Big Society: The Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

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Big Society: The Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is –

”Oh, ‘tis love, ‘tis love, that makes the world go round!”

“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”

“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added “and the moral of that is – take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

 - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Violence, greed, individualisation, atomisation, isolation and loneliness: thirty years of neoliberalism have turned everyone into a selfish profit-maximising utilitarian, have destroyed any sense of collectivity, have disenfranchised communities and have impoverished working class cultures of solidarity. An overbearing state and a runaway market beholden to finance capital have colluded to produce the crisis we currently face, a crisis that reaches deep into society. This is the kind of synopsis of our present predicament that we instinctively associate with a left-wing critique. However, the above is actually an expression‎ of the combined sentiment of a particular right-wing ideology that informs David Cameron’s concept of a ‘Big Society’ as the remedy for this image of a ‘Broken Britain’.[1]

The Big Society made a first appearance in David Cameron’s Hugo Young Lecture in November 2009 and became a key slogan of his election campaign. Since Cameron became Prime Minister, the rhetoric of a Big Society has found its way not only into governmental spin aimed at legitimising austerity and cuts, but a good chunk of the political programme that the idea of the Big Society is a conduit for has entered into policy in some guise or another. Nonetheless, ridiculed by many political commentators as a lame duck and contested by anti-austerity protesters as a smokescreen for business as usual, David Cameron’s ‘Big Idea’ has gone through more trial and tribulation than it has triumph and veneration. Yet, it just won’t quite shut up and go away – a bit like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland who follows Alice around with her incessant insistence on the moral of the tale. And just like Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole, the Big Society is at once an absurd fantasy and contains all too many truths about the way that things are.

According to its ideology, one of the major culprits of our current condition is the welfare state. The cumbersome, expensive, bureaucratic nanny of a state that New Labour left behind, has stripped people of their agency, dominated them and rendered them passive and inactive. Instead of this, by shedding the state of its welfare weight, ordinary people can achieve greater freedom to be the joyful productive entrepreneurs of life that they want to be. What matters here is that the Big Society needs the state as much as it denies it: a rhetoric in which the state is used to both restructure society in ways that serve the privileged appropriation of socially produced wealth, and in turn enact forms of social control and legitimation for the inequitable distribution of the social surplus.

Ostensibly aimed at devolving power ‘from the state to the people’, so that communities can be more involved in the organisation and delivery of previously public services, the Big Society seeks to mobilise our affective capacities for empathy and concern for one another to provide health care, child care and elder-care, run local libraries and deal with unemployment, tackle poverty and inequality and increase general well-being off the back of further welfare state retrenchment and privatisation. Coding these affective capacities as a restoration of all that is great about British ‘civic virtue’, the state is supposed to retreat from its involvement with the management, funding and delivery of public services to rely on voluntary organisations and local communities to do the work. Not only are communities to become service deliverers, the individuals who constitute these communities are to feel more empowered through greater direct involvement in the collective reproduction of their livelihoods without having to depend upon what is for the most part an alienated relationship of dependency. During the economic crisis of the late 1970s under Thatcher, the Conservative mantra that accompanied cuts was that there was no such thing as society. This time around, the Tories are propagating at least what on the surface of it seems to be the opposite: an intense belief in the importance of the social and the need to harness its potential.

The idea of Big Society aptly inserts itself into a crisis discourse of the need for renewal against the other culprit of the current crisis: the unbridled market and irresponsible financialisation. Already ten years ago at the height of neoliberal globalisation’s legitimacy crisis in the face of counter-globalisation struggles, there were those voices that heralded the possibilities of capitalism with a human face[2] – in other words, a nicer, kinder version. Similarly, advocates of the Big Society hold out that in fact, the neoliberals who posited human nature as selfish and self-centred are in part to blame for the demise of those forms of cooperation that held (British) society together. The picture they paint is one of short-term thinking wedded to making a fast buck on rent-seeking capital, bringing with it general moral demise.

Much of the ideological currency of the Big Society relies upon the same kind of false dichotomy that Alice and the Duchess debate in the epigraph to this article. Is it love – cooperation, mutualism, care, empathy, reciprocity – that nourish the roots of a flourishing society? Or is it minding one’s own business – self-reliance, self-interest, individualism, looking out for oneself and one’s own – that serve as the perpetuum mobile of our time? Of course the answer is both and more. To suggest that human behaviour is only every guided by one or the other of such moral sentiments is always a dramatic simplification that serves to obfuscate the political economy of what is actually going on for the purposes of upholding a particular status quo.

The greatest obfuscation of Cameron’s ‘Big Idea’ is that the Big Society is still to be fully realised, whether this means that its past remnants are to be revived or its budding shoots yet to fully prosper. But the reality is that we already live and work in what they are calling the Big Society. Except, this Big Society doesn’t look or feel much like a big tea party draped in colourful bunting as its advocates may perhaps envision it. Instead, what we have is the attempt to extend and intensify an existing trend perpetuated by the neoliberal project. That is, capital’s continuous exploitation of unpaid labour coupled with an incessant search for its further valorisation. The Big Society is supposed to continue both of these things. First, there is the attempt to use the ideology of civic virtue, human flourishing and Aristotelian-inflected notions of a ‘good life’ to blur the fact that these voluntary activities are actually work: as reproductive work that enables commodity production and capitalist valorisation to continue, it is a cost that is off-loaded onto individual house-holds and communities. Second, there is the attempt to further expand the logic of the market and private investment to these spheres building on existing endeavours under New Labour. This kind of ‘Philanthro-capitalism’[3] is seen as progressive in its supposed ability to produce a more ethical form of capitalism, because the commodities produced have some kind of ‘social value’.

This trend is much more aptly captured by a different term: the Social Factory.[4] The image of a ‘social factory’ can conjure up a sense of a society made up of one long assembly line, where factory workers are involved in mass-producing the immaterial commodities of sociality, in the same way they would produce washing machines or packets of peas. Perhaps some of the ways in which investors vie for the opportunity to make money out of our sociality may have that quality to them.   Yet, the Social Factory is not about promoting an image of society as resembling the factory. To clarify the political problem, it helps to draw an analogy with the Feminist analysis of social reproduction. Social reproduction encompasses the biological reproduction of human beings, it also includes the sexual and emotional labour required for the maintenance of relationships, and it involves the unpaid care and voluntary work undertaken in communities – short, the work that goes in to reproducing labour power and life. Feminists have been especially astute in demonstrating how the unpaid reproductive work in the home and in the community is vital in sustaining the capacities for surplus value production in paid forms of labour. In the 1970s analyses of the relationship between the housewife and the male factory worker under Fordism, it was understood that the unpaid work of women was work that reproduced both future labour power (having children) and the labour power of the male factory worker, through performing all of the tasks needed to create the conditions for this work to continue, involving everything from having sex to cleaning the house, making dinner, caring for children and the elderly and the emotional labour of maintaining relationships. In providing this analysis, Feminism was not only able to make visible these huge swathes of unpaid labour as the condition for the production of surplus value in the factory, their concern was also to politicise the sites where the work was performed, i.e. in the home, at the kitchen sink, in the bedroom and in the wider community, thus making these sites visible as relevant in the struggle against capitalist exploitation. Not only this, but they pointed to how the ideologies of the institution of the family had the double function of reducing the cost of labour due to the reliance on the free or low-cost feminised labour in the home, but also absolving the state and capital from having to foot a large part of the bill for the cost of social reproduction.  Similarly, the idea of the Big Society introduces an ideology of civic virtue and communitarian ethics to accomplish the very same thing, using the affectively charged language of civic virtues and community empowerment as ways to decode certain activities as work so as to render them invisible as such, while at the same time, trying to instil an affective investment in these processes in which the cost of social reproduction is off-loaded. On the other hand, the entrepreneur – social or otherwise – becomes the figure of creativity, wealth and economic growth at the same time as so many ordinary people find themselves increasingly dependent on their wage for which they have to work longer and harder and faced as they are with both debt and ever-more precarisation.

Thus, as Alice’s Duchess may indeed declare, it is all much of the same thing really. Yet, we mind our own business at our peril, because what lies behind the Big Society should not be shrugged off as ephemeral or pure rhetoric. There are a number of crucial political questions that are raised for a left politics at the fault-lines of the current crisis and in the coming weeks, we shall unpack some of them in relation to the different facets of the Big Society, including public policy, social value, the Big Society Bank, as well as the politics of social movements and community activism.

This is the first of four articles analysing the Big Society. In the next piece, Emma Dowling turns her attention to the notion of 'measuring social value' and presents a critique of the recent Public Services (Social Value) Act.

Dr Emma Dowling is a writer, researcher and activist. She researches the relationship between social and political conflict and governance processes/institutions, and she studies ethics under the rubric of forms of valorisation and measure. Emma lectures at Queen Mary, University of London.

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[1] See for example, P. Blond (2010); Red Tory, London: Faber and Faber; Norman, J. (2010): The Big Society, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press.

[2] See for example J. Sachs (2005): The End of Poverty – How We Can Make in Our Time, London: Penguin Books; see also George Caffentzis’ critique in: The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital? Archived at http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/caffentzis_future_commons.pdf.

[3] See for example M. Bishop and M. Green (20110: The Road from Ruin, London: A & C Black Publishers.

[4] The ‘Social Factory’ is a concept that first emerges in the work of Italian Operaismo, in particular through the work of Mario Tronti, and in the feminist movements in the 1970s (for further discussion see H. Cleaver (2000): Reading Capital Politically, Leeds: Anti/Theses and Edinburgh: AK Press; Weeks, K. (2011): The Problem with Work, Durham: Duke University Press; see also the special issue of The Commoner on ‘Care Work and the Commons’, Winter 2011, archived at http://www.commoner.org.uk/).

About this article

Published on 02 July, 2012
By Emma Dowling

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/print_article/big_society_the_iron_fist_in_a_velvet_glove