From Ambivalence to Profanity: Resisting the Dogmatic Ideal of Community

Calls for radical community-based action in response to the climate crisis seem to grow louder all the time. A series of community-based, climate justice initiatives, inspired to varying degrees by the Communalist philosophy of Murray Bookchin and the revolutionary movement in Rojava, sprung up around the United States in the form of the Cooperation/Symbiosis-affiliated dual power movements.¹ Yet caution is advised from various quarters. In particular Marxists and theorists of social reproduction have highlighted the role of “community” in the organised abandonment typical of neoliberalisation. I will urge caution in my own way, building upon the logic of the above to draw out the ambivalence of “community”: what produces its ability to provide a ground for resistance is precisely what can be captured and made “reactive” – turned against liberation. 

It is important that Communalists, and other left tendencies that use the concept of “community,” think through this ambivalence because it is a structure that could help free us or keep us captives. It is easy, and often correct, to suggest that capitalism is antithetical to human community, however “The ‘versus’ relationship between capital and community is not [necessarily] a hard, categorical logic of displacement… we are not talking about the on and off positions of a light switch. In capitalist society, community is not totally abolished.”² This is precisely why it is such a dangerous and a hopeful concept. To put what follows simply, community is a site of struggle precisely because it is good at mobilising people.

Below I will briefly lay out the Marxist concern and the social conditions which have led to community’s ambivalent position under capitalism: as both ground of struggle and apparatus of capture. Then I will go beyond, developing a post-structuralist inspired critique of Communalism as a project for the valorisation of The Community, drawing primarily on the work of Giles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben.³ This critique is intended in a comradely fashion, it is not meant to reduce Communalism to the object of critique, but rather through critique, lay out an account of the conditions that allow Communalist politics to fulfil the liberatory promise laid out by Murray Bookchin. 

This is not a synoptic or synthesising account of the aforementioned theorists, neither is it intended as a cohesive post-structuralist Communalism. Rather my intention is to deploy Deleuze and Agamben’s concepts as so many various scalpels to investigate dogmatic and reactive potentials within Bookchin’s Communalism. This is an attempt to think various traditions together with no pretence to a totalizing account. Fundamentally, this critique is written with the hope that the radical promise of collective liberation is possible in a world that has been on fire for far, far too long. 

The Apparatus of Community

To address the conditions under which “community” can contribute to socio-ecological transformation and our collective liberation we must first address those conditions under which it supposedly fails to do so.⁴ In doing so, we have to talk about what is often termed “neoliberalism,” that is, the geographically (and racially) differentiated shrinking back of the state in certain areas of reproduction of both labour and Capital.⁵ This coincides with an increase in certain apparatuses of control and discipline, most notably, the carceral system.⁶ Where the state shrinks back, this opens up new markets for capital accumulation. However, this rollback of the state does not just open up space for private corporations to take over essential services, it also allows “community” to take over certain tasks from the state’s purview. James McCarthy has shown that during the neoliberal period the management of certain forests in the USA was moved from the remit of the state, to that of local communities.⁷ This was part of a wider process identified in the literature on “community.” For instance, in the wake of the Brixton Riot of 1981 the UK government engaged community leaders as another tool of “management,” in that case management of people.⁸ Peer Illner also identifies this shift occurring in so-called natural disaster relief, outlining how Black communities in New Orleans were abandoned to deal with those aspects of the recovery which could not be marketized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.⁹

“Community” is used to deliver policy without direct involvement by the state. “Community” fills a role which allows the state’s aims (be it forest management, an end to resistance or a neighbourhood surviving a so-called “natural disaster”) to be achieved without the state intervening.¹⁰ The community is left to choose only how to implement this policy, with little control over the policy itself. Autonomy is contingent and conditional, and racially differentiated: freedom will give some space to manage resources and others space to suffer without. This rests on an idea of community as a unified entity which has, or can be, homogenised around a single purpose. Capitalism’s mobilization of community embodies a functionalist essentialism. This image of the community, however, excludes certain elements.¹¹ A lack of social capital not only excludes people from the dominant understanding of “community,” letting them be spoken for and over, it can also prove fatal. 

Those socially excluded from the “communities” will not be able to partake in “community resilience” in the face of disaster. It also means that the subgroups most able to perform the role allocated to the “community” come to be seen as its representatives, which can obscure class and racial inequalities.¹² The racial differential cannot be ignored in the examples used thus far, those communities whose voice mattered were “mainly descendants of the people who forcefully displaced the indigenous inhabitants,” whilst those who were abandoned and forced to protect their neighbourhoods were mostly members of racialized populations.¹³

What is central here is this contingent autonomy. The community is free to manage its own affairs precisely insofar as this reproduces the extant system and its values. In Illner’s example the apparatus ensures that what cannot be marketized profitably is done cheaply, at little to no cost to Capital or the state. In McCarthy’s case this apparatus guarantees that the forests are run according to marketized logic in a way which ensures the consent of the local population. Different communities are allowed to form, with different specific functions, but the end which the community is mobilised for is always the reproduction of capitalism.

Communities in Crisis

It is important to note when communities become mobilized under capitalism. In Illner and McCarthy’s examples, it is under conditions of crisis – be that the immediate crisis of a hurricane or the more generalised crisis of climate collapse. To put it another way, the ruling logics resecure their position in moments of, and through, conditions of insecurity and precarity. As Marx wrote: crises are “never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the disturbed balance for the time being.”¹⁴ Climate change represents a new instance of this, but it is an old logic: the ontological instability of societies premised on oppression (in particular settler colonial societies), the constant threat of revolt from below, has always made their position precarious.¹⁵ Under such conditions the communities that the dominant logics mobilize will take their survival as paramount. The communities Capital constitutes and mobilises have capitalism as their condition of possibility, thus they are always mobilized to reproduce that condition. This is not to say that there is a determinism that prevents them mobilising for their liberation, but that in the face of ontological instability or planetary collapse, demands for liberation all too easily give way to demands for mere survival.¹⁶ Hence the importance of social ecological thought and its rejection of this split between liberation and survival: “problems of necessity and survival have become congruent with the problems of freedom and life. They cease to require any theoretical mediation.”¹⁷

 It is not by accident that both radical social movements and capitalist counter-insurgency strategies have both latched onto the community as a key site of struggle. The control over social-reproduction (especially when that is taken to include the labour of ecological reproduction) is becoming increasingly obvious in its importance, and the community has always played a central role in this. As Murray Bookchin wrote, “While the factory and the mill formed the first line of the class struggle in the last century… its lines of supply reached back into the neighbourhood and towns where workers lived.”¹⁸ The community can provide the social-reproductive basis for struggle, a site of active resistance and ground for the building of positive alternatives to capitalism. As such, radicals see it as a key site to secure liberation whilst Capital and its state see it as a key site for securing ongoing hegemony. 

The use of community as an apparatus for the perpetuation of the status quo can be placed in a lineage of “liberal counterinsurgency” that mobilizes the concept of the “social” as a mode of governance.¹⁹ This seeks to ameliorate conflict through constructing a given stable order as proper to the community. This counterinsurgency works by promoting a “deepening of class stratification within these communities” and government recognition of “community leaders” who could be used to mediate between the state and, often racialized, communities.²⁰ This has long been a tactic of colonial control to shape the communities of the colonized and, in certain contexts, offer them certain rights, contingent on the continued goodwill of the state.²¹ Again, the ruling logic is taken as the condition of possibility for the community both through forming what counts as the community and through offering that community legitimacy within the current system. 

A key example would be that of the Butterfly Brigade, a gay, community-based organization in San Francisco during the 1970s who sought to keep their community safe, building on the model of the Black Panther Party. To prevent becoming a vanguard detached from the community they rejected uniforms in the hope that every member of the community would see themselves in the Brigade and, through this interpellation, community self-defence would become normalised. However, a uniform did develop in the form of a “white gay masculinity” which functioned to exclude both “outsiders” and community members who did not accord with this norm. The Brigade then aligned with other “community protection” measures, including the neighbourhood watch and early broken windows policies which mobilised this exclusionary logic against community members who did not fit the norm. In the end “Some homophobic practices were indeed repressed, but this repression always simultaneously entailed criminalising other forms of homosexuality and trans identity perceived as creating insecurity.”²²

The perpetuation of the specific stable order becomes more important than the members of the community itself. Of course, this trade-off is not always obvious until the kind of instability where perpetuation of the current system requires it. As such the apparatus of community in its current mobilisation is inseparable from the “apparatus of crisis” (or krisis). The Italian philosopher Dario Gentili characterises our current moment as one where the dominant governance logic is crisis, not in the modern sense of rupture, but in the earlier Greek (and medical) sense of krisis: the moment which returns things to order. Gentili characterizes the shift from crisis to krisis as the elimination of the “condition of a possible decision… conflict itself is governed… since it aims at a ‘decision’ which is always preordained” by Capital.²³ When such krisis becomes constant the alternatives seem to disappear altogether. Nothing else is realistic, nothing else is even possible, the only alternative to survival on Capital’s terms is death. Gentili argues that there is a new mode of living that goes with this: endless precarity. This precarious mode of living is precisely that which Illner is describing. The ability to survive crisis without overturning the system is exactly what is expected of “communities,” and the only acceptable alternative is death. “Resilience” in the face of crisis “enhances community,” allowing it to better maintain capitalism.²⁴ The climate crisis therefore does not break the spell of Capital; it musters “community” to become “resilient,” infinitely adaptable so as to keep supporting capitalism.²⁵ And infinitely inadequate, because it will never meet Capital’s exacting standards.

Communities in Resistance

Now that we understand the conditions which produce “community” as an apparatus aligned with Capital and the state, we can begin to chart a path towards the conditions which would produce revolutionary communities. To be clear, this is not a program and it is not my intention to explain to communities, nor to Communalists, how to engage in struggle. Rather what follows is a critical examination of tensions within the logic of community resistance that must be carefully considered.

Fundamentally it is a question of resisting the process of identifying with the abstracted apparatus of community which is structured to perpetuate capitalism. Communalist revolution means resisting capital’s determination of what “community” means and its vision of a singular role for it. The process of resisting is “a process of strategic desubjectification.”²⁶ A process of purging ourselves of the parts of our subjectivity produced by systems of oppression: a transformation of the self through praxis that does not simply build on what is already there but actively rejects certain parts of our subjectivity. That is, our constitution as subjects under a political system, and not the “reactivity” which Bookchin identifies with the term subjectivity.²⁷ However, such a rejection does not occur through a simple choice. Firstly, because the system we have described shapes people to recognise themselves in the community, and secondly, because resistance to capitalism is inevitably met with violent repression.

For Bookchin, this revolutionary community is created through joint resistance to hierarchy and by claiming control over the life of the community. The community coming together to set the terms for its own survival is revolutionary: it has the potential to disrupt the functioning of not just capitalism but every governing logic from colonialism to patriarchy to transphobia to ableism, to name but a few. It does this because the communal coming together disrupts the ability of these structures to mediate relations. This is not to say that there is no mediation, but rather when the community comes together to act it produces a new way of being-together, best captured by Bookchin’s phrase “unity in diversity.”²⁸ The community is inherently pluralistic or heterogeneous, and its self-coming-together is thus not a sublimation of parts into a unified and undifferentiated whole. There is of course a Hegelian flavour to this, but we are not dealing with a teleology that ends in some “Absolute.”²⁹ As Bookchin notes: “Above all, it is we who have to be liberated, our daily lives, with all their moments, hours and days, and not universals like ‘History’ and ‘Society’.” (italics in original.)³⁰ This is not to say that we must treat ourselves as monadic individuals who are unchanged by praxis, to do so would be to remain legible to the repressive apparatuses that shape us today and would ignore Bookchin’s reminder that “In seeking to change society, the revolutionary cannot avoid changes in [themselves].”³¹ Rather, we should never be fully sublimated into our own abstractions and apparatuses, or allow them to become alienated powers over us. 

Key to Communalism’s resistance to such counter-insurgent mobilizations is that for Bookchin, “community”  is not representable. This is important because what we have now is a series of representations of community deployed to structure our actions. This un-representability is essential to keeping a Communalist politics from falling back into a project of capture. If the community can be represented, then it has an image to be deviated from and measured against. Instead of representatives of community, Bookchin stresses that: 

Libertarian institutions are peopled institutions, a term that should be taken literally, not metaphorically. They are structured around direct face-to-face, protoplasmic relationships, not around representative, anonymous, mechanical relationships. They are based on participation, involvement, and a sense of citizenship that stresses, activity, not on the delegation of power and spectatorial politics.³²

Here the institution is constituted by people, but does not become alienated from them or reified into a thing above them. It is thus for Bookchin a “citizen” without an ideal model civitas.³³ Where current apparatuses place the citizen as a functionary within the civitas who, by virtue of their essentialized function, can be easily represented, Communalist politics rejects this with a politics of immediacy, difference, and collective action. Where the capitalist apparatus of community operates with an a priori philosophical anthropology and an assumed functionalism, my aim is merely to gesture at people coming together to live their lives in infinitely creative and generative ways. To do more, to pin it down in a taxonomy is to trap it, and to kill the Communalist project.

The embrace of “community” as a tool for liberation must not produce another politics where the apparatus comes to define us and re-create a politics of representational abstractions. Our community cannot be transformed into “The Community”: defined eternally according to a particular conception of a stratified social formation. The rigid bounds of The Community both serve to exclude the outside and constrain the inside: liberation is lost. Instead of an exclusive category, it is an open social formation that people can join. As such, we must insist that the clearly demarcated communal group of the capitalist apparatus be rejected. Instead, as Abdullah Öcalan puts it, “the concept of the [communal] self should be seen in this framework and scope. Each self has the chance to form a confederation from the local to the global.”³⁴

In doing so, Communalism’s liberatory stance allows us to reject positioning an idealized body politic “above” the actuality of the community. The community does not become an apparatus that determines our “proper functioning.” Our “good” is not something that can be analytically separated from us, becoming a disciplinary apparatus; the standard formula of the civic ideal as something we must improve ourselves towards cannot hold. 

The Civic Ideal as Representation

But it is in this “civic ideal” that we find the target of my critique. In Bookchin the polis does represent a civic ideal, one supposedly “fuller and more complete” than what we have now.³⁵ By his later writings it is clear that his aim is “an ideal of citizenship that the individual tries to realize as a form of self-expression.”³⁶ The Aristotelian philosophical anthropology of the zoon politikon, or “political animal,” is explicit here.³⁷ Rooted in current conditions, this ideal, this particular way of living, risks becoming a constraint on liberation in the future. We may have defeated its particular application, but the logics that allowed for liberal counter-insurgency are still latent. The principle of unity in diversity with its aspiration of an unrepresentable, unceasing change and development, risks becoming its inversion: diversity in unity, whereby the perpetuation of extant unity comes to define the bounds of acceptable diversity. 

Whilst for Bookchin this citizenship is “not an obligatory burden of self-denial,” there is still a danger that it becomes an obligatory burden of some particular kind of self-expression.³⁶ At its best, Bookchin’s theory tries to make the citizen identical not with a particular exclusionary conception but with everyone in order to escape its dependence on the corollary of the non-citizen or “outsider.”³⁸ By making difference the condition of unity, Bookchin’s account could shut down the reactive, counter-insurgent forces that mobilise under the guise of “citizenship.” But in struggling for this we always risk the inversion, where the community serves some end, even if that end is the community itself, separating all of us from the end we act for. This reopens that gap which allows unity to become the condition for difference, reopens the space for exception and exclusion. The danger is that The Community becomes in some sense hollow. It loses its latent potentials; its ability to abolish its own condition of possibility and become something else. It creates instead an idealised image that pre-determines acceptable communal action, separating the community from what it can do. It is not that collective life cannot be mediated, but that the particular form of mediation – ideal types – lends itself to a purifying paradigm that always risks falling into the counter-insurgent forces often found in western metaphysics. 

The problem is thus that of “reactive forces” taken up by Giles Deleuze in his study on Nietzsche.³⁹ The critical point of Deleuze’s critique of representation is that when we are subjected to structures in this way, the active force, here liberation, “is separated from what it can do… [it] becomes reactive.”⁴⁰ On Deleuze’s reading, Nietzsche’s concern here is that the radical forces which actively select how we should live, cease to do so. This risks us ending up stuck under a regulative presupposition, constantly referring back to, and reacting against, the extant which separates us from our ability to revolutionarily produce the different.⁴¹ In this separation liberation is lost as we struggle to achieve the perfection of a civic ideal. The creation of new values gives way to the dominance of current values; the potential for people to come together to create new ways of living is suppressed by the imperative to maintain The Community, which has come to represent us. The danger is of a counter-insurgent essentialism which mobilises the exclusionary power of a civitas based on this idealised citizen.  The risk here is in the tension of having a citizen with no discrete polis or fixed civitas. Deleuze conveys this danger, and the alternative, through the metaphysical question of “what is?” and the genealogical question of “which one?”⁴² The former assumes the community to have an essential “kind” and so embodies in thought the social structures that assume one way of being, separating us from what we can do and crushing liberation; whilst the latter assumes a plurality of communal forms and thus embodies liberatory social structures that allow for change and becoming. The danger of community consolidating into “The Community” is that it would force us to stay within the institutions we create today, or even tomorrow, and to stay fixed to the values that underpin them. These may be better or worse values, but if we are committed to a project of liberation then we cannot be satisfied that the values of tomorrow’s communities will be fine forevermore. We can never be sure that they will not, as they begin to consolidate, reproduce the exclusionary city walls to preserve the extant organisation. It is not that I believe us to always already be in this trap when we form communities, but rather that it is always a latent possibility in any organisation or institution. 

The Deleuzean point is that when we “internalise current values”, we lose the ability to create our own collective future. We get trapped in the extant paradigms, including that of the citizen, and the tools of liberation double back on themselves.⁴³ The Community itself becomes a legislative entity. What was intended as the closing of the hierarchical gap between subject and sovereign recreates the structure of that dichotomy: The Community as it already exists becomes that for which we act. The Community’s continuity risks becoming the legislative principle which, as regulative presupposition, always takes precedence in decision making and thus a new power of subjectification and thus separation. We recreate the two poles of the legislator and the subject by creating a gap between us and the principles for which we act: they must always be preserved and so we must endlessly adapt to preserve them.⁴⁴ Within that gap lies the threat of counter-insurgency and the reactive separation of us from what we can do. The collective collaboration towards liberation will take decisions, but must do so critically, without the constant reference back to the current values which hem it in. It must never fall into the trap of “Judgement” which Gentilli identified. Judgement here is neither a decision nor a selection, it is rather “the preservation of a certain political order or condition which has its own set of rules,” Judgement is not the free choice of options but an administrative ruling that returns things to a pre-given state of affairs.⁴⁵  As such revolutionary communities cannot be premised on a “primordial totality that once existed, or… a final totality that awaits us at some future date,” rather we must fight for “a whole of these particular parts,” a unity that liberates us, not some perfected abstraction derived from us.⁴⁶ In this we find a common ground between Bookchin and Deleuze, a commitment to rejecting capitalism’s simplification and faith in finality. We find a shared desire for a liberation that allows life to keep changing, to escape the regulative presupposition that the way things are and the way we are now must never change. 

However, the risk is that unity in difference, that is difference as the condition for unity, gives way to difference in unity, unity as the condition for difference: difference in service to unity. The danger of a given unity, The Community, becoming our end is the rejection of any difference not premised on that extant unity. Any given unity must never be made a pre-judicial norm which conditions decision and determines legitimate action: “the taste for replacing real relations between forces by an abstract relation which is supposed to express them all… we always end up replacing real activities (creating, speaking, loving, etc)” with the very kinds of representation Bookchin rejected.⁴⁷ If Communalism does not risk becoming a mere “disputing [of] properties and changing [of] proprietors,” as Deleuze thought all dialectical analysis ends up being, it is because of the distinction Bookchin draws in his claim that we “would neither give nor take, [we] would actually participate.”⁴⁸ This distinction, this radical refusal of the constitutive division, implies a total theoretical rejection of the logic which would allow The Community to become the kind of structure for which we must act. It is in Bookchin’s understanding of subjectivity as a reactivity.⁴⁹ A series of interactions and changes, not a “being under” as the concept of the political subject typically implies. The political challenge is to ensure that community remains the manifestation of a collective reactivity, in this sense, and does not become something which we are subject under. That this is a danger facing Communalist philosophy is clear from Bookchin’s insistence in his later works that what is needed is a new law and constitution, a new nomos.⁵⁰ The Community, its constitution, becomes the new basis for a new Judgement which functions just like the old, by investing the community with Law, Bookchin risks leaving us subject to a new finality, a new representation which separates us from the potential of new collective becomings otherwise. It is not that decisions should not be made or patterns of behaviour followed, but that the inscription of these as transcendent Law cuts us off from the ability to reshape our collective ways of living.

Profaned Communities

If the danger is that we become trapped within a judicial structure where our behaviours are legislated for us, with reference to values which have consolidated into inviolable dogmas, then how are we to pursue revolutionary change without allowing our Communalist values to become dogmatic? Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the Sacred and Profane, we can develop an approach to social practices which rests on a logic entirely contrary to that which allows reactive forces us to separate us from “what we can do.” Agamben’s account allows us to conceptualise returning what we can do to free and common use: 

if ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men… But use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it only by means of profanation.⁵¹

Key here is this distinction between “use” and “profanation,” which Agamben designates as differentiating between action tied to the structure of functionality and a free, creative form of life. 

If to “use” community is to put it to action towards a goal, then we can see that in addition to Deleuze’s concerns about representation whereby The Community itself becomes the goal, there is a simultaneous process where community is subordinated to the goal. This seeming contradiction functions, through a dogmatic image of the properly revolutionary community which we never quite reach, to endlessly perpetuate struggle and endlessly defer liberation by positioning community as always insufficient to its own purposes which have become a thing distinct from it itself. Instead, to profane the apparatus of community, would be the “rupture of all separation” through the rejection of the logic of “correct use.”⁵² To recognise that the very notion that there is a “right” way to deploy community is to a priori narrow our revolutionary options and to lose sight that the goal of liberation is us, as Bookchin put it, “our liberation” and not that of abstractions. The structure of functionalism which Bookchin was so concerned about in instrumental reason is latent in the structure which sets up some end which we are separate from.⁵³ Obviously, we are not yet living under the conditions we desire, there is work to be done, but what we fight for is nothing other than ourselves, the collective liberation of all of us.  

To be clear, Agamben’s point is not to embrace divergent practices of living together for their own sake, creating new structures of normalisation with new aesthetics. Rather, “freed behaviour still reproduces and mimics the forms of the activity from which it has been emancipated, but in emptying them of their sense and of any obligatory relationship to an end, it opens them and makes them available for a new use.”⁵⁴  The point is that “peopled institutions,” to borrow Bookchin’s phrase, do not serve an end separate from themselves. If survival on a planet on fire and liberation are to truly coincide, then the liberated life must become its own end, contra the logics of discipline and exploitation that have constructed separate ends, the endless pursuit of which has driven human society out of the kind of ecological relationships Bookchin described. The point must be to “deactivate the apparatus,” in Agamben’s terms, that is to transform community from “a means to an end” – even when that end is The Community itself – in favour of living communally as “means without an end”: a free life without the logics of separation that allows for counter-insurgency in the name of a proper way of living.⁵⁵ We cannot simply create new dogmas based on what made sense today, we must always critique our forms of life. We must resist new ideal models of humanity, what Agamben calls  “anthropological machines,” which govern us by always positing us as lesser than our “proper nature,” always failing and in need of correction towards an ideal form of life.⁵⁶ We may have pacts and agreements, and we will make collective decisions, but will not have a nomos, there will be no transfer of constitutive power to define what we are from the state to the community. There will be no “changing of proprietors,” but the embrace of a necessarily unfinishable collective transformation of our social arrangements.⁵⁷ This kind of social arrangement, which is nothing more nor less than life for its own sake and not for the sake of anything placed over it, is, as Walter Benjamin understood so well, law-destroying.⁵⁹ In fact such a prospect recreates the same structures I wish to resist by making change an omnipresent requirement that also recreates the gap between the reality of what we are and the ideal of what we are told we are meant to be.⁶⁰ On the contrary, what I hope I have gestured at is that an anarchism predicated on the social is always at risk of producing a new lifestylism: one far worse than that which raised Bookchin’s ire. One which constructs a form of life which becomes the end and the measure of society, one from which deviation is not allowed because it is always constructed as “betrayal” or worse, “threat.” Such a “social” anarchism ceases to be anarchic, it raises a new arche which dominates life, becoming the end to which we are the means. Any such political project will eventually face resistance because life is in constant state of change, as Bookchin well-articulated. Our communities must not become impediments to this. The danger is always that a representation of the community, a social order, perpetuates itself through exclusion, as we saw earlier with the example of the Butterfly Brigade where an old understanding of the community came to prevent further liberatory transformations. It matters not whether this is an unwritten habit or a clearly defined constitution, it is the structure of nomos preserving itself which is always the threat to those who do not meet its definition. Had the Butterfly Brigade written down a constitution which demarcated those who were in the community and those who were not, it is true that some of those excluded by the aforementioned de facto uniform would have been included, but there would have been someone else, some new way of living, that would have been excluded from community it needed. Any attempt to update such a constitution would necessarily lag behind the realisation of new ways of living together. To be liberatory, the community as it exists must be able to be destroyed and give way to the community which is emerging. For new becomings, the nomos which Bookchin eventually began to put faith in, risks becoming the very “blind custom” and “arbitrariness” which he sought to escape.⁶¹

Bookchin understood the ecological society as one which resisted simplification.⁶² To this end, community must be a creative, not fettering, force. To accomplish this goal, it cannot be made eternal. Community as a manifestation of “unity in diversity” must be open to new becomings, which means being simultaneously open to new creations and the destruction of old.⁶³ For these two moments, together, are the reality of becoming something new, whilst their separation is the end of new becomings. As Deleuze wrote in collaboration with Felix Guattari: “making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion – at least the formal criterion – that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order.”⁶⁴

Conclusion

Communities are a key site for resisting and surviving climate change, however, they are not automatically opposed to the system that creates this crisis. In fact, they are regularly deployed to support that system and, as such, are deployed in exclusionary ways that kill those deemed less valuable by Capital. Communalism gives us the theoretical tools for a praxis that resists this deployment, that rejects the gap between liberation and survival and affirms communities that defend and support all life. 

However, the rejection of that gap must not constitute a new one between The Community as precondition for survival and the lives that survive through that community. History will not end with climate change, we will still need to live freely as we survive this crisis and, hopefully, live beyond it. We must not create social forms that never let us move beyond the krisis, that never accept their contingency and pass away to let new forms blossom. 

If the first level of critique warns us of the dangers that have already ensnared “community” and offers us the critical tools to begin to separate our sociality from Capital’s determination, then Deleuze’s mobilization of Nietzsche’s genealogy inspires us to go one step further, or rather one step in a different direction. This second level of critique challenges us to consider what forces animate our communities and what forces it fetters, not to endlessly justify its perpetuity but to choose new values, new social arrangements that suit new moments. The gap between an idealised image of the Community and the reality of that community creates an imperative; theoretically this can be mobilised for revolutionary ends, but it seems to always become reactive in the end. It is not that we cannot have ideals of liberation that we fight for, it is that we must always regard them critically and never let them limit us going further to liberation. We must never let the ideal of the citizen kill off “the variegated structures, the articulations, and the mediations that impart to the whole a rich variety of forms” which Bookchin believed in.⁶⁵

Community may be the key to not just surviving but thriving in the face of the climate crisis, however,  “we have no interest in producing something that would only be a new program to police straying bodies, proliferate ‘proper’ images of thought, or peddle updated categories of surveillable subjects.”⁶⁶ Liberation insists on what could yet be, breaking down what is. And we must never stop insisting.  

1. Cooperation Jackson, “The Dual Power Map,” 2019. https://cooperationjackson.org/blog/thedualpowermap.
2. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value (Chico: AK Press, 2020), 48–49.
3. I distinguish between community, as a collective activity, and The Community as a proper noun. The point here is not simply a point of grammar because grammar rests on social reality.  The prescriptiveness of the proper noun is a manifestation of the rigidity of our social arrangements.
4. This project of collective liberation is a project of living together, it is akin to governance insofar as it is collective deliberation and action to determine how we live together, but it is also an attempt to escape the metaphysics of ‘governor’ and ‘governed’ which historically underpins that term.
5. My use of this term is intended not as a vulgar periodization that sees ‘neoliberalism’ as anything more than a particular combination of strategies by Capital which exist as continuations of previous combinations which it is neither radically better nor worse than.
6. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).
7. James McCarthy, ‘Devolution in the Woods: Community Forestry as Hybrid Neoliberalism’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 37, no. 6 (June 2005): 995–1014, https://doi.org/10.1068/a36266.
8. Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 51.
9. Peer Illner, Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response between the State and Community, Mapping Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
10. Taylor Gerald Aiken et al., “Researching Climate Change and Community in Neoliberal Contexts: An Emerging Critical Approach,” WIREs Climate Change (Vol. 8, No. 4, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.463.
11. Tania Murray Li, “Images of Community: Discourse and Strategy in Property Relations,” Development and Change (Vol. 27, No. 3, 1996), 501–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1996.tb00601.x.
12. Mena Grossmann and Emily Creamer, “Assessing Diversity and Inclusivity within the Transition Movement: An Urban Case Study,” Environmental Politics (Vol. 26, No. 1, 2017), 161–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1232522.
13. James McCarthy, “Devolution in the Woods: Community Forestry as Hybrid Neoliberalism,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (Vol. 37, No. 6, 2005), 1009.
14.  Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 357.
15. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London ; New York: Verso, 2019), 248.
16.  Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Great Britain: Sphere Books, 1970), 1.
17.  Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 3rd. ed, Working Classics Series 3 (Edinburgh ; Oakland, Ca: AK Press, 2004), 7.
18. Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism (Chico: AK Press, 2021), 220.
19. Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social, Cambridge Studies in International Relations 139 (Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2016), 38.
20.  Shafi and Nagdee, Race to the Bottom, 63.
21.  Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, New paperback edition, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 118;  Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 103.
22.  Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, trans. Kieran Aarons (London ; Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 137–38.
23. Dario Gentili, Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government, trans. Stefania Porcelli and Clara Pope (London: Verso, 2021), 72.
24.  Alison Howell, “Resilience as Enhancement: Governmentality and Political Economy beyond ‘Responsibilisation,'” Politics (Vol. 35, No. 1, 2015), 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12080.
25. Romain Felli, The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2021), 97.
26.  Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 39.
27. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 320. This concept of reactivity should not be confused with Deleuze’s use of the Nietzchean concept of ‘reactive forces’ which will be used later. The former conveys the interactions and complementarities within social and ecological systems whilst the latter conveys the forces which create separations within a person or movement, limiting them within the extant and preventing ‘active’ change or new ‘Becomings’. 
28. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 72.
29. Damian F. White, Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 166.
30.  Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 10.
31. ibid 11.
32. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 435.
33. I use this term civitas which means city to denote the city and the civilisation; the infrastructure and apparatuses of organisation, and the ordering principle itself; the structures of walls and borders, and the project of a form of life.
34. Abdullah Öcalan, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 43.
35. Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities, 41.
36. ibid 75.
37. ibid 40.
38. ibid xxvi.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Continuum Impacts (London ; New York: Continuum, 2006), 37.
40. ibid 59.
41. ibid 63.
42. ibid 71.
43. ibid 82.
44. ibid 87.
45. Gentili 14.
46.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Bloomsbury Revelations (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 57.
47.  Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 69.
48. ibid 151;  Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 367.
49. ibid 320.
50.  Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, ed. Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor (London New York: Verso, 2015), 24–35.
51. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Zone Books (Princeton University Press, 2015), 73.
52. ibid 88.
53. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 359.
54. Agamben, Profanations, 85–86.
55. ibid 86.
56. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004), 29.
57. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 151.
59. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street: And Other Writings, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London ; New York: Verso, 2021), 171./efn_note]

    It is worth briefly dealing with the charge that these post-structuralist critiques boil down to a “lifestylism” against Bookchin’s more political and revolutionary “social anarchism” and later Communalism. Namely, that this rejection of any dogmatic image of The Community is really an argument for endless personal revolution that amounts to little more than thrill-seeking, transgression and change for their own sake.⁵⁸Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, Part 3. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm.

60. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972 – 1990 (New York Chichester: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995), 181.
61.  Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 61.
62. Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 26.
63.  Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 81.
64. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 80.
65. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 87..
66. Acid Horizon, Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape (London, England: Repeater, 2023), 3.