COMMUNITY 

Com-mu-ni-ty n. 1. a body of people having the same interests. 2. 
IEcol.] an aggregate of organisms with mutual relations. 3. a concept 
invoked to establish solidarity, often when the basis for such 
affiliation is absent or when the actual content of that affiliation 
contradicts the stated political goal of solidarity. 

Community, by which one obviously means more than, say, neighborhood, is 
a very elusive term but a continuing touchstone of radical value. In 
fact, all manner of folks resort to it, from the pacifist encampments 
near nuclear test sites to "serve the people" leftists with their 
sacrifice-plus-manipulation approach to the proto-fascist Afrikaaner 
settlers. It is invoked for a variety of purposes or goals, but as a 
liberatory notion is a fiction. Everyone feels the absence of community, 
because human fellowship must struggle, to even remotely exist, against 
what "community" is in reality. The nuclear family, religion, 
nationality, work, school, property, the specialism of roles-some 
combination of these seems to comprise every surviving community since 
the imposition of civilization. So we are dealing with an illusion, and 
to argue that some qualitatively higher form of community is allowed to 
exist within civilization is to affirm civilization. Positivity furthers 
the lie that the authentically social can co-exist with domestication. 
In this regard, what really accompanies domination, as community, is at 
best middle-class, respect-the-system protest.

Fifth Estate, for example, undercuts its (partial) critique of 
civilization by upholding community and ties to it in its every other 
sentence. At times it seems that the occasional Hollywood film (e.g. 
Emerald Forest, Dances With Wolves) outdoes our anti-authoritarian 
journals in showing that a liberatory solidarity springs from 
non-civilization and its combat with the "community" of industrial 
modernity.

Jacques Camatte discussed capital's movement from the stage of formal 
domination to that of real domination. But there appear to be 
significant grounds from which to project the continuing erosion of 
support for existing community and a desire for genuine solidarity and 
freedom. As Fredy Perlman put it, near the end of his exceptional 
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!: "What is known is that Leviathan, 
the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time, in 
His-story, is decomposing...lt is a good time for people to let go of 
its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being 
ejected from its pretty polis."

The refusal of community might be termed a self defeating isolation but 
it appears preferable, healthier, than declaring our allegiance to the 
daily fabric of an increasingly self-destructive world. Magnified 
alienation is not a condition chosen by those who insist on the truly 
social over the falsely communal. It is present in any case, due to the 
content of community. Opposition to the estrangement of civilized, 
pacified existence should at least amount to naming that estrangement 
instead of celebrating it by calling it community.

The defense of community is a conservative gesture that faces away from 
the radical break required. Why defend that to which we are held 
hostage?

In truth, there is no community. And only by abandoning what is passed 
off in its name can we move on to redeem a vision of communion and 
vibrant connectedness in a world that bears no resemblance to this one. 
Only a negative "community," based explicitly on contempt for the 
categories of existent community, is legitimate and appropriate to our 
aims.

