Community – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

A group affiliated around allocation of common resources. Communities may be societies, where allocation is through social relationships, or trade economies, where allocation is through trade.

Expanded explanation

Allocation is the whole of the test. A community is not identified by affection, proximity, size or shared identity but by the fact that a group is organized around handing out common resources, and the only variable that matters is the mechanism by which the handing out happens. Where resources move through social relationships the community is a society. Where they move through exchange it is a trade economy. The same people can constitute either. This is why the trade economy and the society appear in the framework as rival forms of one thing rather than as economy set against culture, since both are answers to a single question about who gets what and on what basis. A society carries debts and credits inside the relationship and balances them there. A trade economy settles each transfer with currency instead, on the premise that any payment produces a balanced interaction, which is the premise Marsh disputes by pointing out that trade does not occur among people with the closest ties. The word also carries an argument about where care belongs. People who are suffering need community support and solidarity rather than ostracization, labelling and isolation inside institutions, which on her account are structures for punishing the negative image rather than for helping anyone.

In Heather Marsh’s words

An established word Marsh gives a precise functional test, sorting communities by how they allocate rather than by how they feel.

“People who are suffering need community support and solidarity, not ostracization, labelling and isolation”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

Society or trade economy: The same group is one or the other depending on whether common resources move through relationships or through exchange.
Allocation as the criterion: Warmth, scale and shared identity do not appear in the definition, which asks only how resources are distributed.
Where support belongs: Marsh places the care of suffering people with the community rather than with institutions, which label and isolate instead of supporting.

How others use it

Ferdinand Tonnies drew the closest existing distinction in 1887 between Gemeinschaft, the community bound by relationship and shared life, and Gesellschaft, the association bound by contract and self-interest, and treated the shift from one to the other as the story of modernity. Benedict Anderson's imagined communities addressed a different question, how large groups come to feel like one. Elinor Ostrom's work on common pool resources is nearest in subject matter, since it studies exactly how groups govern shared resources without either markets or states. Marsh compresses all of this into a single functional criterion. She is not describing a historical transition or a governance design problem but classifying any group by the mechanism through which its common resources are allocated, which makes society and trade economy two species of community rather than two eras.