what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Speak, Memory - the UK in the late 1960s – part VI of the current series about “Change”

 This post has proved quite a challenge – forcing me to confront the question of the reliability of our own personal memories compared with the sort of collective accounts you find in post-war social history which has become so popular in the last decade  with publics everywhere – eg in the UK David Kynaston and Dominic SandbrookSpeak, Memory is, of course, the title of Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography

Take 1968 - which was, in 2018, the subject of celebrations for, and disputations against what it was assumed to stand for – freedom and disdain for authority and tradition. But for me, 1968 was significant more for my election as a councillor for the municipality of a Scottish shipbuilding town and my appointment as a Lecturer at Paisley College of Technology.

After all in 1968 I was 25 – no longer a student - and had more important things to do than tear up Parisian cobbles. Community action was very much in the air and chimed well with the community power debate” which had been an important one for me during university just a few years earlier. In 1956 C Wright Mills had produced his famous “The Power Elite” - a radical critique of the structure of power in US society – which pluralist political scientists such as Robert Dahl tried to take down. And it was probably Steven Lukes who settled the debate eventually in 1974 with Power – a radical view in which he argued that 

Power has three faces –

·         the public face which Dahl, Polsby and others had studied,

·         a hidden face, which served to keep issues off of the agenda of decision making arenas (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), and

·         an even more ‘insidious’ third face, through which the relatively powerless came to internalise and accept their own condition, and thus might not be aware of nor act upon their interests in any observable way.

 

Lukes’ analysis of what he called the three ‘dimensions of power’ has spawned a series of debates and studies about how power affects not only who participates in decision making processes, but also who does not, and why. 

Those who want to know the details of how that debate has gone since have only to consult the magnificent website kept by William Domhoff for the past 50 years – Who Rules America?

And one of the first books I called for in 1968 - with the library facilities at Paisley College at my full disposal - was Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein. This had come out in 1967 and was the more analytical complement to the  activism of Saul Alinsky as I took my first steps in community action.

The promise of change was heavy in the air we breathed in those years - Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70 had started well with official and open Inquiries into so many fields which had been causing deep concern – not least the civil service, local government and devolution – and was sufficiently influenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty to set up its own Community Development Programme which is described in this short article.

It also to set up an enquiry into public participation in planning led by Arthur Skeffington, a Labour MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Tony Greenwood. It arose from growing interest in the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ (that ordinary people need to be engaged in decision-making rather than simply voting for representatives to make decisions on their behalves). What became known as the Skeffington Report or “People and Planning” published its report in 1969 with a famous review by Sean Damer and Cliff Hague giving an excellent sense of the issues and prevailing context. The review mentions only at the end Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation

But all good things have to come to an end – and the Labour government duly ran out of steam. 

Recommended Reading

1968 Memories and Legacies of a global revolt (Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 2009) Trust the Germans to produce the best account of the global wave of protest!  This detailed account looks at all corners of the globe and includes a fascinating last chapter involving a discussion between New Left Norman Birnbaum and Tom Haydn

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) The most famous of the titles which came from the UK anti-poverty programme

local government and the local state – from crisis to crisis a submission as a Conference paper on austerity which gives a good sense of academic discussions a decade ago

Telling Stories about post-war Britain; the crisis of the 1970s (2017) a very thorough and superbly referenced long article which gives a great sense of this turning point in UK history

From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back Norman Birnbaum (2018) Memoir of a sociologist who helped found “New Left Review” and was in the middle of an amazing global network of intellectuals and activists

Aftermath – life in the fallout from the Third Reich 1945-1955 Harald Jaehner 2021 a German journalist covers the period with the harrowing stories I remember from Heinrich Boll’s novels

Social history of post-war Britain; a few books selected by David Kyanston. 

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