COMMUNITY AS POLITICAL COALITION OF THE PEOPLE

Who the American people really are I’m not sure. “We the People” is clearly a political idea that it is the project of the declared union of these people to achieve. I don’t believe any real configuration of this project has been achieved. ‘We the people’ has not been secured any more than its definition and self-understanding has been clarified. This is surely the case despite the apparent economic success of the capitalist program and ideology that exploits its vision—even to the detriment of capitalism.

Certainly America has worked admirably for some. But in the face of its globalist economic expansion and concomitant militarily maintained empire, it’s doubtful at best that its productive capacity and sovereignty is any longer oriented to care for and promulgate the well-being of America as an integral whole. There is little doubt that it is oriented to the privileged class that has exploited and perverted America’s project of a free nation of autonomous communities and self-responsible social individuals.

Though the value of family in particular and human rights in general is constantly held up as fundamental, the state of family is decayed and in disarray both as it exists and as it understands itself. Without the ethos of community that is its fertile soil, it is unlikely that family life and the life of the family will survive. It is unlikely that the communal defense of human rights as they are lived daily will stay rooted in the hearts of the people. Today such community itself goes without identity and those populations which claim to be in tact as a community exhibit all the signs of decay of those who clearly have no real community other than in name and legal constitution.

Given that most communities are at the mercy of their economic stability and those economic and pseudo-cultural forces that can alter their structure and ethos, it is fair to say that in America community as cradle of family life does not exist. What exists is a functional collectivity externally mediated by economic, pseudo-cultural and media forces. The cooperation that manages to work for collectivities of people that continue to maintain proximity and coherence does not flow from the primacy and priority of cultural and social integrity but the contingencies of economic enterprises that permit them to associate and temporarily and conditionally live a life together.

If in fact the life of community has failed as an existential reality that lives, acts and understands itself as a socio-cultural whole, a whole whose project of self-fulfillment is the foundation of its being, then community finds itself in the position of positing its being as follows: as the possibility of survival and self-realization in a political coalition of the people whose political agency defines community itself. It is measured by the abundance of the individual personalities and their political capacity to limit and constitute a Federalist central administration based on the principle of subsidiarity.

Politics today in America is the politics of community. It is a variation of “all politics being local politics.” It does presuppose the primacy of place and the irreducibility of community beyond the condition of place or geography. Community does have structure and loses its ground and purposefulness when conceived in its coherence and identity as a function of utility. It is the politics of community whose purpose it is to transform the capacities of capital and the powers of government to secure and nurture its place. Capital and its Class cannot presume a society of communities when the later are its mere raw material and staging ground for profiteering and preparing people to serve the interests of globalization and empire.

Community’s real power is measured when it so situates itself politically that one man actually means one vote and such principle displaces the practice of ‘one dollar one vote.’ Its ethos is measured by the realization that its culture is an expression of the realization of an identity of autonomous and responsible individuals. Such an ethos is created in creating a new culture out of the many cultures, traditions, practice, languages, wisdoms, religions and histories with which it has contact actually and educationally, historically and in the problematic present. Its first criterion of thought and action, especially political action is the self-constitution and regulation of the good for a multi-culturally concrete, communal social whole.

The individual of such real community knows that when returning home from a “sojourn,” he returns to what he is, yet knows that what he brings back is gifted in further enriching what has always existed for him. The “sojourn” refers to an Indonesian tribal practice of excursion into the world but the inevitable return to community and thus home. This tradition preserves a virtual ontological awareness of the primacy of place and community in determining identity, belonging and purposefulness for both individual and society.

The politics of community is seen as necessary when we allow ourselves to realize that the effects of corporatism, globalism and militarism is playing itself out in our back yards. It is only here also where it can be effectively confronted. The task follows from the human right to reappropriate environment, community, culture and thought. Life itself must be politicized, not to mention the education which has been hermetically sealed, away from its heart beat in the political life of the people. That is, education must be made the medium of self-reevaluation and recreation the values of a life worth living not to mention the constitutively radical democracy through which it takes place.

Many simple truths are yet to be awakened to. Is it so difficult to see that the the control of our food source and substance is to take control of our bodies and our land? The rationalized interest of the food processing industry and factory farms is not in the interest of health let alone the genuine enjoyment of good food. Culture is not the Wal-Mart congregation of conditioned drones brainwashed to believe in the sanctified infallibility of such a cancerous corporation. Sam Walton’s motto was “lower the cost of living.” He actually lowers the value of living.

Our unfortunately still lingering fear of communism and our distortion of the history of populism prevents us from fairly looking at how the privatization process is de-communalizing community. Bureaucracy, state “authorities,” management consultants, law in the service of capital and control of democratic process, education as domestication for job suitability and the political exploitation of religion water down and homogenize community and uproot the individual from a life oriented to place and traditional purposefulness. In the light of this rarifed atmosphere continually sliced and diced by these mechanisms of social processing and societal placement, a concrete, constitutive democracy of community can of course look like nothing but the romantic, animated fantasy of a resurrected Walt Disney.

As a political consequence a real “politics” struggling to find the real opposition that delineates a productive confrontation of interests must appear is inherently corrupt, if not evil and hopeless. Party partisanism does not stimulate a creative belonging to political process, as it should. It does not legitimate and guarantee being heard and being taken seriously. It creates a disruptive hostility and mutual contempt. It encourages the antagonism of a consciousness of distrust—political paranoia. It proffers pseudo-issues, moralistic condemnations, near delirious distractions from a thoughtful discourse and dialogue. And this done in the name of the advantages of power, destroying the validity of the claims of any valid opposition, and securing the totalizing acceleration of expansionism and a finalized post-historical Universalism.
Party partisanism, a ruse of the New International Economic Class, is at best humanly and politically divisive encouraging unnecessary and deleterious conflict, defensiveness and reactionism. Party partisan pseudo-politics assumes and seeks the worst in its genuine opposition.

It is only through a neo-populist federalist reconstitution of the political, that democracy can continue to unfold human creativity and integrity and rehabilitate the possibilities of an organic, multi-cultural social individual, concrete local community and the proper centralization of a “federal” administrative government.