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The conservative hold on ‘community’ is even more theoretically tenuous. The conservatives have discovered community, one might conclude from looking at their recent writings and speeches as a proxy for ‘order’. Markets need ‘order’ so that they can function effectively, and it is no surprise that Burke’s ‘little platoons’, so often quoted by Conservative community enthusiasts, turns out on longer examination to be about order. In the sentence after he makes the claim ‘to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affection’ Burke states’….It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind’( Willetts 1992:15) : not far away from Oliver Letwin’s concept of ‘the neighbourly society’ where ‘’one generation conveys by intimation and emulation to the next the indescribably complex and subtle requirements of social tranquillity in a given setting’. Labour, on the other hand, does, in its 1995 constitution, make the transition, almost by accident, one might think from the practical espousal of ‘community’ to the theoretical adoption of what is largely a ‘communitarian’ constitution. Not only does it make a statement of the objective superiority of the community, or at least the collective in achieving change: (‘by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone’) echoing a central theme of ‘political Communitarianism’ it specifically enshrines community responsibilities alongside rights: ‘…where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect’. The constitution therefore explicitly links rights that stem from membership of a community and the obligations that are placed upon the member of the community thereby. What Labour has done by the substitution of new clause four for old clause four is to shift its definition of the operating arena of efficacious collective action from the state to the community. This is by no means a historical ideological break: for whilst Labour through Old clause four was ideologically committed to state command socialism there always existed within the Party strands of thought, informing and softening the often stark rhetoric of official ‘State socialist’ policy. Some examples: the clarion cycling clubs: motto ‘fellowship is life: lack of fellowship is death’ centred around the Socialist newspaper ‘The clarion’ and which expanded in the 1920s into clarion Choral societies, clarion rambling clubs Clarion clubhouses as an early echo for Socialists of Putnam’s arguments about civic government and ‘social capital’: the long-standing influence of the ‘mutualism’ of the Co-operative Societies and latterly the Co-operative Party as an affiliated Party to the Labour Party itself, and the temporary but significant prominence of ‘Guild Socialism’ in and around the early life of the Party. GDH Cole, its chief protagonist is indeed credited by his political biographer Tony Wright MP as being ‘above all else… a theorist of community, as an expression of fellowship, and the community would need its appropriate instruments of common purpose and self-expression. It was in such a community setting therefore that the state would find its true and proper role as the instrument of community consciousnesses’. (Wright 1979:35) In addition to being, one might say, the re-emergence of this lesser strand of ideology within the Party, ‘new Clause Four’ also, apparently, do two very practical things. Unlike Old Clause Four, it looks as if it can distil itself into policy prescriptions about what ‘rights’ the individual (or the community) can expect from the state and what responsibilities might be claimed by the state in return. It also seems to challenge several decades of liberal orthodoxy about ‘human rights’ and ‘campaigning for rights’ – after all it turns out that at least some of these rights are accompanied by responsibilities as well. But this is where the problems start. Is the ‘rights and responsibilities’ formulation a quasi-Marxist catechism implicitly allowing the state to give or take what individuals thinks of as their rights, and demand tribute for so doing? This sounds very uncomfortable; and in any event the Labour Government, in one of its least lauded but most potentially far-reaching actions enshrined the European Convention of Human Rights into domestic legislation. The problem is that we simply do not know what the phrase ‘rights and responsibilities’ means in the context of government because, left alone, it is too vague to have anything but the most ghostly of shapes as a tool of policy following the logic of community. But not only do we not know: we have not discussed it either. Labour came to Government only two years after declaring that it was constitutionally signed up for ‘rights and responsibilities’. We do know, however, what policies/things have the tag of the rights and responsibilities agenda attached to them, and indeed have been attacked as ‘social policy to reward worthy citizens and discipline irresponsible ones’ (Dwyer 2000:80 q Little 2002:133) or as ‘a morally prescriptive agenda for the social exclusion of marginalized and deviant’ (Hughes 1998:110). These attacks refer to a range of policies that cover what looks like a ‘rights and responsibilities’ landscape: no right for long term unemployed to refuse a training option: compulsory interviews for recipients of single parent benefits: anti-social behaviour orders: parenting orders; locking up the parents of persistent truants and so on. All of these policies may be justified in relation to a ‘bigger picture’ of rights and responsibilities, but since that bigger picture is occluded to say the least, Labour is attacked for its alleged social authoritarianism as if the policies were designed as simple and vindictive attacks on individual liberties. It is an elephant trap that the thin formulation of Labours communitarianism has propelled it towards. But there is a second, more cunningly concealed elephant trap in the path. The critic, if he or she has any subtlety, will compare the list of ‘rights’ Labour is talking about with its list of responsibilities. He or she will then observe what we might call a category mistake. Labour seems to be talking about community responsibilities: that is, responsibilities the individual has to the community in return for the benefits he or she has had from it, but of individual rights: that is, rights that the individual has, as it were, unconditionally, regardless of his or her standing in or benefit from his or her community. Except that, apparently, Labour seems to want recast those unconditional rights so long defended by Liberals as conditional rights in return for accepting a raft of community responsibilities. This is perhaps why it all looks so confused. It is because it is. So we need to start thinking about what we really mean by an account of ‘rights and responsibilities’ that does produce a defensible equation: if we are talking about individual rights, do we really have individual responsibilities to the state that provided these rights to us? That sounds a bit odd, but is, apparently, what Giddens thinks is the nature of the relationship.
This seems to be a potentially disastrous formulation. Is it really possible to derive individual obligations from individual rights in the way Giddens suggests? On the face of it, he seems to be saying that because the state undertakes a responsibility for me, I have in turn some kind of individual responsibility to the state. I literally ‘owe’ it to the state. This seems suspiciously close to the Hobbesian contract, whereby the individual owes unconditional loyalty to the sovereign, because he or she is protected from his or her otherwise ‘nasty brutish and short’ life, and is able because of this to sample the delights of living a little longer and a little better. Etzioni cites this passage of Giddens (in a footnote) as a point of disagreement. (Etzioni 2000:32) The substance of the disagreement is, according to Etzioni that there is not an indissoluble link between rights and responsibilities in the way Giddens suggests. Indeed, he goes as far as to say that “It is a grave moral error to argue that there are no ‘rights without responsibilities’ and vice versa’ (Etzioni 2000:29) Etzioni’s position is that there are, indeed, basic human rights which are not ‘tradable’. “Thus” he says “a person who evades taxes, neglects their children or fails to live up to their social responsibilities in some other way is still entitled to a fair trial, free speech and basic rights” (Ibid: 29) In this, he is surely right. It would be a very odd kind of society indeed for a Government to declare and enforce the idea that, say, a person who did not send their children to school should be convicted of shoplifting without the same consideration being given that would be accorded to the shoplifter who did send their children to school. But this leaves Etzioni in the air as far as the responsibilities end of the equation is concerned. His end position is this: “In short, while rights and responsibilities are complementary and necessitate one another, each has their own moral standing and is part and parcel of ends-based relationships. A good society does not deny a person her basic rights even if she does not live up to her responsibilities, just as it does not exempt from responsibility those whose rights have not been fully honoured” (ibid: 30) He is reduced, almost, to stating that we have responsibilities because we do, that we should be concerned as reasonable members of society for the welfare of others. It is, essentially, a religious concept of obligation masquerading as a secular one. In support of this latter formulation, Etzioni suggests that, conversely the fact that society may have treated an individual unjustly does not exempt them from paying their taxes. It is interesting here that Etzioni refers to ‘basic’ rights, and couches his arguments in terms of the legal system. Paying your taxes is, in a sense, a communitarian act because you may be paying for education although you have no children, or for the upkeep of the local swimming pool even though you do not go swimming. At a national level you may be paying for the upkeep of a standing army equipped with weapons of mass destruction even though you personally are a pacifist But paying your taxes hardly counts as a ‘community responsibility’. It is the nearest you might get to a version of Giddens individual responsibilities: paying my taxes is a part of my responsibility as a citizen but it is not voluntary in the sense that in any way approaches any of the ‘responsibilities’ that are meaningfully discussed in any communitarian argument I have other individual responsibilities as a citizen in respect of the order I might expect my world to consist of. I should not go around murdering my fellow citizens, for example, and not only on the basis of Kant's ‘categorical imperative’: murdering people would disrupt ‘order’ and I will rightly be arrested and prosecuted if I do it or attempt it. By and large, though, the sanction of community does not come into it other than that part of our socialisation into the community is that you don’t murder your neighbours. It is this looseness with argument that seems to cause us to be unclear about what it is we are really talking about when we refer to ‘rights and responsibilities’. For the fact that we can, as an element of the contract of order have a number of basic rights (equivalent, roughly speaking to the menu of human rights that the Labour government has signed up for to enshrine into British law) does not mean that we have to derive ‘community responsibilities’ from no-where, or that we have to make ‘grave moral errors’ in order to establish a viable equation. A good part of the confusion we are in on ‘rights’ comes down to the fact that we are talking about two kinds of rights when we talk about that end of the equation. The first kind we might define as ‘survival’ rights – the kind of rights that are the sine qua non of living a reasonably ordered life within a state that can make a successful claim that it is able to establish its legitimacy and presence over its agreed territorial boundaries. These rights DO have a direct bearing on the state in that it can guarantee these rights if it can pass the ‘control’ test. These will be of the order that the individual can expect security of his or her property, life, reasonable freedom of movement, protection against arbitrary arrest, a fair trial if accused of a crime, and so on. These are only ‘contractual’ in the very wide sense that we might say that, since the State guarantees my survival, I ought to be a bit grateful. But since my membership of that State is not really voluntary, I do not have the choice not to receive these rights. They are in reality, unconditional, and form the basis of the minimum ‘rules for order’ that Conservative theoreticians currently seem intent on confusing with ‘community’. The second kind of rights is associated with a genuine equation – between the rights I gain through access to my community and my responsibility to it. In this context, the State, to varying degrees cannot guarantee this access; it can only set up and maintain the conditions under which that access might be facilitated. It is up to the individual to make the access work. There is also a real sense of voluntary membership associated with such rights: I have the choice not to be a member of a community, but if I am, then there is a tariff for my membership. The State, however, does have a clear role in the maintenance of my community rights, which is why my ‘survival rights’ and my ‘community access rights’ often seem to become entangled. By and large, we will secure better access to our communities and better agency in making access work if we are in receipt of benefits from the state or better still, if we are in work. Community social capital, we know is enhanced by the education of those within communities. Good governance at local and national level is enhanced by a high level of participation in the structures of community decision-making. Clearly, state provision of benefits, of education, of the integrity of structures for local governance, to give just a few examples all serve to give me agency, without which access to my community has little real substance. But in all of these, the state can facilitate, but it cannot enforce. The state can make it more advantageous for the individual to find work, but it cannot force people to work, and nor can it require them to do a good job when they are in the workplace. It can require young people to go to school, and parents to send their children there in the morning, but it cannot make the child actually do anything whilst at school. Because of this, the individual does have responsibility: in return for access to benefits, the individual should have a reasonable responsibility not to cheat the system and to find work if it is possible to do so. The individual, in return for access to schooling, has a reasonable responsibility to profit from the education that is made accessible to him or her. This principle becomes more apparent where we apply the idea of ‘access’ rights to the direct working of the community. Not only does the State have a role in facilitating the agency by which I can exercise my membership of a community, but I have a reasonable expectation that the state will provide me with the circumstances whereby I can access my community and its functions. I should not be arbitrarily excluded, for example, on the grounds of my race or class. I should expect that I should be treated with reasonable respect and tolerance. The State, however, has only limited powers available to it to achieve this. It can outlaw racist remarks and prosecute racist behaviour, but it has only limited leverage on the everyday experience of an individual who is being more subtly discriminated against. It has only the leverage of laying the foundations for, and encouraging community structures and behaviour that stops this happening This is therefore the context in which I can really be said to have a straightforward reciprocal responsibility. My contract in this sense is that if the state is accessing the community on my behalf, than it is up to me to make use of that access, and indeed, the more I do, the more it will be possible for the state to make a reality of the accessibility it has in principle provided. I have a reasonable responsibility to ‘do something’ for my community perhaps in one of the variety of ways that goes towards the building and, maintenance of viable social capital at community level. I have, as it were a moral requirement not to be antisocial. So how might the State assist with the economic agency of an individual where participation in the community is concerned? The key point established about an equation of community rights and responsibilities was that the state does not have a direct relationship with the individual in terms of bestowing community rights, if a communitarian framework for political action is regarded as the right course. The state does have a relationship with the community, but one of encouragement and capacity-building only. So we can say that the State has a capacity building role on both sides of the community equation: encouraging the individual to take responsibility within his or her community for the actions that support it and enhance it, and making available to the individual the basic wherewithal to allow this to happen. Some will say that the Social Security system is, essentially this wherewithal in practice. The allocation on certain conditions of funds to an individual to prevent his or her destitution whilst being out of work or sick, they would say, discharges the States responsibility. But this action whilst undoubtedly having an impact on community agency, might better be viewed as an aspect of individual agency – what use are the (unconditionally guaranteed) individual rights if the individual is starving or destitute and therefore is in no position to exercise them? If we are to make sense of the ability of the individual to access community we must think about more than the requirement that he or she should not actually be starving: and this is where the debate on assets comes in. The introduction of an enabling asset base to the individual does more than keep him or her on a financial life support machine. It enables the individual to decide what to do with that asset, whether it is to invest in his or her community in terms of an asset of place, or to build up a business with the asset, or to advance his or her education. Whatever course is taken, the community is strengthened, and the individual is given agency. The ‘baby bonds’ announcement, made at the most recent budget, albeit pegged initially at a modest level, is in this context, one of the most straightforwardly ‘state-communitarian’ actions of the present Government, and goes well down the path of redressing the often perceived inbalance between what the state seems to be requiring of individuals in the name of ‘responsibilities’ and what ‘rights of access it is offering in return. What we therefore need to do is ensure that we are talking about rights and responsibilities in terms of the same category: that is, collective rights and collective responsibilities. This, it seems will allow us to construct a narrative of rights and responsibilities in the context of policymaking free of the apparent conditionality of individual rights contained in Giddens account, and of the rather empty moral position arrived at by Etzioni. We can make an equation between rights and responsibilities in this sense because of the public nature of the community and from which we derive benefit. There is an equation in this sense between what goes into a community and what comes out, and can reasonably have expectations of what comes out for us as individuals, just as the community can reasonably have expectations from us (collectively) as individuals about what goes in. The corollary of this is that, just as I have argued that the state has an interest in enhancing and sustaining the activities of communities both for the enhancement of the potential of individuals within it and because it assists good governance, so the state has an interest in supporting and enhancing my rights from the community, because it preserves the virtuous circle of my involvement with the community that leads to overall benefits for the state and for my society. Bibiography Etzioni A. ‘The Third Way to the good society’ Demos 2000 Giddens A. The third way: the renewal of Social Democracy’ Polity 1998 Hughes G. Understanding crime prevention: social control, risk and late
modernity Open University Press 1998 Little A. The politics of community Edinburgh University Press 2002 Willetts D. Modern Conservatism London 1992 Wright A. ‘G.D.H.Cole and socialist Democracy’ Oxford 1979 |
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