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Why Community Civics

My name is Harold (“Harry”) DeRienzo.  All of my work, both theoretical and practical, has been grounded in the philosophy that community is the bedrock for humanistic living and the only environment amenable to true democracy. As stated by one of my favorite authors, John Dewey, “Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach the idea of democracy which is not utopian.” With this in mind, I am attempting to revive a term first used (as far as I can tell) in the early 20th Century as a guide for teaching civics in high school at a time when local communities still held political relevance. As I use the term here, believing that (with all of its faults) democracy is the most progressive and potentially inclusive form of government; given that civics involves the rights and obligations of citizens, and believing that democracy can only be effective in the context of a functioning community, I believe my life’s work can be characterized as advocating for and facilitating community civics.

I have written four books to date.  All my work, books and other written material have to do with the importance of community, democracy, and (humanistic) culture, but not in a superficial sense.  Rather, I am concerned about how these concepts are abused or misused while being relied upon as a palliative to allow ourselves to feel good about our selves and our connections. “I am part of the (fill in the blank) community.  I exercise my role in our democracy by voting.  I appreciate multi-cultural exhibits and support the arts.”  These are examples of a superficial manifestations of very deep and potentially powerful human inventions.  My goal here, as with my other writings, is to explore a deeper, inter-connected, conceptual framework and operationalized content to these very important human constructs. 

Community is not a neighborhood.  Community, in its most powerful sense, building upon and complementary to the works of social commentators like John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, is comprised of three interrelated, interconnected and indispensable components.  First, members of a community must have something in common.  Most often this commonality is expressed geographically, but other commonalities can apply as well (as long as the next two components are also present).  The second component consists of actual, perceived, and valued interdependence.  My benefit becomes your benefit.  My pain becomes your pain.  As a community, we suffer and prosper as our members suffer and prosper.  Finally, there must be a degree of collective capacity, the ability to accomplish desired outcomes that are only possible, or most effectively accomplished, through mutually supported and directed action.

Periodic voting is not democracy.  Democracy, to be genuine, must provide public space for active and ongoing citizen participation.  Such participation is only practical and effective in the context of community, in all its “constituent elements,” as stated but not elaborated on by John Dewey in his book the Public and Its Problems.  I believe those constituent elements are described above as commonality, interdependence and collective capacity, the latter of which presumes some degree of local economy.  Without a decentralized economy, we are left with a centralized political system.  Whether we look to Karl Marx in the 19th Century, serving as an underpinning of his writings (“The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.”) or to Buttonwood (the Finance column of The Economist) in the 21st Century ( “To the extent that groups gain economic power, political power will follow.”), political organization and power follows from economic organization and power.  As the economy is centralized and oligarchic, so too will our political system effectively operate as an oligarchy, regardless of what we call it or how often we cast a vote.

Culture is not some extraordinary human achievement, of no utility but possessing unlimited beauty and serving as an exemplar of mankind’s highest possible artistic achievement.  As stated so eloquently and simply by Raymond Williams, culture is ordinary.   As I have stated in my works, culture represents the many manifestations of how we, as humans, working alone and collectively, understand, reconcile, transform, enjoy, fear, transcend, manipulate, separate from, integrate with and exist within the environments we are in and share with others.  In this work of engaging and interacting with our respective environments and with one another in meaningful ways, we create culture, and the manifestations of such culture are expressed in music, art, religion, literature, customs, social hierarchies (or lack thereof), work patterns, tools, games, folklore, and more.  All of these are expressions, manifestations of culture, both extraordinary and mundane. 

Ethics also has an important place in my work – both theoretical and functional.  As a people, as a species, we can only live in a world that we respect and protect, and that includes all people and the environments we share with them.  I have the utmost regard for Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics, ruled by the maxim that we are all bound to one another and to nature.  This leads directly to the social ecology of Murray Bookchin and others, aspiring to a world, the basic value of which is expressed through Hegel’s concept of unity in diversity. 

Other themes are prevalent as well.  They involve economic equity generally and racial equity in particular, with a bias towards theories of change that involve active and meaningful engagement, are organic, emanate from the ground up, are guided by political structures and systems that, like Cooperative Democracy (to paraphrase James Peter Warbasse) employ means for change that are complementary to the ends sought. 

I have worked all of my adult life in New York City, in neighborhoods abandoned by the public and private sector alike.  All of my work has been guided by a respectful appreciation for the capacity of people to solve their own problems if provided with the opportunity and resources to do just that.  Most recently (2002), having been asked to take over a failing community development corporation (one for which I was a founding member back in the mid-1970s), after 16 years of hard work alongside other board members, staff, strategic partners, volunteers, government officials, and others, I was able to take an organization that was effectively bankrupt in 2002 (with six employees, one office, and a failed and decrepit real estate portfolio of about 600 units), turn it around, expand its operations, and then turn over an organization with assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with four offices, scores of employees and a housing portfolio of 1,600 units to a governance and leadership group comprised of community residents and tenants.  The CEO is an African-American woman, one of the smartest and dedicated people I have ever worked with, who started with the organization (Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, Inc.) as a student intern living with her children in a domestic violence shelter.  She was never offered a job after that.  She just took on more and more responsibility over the course of 15 years until it just made sense for her to take over as CEO.  When brought back into the organization in 2002 by the New York State Attorney General, we had a small board of professionals.  As of 2021, the majority of the board are women, mostly women of color, mostly neighborhood residents, with a plurality of the board made up of our own tenants, drawn from our resident leadership group, the Resident Council. 

Theory and practice are my watchwords.  As stated so simply by former Black Panther Party leader Assata Shakur, “theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.”  This is my goal with my ongoing work, this website and its blog.

Books by Harold (“Harry”) DeRienzo

Coming of Age in an Era of Political Apostasy

This is a book about three college students who decide to confront the rising tide of White nationalism on campus, locally and nationally. It is a book of speculative fiction, which starts about one year after the January 6th insurrection and then picks up in 2026, after a 2024 recession dooms the Biden Presidency and results in a Republican takeover of Congress and the White House. This results in federal legislation and regulations that not only mimic but expand upon the “anti-woke” policies recently enacted in Florida and elsewhere. But there is pushback, and youth emerging into adulthood are a major part of that struggle. The themes that run through the book, include history, Indigenous philosophy (Lisa, the main protagonists, is part Iroquois and part African-American), cooperation, social ecology, community, humanistic culture, and redemption, all within the context of rising White Supremacy. Maria is a proud Puerto Rican who early on becomes Lisa’s partner in their effort to confront White Nationalism. Christopher grew up in the White suburbs of New York and plays the part of consistently challenging his own privilege and baked-in assumptions about how the world, and this country works.

To discover the ways of their enemies, the group attends White nationalist rallies, marches, book burnings and a conference. Throughout, although never explicitly expressing it, these young leaders of tomorrow recognize that to effectively overcome the challenges they face in the time of their coming of age, they will have to mature and gain political sophistication long before such sophistication should have been necessary. As the story unfolds, we see they are up to the task.

The book is available in both paperback and as an e-book. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1143953584

A book review from Lee Allen, along with a sample chapter and endorsements can be read on my blog page on this website.

Concept of Community, Lessons from the Bronx

This book, first published by IPOC Press in 2008 stresses the importance of community, a form of social organization that is dying in this country and the world as each person conforms to an economic and supporting political system that survives and thrives on isolated consumers, alienated workers, and disenfranchised citizens easily manipulated and even more easily marginalized and disposed of.  The background for the book is New York City and efforts involving community development in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.  The updated, second edition, with an index, is available for purchase at:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-concept-of-community-harold-derienzo/1014769137?ean=9781668544358

However, this book may be downloaded for free. See details towards the end of my Home page..

Building Homes, Building Communities, The Ongoing Story of Banana Kelly and Community Development in the South Bronx

This book, published in 2020, and with all proceeds currently pledged to one of the premier community development groups in the South Bronx, Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, Inc., is a continuation of the Banana Kelly story but with contributors whose purpose is to demonstrate that development of housing alone is not community development.  Community development must include community-building, planning, advocacy, organizing, legal advocacy and more.  Beyond this comprehensive treatment, there is a section of the book dedicated to a Roundtable Discussion with resident leaders who had experienced homelessness, featuring the way we treat and allow our homeless brothers and sisters to be treated, as well as the trauma, similar to PTSD, that formerly homeless individuals continue to carry with them years and even decades after that experience.  This book is available:

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Harold-Derienzo/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AHarold+Derienzo

Preventing the Next American Civil War, How Culture, Community and Democracy Frame Human Progress

This book, published in 2021, delves more deeply into areas of political science and sociology, with a specific emphasis on how culture, distinctly human culture, is being manipulated and exploited.  This exploitation harkens to Thomas Hobbes’ definition of culture as the result of anything to which labor is applied for the purpose of benefit (profit).  This definition fits our current system of political economy precisely.  However, as opposed to a Hobbesian sense of applying labor to yield an outcome, such as crops or products, given our isolation and alienation, we have become the harvest of marketing mechanisms that would make Goebbels blush.  In a humane society, as described in the book, culture should be “that which is represented by the many manifestations of how we, as humans…understand, reconcile, transform, enjoy, fear, transcend, manipulate, separate from, integrate with and exist within the environments we are in and share with others.” Culture, like community, like democracy is what we make it.  And without working at it, it dies or, in the case of culture, manifests as an inhumane and exploitative culture.  In that vein and in response to the January 6^th insurrection, the book ends on an assessment of where we are as a country and how we could try to reverse the vitriol, hatred, insecurity and violence that we are experiencing over the past dozen or more years. This book is available at:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/preventing-the-next-american-civil-war-harold-derienzo/1139663074?ean=9781666294835