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life. But fundamentally, many community organizations depend on relations that extend beyond community over which they have little control. Most important in this are governments and their policies that shape local activities and development. But the same can be said, albeit on a smaller scale, about the role of foundations in community work. In both sets of relations, the community organizations are structurally reliant on the outside institutions—and while this reliance does not mean that community organizations are powerless in their dealings with outside funders, it does render those relations structurally unequal. There is also an element of political informality in community in which power and the capacity to influence decisions are uneven and depend on the capacity to mobilize and organize at the local level. At the same time, the implementation of community-based and controlled programs and services does give some power if there is a participatory democratic process. These processes are complex and are often linked to local traditions, as well as to how outside forces shape the local. Power is central. Although communities per se do not have formal power, they are the places of organizing for power. Through local organization, citizens can take some control over social political and economic processes that shape daily life. For this to happen, communities, through local organizations, need to see outside targets that should be challenged and not accept the inward-directed policies and practices that shape so much of contemporary local practice. We take this up in chapter 5, which presents examples of organizations that have continued to organize for power in order to make demands on the state and private sectors in their quest for economic and social justice. To sum up the points emphasized thus far, community is both objectively and subjectively important. It is objectively important because of the vital roles it plays in the reproduction of capitalism. And it is subjectively important because of its significance in both people’s experiences and memories and happiness, and also their interactions with the larger political economy and the understandings they have of that political economy. Often the wedding of the objective and subjective bases of communities leads to people organizing around their interests in communities. Thus community organizations—some durable, some transient—emerge. Community, in short, matters in ways both material and immaterial, and people act accordingly. And yet, despite Community and Its Discontents 31 the importance of community, community organizations are often politically marginal due to their fragmentation and relative dependence on outsiders. Community and Social Change Given all of these constraints on community, the key question for this book is what role community organizations play in the process of social change in the contemporary political economy. We have written Contesting Community to explore this question. Our analyses of issues related to community, and the thematic examples throughout, are underpinned by this question. It is clear for us that the kind of social change we are discussing goes beyond local communities and cannot be achieved within them solely through the work of organizations tied to them. Despite their importance, communities and the organizations present within them are too limited and fragmented to achieve much on their own. But we still believe in community because of the importance of local work in reaching people who can organize themselves for power and critically understand the underlying causes of social and economic problems. And, as we elaborate in the last chapter, broader definitions of community, and the community action and community organizing we are discussing, can act as bases for longer-term social change. The advantage and contribution of local work is the stability and place for participation in day-to-day activity that it offers to citizens. Local work can provide a base for long-term action and mobilization. Local communities are the places where people meet, discuss issues of common concern, and find strategies to respond to them. It is the great political potential of communities to take the objective qualities that come from shared territory (which include the aforementioned social service and education provision, labor market networks, and relations of domestic property) and combine them with the subjective processes of identity formation that happen through the everyday interactions of daily life in community. However, without a conscious wider vision, community organizations will remain focused on the local. The challenge is to build an agenda that transcends local work and to find ways to connect with broader organizations, and build alliances to work for fundamental...

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