Big society, education and democracy
Continuing what seems to be this week’s Economist-watch, there was an article on Cameron’s Big Society ideas, and how, despite myriad flaws with the concept, this part of the Tory manifesto simply wasn’t going to go away.
What the Economist doesn’t note, of course, is that with regard to public institutions such as libraries, this ‘renaissance of voluntarism’ (I kid you note – that’s a direct quote) basically means trying to replace paid experts with ‘volunteers’, to do the same job – thus killing jobs and strong unions in one go, and getting rid, incidentally, of the one way in which anyone other than the government could determine how our libraries are run – by trade union action.
That’s by the by.
What interested me was the way in which the Big Society is presented as regards democratic theory. Everyone knows how representative bodies work. We elect people on the basis of what we think they will do. The Economist presents Big Society as aiming to push one step past this, devolving power to “nano” level.
“Traditionally, [giving powers away] meant beefing up Britain’s important local authorities. But Mr Cameron wants to push power further down, to the ‘nano’ level. This vision sees parents helping to set up new schools, public-sector workers running their own services as co-operatives, and small groups of people volunteering on local projects.”
I would like to take a shot at arguing that this method is far from more democratic than the alternative of strong local authorities. Tory Co-ops and the small groups (or large groups, as Paul has taken to pieces the Tory ‘5000 community organisers‘ policy, billed before the General Election) of volunteers, this blog has dealt with at length. What about the parents helping to set up new schools?
Beyond basic educational concerns (e.g. the integrity of the scientific method, or preventing History relapsing into a paean to Empire, with the concomitant racism), I fail to see that allowing different sections of the community to hive off their children is especially democratic. Certainly in theory it gives a great deal of power to the parents, though as Fiona Millar rightly said in a recent Guardian debate, in reality this usually translates to devolving power to some charity or private provider, with parents unlikely even to be involved in choosing or supervising the headmaster.
But in order to do this, it’s directing resources away from other state schools in the area. So the plan risks creating excess capacity at the expense of other children. There’s also the point that each school has an optimum number of pupils; enough to make economies of scale, few enough to render the school environment safe and manageable. Free schools make this impossible to plan for.
The argument, made by Anders Hultin, chief executive of Gems UK, a private company intending to step into this scheme to start opening schools for profit, is that if the market was allowed to handle the Tory policy, schools would only open in areas with pre-existing demand. I find fault with this argument – demand doesn’t just exist, it can also be whipped up artificially. This is what advertising is for.
So there are ‘externalities’, if you like, to allowing for the willy-nilly creation of new schools (and Cameron’s talk of the actual buildings these free schools might use makes my toes curl). There’s also the more vague externality of permitting further segregation of the school-age populace. Further privatisation of education will be felt in the opposition created between the success of ‘my child’ and the success of every child.
Rather than fix the state system, which should also be much more accountable, via elected school boards and local education authorities, there’s the impetus to simply jump ship. Better education requires more money, intelligently spent, and high-quality teaching. But no more money is being offered and it should be a warning bell that the Dept. of Education is advertising free schools in the same way as Academies: as being exempt from the national collective bargaining agreements with NASUWT and the NUT.
If democracy is the theory that every person should have a say in decisions which affect them, then allowing people to hive themselves into free schools or, or be scaremongered into hiving themselves off, violates that principle. The effects of that decision run far beyond any parents who might be involved, to the whole teaching profession, to the whole of the education system and to whole local areas where allocation of funding must be altered.
In fact, if Academies are anything to go by, and Gove seems to think they’re a useful parallel, then the very parents and teachers responsible for free schools might end up feeling just as excluded.
you have it spot on there Dave.
If we thought New Labour was bad, today’s socially liberal conservative party and their liberal co-conspirators are bringing to the fore a “renaissance of vacuous bollocks”.
Dave: very interesting post. I think you might be right about the effects of free schools, though I can’t say I know enough about it to make a judgment which even approximates informed.
I think your analysis of the democratic aspects of the policy blows open a whole load of questions. First, I am not sure your conception of democracy is complete. One could argue that what is really meant by democracy is control over everything that affects our legitimate interests and does so in a way which is not too remote.
Second, whether democracy is always good. Are there situations where there is an intrinsic value in people being able to determine their own situations without external interference and where there value outweighs the negative of some other people being unable to have a say?
Thirdly, there is a question as to whether representative democracy as currently practised in this country actually gives people a real say. I suspect you would be of the position that it doesn’t. I suspect that it may well be that in mass democracies it may well be very difficult for anyone to have a real say, as their voice is lost amongst the millions, or at least thousands of others.
I think there may also be an argument that there is still democratic control of free schools. If their results are particularly negative the electorate can vote for the party which will revoke the policy.
Raincoat: glasshouses.
I add more when I get back from work Barney – but on your very last point, I agree; we can elect a different government (provided the main electoral alternative promises to get rid of Big Society / Free Schools, though the evidence from Sweden indicates that moderate parties are too afraid of pissing off the ‘middle class) and thus retain democratic control.
My point was simply that this is no more democratic than electing these self-same governments to head up a centralised bureaucracy. ‘Free schools’ are an alternative to ‘beefed up local authorities’ but they are not – contra Mr. Cameron and the Economist – a more democratic alternative. They are less democratic, and just as democratic as what we have now.
Some further remarks on the democratic issues you suggest this article throws up, Barney:
If there is a question over whether representative democracy gives people a ‘real say’ (to borrow your phrase) I would argue that it does – but that this say is necessarily confined within parameters broadly set by the existence of democracy in the context of private property and accumulation of capital. By this I mean, on one level, the people’s representatives form their own stratum of society which are not purely responsive to democratic wishes but to internal and other external pressures.
This say is ‘real’ – that is, it exists. But the constraints are equally real.
My conception of democracy, perhaps it is half-formed, as it comes down to a questions of economic organisation, production surpluses and such – and whether or not there are any conditions under which every man can be permitted to pursue his own good (the abolition of private property being a key element, in my view, to prevent the accumulation of capital and the institutional advantage which follows from it). I won’t push this point any further, and hope you will let the matter rest with my concession.
As for whether democracy is always ‘good’, I suppose I would say that it is not good, but it is necessary. Ideally everyone could learn as they chose, or educate as they chose, and these learnings – by virtue of the classless society in which they took place – would ultimately lead to socially productive ends, even if, in the interim, they involved superstitions and whatnot. But we do not live in my ideal world, and in the interim twixt here and there, democracy is one way of ensuring that we’re all treated equally and fairly.
Dave,
I think its necessary to question the ideology underlying some of your points. I don’t doubt your politics or commitment by the way, I just think your position signifies the extent to which bouregois ideas are pervasive.
You talk about State Education being “fixed”. But, by fixed you mean improved. The problem is no matter how much you “improve” it, it remains Capitalist education. And what is wrong with State capitalist education is not just that it is inadequate due to lack of funding etc., but precisely that it is Capitalist. It is the content that also has to be challenged. I don’t beleive that the former problems can be resolved inside the confines of State Capitalism, the latter definitely can’t. The same is true about Healthcare too as debates 30 years ago within the Conference of Socialist Economists discovered. Part of the problem with the NHS is that the content of the healthcare is itself bourgeois, and shaped around the needs of Capital. That is more obviously true with education.
For that reason the solution does not necessarily at all involve more money. More money that provides better schools or hospitals still filled with bourgeois content still designed to meet the needs of Capital not workers might be worse not better. Asw some socialists health economists discovered its possible for workers to actually suffer from too much bourgeois healthcare, which is geared to expensive treatment after the event rather than prevention or addressing the real causes of ill-health that are rooted in Capitalism itself. These forms of treatment not only keep the idea that ill-health is something that is the responsibility of the individual worker which the Capitalist State has to “cure”, thereby removing the focus away from Capitalism as the cause, but also involve the expenditure of large sums of money that just happen to find their way into the pockets of large Capitalist enterprises. Healthcare could be improved significantly – it already has due to rising living conditions which are far more responsible for longer lifespand than healthcare developments – if the focus was on prevention, on identifying Capitalism as the major cause of workers ill-health, and if action was taken to address that cause. The same is true of education. All studies show that kids from deprived backgrounds do worse at school. Simply spending more money on schools will not change that, it certainly will not change the bouregois content of what is piped into kids minds.
I welcome the idea of free schools, and the fact that the Co-op is getting interested in setting up schools, a function it performed long before the State. Its up to socialists to organise workers both as school students and parents and teachers to take over these schools, ensure they are truly demcoratic in a way that State Schools never can be, and that in so doing we begin to clear our kids minds of the bourgeois crap that the Capitalist State has been free to indoctrinate them with for the last 100 years.
Dave: I didn’t mean it to be a matter of concession. I find democracy and our relation to it one of the hardest ideas to grapple with – I was more interested in what ou had to say than any pointless point scoring exercise. Thank you for yuor reply, I will try and digest it when I’m sober.
Boffy: could you give concrete examples of bourgeois education and healthcare? I’m quite confused by the example of healthcare – particularly as it has been a constant drive of governments for at least 14 years to try and improve prevention to save the resources spent on cure. I’m also curious how the real causes of ill health are rooted in capitalism. Whilst some are (stress related coronary disease etc) with many of the big killers I struggle to see the connexion – unless of course only capitalists smoke.
Barney,
There have been many articles and discussion on this in the past. I was reading the other day an old one by Mick Carpenter in Capital & Class 11, entitled “Left Orthodoxy and the Politics of Health”. Actually, your comments prove the point the article and I was making. The focus on “prevention” is framed purely in bourgeois terms. Take your smoking example. What it is saying is that the reason many workers, particularly poor workers are ill is because its their own fault, its because they are stupid and don’t look after themselves. Could it be that the reason workers, and particularly poor workers smoke, or drink too much, or eat poor diets, and don’t taek enough exercise is correlated to their economic and social position?
The amounts spent on actual Primary Care, and real prevention, for example, Health & Safety, which the Government is going to reduce, and which bouregois ideology continually ridicules, are pitiful compared to the amounts spent on building and running big, shiny new centralised hospitals, where bureaucrats can roam, where high paid consultants can choose their working hours, bunking off to play Gold on a Friday, and which provide lucrative contracts for construction and equipment companies. The same is true for the vast amounts of drugs issued on prescription, many of which socialist health specialists hyave said do more harm than good, certainly compared with dealing with the underlying causes of Depression etc. Moreover, as Mick Carpenter says in his piece he Health Care is commoditised, it is about what you are going to be “sold”, rather than what you decide you want, because their is no means by which workers can ctually determine what healthcare they want.
With Education the situation is obvious. Back in the early 80′s I was teaching in an FE College to kids drafted their because they were on a YOPS course. I spoke to another lecturer at the time, a middle aged woman, who beleived she was not political. I asked her what kind of things she was talking to the kids about. Her whole emphasis was on what they had to do as individuals to get a job, or another words just as with ill-health, the fact they were out of work, was made to be in some sense a failing in them, their fault, their responsibility. One comment stood out, she said, “I talk to them about doing a ‘Fair Day’s Work For A fair Days Pay.” She honestly beleived that was politically and ideologically neutral! I also remember in the early 70′s when I was at College myself, being told by a Politics lecturer that, however, good the arguments we might have for abolition of the Monarchy, when we wrote the essay the conclusion was it should be retained, if we wanted the external markers to pass it. I could recite many similar examples from when I was at school.
In the 1960′s marxists had no problem identifying the State as workers’ enemy, nor of describing those aspects of the State such as Social Work, Education and so on as being merely the State’s “soft cops”, part of its ideological arm, as opposed to the “bodies of armed men”. The change came in the late 1970′s, and 80′s, when first Wilson/Callaghan, and then Thatcher began to introduce cuts in the Welfare State. Basing itself on a politics of lesser-evilism, large sections of the Left in opposing the Cuts, simply ended up defending the status quo, and defending Welfarism, rather than continuing to attack the bourgeois nature of the State in all its manifestations, whilst opposing the cuts and privatisation. It had no alternative to provide, because its generally Leninist/Luxemburgist model meant that nothing outside Economistic struggle, and incremental Party Building could be done, and that the solution was “The revolution” sometime in the future, the date of which has been continually moved further and further away.
Its odd that a revolutionary marxist movement that in its vibrant period vehemently opposed the State, and argued for workers self-activity, that decried Welfarism because of the way it undermined workers and tied them to that State, that ridiculed the reformists and revisionists for beleiving that Socialism could be brought about by a gradual extension of the Capitalist State, and by redistributive taxation, now only keeps those ideas for its theoretical works, its day Schools and so on, and yet in its practical activity argues for all those things. It is rather ridiculous that there are organisations that boldly proclaim the comments of Max Shachtman about “Capitalism’s headfixing industry”, meaning primarily its schools, colleges and other ideological tools, and yet defend uncritically that very same “industry”.
Marxists have to be like the Plebs at the beginning of the last century implacably opposed to the bouregois state, and bouregois ideology in all its guises, and that means demanding complete independence from it.
Carpenter quotes a Poem by Brecht, which goes some way to summing it up.
A Worker’s Speech To A Doctor
When we come to you
Our rags are torn off us
And you listen all over our naked body.
As to the cause of our illness
One glance at our rags would
Tell you more. It is the same cause that wears out
Our bodies and our clothes.
The pain in our shoulder comes
You say from the damp: and this is also the reason
For the stain on the wall of our flat.
So tell us:
Where does the damp come from?
-Bertolt Brecht
Boffy – thank you for the full explanation. I mostly agree with your points, though not with the meaning of the smoking example – I smoke.
Education is bourgeois. Education is always ideological. Not so sure about healthcare – the drive to prevent diseases seems to me to be fairly serious i.e. the health and safety culture. Which yes people moan about, but it is still there.
Moreover there are many potential explanations for the phenomena you describe. But I guess you would describe them all as doctors’ self interest (oh, by the way, my father was a consultant; I seem to remember not seeing him apart from Sundays until I was 15 because he was always at work. Maybe he was playing golf).
How exactly would you redesign healthcare to make it unbourgeois?
The choice of poem is interesting. My experience of working in a metal shop was that most of the workers didn’t work in rags. The state has lifted the heal of oppression quite considerably.
Healthcare is bourgeois. Its function is to supply Capital with the workers it needs. Carpenter who worked as a nurse describes it in the terms they used as “hatch, patch and dispatch”. It is not in any real sense designed to meet workers health needs, and in any case has no means of identifying them, because workers have no control over it to be able to express what those needs are. And, although, I am in favour of a campaign for such democratic control, I have a duty as a Marxist to point out to workers, in advance that outside an outright struggle for state power, there is no way on Earth that Capital will simply grant it such democratic control, and so workers will need a strategy to seize parts of the system wherever they can, and bring them directly under workers ownership and control.
What I thought was interesting about the Gerry Robinson series on the NHS was that it was NOT an argument in favour of privatisation, but was very sympathetic to the ordinary workers within the NHS, and excoriating against the almost feudal, hierarchy of the NHS (something it shares with the school), and the incompetence and inefficiency of the Management. And, there was no doubting in the hospital that he visited at the time that one reason for the inefficient use of Operating Theatres WAS that Consultants did not want to operate on a Friday afternoon because it conflicted with their Golf. Of course, as a management Guru he beleives that the problem can be solved by simply better management. That is as unrealistic as the demand for Workers Control.
As for workers in rags. Its not the State that has got workers out of rags, or even “class struggle”, it is simply the development of Capitalism, the accumulation of Capital, and the effect on the Supply and demand for Labour Power, as Marx and Engels explained. But, the fact that some things have improved for workers does not mean that their problems have been resolved. Capital hid the cosnequences of asbestos when it suited it. Today, the majority of workers work with their brain rather than their hands, and con sequently we see the types of illness being those of the Mind. yet, read the gutter press, look at the various Absentee management policies etc. and you will see the same thing, either a denial that these illnesses are in any way due to the work, an emphasis on the idea that they are the workers fault (made worse by a general unwillingness in society to view mental illness in the same way it does other ilnesses), and frequently a suggestion that those suffering are just making it up, sciving etc. or should just pull themselves together.
Only when workers have control of their healthcare can it begin to shed its bourgeois content, and control can only come from ownership.
So you are basing your assessment of consultants on a TV program…
“Healthcare’s function is to produce workers for capital.” Unnuanced ideology. Of course that is a driver, but a respect for those persons’ lives is also a principle which undergirds the NHS.
There is no doubt a lot of truth in the statement that people don’t get the healthcare they want/need. But do all the problems really stem from the lack of workers’ control? Or do they actually also stem from the lack of information about what an individual worker needs? Working out healthcare demands is inherently challenging because, inter alia, the subject of the treatment lacks the information to decide what they need.
I’m glad you appreciate the advances capitalism has allowed. But as capital runs the state I suppose we can give the state some credit as well. Your analysis of the healthcare problems is again unnuanced ideology. Talking of workers problems as a block which either have or have not been resolved is too simplistic. Some have been resolved, others haven’t. Stress/depression/etc have always existed. Mental health issues are a problem which have always been there and haven’t been addressed – not the new manifestation of one generic problem set.
The faults you identify are undoubtedly present. They need to be corrected and I think there is progress on these. There is increasing recognition that mental healthcare is poor and the issue still stigmatised, and there are attempts being made to combat this.
I’m curious as to how patient ownership of healthcare would improve the situation.
I am basing my evaluation of Consultants on the fact that hospitals operate inefficiently in general, that workers in the NHS report the same kinds of hierarchy and bureaucracy, and yes if evidence is provided in a TV programme or not then it has to be taken into account. What is the alternative we accept your view of Consultants based on your personal observation as a kid that your Father was out of the house a lot???
I have no doubt that many ordinary workers in the Health Service have a concern for patients. I have no doubt that many policemen have a concern for protecting law and order. That does not change the nature of either institution, and the class interests they serve. Do all the problems stem from a lack of Workers Control? No clearly not, but the problem of bouregois content stems from the lack of workers control. Dealing with that is the first step to being able to address the other problems of Workers health.
I think its your analysis that is unnuanced. The Accumulation of Capital does automatically lead to increases in workers living standards – despite Capital’s drive to reduce them and to maximise profits – but, the concomitant of that as marx demonstrates is that at the same time it makes them more affluent (higher real living standards) it impoverishes them (reducing actual wealth in reducing the share of wages in total output, removing them further from the ownership of Capital) and thereby enslaves them, and alienates them even more. The State in its economic function only replicates that contradiction.
Again your analysis is unnuanced in rleation to mental health. The question is not whether or not Mental health problems have always existed or not, but their specific nature under Capitalism, and the way in which bouregois healthcare emphasises the individual nature of the problem rather than the socio-economic causes of it. Related to that is the commoditised form of the treatment. Furthermore, it is necessary to look at and understand the nature of the large increase in Mental health problems, and how that is related to the changing labour process.
Worker ownership of healthcare would be free of many of the bourgeois constraints of State Capitalist and Private capitalist provision. It would enable new types of views of healthcare to develop that would start from the provision of healthcare as a USe Value not as a commodity. It would facilitate the development of collective responses and analyses of the causes of health problems that located those causes within workers economic and social environments, and could then concentrate on attempting to focus society’s attention on those problems. It would locate the problem of workers health within the context of Capitalism, and would thereby focus attention on the need to replace Capitalism itself. I think we both know that the current State Capitalist health system most certainly is not going to do that, any more than the State capitalist Education system is going to prepare kids for adult life by explaining to them why unemployment is caused by an irrational economic system!
pointless volunteer work passed down to the bottom … this is just one aspect of the big society that pisses me off so Here’s a send up of David Cameron’s Big Society!
this video takes the piss out of the topic of national service required by all 16 year-olds, starting summer 2011
ironically this film was made entirely by young volunteers at a london charity
view here:
http://www.worldbytes.org/the-big-society-in-action/