Mad Man's Blog

In Britain, we have now have a supposedly ‘reformist’ Prime Minster in David Cameron, whose ideological anchor, is not, as many had feared, a patrician elitism, that seeks to pursue the interests of the rich above all others. Instead, Cameron seems serious, in principle at least, to reducing the ‘overbearing’ extent of the state, to rebuilding society from the bottom up, and in the words of his favourite living philosopher, Phillip Blond, his new conservatism has changed, ‘’The essence of the new Conservatism is the priority of associative relationship’’. Cameron wants to return Britain to an age where the community, not the state, was the element of society that ensured security, prosperity, and opportunity. Cameron is a firm believer in the notion of the ‘organic community’ that supposedly existed in the past, and has been lost, by the actions of an overbearing, over-centralised, State. For Blond, the mistakes have been made on all sides of the political spectrum, and has led us to the problems we now face, from financial crisis, to wealth inequality, to failing schools, to ‘Broken Britain’ and it is clear to all that Cameron shares this belief (even if he is less willing than Blond to acknowledge the role of Thatcher in all this) but is the answer to our current problems to be found through the State’s retreat, and it’s replacement with the lost organic community? Is there any real value to this renewed communitarianism, or is it a mask, for something else?

The Myth of Community: Nostalgia and Ignorance

Blond does not seem to mention the idea of an ‘organic community’ a lot. Perhaps because he is well aware of how easy the notion is to attack. It is not a statement that Cameron would utter much either. So is it fair to critique their position on the grounds of a term they do not explicitly use? Yes. Because it is what there ideas point to, directly or not. It is perhaps a little unfair however, to assume that they automatically want a return to some fictitious post card version of idyllic 1950’s Britain. Because there is a sense, In Blond particularly, that even then, in the early days of the welfare state, the seeds of destruction that would lead to broken Britain were already planted. Things went wrong, from those hopeful times, when the welfare state was thought a genuine national achievement. Blond would argue that it was flawed from conception, that the idea of a welfare state was correct in principle, but flawed in it’s actual formulation. Back then, the flaws where hidden, and the welfare state functioned smoothly enough. Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, inequality has risen, wealth has been more concentrated, the poor have been deprived of the capacity to own assets. Even if Blond is correct in these assumptions (and his work is , while light on theory or analysis, heavy on detail and facts, Blond knows his history) we can still ask, but so what? If this is the case, it is a sign that the system is flawed, and needs reform, but why put into question the role of the state and promote the community?

Blond, and Cameron, would argue that where the error lies, is in the state eradicating pre-existing social and communitarian bonds, and identities, as well as a social and community based economy, the economy of the local. It has been replaced by a individualism, a pursuit of personal greed, where morality, or as Blond terms it, ‘virtue’ are replaced by a capitalism that utilizes the state to subsidize the poor and build in a structural redundancy and eternal poverty. The state in its efforts to achieve equality, deprive the subject of it’s connection to the community, by its interference in education, housing, healthcare, and welfare. By a dependence on the state to provide wealth, the state short cuts the connection to the local community, we have no vested interest in participation, the only link we have, is to the faceless state. What the answer to this problem is then, for Blond and Cameron, is for the state to realise, that the best way to circumvent this culture of dependence is to promote the replacement of many of it’s tentacles, with self sustaining, communities, where everyone has a sense of participation, and vested interest. The community, free from state interference can decide what to do with regards to education, local spending, the communal environment, the use of resources such as communal property. A shared interest, would reduce crime, loneliness (a term Blond seems particularly fond of ) and promote social harmony, integration, and prosperity.

This analysis, may make a lot of sense, and it is worthy of discussion. However, we must take issue with the assumption that underlies it, the notion of an organic community. The theory goes here, that state is the synthetic, inorganic element, that is seen as invasive, harming some natural tendency for human beings to co-operate in organically generated communities that are apriori preferable. Is this true? Is it not the case, rather, that the term ‘organic’ is illusory here, that any community, is instead already a construct, a semblance of power relations, authority structures, that limit, through social rules, customs, and religious practice, the possibilities of being human? Let us not forget the struggle of dismantling the authority of this supposed organic community, which is a set of impositions, and power relations all too often infused with resentment, envy, and hatred of the other. Even if this is all to often masked, sublimated, or disavowed, it can not be ignored by the philosopher.

Blond simply ignores much of philosophy, in this respect, or discounts it, the philosophies of Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, to name but a few, a tradition of unearthing how this given primitive community, is a construct, and is not necessarily natural, or self evidently good. We might well move beyond this philosophical tradition, and look at the reality, the fight for gay rights, for religious freedom, the fight against racism. This is not to say, that all communities are by definition, are constraints on freedom, or are overtly prejudicial, but they were, more than often not so, and what prevents them from being so now, is not, that that which is ‘organic’ has changed, but the intervention of the authority of the state, to transcend the identity and authority of the local community, to translate the subject’s identity into the language of universal discourse (of universal human rights, the right to universal welfare, universal human dignity) has forced back the influence and tendency of these old communities. Can we ignore the fact that the community is permeated by the state for good reason in many cases? In the protection of religious minorities, of the immigrant? Roll back the intervention, and might those good old fashioned communities revert to how they where, in all respects?

Blond might argue, that this need not be the case, and a complete with drawl of the state is not called for, only in certain areas would it be preferable. But what allows him to say this? That the community, should abandon it’s beliefs and tendencies, in some areas, to become just some supplement to capitalism, that does a better job than the state? This would be fine. All parties call for this, to varying extents. But Blond, and Cameron, assume that withdrawing in certain areas will usher in the return of the community. But do they have any control in how it does? Can they prevent a two tier education system, post code lotteries for instance, by promoting local health authorities and free schools? If they attempt to intervene, is this not then social engineering? The real horror of social engineering comes not from a top down imposition, but in an effort to use pre-existing social systems (such as the tendency for parents to want elite education for their children) to bring about structural changes that always seem organic, but are not, they are constructs. So if Cameron/Blond’s notion of community is not to be cut and run, and hope that the community that replaces it is of your liking, then it is an attempt to engineer a sense of community, that appears organic, but is always guided by the hand of those in power. The relevance of this to the likes of Blond and Cameron might be argued. But the question should be expanded, is the community always preferable, is it not a possible source of inequality? (the difference between communities, who qualifies for participation etc) Is the community not a source of false consciousness, as Marx would point out, that codifies class struggle, alienation, oppression, into an assumed natural stat of affairs? Is it time to celebrate the victories, of the state, in redistribution (not just through the benefits system) in its promotion of individual identity as being primary? When we see what we have achieved, might we not then ask, how can we make it so that the state can do better? Even if we have failed to do this, the possibility is still there.

The Role Of the State: Public vs. Private

One of the problems, is that we automatically buy the argument, as Cameron and Blond do, that the private is always preferable to the public. But is the community not public also? Blond might argue that it is, but it is the right kind of public, because it is in reality, a collective of private interests, defining a public space, by the extent to which their private interests are best served by co-operation. They assume the public should be just this kind of space. Thatcher’s famous claim, that so horrified socialists, that there is ‘no such thing as society’ is often assumed to be the mantra of a type of conservative ideology that is an overly individualistic ‘greed is good’ cut throat ideology where individuals must do anything to get ahead. But the likes of Cameron and Blond understand Thatcher’s statement in a different way, that in reality, society is a collective of private interests, that are best served through co-operation, mutual dependence and investment. There is not space that can be abstracted from this, that is the social. The claim has ontological undertones and parallels, the debate between nihilists, who, when looking at a table, see just a collection of atoms that compose the thing we call table, and the universalist’s, who argue that together, the atoms compose something extra, some ‘sense’ of table, that is more than the sum of its individual elements. This debate is analogous to the debate between socialists and Thatcherites. To be fair to the Thatcherites, the socialists tend to misrepresent there position unfairly.

The problem is, that the state has lost its identity with this disputed space of the public, and is seen as that other great private element, that undermines the interest of the individual. From the libertarian perspective, held by Blond and Cameron, the state is its own private world, with it’s own rules, it is a beast only interested in feeding itself, it’s justification is trampling on the liberties of individuals. There may be some truth to this the state, while often well intentioned, has become an almost self perpetuating entity, the ‘bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy’. We all know about the problems of endless regulation, legislation red tape. It may well be over played, but it has some truth. But the problem is that the state has become a duplicate private other, the opposite of the private other of big business and corporatism. The state needs to be stripped, not of its roles, its structure, as such, but of this closed private nature it has developed.

Why? Because the problem can not be overlooked: in so many cases, the state is the community. The state is the parent, the educator, the support mechanism of millions. The state is vital. Even if it tends to be a simple mechanism of engendering a dependence, this is due to the difficulties of the private nature of the state, the easy option, taken by successive governments, is the easy option, subsidy . Efforts to bring about change, which as we know, is much needed, is always hampered by the quagmire of private interests, strained services, waste, and a lack of inventiveness, which has succeeded in obfuscating the social space, so that those not caught in its web of dependence develop a rabid resentment towards it.

The state is perceived as being privately owned, by the idle, the ‘scrounger’ the only one who benefits from it. The average tax payer can not see the state as there’s, in its benevolent form, it simply doles out money to the undeserving, the only interaction with it that the taxpayer gets, is as a limit on what they can do. But the state is an inheritance as much as the community is. The state is crying out to be opened up, to become fully public, to do the difficult thing, to make the state work for everyone. Instead of, or perhaps in parallel with, empowering the possibilities of the community, the government should enter into a serious discussion of changing not the size of the state, but what the state does. The reason why, we assume the state is bad, and the private is good, is because we overlook the private that exists in the public, in the way that public will in the form of government, meets the hidden spaces and structures of the private. Reclaiming the public space is the difficult task, that Cameron will not attempt, because he knows that simply cutting back the state blindly, while painful, is in the long term a good thing, because the community can pick up the slack, and do the transformational work that it is to difficult to reform the state to achieve. When Cameron states that the public sector is the cause of broken Britain, in many cases, he really means the private in the public sector.

What About Capitalism?

The major oversight, to Blond and Cameron’s vision of a renewed communitarianism, is that it jars with the prevalence of late capitalism. Blond assumes, that capitalism is the problem, the effects of Thatcherism and Blairism, but he makes the continued mistake of conservatism, that where as capitalism is the problem, it must always still be the answer. An obvious retort is, that Blair, as a socialist, was not socialist enough, that his efforts where simply to entrench the culture of subsidy and dependence. Instead of turning our backs on socialism, we need to go further with it, more wealth redistribution, more protection of the individual against the excesses of capitalism, which are only going to get more harmful in the future. But we should ask why there is a culture of subsidy in the first place. It is because of the redundancy, of a significant section of the population, whose very social substance was destroyed by the dominance of the free market, during the 1970‘s and 1980‘s. What holds a community together, is a shared economic culture. Blond knows this. Empowering communities means nothing, allowing them investment in shared assets, is pointless, unless they have an economic role to play in the first place. But do they? Or is not the case that the economy has little room for them?

The fact is, that aspiration is universally held, we all want to have the ‘good job’ a decent wage, we all want the latest products, we all think we have the right to pursue our dreams. We are told, constantly, by capitalism in its incarnations (advertising, media etc) to desire and enjoy, and to desire the fulfilment of all desires. Certain jobs, are seen as being contra to this goal. The jobs taken by those not completely caught up in the matrix of capitalist desire, the immigrants, are the ones who take up these jobs. For those on welfare, they simply can not think to become fruit pickers or toilet cleaners. The wage is too low to meet the demands of aspiration for the effort exerted, so much so, that accessing a black economy, and taking benefits, seems more sensible. So the basic requirement, to solve the problem of the sink estates, is for Blond, economic participation, but it is not likely to happen anytime soon, unless by imposition, by forcing a sense of community (the benefits of which being something of a silver lining) by making people take jobs they do not want. This is not far from happening, but it simply serves to highlight the unfinished, unresolved nature of class struggle, and the critique of capitalism itself, why is it that the poor are forced to take jobs, yet those, who, by chance of birth, into wealth and privilege, are able chose what career they want, career options that provide yet more wealth and privilege for their children? We might as well admit that the ladder of social progress has been pulled away forever.

Capitalism, in it’s basic operation, promotes the individual over the social. It is constantly outdating, obsolescing, existing social identities, practices, it undermines the basic geographical space of community, today, it is possible to be a global nomad, to be born in a suburb of London, work in the city, retire in the south of France . How does this help engender a sense of community? Is a stronger community desirable here? Those who need community, are exactly those who are rooted to the spot, to live and die in the same streets. But they do not have any economic prospects, which would empower a sense of community in the way that Cameron desires it to be. Cutting the benefits they have, is likely to make things worse. Lets be honest here, the lack of community is not the problem. It is the wrong kind of community for the tastes of Cameron and Blond that is the real problem. All too often, it is the very poorest, who have the strongest sense of community. We know this truth, more clear cut and obvious abroad, where in Brazil for example, there is little sense of community amongst the rich elites, gated away, travelling in helicopters, hiding behind private security, there wealth provides everything they need. The greatest sense of community spirit, is found in the favela’s and slums. In the sink estates of Britain, so derided by Blond and Cameron, loneliness is not often as prevalent as is assumed by them. Gang culture, interracial couples, children playing out all hours, hardly lacking community is it? Everyone knows the business of everyone here. There is often, a shared culture of crime/drugs (not always destructive and criminal, often recreational) and a shared access to a black economy. All this, of course, lacks the virtue, demanded by theologians such as Blond, and old Etonian’s like Cameron. Though many elements may be undesirable here, the lack of community is not the main problem. It is an unresolved class struggle, a system that keeps them in poverty, rather than improving their lot in life, their prospects, it forever alienates, drugs, violence, being a means of enjoyment that is cheap and easy. In offering up the opportunities to fulfil the aspirations not lacking in the poorest people in society, might the state then, in a radical reformulation, be what is really needed? Left to its own, society will not deliver this, we know this from the likes of Brazil. The real issues, are never touched upon. Such a reformulation though, is one we are unlikely to get under Cameron, seduced as he is, by the Ideas of people like Blond, and the myths of communitarianism.