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 Sandbrook. Speak, 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
