driven by the market – change often
 Space-time compression
 Intergarting the world in global networks of instrumentality (Castells)
  Distance between globalisation and identity
 In developed society the self seems to loose itself
 (patients´ dreams about being programmed by a robot)
 Networked society – cause and result of alienation, desire for affiliation
 Virtual communities and loss of physical connectedness
 Virtual communities need not be opposed to physical communities
 Virtual communication foster a sense of unrealness
 Virtual communities limit their sustainability to the topic at hand
 Disappear quickly, might reappear

- Communities and agency

 Communities are primary sites of resistance to outside domination
 Building new communities through cultural politics
 Building of Shaker communities, takeover of a district in San
Francisco by a gay community
 Oppositional movements are better at organising in and dominating space
than they are at commanding space (Harvey)
 Place bound politics appear even though such a politics is doomed to failure
(Harvey)
 Opposition between space and place
 Communities operate within place – resistance to capital –
capital has the ability to override the constraints of place
 Importance of place within global systems
 Investments into telecommunication infrastructure –
collective action (Sassen)
 Argument for space over place
 Assumption that opposition to outside rule has been
defeated, and with it, the possibilities for community
and class politics
 Place bound politics: not pre-ordained
 Unions exist over space, their membership is in
politics of place

- The (new) civil society

 A way of describing the transition from the feudal household economy to public
commodity-based exchange relations
 Dating to 13th century, French Revolution
 By 1800s “bourgeois public sphere” autonomous, separated from the
government (Habernas)
 Direct control over production given to the public sphere
 State regulates and administers social controls
 End of 19th century states interfered with the system of trade –
destruction of the separation between state and society
 Society – a state of function
 State – public control
 The new civil society takes from its older form the separation of state from the public
sphere (its communities) and its struggle to assert agency in societal organisations
 Reintroduced in 1980s to explain the phenomenon of independent organisations and
affiliations challenging MNCS
 Separating independent communication from institutional structures
 Same as for differing definitions of communities the cause is fragmentation of
society
 Civil society represents the use of old for the new times (Goldfarb)
 “new times” – events in Eastern Europe
 New avenues to express opossitions to state machinisms of
control, demands for more humanistic socialism
 Efforts failed in 1950/60s
 Repressed -social movements
 “an extensive alternative cultural
system, system of public life, a free
public life” (Goldfarb)
 Solidarity – began as a reform-oriented trade union, not
challenging institutional control
 Lech Wales declined to declare the labour movement
a political organisation
 Society x authorities
 Diversity, link between social classes and lifestyle across
space comprised a social force in opposition to ruling class in
Eastern Europe
 Not all development is positive
 Manipulated xenophobia
 Nationalist response of Eastern Europe
 Civil society depends on the actions
of affiliation across space to counter
state domination
 Gelner describes it as a place where free associational activity dominates, limiting
complete dominatiton of the state
 Walzer delineates it as the space of uncoerces human association and also set the
relational networks – formed for family, faith, interest, ideology – that fills this space
 Now use for growth of indigenous moevements
 Christian assertion of identity recognition in Japan , reassertin of the WLsh
language, Zapitistas in Mexico, Mayas in Guatemala, Brazil´s Landless
Worker´s Movement
 Common cause of autonomy from outside control – pursuit of
community stability
 The public is separate from the institutional strurcutres of poer and the coercive
ideologies that they represent