A critique of the conservative Big Society program

1. The ‘transition movement’ green critique:

Excerpted from an article by Alexis Rowell, of Transition Belize:

“What worries me about the Big Society is that I see little understanding of the real underlying problems of our society – materialism (ie capitalism), globalisation of production (as opposed to the spread of ideas) and an unwillingness to live in tune with nature leading to depletion of natural resources. The Big Society takes a lot of interesting ideas, but it never really grapples with the problem of Tesco (which I use as a metaphor for big business).

In an interview with Transition Culture, Philip Blond said that Tesco would have to change so that local businesses can exist cheek by jowl with Tesco:

“I think tackling the ‘Tesco-isation’, if you put it like that, is part of the answer, but also the dominant supermarket players are also going to be part of the answer. I think the point with supermarkets isn’t that they are going to be eliminated, not least because many people wouldn’t want that, but it is actually getting them to operate differently, and to operate differently in a way that works with locality and with other needs, diversification of the food supply, more localised provision, market making rather than market dominating, and I think everybody will have a role, and they will go from big to small. “We don’t want to get in a position of just defending the small against the big, what we want is all modes present, in a way that one mode doesn’t dominate other modes, so we don’t have a purely local economy, because that isn’t sustainable, nor do we have a purely global economy because that isn’t sustainable. We need the inter-penetration of each order or each sphere by the other.”

Later in the conversation he says: “There’s no turning the clock back, no opposing globalisation. The point is rather to orient globalisation towards augmenting the local rather than eliminating it.”

I don’t see anywhere in that interview, or in anything Phillip Blond or David Cameron have said before or since, any convincing explanation of how you can make Tesco and local shops work well together. All the evidence is that out of store supermarkets destroy town centres, that supermarkets lead to money and resources leaking out of local economies, that town centre supermarkets lead to the closure of independent food shops. How would the Big Society prevent that? By educating residents to want to buy local? That’s a lovely idea but it’s naive.

Breaking up the banks and going back to small regional banks or mutual societies is another laudable intention, but how do you restrain 21st century capitalism and the destructive force that is maximisation of shareholder value so as to allow small financial institutions to thrive? How do you change the values of society back to something where “Small is Beautiful”? How do you prevent international capital from taking highly leveraged bets against countries and companies?

I’m all for smaller classes and smaller schools that are closer to where children live, and I’m a big fan of community clinics providing all but emergency services (as in much of France) but if all schools and hospital departments are set free to run themselves and charge whatever they like, then how is that different from the old Thatcherite approaches – privatisation, trickle down and get on your bike?

I don’t want to throw out the Big Society concept. I think there is something there. But at the moment it feels like a collection of ideas floating on the surface with no real understanding of why we are in crisis and no real framework for solving the crisis.

The problem isn’t a dichotomy of socialist big government versus rightwing libertarianism, which Phillip Blond says he’s trying to get away from – the problem is the underlying values of the consumer society. And the solution is not to give those who are at the margins of society more assets so that they can play at the materialist roulette table – the solution is to change the underlying values of society. Where for example is the Big Society analysis of the gap between needs and wants which has been created and exploited by the advertising industry in the modern capitalist era?

So this is, I think, where Transitioners and other deep green thinkers part company with the Big Society. We see climate change, resource depletion, globalisation of production, maximisation of shareholder value, industrialised food, debt overhang, asset bubbles, financial crisis, oil wars etc as symptoms of a society running out of control, whereas the proponents of the Big Society simply want to tweak the model to allow a breed of New Victorian social entrepreneur to take their place alongside the Murdochs, the Leahys and the Trumps of the world.”

2. A left critique by Andy Robinson:

“I wouldn’t take this kind of discursive play too seriously if I were you. First off, governments everywhere – especially authoritarian ones – rely on patronage machines which are ways to keep active “civil society” agents pliant and compliant. Increasingly today, this is done through “adverse incorporation”, where “civil society” groups are guaranteed little if anything, having to compete for funding and make themselves look compliant in advance to have a chance to qualify, without the guarantee of patronage which goes with old-fashioned patronage structures. The approach first emerged in the global South, as the main form of management in “weak” states, and takes forms similar to those emerging in the North most clearly in Latin America, particularly the “Third Way” regimes, and South Africa. It has particularly taken off in the neoliberal era, both as a means of managing social movements (see William Robinson’s “Promoting Polyarchy”) and as a way of privatising or “outsourcing” services by putting them in the hands of NGOs and local groups (it is also a very effective means to re-package statist rent-extraction in terms acceptable to neoliberals, anf often functions in this way, with elite-front NGOs replacing elite-front state agencies as recipients of donor funding). It has been brought into the global North mainly by “Third Way” regimes as a way to close down political space to their left so as to stabilise capitalism. It was used quite effectively by the Blairites to head off a lot of potential critical voices by drawing them into the funding bonanza. So the Tories are continuing “business as usual” for the British state. The difference is that they will suddenly (and viciously) cut off a lot of the funding lines set up by the Blairites (e.g. the sudden scrapping of five development education patronage schemes) and set up their own, slightly different ones, aimed at their own constituency. Since it is a sensible logistical strategy, it is not too surprising that the Conservatives have chosen to imitate it, though I was expecting them to show less strategic intelligence.

It isn’t a move towards a peer-to-peer society because it is primarily a way in which grassroots initiatives are incorporated into the dominant power-apparatus. Patron-client networks are more like peer-to-peer networks than are standard hierarchical states, but nevertheless, they are hierarchical networks and not peer-to-peer. In this case, the hierarchical agent (the government funder) has absolute veto on the extent and direction on the network, and will use this power to perform vertical integration functions which decompose horizontal power. Potential sites of horizontality – community projects, NGOs, grassroots groups – come under pressure to adopt hierarchical internal structures and vertical orientations in order to maximise their chances of getting funding. This is because the situation is competitive, and competitive advantage is obtained by having skills of a vertical type (form-filling, accounting, formal accountability, clear procedures, permanent organisational structures) – as well as by sharing, or at least being able to put up a public appearance of sharing, the substantive content of the dominant ideology (e.g. selling projects as enhancing competitiveness and employability in an area, or as fitting into one or another priority spending area – put simply, an anti-racist group is unlikely to get funding to oppose racism, but has a chance of getting it if they can couch their work as “combating violent extremism” or “enhancing community cohesion”; grassroots-level groups thus get incorporated into promoting the government’s rhetoric even when they don’t get funding).

Hence, the “rule-setting” in the relationship is entirely vertical. I have come across rare cases where this process is subverted by extremely strategically skilled agents who are able to represent dissident projects in conventional terms, and obtain funding in certain of the looser competitive processes, but the normal process is a process of gleichschaltung or vertical articulation. Remember, also, that the fact that most existing NGOs and community and grassroots groups are drawn into the process reduces the critical space, that those who remain outside are weakened both by their lack of other NGO/grassroots allies and by their lack of funding, and that the process makes it difficult for new groups to emerge without being drawn into the process. The effect of vertical competitive integration is horizontal decomposition: links among groups which might otherwise coalesce as a dissident space are undermined by the small compromises each group makes in attempts to make the most of the funding system.

On the whole, I would say this election has changed very little. The current government – probably because it is a coalition – has been decidedly less kneejerk-y than its predecessor, and has not yet attempted anything really drastic (a couple of qualifiers: the Tories are more likely to bring in single big controversial packages than Labour, reducing the need for constant kneejerk micro-crackdowns, and they would be more forthright about their intent to do so if they were not in a coalition) but the same basic discourse and the same overall framework. In any case, the new government does not need further repressive measures – the existing process is locked in. The outlines of the neototalitarian regime have been established in a series of “Enabling Acts” which set the parameters for the regime, most notably the various counter-terrorism laws, the harassment laws, the laws on protest, the ASBO / irregular state orders regime, RIPA and CCA. Since none of these acts have been or are likely to be repealed or modified, and since their day-to-day operation rests with the functionaries of governmentality (from police and PCSO’s to local councils and university management groups), the change in government has little or no effect on the overall regime-type. The existing practices will not only persist but worsen through dynamics operating outside the electoral space. To show this clearly, take the case of the promise that peaceful protest will be re-legalised. Within days of this announcement, protesters set up a Democracy Camp in Parliament Square. Within a few more days, police persecution had begun, and the London Mayor was taking court action to get the (peaceful) protesters removed – using the twin arguments that exercising the right to protest interferes with exercise of the right to protest, and that protests deemed unsightly by Tories might interfere with business and tourism. It is business as usual with a new veneer.”

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