It is misleading & hardly conducive to a transition to socialism to speak of "community" loosely *when there is no community of interests between classes*. Take, for example, the case of the policy choice between direct state funding for higher education and individualized student loans provided via a complex "market" of private lenders -- for-profit as well as ostensibly "non-profit" -- & guarantee agencies, with more government subsidies going to the lenders & agencies (& secondarily to top administrators of universities) rather than students & teachers. The latter policy benefits the ruling class more than the former, and that is why the latter came to prominence & has even come to eclipse the former in the age of neoliberalism.
Paul Burkett summarizes James O'Connor's thoughts on contradictions thus in a book review of O'Connor's _Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism_:
***** The first contradiction involves the danger of over-production crises due to over-exploitation of labor. When "capital exercises [too] much power over labor," wage-based demand shrinks relative to the total value of commodities produced, making it difficult for capital to realize the surplus value contained in these commodities. This over-accumulation tendency manifests itself in the "vast credit structure, aggressive marketing, constant product innovation, and intensified competition" undertaken by capital to cope with the growing "risk of a realization crisis." Capitalism's second contradiction is between capital and the conditions of production. As noted earlier, O'Connor argues that this second contradiction reduces the profitability of capital by increasing the costs of production. When individual firms "defend or restore profits by strategies that degrade or fail to maintain over time the material and social conditions of their own production," the "unintended effect is to raise costs on other capitals (and, at the limit, capital as a whole), thereby lowering produced profits." Profits are further reduced when "social movements demand that capital better provide for the maintenance and restoration" of natural and social conditions, e.g., "when they demand better health care, protest the ruination of soils, and defend urban neighborhoods in ways that increase capital costs or reduce capital flexibility."
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/299burk.htm> *****
O'Connor's theory of two contradictions helps us better understand the politics of educational funding than a communitarian language (= "grit your teeth & pay off your student loans with interests -- that's the way to give back to the community that gave us a gift") does. We should fight for educational funding in such a way that would "increase capital costs or reduce capital flexibility," intensifying the second contradiction that O'Connor theorizes. More specifically, fight for higher taxes for the rich, lower taxes for the working class, no tuition for education at any level, & open admission without standardized tests.
The beauty of O'Connor's theory is that it allows us to link demands of many social movements -- whether such struggles are waged at the point of production or not, & whether they are explicitly anti-capitalist or not -- into a more or less coherent political agenda for the Left. Even what may, on the surface, look like a non-class social movement with non-class demands (e.g., student opposition to higher tuition, widespread opposition to GM food, etc.) may have effects of throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery of capital accumulation, *even* when such effects are not at all intended by movement participants.
Marxists' job is, first of all, to clarify -- as O'Connor does -- the political meanings of existing movements -- i.e., whether & how they ripen first & second contradictions -- & to create the link among promising movements in practice, while trying to win movement participants to the conviction that capitalism must be abolished & that production for needs, not for profits, should be established.
Yoshie