(p.142) "Instead of a political focus on protecting and supporting families, we should argue for expanding, supporting, and reviving communities, and investing resources in local, democratically-controlled institutions for providing care. The entry (both chosen and forced) of women into paid work has drastically undermined the basis for traditional community: the unpaid labour of women. The crisis of care-giving and the burdens on individual family households are a compelling point of entry for a pre-figurative politics which proposes new kinds of sharing relationships and new kinds of public places: like co-housing, community gardens, day-care co-operatives, democratized schools and recreation centres, etc." p....

(p.67)

When a MacIntyrean practice functions well, participants therein pursue internal goods of excellence by cultivating cardinal virtues of character such as wisdom, justice, integrity, and constancy; and by nurturing virtues of acknowledged dependence, such as just generosity, that bind the community. In addition, the key to healthy practices is to have them supported materially by institutions that, while supplying the external goods of material support, do not interfere with the practice’s pursuit of the internal goods of excellence.

(p.73)

Rather than simply destroying community as such, there is evidence that the modern firm is simply creating different types of community: more fluid, more all-embracing, more virtual, and no less virtuous. For example, in Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets, Cetina and Bruegger find evidence of the emergence of ‘virtual’ communities among foreign exchange traders: ‘..social forms are bound together by electronic information technologies . . drawn together as if they were in one place’. In their extensive empirical study the authors find foreign-exchange traders – typically characterised as the most red-in-tooth-and-claw-type of financial agents – developing their...

(p.1) When no vital need to abolish (alienated) labor exists, when on the contrary there exists a need to continue and extend labor, even when it is no longer socially necessary; when the vital need for joy, for happiness with a good conscience, does not exist, but rather the need to have to earn everything in a life that is as miserable as can be; when these vital needs do not exist or are suffocated by repressive ones, it is only to be expected that new technical possibilities actually become new possibilities for repression by domination.

(p.2) I believe that labor as such cannot be abolished. To affirm the contrary would be in fact to repudiate what Marx called the metabolic exchange between man and nature. Some control, mastery, and transformation of nature, some modification of existence through labor is inevitable, but in this utopian hypothesis labor would be so different from labor as we know it or normally conceive of it that the idea of the convergence of labor and play does not diverge too far from the possibilities