In the previous phase of our study of Giddens, we looked at the social processes which Giddens claimed characterised the modern society of today; we had to answer the question as to whether Giddens’ claims were valid, that is, whether the social processes he claimed to be acting were indeed taking place, and whether he had correctly understood them.
Our critique of Giddens in this stage led us to a view that Giddens not only described a range of social processes, but that he was a voice and advocate for those processes, a fact which can explain the success and popularity of the kind of views he is expressing.
This brought us to the second phase of the project, which I characterise as that of evaluating Giddens’ ethics, that is to say, of questioning what Giddens regards as a social good.
My brief is to examine what he has to say about three crucial concepts of modern society: liberalism, communitarianism (or community) and equality. I find each of these concepts problematic and ambiguous, but rather than making any attempt to define them, I think the issue is to identify those relevant concepts which Giddens regards as social goods: that is, in what sense does Giddens regard himself as a liberal, as a communitarian and as an egalitarian, or, what type of liberty, equality and fraternity does Giddens advocate?
This is a different question from that of asking what kind of liberty, equality and fraternity does Giddens find in the social processes he sees at work, but when he points to an ethic as something widely held and politically significant, he does so with a clearly identifiable indication of whether he regards the ethic as healthy and to be supported, or as unhealthy and a symptom of the failure of the social process.
It seems to me that Giddens’ position is that every person benefits, and ought to benefit, from being part of the wider community and they are bound to contribute in return. Failure to contribute may result from exclusion, and in that case would be without blame. He regards poverty as a social evil which needs to be actively combated, but the most characteristic feature of poverty is exclusion, that is, not being included, not receiving social benefits, not having opportunities, not being able to contribute. This concept of inclusion is key to his approach to social problems. It constitutes his definition of equality and of community.
Personally, I think that this is a very useful approach to some ethical problems of modern bourgeois society. The fact is that masses of people not only feel excluded but are excluded; I tend to think that if Giddens’ program of making everyone feel included were to be successful, even while the material fruits of labour were unequally distributed, then this would indeed constitute a substantial solution of the problems of our day. However, I question whether such an aim is feasible in bourgeois society, even in a hypothetical capitalist society in which the extremes of poverty and wealth had been eliminated.
I think Giddens is correct in seeing that there is a loss of a feeling of community, or belonging, and that in any society, such a loss would need to be addressed. Giddens is correct when he says that abject poverty makes community impossible but that community and belonging is consistent with inequality of wealth and income. Much of Giddens’ work is addressed to looking for ways of including people.
I think he correctly points to a healthy persistence of voluntary association in the face of the fragmentary effect of the commercialisation of social relations. Giddens makes it clear that he wants to harness the multiple forms of community to the creation of a commitment to wider society, a kind of pluralist inclusiveness, rather than attempting to establish direct relations between society and the individual. I think he is right inasmuch as identification of the individual with the universal always requires mediation.
Obviously Giddens is an advocate of “multi-culturalism” and pluralism, and sees cultural diversity actually as an “energising” factor in society, rather than a problem in itself. Giddens is a liberal in the sense of welcoming cultural difference rather than demanding cultural homogeneity. Despite counter-attacks of conservatism and fundamentalism, this is one of those progressive aspects of modernism which Giddens advocates.
Giddens recognises the alienating effect of the large institutions and supra-national organisations which rule popular consciousness and life today. Generally, his inclusion-through-mediation approach would have to be seen as a valid one under any circumstances.
The question is this: in a society based on the sale and purchase of labour power, and in which overbearing social power is wielded by capital, is it possible for wage-slaves to be included? It seems that either through community or through stake-holder capitalism, the wage-worker can be “included”, but can this inclusion ever be genuine rather than illusory and palliative?
Something that was discussed earlier is this: Giddens’ social base is the “wired workers” which Giddens claims (where?) to constitute some unbelievable percentage of the workforce, that section of the working class which is currently enjoying prosperity and a large measure of control over their own lives; but isn’t this just a part of a repeated cycle of social progress in which relatively privileged sections of the workforce, at the cutting edge of development of the labour process, become successively proletarianised? Isn’t it more likely that in time we will see “knowledge workers” becoming alienated from the system, joining unions and figuring largely in rejectionist movements?
I can’t get away from the fact that Giddens, like most theorists of post-modernism, ignores the fact that there is one idol which does enjoy universal recognition, and that is money, and the relation of every citizen to the community is mediated through their own dealings with money. Military and political power can potentially prevail against the power of money, and the political regime fostered by money can only exist through multiple mediations, but so long as money enjoys this universal recognition, it rules, and when 98% of value exchanged is in various forms of speculative exchange, behind the scenes for the vast majority of people, then exclusion is the reality of modern society. But the fact that this diversity and complexity is achieved by the sharing of a single common myth also indicates that fragmentation and non-communication is by no means what predominates in modern society, only that the relation of person-to-person is predominantly that of exchange rather than collaboration.
Liberalism, as I understand it, is the ideological movement which asserts the rights of individuals to determine their own actions and seeks to minimise the extent to which the community intrudes into that right.
“Liberalism” has of course multiple, contradictory meanings. Notably, “liberalism”, or “civic liberalism”, is taken by Giddens in a sense opposite to that I have given: namely, he means by liberalism that movement which emphasises the responsibility of the community to secure the basic conditions of life of members of the community.
Secondly, there is the distinction between “economic liberalism” and “life-style liberalism”, i.e., between advocacy of an laissez faire economic regime and advocacy of “live-and-let-live” in respect of life-style choices.
Finally, liberalism seeks to promote the social good without challenging the right of the ruling class to rule. Thus, the American ‘liberal’ who wants higher wages and a better health service is quite distinct from the labour activist who aims for much the same things but whose conception is that this entails a fight against the ruling élite.
Liberalism in all the above senses has a definite association with the growth of bourgeois society. Capitalism could not develop without the smashing up of the constraints with which feudal society held itself together. Even before economic liberalism became a question, the right of enquiry and religious dissent had to be established; even multi-culturalism of a sort was required as a prerequisite to the expansion of trade, and the separation of Church and state lies at the foundation of the bourgeois order.
There has never been a time (and nor will there be a time), however, when bourgeois society could maintain itself exclusively by its own methods: the state has been the provider of infrastructure, education and police, but only because and insofar as the bourgeoisie have been unable to do so by their own methods, i.e., through capital. The family was reconstructed in the form of the nuclear family, but only until women’s labour and domestic services could be adequately provided through the market.
“All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, ...”
Precisely because capital smashes up both newly-formed and all old relations, its life is one of continual conflict and turmoil.
Further, even before “winner-take-all” markets, the market necessarily generates extremes of poverty and wealth, and consequently, a rabble and an anti-social elite. However, liberalism is the ideological expression of the economic relations of commodity production.
But what of Giddens’ “civic liberalism"? Or what the Americans call simply “liberalism"? So far as I can understand it, this meaning of the term adds to the laissez faire ideology I would associate with liberalism, the belief that the community has a responsibility to ameliorate the destructive effects of social power generally, including that of wealth, and therefore stands in some degree in opposition to “economic liberalism”. This kind of liberalism is hardly exceptional, having prevailed among all but the most reactionary ruling elites throughout history. Giddens is certainly not distinguished by his “civic liberalism”. In the wake of the scorched earth policies of Thatcherism, an advocate of removal of the social safety net cannot claim credentials as a “liberal” in this sense. The best Giddens can claim is that “civic liberalism” can better survive in combination with economic and social laissez faire than in combination with “economic authoritarianism”.
Thus it seems to me that the kind of liberalism which Giddens represents is consistent with the liberalism which:
“...has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
When Giddens talks about the “Third Sector” taking responsibility for dealing with poverty and social problems, this is precisely the method most consistent with bourgeois relations, because all voluntary bodies of this kind effectively operate as private enterprises, gaining an income from donations or government assistance, for services rendered in ameliorating social suffering, promoting the social peace, and salving consciences. The fact that they are not-for-profit is neither here nor there. It is not the profit motive which characterises bourgeois relations but cash payment, and overwhelmingly, these kind of organisations are employers in the normal sense and operate in the normal commercial way. The proposal that the government should fulfil its responsibilities through the Third Sector by providing a share of tax revenue seals the question. A Third Sector organisation differs from a normal private enterprise only to the extent that its volunteers are motivated by religious or political zeal rather than earning a living.
Giddens quotes research (by Blundell and Gosschalk) showing that a former association of “economic authoritarianism” with “life-style liberalism” (called ‘socialist') and “life-style authoritarianism” with “economic liberalism” ('conservative') has become de-coupled, with just as many people supporting consistently libertarian or authoritarian positions. The research seems to me to reflect something real. The confusion attending to the meanings of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ reminds me of the way the terms were used during the last days of the Soviet Union, when ‘Left’ meant pro-capitalist and ‘Right’ and ‘Conservative’ meant Stalinist.
Historically, the authoritarianism associated with socialism reflects on the one hand ‘crude communism’ and on the other the underdevelopment of capital, still unable to carry out certain tasks by its own methods.
“How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it. The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital - by the community as the universal capitalist.” [Marx in Private Property & Communism, on ‘crude communism’ — “the first positive annulment of private property"]
And in the Grundrisse:
“The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital. “
In other words communism is not yet sufficiently developed to transcend private property and bourgeois relations are not yet sufficiently developed to dispense with state enterprise.
The twentieth century was a whole period in which crude communism co-existed with under-developed bourgeois relations. The collapse of the USSR terminated this co-existence. Still, few people know anything about a conception of socialism which is as hostile to bureaucratic authoritarianism as it is to the corruption of human relations by capital.
The problem is that Giddens defines this liberalism in the context of TINA. So, a left-wing opposition to the power of money is legitimated only as a kind of ‘civic liberalism’ which wants to limit the worst social diseases of the market but cannot call into to question the rule of capital as such. If Giddens doesn’t present himself as a full-on advocate of laissez faire economics, and talks a lot about the role of government, this cannot detract from the fact that capital rules, and any minimisation of the need to mobilise social power against capital as such (rather than ‘working with business’, etc., etc.) means accommodating to and supporting the rule of capital.
Andy