Of Communities and Constituencies: Radio, the Market and the State

Abstract

This book is about several things. First, it is about the social relationships people create for themselves with each other through music. Second, it is about the forms of self-organization they use to do this and how the voluntary relationships upon which these acts of self-organization are based work. Third, it is about how the social contexts which foster these acts might be maintained and enhanced to make our society and culture more open and democratic. I have chosen to look at how people use community radio stations to do this. However, these organizations, by their very nature, are marginalized within the larger systems of power in which they have no choice but to participate. They are compelled to deal with institutions such as the state and corporations that have a great deal of power over them. The survival of community radio stations is constantly threatened because they are constituted in ways that these more powerful institutions do not recognize. As I will show in this chapter, the logics that govern state and corporate institutions often have consequences that are as deliberate as they are paradoxically unintended and yet perfectly in keeping with their animating intent. None of these dominant institutions explicitly set out to destroy the community radio stations studied in this book, yet in several cases this is almost exactly what happened.

The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.

Antonio Gramsci (1971:238)

The elected are such willing partners.

Fugazi (2001)