November 14, 2009
Cruddas’ Communitarianism
Jon Cruddas MP put in an appearance at today’s Compass AGM. Say what you like about Cruddas (and I prefer to say that I like), he’s a damn good public speaker who exhibits rare qualities in a modern politician: heart-felt commitment, passionate belief, and a healthy disregard for spin, sanitisation and calculated presentation.
But I don’t agree with everything he says, and aspects of his leftwing communitarianism make me uncomfortable.
Cruddas relayed an anecdote-cum-metaphor, describing an old lady he’d met whilst canvasing one of his wards. 86 and living alone, this old lady didn’t get out much and her view onto the outside world was restricted – physically, but in large measure conceptually – to the street outside her front door. The man living opposite her had, however, dumped a mattress in his front garden which has been festering away for weeks. This rotting mattress came to dominate the old lady’s view of everything; as Cruddas put it, her whole world became filtered “through the prism of the mattress”.
This symbol of decay and degeneration was put to good use by Cruddas as a metaphor for wider political crisis and general feelings of helplessness – and they’re solution. He recounted how he and his colleagues had asked the man responsible for the mattress to remove it, but the man refused and ignored them (despite their offering a number to call which would mean the council taking it away for free). Spurred on by this, Cruddas and Co. organised a “No Eye Sore” campaign for the ward, and established petitions so that residents who felt neighbours were bringing down the aesthetic of the neighbourhood could campaign to request nuisance litterers to stop, and if they didn’t stop (despite being offered free council help), the council could step in and fine them the equivalent of the cost of sorting out the mess.
Cruddas hailed this as a great success. Not only did the ward start to become much nicer looking, but this effect reverberated into the political; because people were taking pride in their environment and feeling better about it, they felt enfranchised, connected and like they were making their lives better. Furthermore, by working together to achieve a common goal, a sense of solidarity and achievement was fostered which was genuinely good for the residents who before had felt atomised, cut-off, powerless and surrounded by decay. Cruddas generalised this metaphor to wider society: that we need to create a spirit of collective endeavour, fraternal solidarity, and community empowerment to end the “atomisation” of much of present society (especially amongst the poor working classes).
So what’s my problem with this explicitly communitarian view of people coming together and reclaiming a public space (or a public thing, a Res Publica, maybe?), working together and experiencing a rejuvenation of the political through communal action?
Well it’s not a stereotypical (and naive) “liberal” thought that people should have unfettered rights (spheres of non-interference, if you like) to dump things in their front gardens (i’m here going to focus on Cruddas’ micro example as a way of building up to macro points). I think that front gardens, and their disuse and lack of upkeep, can sufficiently be considered public spaces to the extent that other people have rights over them too, even if they don’t own them. That is, whilst Joe Bloggs has a right to dump things in his (privately owned) front garden, the rest of the individuals in the street may well have rights not to have parts of their environment turned into a wasteheap, which makes them depressed, apathetic, disconnected and frustrated. (And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration; the aesthetics of one’s environment have a significant impact upon one’s happiness and well-being, hence people should surely have rights over their environment and how it looks). So i’m not against a group of residents launching a “No Eye Sore” campaign and pitting their rights to live in a nice environment against the rights of some individuals to ruin their little chunks of that environment, when ruining those chunks impact upon the lives of others.
So I can back a Cruddas-style campaign.
What bothered me, however, was Cruddas’ reaction to a question from the floor. A very insightful and articulate man behind me asked Cruddas what happened to the bloke who wouldn’t get rid of his mattress. Cruddas laughed and joked that it was “only a metaphor”, but when pressed on this issue he came out with: “look, that guy, he was a bad man. He’s gone now. We don’t need to worry about him.” And that’s the point that set my alarm bells ringing.
Although Cruddas was partly joking, the fact that he thought this was just a joke is instructive, I think. On Cruddas’ conception of the political, there is the community, those who want to work as part of it to achieve common goals, and those who stand in the way and must be defeated. Now I can buy all of that. Politics is about conflict, as we should all know by now. But where I differ from Cruddas is that I am not prepared to just dismiss the outsider, the troublemaker, the recalcitrant mattress-dumper as a bad man, even as an off-the-cuff joke. I want to say he’s a man with rights, albeit rights which in this case we are going to over-rule in the name of the rights of others. I want to admit that there is an important value conflict here, and confess that this is important and difficult, and its resolution may in some ways be unpleasant. I do not want to dismiss the recalcitrant as merely bad men, as though that closed the issue and uncomfortable ethical questions about how we use power over people in political society are thereby disolved into the ether of community.
It’s that dissolution of ethical conflict which I find troubling about Cruddas’ communitarianism, and which i’ve picked up on before, but never been able to discern as clearly as I did today. Community and civic engagement is important, yes: but other things matter too, and if you want to attack “neoliberalism” for its atomisation, there’s a real danger of throwing some ethical babies out with the conceptual bathwater.
However that’s not the end of the story. Cruddas is, in general, offering a left-wing communitarian critique of what he sees as the failings of a modern, capitalist-driven, atomised broadly liberal society. Personally, I believe that the best way to critique that society is from a broadly liberal perspective that pays more attention to things like equality of income, wealth and opportunity than simple non-interference and freedom for the market, but which also allows for the kind of community-driven fraternal political “actualisation” that Cruddas favours within the context of recognising the limits of communities and the rights people need to have (even if ultimately over-ruled) vis-a-vis those communities.
Thus, I don’t see my views as necessarily completely incompatible with Cruddas’, even though aspects of his communitarianism trouble me. And I can tell you one thing for definite: I sure as hell would prefer a world where Cruddas’ style communitarian leftism was driving the agenda (hopefully tempered by thoughts from my camp) than the world of David Cameron, his Old Etonian set, and the Thatcherite anti-societal market liberalism that lurks behind the respectable facade painted for the nasty party.
This is important. The left is almost defined by historical faction and schism; by bickering over unimportant and insignificant differences in ideology or practice, whilst the right takes and holds power. So I agreed with Neal Lawson, Compass chair, that the left (I refuse to use the stupid “progressive” word) needs to put aside its differences and find common ground to both counteract the political right, and find new strategies and ideals in a post-New Labour world. Compass, for example, needs to be prepared to back not just Labour, but where appropriate, the Lib Dems and the Greens too, as well as smaller factions, parties, NGOs and civil society groups. Labour has no monopoly on wisdom, and it’s foolish in the extreme to freeze people out simply because they don’t carry rose-adorned cards.
So I’m going to take Lawson’s thoughts, and defy the history of the broad tribe to which I attach myself: Jon Cruddas, there are things about your communitarianism I don’t like, but at the end of the day we’re on the same side. I’ll work with you, if you’ll work with me*.
–
* Metaphorically…unless you want to help me write a half-sensible thesis proposal about David Hume’s theory of obligation, which I am conspicuously failing to do a good job of by myself.
links for 2009-11-14 « Rumblegumption said,
November 15, 2009 at 12:37 am
[...] Cruddas’ Communitarianism « Bad Conscience [...]
Peter said,
November 15, 2009 at 1:50 am
Isn’t what Cruddas said compatible with your anti-communitarian* thought that the man is “a man with rights, albeit rights which in this case we are going to over-rule in the name of the rights of other”? Cruddas (if he’s not an idiot) would surely agree with you there.
Paul Sagar said,
November 15, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Peter,
Yes I’m sure he would. My point however is more about revealed sentiments and attitudes though.
The sort of communitarianism Cruddas espouses concerns me because it tends to lend itself to a kind of groupthink, a kind of value-conditioning whereby “the community” gets to determine what is and is not acceptable, and that those viewed as on the wrong side of that divide are viewed – and possibly treated – in ways that concern me at an ethical level regarding the integrity of individuals, and the equal concern and respect I think the state should at least attempt to extend to them.
It’s tricky stuff, I know. But think about my concern another way: the kind of community-based value that Cruddas style communitarianism leads to can be troubling. In the case above it isn’t so troubling, because I think we probably could agree that the “bad man” needed to lose in this particular conflict. What troubles me is the possibility of more ambiguous circumstances, or of cases when the community acts in a manner which is prejudicial to the interests of certain “outsiders” and where I don’t find that I’m the side (in terms of values) of the community.
OK I’m not expressing myself very well, but I see liberal rights-talk as trying to prioritise the rights of certain individuals over the values of the community. This doesn’t mean that rights will always be inviolable and never in conflict, but it seems to me a better safeguard against things turning nasty.
It seems that the sort of leftwing communitarianism that Cruddas ascribes to has a built-in optimism about the collective group communally discovering and enforcing “the good” in a way we can be happy with, that I’m not sure I share. I guess it’s about fairly deep ethical dispositions, but I’m now descending into gobbldegook, really.
But does what I’m saying make any sort of sense at all? Or is it just crap?
Ste For Sure said,
November 15, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I think you are making sense.
Prevent anti-social arseholes behaving anti-socially is a worthwhile goal. And if this is done democratically through community-based structures, then even better….but the kind of community I want doesn’t just consign said “arseholes” to the scrapheap. We want an inclusive approach to social problems that tries to solve problems at their deep roots which means not just simply punishing or ostracising the anti-social.
I don’t think you need to worry too much about more ambiguous community values that you yourself may be out of step with however. I don’t think there is a risk of a runaway “group think” oppressing people for being different.
Ste For Sure said,
November 15, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I think I can add…
A community-based approach to dealing with anti-social deviants is necessary as well.
I always remember a nice bit in Kropotkin about this, where he says that in present society (for him early 20th cent. of course) we have lost the impulse to ask ourselves “what have WE done to let THIS happen” when somebody commits a crime for example. That is, a sense of community responsibility. When people do awful things, the natural response should be to assume that there is something wrong at the social level that leads people to want to behave like that – and so we need to address the problem as a society, not just “decent members of the community” versus the baddies.
I think perhaps you are getting at something like this, no?
Bill le Breton said,
November 19, 2009 at 2:35 pm
“I don’t like the fact he’s kept a dirty rat infested mattress in his front garden, but I’ll defend to the death his right to do so.”
Why’s the mattress there? Why doesn’t it affect him when he looks out of the window, or does it?
“I couldn’t care a fuck,” he says.
Why doesn’t he care a fuck?
Because whatever he does he thinks it won’t make a difference. The ‘system’ is stacked against him. He is certain of that. The good things are out of reach and he feels totally shat upon not by everyone and everything outside that community. He’d use ‘we’ and include the old lady and Cruddas; he would say ‘we’ because no matter how alone he feels he still feels part of that community all like himself cut out of the mainstream (isolates). Whatever he does it won’t make a difference. Move the mattress, tidy the garden, find a training course. No job, no money, no prospects just ‘them lot’ down the Job Centre (bureaucrats) or the shits that screw you when you work for them (the market). Or those fuckers who tell you what to do with your empty beer cans and go on about their precious environment and the fact that ‘we’re all in this tobloodygether and need to behave the way ‘they’ do. (egalitarians).
Oddly in this world if Cruddas and his gang came round and smacked him one and told him to shove off with his fucking mattress he wouldn’t complain. “We deal with our own round here,” he’d say. “Even when that means it’s you who get dealt with?” Sure. The person with the mattress was not an outsider in this community nor was Cruddas, nor was the old lady. The community itself was outside other, neighbouring communities.
So there’s this strange mix of isolation and community going on at the same time. Isolated, except when attacked by outsiders (bureaucrats, bosses and nosy-parkers) when he/”we” are part of ‘round here’. There’s rough justice within, that’s expected and accepted, but when outsiders intrude, that’s injustice, keenly felt. “Mind you own bloody business.”
Of course it’s a life vulnerable to alcoholism and addiction, to dependence, to unintended pregnancies; it’s brutal and shorter than it need be, it’s full of talent and opportunities not seen and not taken.
But the way is through opportunities, plenty of them; offered, rejected, offered again and again.
“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden.”
Hungover from a party at the FT, I turn to the FT « Freethinking Economist said,
November 19, 2009 at 4:49 pm
[...] enjoyed Paul’s attack on Left economic illiteracy, I was glad to read a sceptical take on Cruddas’s communitarianism. I once tried to count the ISMs in a Cruddas article, and gave up after 20. What would you do? [...]
mariachi vargas said,
September 27, 2011 at 1:46 am
Curiously, a well executed read