Communitarianism, anyone?

Is a communitarian agenda a possibility for British – or any – politics these days?

This question arises from the appearance in the past year of both Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2019) and Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” (2018) - and of similar ideas being expressed in a variety of places over the past decade, including The “Kafka Brigade” (de Jong); clumsy solutions (Grint); “Reinventing Organisations” (Laloux); The “Big Society” (Cameron); and Red Tory/Blue Labour (Bond)

And, of course, behind all this lies the shadow, of the millenium’s “The Third Way” (admittedly more of a rhetorical than real moment); Paul Hirst’s writings of the 1990s on “associationalism”; the communitarian movement embodied in Amitai Etzioni’s writings and activities in the US in the latter part of the 20^th century; and those of GDH Cole in the pre-war period.

So there have clearly been a set of powerful – if peripheral - ideas with which we have been very reluctant to part ……could it be that their time is coming?

I want to explore this question – using three approaches

-       identifying the common, distinctive features of policies, values and behaviour which can be found under these various labels

-       reminding ourselves of the original debates more than 100 years ago around “community”

-       setting up some “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly relevant propositions

1.  The common agenda

Collier’s critique of “utilitarian technocrats and Rawlsian lawyers corroding” the values of cooperation is, for me, very apt  

As far as I am aware, no one has so far attempted to extract (from the disparate elements I’ve sketched above) a common agenda. This is my first, very rough attempt -

- a dramatic change in the balance of rights and responsibilities – with more effort put into strengthening citizen “obligations” and less into “rights”

- Increased role for voluntary organisations – and cooperative activity

- Greater role for mutualised societies; and for (smaller) local authorities

- Municipalisation of services such as water

- More support for social enterprise
- and for local banks
- taxation of rent-seeking activities

- less emphasis on university education and more on vocational education

- development in youth services of “role model” (mentoring)

- rethink on aspects of state regulations in health and safety field

- importance of values of “respect” and “trust” being developed (by example!)

2.   The original debate about “community”

Movement from the close, if not stifling, “community” of towns and villages of past centuries (governed by social norms of respect, trust and acceptable behaviour) to modern “society” - where relationships are looser and anonymous – was a product of industrialisation. And industrialisation took a good two centuries to work through – it was in the late 1980s that the term “post-industrial” was first heard.

It was German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) who gave us the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” with which to make sense of that movement. And the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) first used the term “anomie” in 1893 to describe this feature of modern society.

The blog has several times this year found itself exploring issues of community solidarity - which had been one of the priorities of my political activity between 1968 and 1990. Some social scientists were telling us, in the 1960s, that the process of clearing the old slums had broken a crucial system of mutual neighbourly support (although other forces were also at work); and that a new system of social support was needed.

This coincided with the establishment in the early 1970s of a new department in local government for such things which, in Scotland, was given a quite explicit “preventive” objective. I became Chairman of such a committee in 1971 and used it to ensure the appointment of community workers to try to build more of the spirit of community in areas whose residents were suffering from what was called in those days “multiple deprivation”

In 1977 the UK national weekly "Social Work Today" commissioned me to write a substantial article which argued that our democratic system was failing such citizens - and that political parties no longer performed some of the functions we had attributed to them. In the meantime a few of us had managed to develop a strategy which saw support for these communities deepening – a strategy which has been continued by successive Scottish governments… 

Only one of the reviews I’ve read so far of the Collier book questions its realism – but does so in a rather smart way which reveals all that’s worst in a book review –

Collier’s paragon of the wise and ethical centrist is Emmanuel Macron, a man who, fewer than two years into his presidency, has disastrously low approval ratings, is widely seen as a tool of the wealthy, and just endured the most destructive burst of popular outrage France has seen since 1968. If that analogy didn’t already look foolish when Collier was writing The Future of Capitalism in 2017 and early 2018, it certainly does now.

The dream of a post-ideological pragmatism is itself ideological, of course, but what’s most interesting about Collier’s proposals is that if implemented, they would require not a variety of business-friendly Macronism but something closer to the redistributive politics of Bernie Sanders. The blunt policy instrument Collier most regularly suggests wielding is taxation. But because he’s a serious economist writing a book and the imagined remit of the serious book-writing economist is to rise above politics, to “move beyond the tired binary of Right and Left,” in the equally tired phrase you always find in works like The Future of Capitalism, Collier can’t bring himself to subscribe to a leftist budgetary project. Il faut être absolument centriste.

In the end what emerges most forcefully from The Future of Capitalism is its past — namely, Collier’s deep nostalgia for the collective purpose of the postwar West, which he himself experienced as a child and young adult growing up in Britain. That sense of collective purpose was forged in the fire of World War II. The institutions that defined the postwar liberal order gained legitimacy from their incorporation within a collective project to preserve peace.

What project exists today that could command a similar consensus and simultaneously revive growth throughout the developed world? Even though consensus is proving enragingly tough to secure, the answer is obvious: climate change. But Collier has little to say on the issue, or indeed several of the other major gyrations affecting the global economy today. The threat of automation, for example, which surely demands at least some consideration if your subject is the future of capitalism, is confidently brushed aside in one sentence: “Robotics is, I think, unlikely to reduce the need for work — our wants are probably insatiable.”

But Nobel-ish Prize-winning economist George Akerlof has called The Future of Capitalism “the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes,” which is both generous and wrong.

Collier says we need “radical new thinking” to get out of the mess we’re in — and we do — but he himself offers little more than tut-tutting social regressivism. Whatever good ideas The Future of Capitalism does contain struggle to emerge from the crush of their author’s monomania for the Trente Glorieuses.

Taxing the metropolis to fund the revitalization of small cities, giving tenants the right to buy houses at deep discounts: these aren’t bad ideas on their own, but how do we make them happen? The answer, of course, is through the political process, but on that The Future of Capitalism is by turns silent or blithely optimistic.

Collier’s good ideas remain undercooked because they have the misfortune of nesting in a book of political economy that has nothing useful to say about politics.

As I say, this is a good example of a bad book review - my definition of which is one which tells us more about the reviewer than the book! 

The post is already too long. Collier’s book is so important that that I will try to deal with the third of the “approaches” the post talk about in the next post 

update; just come across an essay on communitarianism on an amazing blog

https://theworthyhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/On-Communitarianism-PDF.pdf