This article (which you may have encountered before), first published in 1969 and added to in 2000, should be of interest to anyone who wants to think about non-capitalist perspectives on community, hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the commons.
I'm 70 years old. I've concluded that when I use the word "community" most people don't interpret it to fully mean what I intend.I attribute this to decades of a semantic "hollowing out" of the term, supported by mass media, appropriation by a host of snake-oil business consultancies, and accelerated by online social platforms.By and large, when I invoke the need to #seizethemeansofcommunity I am pointed in the direction of various tools and platforms that support and promote associations.
How many online "communities" would be better described as online "associations"?Community should be distinguished from association. The distinction is fundamentally one of commitment and identity. Associations, even while they provide their own form of social glue, make little claim on our loyalties and at best make minor contributions to our identities.from The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Communityby Stephen A. Marglin#seizethemeansofcommunity
This video, made by historian Heather Cox Richardson a few hours after Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony on Tuesday before the House Select Committee investigating January 6, is worth viewing (at least by concerned Americans) in its entirety. If I have grabbed the link below correctly, however, the video should start playing a little after the 36-minute point. At this point, having summarized and interpreted Hutchinson's testimony, and having added a few comments on the SCOTUS Dobbs decision, and then offering some historical clarification on how democracies die, she adds comments about some of the things she thinks American citizens will have to do to preserve democracy. Since her thinking begins to get at the problems I have tried to address with my #seizethemeansofcommunity hashtag I thought I'd provide a link that started you at that point.Some notes:She seems to be unaware of efforts like Bonfire and of the available Fediverse, open source, self-hosting options available so, to the extent that she addresses online responses she tends to assume that people will have to avail themselves of platforms like FB and Twitter and the like. The link below is to a YouTube video, accessed through an instance of Invidious to minimize tracking. The YouTube video is a repost, I believe, to a Facebook video in a group she maintains, an indication IMO of a certain lack of awareness on her part about all the forces that are hacking away at democracy.Her comments do touch on what I consider to be an important point: how our elevation of heroes tends to come at the expense of our understanding of the important parts communities of people have played in social, political and cultural progress over the last century.History & Politics Chat: June 28, 2022
Hello, Bonfire World!I am an alter kacker (Yiddish; it sort of means "old fart"...only less sanitary) who lives at the very top of the island of Manhattan ("Upstate Manhattan") and who sees an urgent need to radically reformulate the soil from which American politics grows.Towards that end I have uploaded a number of posts on my Mastodon feed ( https://mastodon.social/web/@baslow ) with the hashtag #seizethemeansofcommunitySince an important part of that effort will, I think, necessarily be online I am hoping that Bonfire can be used as a basis for new forms of enriched and complex community-building...indeed, as part of an effort to reinvent our notions of community for the 21st century that we are facing...
