Justice as Welfare: Equity and Solidarity 9781501301544, 9781441184412

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Foreword

Instead of constructing theories and ideologies to deal with poverty, man . . . should simply give the coat off his back in a gesture of fraternal understanding. (Cioran, 1995, p. 93) the world is not afraid to go back to the past it knows so well. (Yang Lian, 2002, p. 143)

How can welfare be defended and justified in these times of fiscal austerity? Justice as Welfare uses the recent history of the welfare state in Britain to provoke some broader questions about political community. Moving beyond New Labour and the politics of the Big Society, the book argues that welfare is necessary for the freedom and equality of all citizens. In this contemporary understanding of social justice, welfare is not handed down by a bureaucratic state or left to the private provision of the market. Welfare has to be seen as a complex defined by the old methods of redistribution and new approaches that ensure access to opportunities and resources that build the capacity and well-being of everyone. Welfare as Justice requires a new engagement with issues of social rights and the accountability of both state and private welfare providers; we must also think about the relationship between welfare, globalization and the human right to social security. Our account of the modern welfare state in Britain covers a period that begins in the years immediately after 1945 and concludes in 2010 when the Coalition Government took office. Although we are interested in the different ways in which Conservative and Labour governments have attempted to reform welfare in the last 65 years, our primary focus will be on a progressive approach to the welfare state. As there is more to such politics than the policies of Labour governments, we will present a complex of broader arguments that point towards a set of philosophical viii

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concerns about the nature of political community and the goals of social and economic organization. This book does not present a detailed account of the various components of the welfare state and how they relate to each other. Justice as Welfare does not attempt to describe policies on housing, health, social security or pensions. The book’s objective is to make a general argument about the welfare community. These contentious terms will be explained in the text. The welfare community correlates to some extent with the welfare state; but, the concept of the welfare community also points towards a way of thinking about politics and our life lived among others. Welfare becomes a way of understanding politics; or, rather, of imagining a different form of politics. Our argument tries to locate analysis at the level of the ‘everyday conditions of intersubjective relations’ (Vincent, J. M., 1991, p. 49) as a ‘necessary condition for the critique of social relations’ that, rather than simply resting in ‘production’, are immanent to being with others. The major difficulty in writing this book has been bringing together different levels of argument. There are a number of inter-relating strata. There is a concern with the historical and political nature of the post-war welfare state in Britain that takes us to considerations of solidarity, equality and social justice. Interacting with these themes is an engagement with economic anthropology, in particular Polanyi’s work, which points towards a way of thinking about economy and reciprocal social organization. Relating to all these themes, but somewhat removed (or, rather, removed but inseparable) is an understanding of community that draws (most directly) on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. From Nancy we take an argument about social being which, rather unusually perhaps, is located within the problematic of welfare; or, as we will suggest towards the end of the book wel-fare (the term is explained in Chapter 9). The drive of the argument is to discover a way of talking or thinking about welfare that, while above the concerns of pragmatic politics, is nevertheless rigorously focused upon what it means to be in a political community with a sense (no matter how compromised) of the needs of one’s fellow citizens. In seeking to bring together these different levels of argument, one could easily be charged with many intellectual crimes, ranging from confused thinking to obscurantism. For those who want a more or less conventional approach to politics or welfare, the concerns with ‘ontology’ and social being are at best a distraction, and at worst something pretentious and self-indulgent. For those who are more orientated towards continental and post-phenomenological and post-structuralist ways of thinking, the concern with the politics of welfare might appear an unnecessary

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compromise of philosophical thought or an attempt to apply what cannot be applied. Clearly, neither party will be satisfied with this book. It is animated by a spirit of bricolage, or putting things together in the hope that unusual juxtapositions produce new ways of thinking. Ultimately, though, it is necessary to defend this argument against the objections of someone who might be politically sympathetic, but sceptical or even hostile to its method. The argument presented in this book is an attempt to think through how certain terms can still be used sensibly. This might mean stepping outside of one tradition, in order to clarify and re-orientate its terms by borrowing from another. This suggests ways of linking together philosophy and politics. In order to remain consistent with the spirit of the argument, while retaining the conventions of academic discussion, this book circles around something that remains unsaid and unsayable. As explained in the Introduction and Chapter 1, this thinking of community is quite distinct from contemporary approaches in Anglo-American political and social thinking. The discourse on the impossible or unavowable community by Nancy, Derrida, Blanchot and Agamben can be seen as a series of responses to problematics of social being in Marx and Heidegger; and an ongoing dialogue with Bataille (we do not engage with Levinas and the Levinasian articulation of these themes). However, rather than follow Bataille’s elaboration of this theme through the sacred and the ecstatic, the general direction of this argument is to see in wel-fare something of the exposure to others in community. Exposure to others is a complex theme. It does not suggest that we are by nature drawn to each other’s company and that we can somehow peaceably resolve our differences. Community is always divided by wealth, gender, age and race, culture and religion. However, community is also found in our exposure to each other through friendship, sympathy, love and care. These themes are not developed in a humanist sense: there is no essence of humanity celebrated in community. Community is bound up with those impersonal structures of meaning that both unite and divide us. To think of community along these lines requires a discourse that can at least gesture at what cannot be put into words; those unsayable matters of feeling and emotion; the non-correspondence between our sense of ourselves and the demands of language around which community both comes together and is held apart. Perhaps an appropriate metaphor is that of a river that runs through a city. Looking at the map of Manchester in Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England (see the discussion in Chapter 1), I remembered the River

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Medlock that flows through the city (not the Irwell, that ‘river the colour of lead’). The Medlock is now largely culverted, but appears behind the old mills, offices and factories. It formed one of the boundaries of the notorious slum of ‘Little Ireland’ populated by Irish immigrants. Little Ireland is a figure for the failure of community. The Medlock flows down from the hills above the city, where the mansions of the cotton barons were, and hemmed the poor into what Engels called a ‘portion of low, swampy ground . . . surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments’ (Engels, 1988, p. 74). The inundations of the slums by the polluted waters of the Medlock after heavy rains ‘carried all the filth of the river into the houses’ (Busteed, 2002, p. 2). One year (1872) the flood waters were so strong that they washed bodies and coffins out of graves from cemeteries up stream.1 Little Ireland was cleared away in the later part of the century and the area is now covered by rather smart flats and bars: a desirable ‘inner city community’ for smart Mancunians. Rivers in cities may divide, but their banks also offer a place for lovers to meet. Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics in the Pulp ‘song’ ‘Wickerman’ mesh together a sense of Sheffield’s industrial past with a more intimate set of memories. The River Don in ‘Wickerman’ ‘runs through a concrete channel’. Its dirty waters ‘smell[s] of industrialisation’ and evoke ‘[l]ittle mesters coughing their lungs up and globules the colour of tomato ketchup’.2 Along with the debris of industrialization, the river is linked to ‘the place where we first met’. Strangely, though, the identity of the lover blurs: ‘I went there with you once – except you were somebody else’; memories blur, become confused. The river in ‘Wickerman’ is perhaps also a metaphor for these tricks of time. The intimate community evoked by the song is inseparable from what has become distorted; what cannot quite be captured in words and doesn’t quite make sense. These metaphors can, of course, be overworked. But perhaps the rivers that flow through cities do provoke our thoughts; and do relate to different communities forming and reforming; and the mixture of personal and historical memories. I remember, as a kid growing up in a suburb of Manchester, that the River Mersey’s sullen currents seen through bridge slats at Jackson’s Boat always filled me with a sense of horror and a fear of falling. However, the river is now sacred to British Hindus; Ganesh immersed in its dark waters; a sense of people from elsewhere: a new community. Perhaps another way of indicating the traces of community would be to acknowledge all those who helped me to write this book; whose efforts are traces behind these words. Mary Gearey read, re-wrote and edited the

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manuscript countless times; ‘il miglior fabro’. Without her love and hard work this book would not have been written. The book is also something of an ongoing conversation with Costas Douzinas and the problems we wrestled with in Critical Jurisprudence. The concern with association owes a debt to bare sovereignty in Human Rights and Empire; as does most of the argument in Chapters 8 and 9. Peter Fitzpatrick is also a voice bound up with this text; the immunity thesis would have been unthinkable for me without Modernism and the Grounds of Law. Bill Bowring was a source of inspiration on social rights and the politics of community. Peter Goodrich’s genii are also here: not so much the Attic grove, though, as the spirits of thought in the city. I need to salute Valerie Kelley for timely, focused and spirited editing. Special mention needs to be made of: Oren Ben-Door, Paul Virr, Tony Prosser, Sunja Pahujha, Michelle Everson, Terrill Carver, Sally and Robert Cartledge, Lucy Goode and Jean-Martin Lapointe (who gave the book its original title: Justice Awry); Joe and Kris Hughes (songs about rivers), Marie-Claire Antoine at Continuum; Marinos Diamantides; David Gearey (conversations about Attlee and Nye Bevan while watching cage fighting at the Cliffs Inn on the way to Big Sur); Zella Griffiths (long discussions about the injustices of pensions); Niamh and Arthur Gearey: the impossible, infuriating mad glory of the intimate community. A first draft of this book was completed at the Center for Law and Society, University of California and I thank them for their encouragement. A final draft was worked out in Louzignac staying with Simon and Ros Goode whose hospitality needs to be celebrated. This book is (at least in my mind) inseparable from listening to Elbow’s Seldom Seen Kid. I hope that, if this book was a record, it might sound a little like this album. I fear it probably sounds like Rush’s 2112. I used to think that the foreword to a book was the point where the author put the finishing touches to a manuscript, and sat back in his/her chair; knowing that a project was now complete. This foreword is being written half way through the editing process – anticipating that moment of completion which presents itself with all the dreadful imminence of an unavoidable deadline. Lacking the luxury of calm reflection, then, this is done on the hoof; juggling . . . and waiting for fireworks.

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Introduction The Community of Welfare

The welfare state is dead, long live the welfare state. (Negri, 2008, p. 159) Persuaded that poverty is the human lot, I can no longer believe in any doctrine of reform. . . . This phenomenon is exclusively human, for man alone made his equals his slaves. Man alone is capable of so much self-contempt. (Cioran, 1995, p. 93) In this general overview of the themes of the book, we will begin with a definition of the welfare community focused on concepts of social justice, social citizenship and solidarity. The community of welfare can be understood as a reciprocal society dedicated to the social freedom of its citizens. We will be concerned with an inescapable tension between welfare and capitalism. Any defence of the community of welfare must be fought on this problematic terrain. Welfare and the market are bound together to the extent that neither term can stand alone. The future of welfare lies in the degree to which this inherent tension can force a different understanding of the way in which markets can be embedded in society and economy organized for the general good. This understanding of welfare provision does not imply a heavy-handed state. Welfare can be co-produced by the state and its citizens. The penultimate part of our argument will further examine the problems inherent in the notion of a welfare community; tensions exacerbated by globalization but also offering forms of solidarity that extend beyond the borders of the nation state. The final phase of our discussion returns to notions of solidarity, community and the grounding idea of a life lived well among others.

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Our argument moves towards the conclusion that welfare (or wel-fare) can be understood as one of the fundamental meanings of political community. This fundamental (or perhaps even primordial sense)1 runs beneath the more conventional discourses on welfare. We are not seeking to suggest that we can somehow return to a more historically ‘pure’ idea of welfare or that the realization of welfare remains ‘to come’; rather, the sense of wel-fare is bound up with the political community in which we find ourselves.

Welfare, Capitalism and Immunity The welfare state2 is a creation of organized political power. From 1945 until it lost office in 1951, Clement Attlee’s Labour Government put in place the fundamental structure of the welfare state3 and a new way of understanding what it meant to be a member of a political community.4 Consider Marshall’s classic argument about the welfare state: ‘what matters is a . . . general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalisation between the more and less fortunate at all levels – between the healthy and the sick, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the active’. The concept of social justice5 describes the nexus of rules, institutions, rights and obligation that define the terms of resource ‘redistribution’ (Marshall, 1950, p. 33) that put in place ‘the substance of civilised life’ (Marshall, ibid.). Solidarity6 embeds social justice in a sense of common obligations towards shared ends in the welfare community. Our thesis rests upon a re-appraisal of certain themes in welfare scholarship; in particular our position begs complex questions about one of the most troubled expressions in the lexicon of political philosophy: community. Chapter 1 is devoted to an elaboration of these concerns. We will rely on the work of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito to provide an etymology and an understanding of community. Following Esposito’s immunity thesis, we will suggest that the ‘in common’ of welfare cannot be expelled from capitalism. We will stress that any contemporary account of solidarity, social rights or the social citizen must be complex, possibly even contradictory: an assertion of ongoing and irresolvable tension between community and market; labour and capital. Community, then, is a tense and conflicted term. We have no naive assumptions about the concept. The community of welfare is a vast network of governance and control; a subtle set of techniques that discipline and control a populace.7 However, there is still something more; possibilities that are opened up by the welfare community that we will explore as we go along: welfare persists within the order of capitalism.

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In Chapter 1, we build our argument by relating Esposito’s work to Karl Polanyi’s critical understanding of the market-based nature of capitalism. Market economy is ‘directed by market prices and nothing but market prices’ (Polanyi, 2010, p. 45). The market is seen to be ‘self-regulating’ and ‘capable of organizing the whole of economic life’ through its co-ordination of supply and demand. Theorists of the market argue that intervention by governments or other agencies interferes with these immanent laws which, left to themselves, will ensure the most efficient distribution of resources. Polanyi argues that this theory of the market is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that there is an ‘economic sphere’ separate from society. From the bourgeois economists of the Manchester School, to the Chicago School of today, there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of the need to embed markets in forms of social life. Once a market becomes disembedded from society, separated ‘from other activities of life’ defined by ‘kinship, neighbourhood, profession and creed’ both economic and social dis-function may follow (Polanyi, 1977, p. 171). The ontology of the market is ‘atomistic and individualistic’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 171). Market rationalism eclipses other ways of understanding human endeavour and replaces them with the meansend calculus of market actors. Market actors have rather narrow motives such as the pursuit of profit and the dread of destitution. The social world is flattened out so that it can be included into a market that operates in narrow economic terms. Esposito’s immunity thesis allows us to locate an idea of welfare capitalism within this general understanding of the relationship between market and community. Welfare capitalism provides an institutional order that goes beyond the minimal juridical structure that the market requires. Welfare is defi ned through a legal order where community rests upon laws that defi ne those rights and obligations owed by each to all. In this sense, then, welfare ‘immunizes’ the community against capital and its logics of market exchange. Welfare capitalism is, for this reason, an unstable structure. Critical scholars of welfare have long argued that welfare capitalism is contradictory and prone to crisis.8 We want to suggest a new approach: the tensions of welfare capitalism are neither resolvable nor fatal. They are the conditions of a progressive re-engagement with the question of the ends of political and economic organization. Th inking this position through requires us to revisit certain important themes that relate to the role of organized labour in the economy, the control of capital and the provision of welfare as a condition for a functioning market.

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There are a number of points that we want to stress. So far we have a basic definition of the market, but, as yet have not defined capitalism.9 As it would be hard to define a phenomenon as broad as capitalism within the terms of this book, we are going to limit our comments to the slightly narrower concept of welfare capitalism. We also need to pin down Polanyi’s rather general thesis about market and community. These points can be brought together as follows. Welfare capitalism is a particular articulation of capitalism in the post-war period. For analytical convenience, we will suggest that welfare capitalism takes three different forms. In terms of the post-war settlement in British politics, welfare capitalism expressed itself through Keynesian economics, full employment, protection of labour rights and the state’s involvement in the management of the economy. While the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997 attempted to dismantle the post-war consensus, their policies remained within the problematic of welfare capitalism. Conservative neo-liberal policies can thus be seen as a second form of welfare capitalism. The centre left politics of the New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 can be understood as a third form.10 Perhaps the Big Society philosophy of the current Coalition government is a further variation on this theme. Our point for the moment is that welfare capitalism is dynamic11 and that welfare persists within even the mature or neo-liberal phase of capitalist organization.12 The post-war settlement was characterized by a form of social democratic thinking that we will outline in later chapters. In terms of its articulation by Labour Party theorists, it tended to stress notions of solidarity, equality and social justice and focused on the welfare state. We want to re-claim some elements of this tradition of thinking. Conservative discourses on community between 1979 and 1997 were somewhat ad hoc. We touch upon them in later chapters but they are not our major point of reference. We are far more interested in New Labour’s re-working of social democracy around revised ideas of social justice and welfare. The contemporary struggle in British politics is between a centre right response to New Labour that focuses on the Big Society, and a centre left project to re-invent New Labour’s legacy. Thus, any attempt to move beyond New Labour in progressive thinking has to deal with recent centre right and centre left articulations of community.

Solidarity, Social Justice and Community The focus of our thinking is provided by ideas of social justice and solidarity. Solidarity describes the community defined by the welfare state.

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The welfare community requires ‘common institutions’ meeting ‘common needs’ and providing a source of ‘common enjoyment’ so that accidents of birth and family are not definitional of an individual’s life chances (Tawney, 1964, pp. 55–6). Welfare creates community around a system of universal benefits and a set of common experiences. In Marshall’s summary: the welfare state provided everyone with ‘an insurance card that must be stamped; welfare institutions were open to all; everyone could go the “Post Office” to collect a pension or to sign on. Solidarity, in this sense, can be thought of as a form of “common life” ’ (Gray, 1996). Common life is defined formally by a network of rights and duties that make for ‘mutual attachment between individuals’ (Brunkhorst, 2005, p. 161). Solidarity has an underlying normative element: a normativity that can be linked to those institutions that define (Bayertz, 1998, p. 295) the ‘common ground’ between individuals.13 So, solidarity presupposes those legal and administrative criteria that determine the distribution of social resources and provide the foundations for universal, all-inclusive welfare systems. Social insurance relies on systems of calculation and risk apportionment that employ actuarial categories to create distributive ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ by reference to profession and an individual’s location in the life cycle (Baldwin, 1990, p. 11).14 However, the technical terms of social insurance must indeed be grounded in a ‘lived’ reality. This grounding can never be complete: the language of social insurance does not map onto the world as experienced by those counting the deductions from their wages that ‘go to the state’. As Titmuss and other theorists of welfare have shown, welfare and solidarity exist in precisely these conditions of anonymous obligations to others: ‘[t]o give – to be taxed – has never been a simple matter in human history; for our neighbours, fellow workers, the poor, the sick, the ignorant and the feckless’. Making sense of these obligations requires vision and inventiveness. Titmuss’ challenge is taken up by our arguments in this book: in the world of social administration and ‘professionalized management’, how is a creative engagement with welfare and solidarity possible? The beginnings of our answer can be sketched out as follows. Although we do not want to license Habermas’ interpretation of solidarity,15 his work does present a useful articulation of the themes that we are considering. Habermas begins with the idea of the ‘socialized subject’ whose sense of identity comes out of an embedding in a ‘life world’ where ‘self’ and ‘collectivity’ are essentially different ways of conceptualizing this communally defined self. The more developed the subject becomes, the more he or she is inseparable from the associations and contacts

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sustained by being within a world characterized by ‘reciprocal dependencies’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 243). Solidarity is ‘the realisation that each person must take responsibility for the other because as consociates all must have an interest in the integrity of their shared life contexts in the same way’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 244).16 Habermas’ elucidation of solidarity shows us precisely what is at stake in the concept. He provides a pronounced grounding for solidarity in an ontology of association where ‘we are’ precisely because we are with others (we will return to this theme at the end of the chapter). Habermas stresses the importance of reciprocity and mutual dependency to explain the way that we are both individuals and social creatures. As we will see, this taps into rich sociological, phenomenological and anthropological accounts of human behaviour and meaning that are directly relevant to the immunization thesis, but we will not follow Habermas’ account to the latter. At this point in our argument we want to confront a related but distinct problem with solidarity. Surely the term is inappropriate in the context of a plural, multicultural society. Solidarity seems to suggest some inclusion into an essential community that erases the very real differences that constitute social being. This is a valid criticism. However, our understanding of solidarity is not a claim to a ‘thick’ sense of national being rooted in a simplistic notion of common belonging. Our notion of solidarity requires only an understanding of social existence as characterized by a life cycle that moves from childhood, to adulthood and old age. Social existence is also characterized by experiences of risk, sickness and misfortune. One slightly old-fashioned but still relevant notion is that solidarity describes an ‘existential’ community of those who experience a common fate and whose association organizes resources towards common ends. The welfare community stands against the shocks and misfortunes that define us as human beings. Perhaps solidarity requires nothing more than a sense of our vulnerability as human beings and a political agreement that resources are directed towards meeting the exigencies of this shared condition: as Walzer writes, ‘if we did not provide for one another . . . we would have no reason to form and maintain political communities’ (Walzer, 1983, p. 162). Questions about resource use and distribution will always involve conflicts and competing claims (we elaborate this theme in Chapter 4). These difficult and fraught practical issues do not suggest that the concept of solidarity itself is irrelevant. This point takes us to another pressing issue: the very real difficulties that the welfare state faces in present times.17 A great many of the central assumptions that underlie state provision of welfare have been profoundly challenged in the last three decades. In terms

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of British politics, the post-war consensus on the welfare state broke down in the early 1970s. The reasons are complex, and we will consider them in more detail in Chapter 2. How does this relate to our thesis on solidarity? If the welfare state was transformed to the degree that we are suggesting, why do we still want to make use of the term? Solidarity is, arguably, reminiscent of the grey world of post-war collectivism and blind to the subtle and complicated ways in which power operates. The development of bureaucracy, administrative techniques and the complex, interlocking systems and sub-systems of the welfare state might have compromised a certain way of thinking about solidarity, but solidarity is not yet an entirely redundant term. To test this thesis, we will make reference to Foucault’s thinking of power and resistance in the welfare state. Foucault, Donzelot and others grasped in a particularly acute way the nature of state welfare provision.18 Especially in the late 1960s, the welfare state and its institutions became sites of struggle over the very terms in which political community articulated itself. The state was no longer ‘a force of social change and social progress’ – it became ‘the arena of struggle itself’. The welfare state was a contradiction: it offered ‘the rudimentary model of organisation of social life that is liberated from the commodity form’ but, at the same time, could not honour the promise contained in this ‘liberation’ (Foucault, 2010, p. 143). If techniques of governance produce resistances to power and creative ways of re-defining forms of political ‘life’ it might be that a Foucauldian thinking of solidarity points towards those alternative forms of political organization and understanding that grow up in the interstices of the welfare state. Certainly, the notion of a ‘micro politics of welfare’ is relevant for conceptualizing present forms of resistance to welfare reform. The following statement encapsulates our argument. As a response to New Labour welfare reforms at the close of the 1990s, radical groups began to articulate their struggles against welfare agencies in terms of precarity: ‘precarity is a strategy to organise our lives ever more minutely in capital’s interests rather than according to our own desires. . . . the decline of traditional forms of security also frees us to resist in new ways’.19 Resisting in new ways goes beyond conventional accounts of the welfare state and begs interesting genealogical questions about the relationships between conventional politics and forms of local and ‘micro’ struggle. We might then speak of forms of counter-solidarity or the development of solidarity as resistance. While we will make some references later on to these ideas, a Foucauldian elaboration of solidarity falls somewhat outside this book except to the

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extent that Foucault’s thinking on welfare communicates with the immunity thesis. We want to take from Foucauldian thinking a sense of how an understanding of solidarity involves working within the ‘private market order’ (inside the whale, in Orwell’s theological allusion). This is admittedly a very general statement. It suggests the importance of genealogical thinking to establish those nodes of resistance embedded deep in the histories of institutions and politics that could be remade, a theme we examine in Chapters 1, 3 and 5.20 However, we are not pretending to present a proper genealogy of resistance to state welfare. Our arguments about self-help and associationalism are, at least to some extent, concerned with a recovery of a counter-tradition that, given a fortuitous conjunction of forces, might be pressed into political service. The fundamental problem is that we need to go beyond resistance or refusal and imagine a ‘counter’ welfare that articulates differently the forces of self-help. At a political level, it is also necessary to frame our arguments in terms that can be generalized across different interest groups and thus engage popular support for a different form of the welfare state. Might it be possible to ‘break the spell that [the welfare state] has cast[s] on the life history of all those capable of working’ (Habermas, 1989)? Our argument, in this respect, is not Foucauldian. As with our comments on Habermas, we certainly are happy to borrow from his work; but we do not seek to show that Foucault, Habermas or indeed any other single thinker guarantees our position. Our thesis is one of bricolage or, in English, DIY. Crudely: we use the bits that seem to fit. This takes us to arguments about social justice and community. As Stears (2001) has stressed, arguments about social justice need to be creative. Our argument about social justice is creative to the extent it fuses elements of Rawls’ work with that of his communitarian critics. We will also be interested in a ‘left/liberal’ reading that follows Cohen’s adaptation of Rawls’ theory of justice. Read in this way, Rawls provides us with a notion of justice that can guide our thinking about the sharing of resources and the ends of the welfare state. This is, admittedly, a very specific (and contentious) reading of Rawls. However, reading Rawls in this way allows us to adapt one of the major criticisms of his work. The communitarians contend that Rawls fails to describe those ‘inter-subjective conceptions’ that provide our sense of belonging to ‘family, community, class or nation’ as opposed to being simply ‘individuated human beings’ (Sandel, 1998, p. 63). The ‘constitutive attachments’ that we develop to community are ‘enduring’ (Sandel, 1998, p. 179) and central to ‘what we are’.

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We feel that the communitarian criticism of Rawls allows us to locate our reading in a particular political tradition that draws on a thinking of solidarity. It is a tradition linked to the names of R. H. Tawney and Richard Titmuss. We will also build on the theme of reciprocity that is part of A Theory of Justice and which gives Rawls’ work a Polanyian resonance. Our reading of Rawls stresses that arguments about justice are embedded or grounded in claims about social organization where welfare and solidarity are central to the good society. For the moment, though, we want to outline the general intellectual context of the ideas that underlie our thesis. Our approach to community is very different from both Anglo-American political thinking and Habermas’ discourse ethics. It is difficult to give this understanding of community a simple title. We thus describe it in a rather anodyne sense as post-phenomenology. From writers working within this broadly conceived tradition, we extract the following key theme: community rests on ‘something’ that both resists and requires articulation. We cannot do without a discourse on community, but, those making use of it, must not allow community, and the logics of social reproduction that are bound up with it, to exhaust our sense of our associational life. For us, there is something mercurial about community that demands a peculiar expression. This point gestures towards our discussion of ‘being with’. There is a sustained discussion of this theme in the next chapter and Chapter 9, but we can say a little more about this problematic term in this general introduction. Being with allows us to engage with the strange logic that underlies Esposito’s immunization thesis. The immunization thesis returns to a long line of thinking that locates community in a profound contradiction. Community might define us, but, it does so by opening up a strange relationship between our interiority, our sense of ourselves and exteriority. To clarify: consider the claim that community defines us. This statement links a claim to a sense of identity with something outside ourselves, others, the community, the language that we speak. This ‘outside’ enters into us and makes us what we are. Where, then, is the contradiction? Communication certainly involves language, which is a public medium beyond our ‘inner sense’ of ourselves, but, precisely because language gives us a transparent sense of self, and co-ordinates us with others who are similarly constituted, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ correspond. We find ourselves at home in community. Our modest criticisms of this position, based on the claim that there is more to community than linguistic communication, are entirely compatible with the idea that one pole of community is interiority,

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even if this interiority remains ultimately beyond language. Indeed, we will remain within this broadly phenomenological account of association when we argue in Chapter 9 that this strange unsayable ‘thing’ is bound up with wel-fare: a sense of sympathy for others in the community where we find ourselves. So, how does being with fit in? The answer is that it doesn’t. Being with, or rather the interpretation that we will offer, demands that we think in a slightly different way about language. What if we were never at home in community; or, if language never quite communicated what we think we mean? In elucidating this question, we can return to the notion of interiority. However, rather than seeing interiority and exteriority as carefully demarcated, we could see the terms as a kind of fold where inner and outer are part of the same twisted fabric. Our inner sense of self would then arguably be part of the outside; exteriority would also be interiority. One consequence of this folding would be a kind of non-correspondence between inner and outer. To put this most simply, when we think that we are most in touch with the essence of ourselves, we are elsewhere. Playing on the other metaphor we used above, we are not at home to ourselves. There is a permanent non-correspondence between what we think, feel and say; and our failure to fi nd ourselves in the places where we should be. Many bewildering consequences follow from this non-correspondence to self. Suffice to say, for the moment at least, that thinking of the human being as opaque, failing to correspond to itself in its very being, has always an important theme in political philosophy. For example, in Hobbes’ celebrated version of the problem of community, our constitution as human beings, inherently awry, prone to pathology and unable to understand one another, requires the Leviathan to defi ne and to enforce the laws that provide the common terms of existence. Community, then, is a way of dealing with the inherent negativity of being with. Even sophisticated mathematical models of market society contain a fundamental element of this theme in the assertion of the selfishness of the market actor. However, as we will argue in Chapter 9, being with does not necessarily take us to the inherent negativity of human association. Asserting the double or folded nature of consciousness does not mean that we have to think solely in terms of pathology. We will argue that sympathy, reciprocity and mutuality are equally part of this problematic of being with. This theme also resonates (at a very different level) with our claims about social justice and a tradition of political thinking that has always stressed co-operation as opposed to competition.

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We thus come across one of the standard themes in political philosophy: the need for civic institutions that will encourage our better instincts and constrain the worst. We will offer a more nuanced reading of this theme that takes us to the community of welfare. As explained below, we will use Titmuss’ famous notion of the gift of blood to show how the welfare community is an institutional articulation of human association; one particular expression of being with or the non-correspondence of interiority and exteriority that calls for community. We trust this makes sense. These are difficult themes that we will pick up on in Chapter 9. For the moment, it is probably best to take a few steps back and deal with some of the historical issues that are central to our thesis.

The British Welfare State 1945–2010 Chapter 2 focuses on the historical context of the welfare state. We argue that there are three significant moments in the development of the British welfare state. We have touched upon them above. The first significant moment was that of foundation in 1945; the second was the Conservative victory in the General Election of 1979. Margaret Thatcher’s radical, reforming government was intent on forcing a break with the consensus over the welfare state that had characterized the politics of the post-war period in Britain. The election defeat of the Conservatives in 1997 brought to power Tony Blair’s New Labour Government. We will argue that this is the third significant moment in the history of the British welfare state. New Labour thinking asserted the relevance of egalitarian arguments and welfare provision for a globalized economy. Indeed, international competitiveness was seen as requiring the social cohesiveness that comes from a skilled workforce committed to both creating and sharing social wealth. As Esping-Andersen has pointed out, social justice became linked to social mobility and access to training that allows individuals and their families to increase their income and assets. It is as if the current state of politics in the United Kingdom is an argument over the legacies of Thatcher and Blair. With defeat in the election of 2010, the New Labour era came to an abrupt end. The first coalition government in British politics for 70 years took office with a radical agenda to tackle the deficit in public finances that was a direct result of the banking crisis of 2008. The Coalition shares with New Labour the concern that the welfare system itself contributes to persistent patterns of poverty and deprivation. However, reforms are also driven by the Big Society agenda.

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A personal initiative of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Big Society is an experiment in the delivery of public services. The Big Society seeks to involve private and third society actors in welfare provision. It is also, somewhat unfortunately, linked to wide-scale cuts in the government spending. As the idea has a pedigree in mutualist thought, it cannot simply be written off as a cheap fi x for services provision in a time of fiscal austerity. We will assess it in more detail in Chapter 3. What seems most politically important is the way in which the Coalition Government’s austerity policies appear to be creating increasingly profound social dislocation and a sense that the public sector in general, and welfare institutions in particular, need to be supported and defended.

Contextual Economy and Progressive Politics Chapter 3 develops two separate but related concerns. Picking up on themes in Chapter 1, we will develop a progressive account of welfare, economy and society. We will also be concerned with the response of the Labour party to both Coalition politics, and to the legacy of New Labour. To what extent is a progressive agenda on welfare now possible? We will assess recent Labour thinking on welfare and public sector reform. Since the demise of New Labour, there has been a real engagement with progressive thinking, and a desire to re-work ideas of mutualism and social justice. We do not want to suggest that this post-New Labour revisionist project is driven by the arguments that we present. It is necessary to observe a distinction between the resources from which critical ideas are drawn, and the way in which these might be articulated in the more pragmatic context of party politics. Our approach returns to Polanyi and the notion of a socially embedded economy. Economy is embedded in systems of ‘maintenance, learning and generation’. These systems are fundamentally normative and materialized to the extent that they have an institutional form (Williams, 1961, p. 117) as well as a complex set of ideas, assumptions, feelings and expectations that have grown up around them. Economic reproduction requires norms that are embedded in forms of life. This huge theme will be examined through a focus on two concepts that anthropological evidence suggests are central to social organization: reciprocity21 and mutuality. Notions of reciprocity and mutuality provide a way of understanding arguments that privilege co-operation, equality and self-help in social and economic organization (we will not use the term social capital for reasons explained in Chapters 5 and 6). In order to elaborate these arguments we will make

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reference to contextual economics. While it is not anti-market, contextual economics is committed to re-thinking how markets operate and how values function in the discourse of economics. These themes can be linked to Karl Polanyi’s influential argument that markets are not spontaneous and self-organizing. Markets are rooted in social relationships and have to be put in place and regulated for the good of the political community.

Equality, Social Freedom and Recognition To understand how equality is deployed in Chapter 4, it is necessary to go back to at least one aspect of the theory of solidarity outlined above. Equality does not describe the mathematical division of resources, it indicates the nature of common institutions that are open to all citizens and which provide opportunities to all those in a political community. John Roemer puts this point well: resources ‘are not [just] distributed through income’, but are ‘embodied’ in institutions (Roemer, 1994, p. 166) and people access them to the extent that they ‘take their places in institutions’. However, there is a prior point. To think in terms of equality requires us to specify equality of something; what is this ‘something’? We need to determine ‘what’ is being made more equal. What is the ‘substance’ being divided? We can speak of equalizing income through progressive taxation, for example. However, while this is important, it is not absolutely central to our argument. Indeed, re-distribution of income, in and of itself, would probably not achieve the desired social ends. We are also using equality in the sense of access to institutions and advantage. However, access to institutions does not capture the full sense of what is being equalized either. We need to qualify our argument again. We will argue that the ‘something’ being equalized is access to well-being. Distribution of resources is to be guided by the notion that egalitarian welfare enhances the well-being of all citizens: egalitarian welfare builds the capacity of citizens as productive members of a community. So, what do we mean by well-being? Well-being is, in part, not only about having the skills necessary for productive and engaging work; but it is also about being supported while out of work or while engaging in other non-waged social activities such as caring for a family. Well-being is also about being recognized as a member of a political community. Recognition, therefore, presupposes the very capacities that define social activity. We will see that this notion of recognition is fundamental to how we understand the civic being of the citizen in

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solidarity with his/her consociates. To use terms we introduced earlier in our discourse, social freedom requires mutual and reciprocal relationships. Well-being is not used in the sense understood by welfare economists. It is not a question of preferences, manifested by the way in which individuals indicate their ‘choices’ in their market behaviour. Well-being is a much fuller account of embodied, material life. Indeed, well-being is not in essence an economic concept. It addresses human ‘being’ and ‘doing’ that run from the achievement of the most basic forms of survival, through to the achievement of states of more advanced capacity and functioning.22 So, ultimately, our theory of equality is grounded on something that cannot be divided up. Welfare as well-being is grounded on an account of social freedom.23 Social freedom is understood in terms of substantive equality. This is not freedom from constraint; nor is it absolute equality between all citizens. It has to be understood as the freedom to make decisions and to follow them through. Freedom can only be realized with others and through communally produced resources. The free society is characterized by the fact that ‘those freedoms that are thought necessary to agency are available to all’. The ‘good life’ can only be lived ‘relationally’ or when ‘we help each other’ (Purnell and Cooke, 2010, p. 21). To further develop this thinking of social freedom we need to discuss equality and justice. Bernard Crick has argued that all social and economic inequalities need justifying.24 Only if a ‘clear public benefit’ follows from inequality could inequality be justified. In Chapter 4 we will elaborate this theme through a re-reading of John Rawls’ theory of justice. In particular, the concept of the difference principle remains an important point of reference. Rawls’ work has been appropriated by those working within left and left liberal traditions, and we will be concerned with their arguments. However, we don’t follow Rawls in attempting to create a single, over-arching concept of justice. We approach justice in the spirit of bricolage or DIY, putting together the elements of a theory that seem to organize most adequately an account of egalitarian well-being.25 This approach understands justice to be an important element in an ongoing argument over the ends of political organization. The concept of complex equality (Sen, 1992; Walzer, 1983) is an exemplification of this theme: justice requires a distribution that means that some will have less, and some more of something. For us, this is a political problem. It means that there is no articulation of justice that is not political.

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Association, Mutualism and Human Rights While Chapter 4 considered the ideas of justice and equality, Chapter 5 turns its attention to themes that were touched upon in Chapter 3 (and existed in a minor key in Chapter 4): the relational nature of social life. Relying on associationalist theory, we will develop a contemporary understanding of traditions of self-help and mutual aid. Associationalism is very much concerned with the need to achieve synergies between state and nonstate operators; it is acutely aware that the state ‘cannot do everything’ and should focus on what it does best: ‘building institutions which can successfully meet human needs through various forms of self-governance, rather than being directly owned, managed or controlled by government’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 95). The welfare state was ‘founded on the model of empowering bureaucrats and system managers rather than citizens or claimants’ (Vincent, D., 1991). As Esping-Andersen writes, this model of welfare provision side-lined forms of welfare that had developed outside the control of the state ‘self organised friendly societies or . . . union or party sponsored fraternal welfare plans’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990, p. 24). However, it is easy to misunderstand what is at stake. Although friendly societies and unions provided pools of savings to their members and subscribers, they did not do so on a scale sufficient to comprehensively alleviate poverty and want. Indeed, as trade union membership was relatively small in comparison to the working population, and benefits from friendly societies limited to member, coverage was far from universal. The state had to be involved in welfare provision to achieve universal coverage. Chapter 5 thus attempts to update traditional progressive concerns around co-operation and selfhelp co-ordinated and aided by the state. The insights into associational life provided by Chapter 5 will be further nuanced by Chapter 6. Chapter 6 picks up on the discussion of reciprocity and mutuality. We will argue that these themes point towards an understanding of productive agency.26 Productive agency grounds the communal belonging of citizens in mutual recognition: we make ourselves.27 Productive agency will be addressed through a concept of social and economic rights. Before we go into a little more detail on the complex of work, recognition and citizenship, we will clarify our understanding of social rights as human rights. These observations on the nature of human rights will also be relevant for our discussion in Chapter 8, where we examine the human right to welfare. For the moment, though, we want to deal with the generic concept of a social right, which includes both labour rights and welfare rights.

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Advocates of social justice have always made two claims about the distinction between civil rights and social and economic rights. First, they have argued that rights are indivisible, and that there is no sensible or compelling distinction between civil rights and social rights. Given the more or less general acceptance of this position, we will not spend any more time on this point.28 The second potentially problematic issue is that human rights have been seen as a defence of the self-interested, ‘atomized’ individual. Of late, progressive approaches to human rights have seized upon the relevance of social rights to think about mutuality (Bowring, 2008). We touch again upon social rights in Chapter 8, but, we cannot engage with the technical legal debates about the nature or effect of such rights. We want to make a broader point. Social rights articulate a complex of reciprocity where my rights are respected by you because your rights are respected by me. This gives us some sense of the relational context of reciprocity. Social rights also relate to the opportunities to be part of a productive economy and to have legitimate claims on the resources so produced. This is some way from Marshall’s notion of social rights. Marshall’s concept arguably stressed the nature of a right as a claim. Rights as an expression of social reciprocity allow individuals to claim resources that they have communally produced. Our concept of reciprocity is also critical of the way in which communitarian arguments have used the term. Reciprocity must be used to articulate a set of obligations and duties that extend throughout the whole of the society and are not simply used to discipline the poor. We don’t mean to suggest that rights provide the ground for our arguments in an account of legal normativity. Rights provide one useful concept for articulating the way in which we recognize each other as citizens involved in the reproduction of the terms of our material existence. The reproduction of our material existence should not be seen in a narrow way. We will show how it incorporates important arguments about the gendered division of labour and the need for welfare. Welfare for those who are not ‘productive’ is not a misuse of resources. Moreover, anthropologists and social psychologists have shown that a strong motivator of human behaviour is limited altruism. Limited altruism describes behavioural patterns where resources are shared with strangers on the basis of rules that prevent the exploitation of those who have contributed to a common fund. This provides a strong justification for use of resources in welfare. As long as the terms of receipt are transparent and of general application, there is no sense in this argument that homo reciprocans would begrudge his or her fellows welfare.

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Reciprocity and mutuality must themselves be defined. Both words have a wide range of meanings. We will argue that they can be given a fairly precise and determined sense. Reciprocity, at its crudest, can describe ‘tit for tat’ relationships but, we will suggest that, alongside mutuality, the terms relate to forms of exchange that characterize social organization around values such as co-operation and weak altruism. In the final section of the chapter, we will re-visit arguments about community and work. We will conclude with a re-reading of Marx that links labour and recognition. For us, this concern relates to reciprocity and mutuality which articulate the way in which we recognize ourselves. A theme that runs through the arguments in Chapter 6 picks up on our concern with organized labour and trade unionism that were first outlined in Chapter 3. Our arguments about co-operation and reciprocity are not meant to detract from the importance of trade unions as bodies that protect the interest of labour. Chapter 7 elaborates this account by reference to pension provision. This area raises in its acutest form the issue of control of what we will call welfare capital. We will argue that it is necessary to think about the regulation of investment and to use the power of pension capital to further social investment. We will show that the unions have opened up valuable arguments and possibilities in this field, drawing attention to the social and economic consequences of unrestrained ‘flight capital’ for both national economies and global economic organization. This area of welfare raises key concerns about the control of capital, and we will make use of the arguments of Blackburn and Minns about the need for social investment and the kind of strategies that might achieve such a goal. Our arguments will take us beyond the politics of the trade unions to engage with activist groups who are agitating for the state pension and articulating a powerful claim to just rewards for a life’s work.

The Right to Welfare, Globalization and Sympathy This brings us to the last phase of our argument. Chapter 8 provides something of a summary and re-statement of our thesis in addressing the global situation of the welfare state. It is necessary to avoid the simplistic argument that globalization has so de-centred the nation state as to make welfare impossible. We will internationalize the immunization thesis to suggest that the in common of welfare remains firmly within globally extended capitalism. Globalization and welfare is a contested field. A globalized economy may be open to the movement of capital, services and

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trade, but it also presents certain problematic opportunities for new ways of thinking and delivering welfare. We will trace these tensions through important international discourses on welfare and social risk management. We will focus on the internationalization of the concept of solidarity in the social policy of the European Union and the discourses on social security and risk management that have increasingly become part of the ideologies of governance and world trade sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank. We will conclude by examining the problems inherent in asserting a human right to social security, and briefly consider the fragmentary but promising beginnings of an international discourse on social justice. The final chapter returns to the community of welfare. We will re-deploy the notion of association to pull together the various elements of our argument, and offer a phenomenological account of the meaning of community. We will argue that association can be understood through concepts of sympathy for others that take us to the root meanings of the terms welfare and reciprocity. However, we will also be concerned with the problematic relationship between association and being with. How do we understand this slippery term? As we have seen, being with cannot be easily co-ordinated with any political programme or ideology,29 nor can being with ground any sense of positive obligations. Being with is not solidarity; it cannot be legislated and it cannot easily be co-ordinated with institutions. Being with escapes from any attempt to definitively determine a social reality at the same time as it provokes an articulation of what it means to be with others. We will offer a reading of Richard Titmuss’ classic notion of the ‘gift of blood’ as a provocative account of our being with others. Titmuss presents voluntary blood donation as a figure of welfare. The gift of blood is, for us, an attempt to define a public sharing of what is one’s own; a flowing of what is interior into that which is not one’s own: the body of the other. The essential point is that blood is given in situations of anonymity, to ‘unnamed strangers irrespective of race, religion or colour’. Although the gift of blood is a ‘bond’ that links ‘men and women in the world’ (Titmuss, 1987, p. 62), the gift does not somehow bring all together into some communion of presence to each other. For a start, the gift of blood is mediated by technology and the institutions of the welfare state (we will not pick up on the difficult question of technology to avoid overcomplicating our argument). The point is that blood donation requires this mediation. Indeed, Titmuss is careful to show that blood donation has to be organized by the state, and cannot be left to the market. As a figure

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of welfare, the bond of the gift of blood is something that passes through all citizens and the state. The gift of blood ‘externalizes’ that which is one’s ‘ownmost’ and shares it with anonymous others. These are difficult times to make arguments in favour of welfare. It is increasingly important to hang onto the kind of sentiment behind Crossland’s contention that the welfare state represents the achievement of a quiet ‘revolution’ that positively altered the constitution of society. To think again about welfare, it is necessary to be imaginative. In the wake of the banking crisis of 2008 and the profound global recession which it produced, it is surely the case that free market economics have been profoundly discredited. However, it would appear that the centre right has managed to dominate the agenda, and create an account of the disaster where public spending, public services and the costs of welfare are somehow responsible for the parlous state of national finances. This book presents arguments about welfare as central to any counter-narrative. Asserting that welfare is necessary for a politics of the common good means seeing the state, and state spending, as essential to a sustainable economy and social well-being. Now is the time to take on those financiers that Harold Wilson referred to as the little gnomes of Zurich.30

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1 Inside the Whale Being with and Immunity

What kind of experience? What kind of human beings? (Orwell, 1979, p. 543) ‘Nosce te ipsum’ (Read Yourself) (Hobbes, 1988, p. 10) It is not love to my neighbour, whom I often do not know at all, which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. (Kropotkin, 1995, p. 47)

Introduction We need to take up some questions posed by Jean-Luc Nancy about the theme of community and Heidegger’s ‘concept’ of Dasein. According to Nancy, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein raises a fundamental issue before any thinking of ‘we’: ‘we’ are the beings for whom being is an issue.1 This is not just an issue of how the world makes sense to us, but how we understand ourselves. For Heidegger, Dasein is an ‘entity’ that ‘has to be’; that has to ask the question of its own Being. Nancy stresses that this questioning can only take place because we are always involved with others: our world makes sense to us. 20

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So, we will follow Nancy in interpreting Dasein as mitdasein or being with. What does this mean? Community, as an ‘in common’, is not an essence, a national language or citizenship in a legal order; a sense of cultural or religious belonging. Being with relates to ‘what divides us’ and ‘is shared out to us’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 69). This sharing is the measure or the non-totalizable set of relations that is being in common. We will argue that the in common lies in the circulation of meanings among us. But the being with of the in common also points elsewhere. In the introduction, we referred to this as the problematization of interiority, the un-homing of home. Being with, in this sense, is inseparable from the peculiar sense that authentic ideas of community lie in experiences that both bring community into being, and make it impossible. In this chapter, we will try and follow this ‘logic’ of association into the immunity thesis.2 We will suggest that the immunization thesis applies to a particular articulation of welfare within capitalism. However, immunization of society through welfare requires a very different understanding of the market than the one dominant at the moment. We will link this theme to the relevance of reciprocity and mutuality for an order of welfare in and against capitalism and we will outline how this allows us to ‘ontologize’ ideas of solidarity and social freedom as the ‘bond’ of the welfare community.

Dasein and Being with Our argument about mitdasein faces two initial problems. Why use Heidegger’s philosophy to think about welfare? At worst, we might repeat Heidegger’s own mistakes and turn our account of the welfare community into the expression of a leader who can somehow care for his people. This is a long way from the meaning of welfare that we are pursuing (although there is always the risk that solidarity gets interpreted in this way). Second, the major problem with Heidegger’s thinking is that it fails to grasp the ‘we’: the ‘in common’. Rather than the kind of radical ontology we find in Habermas’ work, Heidegger appears not to be interested in the subject rooted in a social context. His focus is on the solipsistic quest for self-understanding. To the extent that others appear at all, they are the mob, the ‘they’ who are responsible for distraction and the cheapening of meaning. Relying on mitdasein to provide a reading of solidarity thus appears somewhat problematic. We want to elaborate how we are appropriating this term. To explain mitdasein, we need to define Dasein. Who, or what,

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is Dasein? This is a very difficult question to answer in a short book. At the risk of overly simplifying a complex debate, we can offer some general comments. We began this book with a discussion of solidarity. Solidarity is, for us, part of a much broader understanding of our being in the world. Solidarity can be understood as one of the ways in which we are with others. The following paragraphs provide a sketch of the Dasein and being with that will underline our arguments. Dasein is untranslatable, but means something like ‘being there’. Dasein tells us something about our social life; or, to pick up on the point we made at the beginning of the chapter, questions of Dasein relate to our nature as human beings. So, when it comes to a question of the ‘who’ of Dasein it is an issue of establishing this ‘who’ through the way that Dasein lives. Dasein’s ‘who’ can be defined by asserting that Dasein is ‘in every case I myself’. However, the ‘who’ takes us towards the problematic of the others among whom Dasein lives; an issue inseparable from sense, meaning and language. However, we need to move slowly, and deal with these themes separately (to the extent that they can be separated). The ‘who’ of Dasein is the ‘primordial’ fact that being is always being with others. Primordial, in this context, describes the fundamental structure of being: a being with, or even a being between others. The ‘between’ cannot be imagined as a space that connects or breaks down the singularity of those who communicate. It does not include into any essential community. If anything it holds separate at the same time as it brings together; proximity and distance exist at the moment that we speak of one with the other. This point can be explained in a less obscure manner. If you consider your ‘being’ or, crudely, the sense of ‘I, myself’, what do you find? Do it now. Stop reading this book. What is your ‘I’? The inner most sense of self? The inner essence of you? Already there are problems: you need to think of yourself in language and language is not you. Pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘you’ are empty symbols that fail to resonate with ‘your’ experience of ‘yourself’. To put yourself into language, to conceive of yourself, to think of the ‘I’, is already to have compromised your unique essential self with a general structure: impersonal words, grammar, that makes ‘you’ you. The very language that allows us to think of ourselves also de-centres us. If one accepts that language is a general, impersonal structure, then, it would appear that this exteriority constitutes our interiority: makes us who we are. This is the ‘fold’ that we discussed in the previous chapter. The impersonality of language is not necessarily a bad thing. If we are creatures of language, then when we use language we expose ourselves to others in a radical way: ‘[t]he existence of every being thus summons the

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other or a plurality of others’ (Blanchot, 1988, p. 6). We do not mean to suggest that there can be no secrets; that we somehow see into each other’s souls. Clearly this is not the case. Our exposure of ourselves to others through language is also the hollowing out of the secret of our selves. There is always the unsayable; that which cannot be put into words. Blanchot, a thinker of these problems, calls this hollowed out self ‘the insufficient self’ (Blanchot, 1988, p. 6). This insufficient self does not find sufficiency in community. Community doesn’t provide the comfort of sufficiency: it opens the self to others. This opening of the self to others is the fundamental problem of mitdasein. Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of our argument. The philosophy of Dasein provides a rigorous account of our social being. Dasein is an ‘external’ structure. While Dasein is ‘us’, it is also the structure of meaning that provides the form of our internal consciousness. Our sense of ourselves, then, is strictly a sense of Dasein; our interiority refers us to the outside of language and meaning that exposes the self to the world and others. Indeed, being with discloses others as necessary for Dasein. This ‘understanding of others’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 161) is ‘primordial’. It is a substratum that allows others to appear as a matter of concern to Dasein. For Nancy, others are ‘strange’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 6). Others are not an anonymous mass who are opposed to the ‘one’, the lonely, self-defining subject. We would also make a mistake if we conceived life among others as somehow ‘statistical’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 9). Others, as sources of meaning, are always the subject of a ‘who’: ‘a guy, a girl, a kid’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 7). These others may be ‘imprecise’, but they are not the vaguely threatening anonymous chatter of the ‘they’; others are always ‘faint outlines of voices, patterns of comportment’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 7). The strangeness, the singularity of people, lies in these affects: present within a crowd, one is always more or less aware of the faces and voices of those one is among; even if one’s attention is never held by a particular face or person, the experience is never one of simple anonymity. Our description of Dasein is necessarily abstract and general. A proper account of being with would require a thorough discussion of the historical and material context that determines the shape of our lives together. This book attempts to provide at least something of this context in discussing the welfare community. We will pick up on these questions later in this chapter, as we need to deal with another aspect of being with. Being with relates to our embodiment: the fact that our Dasein is always differently constituted. In other words, we ‘are’ our materiality: male or female, young or old, able bodied or disabled, gay or straight; of a certain

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background, ethnicity or culture. Dasein is our embodied consciousness. The singularity of our selves is also, then, a feature of mitdasein. Rather like Jo, in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, we are unique: ‘bloody marvellous’. This element of ourselves also qualifies any assertion that we are simply creatures who use language. Our embodiment means that we have desires and appetites; we have emotions and drives that have a very problematic relationship with language as they both require and resist rational articulation. To take stock again: our life with others is as much a question of environment, emotion or mood as it is our reasoned, rational or linguistic response. What is most intriguing about this reading of mitdasein is a realization of the need for community in our non-correspondence with ourselves. This is one of the key themes of political philosophy. Consider, for example, Hobbes’ version of the social contract. The Leviathan is required to preserve social peace among rational but ‘brutish’ and selfish creatures. The ‘war of all against all’ can only be brought to an end by accepting a limitation of one’s power in a sovereign who embodies the commonwealth. Indeed, the propensity of human beings to anti-social behaviour means that the sovereign must be ever watchful. The community founded by the Leviathan must immunize us from ourselves. Institutions are necessary for the very structuring of the human psyche. However, it is very much a question of the how one ‘reads’ the human being. For instance, arguably, in contradiction to Hobbes, Kropotkin argues that human beings tend towards mutual support. Put crudely, his argument is that human nature has developed in such a way that the gains from co-operation with others outweigh the advantages one can gain by acting in a self-interested way: All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of what is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulae as ‘The right to work’ or ‘To each the whole result of his labour’. What we proclaim is the Right to Well Being: Well-Being for all. (Kropotkin, 1995, p. 20) This argument links reciprocity to work and a claim over common resources. Communal participation justifies mutual and reciprocal rights: ‘if the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all’ (Kropotkin, 1995, p. 20). It is interesting that Kropotkin has to make use of the language of fairness and

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right to explain his position, and we will return to this point in Chapter 6 (we will also re-visit Kropotkin’s concerns with work and well-being). Our concern, however, is not with questions of human nature or evolutionary arguments. Rather, we simply want to point out that there is a way of thinking about associational life that does not come to Hobbes’ conclusions; that suggests that there are different ways of thinking about being with. These are complex ideas, and we need to move slowly. There are a great many themes knotted together in our analysis. Hobbes and Kropotkin would probably agree with the assertion that institutions are necessary to structure human subjectivity; they would profoundly disagree over the form and nature of those institutions. Uniting their different approaches is the fundamental concern with the meaning that institutional structures give to social life.3 We could call this the theme of recognition.4 The institutions that structure the social world (either, in our rather simplistic account, the sovereign state of the Leviathan, or the reciprocal community of co-operation) allow us to recognize ourselves as citizens and feel a sense of belonging to something that is greater than us. It is a long way from the Leviathan to the welfare state, or indeed, from Kropotkin’s account of co-operation to contemporary understandings of work, but, the underlying ‘structure’ identified by both thinkers is still necessary. We can take this point further and return to Esposito’s immunity thesis.

Community and Immunity The immunity thesis is the most recent of a long series of biological metaphors in political theory. We have long spoken, for example, of the ‘body politic’ or the ‘body of the nation’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 45). Immunity, in ‘politico-juridical language’ describes a very specific problematic: ‘a temporary or definitive exemption on the part of the subject with regard to concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances would bind one to others’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 45). What does this mean? Immunity is etymologically linked to community.5 For Esposito (and somewhat counter-intuitively) community is based on the ‘immunization’ of what is held in common: If communitas is that relation, which, in binding its members to an obligation of reciprocal donation, jeopardizes individual identity, immunitas is the condition of dispensation from such obligation and therefore the defence against the expropriating features of communitas. (Esposito, 2008, p. 50)

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So, although Esposito begins by talking of the subject immunized from common bonds, he goes on to suggest that it is not just individual identity that is at stake. The private ‘order’ is immunized, or immunizes itself, against those reciprocal obligations that create the ‘in common’ of community. Although this argument requires further elucidation, we can appreciate in outline how it relates to our discussion of solidarity. Solidarity defines the ‘in common’ of the welfare state: that set of mutual rights and obligations that we have described as the welfare community. It is necessary to stress another point in order to develop our argument. Esposito points out that the ‘paradigm’ of immunization creates a relationship between (at least) two terms, the public and the private. However: ‘[r]ather than being superimposed or juxtaposed in an external form that subjects one to the domination of the other, in the immunitary paradigm, [the two terms] emerge as the two constitutive elements of a single, indivisible whole that assumes meaning from their interrelation’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 45).6 Thus, it is not as if the public and the private can be simply opposed. The two terms are bound up together in a ‘whole’ that they define, and which defines them. The public cannot be abstracted from the private, in the same way that the private cannot delimit itself from the public. In the last chapter we argued that there is an order seemingly opposed to that of the welfare community: the order of the market championed (most recently) by the neo-liberals. However, following Esposito, we need to see these two orders bound together in a constitutive tension. The ‘in common’ of the welfare community must ‘immunize’ itself against the order of the market. At the same time the market must try and limit the costly demands that the ‘in common’ places upon it. This constitutive tension, we suggest, is the contradiction of welfare capitalism. The welfare state is indeed founded as a compromise with capitalism; its limits (and its potential) define themselves as an order of human need that cannot be satisfied in market terms, while existing alongside (and within) a market order. The immunity thesis also helps us to understand the persistence of welfare within capitalism. The market (despite the reforms of the last 30 years) has not been able to significantly limit the ‘parasitical’ presence of welfare. We need to take a couple of steps back in order to elucidate these terms further. Polanyi’s work allows us to appreciate the ‘whole’ that Esposito is describing: the ‘whole’ is the complex of social and economic reproduction that embeds economy in society: ‘the inclusion of the noneconomic [into the economic] is vital’ (Polanyi, 1977, pp. 249–50). To elaborate: economic

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processes denote the ‘movement’ or circulation of commodities that have been produced by human activity. Commodities are produced in and pass through institutional locations. Production, distribution and exchange combine elements that can be described as ecological, technological and societal. These institutions are the ‘bare bones of the process of production’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 249). Any ‘unity’ imposed on these institutions must come from ‘societal conditions’. Although Polanyi is thinking generally about the social presuppositions of economic organization, the relevance of his thesis for an elaboration of the immunity thesis is clear. The order of market exchange can only come into existence within a social world. We can sharpen this thesis by applying it to welfare capitalism. Polanyi argued that market exchanges were inseparable from forms of redistribution and reciprocity that impose ‘symmetry’ between economy and social mores. Market exchanges are socially integrative only to the extent that the value of exchanges can be institutionally determined rather than left to the price function of the market. The authority that institutes the market must also inaugurate forms of redistribution and reciprocity that redirect goods on the basis of human need. While these insights were based on anthropological studies of premodern societies, Polanyi argued that the tension between exchange and redistribution are not so restricted (we will see in Chapter 3 that Polanyi was building on Mauss in this respect). The opposition between exchange, distribution and reciprocity provides a way of thinking in general about the terms of social and economic organization. Thus, although reciprocity can be organized in terms of relationships that focused on ‘[k]inship, neighbourhood or totem’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 253), in other kinds of historical context one might find ‘voluntary or semi-voluntary associations of a military, vocational, religious or social kind’ that privilege ‘some sort of mutuality’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 253). In ‘modern’ social formations, redistribution can take place through a ‘modern welfare state’ (Polanyi, 1977, p. 253). Hardly surprisingly, redistribution of resources and reciprocal relationships between citizens tend to ‘integrate groups’ in relationships of solidarity (Polanyi, 1977, p. 254). We need to qualify this thesis somewhat. The modern welfare state is a very particular form of political organization and cannot be confused with pre-modern forms of social and economic organization. Historical processes of development, labour differentiation and technical advance, coupled with political responses that privilege the nation state tend to destroy that ‘stable network of self-governing institutions’ that would

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have provided welfare. This is precisely the problem of the modern welfare state and a further element of the immunization thesis. Those institutional sources of self-help and social organization that were inconvenient to power, or were incapable of providing universal benefits, were swept aside in the creation of a very particular welfare order. As a consequence, ‘society as a functional moral entity disappears’ (Glasman, 1996, p. 7). Solidarity as self-help, constituted through the reliance on others and the appropriate institutional forms, becomes squeezed out by state provision. We need to recover these traditions, but to do so within the problematic of the welfare state, a concern that we will develop in Chapter 5.

Reciprocity, Mutuality and Solidarity We must now develop the final sequence of our argument. Our discussion concerns the political themes that have run through this chapter. We have argued that, for Polanyi, the market is inseparable from society. The discussion of being with thus far has focused on the social world in which we associate with one another. Thus far we have not considered how we can embed the theme of the market in this associational space. We can now stress that we want to approach this concern through an ‘ontology’ of reciprocity, a notion that further elaborates our arguments about the circulation of sense. These themes will only be outlined in this chapter, as they are developed in proper detail in Chapter 9. In general, reciprocity can be seen as exchanges of meaning: our involvement in a world that we, as language-using human beings, symbolize to each other. The fundamental economy, then, would be that of signs: of the meanings that are defined and circulate among us.7 Once again, this is a difficult theme to which we will return to in Chapter 5, so we will only present a brief outline here. The essential point, in Mauss’ terms, is that reciprocity describes those meanings that we exchange and which circulate among us (Mauss, 1990, p. 89). This argument enables us to radicalize our reading of Polanyi’s anthropology. The public world that enables economy is itself enabled by sense. To argue that economy ultimately raises the question of sense is supported by the argument that market exchange for profit, ‘exposes or strips bare’ the ‘with’ as Being together (Nancy, 2000, p. 64). The fundamental point is that through the development of the money form, everything becomes exchangeable and made equivalent. The analysis of profit brings up the problem of human value: ‘this is . . . why there is the stripping bare of the being-social and, at the same time, its being brought to life, exactly because

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the “human” is “valuable” in itself. This being valuable in itself – or even value itself – is “dignity”’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 74). What do we make of this? Meaning is not somehow prior to monetary exchange. The phenomena are inseparable. However, privileging a social reality relates to those meanings that create human value; even, perhaps, the very value of the human being. Meaning as reciprocity presupposes that human beings are sources of value that cannot be made equivalent. The ‘dignity’ of the human being relates to the idea that each of us is a unique point of meaning. This is not solipsistic, as our ‘dignity’ (the absolute value of the self) is enabled by the circulation of meaning between all of us. Furthermore, the exteriority of language suggests that this value is also one that passes among us and is inseparable from being with. The relational world of communication is where human identity is created as an ongoing and reciprocal process that is trans-individual.8 We can conclude our argument by making the last essential links between association and the immunity thesis at an ontological level; the framework for our appropriation of solidarity as an ‘ontological’ theme. The value of the human being has to be protected from the market. But, at the same time, the market must be relied upon for economic reproduction. For us, this is the institutional problematic of welfare. As we have seen, the welfare state defines the welfare community that exists inside the market order as welfare capitalism. Welfare capitalism attempts to secure those areas of social reproduction on which market exchanges depend and to limit or alleviate the social costs of the market that are the degradation of poverty. We will develop this point in depth in later chapters, but it needs to be linked to a second point (and one on which Marx and Polanyi would agree): human beings are not ‘commodities’ (Glasman, 1996, pp. 5–6); people are not things (a point which would also be in agreement with our analysis of Dasein). This fact begs a number of questions about economic organization and the imposition of a welfare order on the market; it also takes us back to our discussion of solidarity. The market then does an ‘absolute wrong’ to ‘the one who is exploited’ (Nancy, 1991, pp. 35–6) or deprived of work. This suggests that a Marxist articulation of these matters is not irrelevant, but we will have to be careful. We do not want to go back to the worst aspects of Marx and Marxism. We are arguing against two forms of community: the community of profit, and the ‘oppositional’ community of communism. We must not lose sight of the need to critique the injustices wrought by the capitalist mode of production. This makes for certain fundamental problems. To the extent that

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we are using the language of association, it is necessary to separate it from the forms of organized opposition that remain committed to an immanent community of the organized working class. It is also necessary to elaborate a critique of political economy that does not collapse into those discredited forms of Marxism. These pressing issues will be dealt with in Chapters 3 and 6, where we will attempt to show that, within Marx’s thinking, there is a keen appreciation of being with. At this stage in our argument, then, we can make a more general point. Let us recall our discussion of solidarity in the previous chapter. Although solidarity is a porous and problematic term,9 it is an essential element in the definition of a welfare community committed to the wellbeing of all its citizens. Solidarity provides the material support for the concept of membership in a political community without which ‘welfare would lack normative support and justification’ (Mau, 2004, p. 59). Solidarity articulates ‘the concern for one society’ based on the need to ‘deepen and enlargen [the] self respect’ of its citizens (Titmuss, 1987, p. 215). Solidarity is a belonging to an association characterized by social justice; the organization of resources to a common end; that end being the protection of all human beings from a common fate. But, perhaps protection is the wrong word. It limits the reach of welfare. Welfare is not just about providing for human need. It is about enhancing human well-being. This theme will finally allow us to return to solidarity, and see it as a realization of social freedom. While we will draw our concluding arguments from Nancy, we would not claim that our understanding of freedom as solidarity is licensed by his work. Rather, it is a result of reading Nancy through a certain tradition of association. Nancy, for one finds a language of ‘ontological sociality’ (Nancy, 1993, p. 28) inappropriate. Why? It depends on how we proceed. Provided that we can think about people brought together in and as mitdasein, perhaps we can use a qualified notion of sociality. We would have to begin our analysis from the outside – from exteriority. The generous distribution of being that de-centres Dasein is the rhythm and spacing of the world. Nancy is concerned with a human being ‘given over’ to freedom: ‘delivered for what from the beginning exceeded it, outran it and overflowed it’ (Nancy, 1993, p. 9). As we have argued, this cannot be explained from the reference point of the human being. This ultimate freedom is that of being that distributes itself as being; or, ‘sharing divides and shares itself: this is what it is to be in common. One cannot tell its story, nor determine its essence: there is no myth of it, nor is there a philosophy of it’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 64). This is a freedom that, to the extent its spacings

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can be determined, is that of our being with – our exposure to each other through our distribution in the world as differently embodied beings. We will explain this idea in more depth in Chapter 4, but we feel that it points towards a notion of well-being as inseparable from a certain understanding of relational life and an account of social justice. To think otherwise would be to accept the degradation of being, the poverty among us, that limits the being of all of us. Solidarity, then, might be based on the throwness of Daseins into a world in which Dasein has to care for Dasein; and where the injunction or obligation to care is nowhere other than the exposure of Dasein to Dasein in association.

Conclusion This chapter has provided a sketch of an ‘ontology’ of association. To crudely summarize: Nancy’s notion of being with is essential for recuperating a way of thinking about the sense of ‘our’ world and providing some general co-ordinates for understanding how the meaning of the world is shared. We argued that being with underlies our experience of social being and exposes us to each other in community. Being with is indeed bound up with association; with the sense that others have for us. We have made use of the ‘immunity thesis’ to argue that solidarity is bound up with a problematic assertion of ‘the common’ within the order of the market. Elaborating Polanyi’s understanding of the relationship between society and market, we have argued that notions of reciprocity and mutuality underlie solidarity and make welfare a condition for market exchange. Solidarity relates to the institutionalization of our social being, the immunization of the community that protects social being against the very commodification that it enables. We are aware that this analysis has been rather heavy going. Perhaps a change of focus is necessary. The next chapter will outline the historical context of our thesis, before we turn in Chapter 3 to a more political treatment of the themes that we have outlined in this chapter.

Appendix: A Brief Concluding Note on Solidarity The space offered by an appendix is the best place to discuss the following shadowy and hidden themes. We are concerned with the deeply problematic relationship between friendship, fraternity and solidarity. Solidarity can be traced back to the Latin practice and creation of sodalitia; so called because of ‘the unity, intercourse and friendship,

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which bound together those who were in the habit of eating and drinking together’ (Bodin, 1955, p. 98). The band of brothers; those who share a meal. Bodin, the great champion of the absolute sovereign, is forced to admit that sodalitia were able to organize themselves without recourse to sovereign power: ‘mutual trust is the foundation of [sodalitia] and much more necessary to men than justice’ (Bodin, 1955, p. 98). This is an interesting complex of themes that link together sovereignty, solidarity, trust and justice. We will deal with the last two terms: why is it necessary to oppose trust to justice? Justice makes enemies of friends because it is predicated on the enforcement of rights, and the logic of winner and loser. Mutual trust and affection promotes compromise and ‘foster[s] love amongst men, and between men and God’ best achieved by ‘intercourse and daily association’. This is the practice of the sodalitia, the guild or the association. Trust and affection; the bonds of solidarity come out of daily life. What is the nature of the mutual obligations that arise out of the sodalitia? We concluded Chapter 1 by suggesting that Dasein calls Dasein to care for itself. However, this does not mean that we are committed to an ethics (our discussion is quite dis-similar from the ethics of solidarity that Michael Sandel (1998) proposes). The ontology of being with that we discussed, however, does open up the space where some notions of ethics might be possible. To the extent that the obligations of solidarity can be spoken of at all, they are bound up with the ‘response’ that has been ‘inserted’ into the relations with others and which surprise us (Derrida, 2005a, p. 31) with their insistence. It is a ‘responsibility without freedom’ to the extent that it is given to us ‘from the other’ (Derrida, 2005a, p. 232). We are caught or interpellated not so much by ‘signifying’, but, that something is signified to someone. This would mean that the suspension of our freedom is not a choice that the subject or the self actively makes; but the freedom of the will is qualified not erased. The speaker could, presumably, always choose not to assume the responsibility that has been given. However, the obligation cannot be found in the intention of the speaker. It comes from the other to whom one speaks. In other words, there is ‘something before autonomy’ that goes beyond it and ‘overwhelms’ it. In terms of the political tradition that we have been thinking about, a tradition that passes through socialism and the trade union movement, this language is perhaps somewhat strange. For a tradition that has long stressed the virility of the working man, the vita activa of the life of work and politics, a sense of solidarity arising out of a radical passivity seems

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inappropriate. Indeed, the very question of work or labour would also seem to be problematized by the discourse of being with. However, we don’t need to come to these conclusions. The traditions of thought that we are examining have always carried with them a concern with associational life, an open-ness to others through the work that brings us into contact with each other. Later, we will try to suggest, via Marx and Nancy, that the traditions that ‘represent’ (another problematic expression) labour can be understood through the complex of passivity/activity that our discourse on solidarity and freedom involves. The exclusivity of fraternity, the discourse of brothers, will also be examined; but we will delay this theme until the end of the book.

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2 A Short History of Decay Welfare and the State, 1945–2010

‘Once poor, always poor’ Morrissey

Introduction This chapter presents a rather schematic picture of the development of the welfare state to elucidate our central themes. We will take as our central reference point three significant dates: the creation of the modern welfare state by the Labour Government of 1945, the advent of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative regime in 1979 and the New Labour administration of 1997. The Labour welfare reforms of 1945 set up institutions that embedded the economy in forms of welfare provision. Social and economic changes, coupled with the political approach of the Conservative administrations during 1979–97, re-defined the terms of the British welfare state. Tory re-shaping of welfare was continued, albeit it in a somewhat different direction, by the New Labour administrations between 1997 and 2010. New Labour developed policies on social justice and markets that took the Conservative neo-liberal project in a new direction. In the final section of the chapter we will engage with the present welfare reforms of the Coalition Government. We will argue that any possibility of re-invention of progressive welfare thinking has to be understood as both a response 34

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to this most recent political initiative, and in the historical and political context that we have outlined. Progressive thinking has to engage with the legacies of state provision and the privatized localism of the ‘Big Society’ that is the inheritance of contemporary British politics.

1945–79: The Welfare Consensus The Labour election victory of 1945 defined the post-war welfare state. During the war years, Britain had been administered by an all party coalition. Once the tide turned in favour of the allies, post-war reconstruction began to be addressed. The debate on reconstruction was encouraged by the fact that both union leaders and industrialists had worked closely together, ‘drawn into government ministries and the panoply of war time production boards’ (Padgett and Paterson, 1991, p. 194). The experience of war thus foreshadowed the ‘concordat’ that would underlie the postwar period. The Old World and the New Society (The Labour Party, 1942) gave some indication of the direction in which Labour thinking was moving. The millenarian title reflected the hope that a country could be created that was ‘worthy of the men and women who have preserved it’ from its enemies (Orwell, 1947, p. 41). In Orwell’s dramatic words, the sacrifice of British servicemen and women would not leave the old networks of privilege in place; no more would ‘Rolls Royces glide past dole queues’ (Orwell, 1947, p. 38). Immediately after the war Labour seized the initiative. Elaborating electoral strategies that had been used in 1918, the defeat of fascism was presented as a people’s victory. The mistakes that had caused the loss of the earlier post-war election were not to be repeated. The enemies were the ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ and who had shaped the peace, controlling the mines and the factories, and operating them in their interest, rather than for those who had ‘actually done the fighting’.1 The defeats and compromises of the inter-war years were also to be revenged. Twisting Churchill’s words, the 1945 manifesto stressed that ‘[n]ever was so much injury done to so many by so few’. Economic depression and social dislocation were due to the ‘concentration of too much economic power’ in private hands.2 It is worth stressing the historical context of these arguments. In the immediate post-war period there was a real sense that the old order had to be reformed. George Orwell’s essay, The English People, evokes the mood of a nation seeking to renew itself. Orwell speaks of the common people

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who are ‘in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four ale bar and the suburban back garden’ (Orwell, 1947, p. 109). The future was being held back by ‘a generation of ghosts’. We can perhaps appreciate how the idea of welfare was so central to the new order. Labour’s programme was a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. If we look to Beveridge’s proposals which underlay this expansion of the ‘service state’ we can appreciate the nature of the approach.3 Beveridge had immediately seized upon the need for ‘revolutionary thinking’ (Beveridge Commission, 1942, para. 7) to create a system that would ensure ‘a comprehensive policy of social progress’ (Beveridge Commission, 1942, para. 8) focused upon ‘income security’. Public ownership and planning were seen to be the key to re-building the economy and promoting the recovery of capacity after the devastation of the war. Economic re-structuring and full employment would deliver the prosperity that would in turn enable institutional reforms. This was planning on a grand scale. The new National Health Service (NHS) would improve the nation’s well-being. Slums would be cleared and publicly owned houses built. Free secondary education would be guaranteed for all. Social insurance would be extended to all workers, and social security would provide further protection against ‘rainy days’. The reform programme engaged the country with a vision of the future: The nation needs a tremendous overhaul, a great programme of modernisation and re-equipment of its homes, its factories and machinery, its schools, its social services. . . . All parties say so – the Labour Party means it . . . Labour will plan from the ground up – giving an appropriate place to constructive enterprise and private endeavour in the national plan, but dealing decisively with those interests which would use high-sounding talk about economic freedom to cloak their determination to put themselves and their wishes above those of the whole nation.4 The institutional range of the welfare state is apparent in the legislation which stretched from education, through family allowances to the creation of the NHS. Free secondary education was established by the Education Act of 1944. The Family Allowances Act 1946 created benefits paid in cash to mothers of two or more children. In the same year, the National Insurance Act set out a comprehensive scheme of social insurance based on universal benefits and contributions. Unemployment was tackled by

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the National Assistance Act 1948, with benefits set at a means-tested level that could be paid to anyone out of work. The NHS Act 1946 put in place ‘a comprehensive service to secure physical and mental health’. At first services were provided entirely free of charge and based entirely on medical need. However, charging also soon became part of service provision. Reform in the areas of public housing was achieved by the Housing Act 1949, and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 (Glennerster, 1990, pp. 12–13). There was certainly a radical edge to the Labour Government. The Government was hostile to the involvement of private interests in the provision of social insurance. Centrally administered systems were considered to be more rational and transparent. Private health was associated with duplication of effort and excessive cost. The National Health Insurance Scheme in particular displayed the negative features of private involvement. It was nine times more expensive to run than the Unemployment Insurance Scheme. Beveridge also pointed out that the poor were unable to contribute to voluntary and privately run insurance schemes through lack of resources. Private schemes made profits for their owners, and were thus not an efficient way of providing general welfare.5 From our perspective, it is necessary to weigh up this heavy reliance on the state. Within the context of 1945, the centrality of the state to welfare provision is understandable. It was, in part, an inheritance of the state’s direction of the war effort. The influence of Fabian thought also pushed the Labour Government towards a commitment to central state institutions dedicated to social and economic management. Labour ministers believed that the patchwork of provision by friendly societies and other bodies was incompatible with the central assumption of minimum standards for all citizens. Despite the numbers of people who were members of friendly societies, their resources were still insufficient for universal provision. State provision of welfare thus excluded or marginalized those semi-autonomous working-class organizations which had been central to the provision of welfare to their members. However, it is easy to forget the radicalism of the idea of the welfare state. For example, Anthony Crossland argued that: Democratic socialists were convinced that only comprehensive state welfare could ensure universal and uniform provision. Thus the growth of state provision was identified with the pursuit of an egalitarian strategy . . . it became the core of [our] political project . . . (Crossland, 2006, p. 34)

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For all their faults, the Attlee Government’s reforms were an attempt to create a set of institutions that would change market capitalism. The great triumph of the Attlee Government was re-defining the terms of British political life around the welfare state. Electoral defeat in 1951 was followed by the Conservative administrations of Winston Churchill (1951–55), Anthony Eden (1955–57) and Harold Macmillan (1957–63). This period suggests that the electorate accepted that the Conservatives could manage the welfare state as well as, if not better than Labour. The welfare state had become politically acceptable. What was the response of the Labour Party? There were pressing questions. One particular problem with which Labour thinkers and activists wrestled was the failure of nationalization and welfare provision to produce either changes in social relationships or consistent wage increases. Furthermore, it appeared that welfare reform had stalled. While the NHS and family allowances were still organized on the basis of universal provision, social security did not provide a national minimum and the flat-rate contributions principle for unemployment and sickness benefits has been maintained (Bealey, 1970, p. 36). Room for manoeuvre was limited by inflation and a growing public hostility to higher taxes. Hugh Gaitskell, who had replaced Clement Attlee as leader in 1955, was particularly keen to find a new direction for the party. Full employment coupled with increased productivity provided the underpinnings for an economic policy that would sustain the cost of welfare. But, committed as Labour was to democratic socialism, it was necessary to confront the fact that while the core vote appeared to be holding up, it was proving difficult to inspire other voters with an ‘enthusiasm for running’ factories or to a political engagement with the issues on which Labour campaigned, such as the struggle against ‘hardship’. Perhaps Labour was too committed to the institutions established in 1945 to deal with these issues. Indeed, the assertion that 1945 represented the realization of something peculiar to the Labour Party and socialism has to be challenged. As Wright argues, 1945 can be seen as ‘less of a socialist adventure than as the product of a developing liberal social democratic consensus’. Indeed, doubts about the role of the state had been expressed by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, influential Labour Party thinkers, after the First World War. They were concerned that the state was neither ‘efficient’ nor able to ‘promote the aims of popular government’ (Wright, 1984, p. 37). Most importantly they feared that the state could become invasive and not permit ‘self-realisation’ (Wright, 1984, p. 37). The power of the central state was such that it could further its own interests and become detached from forms of accountability (Wright, 1984, p. 37). These misgivings suggest

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that we should be a little careful in linking socialist thinking to any simple commitment to the state or, indeed, to the welfare state. Indeed, Peter Townsend saw the ‘cold and complacent phrase’, ‘the welfare state’ ‘as one of the reasons why people were turning their backs on socialism’. Welfare seemed to be a defence of a ‘national minimum’, not any real championing of equality (Wright, 1984, p. 92). Welfare had become part of the status quo, offering a comfortable lifestyle to those who claimed benefits and, for those committed to thinking through the problems of the welfare state, a distraction from the real tasks: critical engagement with economic and social reforms. The loss of this critical tradition made Labour vulnerable to the arguments of the right in the 1980s and 1990s. Labour’s defence of the welfare state was pilloried as a commitment to top-heavy and expensive central government, focused on remote and unaccountable state agencies. Indeed, events outpaced the Party’s ability to re-define itself. Over time, the crossparty consensus that had held together welfare politics began to break down. The structures of the welfare state were compromised by ‘hyperinflation’ and ‘capital flight’. The welfare state was ‘outflank[ed]’ by ‘well organised labour movements’ by ‘corporations and capital’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 506). Having lost control of the processes of capital accumulation, Labour sought to fund increasing unemployment and its associated social costs through general taxation, the burden of which fell on those on middle incomes. Middle-income earners thus began to shift their political allegiances away from the Labour Party. In the late 1960s and 1970s Labour’s commitment to the social contract was an attempt to re-found and re-think a politics of solidarity and to bring about ‘a fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth’ (Hall, 1988, p. 21). The foundation of the social contract on a ‘social wage’ allowed the unions a much greater role in the formation of government policy but failed to provide a workable relationship, in part because the economic situation required cuts to both wages and welfare spending. It appeared to Labour supporters that the social contract was no more than a legitimization of these fiscal restraints. To Labour’s opponents, the social contract revealed that Labour ministers were incapable of independent action and compromised by their dependence on the Unions. The politics of the social contract proved increasingly hard to sustain. Calls for wage restraint appeared to be unenforceable and inflation impossible to bring under control. By 1978 it seemed that Labour had lost control. There is something of a consensus (challenged by revisionists) that the late 1970s was an end game for a kind of politics of welfare that had opened in the post-war

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period. The un-ravelling of the Labour Government and the abandonment of Keynesian economics opened a new era in social and economic policy. ‘The winter of discontent’ served as a political shift that brought in Margaret Thatcher’s majority Conservative Government of 1979.6 We can get some sense of what was at stake in the General Election of 1979 by looking briefly at the major terms of the Conservative Manifesto. It spoke of ‘a great country which seems to have lost its way’. Labour were an easy target, although the Manifesto graciously admitted that they were not responsible for bringing Britain to ‘the brink of disintegration’. The welfare state project was associated with ‘the politics of envy’, an active discouragement of ‘the creation of wealth’ that enlarged the role of the state, diminished the responsibilities of individuals, and thus ‘crippled the enterprise and effort on which a prosperous country with improving social services depends’. The social contract was clearly a target for reforms. To the Conservatives, it showed that the Trade Unions enjoyed power without responsibility and was a token of the power of the minority to ‘abuse individual liberties and to thwart Britain’s chances of success’.7

1979–97: The Era of Conservative Welfare Reform The new Conservative Government was committed to radical reform. Alongside public spending, the targets were trade unions, corporatist industrialists and the public sector. A significant departure from the consensus that had prevailed since Beveridge was the abandonment of the commitment to full employment.8 During Margaret Thatcher’s first administration (1979–83) proposals were put forward for ending public funding for higher education and the NHS (Lowe, 2005, p. 325). Although these objectives never became law, real changes were brought about in the period of the third Conservative Administration (1987–90). Spearheaded by the creation of internal markets, the Government pushed forward a campaign to re-shape public services. Internal markets were fundamental as they were meant to open up provision of public services to the discipline of competition. One brief example can show how internal markets operated. Rather than providing direct funding to a hospital, central government would fund District Health Authorities. These bodies would then purchase services from those hospitals that could provide them most competitively. In Lowe’s summary: ‘[g]overnment was to continue to finance, but not to directly deliver welfare services itself’ (Lowe, 2005, p. 326). Margaret Thatcher’s resignation in 1990 triggered a General Election. The Conservative Party was returned to office and John Major took over as

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Prime Minister. Major explicitly affirmed that the welfare state was integral to British society and denied that there would be privatization of the NHS. However, economic recession was to create strong budgetary restraints on Major’s room for manoeuvre. After the fundamental review of policy in 1993, Major’s Government shifted to a more Thatcherite emphasis on limiting benefits and ensuring that private sector played a greater role in providing services. The increasing unpopularity of the Government and its mismanagement of the economy led to its defeat in 1997. How can we assess the record of the Conservative Governments? Stuart Hall provides us with a useful way of thinking about the nature of the Thatcher/Major administrations. Conservative policies were directed towards clearing the way for ‘capitalist market solutions, to restore both the prerogatives of ownership and the political conditions for capital to operate more effectively’ (Hall, 1988, p. 4). The inventiveness and drive of this offensive caught the left completely off guard. To refer once again to Hall’s position, the Conservatives saw themselves as opening a new era in politics, ‘too much has gone wrong in Britain for us to hope to put it all right in a year or so’. The Conservatives proved adept at articulating ‘different social and economic interests’ and holding together a sufficiently broad and popular coalition to re-shape the post-war consensus in British politics. Thatcherism managed to present itself as the ally of the ‘little men’ against the ‘big battalions’ of the state. Thatcherism set its face against the Trade Unions and the corporate interests that Labour represented; the ‘lame duck industries’ which were unprofitable and kept in business by state funds or ultimately by taxing hard working families. Of course, this kind of rhetoric did not confront the real problems: the relative uncompetitiveness of British industry, the lack of investment and top-heavy management structures. Thatcherism captured ‘hearts and minds’ to such an extent that ‘[c]ertain ways of thinking, feeling and calculating characteristic of Thatcherism’ have become ‘common sense’. Thatcherism became ‘the common sense of the age’ (Hall, 1988, p. 8). The Conservative Governments were committed to managing society in order that the market could operate correctly. To refer to Polanyi’s fundamental insight: markets must be created and sustained and this objective requires social as well as economic management. The welfare state was not dismantled. Although increases in expenditure were restrained, the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) consumed by public expenditure remained fairly level throughout the period during 1979–96.9 There was a general appreciation, shared by industry and politicians that certain services could only be efficiently provided at a macro level by the state: in

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particular health care and education. The Treasury also resisted privatization, pointing out that privatization would mean a loss of £1 billion in revenues. The extent of Tory re-thinking on the market and privatization in the wake of its defeat in the 1997 election can be indicated by Peter Lilley’s statement that it was necessary to accept that the ‘free market has only a limited role . . . in improving public services like health, education and welfare’.10 However, none of these comments detract from the dominance of monetarist policies and the abandonment of Keynesian demand management. The reforms of the Tory Government re-shaped the British economy and opened it to the global movements of capital. Conservative policies created a new context for welfare. While the oftquoted statement of Margaret Thatcher to the effect that there is no such thing as society overstates the Conservative position, it would be fair to say that their reforms altered the ideological structure of welfare. We are a long way from Marshall’s notion of the social citizen with welfare rights. For the Conservatives, the function of welfare was to ‘support family life, by helping people to become home-owners, [and] raising the standards of their children’s education’. If people could be encouraged to be self-reliant, welfare services could be concentrated on the effective support of ‘the old, the sick, the disabled; those . . . in real need’. This approach was not necessarily against the spirit of Beveridge, who also stressed self-betterment. However, Conservative policy began to link state provision to denial of opportunity.11 Consider this claim from the Manifesto of 1983 about the problem of unemployment: [t]he answer is not bogus social contracts and government overspending. Both, in the end, destroy jobs. The only way to a lasting reduction in unemployment is to make the right products at the right prices, supported by good services. The Government’s role is to keep inflation down and offer real incentives for enterprise. As we win back customers, so we win back jobs. Surely this is just commonsense. A generous welfare state ‘destroys jobs’ as it decreases the competitiveness that provides jobs in the first place. The great Conservative triumph was to re-define popular thinking on the welfare state. In the popular imagination welfare became associated with waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency. At best it was to help the poor, the disabled and the feckless; a safety net for those who were unable to better themselves in the new enterprise economy. After Thatcher and Major, it would become more difficult to assert that welfare was not just for the poor, and was in the interests of all.

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Election defeat did not bring to an end the ideological project associated with privatization and enterprise economy. The election of Tony Blair as the first Labour Prime Minister since James Callaghan suggested a shift in British politics. New Labour were, however, very different from the party that left office in the ‘dark days’ of 1979. The great struggles in the Labour Party from the late 1970s until New Labour took office helped remake the Party’s attitude towards markets. New Labour combined ‘open markets with social justice’.

1997–2010 New Labour and the Welfare State In the early 1990s, Tony Blair had argued that ‘Labour has not been trusted to fulfil the aspirations of the majority of people in the modern world’ (Powell, 1999, p. 6). The New Labour project was based on Blair’s vision of a new Britain: ‘one nation, with shared values’, a ‘meritocracy’ that should be run in the interests of ‘the broad majority of people who work hard, play by the rules [and] pay their dues’. The enemy was ‘an elite at the top increasingly out of touch with the rest of us’.12 This is the language of moral purpose. While a religious passion was never far from the British socialist imagination, it takes on a very marked, almost comical pact between a people and a great man; a Moses, who makes a ‘covenant’ of ‘ten specific commitments’ that represents a ‘bond of trust’ between government and the governed. The 1997 Manifesto concludes with a familial metaphor that echoes, at least dimly, Orwell’s essay of 1947: ‘I want a Britain which we all feel part of, in whose future we all have a stake, in which what I want for my own children I want for yours’. The great leader, the family man; a party dedicated to national renewal: ‘[w]e are a national party, supported today by people from all walks of life, from the successful businessman or woman to the pensioner on a council estate’.13 The first Blair Administration was committed to spending restraint. A manifesto promise stated that they would keep within the spending plans of the previous Tory Administration. This pledge was considered to be essential to restore the trust of the electorate in a New Labour party that no longer believed in the ‘tax and spend’ policies that had discredited Labour administrations in the 1970s. Fiscal responsibility was to be ensured by handing control of monetary policy to the Bank of England. These measures may have limited the new government’s room for manoeuvre but, for their apologists, they were essential for sustaining economic growth which would allow some measure of redistribution. Egalitarian designs were modestly indicated by election promises to reduce class sizes

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in primary education, cut waiting lists for NHS patients and to encourage a quarter of a million young people off welfare and into work. New Labour’s approach to welfare reform was supported by a buoyant economy and low unemployment; a product, in part, of Conservative policies. Between 1997 and 2004 Government revenue increased as annual growth was never below 2.1 per cent. Gordon Brown, the then chancellor, was able to increase revenue still further through the sale of licences for mobile phones (which brought in £22.5 billion), a wind-fall tax on the profits of privatized utilities (worth £5.2 billion) and taxation of private pensions (£11.7 billion over three years) (Lowe, 2005, p. 386). This allowed investment in social services without requiring funds to be raised through increased taxation. New Labour presented its approach to welfare as the ‘biggest attack on structural unemployment for decades’. There was also emphasis on tackling poverty – a problem whose solution was in the national interest. The welfare state had to be transformed from ‘a safety net to a springboard for economic opportunity’ (Borrie Commission, 1994, p. 20). New Labour were building on the suggestions of the Borrie Commission on Social Justice.14 It was necessary to make the link between welfare and ‘economic success’ (Borrie Commission, 1994, p. 18). Welfare was a condition of economic success; and economic success a central factor in the funding of welfare. This defence of ‘productive’ welfare was necessary to regain the ground lost to the Conservatives and to counter the argument that welfare is a ‘burden’ and an expense ‘we can ill afford’. The Borrie Commission was not the only influence on New Labour welfare thinking. Tony Blair and other senior figures in his Government were inspired by the traditions of friendly societies, trade unions and co-operatives where people came together for self-improvement and collective action.15 However, these traditions could not simply be adopted, they needed to be reinvented (Field, 2000, p. 44). Welfare thinking was also informed by the ‘Third Way’ philosophy that justified the need to ‘sustain welfare spending’ (Giddens, 1999, p. 106) and to assert that such spending does have a meaningful effect on ‘resource distribution’. Third Way welfare thinking stressed that ‘social solidarity’ required ‘inclusion’ of the ‘members of the professional and moneyed middle classes’ to public welfare provision. Their support for public institutions was essential as, unless convinced of the relevance of welfare, they would be tempted to join the ‘new corporate rich’ who had already abandoned public services completely. Welfare must therefore: ‘impro[ve] the quality of public education, sust[ain] a well resourced public health service, prom[ote] safe public

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amenities and cont[rol] levels of crime’. This is the vision of the universal welfare state updated, as ‘[o]nly a welfare state that benefits most of the population will generate a common morality of citizenship’. Welfare, then, is not just a question of helping the poor. It creates an inclusive ‘cosmopolitan’ national community in which both rich and poor feel that they have a stake. Third Way thinking on welfare thus worked in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion was understood in a ‘thick’ sense. In keeping with the idea that New Labour was a party dedicated to the renewal of a national society, welfare was necessary for national belonging. This reinvention of citizenship moved some way from the concept of the social citizen, privileging the duties that were incidental to citizenship. The inclusive society offered ‘opportunities’ and ‘involvement’ in the public world of work, education and civil association to all those that would, in Tony Blair’s phrase, ‘play by the rules’. Poverty was seen as exclusion from both employment and civil society. While it was important not to stigmatize those who were excluded from mainstream society, receipt of benefits had to be made conditional on accepting certain obligations and duties. This was coupled with the drive to make welfare spending more focused and efficient. To take one theme: as research into income distribution showed that supporting single parent families did have a significant effect on those who live below the poverty line, resources should be directed towards such groups of people. Third Way thinking thus retained notions of the social relevance of ‘welfare spending’ (Giddens, 1999, p. 106) and was, at least to some extent, concerned with the redistribution of resources. However, the most important consideration was getting those on benefits into work. Work offered ‘the best escape route from poverty’ and ‘a platform on which to save, and a sense of individual purpose’.16 There was certainly a need to do something to respond to the social legacy of 18 years of Conservative Government. While spending on social security amounted to a third of all government expenditure (in 1998 it was £83.6 billion), poverty and inequality remained deep seated and widespread. Around 20 per cent of the population were living on well below the average income (10% lived on less than half the average income in 1979) and around 4 million children lived in poverty. Since the Conservatives took office in 1979, the number of households which were dependent on benefits had risen to become one in five of all households in Britain. Exacerbating these conditions was the general contraction in benefit levels: the poorest fifth of the population were living on benefits that had decreased in value over the period of the Tory Administration (Brewer et al., 2007, pp. 1–2).

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Soon after New Labour took power, they published a Green Paper on welfare reform. The Paper promised a ‘new contract’ between government and people that would not defend the old welfare ‘status quo’ but would open the welfare state to ‘modern needs’. Frank Field, the minister for Welfare Reform, presented reform as resting on ‘the twin pillars of work and security: work for those who can, security for those who cannot’. The former group would be encouraged to re-engage with work. Introducing the bill to Parliament, Field stressed that although reforms would mean more spending on health and education, costs would be offset by savings in other areas, in particular a drive against fraud. As the bill for incapacity benefit had tripled over the past two decades, it was clearly necessary to ensure that as many as possible could be helped into work. Welfare reform was framed in the language of the New Deal. The first New Deal was offered to young people, and New Deals for lone parents and the long-term unemployed followed shortly afterwards. The various packages incorporated targeted help and tax credits. However, punitive sanctions (including loss of benefit) were made available should an individual not take up a job offer. We can see such an approach as a variation on the concept of workfare. Workfare can be defined as the requirement that those in receipt of benefits take part in ‘unpaid work experience’.17 Benefit is limited and made dependent on evidence that the recipient is actively looking for work or will remain in work for a certain period. The Workfare packages were first developed in the United States under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).18 National statistics appeared to show that the programmes were a success. From the initiation of the schemes to 2002, 50 per cent of claimants appeared to have been helped off benefits and into work (Blank, 2002, p. 1108). The second Blair Administration (2001–5) was more radical in its approach to the welfare state. Reforms began in 2002 after the Labour Government had secured a second general election victory. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) formed the centre piece of legislation. PPPs built on Conservative policy initiatives (Private Finance Initiative, PFI) and were designed to bring private funding into the public sector. Conservative arrangements took different forms in different fields of welfare. PFIs could allow for private construction of buildings and infrastructure, which were then leased back to the state. Other arrangements allowed private companies to staff and manage prisons and schools. As PPPs continued this practice of ‘contracting out’, we can appreciate that they continued the prevailing spirit of restructuring welfare. Indeed, Labour policy primarily focused on driving forward a managerial revolution in public service

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provision, founded on the questionable assumption that private management styles were more efficient than those in the public sector. Public-sector unions mounted campaigns of opposition against PPPs, arguing that they destroyed the ‘ethos’ of welfare provision. One particular flash point was the building of foundation hospitals on a PPP basis. Local hospital trusts did not receive equal government funds. Not all of them could attract private funding. Moreover, private funds would only be forthcoming if there were opportunities to make profits. Opening the NHS to PPPs thus destroyed the fundamental pillars on which Beveridge had built the service: national planning and the non-market principle of ‘the primacy of clinical need’ (Lowe, 2005, p. 392). Criticisms of foundation hospitals also argued that they made for a ‘two-tier’ health service, where successful institutions attracted funding and specialized staff, and others were allowed to fall behind. Other aspects of PPPs and management styles created unrest and demoralization. The culture of targets, inspections and audits was particularly unpopular. Rather than monitor service delivery, bureaucratic ‘audit culture’ effectively directed resources towards meeting targets, rather than providing services. Lowe describes them as ‘command and control mechanisms’ (Lowe, 2005, p. 393). Alongside PPPs, New Labour’s reforming zeal expressed itself in the Welfare Reform Act 2009 and was driven by the realization that ‘further evolution’ was necessary to revise the workfare approach. The Act was based, in part, on the recommendation of the Freud Report which castigated the idea of passive receipt of benefits and spoke in terms of ‘conditionality’.19 In the words of the sponsoring minister, Yvette Cooper, the Act was based on the philosophy that employment, not benefits, was the way out of poverty. Welfare reforms would ensure that ‘almost everyone [was] on a journey to work’. Freud also stressed that the UK’s ‘skills base’ remained poor by international standards with ‘35% of the working age population’ lacking a ‘good school leaving qualification . . . more than double the proportion in the US’. Nearly 5 million people had ‘no qualifications at all’ and there was compelling evidence showing a strong correlation between lack of skills and unemployment: 50 per cent of those claiming benefits were without qualifications. Freud was also aware that ‘multiple disadvantages’ kept people out of work, and that the existing workfare structures were not sensitive enough to those suffering from such complex barriers to work (Freud, 2007, p. 4). The Act was structured around a number of provisions to enhance the support available for the movement from reliance on benefits to gainful employment. In the words of the Act’s briefing notes, the objective

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of the legislation was to allow those on benefits to ‘find sustained work in the open labour market’.20 The Welfare Reform Act made significant changes. Income support was abolished, and the able-bodied moved onto Jobseekers’ Allowance. Those unable to work qualified for Employment and Support Allowance. Sanctions were introduced for failing to take part in training; and the partners of benefit claimants were also required to take part in work-related training. Even receipt of Employment and Support Allowances for the incapacitated was made subject to requirements for work-related training. The rationale for the regime put in place by the Act relied on the argument that the ‘work for your benefit schemes’ enables participants ‘to benefit from the opportunity to develop work habits and routines that they may not have experienced for some time’. It is clear that this is meant to help people break the kind of behaviour that had kept them out of work. The requirement for lone parents is similar and builds on changes in 2008 that made interviews a condition for receipt of benefits. Under the Act lone parents had to take part in work-focused interviews (WFIs) every six months as part of their claim. The Act also made a distinction between lone parents with young children, and those whose children were older. The latter group were given a much greater responsibility to find work. We need to consider briefly another underpinning of New Labour policy: the emphasis on partnership between the state and market in order to bring private firms into welfare provision. In terms of the 2009 Act, Freud was also keen to stress the role that private and third-sector organizations should play in the delivery of welfare, a concern that relates back to the New Labour sponsoring of PPPs. Since the creation of Job Centres Plus in 2002, welfare provision had increasingly relied upon private contractors and third society groups. For instance, in delivering ‘flexible new deal’ schemes, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) rely on a private operator, SERCO. There were arguments to extend what Freud called ‘outcome-based’ contractual arrangements across the field of welfare provision. Outcome-based contractual arrangements represent a significant change in the structure and operation of welfare. The state becomes a contracting partner, seeking ‘best value’ rather than directly involving itself in the management of the various schemes. Freud envisaged a market in welfare provision worth billions of pounds. Precisely because of its size, and the potential for profit, it would ‘attract commitment from a wide range of private service providers and voluntary groups’. We can appreciate that the 2009 Act was the culmination of efforts that had begun in 1997. Various ad hoc reforms of welfare are effectively

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summed up and focused in the 2009 Act. There are two critical questions that we can ask. How effective are the workfare strategies that the Act puts in place; and what is the social cost of such punitive welfare strategies? In order to answer these questions, we want to offer a broader analysis of the New Labour regime. New Labour believed in the centrality of government to social and economic management. Government regulates the market, challenges monopolies and provides the ‘public good’ of welfare. New Labour certainly redirected the Conservative market reforms. Their approach was based on a realization that markets must rely on factors ‘external’ to them in order to function properly. For instance, unless there are processes of education and upbringing, forms of family nurture or religious education, the values of honesty, hard work, ‘self-denial’ and ‘other-orientated’ behaviour that were essential to economic behaviour would not develop. The fundamental idea is that the synergies of market and civil society need to be carefully integrated in order to become mutually supporting. Left to its own devices, there is no ‘guarantee’ that the market will operate to distribute wealth efficiently; in fact, quite the opposite: ‘deregulation’ tends to lead to such inequalities of wealth as to ‘weaken social solidarity’.21 In one influential22 vision of ‘progressive market strategy’, the market remains the sole means of economic growth, while government maintains basic social and political structures that give effect to ‘fair opportunity’ and ‘mutual responsibility’.23 What does this mean for welfare? The New Deal certainly decreased fraudulent claims (Lowe cites figures that show that by 2001 over 32,000 had had their benefits withdrawn) and did appear to be successful in relation to its target to get younger unemployed people into work. The most important criticism, however, draws attention to the New Deal’s focus on ‘individual’ behaviour. This obscured the systemic problems that kept people out of work such as the cost of childcare or public transport. Lowe writes that dealing with problems such as these ‘required greater regulation of the market’ than the government was prepared to tolerate (2005, p. 403). Did New Labour decrease inequality? Although the years from 1996 to 2008 had been a period of general rising of living standards (on average growing by 2% a year) we cannot conclude that levels of general prosperity had also risen (Hirsch, 2009). There is a rather complex pattern over Labour’s three terms in office. In the first term income levels rose fairly evenly. In the second term there was also evidence of reductions in inequality. However, Labour’s third term showed the general growth of

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inequality. The Institute of Financial Studies (IFS) has shown that income inequality had risen ‘on most measures’ in each year leading up to 2009 (the last year that full data was available) and is now ‘at its highest level since our comparable time series began in 1961’ (Hirsch, 2009, p. 1). These patterns can be further elaborated by looking at studies that compare income inequality in 2007/8 with figures available at the end of the period in which the Conservative Government was in office (1997). The incomes of the poorest (2% of the population) were lower at the end of the period of Tory rule than they were at the beginning. Relative poverty also rose throughout the 1980s. At the end of New Labour’s period in office, although there had been a slight overall fall in rates of relative poverty, it had risen among adults of working age with children. New Labour tax and benefit reforms also appeared to have benefited the poor rather than the rich (Hirsch, 2009, p. 1). In terms of child poverty, figures available in February 2009 stated that the total number of children in poverty would fall by 0.5 million (from 2.9 million to 2.3 million), leaving the Government more than half a million short of its target. Within this overall picture, there were fluctuations similar to those observed above. Child poverty dipped in 2004–5 but rose again in 2007–8. It would appear that increases in child poverty in the latter years of the 2000s further undid the earlier advances. Poverty among pensioners also rose towards the end of the decade, but was still lower than it had been in 1998–99. The most persistent poverty levels were found among ‘adults of working age with dependent children’. In 2007/8 it was ‘at its highest level since the start of our comparable series in 1961’. Although this group would have received some increase in the value of benefits and tax credits because of falling inflation and further assistance from discretionary awards, studies suggest that they might have been more seriously affected by recession than pensioners. Standards of living for this group were further reduced by the reduction in ‘out of work benefits’ (Hirsch, 2009, p. 4). Unemployment also remained a persistent problem. At the end of New Labour’s period in office there were still ‘more than 4.2 million working age adults and 1.7 million children living in households where nobody works’. The Government had been able to reduce the total of ‘workless households’ over the decade to 2010, but there was a significant number of households dependent on benefits in which there was no one ‘actively seeking work’. Youth unemployment remained roughly similar under both governments (ONS, 2010, p. 1). It would perhaps be best to suggest that the verdict on New Labour is somewhat mixed. It is difficult to weigh up New Labour’s record on welfare

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and equality. It would perhaps be fair to say that the Government’s record on tackling poverty was sketchy and that the depth of poverty, a result of Conservative policies, was more extensive than had otherwise been perceived. Although figures published in 1997 by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) showed that there had been reductions in poverty levels (Hills et al., 1997, p. 108) the report stressed that Labour required new vision and commitment to lessening inequality. Progress had been made but this was perhaps marginal. The real problems remained the stark extent of income inequality, persistent areas of urban poverty and groups who appeared not to have been helped by reforms to date: ‘the long term unemployed, disabled people and some ethnic minority groups’ (Hills et al., 1997, p. 109).

The End of New Labour; Austerity and the Advent of the Big Society Although Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 2007, a General Election did not take place until 2010. Labour went of the offensive. The Tories were accused of planning a ‘raid on the quality of life of [the] middle class’; an attack on jobs and prosperity that the Labour Government had sustained: ‘only Labour’ could hold ‘the progressive centre ground’.24 But there were very real problems. Gordon Brown’s introduction to the Party’s Manifesto had to deal with the perceived failures of Tony Blair’s premiership, the costly and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the return of the very same sleazy politics that had lost the Conservatives the election of 1997. It was therefore important to confess that this was not a ‘business as usual election’, and that the ‘bond of trust’ between people and ‘the politicians elected to serve them’ required urgent attention. As a national party, and not just the representative of sectarian or class interests, Brown committed Labour to a ‘renewal of our society’ that would be achieved through further strengthening ‘the communities that bind our country together’. It was necessary to stress Labour’s financial responsibility; there were ‘no big new spending commitments’ and an undertaking to ‘give the maximum protection to frontline public services’ (The Labour Party, 2010, p. 2). The strategy did not work. Why did Labour lose? The fraught relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not help, giving the impression of drift and infighting rather than clear leadership. Arguably, the party also failed to deal with pressing economic problems. The government had simply ‘run out of ideas’,25 or it lacked the big ideas and the hold on the public imagination to justify a fourth term in office (Giddens, 2007, p. 61). Although the 2010 Manifesto stressed that it certainly was not business as

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usual as far as the banks were concerned, and it was necessary to be ‘bolder about reforming our financial institutions’,26 the social and economic dislocation that followed in the wake of the banking crisis was leading to more profound uncertainties about economic regulation. People wanted ‘protection from a downturn made in Wall Street’ and Labour were unable to provide it.27 Furthermore, there was increasing dissent and uncertainty within the Party itself over its direction; an acute realization that ‘Labour [was] a party with a working-class base’ but that ‘the cross-class appeal to win and govern’ lacked definition. Party strategists pointed out that ‘Labour’s core support is no longer sure what the party stands for’.28 Towards the end of the New Labour period there was an attempt to re-think the nature of the political project of the centre left.29 Gordon Brown was well aware of the need for decentralization and devolution of power and the need to counter David Cameron’s brand of compassionate conservatism. Labour thinkers began to speak of the need for a ‘new egalitarianism’. Rather than being explicitly critical of the achievements of the Government, the new egalitarians argued that ‘the New Labour approach’ should be ‘extended’ and ‘entrenched’ (Giddens, 2007, p. 108). Given time, it would require institutional reform, and not simply of welfare structures. In terms of employment policy, it would be necessary to continue to sustain high levels of employment at rates above the minimum wage, and to commit to the EU Lisbon Strategy (1999), which requires an average of 70 per cent employment by 2015 (Giddens, 2007, p. 108). Given that there was insufficient time for these ideas to be worked through (Giddens, 2007, p. 44) any progressive fusion of ideas will now have to be developed in opposition. With the defeat of New Labour in the election of 2010, a significant political realignment appeared to be taking place in British politics. It would perhaps be more accurate to see the election of 2010 as resulting in an impasse with neither party able to form a majority government. Although it is clearly too early to offer any sensible assessment of the resulting coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, an agenda on welfare reform has been put forward. Just as New Labour inherited and nuanced Tory policy on welfare, Coalition welfare policy continues a number of New Labour themes but with a centre right inflection. The Coalition Government has announced that their welfare reforms will mould a ‘dynamic’ benefits system that will assist people into work and break down the endemic culture of dependency.30 At present there is a welfare reform bill before Parliament. It is focused on the introduction of a ‘universal credit’. This is defined as ‘an integrated working-age credit that

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will provide a basic allowance with additional elements for children, disability, housing and caring’. The universal credit is aimed at people ‘both in and out of work’ and is intended to replace the complex array of benefits and credits that were the result of Labour policies. Furthermore, instead of deducting earnings from benefits, which takes place under the present system, the bill proposes that people will ‘generally keep more of their earnings for themselves and their families’ (DWP, 2010, pp. 25–7).31 In keeping with workfare programmes in general, the bill also contains sanctions for those who do not participate; as the White Paper tersely puts it: ‘The new sanctions will provide greater incentives for people to meet their responsibilities’. Encouraging people to act responsibly includes capping benefit payments so that it is not possible to ‘receive more in welfare than median after-tax earnings for working households’. Conditionalities will also be tightened up to include ‘Mandatory Work Activity’ that will apply to some participants, and extends attendance periods in job-training activities to 4 weeks. Lone parents will face further restrictions. Once a child reaches 5, lone parents must be prepared to ‘actively seek work’ (DWP, 2010, pp. 27–8). Such proposals appear a tidying and re-definition of New Labour welfare thinking rather than a radical new beginning. There is, admittedly, a different inflection on the thinking behind the bill, and it is indeed intriguing that Duncan-Smith32 uses the language of social justice. However, assessing the Coalition’s approach requires us also to engage with an idea that has been linked to welfare reform, and to a much broader agenda on public services: the Big Society. David Cameron, the present prime minister, has publicly committed himself to an agenda on social reform entitled the Big Society. Although it is a somewhat vague term, it elaborates the idea of small government and a centre right notion of mutualism. Defending the Big Society, Cameron has claimed that: ‘We know that when you give people and communities more power over their lives, more power to come together and work together to make life better – great things happen’.33 The Big Society is about ‘devolving power to the people’. The state takes a supporting role; ‘encourage[ing] social action and help [for] the poorest’ (Cameron, 2009). The Big Society project is not new; we could relate it back to Macmillan’s middle way, and perhaps even further back to a Disraelian notion of onenation Toryism. It attempts to move the New Labour project towards the centre right by insisting that the fundamental problem of welfare (aside from its cost) is the reliance on an uncompetitive and inefficient state for its delivery. The idea of the Big Society provides a way of articulating what

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Norman has called a ‘connected society’ which acknowledges something that goes beyond institutions: the ‘shape and meaning’ to ‘human life’ (Norman, 2010, p. 106) that is formed by civil society. The ‘radicalism’ of the Big Society position lies precisely in being clear about the role that the state has to play. This requires intervention in the economy, and the state actively involving itself in ‘monitoring the profitability of different sectors of the economy’ (Norman, 2010, p. 228); moreover, it is only the state that can address the emerging problems of an ageing population and pension provision. The financial crisis shows that ‘it was the nation state and specifically the state’s ability to tax, fund and regulate’ that prevented a more cataclysmic collapse of international banking (Norman, 2010, p. 230). Big Society thinking looks beyond both private providers of welfare and state institutions. Thus, ‘social enterprise’ or the third sector groups should input into ‘supporting individuals looking for work’. How is it possible to create those ‘[p]eer-to-peer relationships and social networks’ that enable people to enter labour markets? How can social enterprise influence the kind of jobs that require workers?34 The objective would be to co-ordinate social enterprise initiatives with workfare programmes to reach those for whom workfare has failed. Social enterprise has another important input: influencing employers and thus shaping labour markets. Big Society advocates tend to speak in terms of ‘pulling’ the employment market, rather than passively allowing individuals to be pushed into jobs that are neither suitable nor rewarding. While this is an appealing vision, serious problems remain. The Big Society approach tends to assume that the interests of social enterprise and profit-driven private welfare providers are similar. How would conflicts of view be resolved? The consensus appears to be that the state retains a role in policing standards and ensuring consistency, but such questions of regulation raise more questions than answers. The risk is that welfare provision develops as a patchwork of relationships between various providers and interested groups with little meaningful oversight. Once the fulminations against Fabianism and the commitment of Labour to ‘the big state’ are countered, it could be argued that the more engaged elements of Big Society thinking can actually be co-opted into a broad agenda that seeks to use the power of the state to limit and regulate over powerful commercial and financial interests. We will return to these points in the next chapter.

Conclusion This chapter has sketched an account of the development of the welfare state during 1945–2010. We have structured our analysis by reference to

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three key historical moments, and have tried to show patterns of continuity and change that have animated the post-war period in British politics. The welfare reforms of the Attlee Government set the terms in which Labour would have to defend the welfare state and articulate its understanding of social justice. While Conservative governments during 1979–97 did push forward significant social and economic reforms, they did not significantly change the welfare state. New Labour’s approach to welfare was a response to the Conservative ascendancy and a significant re-definition of Labour social thinking. The concept of social justice reappeared in Labour Party thinking and fed into the work of an active (some might say hyperactive) reforming government. We offered a tentative assessment of the successes and failures of New Labour’s welfare reforms, and outlined the approach to welfare that will be taken by the present Coalition Government. We have suggested that any progressive re-working of welfare must engage with Coalition welfare reforms. A ‘spell in opposition’ offers Labour a chance to examine itself. Some commentators have suggested that this ‘internal debate’ would allow Labour to fight an invigorated campaign at the next election.35 Whatever strategy takes shape it seems that the Party will move away from New Labour. Does this mean a lurch to the left? Certainly the press has associated Ed Miliband, the new leader of the Labour Party, with a return to the ‘dark days of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock’.36 We will offer a more sensible assessment. In the next chapter we will begin to focus on the end of New Labour and the way in which a new thinking on welfare might develop. The extent to which a progressive response is possible to the politics of the Coalition Government requires us to settle accounts with both Thatcherism and the Blair/Brown Administrations. Analyses of the possibilities of progressive politics tend to present a rather stark picture where there appears to be a choice between an authentic socialism that pre-dates New Labour and a centre-left project that has exhausted itself and entered into a period of crisis. Such thinking is not helpful. It distracts us from identifying the new forces at work, and how strategies can be opened up within present political positions.

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3 The Broken Middle Welfare, Solidarity and Economy

In our affirmation of ordinary everyday life, we can rediscover the common good. (Cruddas and Rutherford, 2010, p. 2)

Introduction Progressive thinking on welfare must face up to a difficult task. Indeed, if ‘[t]he events of 2008 were a crisis of capitalism, as profound as the 1970s and 1930s the scale and depth of the current recession requires difficult questions to be asked about economic and social organization’ (Gamble, 2010, p. 186). It is worth bearing in mind the keynote address given by Rowan Williams at the Trade Union Congress (TUC) conference in 2009. The Archbishop reminded the audience that economy is the Greek word for ‘housekeeping’. Technical economic analysis can blind us to the key issue: economic organization should be informed by ‘the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in’.1 This chapter will develop as follows. Resisting the ‘dehumanising of economic life’2 is linked to arguments about the central role that mutuality and reciprocity play in a meaningful social and economic organization. The underlying problem is a market society where ‘everything [. . .] is for sale: [including] an individual’s manual and/or intellectual labour, the use of their bodies’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 204). These themes require an analysis of work and welfare. We will draw on the insights of contextual economics 56

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and its arguments about core economy. Contextual economics points to broader arguments that challenge the centrality of capitalist markets to economic organization. In the last section of the chapter, we will concern ourselves with the political aspects of this theme, as we examine the re-invention of the Labour Party, and the possibility of a different politics that reclaims the common good.

Lives Well Lived: Humanizing Economy Addressing the TUC in 2009, Rowan Williams argued that: We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, ‘economic realities’, economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, ‘sustainable’ in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation. (Williams, 2009, no page numbers) In thinking about economics it is important to keep these words in mind. This is because it is difficult, given the ‘realities’ that are meant to structure economics, to articulate and promote ideas about economic organization that go against the present orthodoxy. The ‘haunting’ that Williams evokes also echoes distantly (and in a very different sense) The Communist Manifesto. As it is unlikely that the Archbishop of Canterbury is suggesting a return to communist thinking, it is probably not the case that the different sense of economics evoked in this passage is a valorization of Marxist economics. This does beg the question of the resources for this new thinking of economy. The etymology of the term economics, and the metaphor of the home which Williams develops, also suggests concerns that are a long way from Marx’s thinking but, as we will argue below, it would be a mistake to abandon Marx’s insights into economic organization. Williams’ address gives the orientating points for any thinking that might draw on his provocative arguments: Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about ‘housekeeping’, has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed

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economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making – until the bluffs were all called at the same time. (Williams, 2009) We must face up to an economics that has privileged the market above other ways of distributing resources. The market itself is dominated by the ‘financial trading world’ that has been brought down by its own obsession with short-term profit. The recession has revealed the exorbitant social costs of an ‘authority’ beyond ‘human decisions’ or political control. The costs of the market are global, impacting on both developed and developing economies. While Williams’ approach makes ‘Christian doctrine’ a grounding for arguments about alternatives to market capitalism, Justice as Welfare does not explicitly use this resource. We prefer to follow Williams’ more general point: how does the organization of the economy support the human community? In order to rethink the priorities of economic organization, we need to follow the provocative question: what does ‘a human life well-lived look like’? The economy has to serve people whose ‘imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy [are] regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity’. As Morgan writes, ‘the economist should at least be asking what it is we are living for, and engage with the dynamism of the lived life of social being’ (Morgan, 2002, no page numbers). In order to clarify what is at stake we will make use of ideas drawn from contextual economics. Contextual economics offers insights into ‘the human economy’ (Hann and Hart, 2011, p. 8). We are already familiar with the key ideas from our discussion in the Introduction. Contextual economics builds on the notion that reciprocity is not restricted to primitive economies, but, is fundamental to the operation of the market. Contextual economics helps us to think these terms through in more detail. Goodwin’s work is useful in this respect. She argues that an economic system ‘must maintain and, where necessary, rehabilitate, the productive resources required to preserve or increase human well-being’. Drawing on Goodwin’s work, we can bring these themes together in the concept of core economy. Core economy is a way of thinking about the ‘human input’ into an economy that is orientated to the cohesiveness and well-being of community. The concept is broad enough to cover all forms of work, not just work for wages. Indeed, it stresses the importance of caring and nurture for the creation of adult workers who are capable of wage labour. In most basic summary, then, we could see core economy as an

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articulation of labour as one of the ‘common assets upon which society at large depends’.3 We will return to these themes throughout the book. For the moment, though, we want to take one element of core economy, labour, and examine its relationship with market economy. Production for the market requires the commodification of labour. We are not using this expression in a strict Marxist sense. Indeed, we are drawing on Polanyi: labour, which is not a commodity, has to be commodified: human labour power has to be made into something that can be bought and sold. The fundamental point, expressed in different ways by Manchester School economics in the 1890s, or contemporary neo-liberalism, is that labour is an ‘input’ into production whose costs must be kept as low as possible. In this chapter, our investigation into labour as a human input into production will take us back to the industrial revolution, and forward to the globalized economies of our time. In the late 1800s the emergence of mechanical methods of production wrought dramatic changes on society. For instance, while textile manufacture remained largely organized around domestic workshops, artisans could combine spinning and weaving with the cultivation of small plots of land. It was only with the disruption of this way of living and working that a class of labourers came into existence. Factory workers, those who operated looms and lathes, became a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive. No longer linked to the land, or to the protection of guilds, a mass of people became subject to contracts of employment. As Gorz points out this separation of people from both the land and the means of production was central to establishing an industrial workforce. The commodification of labour was inseparable from endemic patterns of poverty and unemployment: separated from the land and from systems of home production, factory workers became a class of people subjected to the vicissitudes of wage labour. Commodified labour is thus subject to various networks of discipline and control that seek to integrate it into market systems that are meant to co-ordinate the most efficient use of resources. For instance, if one examines the report of the Poor Law Commission, one can see the influence of Benthamite ideas that justified the privations of indoor relief on the basis of aggregate benefits for the community at large. Malthus’ writings purported to show that the old poor law encouraged large families and made for growth in population that would exceed food supply. It was necessary to dis-incentivize population growth in order to preserve resources. Similar ideas can be found in Ricardo’s arguments that resources spent on

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the relief of poverty effectively limited investment in economy. While lacking the subtlety of Ricardo, the ‘bourgeois economists’ of the Manchester School saw reliance on market mechanisms for the distribution of social resources as preferable to welfare which encourages the idle and undermines the work ethic. The whole point of poor relief was to produce responsible, hard-working individuals who would be economically productive and not reliant on the help of others. The sciences of population, economics and utilitarianism all fed into a new understanding of how life could be understood and controlled. How does our analysis of labour and contextual economics relate to these themes? We don’t want to suggest that the ideas that fed into social insurance and the early forms of state welfare brought commodification to an end; but, they did arguably represent a way of taking into account human needs that could not be provided for by the market; they also related to a politics that put forward the interests of Labour. To take just one emblematic point of reference, James Kier Hardie, one of the founder members of the Labour Party, saw Labour politics as pointing towards ‘each for all, not each for self’ (Bealey, 1970, p. 4); a theme that can perhaps be seen in more contemporary terms as the ‘sociablity’ (Rancière, 2007, p. 219) that animates the mutualist and co-operativist currents of Labour thinking. The question for us, however, is how to update this thinking in the light of the political and economic changes of the last three decades. We need to appreciate that market economy is ‘a diremption from non-economic institutions in a manner that negates both social control over economic institutions and moral behaviour within them’.4 Building on this position means asserting that an economy is dependent upon and located within social relations: ‘there remains all that goes into the bonds between individuals, all that comprises their relationships – public and private, social and intimate’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 210). A useful starting point for analysis is Goodwin’s pithy statement that ‘while markets can be a part of the solution to many human needs, they rarely can be the whole solution’.5 This is because markets need to be regulated: ‘markets need boundaries, rules, and safeguards against their internal tendency toward concentration of power and their lack of internal motivation to work for the wider good’. The sense of the ‘wider good’ has to be imposed upon the market through political or social means. To think about the wider good in the material sense outlined above, we need to ask a critical question about economic organization, a question that is not about ‘what is produced, how and for whom?’ but ‘who gains and who loses’ (Goodwin, 1990, p. 53). Our analysis of this point returns

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to the themes about wage labour that we outlined above. We can get a very clear sense of the relevant issues if we consider some recent indicators of the state of British economy and society in 2010. The recession6 has exacerbated pre-existing tensions.7 There is an increasing gap between a rich minority and those ‘lower and middle-income’ earners. This gap is a consequence of the unbalanced nature of the British economy where more is paid out in profits than wages. Research published in 2011 draws attention to a 55 per cent rise in salaries and remuneration to the directors of FTSE 100 companies.8 Directors received ‘average bonuses of £701,512 – more than many people collect during their entire working lives’. It is instructive to note that this increase of ‘34 per cent on the previous year’ compares with a rise in average wages of 3.6 per cent. This pattern repeats itself. Consider Tesco’s position, as revealed in its 2010 accounts. The company’s chief executive was awarded £17.9 million in payment while the average salary of his employees was £16,500. The reality for many of the company’s employees is that ‘they have to apply for tax credits and social security benefits to keep their heads above water’. The banks are singled out for special note. Barclays has paid out £2 million in bonuses; Goldman Sachs over £8.068 billion. Even the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has made losses of over £1 million, remunerates its executives with £2 billion in bonuses; and bankrupt Lehman Brothers is making payments of £20 million.9 Research done by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2009 shows that most families are experiencing a rise of around 5 per cent in household budgets. This above-inflation rise is borne disproportionately by poorer families, as they spend more on food and public transport, costs of which have risen 12 per cent (on the previous year). Moreover, poorer families have also not been able to take advantage of cheaper costs in mortgages and motoring. Hit particularly hard are working-age people who are reliant on benefits, as benefits have not risen as fast as increases in household budgets. Income insecurity is also widespread. Since the publication of minimum income standards in 2008, this problem can be studied systematically. Research shows that a single person in Britain needs to earn at least £13,900 a year before tax in 2009 in order to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children need to earn £27,600. Alongside such figures, the subjective perception of insecurity can also be established. Data from the European Commission shows a marked rise in fear of unemployment in the United Kingdom. Figures relating to 2010 go well above the averages recorded since research began in 1982, and have exceeded levels noted in the recession of the early 1990s. Evidence suggests that these fears are well grounded.10

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The market ill serves those ordinary people who represent a third of the population of the country and who ‘manage with a household income either side of the UK’s £22,000 median’ (Plunkett, 2011, p. 13). Evidence from the Resolution Foundation shows that a large proportion of people in this income group have serious problems managing family budgets; they have few savings and rely on credit cards to get ‘to the end of the month’. In John Healey’s pithy expression they are ‘[t]oo poor to get the best from the market, too well off to claim state benefits’. But the more established middle classes are also suffering from the restructuring of work and longterm trends in the economy: knowledge work, supposedly the West’s salvation, is now being exported like manual work. As a result of liberalized markets, capital and personnel move freely in search of profits. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested.11 Knowledge work, with its prestige and job satisfaction, appears to be suffering a similar fate as manual work. Just as the industrial revolution re-defined work ‘so in the electronic revolution the same fate will overtake many professional jobs’. This ‘digital Taylorism’ is thus re-defining a generational structure of work, enabling the export of jobs. Graduates face the prospect not only of lower wages, smaller pensions and less job security than their parents enjoyed, but also of less satisfying careers. Changes in jobs, career structure and remuneration do not just concern those entering employment. Figures suggest that there are large numbers of middle-income earners who are unable to afford a mortgage.12 The effects of recession, coupled with difficulties of obtaining credit have combined with increases in the cost of living to make home ownership increasingly out of reach for those on average earnings.13 Projections suggest that it would take people on the lower end of the income scale 45 years to save enough to afford a deposit (saving 5% of their income per year).14 Wages have remained frozen since 2005, a pattern not seen since the 1920s15 and affecting the middle class as much as the working class.16 To use a technical expression, we have been discussing some of the ‘negative meta-externalities’ that have been brought about by unrestrained markets. The wider good is not served by an economic system that privileges the returns to financial capital above that of the wages and living

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standards of most people. In responding to these concerns, we want to return to our discussion of reciprocity and mutuality as modes of economic organization. Reciprocity relates to the need to determine the ‘fair terms of social co-operation’ (Galston, 1991, p. 53). The notion of reciprocity applied to an understanding of the nature of work holds that all those involved in economic production should co-operate in its co-ordination and regulation (Durkheim, 1958, p. 134). Those involved in economic production include both owners of property, to the extent that they ‘make their wealth productive’ and the workers themselves. The pressing task is to discover ‘the moral restraint which can regulate economic life’ (Durkheim, 1958, p. 240). While we do not necessarily want to use the notion of ‘moral restraint’ we can take forward the following point: ‘where economic relations form the basis of communal life, social unity is above all the result of a solidarity of interests; it is there due to internal causes, to the bonds of inter-dependence’ (Durkheim, 1958, p. 148). We might say, then, that reciprocity is an expression of solidarity: the mutual interests that arise among those involved in productive labour. While we can appreciate the importance of mutual and reciprocal relationships in this approach to work, we also need some sense of work as a site of struggle over the terms of social and economic reproduction. We are concerned with Fordism, Taylorism, Toyotism and its various re-workings which continue into the contemporary period. We can go back to the question that we introduced at the beginning of this section. Who are the winners and losers? The losers are those who are subjected to the discipline of work, whose labour power are commodified17 and who are thrown out of work in a recession or when industry is reorganized.18 Marx remains relevant if we are to think through these issues. To pick up on the discussion in Critique of the Gotha Programme (without necessarily agreeing with Marx), if labour is ‘the source of wealth’ then ‘the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society’ so long as they are productive. The justification for this argument rests on the assertion that if ‘useful labour’ is possible ‘only in society’ then its fruits should belong to society. We cannot engage at this point with the complex debate about the labour theory of value; and we certainly don’t want to agree with either Marx (or the Gotha Programme). We would prefer to read the problematic of labour through Polanyi’s thesis (discussed in Chapter 1) to suggest that economic organization must be controlled and regulated so that what is produced by communal activity is shared in a fair way among those involved in its creation. Following Glasman one should not be naive in one’s understanding of capital. Capital will always seek to maximize

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its profits subject to the limits that are placed upon it by political power. If capital is subjected to ‘minimal restraints’ then capital will ‘exploit its environment’ for ‘maximum returns’ (Glasman, 2010, p. 117). The Labour movement has always known this fact, and has its roots in asserting the power of organized labour to extract concessions from capital: ‘[b]uilding a mutual relationship with capital, gaining recognition as a partner in production’ (Glasman, 2010, p. 117). So, we need to think about how the interests of people are taken into account in the structure and organization of economy. We also need to think about welfare as a further development of our concern with reciprocity and social organization. This is not a new theme. Mauss stressed that reciprocity was behind the response of the British state to the ‘long drawn out unemployment’ which has caused ‘an entire movement’ to arise in favour of ‘insurance’ for the working man (Mauss, 1990, p. 86). If a worker ‘gives his life’ to ‘the collective’ and to his [sic.] ‘employers’ the obligations of the latter go beyond the payment of wages. The worker is owed in return ‘a certain security in life, against unemployment, sickness, old age and death’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 86). We can generalize this position. Mauss is not just talking about social insurance. Reciprocity can be linked to a mutualism that is achieved through ‘cooperative endeavour to produce a joint product’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 86), a common participation in labour that underlies the general sense that one has a stake in an ongoing community.19 Welfare is about using the resources of the state towards the general enrichment of all, to ‘lives well lived’. Arguments from mutuality can be used to justify a much broader understanding of the importance of welfare to a political community. In the section below we will argue that, in the wake of the recession, welfare provides a common good. The pervasive anxiety about earnings and living standards that has resulted from the banking crisis provides a new ‘motivational base’ for a popular appreciation of the centrality of welfare to a functional economy. Under conditions of ‘deep and widespread uncertainty’ there is an increased sense of shared fate: ‘anyone’s future might be your own’. The crucial factor appears to be the extent to which anxiety expands ‘people’s moral horizons’ and leads people to accept shared risks (Goodin and Le Grand, 1987, p. 67). Even William Graham Sumner, author of What Social Classes Owe Each Other, and not a proponent of social solidarity, asserted that it would be hard to fi nd anyone who would say ‘I am sure . . . I shall never need aid and sympathy’. It is thus a question of the way in which the new austerity has created a sense of vulnerability20

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that makes people more willing to contribute to and support institutions in ways that distribute resources, alleviate distress and to allow people access to advantage. These themes take us back to the grounds of popular support for welfare. The inability of governments in the 1980s and 1990s to significantly reduce welfare spending could be explained by the fact that ‘citizens did not want them to’ (Horton and Gregory, 2009, p. 79) or, rather, governments were able to make reductions in those parts of welfare provision that had lost popular support, such as unemployment benefit. To put this in slightly different terms: the NHS has survived ‘eight economic cycles since the Second World War’ while ‘a commitment to full employment only survived five of them’ (Horton and Gregory, 2009, p. 79). This suggests the power of public opinion in influencing government policy. We can make reference to Clarke’s studies of public attitudes. Clarke found that people did not see themselves as consumers of public services (Clarke, Newman and Westmarland, 2008, p. 109). While they considered themselves to be ‘pro choice’ they also had anxieties about equality and access to services. Clarke’s findings also suggested that people are concerned about the fate of their communities, especially when institutions appear to be exclusively the preserve of the rich or of religious interests, rather than open to all. To get a better sense of this problematic, we can refer to Crouch’s argument about common political concerns that bring together ‘the interest of the under privileged, those on moderate incomes, those who find it a struggle to manage work in a 24/7 environment whilst bringing up children’ (Crouch, 2007, p. 55). Consider the following argument: if the state did not provide certain benefits, imagine the ‘burden that would fall on a family with young children if they had no child benefit, had to pay for secondary education, support their retired parents and buy the costly health and social care required by their grandparents’. Welfare provision by the state serves to ‘distribute income over life’. It distributes resources from ‘the well to the sick’ and from ‘those who die young, to those who die old’. While the general movement of politics in the last two decades has been to persuade the middle classes to move from public to private provision, the inherent expense of private provision may provide opportunities to make public provision appear attractive. Moreover, it is unlikely that private operators would seek to take over certain welfare services, as it would be difficult to run them profitably. Abel-Smith’s warning still rings true: ‘bankruptcy and unemployment are not risks for which the private sector can provide’ (Abel-Smith, 1984, p. 170).

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Welfare is not an inefficient and costly way of distributing resources, nor does it necessarily turn its recipients into passive consumers of state services. We will see that welfare provision does not privilege a statecentric distribution of resources. Theories of welfare provision can make use of contemporary thinking on co-production to elaborate further the role to be played by people themselves in providing welfare for their needs. Co-production theory asserts that people should be involved in the provision of the services that they use. It is necessary to break down ‘clientistic’ relationships that can be limiting and disempowering. Co-production goes beyond New Labour concerns with involving people in policy making. This tended to limit citizen input to the design of services. Once consultations had taken place, citizens tended to drop out of the picture. Co-production envisages an ongoing role for citizens in the actual delivery of services. However, it is worth noting that welfare provision with no input from the state or professionals is not co-production. Co-production ‘occupies the critical middle ground where user and professional knowledge is combined to create and deliver services’ (Stephens, Ryan-Collins and Boyle, 2008, p. 16). The pressing question for us becomes: how is it possible to get people involved in the running, delivery and control of welfare in such a way that allows more control over their lives? In other words, how can welfare be co-produced between state agencies, voluntary associations and welfare recipients themselves? To pick up on two general themes so far: this is not a vision of the Big Society, nor is it New Labour’s command control and managerialism. Our concerns with equality and distribution of resources do not end up with heavy-handed ideas of state redistribution and bureaucracy. Nor do we seek to privatize the state of our existence. It retains a central role overseeing and regulating markets in the interests of the common good and social reproduction. So, in co-production welfare is not provided through the distribution of goods and resources to ‘objects’ that are somehow passive and deserving, as this process leaves in place the fundamental structures that perpetuates inequality. In other words, welfare provision requires different tools: some that relate to welfare as more or less traditionally understood; others that require reliance on private or ‘social’ providers. The state, however, remains firmly in the picture and the re-distributive elements of welfare also play a central role.

The Politics of Economy Our arguments above are, admittedly, somewhat abstract. We need to place any possible development of them in a political context. This means

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picking up on one of the themes left at the end of the last chapter, and engaging briefly with the Labour Party’s reinvention of itself after electoral defeat in 2010. There is a clear revisionist21 response to the ideology of New Labour. The problem for the revisionists is to distinguish between the ideas that are to be ‘dropped’ and those that will be carried forward. Returning to Gaitskell and Crossland, the revisionists argue that Labour has been better at jettisoning ideas, such as the commitment to public ownership, rather than updating traditional Labour concerns in modern or even postindustrial contexts. Tony Blair’s overarching concern with modernization fits into this pattern. Modernization was talked about in terms of the third way, social democracy or the centre left. None of these terms was used consistently or precisely, but proved useful for dis-associating Labour from positions that it had taken as a party in the past. These ideological evasions that took place were perhaps obscured by electoral success. In a time of electoral defeat, though, it is necessary to define carefully the values and ideas that are to structure and define future policies. In an important speech to the Fabian Society in 2011, Ed Miliband, the new Labour leader, showed that he was prepared to speak in terms that went back to the roots of the Labour party as a ‘grass roots organisation’ seeking a political articulation of vision that went beyond ‘sectional interests’.22 For Miliband, this means developing arguments about a ‘fairer sharing of the nation’s wealth’ and the need for ‘strong and responsive public services’. It is also necessary to settle scores with New Labour. The New Labour project has brought about a ‘fairness divide’ between those at the top ‘and the majority, the lower and middle-income, who have been struggling to keep up: working harder, for longer, for less’. While Labour policy has yet to be determined, Miliband does indeed appear to be making a pitch for those ‘[m]iddle earners who are no longer guaranteed to share in our nation’s success’.23 The notion of the ‘squeezed middle’24 appears to be a way of broadly describing those to whom Labour needs to appeal. Progressive politics is perhaps moving along similar lines to those that we outlined in the first part of this chapter. Although there is as yet no clear statement of Labour Party policy, there are indications of key issues. In party circles there is an appreciation that the economy must move away from its reliance on financial services and develop strengths in other sectors, such as ‘manufacturing’, ‘low carbon businesses’, ‘business services and the creative industries’. In a recent speech John Denham, the Shadow Business Secretary, indicated the direction of future Labour policy. Denham spoke of his commitment to a ‘strong private sector’25 that would underpin a ‘more competitive and fairer economy’. Responding

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to deep-seated inequality means ensuring that the burden falls on those who were most able to pay, as opposed to (e.g.) raising taxes on VAT which would have a disproportionate effect on those with fewer resources. The ‘Robin Hood Tax’ argument is especially relevant. The tax would be levied on foreign exchange, derivative and share trading.26 There are variations on this argument. The TUC has called for a small (0.05%) tax on transfers made between UK financial institutions and has estimated that this could raise around £30 billion a year.27 Profits and bonuses alone are estimated to amount to some £90 billion by 2011. Although these will be taxed to raise around £20 billion, it would be fair to suggest that the financial sector could be made to pay at least the same amount again (Dolphin, 2010). Coalition policy in this area appears stalled. Ministers appear to be reluctant or unable to extend the tax on banker’s bonuses and develop ‘the sort of institutions which would address the long-term and longstanding problems of adequate finance for growing companies and for regional economies’.28 There have also been significant failures in securing inward investment to make up for ‘market failure’ and stimulate job creation. The overriding requirement is for the reconstruction of the country’s manufacturing base and an export-based strategy that would move the economy out of recession and make the most of competitive exchange rates to export to rapidly expanding economies like those of India and China. It is necessary to acknowledge that quality jobs and a sophisticated economy characterized by reciprocal social relations depend on trade unions. Trade unions were a significant factor in the development of welfare states (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Boeri and Van Ours, 2008, p. 163). In the era before the welfare state, unions pioneered ‘mutual insurance’ as ‘part of associational self help’ (Boeri and Van Ours, 2008, p. 163). Furthermore, the TUC has its origins as a lobbying group for Labour interests in Parliament. Taking these points together means that we have to think about unions outside the usual industrial relations context; in particular, because an empirical link can be demonstrated between strong union links with social democratic parties and ‘welfare state generosity’: Union policies towards welfare benefits mitigate the effects on the well being of workers of market failures that result from imperfect insurance and credit markets . . . union policies towards financial markets can be significantly welfare improving. (Boeri et al., 2001, p. 250)

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These are provocative themes. In British politics, they tend to raise spectres from the past; in particular, the period during 1974–79 when, so the story goes, the unions were too powerful.29 Brendan Barber, the current General Secretary of the TUC, has contrasted the myth that the trade unions held the country ‘to ransom’ at the end of the 1970s with the responsibilities of the banks for the credit crisis and ensuing recession. The response of the unions to the Banking Crisis of 2008, and the role that they have assumed in attempting to articulate a sustained and principled position in the face of cuts to public sector spending, might suggest that they are repositioning themselves, attempting to become ‘social actors’ (Upchurch et al., 2009, p. 111). If, as we have argued above, the 2008 crisis suggests that an economic model has been compromised, it may be time to forge a new consensus ‘that recognises that unions are essential to establishing both fairness at work and fairness across society more generally’. It is certainly important to stress that the unions have, for the last decade, showed a new approach. It is not a question of returning to wages councils or to a social contract, but to appreciating the centrality of the unions to a balanced economy. Indeed, the unions suggest that their involvement in workplace organization leads to enhanced employee ‘voice’ and ‘better long-term employment relations, reduced staff turnover and a positive impact on the effects of workplace change’. The understanding of economy that the unions are articulating is a long way from the language and concerns of the 1970s. Perhaps the time is ripe for a creative partnership between the unions and the Labour Party. Connected with this theme is the need to rethink the role of the state in the provision of public services. In place of New Labour centralization, there is now a concern for ‘local communities’ and for ‘people taking more responsibility for their own lives’. The key issue, then, is to seize back the initiative from the centre right. Progressive thinking looks back to ‘1945’ as ‘an achievement of solidarity’, but is critical of the legacy of statist thinking as destructive of ‘mutual solidarity’ or ‘the ways we took care of each other’.30 The difficulty is in squaring this critique of ‘state driven’ redistribution with a defence of equality. Rather than thinking equality through the New Labour discourse of poverty and exclusion, the central term has become ‘relational’ politics. This is a politics of the everyday, or the politics of reciprocity and mutuality where ‘what matters in everyday life is the quality of our relationships – our family life, our ability to go to church or to mosque or to synagogue, to have relationships there with other people, to care for our elderly’.31 The path forward may be to link welfare provision much more closely with community institutions. Picking up on the concerns expressed in

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Refounding Labour, and the general sense in which it is necessary to fight elections and build party support at the local level, a re-engagement with welfare requires working within the workfare structures of the Coalition, acknowledging the role played by private providers and civil society actors, in order to ‘tackle issues such as worklessness, health inequality and poor educational attainment’ (Hain, 2011, p. 10). Labour’s policy review is examining ways of rebuilding and rethinking how public institutions should operate, and resisting the arguments that they should either be run by volunteers or privatized. Labour thinking is also looking again at the work of the post office. It is interesting that Marshall’s discourse on welfare invoked this as a central institution of the welfare state. This builds on policies of Brown’s Government. Support for the post office was seen as a central part of the response to the banking crisis, a way of working with institutions that have some degree of public trust.32 How can these themes be brought together? Hassan has drawn attention to the left’s ‘lack of a story’ (Hassan, 2007, p. 11). A ‘defining project’ now seems to be in the hands of the right. The moral certainties and simplistic assertions of the right, at least in the United States, contrast with the left’s ‘tactical politics’ that lack consistency and fails to articulate any vision of common interests (Hassan, 2007, p. 12). What the left lacks is a ‘general picture’, a way of bringing together different ideas into a consistent philosophy. It is necessary to invent a principled way of thinking about ‘public goods’ (Hassan, 2007, p. 17) such as education, health and unemployment benefits. For Hassan, the ideas that could be used to challenge the ‘in vogue business ideas’ that informed New Labour can be traced back to ‘decentralist ideas of guild socialism’ (Hassan, 2007, p. 17). The left has to use its imagination to work out new ‘institutional means’ to achieve political ends in a period when the old certainties of ‘collective action’ (Bentley, 2007, p. 94) are no longer compelling. It may be that the old ways of achieving collective ends have been compromised, but this does not mean that ‘the need’ for ‘shared goods’ and ‘public response to collective risk and threat’ (Bentley, 2007, p. 95) have also come to an end. Progressive politics are ideologically distinctive in their belief that the state can help to build cohesive communities and that the market can provide some goods but not others. Goss argues that there is popular support for the idea that the ‘public realm’ should not be reduced to a ‘market place’. Goss refers to a Guardian Poll taken in September 2005. The majority agreed that New Labour were relying too heavily on private providers and that, despite investment, services had not markedly improved. The New Labour drive to modernize and centralize supposed that public

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services could be ‘delivered’ by government agencies ‘making things happen’ (Goss, 2007, p. 108), an approach that required targets to be set and performance to be monitored. This limited command/control model arguably lies behind the failure to improve services. Evidence suggests that the imposition of nationally set targets distorts local needs. Services are run in the interests of auditors rather than end users. Command/control models also prevent the development of local initiatives and tend to demoralize staff. It is not even as if such mechanisms are still uncritically accepted in the private sector. Much more subtle mechanisms have been developed that are sensitive to feedback from both ‘front line workers and customers’. Cumbersome audit cultures (Goss, 2007, p. 109) are inefficient and alienating. If the private sector has turned its back on the audit culture, why insist on them in the public sector? The reality of public services is that they are located in a ‘mixed economy’ of both public and private delivery and provision. Government failure to innovate in public service delivery has led to ‘decay’ (Goss, 2007, p. 111) and demoralization that has in turn provided a justification for further privatization. Public service decay can be countered by stressing the general interest in efficient and consumer-focused services provided on a collective basis. This shifts the argument from the old assertion of a public sector consisting of government agencies to a subtler appreciation of a ‘public realm’ defined as ‘areas of our lives’ characterized by ‘social and community values’ where ‘we have legitimate collective interests as citizens’ (Goss, 2007, p. 111). One problem is that it is hard to know exactly what this realm is, and how we should think about it. We will turn to this problem in the next chapter. For the moment we can suggest that it is shaped by a ‘mixture of public, private and voluntary organisations’. The key difference from the Big Society and from New Labour’s command/ control model is that public and welfare services must be made ‘accountable to the people’ and governed by ‘values that protect the public’ (Goss, 2007, p. 111). Quite how these mechanisms are put in place is another question and would demand a much more detailed study, although we have suggested that ideas drawn from associationalism, co-production and core economy might be useful. We also need to confront the argument that markets make public services more efficient and cost effective. Public services need to be responsive to their users but this does not mean that they have to be provided on market terms. Targeted public services must be responsive to the needs of local communities who must also have some real control over the services that are being ‘delivered’ to them. The complex structuring of innovation and

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accountability on which public services depend cannot be reduced to the idea that the key to public service reform is consumer choice. The concept of choice as a driver of consumer behaviour has itself been heavily qualified in commerce. In business, the concept of choice has been eclipsed by the idea that consumers are driven by a desire to have their specific needs provided for. This requires networks of co-production which are difficult to achieve in markets but could conceivably be provided within the mixed economy of public services. Some sense of how such systems would work can be glimpsed in the following sketch. Public services would involve ‘pooled budgets, integrated services and partnerships to tailor services to individual or neighbourhood needs’. Designing public services means taking into account how people take control of the communal goods that they need: ‘places for kids to go, safe streets, cohesive, safe communities, less waste, less congestion’ (Goss, 2007, p. 112). If we are to re-assert the values of the public sphere, then it is necessary that private providers are properly controlled and scrutinized. How this would take place is difficult to say precisely. The problem is presently taxing the proponents of the Big Society. The risk is that the Big Society repeats the mistakes of New Labour, seeing third sector and voluntary organizations as ‘cheap providers’ rather than distinct bodies whose services have to be nurtured by an ‘enabling state’ (not a state content on merely opening up profit-making opportunities in the provision of public services) (Goss, 2007, p. 114). The central point to grasp is perhaps the most difficult. Even though private providers deliver public services the ‘public sphere’ is not animated by market values because ‘the drives of selfinterest, accumulation of profit and compassion are at odds with social values of sharing [and] mutuality’. But, how do these themes make for a politics of the general good? Within the context of the recent history of the Labour Party, one of our main reference points is to Tony Benn’s reasoning in 1979, when ‘restoring the legitimacy’ of the Party in ‘the public mind’ meant reaching out from the traditional core of Labour supporters to ‘other activists’. This appeal went beyond the notion that inequality was simply to do with ‘class relations deriving from the ownership of capital’ and was based on the realization that the moral argument about equality was ‘as wide as life itself’ (Panitch and Leys, 2001, p. 172). Certainly, in a way quite opposed to Benn’s ideas, New Labour successfully created a party that reflected ‘all walks of life’.33 But, how is it possible to move beyond New Labour, while carrying forward a politics of the common good? Although Labour appealed to these sentiments in the General Election of 2010, the strategy

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did not work. There was increasing dissent and uncertainty within the Party itself over its direction, an acute realization that ‘Labour [was] a party with a working-class base’ but that ‘the cross-class appeal to win and govern’ lacked definition.34 Arguably, the party failed to deal with pressing economic problems; as we have seen the New Labour government failed to come up with policies that captured a real sense of the public good. 35 Although the manifesto promised various reforms, 36 Labour’s message was not credible to the electorate. The social and economic dislocation that followed in the wake of the credit crisis had opened up the political space for bolder policies. As Cruddas and Rutherford have pointed out, ‘the left lacks a story that defi nes what it stands for’. Th is chapter has tried to fi nd the terms in which this story could be told. It has outlined a way of thinking about welfare, economy and society that might inform a progressive politics. We have to begin from the point of view of the well-lived life37 and update the concern with co-operative and mutual ways of working with ideas about core economy and co-production. It is necessary to stress that welfare is a precondition for a market, and that markets cannot either fairly or efficiently distribute all the resources necessary for social wellbeing. Such goods can be provided by looking to values such as ‘collective action, moral pressure, tolerance, compassion . . . and reciprocal support’ (Goss, 2007, p. 112), values that cannot be ‘commanded’ and which are not ‘bought and sold’. Nurturing values of tolerance and support can only be achieved through dialogue and approached on the fundamental assertion that citizens are not consumers but ‘activist providers’ (Goss, 2007, p. 112) who work alongside government in ‘co-provision’.

Conclusion We have argued that solidarity, as a working through of a notion of the social and economic organization of mutual and reciprocal relationships requires us to think about the structure of work, and the structure of welfare. The gap between the rich and the poor is such that the former feel no obligations to ‘the common bonds of solidarity’.38 As far as welfare is concerned, and recalling our arguments in Chapter 1, solidarity requires that there should be common institutions, shared experiences and approximate equality between all citizens. In this understanding of solidarity, equality is inconsistent with large differences between the incomes of the rich and the poor. Equality, in this sense, is also inconsistent with institutions that

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serve the interests of the rich, and to which other citizens have only limited access. Finally, our understanding of solidarity returns to the idea that social investment is necessary to create a workforce that can sustain the spending levels necessary for a properly functioning welfare state. We have reviewed some general arguments about alternative ways of thinking about economy, and examined Labour’s response to the recession. We do not want to suggest that there is an unproblematic relationship between the two parts of our argument. We are not arguing that progressive economics or a humanization of economy are ideas consistently followed by Labour. Rather, we wanted to suggest a possible way forward for progressive thinking. Given that Williams’ speech, which opened our analysis, was addressed to the Labour movement, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the exhortation ‘to resist the barbarising and dehumanising of economic life which jeopardises natural and human capital alike’ is a way of thinking about economy that has animated the British left. It might be that it is possible to develop and present a politics that can capture the public imagination, a politics that is informed by a need to reshape economic objectives. We are most concerned with outlining principles that allow us to think creatively about both economy and welfare. In the next chapter we want to elaborate this particular understanding, and engage with how it might be possible to make arguments about equality that seek to ensure a more equal distribution of wealth and opportunity that is in the interests of everyone.

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4 How We Live Measures Our Own Nature Equality, Welfare and Social Justice The best life of each man is, and is felt to be, bound up with the best life of his fellow-citizens. (Leonard Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory, 1911, p. 207) ‘We want to work so hard/ We can’t get the chance’. (The Kinks, ‘Dead End Street’)

Introduction Our objective in this chapter is to elaborate an account of justice1 founded on equality of access to well-being. Equality of well-being can be understood as the achievement of social freedom. Social freedom requires the provision of resources that allow individuals to become citizens capable of achieving social and economic goals. Equality, then, is not meant in the naive sense of ‘taking from the rich to give to the poor’ nor is equality a levelling of social differences; the notion that we should all wear ‘blue overalls’.2 Concepts of meritocracy and equality of opportunity must also be critically reassessed. While arguments about income equality are important, such concerns are merely one aspect of a broader account of how social resources are distributed. Our argument will develop as follows. In the first section we will link the concept of social freedom to the notion of the capability of individuals in their social and institutional contexts. We will then argue that

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well-being, or the realization of capability, requires a common sense of belonging to a political community where one is recognized as a citizen. This notion of recognition takes us towards Rawls’ theory of justice and our reading of the difference principle. In terms of a theory of social justice and equality, we want to build on at least some of Rawls’ arguments (Pimlott, 1984; Roemer, 1982; Cohen, 2008; Nielsen, 1978). Our task is not to review this literature in its entirety, but to make use of certain elements. Rawls’ work can be adapted to show how ‘unjustifiable inequalities’ can be attacked. From this perspective we can approach concerns with the social division of resources that have produced (and are intensifying) the gap between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’. We will also briefly engage with arguments about basic income and asset-based welfare as ways of achieving social justice. The final part of the chapter distinguishes our arguments from other influential approaches to egalitarianism.

Equality, Welfare and Justice Our starting point is an argument about needs. Need has been central to an understanding of welfare. Indeed ‘the recognition and satisfaction of need marks the welfare function of the modern state’ (Plant et al., 1980, p. 20). However, this position does not take our argument far enough. To suggest that there should be some form of public provision for basic needs would be accepted by more or less all thinkers on welfare; even libertarian theorists or centre right thinkers. So, we are not concerned simply with the satisfaction of basic needs. A more ambitious claim is necessary. Welfare can be seen as the provision of resources that enable individuals equal access to well-being. We can therefore appreciate the general link between welfare and social freedom. These terms are different perspectives on the central argument that equality is about the general development of capability. Welfare is more than a safety net for the poor. Welfare is the means of realizing the equal freedom of all to become citizens of a good society. Enabling people to achieve well-being and to become autonomous, selfdirecting individuals goes beyond narrow understandings of freedom from coercion. Whether capability is linked to the idea of freedom to choose or seen in a more radical sense as the constitution of the self, it can be understood as a concern with substantive agency and the social conditions in which agency is achieved. Following Gould, capability as a realization of substantive agency relates to a concept of social freedom understood as the ‘enabling conditions of action’ (Gould, 1988, p. 35). This is a difficult theme

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but can perhaps be put most dramatically as follows. Poverty is a profound limit on social freedom. To lack the resources that enable choices to be made and acted upon is to compromise the autonomy that informs the life of the citizen. The essential point is Orwell’s: to be poor is to be acted upon,3 to be ‘less than’ those who are not poor. While this language may be imprecise, it stresses the fundamental point. Whether we want to look towards statistics or more subjective evidence, freedom requires that ‘individuals . . . survive, develop, and function in a society’ (Engster, 2007, p. 28). Poverty is an extreme example of a failure of capability and a kind of social death.4 However, those who are not considered poor may still require resources to achieve the ends that they desire. Our analysis of the ‘squeezed middle’ or ‘just coping class’ in the last chapter suggests that this is a fairly large section of the population. The ‘just coping class’ may also find it hard to achieve the ends that are considered to be a general good. Even those who can cope might perhaps find it difficult to do so if their salaries declined and public goods were only available from private providers. This is to run ahead with our argument. At this point, it is worth recalling Roberto Esposito’s argument that the Sanskrit root of freedom, frya, refers to ‘something that has to do with an increase, a non-closing, a flowering, also in the typically vegetative meaning of the expression’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 70). Freedom is a process of individual realization, a ‘flourishing’ that allows the individual to become one among others who all count equally. Let us clarify. Social freedom requires ‘negative freedom’ or the ‘abstract capacity’ (Gould, 1988, p. 32) to choose a course of action. So long as an individual ‘desires or wills’ we could say that the she/he is free to achieve his/her goal provided that there are no constraints upon the desired end. Negative freedom is itself a complex notion. A proper development of the concept would require a full account of agency and cognitive and emotional development. As far as legal and political philosophy are concerned, negative freedom tends to be associated with rights or liberties that protect the individual from the exercise of state power. These ideas can be correlated with the formal equality before the law that constitutes citizen’s rights. Social freedom goes beyond these minimum conditions. Gould relates it to the conditions for an agent’s ‘self determination and self development’ (Gould, 1988, p. 33). The link with the idea of capacity is clear: an individual is free to develop through self-determined projects. The idea of social freedom thus also comes into focus: the development of the person has a ‘social dimension in the social relations and common purposes that provide a fundamental context’ in which individual desires are shaped and satisfied.

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Social freedom requires that individuals have claims on resources that allow them to become citizens in both a formal and substantive sense: both equal before the law, and equal in the resources they can utilize for their own self-development. As this self-development can only take place in a social context, our account of social freedom is not unduly individualistic. Nor, despite the arguments of Berlin (1969), does this account of social freedom mean that the individual is somehow co-ordinated with a ‘collective’ that ultimately denies individual freedom in the name of some ‘social whole’ (Gould, 1988, p. 37). Social freedom requires institutions accessible to all and co-ordinated action against problems like poverty. Social freedom is entirely coherent with a plural society in both an economic and social sense. It does not require collective state provision or a planned economy, nor does it mandate a single set of ends that an individual ought to desire. Cohen’s notion of midfare allows us to link the argument about agency to an idea of welfare. Midfare (Cohen, 1989, p. 28) might be a strange expression but it is useful in a number of ways. First, it is a way of thinking about human capability in an institutional context. Cohen argues that midfare describes how people access goods and services that they require, as they lack the ability to obtain them ‘through no fault of [their] own’ (Cohen, 1989, p. 28). People require ongoing access to services that they can neither themselves perform, nor are in a position to bring about. We will qualify this idea a little when we refer to co-production in Chapter 5 but, for the moment, let us allow this point to stand. Cohen’s argument about midfare points towards the problematic of the social achievement of well-being. Goods and services are required by all citizens and, if the market shows itself unwilling or unable to provide them (or can only provide them inefficiently), alternative forms of provision must be secured. We need to leave this point to one side for the moment and return to the detailed analysis of the notions of capability and midfare. The capability/midfare approach stresses that we need to think about how people access and use goods, opportunities and services, and how use and access relate to the ‘actual opportunities of living’ (Sen, 2009, p. 233). This builds on the notion of need. We can produce fairly precise and welldefined notions of the different needs that must be satisfied to enable people to become agents who achieve a satisfactory level of well-being.5 It is important to note that well-being is a necessarily diverse concept, an understanding of the ‘heterogeneity of human beings’ (Sen, 1992, p. 1). Different people have different needs. However, we can argue that in general, life is ‘constituted’ by satisfying these diverse needs. The most basic

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needs are satisfied by the achievement of ‘adequate’ sustenance, health and the ‘avoidance’ of an untimely death. More complex needs relate to selfrespect and integration within a community (Sen, 1992, p. 1). If we return to the institutional idea of midfare we can stress that we are concerned with the availability of social resources that allow particular articulations of ‘doing and being’. A citizen cannot be understood merely as someone whose basic needs are satisfied, nor is it a question of simply redistributing income.6 Assuring well-being requires us to think about how health care, education, access to opportunity, income security and decent housing have to be provided in a consistent and co-ordinated manner. Research has shown that the social problems of poverty cannot simply be met by encouraging people to take up work. It is also necessary to achieve social protection through targeted anti-poverty initiatives. Poverty can be tackled by a sufficiently ‘intelligent’ set of state and para-state agencies and suitably designed policies. Public spending on education and training has to go hand in hand with a response to those social, economic and political conditions that create cultures of dependency. Underlying this approach to welfare are three fundamental ideas: the active participation of citizens in social and economic life; the commitment to the idea that those who cannot so participate, either through unemployment, old age or sickness, are to be protected from penury and the need for the state to be proactive and interventionist in its social policy.7 The fundamental point is that the achievement of well-being requires a shared sense of being a member of a community, with all the burdens, obligations, rights and opportunities that constitute citizenship. This point comes into sharper focus if we compare our approach with other understandings of welfare. Well-being is not about an equalization of happiness.8 We are, in other words, a long way from welfare economics, utilitarianism and the problems that have bedevilled these traditions of thought. We are concerned with a theme to which these approaches remain more or less blind: how does welfare constitute a sense of belonging to a political community? As we argued, provision of services like health, education and social security do not just ‘help’ the poor or the disadvantaged. The common provision of resources is related to the very idea of the citizen. Those suffering ‘clustered disadvantage’ are not just materially poor. They suffer a form of social death, exclusion from the terms of recognition with which a community defines itself. As one of our reference points in this chapter is John Rawls, we want to exhume these themes from his theory of justice, and to show how they communicate with broader progressive traditions of thinking.

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Although Rawls is not normally seen as a welfare theorist, it is interesting that he sees ‘[s]ocial justice as “a public conception” that allows citizens to conceive of themselves as social beings’.9 Welfare institutions are necessary as they allow people to ‘see themselves’ reflected in the institutions of the just society. This is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s argument that the worker requires at least one clean shirt to appear in public. Those who lack basic resources lack a viable self-image. They feel ‘shame’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 256) at their inability to achieve autonomy. Shame is experienced in the gaze of others. The person feeling shame realizes that she/he is not valued by that other; it is a particular realization of self-esteem or an ‘especially intimate connection’ between ‘our person and with those upon whom we depend to confirm the sense of our own worth’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 443). Self-esteem is rooted in the public recognition of our inner sense of worth. It is an indication that we are ‘someone’; that we have achieved autonomy. Shame is the debilitating failure of this complex: our awareness that we have not, somehow, become properly adult and achieved the status of full citizenship. We want to stress the provenance of this idea. As far as the arguments of this book are concerned, we can trace this theme from Rawls back to Tawney. Tawney saw inequality and the poverty that results from its more extreme forms as a condition in which a sense of life, a sense of oneself, is diminished and the political community itself is impoverished. The response to this impoverishment is not an argument that resources should be somehow divided among ‘the poor’. Tawney spoke of a ‘common culture’ and asserted that ‘people are innately social beings’. Reflecting his roots in ethical socialism, he spoke of state intervention to ‘deliver education, health [and], social security’. Hardly surprisingly, the assertion of communal provision relates to notions of ‘the common good’. In Tawney’s thinking, a concept of the common good did not require strict equality. Rather, furthering the common good required the removal of impediments to the achievement of individual flourishing; and the belief that the flourishing of one required similar conditions for all. The target then ‘is not power and inequality but capricious inequality and irresponsible power’.10 A shared culture of common belonging is essential to the achievement of equality. To develop this theme we need to connect with some further ideas drawn from Rawls. At the centre of Rawls’ argument are principles of justice that people would choose in the original position to define the community to which they will belong. This is admittedly a somewhat problematic idea, and we do not want to defend it.11 Whether or not people would choose

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the so-called difference principle (as opposed to, for example, a different approach to the division of resources) is entirely open to argument. It might not be possible to provide a single foundation for an account of justice. However, Rawls’ interest in recognition, the key theme in our argument, can be usefully divorced from arguments about the transcendental principle of justice. We will take this theme as a general way of thinking about the difference principle and how it relates to the ‘distribution of social and economic advantages’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 61).12 The difference principle states that ‘[a]ll social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth and the bases of self respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 62). We need to expand the definition a little further. What is to be distributed equally? Rawls defines a class of ‘certain primary goods’ that all people require and that can be made communally available. These are ‘rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 62). We are not too concerned here with the distinction between ‘natural goods’ (intelligence, for example) and social goods. The former are somehow ‘given’ by virtue of birth while the latter are not. This distinction probably does not hold. For example, given sufficient resources it is arguable that certain ‘natural’ talents count for much less than some would assert. The real problem, then, is the extent to which one’s social position affects the degree to which one’s talents or health are developed or protected.13 We hope that this robust argument gets around a number of arguments about talents that have led theories of equality down blind alleys. The difference principle raises some much more interesting issues. Some have argued that Rawls’ arguments about self-respect and ‘moral autonomy’ necessitates ‘very near equality of wealth and power’ (Nielsen, 1978, p. 240).14 This opens some pressing concerns. It points at how the difference principle is interpreted. Cohen has made this point forcefully. There is a radical reading of the difference principle and a more limited ‘conservative’ interpretation. To understand how this argument develops we need to deal with the idea of incentives. For the conservative interpretation of the difference principle the ‘vast inequalities’ in UK or US society are somehow justified. Consider the argument made by certain bankers in the wake of the crisis of 2008 that their massive bonuses are for the general good as they create wealth. This claim could be justified by the conservative reading of the difference principle. This narrow interpretation is simply about ‘expediency’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 86) or an encouragement of the ‘selfish character’ nurtured by capitalism.

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Stressing the incentives argument in the form above thus severely limits the degree to which the difference principle could be used to think about and justify redistribution of resources. An egalitarian argument would have to put forward a generous interpretation of the difference principle. Cohen asserts that the best strategy is to reframe the incentives argument. Rejecting it altogether makes egalitarianism seem somewhat mean-spirited, an expression of envy or jealousy rather than a principled objection to the social consequences of the distribution of resources. Egalitarians do not simply object to the fact that some have vast quantities of wealth. They question the fact that ‘some people’ are ‘so badly off ’ or have so little, when ‘other people are so well off ’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 31). This question introduces a notion of being ‘badly off rather than simply “less well off ”’. The latter term loses the sense of the argument. Egalitarianism makes little sense if applied to a set of people who all have large holdings of wealth even though some may be relatively better off than others. The egalitarian argument addresses the chronic lack of resources which could be ameliorated by ‘equalizing redistribution’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 31). An elaboration of this argument is consistent with a broad or generous interpretation of the difference principle. This would allow ‘those inequalities that either make the worst better off or do not make them worse off ’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 29). Thus: ‘an inequality is mandatory if it really is needed to improve the condition of the badly off, and it is permissible if it does not improve but also does not worsen their condition’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 31). Admittedly, this is not an egalitarianism of ‘strict equality’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 32). The argument is that this becomes the ‘complex maxim . . . make the badly off well off, or if that is not possible, make them as well off as possible’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 32). Arguments about meritocracy are too crude to realize this objective. Given the importance of ‘occupational structure’ and the fact that it is not so much merit but the resources that people are able to mobilize that determine their life chances, arguments from merit are too limited. Meritocracy is also too individualistic, and obscures the extent to which resources and life chances tend to be distributed over generations.15 The solution, bringing together Cohen’s arguments about the difference principle and the capacity approach, would be to ‘give’ more to those ‘lower down the social scale’ – lessen the inequalities that exist between ‘the rich and the poor’16 and to encourage ‘high, universal social standards’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 108). This technical argument about the difference principle is entirely consistent with our approach to equalizing well-being. The ‘badly off ’ are those that suffer clustered disadvantage. Making them ‘better off ’ requires a number of interventions. Material inequality can be tackled

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by redistributive taxation and targeted provision of social services; cultural and social inequality can be confronted through education and the limitation of the privileges and inequities of power. Inequalities of power can be taken on by experimenting with new forms of democratization in both economic and political spheres (we will pick up on this theme as it relates to welfare in the next chapter). The three kinds of inequality are, of course, interrelated, and beg complex practical questions about how it would be best to proceed against them (Wright, 1984, p. 88). The question is: how could we put into effect anything like the difference principle?17 How would it be possible to equalize income, opportunity and outcome?

Basic Income and Asset-based Welfare At this point in the chapter we want to return to and develop the arguments that we outlined in the first part of the chapter. Our arguments about social freedom have been developed through a concern with the social provision of resources that allow the achievement of autonomy and recognition as a member of a political community. We have suggested that development of capability goes beyond redistribution of income. We now want to return to this theme and develop it further. Giving ‘more’ to those ‘lower down the social scale’ requires (among other objectives) redistribution of income. The issue is: how can this end be achieved? We want to assess two responses: the idea of basic income, and arguments for assets-based welfare. Both basic income and asset arguments are focused on the terms in which citizens make claims to social resources; both these positions are also innovative. They address, in different ways, structures of work and income, and thus move the debate away from any sense that we can proceed on a narrow front. Arguments about welfare, as we have suggested, need to extend beyond the understanding that we are concerned with passive receipt of benefits, to broader considerations of social and economic organization. The notion of a basic income certainly has a heritage in the traditions of thinking that we have been examining. Cole was one of the earliest exponents of such an idea. He saw ‘productive power’ as the result of ‘the social heritage of inventiveness and skill’ that was shared between generations of workers. Although this is a little imprecise, it points towards a broad principle that ‘all the citizens should share in the yield of this common heritage’ and, therefore, that the rewards of production should be ‘distributed in the form of rewards for, and incentives to, current service in production’ (Cole, 1944, p. 144).

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Contemporary articulations of basic income provide a much more detailed sense of how such proposals would work. However, there are also a wide variety of proposals and concrete suggestions for the organization of basic income schemes. Given the complexities of the literature on basic income, we will take Van Parijis’ work as our point of reference, as it is perhaps the ‘purest’ form of the argument. For Van Parijis, basic income is ‘an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement’. We can stress the important elements of this definition. Basic income is entirely individualized. One’s entitlement is dependent neither on being in employment nor being a ‘job seeker’. A basic income is delivered through regular payments of cash; it is not a tax credit, a voucher or coupon scheme. Basic income is thus distinct from means-tested benefits, or benefits awarded on the basis of rights. It is not levied by reference to one’s status as a worker but on the fact that one belongs to a political community; that one is a citizen. So, a basic income would replace a complex system of welfare benefits. Apologists for a basic income have provided convincing arguments that the cost of such a scheme would be no more expensive than providing benefits on the basis of conditions or the labyrinthine mathematics that underlie the calculations of a universal credit. However, basic income arguments also provide a much more radical claim. The problem that underlies both workfare and tax credits is that they pressure people into taking dead-end jobs that give little sense of self-worth. Private companies that oversee workfare projects perpetuate the culture of placing individuals in low-paid, dull jobs so that they are able to meet their performance targets. If a basic income was guaranteed some might be more willing to work in low-paid jobs that were worthwhile. It is possible that a different culture of work might emerge. The idea that work and training serve a disciplinary function might begin to break down. Basic income could encourage the development of different ways of working. Indeed, there might be all kinds of interesting developments – a transformation of both work and life. Basic income arguments are certainly provocative. They demand that one thinks outside of the stereotypes of benefit claimants as scroungers and cheats and have faith in people’s honesty, integrity and creativity. It is precisely this demand to think differently that is the weakness of basic income arguments (at least for the moment). Unless there was a sustained and well-coordinated campaign to present basic income arguments, it is hard to conceive that they would make headway. This is not to say that they are flawed; only that the public need to be primed for their reception.

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This begs the question: what might break the ground for basic income arguments? We can turn at this point to investigate asset-based welfare. As asset-based welfare can also be traced back to asset-based egalitarian thinking in the work of Cole and Tawney, it has a similar pedigree as basic income arguments (Paxton, 2003, p. 1). It is also consistent with our general argument in this chapter to the extent that inequalities in wealth should be ‘moderated’ and particularly unfair distributions addressed. Egalitarians18 see asset redistribution justified on the claim that ‘every citizen has a claim to a fair share of resources’ so that they can ‘participate as citizens’, but also because ownership of assets promotes ‘opportunity and self fulfilment’ (Paxton, 2003, p. 1). So, a great deal depends on the structure and design of social investment programmes. Ackerman and Alstott (1999) argue that a grant should be made to young people to allow them to pay for their education as a right of citizenship. A similar idea in the British context can be found in the work of Le Grand and Nissan (2000). A large grant, funded by reform of inheritance tax law, would allow individuals to invest in education, training, purchase of property or setting up a business. Indeed, it might be possible to assert that this form of asset building presents a possibility for an egalitarian politics. Those institutions, such as post offices, that have offered services to small investors have tended to operate in different ways to the major savings banks. They have had branches at local levels in communities.19 Historically, the poor and low waged have been excluded from financial services: this entails ‘reliance on informal finance and high-cost (not to say rapacious) moneylenders’ that discourages saving (OECD, 2003, p. 11). The OECD have backed this argument, drawing attention to the ‘gulf of separation’ (OECD, 2003, p. 14) between ‘poor people and financial systems’. Banks need to change their attitudes. The poor have traditionally been seen as credit risks.20 Such approaches ignore the evidence about the ‘credit worthiness’ of low-waged investors, and reflects a failure to assess human capital potential alongside more conventional financial concerns. This approach to asset-based welfare is a long way from paternalism. Asset-based welfare encourages people to ‘look after themselves’ and invest in lifetime savings accounts. If poverty is ‘at root a lack of money’ (OECD, 2003, p. 22), then financial security has to be a responsibility that the individual is encouraged to undertake. Individuals could be encouraged to save through a redesign of how public expenditure on saving is targeted. At present it privileges the well-off, at the expense of low- and middle-income earners. Means testing benefits against savings also disincentivizes personal savings. For asset-based welfare to make a difference,

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it would thus have to operate within this co-ordinated policy context. Conventional welfare policy, in focusing primarily on either replacement of lost income or long-term savings for old age, has largely failed to seize the potential benefits of asset building. Asset-based welfare ultimately offers a chance to move beyond precautionary savings and ‘unstable incomes’ (OECD, 2003, p. 9). Furthermore, asset-based welfare appears less difficult to put into practice than basic income.21 It raises interesting question about banking and the social structure of savings, points that we will pick up on in Chapter 7.

Equality and the Market Whether or not one accepts basic income or asset-based welfare, egalitarian politics requires extensive regulation of the market. This is why we are not convinced by Dworkin’s arguments. 22 Even taking in good faith all the caveats about insurance and regulation, 23 his model of resource equality does not take sufficient cognisance of the structural and systemic features of inequality. For instance, Dworkin assumes that people ‘enter the market on equal terms’ (Dworkin, 1981b, p. 289). This is far from reality and suggests a kind of pristine social space in which the market operates. If we return to Polanyi’s arguments, a market is inseparable from a process of historical development which effectively creates social divisions and inequality of resources. Furthermore, Dworkin’s concern with talent and ambition also fails to ‘capture’ forms of inequality that appear at a more basic level. Categories of praise and blame are created by structured processes that work towards certain ends; ends that relate to control over social and economic systems. Finally, Dworkin seems to be motivated by a kind of bogey-man argument about the welfare state. One of his main assumptions is that a welfare state has to be centralized and under the control of bureaucrats. Th is allows him to make a distinction between a market that directly determines the relative costs of the decisions that people make, and schemes of welfare where these decisions are somehow made in an indirect and less efficient way by officials.24 In distinction, we will examine the possibility of a community that provides for the mutual satisfaction of the rights of its members. Just as society encourages the human rights of its members, the members of the community must ‘accept their obligations’ to a society that has nurtured them, and enabled them to become ‘successful purposive agents’ (Dworkin, 1981a, p. 187).

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Accepting these obligations in the correct spirit further strengthens the community so that ‘it becomes a community of cooperativeness and fellow feeling’. We are also a long way from Walzer’s concerns about egalitarian distribution of resources. He has argued that unless one is willing to acknowledge an interventionist state that may verge on the ‘tyrannical,’ ‘there is no single set of primary or basic goods conceivable across all moral and material worlds’ (Walzer, 1983, p. 8). As we do not want to assert that there is a single notion of primary goods, we feel that we are in fact much closer to his idea of complex equality. In other words, different ‘things’ need to be distributed to different people in different ways. Distributional schemes are necessarily contentious, an issue that points towards a much broader concern. In Gray’s pithy and insightful argument, the ‘plurality of our cultural and ethical life means that we cannot recover (if we ever possessed) a common culture that is unified by any single world view of conception of the good’ (Gray, 1996, p. 20). The guidelines that Gray outlines require government to act upon a ‘thin culture of obligations and responsibilities’ (Gray, 1996, p. 21) that enable ‘different forms of common life’ to ‘coexist . . . in shared common institutions’ (Gray, 1996, p. 21). Gray stresses that, in the absence of a common culture, common institutions are required, as common institutions allow ‘different forms of common life’ to flourish. Th is is an updating of Tawney’s institutional vision. Most importantly for us at this stage in our argument it provides the basic co-ordinates for any understanding of how distributions of resources can be justified, and choices that are ‘ethical and political’ (Gray, 1996, p. 51). Any theory of justice is thus, at best, a guideline; a point of reference in a general debate about the ends to which a society is organized and an element in a broader political account of political organization that can provide (in our argument) a compelling account of social freedom.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that an understanding of equality as freedom can provide a way of thinking about welfare as a way of equalizing the well-being of all citizens. Our understanding of equality is not based on a mathematical idea of division, where resources are somehow divided up among those citizens who are considered to be needy. It is an argument about social justice that requires some form of redistribution of income, but also the kind of social support that allows those who suffer structured

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disadvantage to enhance their capability to achieve ends that are considered socially desirable. But welfare is not just about assisting those with structured disadvantage. The notion of well-being would also cover the kind of practical issues that we were considering in the last chapter: well-being covers the capabilities of all citizens. The notion of equality, therefore, relates to the idea of civic culture where all are not just recognized as formally equal, but the resources and opportunities are made available by state and private providers to allow all citizens to enhance their abilities to achieve valuable ends. This takes us to the argument about basic income and asset-based welfare. Although basic income arguments are compelling, asset-based welfare appears to be a more politically achievable way of distributing income.25 Finally the last section of the chapter dealt with Dworkin’s understanding of the market, and Walzer’s fears of interventionist government. So, equality concerns the ‘removal of collectively imposed social and economic inequalities’ (Tawney, 1964, p. 15). Equality ‘dissolve[s] the servile complex’ and enables the creation of a vigorous population who would have ‘the nerve and self-confidence’ of citizens. We can appreciate, then, that social justice is about the way in which people can be enabled to become autonomous: to become citizens or members of a political community.

Appendix: Poverty and the Degradation of Being Poverty is a negation of life, degrading people’s sense of the world and of themselves. To be poor is to be cancelled out. Nowadays, ‘[e]veryone has more – but the poor have less of it – less of what it takes to live the common life’ (Toynbee, 2003, p. 13). This is not dramatic, it is an ‘ordinary extremity’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 6); the way in which opportunities become limited and life ‘slides out of view’ (Pulp, ‘The Common People’). Those who are poor appear to live apart, to occupy a different time: ‘[t]o many observers . . . the poor seemed to live outside time’ (Vincent, D., 1991, p. 21). How does this disappearance of the poor take place? It happens right under our noses. Consider the great industrial cities of the 1800s described by Engels – Liverpool, Salford, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds or Sheffield. We don’t want to limit our frame of reference to this time and place, but, this is where our analysis begins. On the peripheries of the great towns are the houses of the factory, foundry or mill owners. Crowded around the factories, in view but still

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an undiscovered country, are the slums – a ‘radically dissimilar nation[s]’ from that of the propertied classes. The slums are a place apart, inhabited by a ‘race apart’: All conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. If the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. They are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below or garrets that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. They are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. . . . They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command. And if they surmount all this, they fall victims to want of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had hitherto been vouchsafed them. (Engels, 1988, p. 129) Engels describes deprivation in the most material of terms. He stresses that poverty and its vices cannot simply be seen as the ‘fault’ of individuals. The conditions in which the poor are forced to live are the reasons for their ‘sexual indulgence and drunkenness’. A sense of life, a sense of oneself, is radically diminished. To take another point of reference from Orwell: You thought it would be simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping. (Orwell, 2003, p. 24) Who is the ‘you’ that Orwell addresses? It is, at one level, Orwell himself. What does this mean? He appreciates that poverty is not that far away. Anyone can become poor. Poverty is squalid and boring. Orwell speaks of its ‘peculiar lowness’ and its ‘complicated meanness’. Complicated meanness can be understood as the difficulties of making ends meet, of the

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management of insufficient budgets, and the strategies that one deploys to survive: ‘a ‘pauper’s cuisine is always more expensive than beans on toast’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 17). Poverty, then, is ‘not having’, deprivation, a failure of capacity, non-being, the diminishing of the self: a ‘total existential crisis’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 24). The poor are immobilized (Campbell, 1984, p. 37). They stay at home watching TV (Campbell, 1984, p. 183). Writing in 1984, Campbell cites an unemployed man, who told her ‘they don’t treat you as if you were just unemployed they treat you like a person who has just crawled out of the gutter’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 24). The poor disappear from both any sense in which they belong in a community, and, it could be said, they also disappear from themselves. The destitution brought about by poverty, the lack of status, is a public condition. You have become poor when you can no longer pretend otherwise: when it becomes obvious to others that it has become necessary to pawn whatever belongings remain: ‘[f]amilies became poor when they could no longer keep their stories private’ (Vincent, 1991, p. 3); or, in Bob Dylan’s accurate expression: ‘you are invisible now, you have no secrets to conceal’ (Like A Rolling Stone). In case this seems a rather obscure theme, we can bring it up to date by reference to a present study. Having taken a low-paid job in a hospital, the author writes, ‘[o]ne thing became clear: people are recognised more by their status than by their face . . . porters are part of the invisible below-stairs world, the great unnoticed. No one ever recognised me’ (Toynbee, 2003, p. 64). The ‘world below the stairs’ is the symbolic location of the low-paid worker whose cheap clothes and menial position make them invisible. Despite their invisibility, the poor are still objects of observation. But, something else is at stake. Consider the following passage from George Orwell’s Diaries. It concerns an incident in Wigan in 1936: Passing up a horrible squalid side-alley, saw a woman youngish but very pale and with the usual draggled exhausted look, kneeling by the gutter outside a house and poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe, which was blocked. I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in a gutter in a back-alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain. At that moment she looked up and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same thing as I. (Orwell, 1979, p. 203) We will never know exactly what Orwell or the woman were thinking but something is shared between them. The narrator is sunk in the cares of the

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day, walking through the dirty, frigid streets of the town. In the moment when his glance meets with that of the woman, something passes between them: he looks at her and she at him. They share a sense of complete desolation. Could this be an experience of sympathy? Orwell does not use these words. He records only with the detached eye of the observer. Orwell’s moment of sympathy was something that happened: a human response to the misery of the other person. We have to be careful with this passage. We are not trying to suggest that welfare has its ‘roots’ in the kind of primordial experience that Orwell describes. The welfare state, as we have seen, is a creation of the law. It provides a form of anonymous and collective responsibility that is founded on the forms of solidarity that we described in the Introduction. Although Orwell’s response is of a different order, could we say that the personal response to the misery of the others and welfare are bound up together? Or, rather, could we say that a certain understanding of social justice might connect (at some level) these phenomena? In Chapter 9 we will attempt to unravel this knot a little further when we turn to the complex relationship between welfare and wel-fare.

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5 Associational Welfare Self-help, Mutualism and Co-production

We, the members of this society [understand] that man is formed a social being . . . in continual need of mutual assistance and support; [there are] interwoven in our constitutions those humane and sympathetic affections which we always feel at the distress of our fellow creatures . . . Rules of the Sociable Society of Newcastle, 1812. (Thompson, 1980, p. 461)

Introduction This chapter elaborates an associationalist approach to welfare provision. Associationalist theory will help us to think about ideas of mutualism and self-help that are distinct from New Labour and Coalition approaches to welfare and public sector reform. Associationalism is important as it balances the need for state welfare provision with an appreciation of the vital role to be played by citizens. Indeed, for the associationalists, the state is still an important source of ‘funding, law making and organisation’ (Rodger, 2000, p. 110). In outlining our account of citizen involvement in welfare provision, we will also make reference to ideas that have been developed by progressive thinkers in the wake of New Labour’s defeat. These ideas come from a variety of sources. Liberation welfare advocates seek to give people more ‘power and control’ over the system itself (Gregg and Cooke, 2010, p. 19). Co-production theorists offer a new way of thinking about the design and delivery of public services. They argue that people must take control over their lives, rather 92

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than become passive recipients of professionally mediated welfare. We will also return to the considerations of core economy that we outlined in Chapter 3. The latter part of the chapter stresses the difference between our approach and the Big Society agenda of the centre right. We will conclude with some critical comments that return to one of our central contentions. Mutualism and the championing of co-operative ways of working make no sense outside of state support for a well-funded and co-ordinated public sector. We are not seeking to move away from a public polity defined by a strong and transparent central state that uses its power to regulate, fund and co-ordinate those involved in the provision of welfare services.

Self-help, Mutualism and Associationalism Let us briefly recap our argument so far. We have been concerned with the distribution of resources in sustaining the well-being and quality of life of all citizens of a welfare community. In this chapter, we will suggest that these themes are ways of updating progressive concerns about co-operation and self-help. We will argue that this approach takes us away from reliance on the state without downplaying the central role that government agencies must play in the delivery and co-ordination of welfare provision. The state should focus on what it does best: ‘building institutions which can successfully meet human needs through various forms of self-governance, rather than being directly owned, managed or controlled by government’ (Bentley, 2007, p. 95). Developing this argument requires us to return to ideas that we discussed in Chapter 2. We need to recover a critical tradition of welfare thinking: [T]he welfare state came to embody both a political ideal and a strategy of social provision. Democratic socialists were convinced that only comprehensive state welfare could ensure universal and uniform provision. Thus the growth of state provision was identified with the pursuit of an egalitarian strategy . . . the pursuit of equality [was] the defining feature of modern socialism, and the provision of welfare services and redistribution were the means whereby equality was to be attained. (Hirst, 1994, p. 162) Our point is that commitment to the state and bureaucracy should not be seen as central to either egalitarianism or democratic socialism. Indeed, there were always currents of thought appreciative of the fact that ‘the complexities of the management of modern society . . . went beyond the capacity

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of a single co-ordinating institution’ (Barker, 1984, p. 30). ‘Heretical’ Fabians like Cole and Laski, looked to pluralist understandings of the modern state.1 In their work on political philosophy, they qualified the centrality of the concept of sovereignty for an understanding of political community and examined subtler ways in which the social and economic activities of different groups of citizens could be co-ordinated. For Cole, it was necessary to move beyond the welfare state and the very idea that ‘people get given things’. Cole was driven by the need to articulate new forms of social and economic organization where people ‘find satisfaction in doing things for themselves and one another’ (Wright, 1984, p. 91). Such alternative ways of thinking were not limited to ‘the pluralists’. Richard Crossman expressed his doubts about the socialist credentials of the welfare state. In a prescient comment he asserted that democratic inputs and popular participation had to be encouraged in order to counter the bureaucratization that was making welfare provision increasingly distant from the people it was meant to serve. Even Hugh Gaitskell,2 despite his reverence for state and constitution, had his doubts about the abilities of central agencies to successfully deliver policy objectives (Barker, 1984, p. 35). These general concerns can be connected with our arguments in Chapter 3 about contextual economy and the points we made in Chapter 4 about social freedom. In order to emphasize these connections, the following passage is worth quoting in full: A powerful person is someone who has the real freedom to pursue their idea of the good life, the actual power to . . . ‘do this or be that’, including freedom from the arbitrary control or domination of something and someone else. A reciprocal society is the necessary context for people to be powerful and is sustained, in turn, by powerful people. It is the space between (and independent from) the state, markets and citizens, where we respect the relational, mutual nature of life and the need for power and interests to be exercised through negotiation not domination. (Cook, 2010, p. 22) This is an intriguing argument. The ‘power’ of the people, their capacity, ‘comes’ (at least in part) from reciprocal social relationships. Thinking this point through requires the elaboration of mutual life. To briefly stress a key point: mutualism requires that the state should be actively involved in the management and oversight of welfare and economy. Power might be located in civil society but, without the state to control the market, it is unlikely that civil society would thrive.

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These contemporary arguments grow out of a tradition of political thinking that has long been associated with the labour movement. The language of reciprocity, the concern with ‘a space’ that is neither the state nor the market is rooted in mutualist and co-operativist thought. We need to examine the historical context of working-class mutualism, before returning to any re-articulation of these compelling themes. We can borrow arguments from Thompson, Titmuss and Cole to further clarify our understanding of mutualism. Titmuss asserts that mutualism comes out of a working-class ethic of ‘mutual aid’. Mutual aid was a ‘spontaneous growth’ from ‘traditions and institutions’ that ‘counter[ed] the adversities of industrialism’. This corresponds with Cole’s approach to mutualism. Cole argues that the beginnings of the trade union movement can be found in the context of self-help organizations. Indeed, trade unions ‘were and are benefit societies’. The activities of unions express ‘concern about working conditions’ and their organizational strategies can be seen as a development ‘of the lodge habit of insuring against all sorts of other future dangers’ (Cole, 1944, p. 61). The growth of Robert Owen’s influence combined with these mutualist current of thought and organization in the early decades of the 1800s. According to Cole this was achieved by activists in ‘the trades club, the chapel, the reading or social club, the Corresponding Society or Political Union’. The combination of welfare activities and political organization can be seen in ‘the building of social clubs or alms-houses’ and also self-organization in industry (Thompson, 1980, p. 790). Thompson describes striking trade unions ‘employing their own members and marketing the product’. These practices provided something of a precursor for the organization of co-operative societies that both marketed and sold what they had produced. In turn, this enabled further links to develop between trade unions and the co-operative societies: many co-operative societies were actually indistinguishable from the unions, which took up production as a part of their union activity (Thompson, 1980, p. 78). Mutualism thus has its beginnings in ‘a great network of friendly societies, medical clubs, chapel societies, brotherhoods, co-operatives, trade unions, and savings clubs [and] schemes of mutual insurance’. In such associations, risks were shared as ‘part of the common lot’, an ideology that constituted ‘microscopic welfare states’ opposing human values to those of ‘technology’. By the end of the nineteenth century half the adult population belonged to a friendly society, more than the membership of ‘trade unions, political parties and religious bodies’ (Thompson, 1980, p. 79). The spirit of the friendly societies and the co-operatives ‘expressed the ordinary man’s revulsion from a class consciousness, discriminating

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charity and a ruthless and discriminating poor law’. Titmuss notes that the poor law was despised because it destroyed self-respect, when ‘respectability’ meant ‘meriting the respect of others’ (Titmuss, 1987, p. 122). Titmuss’ discussion of these themes meshes with broader traditions of mutualism and self-help. Self-help, at least as articulated in 1875 by Samuel Smiles, can be read as an elaboration of reciprocity: ‘the duty of helping one’s self in the highest sense involves the helping of one’s neighbours’ (Gosden, 1973, p. 45). Smiles’ sentiment expresses the philosophy of reciprocation that lay behind the structure of friendly societies. All members of a friendly society contributed to a common fund that provided insurance against ‘sickness, unemployment, or funeral expenses’ (Thompson, 1980, p. 419). The spirit of belonging was encouraged through initiation rituals, drinking and feasting; a feature of associational life that led some friendly societies to trace their lineage back to medieval guilds.3 Although trade unions and friendly societies were seen as subversive institutions, alongside official distrust, there was also an appreciation that if these working-class organizations were placed under the watchful eye of the authorities, they would be useful in encouraging thrift and respectability. After the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834, friendly societies were embraced as worthy institutions. The Friendly Societies Act of 1875 sought to stabilize the finances of friendly societies and provide a central register. The register helps us to realize the sheer scale of these forms of organization. Official figures show that by the end of the nineteenth century, more than 3.5 million people were members of friendly societies. With membership increasing by ‘at least 90,000 a year’, it is hardly surprising that by 1910 membership stood at 6.6 million. The Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies wrote in 1892 that ‘3.8 million of 7 million industrial workers were insured against sickness through a registered friendly society, while at least another 3 million belonged to unregistered societies’. This certainly provides a compelling vision of mutualism. However (as we pointed out in Chapter 2) when the welfare state was created the network of friendly societies and associated institutions was overlooked in favour of state provision. The resources that friendly societies mobilized were not extensive enough for universal provision.4 The spirit of mutualism was also marred by competition between friendly societies for members. Despite these limitations, it is not entirely surprising that attempts to revitalize welfare thinking have looked back to these traditions of self-reliance. This produces some interesting issues. Both New Labour and Big Society thinkers have sought to claim the spirit of self-help as their own political inheritance. Our associationalist sense of self-help needs to be distinguished from these centre left and centre right interpretations. We will begin by examining New

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Labour discourses, before showing how associationalism suggests a different and more radical agenda. In the last section of the chapter, we will offer a critical reading of Big Society understandings of mutualism, and show how our thinking moves in a very different direction. Our consideration of New Labour thinking takes as its central reference point Frank Field’s approach to welfare. Field sought to reinvigorate the provision of welfare through the promotion of civil society participation. He presented his thinking as a return to working-class traditions, to notions of mutual aid that ‘chang[ed] lives’ through ‘building societies, savings banks, public libraries and mutual life insurance – long before trade unions became a force, and parliamentary representation was achieved’ (Field, 2000, p. 47). Field’s recuperation of a tradition of mutualism was inspired by two objectives: first, to ‘extend universalism’ through new forms of partnership between state and private sector (Field, 2000, p. 6), and second, the desire to break the state’s monopoly over welfare and make it ‘one of . . . a number of welfare providers’. Notions of self-help could thus be updated to a new era of popular involvement through ‘member-owned organisations’ (Field, 2000, p. 31). Self-help was thus re-born as stakeholder welfare. Stakeholder welfare sought to re-legitimize provision of benefits and services by arguing that institutions could be independent from government and controlled by representatives of all interested parties (Field, 1996). Field even proposed the creation of a new agency: an insurance corporation ‘run by its members’ that would oversee the delivery of unemployment benefits and a ‘care pension’ (Field, 1996, p. 38). In this articulation of ‘more localised distribution systems’ (Field, 1996, p. 373), benefits were more directly linked to payments by worker and employer, thus encouraging a greater sense of commitment to a system that was not an unresponsive and distant state-run bureaucracy. What do we make of Field’s recuperation of traditions of self-help? The orientation of stakeholder welfare to participation is certainly important but, in our assessment of the democratic credentials of his model, we need to think critically about the form of participation encouraged. If the creation and delivery of welfare institutions is designed and operated through citizen participation, then the model represents a significant movement forward. On the other hand, if the rhetoric of participation conceals a fundamental divide between government and welfare clients, then it may be the case that the bureaucratic inflexibilities of the system remain. We will return to this point presently when we examine co-production. Field certainly deserves credit for attempting to deal with the bureaucratic inflexibilities of welfare provision. Moreover, his fundamental point is sound: at least part of the solution to the problem of the welfare state is

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to ‘devolve the provision of public welfare and other services to voluntary self-governing associations; [and] to enable such associations to obtain public funds to provide services for their members’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 167). It would appear, however, that stakeholder welfare did not catch on. Any development of these ideas needs to move outside the New Labour framework, in particular its enthusiasm for the use of market involvement. To sharpen up this sense of contemporary self-help, it is worth picking up on the contemporary relevance of associationalism. It is as if associationalism re-appears in social and political theory whenever there is a sense that the state has grown too strong and needs to be balanced against civil society participation. The last ‘renaissance’ (Stears, 1999, p. 570) of associationalist thought occurred at the end of the 1980s and in the early part of the next decade. In the British context, this was perhaps a response to the end of conservatism, and a welcoming of the possibilities opened up in the early years of Tony Blair’s Government. Hirst’s (1994) work is seen to be one of the most fully worked out version of associationalism (we will return to Hirst presently) although Hadly and Hatch (1981) also wrote convincingly about the decentralization of government functions and the need for dialogue between professionals and clients of welfare services. Stears’ criticisms of associationalism are worth taking into account in re-working what this school of thought can tell us about a response to the Big Society. His championing of a ‘state welfare system’ (Stears, 1999, p. 586) with associationalist elements built in provides a template for our arguments. Indeed, Hirst’s response to Stears stresses the ‘experimental’ nature of associational thought, and the need to adapt it to changing circumstances (Hirst, 1994, p. 596). It is worth spending a little more time, however, on the theoretical underpinnings of associationalism, to elaborate how it builds on mutualist insights to provide a convincing account of social being and civil society. To further acknowledge our debt to Hirst, we can follow his genealogy to two important intellectual resources: the work of John Neville Figgis who was an inspiration for Laski and Cole (Hirst, 1994, p. 16), and Durkheim’s understanding of civil society associations. Figgis argues that communal personality is inherent in social life, it should not exist merely at the grant of a sovereign power. The denigration of the former by the latter means that the social field is composed of two entities: the individual and the state, the one operating in the public sphere, the other confined to the private. This is a structure of authority that denies that there can be any communal body whose ‘being’ is not recognized and granted ‘life’

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by the state. Underlying this argument are two claims: first, that the real genius of social life lies in civil society, in the network of ‘families, clubs, trades, unions, colleges, professions’ that have a claim to a social reality that is at least as real as a ‘municipal corporation or a provincial parliament’ (Figgis, 1914, p. 70). Second, there is an argument about the inherently social nature of human life: ‘personality is a social fact’. Political theory misunderstands this reality when it sees the state as the prior term; moreover, had the post-war Labour Party taken Figgis’ pluralism more seriously, it might have built ‘its socialism in civil society’ and ensured a state ‘not hostile to this enterprise’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 17). Why is this important? We will pick up on some of Figgis’ philosophical points about social being in Chapter 9. For the moment, we want to stress some more basic points. Figgis provides a way of thinking about human association that cuts against the ways in which terms like ‘human capital’ describe the nature of civil society. For the World Bank, human capital defines what makes people ‘economically productive’.5 This collapses the complexity of associational life into an entirely utilitarian and instrumental concept. While human capital does stress the importance of investment in ‘education, health care and job training’, it does so at the expense of a proper understanding of social life; what modern theorists of democracy have called the ‘moral life’ of politics, a point to which we will return below. In terms of our present genealogy of associationalism, however, we want to show that Figgis’ notion of social being resonates with a Durkheimian concept of civil society. Durkheim was concerned with the issue of how a state could be administered without ‘diminishing the individual’ (Durkheim, 1992, p. 57). For Durkheim, the problem was that the state remained distant from ‘individual interests’ and could not ‘take into account the special and local conditions in which they exist’ (Durkheim, 1992, p. 63). It was necessary that some sort of body could take responsibility for interventions in social and economic life to prevent ‘tyrannies’ arising. If the state assumed functions of social regulation, there was the risk that it would become ‘despotic’. Durkheim argued that the way forward was to enhance the social and administrative input of ‘secondary associations’ interposed ‘between the State and individuals and vice versa’ (Durkheim, 1992, p. 96). Secondary associations could take over such tasks as overseeing the ‘general conditions of the labour contract, of salary and wages’ and other such functions (Durkheim, 1992, p. 40). Durkheim imagined that once structural changes were made, a rich associational life would develop and new institutional forms would evolve.

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It would be interesting to speculate on the syndicalist or socialist influences on Durkheim’s thinking, but this is not the point of our argument. Our main concern is to stress how developing Durkheim’s vision may provide a response to the criticisms of welfare bureaucracy. It would perhaps be useful at this stage to provide a few more orientating points for contemporary associationalism. For Cohen and Rogers: ‘groups improve an imperfect system of interest representation by making it more finegrained, attentive to preference intensities and representative of diverse views’ (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 43). Groups can be ‘schools of democracy’, and De Tocqueville is cited as a champion of the power of association to foster the sentiments of the good citizen. Associationalism is very much concerned with ‘alternative governance’ (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 44).6 Groups can supplement both ‘markets’ and ‘public hierarchies’ and play an active role in the execution of policy that may even involve taking over certain state functions. The positive input of the group is revealed most clearly in providing the ‘background of established forms of communication and collaboration [that enable] parties to settle more rapidly and reliably on joint beneficial actions’.7 As the social democratic state must be deeply involved in the ongoing management of economy and society, associations provide a useful resource for integrated and informed governance outside of the ‘state-market dichotomy’ (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 45). It is perhaps in this sense that contemporary associationalist thinking can be distinguished from those corporatist ideas of organization that it resembles. Corporatism is associated with the politics of the European welfare state and the maintenance of the post-war social consensus. There were a number of forms that corporatism took, but in Mathews’ useful definition, it involved ‘agreements between unions and employers at the level of the firm, to industry and economy-wide level agreements backed by the . . . administrative machinery of the state’ (Mathews, 1989, p. 37). Critics have pointed to the way in which these powerful, organized groups acted in the furtherance of their own interests and compromised any sense that communal goals could be secured. Indeed, corporatism is seen as allowing the co-ordination of commercial, labour and business interests and allowing them to achieve greater leverage and influence over political processes. Associationalism starts from the assumption that reforms cannot ‘eliminate the great and unequal power of business interests in any capitalist polity’ unless the state chooses to take them on (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 137). Th is concern takes us outside the scope of this chapter.

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We want to stress that, in distinction to corporatism, associationalism seeks the reinvention of the ‘moral life’ of democratic politics (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, p. 40). These arguments go well beyond the New Labour obsession with focus groups and public perceptions of policy. Following the Durkheimian line of argument, the moral life of politics has been usefully described as ‘middle democracy’. Middle democracy carries the sense that civil society groups mediate between the family and the state and make a claim to the spaces of the ‘everyday’ where mundane political and legal decisions are made and carried out (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, p. 40). Apologists for middle democracy show how the involvement of groups in decision making promotes reciprocity as a means of determining the ‘fair terms of social co-operation’. Decisions must be reached in a ‘mutually justifiable’ (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, p. 53) manner so that parties are legitimately bound by the conclusions that they have reached.8 The ‘middle democracy’ approach is clearly coherent with the arguments that we have made in the previous chapter. Middle democracy thinking also helps us to update the positive legacy of the self-help tradition, as inherited and expanded by associationalist thinkers. Within the last couple of decades, political theory has thus rediscovered the ‘value’ of association (Kateb, 1998, p. 37). Those who join associations discover ‘pleasures’ in being with others and open themselves up to ‘diverse kinds of experience’ that lead to a transformation of ‘feelings’ through social intercourse. Association with others is not some fraught existential drama; it’s the stuff of everyday life. Finally, we can relate these themes to accounts of mutualism. For Hoggett and Thompson, a re-thought mutualism is seen as a way of combining the ‘universalism’ that characterized the socialist understanding of welfare in the years after 1945, with ‘particularism’ and a ‘commitment to social diversity’ (Hoggett and Thompson, 1998, pp. 237–51). Hoggett and Thompson’s associationalist approach combines elements of welfare socialism with a response to the radical critiques made by both feminists and anti-racists. Their associationalism does not subscribe to the ‘difference’ approach9 which is accused of failing to put forward any account of how differences can be co-ordinated into a polity where institutions enjoy something like general popular support.10 Th is does not mean that the contemporary mutualists lack a theory of power. They admit that those groups that are able to influence and control economic and political decision making will dominate those that are more marginal. There is no guarantee that any group will be either willing or able to

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see beyond the interests of its members to appreciate the more general concerns of the community. In other words, social space is not composed of formally equal groups who simply relay information to each other. Different groups will seek to present their own version of political events. The threat of the loss of any form of ultimate democratic control and an ‘alienation’ of popular decision making is ever present (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 47). Powerful groups will be able to ensure a ‘de facto transfer of public power’, distorting the extent to which associations and representative democracy can be brought together (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 41). Although these might seem like formidable objections to the role of groups in the realization of democracy, it is possible to design a polity that would restrain the more powerful, and encourage the least powerful. Schmitter’s proposals for increasing the representation of nontraditional interests are worth considering in this context. To enhance the representation of groups that would otherwise be excluded, Schmitter recommends the granting of ‘semi public status for interest associations’ (Schmitter, 1995, p. 137), the costs of which would be met from general taxation. Alongside the institutionalization of these groups, a voucher scheme would operate. Funds for associations would be linked to the number of vouchers that they claimed from citizens. Those associations that responded to the needs of citizens would be able to exchange vouchers for state funding. The system would be flexible enough to allow the creation of new associations, and hence the articulation of new concerns. The associations within the scheme would have their state funding linked to the condition that they subscribe to a charter that outlines the rights of their members and prohibits certain activities. The main virtue of the voucher scheme is that it would allow ‘a relatively free expression of each citizen’s preferences’ (Schmitter, 1995, p. 177). Th is system of representation would also go some way to showing how associations could be made directly responsive to citizen’s interests, rather than somehow being opposed from above, in no matter how enlightened a manner. So, associationalism attempts to grasp something like the idea of the ‘in common’ that we discussed in Chapter 2. As Hirst has indicated, the welfare state ‘appropriates to officials and bureaucrats things that the common people have in the past done for themselves’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 165). If we leave to one side the rather vague and Tawneyian expression ‘the common people’, we can appreciate Hirst’s point. Instead of contributing to the development of public life most people are now resigned to pay taxes

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and to refuse any real engagement with a common life. We cannot confuse this point with the standard critique of the alienating qualities of welfare bureaucracy. All forms of bureaucracy and officialdom are not necessarily bad. We cannot avoid the point that the management and delivery of welfare services involves bureaucracy. However, the pressing issue is ‘one of citizens’ involvement with and responsibility for’ the services that the state provides. Citizens are effectively rendered passive by the services that they consume, they become ‘objects of administration’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 166). Associationalism is not nostalgic for an era of collectivized decommodified welfare. It is clear minded about the reality of mixed welfare delivery involving state, voluntary and private operators. In place of the rigid and top-heavy structures of collective provision, associationalists argue for the involvement of groups in the design, delivery and consumption of welfare services. User involvement provides forms of governance which the state cannot achieve. Indeed, making welfare providers more accountable to members ‘ensures a first line form of policing of service delivery by members and reduces the load of inspection and rule setting on the state’ (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 168). Instead of being both the provider and regulator of welfare, and thus confusing provision and regulation, the state can assume its role as a ‘guarantor’ of the quality of the services non-state agencies are providing. This argument can be linked to a second point. The marketization of welfare provision means that there are now consumers rather than clients of welfare services. Consumer interest in efficient and fair services can assist in the policing of private welfare providers. This is a potentially radical agenda, given the increasing reliance on private companies and a failure of clarity over their accountability and control. To the extent that welfare services are another product on the market, empowered consumers will simply choose not to make use of poor services. Moreover, the inherent tendencies of private companies to oversupply services in the desire to make profits could conceivably be countered by a truly plural market in welfare provision. To carry this vision through would require reforms that go beyond the policies of the present government. If we allow that associationalism operates within a welfare market, we can get a clearer idea of the groups that would be necessary for the governance of welfare provision. They would have to be ‘voluntary self-governing organisations’ composed of both producers and consumers (Hirst, 1994, p. 176) and receive funds from the state. Such groups would be subject to general standards and rules made by oversight organizations. Outside this oversight structure, any form of voluntary organization, whether ‘church, trade union, charitable trust’

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would be able to set up ‘as wide or narrow a range of welfare services as its members choose’. Such groups, providing services to citizens, would be part of a welfare state in which both entitlement to central funds and state regulatory bodies would operate at regional levels. Associationalist proposals can thus be distinguished from the experiments with decentralization that characterized welfare reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. These initiatives allowed schools to opt out of Local Education Authority (LEA) control and encouraged the creation of Trust Hospitals outside the control of health authorities. Such programmes were driven by ‘top down management’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 174). Workers were the objects of ‘hierarchical administration’ and management itself was not made responsible to ‘service providers or consumers’ (Hirst, 1994, p. 176). Associationalist writers have speculated on different ways in which democratic control can be built into welfare provision. We would suggest that a much more pronounced role is given to pressure groups and Claimants Unions (CUs). CUs emerged out of the welfare rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s. At present, there are numerous groups engaging in activism and protest against benefit reforms. In London the Newham Claimants Union, the Hackney Unemployed Workers Action Group and Haringey Claimants Action Group are particularly active. At a national level there are Unemployed Workers Unions and the UK Coalitions Against Poverty. The welfare reforms of the Coalition Government have provoked a specific response in the No To Welfare Abolition network11 which brings together a number of grass roots activists and pressure groups. Activists have drawn attention to the real problems that have arisen out of workfare. Consider the following argument: After 6 months on the dole, claimants now have to sign up to programmes run by private companies, supposedly intended to help them find work. In many cases, there is little or no actual work or training provided, and in any case, the purpose is to force claimants to spend between 3 (with ‘work placement’) and 5 (with ‘training’) days a week in an area where they can be monitored continuously. Further, the companies running these schemes receive a bonus for each person they get off the dole, no matter what happens to that person. Therefore, any claimant who stays on the scheme for any length of time is seen as blocking the company’s revenue stream, and so is removed by the quickest method – usually by asserting that the claimant is not trying hard enough to find work, leading to their benefits being cut off.12

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What do we make of this comment? It returns to a perennial concern with welfare and the dole. Critical commentaries show that the delivery of the Job Centre Plus strategy and the activities of some personal advisors have served further to alienate the unemployed, rather than encourage them on the path to work.13 As the extract above suggests, the recipient of ‘training’ feels largely disengaged. Moreover, there is the perception that the providers are primarily interested in their profits rather than providing a service. Such concerns support the critical point that the workfare approach is a method of discipline in the form of work. In Donzelot’s terms, ‘a system of control and surveillance that keeps people in their rightful places’ (Chambon et al., 1999, p. 87) where the rightful place is understood as work for the sake of it. Indeed, CUs have provoked a more general public debate on welfare. They have argued that welfare reform has not focused on the accountability of welfare agencies. Furthermore, there should be proper scrutiny of private companies profiting from provision of public services. Rather than create robust mechanisms to ensure the accountability of private welfare providers, policy is fi xated with the ‘micro-management’ of individuals who are seen to be personally responsible for not having a job, or demonized as feckless and workshy. If the criticisms of activist groups were taken seriously, and they were given a formal role in the monitoring of welfare delivery by both private and public agencies, it may be the case that there would be a number of positive outcomes. Workfare might become better organized and less alienating. Moreover, welfare providers might be encouraged to target their services more efficiently. The formal input of activist groups would also allow their expertise and grass roots knowledge to inform broader strategies to encourage people back into meaningful work.

Associationalism, Co-production and the Big Society Why is associationalist thinking different from the Big Society? Admittedly, with the advent of the Big Society, certain associationalist themes have entered political debate. Consider the ruminations of ‘the Red Tory’, Philip Blond: [l]ook at the society we have become: we are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. The intermediary structures of a civilised life have been eliminated, and with them the Burkean ideal of a civic, religious, political or social

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middle, as the state and the market accrue power at the expense of ordinary people. (Philip Blond, Prospect, 28 February, 2009) The claim that decentred services, more in touch with people at local levels, should be at the core of welfare provision is shared by both the associationalists and the advocates of the Big Society. Perhaps the most marked distinction is that the Big Society appears to be driven by a cost-cutting agenda and an attempt to shift the welfare ‘burden’ to private operators and third sector groups. The state retains responsibility for only the most vestigial welfare functions. Associationalism, on the other hand, retains the sense that any real alleviation of poverty will cost money and requires state involvement in the creation and enabling of middle democracy. The way in which associationalism might feed into an agenda that is distinguished from centre right thinking takes us to concerns developed by the recent liberation welfare approach. Liberation welfare can be seen as the centre left response to Coalition thinking and policy on social security reform that is entirely coherent with the associationalist agenda. Liberation welfare thinking stresses the importance of work as a way out of dependency and poverty. This is perhaps uncontentious. These ideas also lie behind Coalition welfare thinking. Employment decreases the costs of welfare to the public purse and stimulates further growth by providing people with more disposable income. However, in distinction to the architects of the Big Society, liberation welfare asserts that the state must address the structural conditions in which opportunities are distributed and ensure that exclusion from resources is broken down. This leads to a new set of issues: to what extent does the welfare system provide support for people running the increased risks of a globalized economy? Is welfare ‘reciprocal enough’ (Gregg and Cooke, 2010, p. 19)? Does it strike the balance between the benefits that it offers and the demands that it places on recipients? Are individual users of welfare given enough power to influence decision making in a system that is still largely driven by ‘arbitrary categories’? (Gregg and Cooke, 2010, p. 19) For liberation welfare theorists, further reform requires the old arbitrary categories of qualification to be replaced with a greater sensitivity to individual needs. The emphasis on work rather than welfare makes for a reorganization of entitlement so that a single income replacement benefit and a bespoke employment programme could replace the confused and confusing network of allowances, housing benefits and Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) that are New Labour’s legacy. In seeking a streamlined and simplified benefits system, liberation welfare theorists also seek to

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outflank the Coalition’s re-ordering of benefits. Furthermore, unlike Tory and Liberal Democrat thinkers, they are not hobbled by a commitment to a non-interventionist small state. Progressive welfare reform is driven by the kind of active state intervention that we considered in Chapter 3. As ‘communities can only be engaged at a local level’, it is necessary to be sensitive to the ‘neighbourhood, the estate’ or even, at the micro level, of the ‘street’ to put together the mix of services required. The movement away from ‘standardised services’ (Gregg and Cooke, 2010, p. 117) involves the reinvigoration of local authorities and a contraction of the ‘civil service at the centre’ so that civil servants can concentrate on strategic and framing concerns, such as obtaining funding from central government and ensuring the regulation of markets in the interests of communities. Liberation welfare advocates focus their arguments on community engagement. Individuals must be encouraged to take control of their own ‘journey’ back to work (Gregg and Cooke, 2010, p. 30). If work is not forthcoming, liberation welfare places the responsibility on government to ensure that suitable jobs are available. This means that government becomes the ‘employer of last instance’, providing jobs for those who had been unemployed and unable to find work for 12 months. Liberation welfare thinking on the re-design of the benefits system can be linked with the co-production approach to welfare reform. Although co-production is perhaps still a somewhat undeveloped idea, the concept is sufficiently clear for us to be able to assess how it might be relevant to our arguments. Co-production can be defined as ‘delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals and service users’ (Boyle and Harris, 2009, p. 39). We want to stress a number of elements of this definition. The reciprocal aspect of co-production is distinct from ideas of consultation, voluntary service or user involvement. Co-production seeks to involve the users of services in the creation and delivery of services and to break down the one-sided reliance on bureaucrats and professionals (Brandsen and Pestoff, 2009).14 While not seeking to reject professional skills, the co-production approach links such assistance to the social knowledge of users, considering each input equally valuable and encouraging participation between specialists and nonspecialists. Co-production reframes the values of self-help in the contemporary language of social networking. It is also a response to centralized audit cultures where funding is conditional on achievements of targets set by centralized agencies. Audit cultures are expensive and inefficient, as monitoring delivery is subject to vagaries of information flow and tends to trap resources in responding to audits rather than providing services.

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Co-production comes out of the work done in urban governance by scholars of public administration in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular in the University of Indiana.15 Another important input is the research and thinking of Olstrom and Cahn. Olstrom’s work on policing in Chicago in the 1970s attempted to explain why improvements in efficiency did not follow from investment and centralization of resources. Olstrom found that taking officers off the beat, and limiting their direct involvement with the community, broke down links between local people and police officers. She argued that successful policing ‘brought in’ the community and generalized this insight to conclude that service provision had to involve those outside of organizations. Olstrom’s thinking was given a practical form by Cahn’s experiments with youth juries in Washington and Wisconsin. The criminal justice system in these areas was close to collapse because of case overload. Youth juries put young offenders, accused of non-violent crimes, before a jury of their peers. The jurors themselves had been young offenders. In 2007 rates of recidivism for those tried by youth juries proved to be half of those of the main stream system. Cahn’s model was successfully implemented in the United Kingdom in 2009. Street Law projects are now part of what could be called the co-production of criminal justice. Alongside criminal justice, experiments in co-production have also produced positive results in mobilizing resources to deal with problems of ill health. Mental Health and Disability organizations have sponsored projects like the Shared Life Scheme that brought together individuals in networks of mutual support. Expert Patient Schemes have also proved useful ways of helping patients to assist each other. Outside of public health, experiments with co-production have begun in secondary education, examining how pupils can be involved in the running of their schools. In the area of housing, the Taff Housing Association in Cardiff has pioneered an innovative scheme that pays tenants in credits for providing services for the Housing Association. Credits can be spent with partner organizations, an experiment in alternative currencies that we unfortunately do not have the space to consider. However, although there has been wide take up of co-production methods in public service provision, theorists of co-production are aware that they must provide a convincing account of the concept that responds to the situation in which the contemporary welfare state finds itself. Co-production has to take into account fiscal austerity and the pressures placed on welfare by an ageing population, rising demand from users and a ‘dysfunctional finance system’ (Boyle and Harris, 2009, p. 3).

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Co-production theory has focused on the need to find ways of changing the behaviour of welfare users and has demonstrated that behavioural change is both easier to achieve and more sustained when individuals come together to support each other. This form of self-help has had an impact on the provision of health care services. There is evidence that patients working with each other can successfully change their patterns of behaviour. Self-help as applied to alcohol, smoking and drug abuse also has the potential to generate savings and to allow medical resources to be focused where they are most needed. It is worth noting that self-help is not an excuse for withdrawing services. Co-production stresses the synergies that are available by bringing together networks of support, as well as the help of professionals. So, what sense do we make of co-production? Ideologies of coproduction could, of course, be deployed in the wrong way as a kind of cheap ‘quick fi x’ for the cash-strapped welfare state. It would be easy to see how government could seize upon co-production as a further encouragement to ‘roll back the state’. Indeed, the Big Society seems uncomfortably positioned between the creative energies of co-production and a desire to further the creation of quasi markets in welfare. In order not to lose the radical edge of co-production thinking, it is worth briefly locating it in core economy thinking. Within the limits of this chapter we cannot engage with the re-working of production, distribution and exchange that can be found in the work of new economy and core economy theorists such as Coote and Franklin (2010) as this would demand a book in itself. To elaborate our argument we want to indicate the way in which co-production is linked to notions such as time banking. Core economy can be explained in starkly simple terms as a way of making ‘better use of people’s uncommodified time and capabilities. Core economy stresses the need to reduce dependencies on money for buying the means of getting things done’.16 As with co-production theory, it finds its inspiration in social networks and human capacities. The central touchstone for the idea of time banks is based on reciprocal relationships between people where what is given is returned in kind. The term was invented in 1986 by Edgar Cahn. A time bank is a way of storing and exchanging ‘time credits’ that represent various jobs or tasks done for others. Although time banks cannot, at least at the moment, replace money as a medium of value and exchange, they do allow a form of alternative economy to develop that acknowledges that all members of a community have something to offer. The scheme has proved successful

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and workable when run out of doctor’s surgeries in London. A couple of examples will have to serve by means of illustration. Doctors began to appreciate that they were medicalizing social problems, treating with drugs complaints that were to do with isolation and loneliness. Creating schemes that allowed people to exchange ‘time spent’ with those suffering from social marginalization for other services involved people in networks of mutual exchange. These networks helped to break down the withdrawal from society that had led people to develop health problems. Other examples of time banking show that such schemes work outside of the health care context, and can be found in educational and innovative schemes for social re-development. The point is that time banking represents a way of releasing ‘enormous human resources’ (NEF, 2001, p. 7). We could relate this back to our earlier point about co-production and unemployment. Although someone may be out of formal employment, they would be able to contribute to, and trade in, time credits. Thus, helping out at a community level would be repaid in credits that could be ‘spent’ with partner institutions, as in the Taff Housing Association scheme in Cardiff, or used to ‘buy’ training in other fields. If one of the concerns of progressive welfare policy is to encourage people to become active agents of change in their lives, as well as contributing to the production of the services that they consume, then time banking as a partial solution to unemployment may have a great deal to offer (NEF, 2001).

Problems with Mutualism We need to conclude our analysis with a somewhat critical point.17 The unions have pointed out that there are problems relying on mutualism, co-operative and third sector providers in a period of privatization and fiscal stringency. These arguments could equally apply to co-production, although this is not as such a target of the criticisms that we will examine below. Mutualism, co-operative ways of working and co-production can be seen as a way of obtaining employee ‘buy in’ for reforms which limit other ways in which the voice of employees can feed into and influence the delivery of services or business objectives. Employee-owned co-operatives18 will soon be possible in job centres, ‘community nursing teams and primary schools’. These co-operatives will be funded by the state, provided that they come up to national standards, and are run as not-for-profit organizations. This is David Cameron’s ‘great handing back of power to the people’. Employee-owned co-operatives have been presented as ‘the right to be your own boss’,19 and as a means

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towards an ‘engagement ethic’ that gets around ‘monolithic government bureaucracies’.20 However, employee-owned co-operatives are not just part of the Big Society agenda. The attractions of co-operative forms of working were apparent to the last government. Labour ministers praised the ‘John Lewis model’ and argued that such forms of employee involvement enhance ‘feelings of solidarity and responsibility’. Gordon Brown was in favour of building on what he saw as the ‘success of the Foundation Trust model in the NHS’ as it promoted employee engagement in hospital governance. The political consensus on these initiatives can be seen in the Liberal Democrat commitment to ‘a people-centred NHS, fit for the 21st century’ where everyone from ‘cleaner to chief executive’ was empowered and ‘part of the team’. It is no wonder that the trade unions are sounding a note of caution. Critics have posed a very good question: why is it that these experiments are being pushed forward in the public rather than the private sector?21 The risk is the ‘fragmentation of public services’ and ‘the breakdown of cooperative relations between providers’.22 There are also concerns that the model driving reform is simply wrong in relation to public services. For many employed within the public sector, the problems experienced at work tend to relate to ‘top-down targets’ and ‘overly burdensome bureaucracy’. These problems could be tackled without contracting out services to other providers. Indeed, public sector reform is being subjected to inappropriate objectives: ‘[p]eople rarely go to work in the public sector in order to be entrepreneurs, rather they do so to help provide good services’. Research done by the Nuffield Trust supports the position that problems should be addressed through enabling a ‘collective voice’ in the organization of a service rather than through privatization. The Nuffield Trust also discovered that there is no real popular desire for re-structuring working relationships.23 There are other criticisms. Once public services are transferred to new organizations, there is the strong possibility that public sector benefits would be limited or entirely curtailed. For instance, present regulations under The Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment Regulations (TUPE) prevent public sector workers taking their pension rights to new organizations. There is also a failure of clarity in relation to the governance of the new social providers. The extent to which the new organizations are accountable or transparent depends to a large extent on the contractual terms that set up particular service provision arrangements. This does not appear to be a sensible way of controlling the delivery of public services in a co-ordinated manner.

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These issues suggest that it is necessary to proceed with caution. While the case can be made for radical ideas, the ways that they are put into practice raises difficult issues. Furthermore, mutualism and co-operative working cannot be seen as a way of limiting costs, or imposing an entrepreneurial model of public services. There is indeed a need to think carefully about accountability in public service organization and provision, but the Big Society agenda does not seem to want to face these concerns. Big Society experiments in mutualism risk weakening the democratic accountability and co-ordination of service providers. Furthermore, once service provision is left entirely to the market, innovation would be limited by the need to provide services in the most competitive way possible.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that we need to move away from the idea that the welfare state operates through bureaucratic mechanisms overseen by remote officials, insensitive to the desires of recipients and sponsoring a culture of unconditional state hand outs. We need a different way of understanding the role that self-help and mutualism can play in the welfare state. We have looked at various ways in which users of welfare services can be brought into their design and delivery. We have also examined theories of co-production and core economy that suggest new ways of thinking about how people can collaborate in the production of the services they share. We ended with a note of caution. The Big Society agenda appears to be pushing forward with ideas of co-operative working that are neither popular nor well thought out. While the case could be made for workers in co-operatives being more motivated and autonomous, the important details are yet to be worked through. The more sober approaches acknowledge that more experiment is needed to determine the most effective co-productive systems of working.

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6 Paid on Both Sides Mutuality, Reciprocity and Economy ‘I’ve never been past this point, what lies ahead I really could not say’. (Pulp, ‘Wickerman’) This chapter seeks to broaden the arguments of the Chapters 3, 4 and 5. In doing so, we move away from the concerns of public sector reform to make some general points about work, rights and welfare. Our argument begins with a re-consideration of themes that we have touched upon earlier in the book: citizenship and social rights. We will relate citizenship and social rights to an account of productive agency that revisits themes of associational life and reciprocity. To elaborate the broader consequences of our argument, we will make reference to the notion of the socially embedded economy. We will look at recent anthropological evidence that suggests reciprocity and ‘limited altruism’ are central to the human propensity to share resources. This evidence points towards a re-appraisal of communitarian understandings of reciprocity that have been influential in workfare approaches to welfare. The concept of the socially embedded economy then requires us to engage with two subsequent themes: welfare as capacity building and the nature of meaningful work.

Citizenship, Rights and Recognition We want to begin our analysis with a brief re-appraisal of ideas that we have discussed so far. In the previous chapter our associationalist

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argument suggested that people could be actively involved in the provision of welfare. From this perspective, we can now revisit the concept of the social citizen. This theme reappraises a point that we made in Chapter 1. We argued that the social citizen can be understood in terms provided by T. H. Marshall. Marshall argued that the social citizen was entitled to ‘a modicum of economic welfare’ in order to be able ‘to live the life of a civilised being’ (Marshall, 1950, p. 11). In Chapter 4 we argued that more than a ‘modicum’ of welfare must be provided if citizens are to exercise their freedom and autonomy. How can we elaborate this thinking of the citizen? It would be difficult to go back to the idea that citizenship is articulated by rights. The whole drift of the arguments that we reviewed in Chapter 2 transformed the concept of the citizen. Both Conservative and New Labour understandings tended to privilege the duties rather than the rights of citizenship and to see citizens as consumers of services. The citizen has become an economic actor; workfare packages stressing the duties of recipients of benefits to enter work or training. How can we reclaim the concept of citizenship? We will suggest that two arguments are useful in this regard: an engagement with work and a consideration of productive agency. If we bring these two arguments together, we can defend a notion of citizenship based on meaningful work that contributes to social and economic reproduction. This configuration of citizenship goes some way to redressing the distortion of the concept, while acknowledging the reality of the market and the need to engage with the commodification of labour. As we suggested in Chapter 3, the Marxist analysis of commodification is too narrow to think about what is at stake. So, our analysis of productive agency assumes that labour is performed in markets for wages and that wage labour, although commodified, is a source of value not entirely reducible to market terms. It is also important to note that there is still an important struggle over the terms in which labour is commodified, a question of how labour is organized and rewarded. Ultimately, we will see that we have to engage with the difficult issue of the meaning and value of work. So, the starting point of our argument is to assert the importance of productive agency. This takes us back to earlier arguments about human inputs into economy. We don’t want to see this input in conventional economic terms. Value is not determined by price. What, then, is the value of productive agency? The first point to note is that production is understood as a ‘co-operative affair’.1 Work is shaped by the desire to participate in ‘collective effort . . . in environments that respect[s] fairness and dignity’.

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This raises questions about what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom. To return to the words of Rowan Williams, economy is housekeeping. An economy must be embedded in social relations and produce what is necessary to satisfy human well-being. While this can involve markets, markets ‘cannot solve all economic problems’.2 Although this concern with the social relations of economy might seem like an argument about human capital, such an expression would be inappropriate. We hinted at this point in the previous chapter when we discussed the work of John Neville Figgis. The term ‘human capital’ collapses two different terms; indeed, it is another example of the failures of economic reasoning to grasp the fuller sense of value and the human meaning of work. Economy should be directed towards the sustenance of well-being. Although well-being is a complex term,3 we can point to the following general themes that most theorists would agree upon. Well-being does not simply equate with economic growth or with measures of income (which is not to say that these terms are irrelevant).4 The definition of well-being that we will deploy relates to the importance of ‘high quality work’ that provides ‘purpose, challenge and opportunities for social relationships’. Most importantly, high-quality work ‘constitute[s] a meaningful part of our identity’ (Shah and Marks, 2004, p. 2). We can locate our concept of productive agency within this framework. Productive agency requires ‘abilities and opportunities for earning income’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 134) that allow the development of self-respect which in turn breeds mutual ‘respect and cooperation’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 135). Interpreting productive agency through well-being stresses that high-quality work is not simply waged work. The concept of productive work thus covers nurture and voluntary work; activities that fall outside of the formal economy, but which can be shown to enhance the sense of well-being of those engaged in it. There are a couple of important points that we need to stress. Arguing that productive agency relates to a notion of citizenship does not suggest that qualification or receipt of welfare makes one less than a citizen. However, it does take into account the very real impact on well-being that unemployment causes.5 There are those who, through injury, disability or sickness, are incapable of work. Notions of productivity are clearly inappropriate in this context. Moreover, the notion of productive agency would not seek to stigmatize those suffering from clustered disadvantage. Clustered disadvantage limits agency and severely compromises any sense of well-being, freedom or autonomy. Dealing with these issues take us back to Chapter 3. Individuals have to be encouraged to develop their ‘productive capacity’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 126). Encouraging productive capacity

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cannot be confused with Workfare. Workfare strategies are punitive. Benefit is limited and made dependent on evidence that the recipient is actively looking for work; or will remain in work for a certain period. The problem is the kind of work on offer: ‘onerous, stigmatized and unpaid or low paid’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 129). Furthermore, the kind of training and work offered makes work appear as a ‘punishment’ not as a chance to assume autonomy.6 We also want to stress that productive agency requires the organization and control of work in the interests of those who sell their labour as a commodity in the market. This, of course, picks up on arguments we made in Chapter 3 about the necessity for trade unions to have a central role in the social control of work. However, it is also worth recalling our analysis of the distributive aspects of welfare. As has been shown, welfare serves to distribute resources from workers and businesses between people at different stages in the work/life cycle. After outlining the basic terms in which the productive agency of the social citizen can be understood, we want to reappraise arguments about social rights. A social right can be seen as a legal and political claim over the terms in which one belongs to a political community. Whether social rights are considered to be legal or political (or both) in nature they can be seen as the articulation of the general terms in which a political community should be organized. As economy is necessarily a communal activity involving the organization and co-ordination of people and resources, a social right only makes sense if it recognizes the communal nature of social and economic reproduction. The next stage of our argument links this notion of a social right back to our earlier discussion of recognition and social justice.7 In Chapter 4 we argued that underlying the analysis of justice is a claim to social belonging. We discussed Adam Smith’s point about the shame occasioned by appearing in public without a clean shirt and Tawney’s notion of a common culture. Lying behind these ideas is a concern with social recognition. We ‘are’ to the extent that we are recognized by others. This is a complex theme. At the risk of simplification, we want to suggest that there are two main concerns (which can only be separated for analytical purposes). The first theme is focused upon the nature of subjectivity. The second concerns the processes that make one a member of a community. The concept of social justice is primarily an elaboration of the second theme (although we can see how the concern with capacity returns precisely to discourses about human development). Bringing the strands of our argument together, our claim is as follows. The concept of social justice provides a structure of

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recognition to the extent that it connects social belonging to formal and substantive equality as defined through social (and civil and political) rights. It is this structure of rights that defines the citizen. Thus, to revisit briefly the discussion of earlier chapters, citizens recognize each other as such through the rights that define them as equal members of a political community. Thinking about rights and recognition allows us to deal with another problem that we left to one side in earlier chapters. Tawney’s account of a common life relates to ideas of a morality. Tawney understood morality through ideas of ethical socialism and Christianity. This way of thinking is now somewhat problematic. At the very least, it would be difficult to show how Christianity defines a morality that enjoys unquestioned support. Suffice to say, then, that we are not attempting to assert a common morality. We are concerned with what we might call a basic structure of social recognition. Tawney’s arguments about moral life can be reassessed from the perspective of social rights. As suggested above, they are positive norms. Norms of social recognition are very much concerned with the need to prevent a society tending towards anomie. To recap our arguments; social rights give all citizens an equal place in society. Anomie, in this context, can be understood as the displacement of social norms by those that are directly associated with market behaviour.8 We will also argue that if economic reproduction is not linked to the way in which men and women recognize each other as equal citizens, economic and social relationships pull apart, producing the ‘anomic state’ of ‘incessantly recurrent conflicts’ and ‘multifarious disorders’ that characterize much of contemporary social and economic life. We now want to suggest that articulating recognition through social rights can be understood as an argument about mutuality and reciprocity. We need to deal with a matter of definition. According to Schmidtz (2006, p. 82) reciprocity can only relate to those who have ‘done their share’ and are thus able to ask for something in return. This approach to reciprocity would be inconsistent with a great deal of the evidence. Reciprocity runs all the way from gratuitous giving through to mutual exchange. We must appreciate the social range of the concept. To read the concept in too narrow a way fails to see the different ways which ‘allow people to live as reciprocators’ (Schmidtz, 2006, p. 87). In terms of the contemporary literature, Becker’s work is a useful starting point. Reciprocal relations are ‘aimed at . . . sustaining a social structure’ that enables a culture to be built up around the identification of those exchanges that are deemed to be socially worthwhile. Becker carries forward the clear sense in which

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reciprocity is best understood as a process of identification, rather than narrowly on the basis of exchange (or even deferred exchange). The concept of mutuality allows us to clarify this argument. Although mutuality and reciprocity are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction between them that we can relate back to our argument about recognition. A reciprocal relationship can only take place if there is already a normative and symbolic structure that defines the terms in which reciprocity can take place.9 How these norms are defined is a matter of dispute. Within this book the terms of mutual recognition relate to our arguments about equality. We can develop this point as follows.10 The rights that we discussed above only make sense in a social context where ‘my’ duties and entitlements are also accepted by others, and supported by authoritative legal standards. Rights, such as the right to work and the right to welfare, have to be seen as claims for the realization of resources that allow individuals to be productive members of a community. This does not just relate to wage labour; unwaged labour is equally important in providing the services that allow social and economic reproduction. We can generalize this argument. As human rights hold for all human beings, ‘my rights’ must be respected by all other human beings and I, in turn, must respect their rights. The important point is that rights make for a mutual sense of entitlement and responsibility. Human rights ‘entail a mutualist and egalitarian universality’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 108). Rights thus provide the terms of mutual recognition that define belonging to a common culture.11 There is a final point we can make in this section about mutuality that elaborates our earlier comments on welfare and productive agency. In Goodin’s defence of the idea of welfare, mutuality plays a distinct role. Goodin is confronting the claim that the welfare state encourages dependency. What, he asks, is morally wrong with being dependent on others? Some would indeed assert that it is somehow wrong to rely on state provision because there is an overriding moral obligation to self-reliance. The assumption is that ‘in a market society, you should be able to provide basic food, clothing and shelter for your family through your own efforts’ (Goodin, 1998, p. 365). It is considered shameful to rely on the state or others to provide these basic needs. The problem is that, to some extent, most would agree that at least at certain stages in one’s life, one is dependent on others. Most would probably also concede that there are some who are unable to look after themselves as adults, the ‘abjectly dependent’, who are thus dependent on others to take care of them. There is nothing morally questionable about this fact. Likewise, most would probably not

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disagree with the argument that communal resources should be provided to encourage people to take up the primary duty to become responsible for themselves. The problem of welfare dependency has to be disassociated from the claim that any form of dependency is wrong. Moreover, the ability to depend on others and to trust them is surely an important value in civic culture. Thus, ‘if mutual dependence or dependence on mutually shared institutions is morally innocuous in general’ (Goodin, 1998, p. 364), then the welfare state cannot be condemned for creating dependency.12 If we are thinking about labour and citizenship, we need to take into account feminist arguments about the nature of work, particularly as it addresses the very distinction that we have been discussing: the relationship between waged and unwaged labour, between autonomy and dependency, the private world of the family and the public world of work. To be slightly more specific: social norms tend to identify women as carers of children or elders. At least in the early decades of the post-war period, the various pressures to assume this kind of work meant that women tended to be dependent on their husbands, work part time, or work around the demands of family life. While there have been changes in patterns of employment in recent years, we could still perhaps argue that caring work still tends to be done by women, either within the context of the family, or in certain sectors of public service. This takes us to a second point. Feminism added a particularly insightful understanding of the dynamics of wage labour. Consider the contradiction inherent in the very idea of waged labour. Men ‘own’ the labour that they contract with an employer to supply in exchange for a wage. The working class is thus composed of working men (Pateman, 1988, p. 135). Women slip in and out of employment depending on the prevalent ideology of the correct relationship between work and home, ideologies that also tend to construct different ideas of work for women occupying different levels in the social hierarchy. Thus, the First and Second World Wars were marked by the mass employment of women in contribution to the war effort. The immediate aftermath of both world wars were characterized by the contraction of employment opportunities, and the promotion of home and family as the primary location of women’s work. Overlaying these patterns of employment were assumptions about work that reflected class prejudices. While these have a complexity and subtly of their own, they tend to relate to assumptions about the roles of women as wives and mothers and the social standing of a family where a wife and mother did not have to seek paid employment. For some, a wife compelled to work was a source of public shame, a token of poverty or the

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failure of the husband’s ability to provide for his dependents. Although such attitudes may describe the social mores of a couple of decades ago, it would be wrong to forget that assumptions about work and family, or the gendered division of labour, continue to influence the jobs that men and women do and the way in which work and identity are fused. We can thus see something of a continuity between Beveridge’s arguments in the mid1940s that women’s work is ‘vital but unpaid’ (Pateman, 1988, p. 139) and contemporary assumptions that certain services will be provided for free in the private sphere of the family, rather than publicly by the state. This is still the case in the pattern of women caring for the elderly, the young and the infirm. How do these arguments relate back to our discussion of rights? If rights are a structure of recognition, how are women recognized as citizens. How does this argument touch upon the very definition of citizenship with which we are concerned? This complex can be traced back to an idea of citizenship, where belonging is predicated on notions of independence and autonomy that are peculiarly male. Recognition, therefore, is predicated on supposedly ‘male’ attributes. Indeed, at least historically, citizenship is based on notions of property ownership and the capacity to contribute to the defence of the state. Precisely because women were accorded subordinate positions to men in law, employment and eligibility for military service, they either acceded to the status of citizenship later than men, or were considered less than full citizens. These structures of recognition and citizenship are not, however, resistant to change. Early feminist struggles did, to some extent, force structures of citizenship to adapt to women’s needs and demands. Eleanor Rathbone’s campaign for family allowances in the 1920s would be a good example. These arguments about women being recognized as citizens can be co-ordinated with considerations of women’s productive agency. As Pateman points out, ‘if women as well as men are to be full citizens, the separation [between paid employment] and the free welfare work contributed by women has to be broken down and new meanings and practices of “independence”, “work” and “welfare” created’ (Pateman, 1988, p. 147). Feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the inequities inherent in the unwaged nature of a great deal of work that women perform as mothers, housewives and carers. Responses to the invisibility of women’s work have taken different forms, from arguments and agitation around the issue of wages for housework, through to assertions of the need for a ‘guaranteed minimum income’ (McIntosh, 2000, p. 124). If we link together the campaigns for the redefinition of work and employment with arguments about

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guaranteed wages, we can perhaps appreciate the relationship between much feminist thinking and our argument above about a broad definition of productive agency. The main point for our argument is that ‘the self and mutual respect of citizens’ cannot be narrowed down to a concept of ‘the sale of labour power in the market’ (Pateman, 1988, p. 147). This is precisely why feminists looked to the state to intervene in the market to create employment on more equitable terms with men. As the market could not be left to reform itself, it was necessary to pressure the state to act. Legislation in the early 1970s on equal wages and sex discrimination and ongoing changes in social norms and labour markets have indeed seen more women entering work; even though, on the whole, women still earn less than men, and tend not to be as well represented in senior positions. Our point is that many of the feminist arguments remain vital to a critique of market economy, and relevant to the ongoing discussion about the structure and meaning of work. Questions of the structure and meaning of work require us to go into more detail on the terms that have been central to our argument thus far: reciprocity and mutuality. The next section of the chapter will argue that reciprocity underlies economy. Our engagement with this theme has its pedigree in Evan Durbin’s attempt to make use of recent evidence of the causes of co-operation in human beings. Durbin stressed that ‘psychological and anthropological studies contribute enormously to our understanding of social institutions’ (Durbin, 1940, p. 37). His argument built on a Durkheimian insight: that the division of labour was one central factor in social stability and in fostering the spirit of co-operation. However, it is worth pointing out that the ‘pleasure felt in the presence of human company’ (Durbin, 1940, p. 43), as well as ‘care for the good of others’ were also seen to be important. This strikes us as another token of the relevance of the themes of sociability and association. It is important at this point to stress that we do not want to suggest that either our argument, or Durbin’s approach, relied solely on recourse to social psychology or developmental anthropology. It should not be taken in any reductionist sense. After outlining at least some of the evidence for human co-operation over welfare and economy, we will pick up on our concern with the meaning of association as it presents itself in the work we undertake with others.

Reciprocity and Economy The first part of our argument outlines a defence of welfare based on the ‘voluntary egalitarian redistribution of income among total strangers’

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(Bowles and Gintis, 2000, p. 33). If it can be shown that human behaviour displays such an egalitarian disposition, it would challenge the assumptions made by economists about the inherently self-interested nature of the human being. Economists have found homo economicus present in the responses of ‘selfish voters’ who favour welfare and income redistribution because it ultimately suits their interests. However, homo reciprocans is, at least to some extent, committed to ‘the well being of others’. Homo reciprocans enters into transactions which incur personal costs, without the possibility of repayment (Bowles and Gintis, 2000, p. 38). The motivation for such behaviour is not necessarily altruistic nor without conditions (Bowles and Gintis, 2000, p. 38).13 This is not, then, a theory of ‘unconditional altruism’ (Bowles and Gintis, 2000, p. 37). But it does describe behaviour where individuals are willing to ‘cooperate and share’ with those ‘similarly disposed’ (Bowles and Gintis, 2000, p. 37) and to criticize and punish those who appear to take advantage of mutual aid relationships. How, in any more detailed sense, would this feed into our concern with welfare? It suggests that provided that welfare systems do not appear to be exploited, there is no reason why they should not be supported. Support for welfare does not depend on the demands of altruism but on some sense in which receipt of benefits is controlled. We need to be careful with this argument. We can see how it relates to our argument about social rights. If social rights are definitional of a productive community, then recognition and belonging depend on the perception that individuals are contributing to economic reproduction. We have tried in the earlier part of the book to suggest that understanding welfare through capacity building has precisely this objective. The extent to which problems of inequality and clustered disadvantage are resolvable requires support for welfare, while a concerted effort is made to alleviate or change the conditions that make welfare necessary. These themes take us to an examination of workfare. The problem with workfare as presently configured is that it fails to resolve the problems that give rise to dependency on benefits. This can be seen most starkly in the work of the welfare paternalists (Segall, 2005, p. 332). Lawrence Mead’s work provides a good example. He has argued that benefits must be conditional not on the criterion of job seeking but ‘on proof of work’. Mead aims to address the ‘passive poverty’ (Mead, 2007, p. 110) created by welfare culture. It is necessary to move away from the traditions of ‘the Great Society’ and economic reform overseen by a liberal elite. Government intervention and progressive taxation have not solved the problems of poverty. Under the motto ‘beyond entitlement’, policy prescriptions are needed to

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encourage the ‘inert’ and ‘depressed’ poor to prove their competence for work, and thus to show that they are fit members of a political community (Mead, 2007, p. 112).14 Although third way thinking cannot be confused with welfare paternalism, it also attempted to tackle the growth of an ‘under-class’ of people dependent on benefits rather than waged work. Third way theorists argued that receipt of benefits had to be linked to conditions that stressed the corresponding duties on the recipient: obligations that were ‘owed’ to the community that funded those benefits in the first place. Communitarian discourses on responsibility tend to be worked out in terms of reciprocity and mutuality. However, as critics have pointed out, asserting that the right to benefits is linked to certain obligations to the community is not an exemplification of reciprocity. Commentators have denounced these justifications for workfare as ‘insubstantial’ (Moss, 2006, pp. 88–9). Workfare would only be legitimately based on a reciprocal complex of rights and duties if those who took part in workfare did so through their freely informed consent (Moss, 2006, p. 94). If workfare schemes do not allow an individual to develop real skills for meaningful employment, it would be likely to fail the test of legitimacy that Moss proposes.15 As Standing (2002, p. 178) points out, workfare arguments do not add up and certainly do not operate in terms of reciprocity. Consider the following. The argument that ‘the right to income’ should be linked to ‘the duty to labour’ is ‘unbalanced reciprocity’. This is because the ‘insistence on duties’ serves to ‘stigmatize’ and encourage an individual to ‘forgo their rights’. A right can only be ‘meaningful’ if an individual is able to exercise it. The only way in which workfare could be justified from our perspective is to see it as geared towards capacity and functioning on non-punitive terms. This can be linked to a second point that returns to the arguments of Chapter 4. Workfare must allow access to advantage. Thus, to follow Standing, ‘[u]nless the state can guarantee fair and equal access’ to work and jobs, workfare becomes simply a means of discipline and control. There is no real point in sponsoring the kind of work that is ‘onerous, stigmatized and unpaid or low paid’ (Standing, 2002, p. 129). Such jobs offer no chance for training or self-betterment, no opportunities for ‘initiative and autonomy’ (Standing, 2002, p. 130). To be consistent with our argument, welfare would have to encourage the development of self-respect, which allows the agent to relate to others on ‘the basis of mutual respect and cooperation’ (Standing, 2002, p. 130). So, it is necessary to move away from punitive workfare schemes. They cannot be supported on the basis of some argument that reciprocal norms

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require that the poor should somehow work for their benefits. Bowles and Gintis’ argument suggests that there should be terms for the receipt of welfare but, provided such terms do not exploit a sense of mutual aid, they are not inconsistent with the human desire to share resources. The anthropological evidence can also be used to think more generally about how economy operates, in particular about how social wealth is shared.16 We need to be clear on this point. As suggested above, our argument is not based on any assertion of the theory of surplus value.17 It is, rather, based on an understanding that the part played by labour in economy needs to be protected and enhanced. We analysed the unbalanced nature of economic rewards in Chapter 3. The rewards that go to labour in terms of wages or welfare have decreased against the share of social wealth that is claimed by capital. If we want to think of economy in terms of norms that define mutual relations that allow recognition of equality, then we need to consider a defence of the role of labour in economic production. There are two elements to our argument. First, welfare as capacity building has to be seen as a condition of a skilled and educated workforce able to compete in a global economy. Second, the ‘communal contribution’ (Gudeman, 2001, p. 155) of those who labour18 must be properly understood as the social reality of economy. Commentators have spoken convincingly of the need for a new narrative of political economy. Such a narrative would have to show how values such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘social investment’ (Gamble, 2010, p. 108) are central to production. Labour economists have argued that unless quality jobs in a regulated economy are spread throughout society, there is the risk that persistent unemployment and falling incomes will make more households dependent on credit (ILO, 2011, p. 11). Restricting quality jobs to relatively few people also encourages the creation of an informal economy or the casualization of opportunities in the formal economy. These trends would also tend to depress wages, entrench forms of inequality and create social costs that are borne by all through crime and associated social problems. We thus need to think carefully about both labour and how the rewards from labour are distributed. Within sophisticated mechanized production, the exacting nature of work requires skilled workers whose very efficiency contributes to the overall profitability of production. The important point is to realize that human labour ‘enhances production possibilities’ (Sen, 2001, pp. 292–3). We are concerned with contemporary models of social and economic organization that bring together people, in discrete but interrelating forms of work, that allow the co-ordination of socialized ways of working. Socialized

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working describes the historic shift from mass industrial production, and even large-scale production in agriculture, to regimes characterized by flexible working and different patterns of employment. These processes are driven by technological innovations that relate to the development of software, marketing and require computer literate ‘wired workers’. In order to make work more productive, systems of management have to make use of co-operative and communal networks. Domestic and familial reproduction as a condition for the reproduction of social relations are also part of this complex. A skilled and competent workforce requires affective labour as its precondition. This is a key point. An economy would not operate without the nurture necessary to produce adults capable of work. Underlying the possibility of production is the social reproduction that takes place in the family. This point becomes acute if we re-consider some of the arguments we deployed in Chapter 3. The level of educational achievement of an adult corresponds strongly to the support, both emotional and practical, given to the child in the early stages of his/her development. As well as the general social benefits of well-adjusted, socially integrated young people, there is a direct economic benefit obtained from an educated workforce. There is a great deal of research on the concept of the knowledgedriven economy and the policies that will enable its expansion; but, as the International Labour Office (ILO) has affirmed, sustainable growth can only be brought about through ‘quality job creation’ (ILO, 2011, p. 9). The opportunities for job creation have to be assessed within the terms of national economies. For instance, at present there are concerns about the provision of sufficient ‘highly skilled’ graduates to drive forward the UK’s knowledge-based economy. Whether one looks at the 2009 Skills White Paper, or the report issued by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the same issues keep recurring (Levy and Hopkins, 2010, p. 11): how to produce a workforce that can compete in a prosperous global economy. Furthermore, recovery from recession requires the kind of skills that depend on ‘tacit’ knowledge. Tacit knowledge is a kind of flexible intelligence that can be applied to a variety of problems. It requires the kind of intellectual confidence that comes out of a university education (Levy and Hopkins, 2010, p. 5). Analysis also suggests that the recession has destroyed jobs in ‘manual, unskilled and elementary occupations’ (Levy and Hopkins, 2010, p. 6). The idea of the ‘knowledge economy’ should not obscure the important point that manufacturing is itself driven by the need for innovation. If it is possible, therefore, in the long or medium term, to re-balance economy away from financial services, provision of skilled and educated workers appears to be essential.19

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But this is not just about income distribution or access to advantage. It is also necessary to return to the question posed in Chapter 3 and ask about the very point of economy. We argued that an economy must create a ‘social environment’ that offers ‘security for citizens’, in particular those unable ‘to contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business’. Economy is inseparable from ‘a social and material nexus of relations’ that cover ‘three-dimensional human beings: people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity’.20 To clarify: we are not seeking to argue that all social relations are, or indeed should be, entirely geared to economic reproduction. This is not an argument about the ontologically centrality of work, and thus the secondary status of those that cannot work in a way that is defined through the nexus of wages. The point is that an economy must be embedded in social relations. This might allow us to re-claim welfare through the argument that economic reproduction has to be based on relationships between people, and economy must ultimately be understood as rooted in social reproduction.21 We can generalize still further. Economy cannot be considered outside of ‘the general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilised life, a general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalisation between the more and less fortunate at all levels – between the healthy and the sick, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the active . . .’ (Gudeman, 2001, p. 33). This does not mean simply returning to a model of bureaucratic, top-down and state-driven welfare provision, but it does require arguments about the end of economy and economic organization that we have opened above and which will be more directly confronted in the following chapters. If welfare is about building capacity, then the question remains: capacity for what? In distinction to the valorization of work by the communitarians, republicans and paternalists, any progressive development of welfare thinking has to relate labour, its role and its value to a realization of co-operation and mutual support; to the contributions made by all to the creation of communal well-being.

Conclusion In this chapter we have argued that welfare is central to the social embedding of economy. We have argued from sociological and anthropological evidence that reciprocity and mutuality are central to both social being

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and to economic organization. Arguments about reciprocity and economic organization point towards the need to deal with the relationships between capital and labour and we have asserted that labour needs to protect its role in production. Our argument is that unless there is a degree of social control over economy, the rewards of economic growth flow to capital, rather than the interests of working people. An important element of this argument relates to welfare. It is hard to see how, in the long term, a sufficient number of skilled workers can be produced without collective support for the social conditions that produce them. If (for example) the provision of education at public cost can be seen as an investment in the future enhancement of production, rather than a ‘cost to be borne’, it might be that provision of welfare more generally can be seen as a strengthening of the social cohesion necessary for a socially embedded economy.

Appendix: The Sense of Work Is work meaningful? Nancy points out that labour opens onto the ‘sense’ of the world (Nancy, 1997, p. 102). How can we link our arguments about reciprocity with sense? Nancy’s poetic expression invites us to think again about work’s ‘social’ reality; about how, when working, sense circulates among us. Precisely because Nancy’s thinking about work is developed in and against Marx, and we need to return to the thought of the master. Marx would entirely disagree with the thesis that we have presented in this book. The exchange of labour for money cannot provide an authentic grounding for social recognition. The terms in which people recognize each other in a community characterized by wage labour are fundamentally distorted. How, then, would Nancy help us to counter Marx’s argument, while retaining a radical thinking of the social world? These are complicated themes. They touch upon some of the most important and problematic distinctions in philosophy, as well as political questions about the control of work. Where does work begin and end? These themes run throughout Marx’s oeuvre, focused on the great provocation that work in conditions of capitalism is inherently exploitative and alienating. Work, socialized in a communist society, is the great figure of liberation: of the good society organized around activities in which we find the truth of ourselves freed from the false necessity of working to create profit for someone else. Bound up in Marx’s thinking is the classical distinction between the homo faber and homo laborans. The former is ‘man the maker’: the

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demiurge, artist or poet whose task is not so much labour but the creation of works of lasting beauty. Homo laborans, at least for the Greeks, was not man properly realized but man as drudge, involved in the repetitive, meaningless work that satisfied the necessities of life. Homo laborans was little more than an animal (Arendt, 1958, p. 173). In a genealogy too complex to trace in this book, the distinction between homo laborans and homo faber could be mapped onto the distinction between poesis and praxis (Arendt, 1958, p. 76); a coupling that raises the whole issue of the world of action, which, in Arendtian terms, is the ‘vita active’ of the public man, and the proper telos of human activity. Work, then, is inseparable from ontological questions. Although we can appreciate that work raises the issue of the meaning of human existence, we do not want to follow Marx (or even Arendt). We want to affirm that work opens us to others, and is central to the circulation of sense. We thus need to begin with a qualified critique of Marx. For clarification: we will not follow the problematic distinction between work and labour, between homo laborans and homo faber nor will we try to work with the distinction between poesis and praxis.22 For Marx’s argument to make sense there must be some fundamental meaning of humanity that precedes wage labour, and which provides the ‘absolute value’ beyond wages and price that defines the capitalist location of work. For Marx, work is the production of ourselves. We would dearly like to hold onto this noble theme, as it underlies what we have argued about the nature of recognition. We become citizens to the extent that we are recognized by others as such. This is, of course, a symbolic form of recognition. Our argument in the first section of this chapter stressed that subjectivity is not a given. Following Tawney, Rawls and a whole tradition of social thinking, we are created by those social, psychic and institutional structures that give our being form. Marx’s contribution was to link this theme of self-creation to work. The issue is not whether Marx is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The challenge for any theory of work as the production of the properly human is the association of this theme with a communism that has been profoundly discredited. This is why, when thinking of Marx, Nancy introduces the idea of the ‘impossible’ or ‘un-worked’ community. Nancy ‘unworks’ Marx’s theory of work, and thus problematizes the idea that in a communist society humanity is realized through socialized production. Note, though, Nancy is not rejecting

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Marx; he is asking us to follow a different understanding of what Marx was saying. Nancy is concerned with Marx’s notion of the ‘social character of labour’ and focuses on the argument that in the ‘rural patriarchal system of production’ work took place at home; or, rather in workshops that were also people’s homes. In the production of cotton, spinning and weaving was done ‘under one roof’; the former task undertaken by women, the latter by men. Labour was ‘social labour within the framework of the family’. It was not, at this point in history, subjected to ‘generalized equivalence’ measured by ‘socially necessary labour time’. In other words, work was not subjected to generalized exchange; markets were local; production was domestic, not factory based. Although there was a gendered division of labour, it was perhaps not as hard and fast as it became during and after the industrial revolution. It is worth recalling William Morris’ aphorism: ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ (Morris, 1892, p. 1). Moreover, efficiency and profit did not dictate modes of production. Indeed, as historians have shown, before the industrial revolution, people only worked when it was necessary to do so. Thus, ‘the product bore the specific social imprint of the family relation’ and production represented ‘the particular features of his [and her] labour and not its universal aspect’. We do not want to suggest that Nancy’s argument suggests any return to a medievalism or ‘Morrisist’ ideas about craft (while Morris’ aphorism about gendered labour retains its relevance): it requires us to think in a new way about the sense of work. In Nancy’s interpretation of this passage from Das Grundrisse, Marx’s thinking of social labour suggests that work is an ‘articulation of singularities amongst themselves’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 75) which is also ‘sociality’ thought as ‘sharing’. Let’s pause for a moment. Nancy has exhumed from Marx an idea that labour ‘exposes’ us to each other. Marx’s concern with ‘social labour’ or the labour of individuals with other individuals becomes a working in common that defines the community of singularities. Nancy argues that Marx’s ‘intuition’ was that capital ‘exposes or strips bare’ the ‘with’ as Being together (Nancy, 1991, p. 64). The ‘event’ of Marx’s thought directs our attention to work as a ‘socially exposed particularity’ in opposition to the socially imploded generality characteristic of capitalist community’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 74). Th is takes us back to production and recognition. In working, we produce ourselves: it is a ‘species activity’: the defi ning feature of human nature; the ‘real, conscious and true mode of existence’ as articulated by

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both ‘social activity and social enjoyment’ (Marx, 1975, p. 217). The sense of this mysterious and provocative phrase is that it is through production that human nature becomes conscious of itself as such, and that this coming to itself is a passage of joy, that both producing with others, and for others is enjoyable. Indeed, the joy of being with others becomes, produces and creates the ‘true community of men’ (Marx, 1975, p. 217). The truth of being with one another, the ‘social entity’, is the specific construction of a life in common, that is lived with each other. There is ‘no abstract universal power’ which presents itself up and against the individual, suggesting that the becoming of the true community is itself a power: but one of self and communal defi nition. It may even be a form of ‘wealth’ but one that extracts nothing from anyone, and circulates freely amongst us. How do these ideas relate to our thesis? Nancy’s re-interpretation of Marx’s ideas of labour allows us to make use of this sense of the in common. Nancy’s reading of Marx suggests that the logic of economy needs to be re-located in a broader economy of meaning; those meanings that are generated between people who work. For us, this concern relates to reciprocity and mutuality which articulate the way in which society and economy make sense. As we have seen from our analysis of reciprocity, reciprocal relations underlie and enable market exchanges, but are not themselves necessarily an exchange of services or commodities for money. In terms of the theory of generalized reciprocity, some forms of emotional exchange simply cannot be thought of in monetary terms. This is not to say that their social worth should be undervalued. We have repeatedly argued that relationships of nurture actually enable economically productive relationships. One way in which the social value of such labour can be acknowledged is through the redistribution of resources that characterizes welfare. This is not to confuse the relationships of taxation and obligation that constitute one element of welfare with reciprocity. These are clearly not reciprocal relationships. Reciprocity emerges at what we are now calling the level of ‘sense’ or value. We can also summarize and re-state our thesis on work, welfare and recognition. We have argued that citizenship relates both to productive agency and those social rights that protect and enhance it. If we want to think in terms of the ‘sense’ of these claims, then it takes us directly to the sense that circulates among us. Reciprocity has provided the basic terms of our account. It now becomes clear that this account of the reciprocity of rights is itself dependent on an understanding of signification, or those symbols that we exchange between us and which have meaning. It would overburden this book if we attempted to develop this account of

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signification in depth. We intend to say more about it in Chapter 9, but, for the moment, we merely want to draw attention to a couple of key ideas. The theory of ‘being with’, our exposure to the meanings that constitute our worlds will form the basis of our approach to signification. This is not simply an account of language. We need to think about the totality of our signifying practices, the said and the unsaid. To borrow a theme from Hannah Arendt, we need a sense of what is shared between us in ‘[t]he public realm [that] gathers us together’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 52). We will pick up on this analysis in Chapter 9. Before we can develop our ‘theoretical argument’ we need to engage with some prior concerns that relate to the structure of work and welfare.

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7 A Life’s Work Pensions, Welfare and Capital ‘The problem isn’t public sector pensions. The real problem is the devastation of private sector provision and the abject failure of the three main political parties and the industry to offer any meaningful solution’ Decent Penions for All (London: TUC, 2009), 31 (citing Pensions Week at http://www.pensionsweek.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/ 2562/Good_pensions_bludgeoned_by_stats.htm)

Introduction In this chapter we will consider the extent to which capital bound up in pension funds can be controlled.1 We will examine both private and public pensions.2 As far as the former is concerned, we will argue that financial reform requires a central role for trade unions. In the words of the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), John Monks: ‘the trade unions must unite with business and governments in a new social partnership to counter the financial markets’ self destructive orgy’.3 In our examination of public pensions, we will argue that while the move to privatization is probably irresistible, there are still points of resistance, and we will examine trade unions’ responses to recent developments in the pension field. We will frame these concerns by reference to themes developed in previous chapters. Drawing on recent readings of Polanyi, we will argue that finance capital (money autonomously creating its own value) must be discouraged from making all other social and economic relationships dance 132

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to its tune. Polanyi’s arguments against the commodification of labour – rooted in the context of the early Labour movement – can be adapted to think about the pressing problems of the present. The point is not simply more regulation but, rather, how to think differently about capital’s social responsibilities. Central to the argument is the need to ‘embed’ finance capital in institutions that make for a productive economy and a cohesive society. The chapter will develop as follows. For analytical convenience, we will begin with the problems occasioned by deregulation of financial markets and the growth of private pension provision. We will then turn to consider the problems that relate to legal regulation and the statutory response to control of pension funds. This will take us directly to a discussion of union involvement in pension regulation. After analysing the changing nature of the Union response, we will engage with the recent response of the unions to ‘casino capitalism’ and the possibilities of intervention in pension control and provision.

The Privatization of Pensions In order to develop our argument, we need to look at the historical and economic reasons for the rise of finance capital and the failure of regulation. We will relate this theme to a consideration of pension provision in the United Kingdom.4 This takes us back to the Labour Government of 1945. Commentators have argued that Attlee’s Government failed to lay the foundations for a workable system of pensions.5 The National Insurance Act 1946 introduced a ‘flat rate pension’ (to take effect from 1948) that fell far below an ‘unambiguous national minimum’ level of benefits.6 The 1946 Act departed from Beveridge’s recommendations for a fully funded scheme where each generation would bear its own pension costs, as it proved prohibitively expensive. Implementing a funded system would have to have taken into account the immediate needs of older workers who had not built up the necessary contributions. Thus, the 1946 Act attempted to avoid these expensive obligations on the public finances by setting up a ‘Pay as You Go’ (PAYG) system. The National Insurance (NI) contributions on which the system was based were calculated on the requirements of funding the pension needs of present retirees, rather than the future pensions of those who were actually working.7 There were other compromises. Attlee’s policies created ‘two nations’ in pension provision: ‘those who look primarily to their employers for their main security and those who look only to the state’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 171). Abel-Smith has argued that ‘[r]ather than incorporating

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occupational pension schemes’ into state provision they were ‘left to grow on top’, leaving control of such schemes in the hands of employers. The assets of private schemes were thus outside of the state’s ability to control and influence their investment. The Government also failed to use NI in an imaginative and engaging way. In comparison with continental systems, the British system lacked the ‘active participation of employers and employees’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 171). Government did not use its influence to develop the strengths of a centralized state provision of social security. However, one should not underestimate the budgetary constraints under which post-war pensions policy was designed. Beveridge was pressured by the Treasury and factions in government to reduce the costs of funding pensions (Harris, 2006, pp. 32–3). Although Beveridge believed that his proposals maintained pensions at a subsistence level, a belief repeated by the Civil Service Commission of 1943, Abel-Smith was able to show that benefit levels were not sufficient to prevent an increasing number of pensioners relying on means tested benefits (Timmins, 1995, p. 136). Pressures on government to improve the income of retirees led to the development of an ‘earnings related state pension’, which would have allowed a social insurance scheme to develop. In 1961 a system of graduated retirement benefits (GRB) was introduced. GRB provided for mandatory contributions that would effectively allow those in a scheme to increase the benefits that they would enjoy on retirement. However, once again, prohibitive costs prevented resolute government action. GRB were not increased alongside inflation, significantly reducing their value for the scheme’s contributors. The GRB scheme came to an end in 1975 (DWP, 2006, p. 15). The opinions of historians vary as to why the promise of pension reform remained largely unfulfilled. Some have stressed the role of the Treasury; others the assumptions Beveridge himself made (Fawcett, 1996); but, as Blackburn points out, the state failed to establish its dominance in pension provision in the immediate post-war period (Blackburn, 2002, p. 28; Macnicol, 1998, p. 371; Pemberton et al., 2006, p. 45). The second major problem was that the basic state pension (BSP) never established a ‘subsistence’ level for retired people (Timmins, 1995, pp. 136–7; Blackburn, 2002, p. 281). Means testing remained, as did the requirement (for those who could afford it) to take out private pensions. Indeed, a ‘parallel system of private, earnings related occupational pensions began to evolve alongside’ the state system (Joyce et al., 2010, p. 10). Labour and Conservative Governments continued to encourage the use of private pensions from the 1950s onwards, even though the tax breaks for private pensions led to

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£100 million a year being lost from the Treasury. As the annual cost of the basic state pension in the same period was around £45 million per annum, these figures provide further evidence of the limitations of government approaches to private pension provision. But there was innovative thinking on pensions taking place. The Labour MP and Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman, working closely with Richard Titmuss, proposed a superannuation fund that would be financed from public bonds (Glennerster, 2000, p. 61). Both Titmuss and Crossman were alarmed at the growing power of the private sector and the failure to channel resources to investment in ‘social infrastructure’ (Thornton, 2006a, p. 138). The increasing impoverishment of those reliant on the basic state pension was also a cause for concern. Titmuss championed the idea that making pensions income-related would allow redistribution of wealth and an improvement of benefits for pensioners. These ideas fed into the National Superannuation Scheme, which was adopted by the Labour Party in 1957. It is worth noting that the Superannuation Scheme was specifically designed to ‘slow the growth’ of private pension provision by ‘setting out extremely stringent contracting-out conditions’ (Araki, 2000, p. 604). When Harold Wilson’s Labour Government took office in 1964, the scheme ran into opposition and, despite Crossman’s vigorous sponsorship and defence of the bill, it narrowly failed to become law (Thornton, 2006b, p. 293). During Wilson’s second period in office, plans were made for both an index linking of pensions and the creation of a secondary pension (Thornton, 2006b, p. 294). The responsible minister, Barbara Castle, made use of the research that Titmuss, Crossman and others had already undertaken. Castle’s proposals were popular with the unions, in particular the Transport and General Workers Union whose general secretary, Jack Jones, was a keen supporter of pension reform. However, in case our argument seems uncritical of the unions, we want to point out that there were tensions between the objectives of the unions and the desires of some ministers to protect the low waged and the poor. The unions were concerned to protect the pay rates and benefits of their members. Barbara Castle’s State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) was the next major innovation. The basic pension was raised to 20 per cent of male average wages (Barr and Coulter, 1990, p. 279) while the SERPS scheme was projected to provide another 25 per cent of average earnings. Castle’s Act enjoyed cross-party support as provisions were included for opt outs from SERPS. However, despite its initial popularity, SERPS became increasingly discredited through its association with excessive

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public spending. The Labour Government appeared to be losing control of the economy. In 1976, James Callaghan, Wilson’s successor as Labour Prime Minister, was forced to agree to a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which imposed terms on public spending. SERPS was also to prove a target for the Conservative drive to limit government spending and to open pension provision to the market. We will pick up on these themes in a moment, as we want to stress that this potted history should at least mention the work of the sadly neglected Wilson Commission on the financial sector in the United Kingdom. The Wilson Commission made proposals that would have allowed the state to protect the economy from what in contemporary language is called flight capital. Tony Benn expressed an appreciation of this problem in a 1979 publication. He reported that the finance industry was not managing the sums that they had collected in pension funds in ‘the common interest’. As these ‘savings belong to the workers’ it was necessary to engage in reforms that would allow pensions to provide both retirement funds and a ‘buoyant economy’ (Benn, 1980, p. 13).8 SERPS fell victim to the Conservative Government’s attempts to limit the welfare ‘burden’ on the state and the Tory’s desire to develop a pensions policy that was distinct from that of Labour.9 Indeed, Labour pension provision had long been in their sites. Towards the end of Heath’s Government, Keith Joseph, then secretary for Health and Social Security, had pushed forward plans to move pension provision from the state to the individual, and to encourage the take-up of private pension arrangements. Joseph was keen to see earnings-related contributions replace the existing flat rate of the state pension. These proposals took legislative form in the Social Security Act 1973.10 In 1983, Norman Fowler announced an inquiry into provision for retirement, with a specific remit to examine the present and future costs of SERPS. Conservative policy was driven by a number of concerns. The Government was keen to push forward private provision, and saw the barriers to transfer of benefits under existing schemes as impediments to the development of the pensions industry. The Conservatives also wanted to reform pension provision to allow for greater job flexibility and a more mobile workforce. At first, the Conservatives intended to bring SERPS to an end completely and to gain a ‘transition’ to a system where ‘individuals’ contributed ‘directly to’ their ‘own additional pensions’. Their approach was justified on the basis that it provided extra choice and relieved the public purse of the responsibility to fund state pensions (DHSS, 1985). This programme began to take shape after 1987 in tax policies which encouraged people to ‘contract out’ of SERPS and take out

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personal pensions. By 1990, 4 million had followed this course of action (Walker, cited in Blackburn, 2002, p. 129). The impact of these early moves to privatization was disastrous. The loss to the Treasury in tax relief for those contracting out amounted to £16 billion (Blackburn, 2002, p. 285) and only 17 per cent of pensioners remained within SERPS. The savings that were meant to result from people taking personal responsibility for their pensions did not materialize. Contracting out of the state pension ‘merely converted public pensions’ expenditure into tax revenue forgone’. Walker writes that the ‘misrepresentation of the benefits that would flow from personal pension plans . . . is now one of the great scandals of the British financial markets’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 285). Many would simply have been better remaining within SERPS. Over their period in office, New Labour presided over a significant re-articulation of the pension regime.11 The introduction of stakeholder pensions and State Second Pensions (2SPs) in 2001 was intended to provide cover for those who did not have access to an occupational pension scheme.12 The Pensions Act 2007 raised the state pension age, further reformed 2SPs to provide ‘flat rate benefits’ (Joyce et al., 2010, p. 12) and sought to broaden entitlement to the Basic State Pension (BSP) to reduce numbers relying on means-tested benefits. The 2007 Act also attempted to preserve the value of pensions by requiring them to rise in line with average earnings rather than prices (DWP, 2006, p. 15). Commentators have suggested that while the Act establishes ‘near universal . . . benefits’ that will ‘reduce poverty for all pensioners’ the reforms do not amount to providing a significant replacement rate for income lost in retirement (Joyce et al., 2010, p. 12). The 2008 Pensions Act built on the earlier Act; in particular, creating a scheme of automatic enrolment into personal accounts that ‘will extend the benefits of private pension saving to those on moderate to low incomes’ who were not members of occupational pension schemes (DWP, 2006, p. 47). How can we weigh up New Labour’s record on pensions? Commentators suggest that New Labour largely continued the Conservative approach to the privatization of pension provision. However, as Clark and Emerson (1993) pointed out, the New Labour concern with social justice made for sensitivity to the poverty experienced by pensioners. This translated into means tests that were more generous in the provision that they offered.13 New Labour policy was also driven by the need to contain the costs of public pensions, while encouraging savings, particularly among middleand lower-income groups (Disney et al., 2007). Evidence on the take-up of 2SPs is perhaps contradictory.14 However, it would be fair to say that

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New Labour were not committed to a reinvigoration of the state pension system or SERPS. Indeed, government thinking envisaged that SERPS would eventually be replaced by 2SPs. The general point that comes out of our consideration of the privatization of pensions concerns the transformation of structures of saving and welfare that has played itself out in the post-war period. Collective provision appears to be fatally compromised: ‘pension provision now lies with the individual worker who no longer relies upon . . . Social Security’ (Langley, 2009, p. 67). The developments that we have been studying relate to the ways in which responsibility for funding retirement has been taken out of the hands of the state. PYG schemes ‘miss[ed] opportunities’ for developing capital markets under political control (Langley, 2009, p. 46). As we will see, the funding of pensions is now increasingly dependent on financial markets which have largely escaped regulation. The result of Conservative and New Labour pension reforms has been to shift responsibility for pension provision to individuals. The state retains only a limited responsibility to prevent the ‘low income workers’ (Langley, 2009, p. 36) slipping below the poverty line in their retirement. We need to further examine the privatization of pensions.

Pensions, Law and Finance Capital The privatization of pensions is an integral element of the reworking of the welfare state. To understand this dynamic we can make reference to the work of Minns. Elaborating Altvater’s concept of arbitrage capitalism, Minns explains that this form of ‘profit taking’ is perhaps the purest form of capitalism. Profit appears to be produced without the need to rely directly on labour or indeed the production process. However, as Minns pithily puts it: ‘[f]inancial returns [are not] a surrogate for economic or social health’ (Minns, 2001, p. 115). The language of rates of return, the assessment of the ‘financial return’ on an investment distracts us from other, more meaningful ways in which economic growth can be understood (Minns, 2001, p. 110). The problem is the hidden costs of a financial system that makes vast profits and disguises the social costs of its activities. For instance, privatization of pensions and financial restructuring have led to a growth in acquisitions and mergers that may make a great deal of money for investors, but are unproductive as far as the wider economy is concerned (Minns, 2001, p. 120). During 1982–95, only 2 per cent of ‘stock market turnover’ in the United Kingdom went to provide ‘new capital for companies’ (Minns, 2001, p. 111). This capital was largely used up in restructuring corporate

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debts and paying dividends. Very little was invested in the ‘productive’ capacity of companies. Evidence suggests that investment tends towards the facilitation of ownership transfers or the purchase of former publically owned assets, rather than the development of productive areas of economy (Minns, 2001, p. 113). This takes us to the problem of ‘hot money’ or ‘flight capital’. Hot money is money that moves rapidly in and out of national economies. It is not invested in long-term projects or in services or infrastructures (Minns, 2001, p. 29).15 Hot money is immensely liquid and can be ‘de-invested’ from one economy and reinvested in another if a higher rate of return seems likely. The consequences of these rapid movements of capital can be devastating for a national economy.16 Hot money affects investment in businesses, as well as the ability to develop social infrastructures such as hospitals. In other words, it impacts upon the ‘social conditions of production’. What can be done? Reflecting on the US experience at the close of the 1980s, Ghilarducci concluded that union activities on pension provision and control of pension trusts had ‘[laid] bare the central fact that labour creates capital (not only from the sweat of workers’ brows, but . . . through deductions from their pay) and that capital is not always invested to advance worker interests’ (Ghilarducci, 1992, p. 131). Although not relying on Ghilarducci’s analysis, the ILO has drawn attention to similar points. Studies of ‘functional income distribution’ show that, despite increases in productivity, capital’s share of national income is much greater than that of labour.17 The ILO argue that this is because social security payments have been made less generous and harder to obtain. At the same time, tax revenues from corporate capital and higher income earners have declined. The proportion of money paid in taxes by lower income groups has also risen. Particularly marked is income insecurity among old-age pensioners. Rates of chronic poverty have also shown significant increases. Although shares of national income claimed by middle-class groups have remained roughly equal, this group has been affected by the cost of private health care.18 It is difficult to draw any simple conclusions from these figures. The ILO’s research suggests that greater regulation and taxation of capital would be in the interests of most people. However, the distinction between labour’s interests in regulated markets and capital’s desire for unregulated markets is not clear cut. This is because capital markets are now directly tied to the way in which welfare pensions are funded. Given the fact that deregulation has produced ‘social security capital’ there can be no easy

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distinction between ‘evil and unaccountable’ capital and capital that is (perhaps now irretrievably) linked to the ongoing viability of pension provision (Minns, 2001, p. 33). Indeed, during the wave of deregulation and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, capital markets were buoyed by governments transferring assets out of public ownership and into the hands of private investors. Welfare capital no longer comes from conventional sources such as general taxation of individuals and corporations, bank and central government borrowing. Pension provision is bound up with investment in financial markets. This fact opens up the possibility of a new politics of pensions. There is clearly a need for ways of creatively thinking about how investment can be controlled. Assessing the opportunities for developing such strategies requires further analysis of the structure of pension funds and international investment. Minns points out that the drive to open up and introduce capital markets suits the Anglo-American model of pension provision.19 Lying behind this model is an assertion that the ‘free movement of capital’ is essential to economic growth and the expansion of the global economy (Minns, 2001, p. 78). And there is big money to be made. The management fees paid by contributors to financial managers for the ‘estimated $10–12,000 billion worldwide pensions assets’ are ‘equivalent to at least twelve times the total public pensions bill in Greece, more than four times the total public pensions bill for Belgium, more than the figure for France and more or less equivalent to that of Germany’ (Minns, 2001, p. 80). These figures are underestimates, as they leave out the revenue earned by associated activities relating to takeovers and advice on privatization schemes, during 1977–98. As these fees are paid out of public funds, the financial services sector has made a great deal of money from taxpayers; a ‘de facto subsidisation of private welfare’ (Minns, 2001, p. 81). One might question whether or not these fees are taken into account in calculating whether or not state management is more or less inefficient than that provided by private firms. Pension funds are managed by IFIs (international financial institutions) such as banks, mutual funds and insurance companies. Studies show that, at least in the United Kingdom, the same banks and insurance companies were involved in giving advice on both the privatization of pensions and corporate takeovers. Similar patterns can be observed in the EU (Minns, 2001, p. 80).20 The advice that these banks and companies give relates to the benefits of capital markets as ways of ‘disciplining’ the management of companies through their stock market price. IFIs, thus, have a vested interest in sponsoring and providing services for corporate takeovers and mergers.21

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Critics have pointed to the ‘concentration’ that takes place in the financial services industry. This has left a small number of international firms in control of funds equivalent to ‘the size of US GDP’ (Minns, 2001, p. 28). This raises the problem of control. Blackburn’s invocation of Gogol’s ‘dead souls’ describes pension holders who have little or no control over the pension funds in which they have invested. Nevertheless, the top pension funds in 2000 were made up of contributions from ‘teachers and other public employees’ with ‘employees of major corporations’ also represented.22 These funds, ‘amassed by relatively modest people’ are in the hands of ‘pension fund management institutions’ (Minns, 2001, p. 110). Blackburn concludes that ‘the limited rights of the policy holders or members, all conspire to ensure that pension funds will be “grey capital”. Pension funds exist in an economic and legal limbo’ (Minns, 2001, p. 115). Under trust law, control of a trust rests with trustees. Trustees make use of consultancies to appoint fund managers. Fund managers do not ‘own’ the pension assets and trustees can shield themselves from any bad investments by fund managers through showing that they took advice. As fund managers are employed by institutions, the control mechanisms presently in place make them more ‘responsive’ to the shareholders that own fi nancial institutions than to the pensioners of the funds that they manage.23 Within this structure the ‘policy holders’ whose money is at stake have relatively little protection ‘because their rights and powers are weak and unclear’ (Minns, 2001, p. 121). Pensioners and policy holders have limited powers over trustees; ‘no direct . . . control over the assets which are held to finance their pensions’ (Minns, 2001, p. 123). Furthermore, pensioners cannot make use of the ‘self-help’ remedy of ‘cashing in’ their pensions, as the terms of the pension deed often prohibit such a course of action or make it prohibitively expensive. Arguably, the entire legal framework of trust law is ill-suited to the needs of the pension holder. As it was developed mainly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to manage family wealth tied up in small trusts, it has failed to develop the mechanisms to control large institutional management agencies. The arcane debate over the nature of the beneficial rights of pensioners has not assisted the development of a set of clear concepts that would articulate the precise nature of pensioners’ interests in a trust fund. Recent case law has also denied that rights can be held by ‘the collective entity of policy holders’ (Minns, 2001, p. 129). These problems point to the need for much greater regulation of pensions. Although some trade unionists have been slow to realize the possibilities that pension funds offer, others, such as Rudolf Meidner, were

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more imaginative. Meidner was a Swedish trade union economist who came up with a proposal to fund secondary pensions without increasing general taxation. Meidner’s plan was based on the requirement that corporations above a certain size would issue shares to their own workers and to regional bodies to invest in ‘wage earner funds’. These funds would remain invested in the relevant corporations. The income derived would be used in socially beneficial ways and cover pension provision (Blackburn, 2002, p. 14). Meidner’s plan enjoyed some popular support, but business interests mobilized against it before the 1982 elections and managed to convince the electorate that it would merely increase union power. Commentators have suggested that had the Swedish Social Democratic Party made it clear that the plan would operate in the general interest, it would have been easier to refute the arguments of detractors. With the Social Democratic Government out of office, Meidner’s plan failed to materialize. Blackburn notes that funds that had been built up in the wage earner funds (£1.8 billion) were eventually used to ‘found a variety of scholarly research institutes’, thus showing ‘a modest outcome [for] the scheme’s potential for underwriting social expenditure’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 16). The Meidner plan suggests a way forward but, given its failure, how can contemporary issues in pension investments be approached? The key political and policy objective is to show that investments have to be subject to restrictions to limit the problem of flight capital and profiteering. Blackburn has put forward a programme of reforms to enable regulation of pensions and investment in the economy. He argues that governments should take the lead on pre-funding and universal secondary pensions and that the public pension should be enhanced and ‘indexed to earnings’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 479). Government policy should also focus on the creation of secondary pensions for all ‘over a certain age’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 479) and include entitlements for those either marginalized from pension schemes or unable to afford contributions in the first place. This approach would probably mean raising income tax, but evidence suggests that there would be broad public support for increases if specifically ‘earmarked’ taxes were linked to the creation of a pension regime and co-ordinated public expenditure on health care and child poverty (Blackburn, 2002, p. 468). While general taxation could generate more revenues, it would also be necessary to put in place other mechanisms such as windfall taxes on ‘commercial property values’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 477). Blackburn proposes that companies should either issue ‘new shares’ or release at least a 10–20 per cent proportion of their profits to an existing

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trust fund (as in the United States) or a ‘range of regional pension boards’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 469). The political gamble is that popular dissatisfaction with privatization, ‘deregulation and outsourcing’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 471) would lend support to such a re-definition of the role of the state. The ‘bail outs’ of failing banks and funds, which, despite the rhetoric of the ‘small state’ are a prevalent part of privatized regimes, would undoubtedly have to continue, but state intervention could be explicitly linked to preventing bad practices such as speculation and poor management. The pension system could also mitigate the worst of market excesses. While it would be unwise to use investment money to prop up failing businesses, experience has shown that regional regeneration can take place, and investment in education, transport and new business is a good use of funds (Blackburn, 2002, p. 481). A case can be made for investing funds in economic projects such as the development of social infrastructure. These projects have not proved popular for commercial investors because they require long-term investments of capital. Encouraging social investment would require governments to issue bonds in which pension funds could invest. If a given project proved successful, for example in regional regeneration, then a fund could also claim a proportion of the relevant taxes deriving from the resurgent economic growth. However, reforming pension provision requires more than state action on investment practices. Legal reforms are also necessary. The fundamental idea is that funds need to be made ‘answerable . . . to their own members and to the community as a whole’ (Blackburn, 2002, pp. 473–4). Broader accountability could be based on a ‘social audit’, which would give a fund a chance of belonging to a register that entitled a pension fund to certain tax privileges. Member representation on management boards would be required as a threshold consideration for these privileges. Action would also be necessary to curb the fees paid to fund managers and to limit ‘exorbitant executive pay and outrageous rewards for money managers’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 481). These interventions could be achieved through member activism and mandating management not to vote for boards who acted irresponsibly (Blackburn, 2002, p. 482). Tighter regulation of the industry, and particularly of derivatives and hedge funds, could make use of present developments and initiatives. The former German finance minister Hans Michel has suggested that hedge funds should no longer be exempt from disclosure requirements (Blackburn, 2002, p. 483) and that ‘short selling’ (borrowing shares and selling them

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with the intention of decreasing their price) should be tightly regulated (Blackburn, 2002, p. 483). Others have suggested that as derivatives are ‘undisclosed and unregulated contracts’, they should not be enforced by law. The key would be to overhaul the way in which funds were audited. The fundamental point is that ‘pension fund trustees, and any fund managers they appoint, are rendered answerable to policy holders or plan members rather than to company boards’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 483). These are radical proposals and we need to assess what might be possible in present political conditions. Does the recession change everything? Market de-regulation was a significant factor in the credit crisis.24 In terms of our analysis, the process of de-regulation has led to the dominance of one form of capital – finance capital – over the other forms that capital takes. This might be the ‘purest’ form, the most profitable way of increasing the value of capital, but it is de-linked entirely from social relations of production. Building on our arguments in the previous chapter, and elaborating the insights above, we want to suggest that the present activities of the trade unions suggest that they might be important players in pushing for a shift in economic power.

Pensions and the Credit Crisis: The Response of the Trade Unions In the wake of the economic crisis of 2008–9, The TUC, and other unions, such as GMB and UNISON have been active in presenting themselves as the representatives of a coherent political and economic position. The position of the unions is based on arguing for investment in the economy, the need for regulation of financial markets and a series of other proposals from a permanent tax on banker’s bonuses to taxes on financial institutions. The unions acknowledge that broader failures of a regulatory regime has led to ‘casino capitalism’. What is required is a ‘New Social Deal’ – harking back to Aneurin Bevan’s ‘new dispensation’ and the reconstruction after the Great Depression in the United States. One important element would be a strengthening of collective bargaining to allow a ‘countervailing pressure in relation to the financial world and unthinking shareholder value’.25 New thinking would be required on labour markets which after a decade or so of reforms are ‘flexible’ but are certainly not ‘secure’.26 Action would also need to be taken to prevent mass redundancies and the ‘hollowing out’ of unemployment benefit by ‘years of structural reform’ and ‘precarious job practices’.27 The proposed New Deal explicitly associates

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the reform of employment practices with ‘strengthening and broadening unemployment benefit systems’ and guaranteeing jobs for the young. The publication of Lord Hutton’s review in 2011 provides a focus for the struggle over pensions that meshes with these calls for reform of labour markets. Hutton’s review addressed the structure and sustainability of pensions in the public sector. It was driven by a desire to clear away ‘myths’ and address underlying problems. Hardly surprisingly, Hutton drew attention to the rising costs of public pensions and the longevity of pensioners; costs, he argued, that were being borne by the taxpayer. He also asserted that final salary schemes tended to provide disproportionate awards to those who retired at the top of their professions, rather than those whose working lives were more modest in achievement. Hutton argued that there was a ‘danger of an iron curtain between private and public sectors’ that would limit ‘labour market mobility’.28 Hutton’s main proposal for reform concerned final salary schemes for employees in the public sector. He recommended that final salary schemes should be replaced with a new kind of pension that links pension benefits and entitlements to an individual’s average earnings over their career, rather than on a final salary. The TUC’s response to Hutton has been measured. Rather than denounce the report in its entirety, the TUC has expressed concerns that the Government will simply ‘cherry pick’ proposals that could be used to legitimize further attempts to make workers in the public sector work longer for less.29 Figures used by the Government to suggest that the pension’s deficit is out of control have also been questioned. If pension liabilities are calculated over the long term, rather than seen as falling due in the short term, then a different picture emerges of sustainable investments; a situation confirmed by independent research published by the National Audit Office.30 Picking up on Hutton’s observation that public schemes enjoy ‘high levels of participation’ and anxieties about a ‘race to the bottom’ if private sector patterns are imposed on the public sector, 31 the TUC has attacked government proposals to implement the privatization of public pension provision. The TUC has used the report as a focus to draw attention to other inequities in pension provision. For instance, the pension of the average company director is presently 26 times that of a pension under average Occupational Pension Trusts (OPT) schemes. Directors have retained control over the more generous defined benefits (DB) schemes, while the same schemes are either being withdrawn from employees or access to them is being restricted. Retirement ages also show evidence of inequality: the

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average age of retirement for company directors is 60, while for employees it is 66. The present legal and regulatory regimes still fails to provide transparency for pension arrangements. Despite the changes under the 2005 Act, it remains difficult to determine the costs that are levied for the management of pension trust funds. The response to Hutton is only one plank in a broader set of strategies to ‘hold corporate leaders to account’. One way of doing this is to pressurize funds to make use of ‘do no harm’ clauses. Such clauses ‘require fund managers . . . to satisfy pension fund trustees that their investment decisions are not causing systemic harm to the financial system’.32 A second innovation is in the area of worker capital stewardship. Worker capital stewardship schemes make use of economically targeted investments or encourage pension funds to generate returns for their members while supporting job creation and development of public infrastructure. Various organizations are developing both the institutions and the cross-border connections necessary to allow the investment of ‘workers capital assets’ such as Union pension funds in ‘international solidarity capital networks’ (Croft, no date, p. 6). Such activities are not without precedent. They can be traced back to proposals such as the international disinvestment campaign against the South African apartheid regime (Croft, no date, p. 7). As well as having roots in the trade union movement, the principles that structure much contemporary investment thinking are drawn from the UN’s Environmental Programme’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). UNEP FI thinking on responsible investment defines responsible investment as ‘the incorporation of environmental, social and governance analysis into investment decision making’ (p. 13), principles that are as applicable to the activities of pension funds as they are to any investor (p. 13/14).

The Politics of Pensions Our argument so far suggests that there is opposition to the financialization of pensions. We are not seeking to argue that the financialization of pensions can somehow be halted, and pension provision switched back to the state. We are more concerned with how markets can be regulated and how pension funds can be used to further social investment. The two sections above argue that the unions are central to such strategies. This is, of course, deeply problematic, not least because it creates a rather simplistic opposition between capital and labour. Outside of the Labour movement critical thinkers are sceptical of claims that a collective subject called ‘labour’ exists to challenge the financialization of economy. In order to

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move our argument forward we need to look at these claims in a little more detail. The point is not that the unions cannot form a critical voice against forms of financialization of pensions, nor that they have been unsuccessful in developing strategies to defend the interest of their members or wider points of principle. Rather, it is important that other forms of dissent or opposition are taken into account. As not all workers are members of unions, it is sensible to consider other social groups and organizations that represent the interest of pensioners. There is a second theme to bear in mind. While innovative forms of opposition and creative ways of directing and controlling finance capital require new ways of thinking about politics, we should not abandon more conventional approaches as there are resources within conventional politics that can address central matters of concern. Our argument in this section will develop as follows. We will examine the way in which a politics of pensions could draw on all the social actors and the forms of politics that we have been considering throughout this book. Our objective is to show that there are ‘multiple forms of dissent’ (Langley, 2009, p. 142) that share at least some concerns in common. Throughout the chapter, we have made references to Labour thinking on pensions. In case New Labour thinking appears to exhaust the resources that a progressive centre left party could draw on, we want to briefly suggest that Labour thinking is much richer than the New Labour legacy might suggest. For instance, the 1991 Policy Review was critical of the city and its failure to invest in British industry. The review recommended that: ‘fund trustees might be trained to exercise close control over their fund managers with a view towards ensuring that they took a longer-term view of their investments in British industry’. Furthermore, the review pointed out that ‘as shareholders . . . often have little commitment to the long-term survival of the enterprise that they own’ (Labour Party, 1993, p. 11), fiscal measures to discourage speculative share-buying might go some way to change attitudes. The fundamental objective, however, was to alter a situation where ‘financial institutions appear to regard themselves as dealers in company shares rather than long term owners’ (Thompson, 2003, p. 5). Policy proposals focused on reforms of the Bank of England to facilitate affordable and long-term investment, and recommended changes to company law that, following German and Japanese precedents, would allow representation of investors on company boards (Thompson, 2003, p. 262). These potentially ‘radical ideas’ were themselves reformed when Labour took office in 1997, and the Policy Review’s agenda watered down by a

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reluctance to countenance ‘heavy handed legislation’ (Thompson, 2003, p. 269), and a refusal to take on the city (Thompson, 2003, p. 270). Despite the reluctance of New Labour to see through the recommendations of the Policy Review, there were developments in pension law that arguably enhanced the voice of pensioners in OPT. One of the major innovations of the Pension Act 1995 was the Member Nominated Trustee (MNT) to ensure that ‘the interests and views of scheme members as potential beneficiaries are constantly kept in mind’.33 The TUC has affirmed the role of MNTs, stressing that they represent the interests of a pension fund’s beneficiaries ‘who are the ultimate owners of the investments held in their pension scheme’.34 In this sense, the MNT goes some way to countering the weaknesses in trust law that we discussed above. The Pensions Act 2005 further developed this scheme, making it more difficult for employees to opt out of the requirement for member trustees or to retain overall control of the pensions scheme. By 2008, more than 86 per cent of pension scheme boards had one-third member nominated trustees, and the TUC pushed (and is still campaigning) for boards to have 50 per cent member nominated trustees.35 The importance of member trustees was affirmed by the Pensions Regulator in 2009 as an essential element of ‘good pension scheme governance and administration’.36 In 2010, Brendan Barber championed the role of member nominated trustees: ‘[w]hether it’s putting pressure on fund managers to become more active, questioning investment decisions or raising awareness among pension fund members of the issues at stake, MNT can make a difference’.37 There are many forms of dissent to investment that do not focus on the trade unions or shareholder activism. Given the constraints of this chapter, we will focus on the arguments of the National Pensioners Convention (NPC) to get at least some sense of a particularly creative and radical approach to pension provision. The Convention has argued against many of the myths that the Government has pushed in order to support its drive towards private pensions; in particular the claim that older people are a burden on society to be supported by costly state pensions. This is not only ‘insulting to those who have already undertaken decades of paid and unpaid work in and outside the home’ but underestimates what older people do provide to society in terms of both paid and unpaid work (NPC 2009, para. 2).38 The NPC has pointed out that ‘affordability’ of pensions relates to the ‘wealth produced’ by an economy, and a set of decisions made about its distribution. Governments have failed to use resources in a consistent and focused way to develop the capacities of older people. For instance, the privileging of vocational education effectively limits the options of

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pensioners who seek to ‘stay active in later life’ (NPC, 2009, para. 9) and the present rules on carer’s allowances mean that those older people who are caring for their partners cannot cope. Supporting carers would mean that fewer older people are institutionalized. One major demand relates to the state pension. The costs associated with an ageing population have been exacerbated by the decisions of both Conservative and Labour Governments to run down the state pension and rely on expensive and ineffective means tests. The resulting poverty created for old people who do not have sufficient private provision drives up the cost of their care. The NPC argue that it is false economy to move to private provision as it disguises the social costs of contracting state pensions. In the light of the recent collapse of Southern Cross, one of the largest private providers of care homes in Britain, the NPC’s call for the creation of a National Care Service, funded from general taxation, seems both sensible and prescient.

Conclusion In this chapter we have argued that innovative strategies need to be developed to control welfare capital and to ensure social investment. These strategies are a response to the politics of privatization and de-regulation. Our arguments have stressed the need for radical reforms in pension fund regulation and labour markets.39 We have examined the response of trade unions in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. We were particularly concerned with the Meidner plan and Blackburn’s elaboration of proposals for developing forms of regulation and control. The next chapter will pick up on these themes: is welfare possible within a globalized economy?

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8 There, outside all caring . . . Welfare, Immunity and Globalization ‘Poverty is the biggest brutality’ (Slogan on a protestor’s banner in Syntagma Square, Athens, July 2011)

Introduction This chapter examines the constitution of welfare in a period of globalized capitalism where the boundaries of nation states have become open to flows of people, services and commodities. Globalization has not, however, brought an end to the nation state. Indeed, the international discourses on welfare that we will examine involve nation states in multilayered networks of governance. We are concerned, therefore, with a re-definition: a reworking of welfare in a globalized economy that is characterized by tensions between liberalized markets, European solidarity rights and international human rights.1 Our argument will focus, first of all, on the EU. The EU provides a ‘form of governance beyond the nation state’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 274) where ‘European social welfare systems [have] serve[d] as a model’ for international governance of a social market. Although Europe is central to our problematic, we must also look to a level of governance that operates at a global level. We will study the complex interactions between discourses of human rights, in particular the human right to social security, and discourses on Social Risk Management (SRM) promulgated by the

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World Bank (the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), hereafter the World Bank). While the World Bank (most recently) has started to see its ‘mission’ in human rights terms, a human right to welfare still has critical potential. For instance, in 2008, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) requested that ‘the international financial institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, take into account the right to social security in their lending policies, credit agreements, structural adjustment programmes and similar projects’ (CESCR, General Comment No. 19, 2008, para. 83). To organize our thesis we will return to the notion of immunization. Immunization will help us to understand how tensions between a neoliberal market order and a social order that does not operate in market terms has been exacerbated by globalization. We will tentatively identify the immunizing resources that can protect the social order from the worst excesses of the market. As Van Langendonck has asserted, a globalized economy offers opportunities for new forms of welfare to take shape: ‘[s]olidarity within one occupational group, or within one nation, is limited solidarity’ (Van Langendonck, 2007, p. 10). We will argue that the regime of international human rights provides, at least to some extent, a framework for intervention in markets to ensure the ‘regulation [and] redistribution’ of resources.2 While we do not yet think it is possible to speak in terms of ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 57), we will elaborate the fragile sense in which a concept of international social justice might be taking shape within the globalized market.

Globalization and the Welfare State Globalization of trade and finance has de-centred national economies and integrated them more deeply into transnational flows of personnel, goods and services.3 The Keynesian consensus that assumed governments could significantly influence national economic demand appears to be over.4 Since the 1980s, supply-side economics have replaced demand management, anti-inflationary policies have lowered levels of taxation and public assets have been privatized. The terms in which the welfare state had operated have been dramatically redefined. These economic changes can be linked to the development of trade blocs in Asia, China and Latin America. The competitive advantage of such developing regions is cheap labour. Employers and states are not ‘burdened’ with social security. The mobility of capital and outsourcing also tends to decrease the very government

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revenues that would have provided social security. What do these globalizing processes mean for the welfare state? It is not the case that globalization has destroyed the nation state. Quite the opposite. Globalizing processes require co-ordination by national authorities.5 As far as welfare is concerned, it would be fair to suggest that although the state’s room for manoeuvre has been limited, the welfare state is not in terminal crisis.6 Despite the politics of privatization and de-regulation that characterized both Conservative and New Labour governments, the state has retained a broad role in economic management and welfare provision. As we have argued, spending on welfare as a percentage of GDP remained broadly stable. We might even suggest that privatization of the welfare state offers new opportunities for investment and profit. As Harvey has pointed out, this relationship between welfare and capital is not new. The creation of the welfare state in 1945 brought an end to the crises of under-consumption that were important factors underlying the depression of the 1930s. Systems of social security contributed to a period of prosperity and economic growth that lasted for at least a decade after 1945. In more recent years the sale of public assets under both Conservative and New Labour governments, the creation of quasi-markets in health and the privatization of higher education have opened up new opportunities for private capital. As we pointed out in Chapter 5, a great deal of social security administration is now in the hands of private companies, and pension provision is inseparable from world financial markets. Provision of welfare is a good way of making money. We want to stress that there can be no strict separation between the needs of capital accumulation and social expenditure on welfare. The state sector and the private sector are interlinked in complex and inseparable ways. This is an inherent tendency of welfare capitalism and leads to an ongoing set of tensions between capital and labour, a continuing struggle over the terms of social and economic reproduction. It is difficult to see how these contradictions could ever be resolved. The pressing issue for progressive thinking is to articulate the ways in which the inescapable antagonisms can be creatively exploited. This requires a slightly modified way of understanding the contradictions of the welfare state. Reference to the work of Esposito and the immunity thesis is apposite, as it will provide us with a way of describing what is at stake. For Esposito’s argument to make sense within the terms of this chapter, we need to see how it illuminates the problematic of the welfare state in a globalized economy. To what extent does an international welfare order offer the possibility of a protection of social integration within the terms of

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an internationalized market economy? Can we be more precise? Consider the following argument. National welfare states used the ‘fiscal powers’ of government to shelter citizens from ‘excessive market risks’. These market risks have been exacerbated by globalization; greater levels of ‘social insurance are required to limit the social costs inflicted on national economies by international economic integration (Rodrik, 1997, p. 6). To take one example: liberalization of trade must be offset by a firm commitment to at least some concept of social assistance and social protection: ‘the combination of liberalization policies with redistributive regulation could prove not only a social imperative, but a condition for political sustainability as well’ (WTO, 2004, p. 9). Welfare both legitimizes liberalization and opens a space where social protection can be affirmed within a market order. The precise relationship between these two objectives can only be understood in specific contexts. For instance, liberalization of trade necessitates governments to strike ‘the right balance’ between ‘a more socially acceptable distribution of wealth’ and non-interference with ‘the way in which the market sets prices and efficiently distributes resources’ (WTO, 2004, p. 151). A great deal depends on how such strictures are interpreted at a national level. So, we need to be aware that an order of human rights and international governance has grown up at the same time as international markets in trade and finance. However, we need to be careful with this thesis. Ruggie has persuasively argued that ‘regimes’ of international governance are ‘neither determinative nor irrelevant’ to transnational movements of ‘trade and money’ (Ruggie, 1982, p. 383). Although Ruggie was not considering welfare his point is relevant when we consider the fragile sense of welfare beyond the nation state. There is nothing that resembles the welfare state at an international level. As Yeates has argued, considerations of welfare and social policy must take place in a ‘pluralistic and multi-levelled institutional framework of global Governance’. These networks of governance are ‘decoupled’ from the nation state by the ‘greater involvement by supranational and international institutions in the political management of globalization’ (Yeates, 1999, p. 389). Cabrera has made similar arguments, but focused them on the EU. She argues that the EU can be understood as a ‘multi level system guided by principles of supremacy and subsidiarity’ (Cabrera, 2004, p. 86). Although the EU is an ongoing experiment in the elaboration of a supra-national legal order, and has profound problems of democratic accountability, it does at least offer a working understanding of how nations and regions can be co-ordinated under central institutions. Moreover, the EU contains mechanisms that serve to distribute resources

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within the Euro-region and encourage economic growth and social opportunities in less developed countries and regions. So, caution is necessary in assessing the EU as a ‘welfare regime’. Even though the EU is perhaps the most extensive experiment in international welfare rights, it does not provide welfare as such: ‘[t]here is no European welfare law which grants individual claims for payment from Brussels; there are no direct taxes payable to the EC and hence available to be disbursed in a social welfare budget . . . and there is, moreover, no welfare bureaucracy in Brussels worthy of its name’ (Leibfried, 2000, p. 45). In the light of Yeates’ arguments, the EU’s concern with welfare can best be seen as co-ordinatory; overseeing the welfare provision of member states and attempting to influence and guide their development according to the objectives of the Union. We will see that EU welfare ‘policy’ raises some broad questions about the nature of the European social market. Our concern is the extent to which we can think of EU welfare policy as immunizing against a liberalized single market dedicated to the free movement of goods, personnel and services. The traditions of the EU suggest that there is a continuing commitment to welfare provision. The European Commission has asserted that the commitment to social security and assistance that runs through the different political and social traditions of the member states7 animates the spirit of the EU. The free movement of goods, personnel and services has to be embedded in a transnational system of benefits and entitlements. This does not mean that discretion in the design and implementation of social security systems is taken out of the hands of the nation state. Coherence across the Union can include regional variations, as long as certain core values are preserved. Given the nature of the common market, one important element in this framework is the co-ordination of entitlements for migrant workers within Europe. We will argue below that this feeds into the articulation and development of solidarity rights within the European single market. As we do not have the space to consider the rulings of the European Court on this matter, we are somewhat limited in the degree to which we can examine this theme. Our objective, therefore, is to provide a sense of overview: we are concerned with the way in which the Union holds together a commitment to solidarity and welfare with a market order.

Solidarity Rights and the Single Market So, can we think of the EU social market as a ‘filter through which wealth is redistributed’? Is it possible to ‘theorise’ the advent of ‘the welfare state

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at the supranational level’? (Ross and Borgmann-Prebil, 2010, p. 41). This would require a Europe that challenges the idea that the EU is a freetrade block competing in a world market. It would be necessary to go beyond the single currency and a neutral central bank, to look to ways of co-ordinating taxation and welfare policies (Habermas, 2001, p. 100). The Union has made progress in creating forms of common regulation across member states, and these could be further expanded into economic policy and social security provision; a process that is itself already underway. This could only be achieved if the European political system could ‘summon the necessary political resources to impose redistributive duties on powerful participants in the market’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 98). The reality of a ‘social Europe’ is thus a question of political will, and of institutional structure. What is the European Social Model (ESM)? Although Jacques Delors was one of the first to ‘popularize’ the term (Jespen and Pascual, 2005, p. 234), it can be traced to the European Social Commission’s ‘White Paper on Social Policy’ (1994). Although there is controversy over the precise meaning of the ESM, there are perhaps a number of key themes. The term describes, first of all, the traditions of social protection that run, albeit in different ways, through the cultures of the member states of the EU (Begg and Berghman, 2002, p. 180). The ESM builds on these traditions, as it seeks to balance ‘sustainable economic growth’ with ‘social cohesion’ (Jespen and Pascual, 2005, p. 232). It is worth noting that the ESM is ‘more than welfare state provision’ and describes ‘collective decisions on the labour-income nexus’, or, the broader way in which European societies are committed to ‘minimum wage’ legislation, collective bargaining and the management of flexible labour markets. The ESM can thus be most broadly linked with ‘the conviction that earning one’s living through work is the basis upon which social welfare should be built’ (Jespen and Pascual, 2005, p. 236). Indeed, if we look at the foundational treaty of the EU, we find that alongside the commitment to the creation of a European market founded on the free movement of goods and services, there was an affirmation of welfare rights. Article 136 of the treaty refers to the ‘fundamental social rights’ and ‘proper social protection’ that come out of a ‘dialogue between management and labour’ and ‘the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion’. Article 137 goes into a little more detail: 137(1)(c) places ‘social security and social protection of workers’ to the centre of the treaty’s social provisions. Social security and protection is linked to two points: ‘the combating of social exclusion’ (at sub-section j) and the need for ‘the modernization of social protection systems’.

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Development of protection for social rights gathered pace throughout the 1980s and became central to the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 1999. Annex IV returns to the foundational values of the Union.8 The Charter of Fundamental Rights defines welfare rights as solidarity rights. Solidarity rights extend beyond welfare, to protect workers in a number of fields. The Charter articulates a regime where workers are entitled to a degree of control over their conditions of employment.9 Furthermore, Article 34 guarantees social security and social assistance. The Article defines ‘social security benefits’ and ‘social services protection’ as covering ‘maternity, illness, industrial accidents, dependency or old age’ and in certain instances, unemployment. The next paragraph elaborates the important requirement that entitlement to benefits is extended to ‘[e]veryone residing and moving legally within the European Union’. The final paragraph states the central principle: ‘the right to social and housing assistance’ has to ‘ensure a decent existence for all those who lack sufficient resources’. Such a right is necessary to ‘combat social exclusion and poverty’. Article 35 is free-standing and asserts the right to ‘preventive health care and the right to benefit from medical treatment’. It would thus appear that social rights are fundamental to the EU. The various charters link together rights and legitimacy, stressing that rights are central to the ongoing legitimization of the Union. As far as the EU is concerned, the fundamental issue is whether it can hold together its orientation to social solidarity and welfare alongside its commitment to economic growth and competitiveness. This is, in itself, a complex question. The present role of Union institutions is one of co-ordination rather than directly initiating change in member states. However, it has certainly presented itself as keen to sustain the social dimension of the community. The European Commission’s promulgation of a Social Agenda 2006–10 further clarifies these concerns. It goes under the banner: ‘[a] social Europe in the global economy: jobs and opportunities for all’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 33). The fundamental point is that ‘high standards of social protection have been a major contributory factor in Europe’s economic success [and] they should not be seen as optional extras or luxuries that can be dispensed with when times get hard’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 14). Social protection is ‘integral’ to the socio-economic model of the Union. The risk is that if Europe fails to achieve social solidarity as well as economic growth, wealth creation will rest in the hands of the few, and many will be condemned to social and economic exclusion. The new reality of welfare must be based on the assumption that ‘full employment cannot be

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taken for granted’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 14); rather, the ‘turbulent’ destruction and creation of jobs and the redefinition of the relations between service industries, manufacturing and agriculture are the new reality. The fundamental objective: ‘economic and social progress must go hand in hand’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 2). Europe is about ‘[c]ompetitiveness and solidarity’. The overriding requirement is to put in place a ‘Europe of opportunities’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 6). What do we make of this? In some ways it is difficult to offer a definitive statement on the discourse of social protection and social rights, as they are still in the process of development.10 Certainly, some commentators see social rights as having a ‘considerable potential as a transformative concept in developing a commitment to social justice as part of a revitalised and cosmopolitan EU’ (Ross and Borgmann-Prebil, 2010, p. 45). As this statement suggests, solidarity rights must themselves be seen as part of a wider set of questions about the meaning and direction of the EU. We could certainly suggest that the Union appears to be trying to immunize solidarity from the market. The Commission’s insistence on social dialogue with social partners, such as trade unions, usefully updates a perennial concern in social democracy. The fundamental difficulty is to show how solidarity is necessary for sustained economic growth, which must rest upon ‘human well-being’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 2). The critical question is, though, who are excluded from the social dialogue, and in whose terms is it primarily conducted? The Commission proposes that the appropriate ‘democratic forum’ for more wide-ranging ‘open and democratic’ dialogue needs to be put in place (The European Commission, 2005, p. 44). There are perhaps tensions between this openness and commitment to social dialogue, and the need to ‘make full use of the opportunities offered by liberalization’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 10). This would acknowledge the liberalization measures already being taken by member states, and stress merely the need to co-ordinate them. Indeed, the thinking of the Commission appears to support the acceleration of the process. The Commission recommends that member states ensure ‘[g]reater public awareness and acceptance that adjustments in the short-term are needed’ (The European Commission, 2005, p. 11) for long-term prosperity. There are other developments. The Commission has promised to reform the ‘wild west’ derivatives markets (Financial Times, September 2010) and to reform financial trading. Present Commission policy has inherited a principle developed within French politics, la responsibilisation de l’Economie, that is articulating its response to the credit crisis and

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the destruction of public finances. As the state is limited in the extent to which it can raise taxation and ‘compensate for social inequalities’, financial markets themselves have to ‘integrate social functions and refrain from discriminatory practices’.11 This suggests a new role for the state; a shift from its position as the creator and funder of welfare states through public law, to the use of private law and market regulation to ‘force’ commercial and financial institutions to abide by ‘principles of social solidarity’. Although it is too early to say if these ideas will reform financial markets, that such arguments are taking place suggests that there is an appreciation at the heart of Europe of the need to impose social responsibility on market actors. Indeed, the Commission’s commitment to welfare must be assessed in the context of its response to the banking crisis. The austerity packages that have been imposed on Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain suggest that the overriding objective is to severely restrain public spending to enable the restructuring of international capital. As Will Hutton has pointed out, the terms of the debt-relief packages provided by the EU and the IMF ‘includes the sacking of a fift h of Greece’s public sector workforce, swingeing tax increases and the biggest, fastest privatisation programme, relative to national output, ever mounted’.12 Such is the scale and intensity of the repayment programme that Greece has had to commit to spend ‘around 40% of its current GDP’ over the next three years; terms that approximate to the reparation payments that were demanded by the allies on Germany after the First World War. The real risk is that this approach effectively destroys the ‘compact’ between labour and capital where the costs attendant on that market liberalization are socialized by the welfare state (Ruggie, 1994, p. 5). The question of ‘whether Europe works as an effective system of solidarity [. . .] or simply sets a juridical framework to promote a greater degree of competition among them’13 must be resolved in favour of the requirements for free market reforms and the smooth flow of money.14 It is perhaps difficult to see at the moment whether or not a ‘postrecession’ order will emerge with the EU intact. If the political will is present, it is not inconceivable that terms could be imposed on banks and other agencies that would limit the destructive nature of financial speculation. A social Europe worthy of its name might grow out of such a political solution. It is important to reaffirm that way in which the tradition of ‘European . . . trust’ in the state, rather than the market could carry forward a challenge to the ‘individualistic ethos of market justice’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 276).

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Social Risk Management and the Human Right to Social Security Discourses on trade and financial liberalization are inseparable from assertions of rights to social security. This problematic sets up a complex set of tensions. The bodies dedicated to management of the global economy, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the IMF do not argue for the eradication of the welfare state. Indeed, there is a real appreciation that liberalization causes ‘pain’ for those who lose their jobs through globalization. There is a general appreciation that a functioning economy, at the world level, requires at least something of a safety net to prevent hardship in times of adaption to operate at national levels. The debate over social security and social protection is a complex one, and has to be seen in the context of the World Bank’s re-definition of itself and its mission. By 1998 the World Bank had begun to admit that policies inspired by the Washington consensus had not been entirely successful. It became necessary to look again at social policies that were built on ‘poverty reduction . . . and private sector participation in the delivery of public services’ (Holzmann et al., 2008, p. 3). The World Bank acknowledged the need for ‘[s]ocial safety nets’. Social safety nets rely on policies such as ‘emergency employment programmes, food distribution to children and vulnerable groups, and schemes of minimum income support’ (Holzmann et al., 2008, p. 98). They are distinct from more expansive models of welfare and social security. Social safety nets were conceived as part of a policy of SRM. We cannot consider the micro-management of SRM in this chapter due to limitations of space, but we can review some of the overarching principles: Within the social protection sector itself the risk management framework poses challenges in terms of rethinking existing public sector programs and expanding the range of interventions to provide better support for informal and market-based activities. (World Bank, 2001, p. xi) This sounds rather ominous. We are encountering an approach to the transformation of welfare that moves away from universal state-funded modes of delivery towards ‘informal’ mechanisms and the market. At least at the level of its theoretical presentation, SRM is not a form of market fundamentalism. Rather like World Bank Pension policy (that we examined in Chapter 7), it recommends a mixed ‘mode of delivery’ that preserves an

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important role for the state in the ‘war’ against poverty. The critical question relates to the extent to which SRM policies allow anything like the immunization of solidarity and social protection from market forces. To some degree SRM represents a new line of World Bank thinking. SRM broke with the consensus that social security was an ‘expensive luxury’ that depressed economic growth (Holzmann, Sherburne-Benz and Tesliuc, 2003, p. 2; Holzmann and Jorgensen, 1999). At a policy level, SRM was a response to the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s. The Bank and its advisers realized in 2001 that ‘high growth rates’ were not enough to bring about rising prosperity; moreover ‘covariate economic shocks’ (Holzmann et al., 2003, p. 3) soon destroy any advances made, unless ‘public support schemes’ are put in place. Thus, such schemes need to be implemented before economic crises when resources are available. Prompted by the G7, the World Bank was asked to develop ‘Social Principles’ and ‘Good Principles of Social Policy’ (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000, p. 73). This was christened an ‘ex-ante approach’ which ‘assessed the potential risks’ and put in place ‘social safety nets’. There are other factors feeding into the Bank’s championing of SRM. Globalization of trade results in certain benefits, but trade also produces risks that bear on the poorest most harshly. The gap between the ‘haves and have nots’ can be exacerbated by the necessary economic changes that allow a nation to exploit its comparative advantage (Holzmann and Jorgensen, 2000, p. 3). World Bank discourses on risk management reposition the state. The problem from the Bank’s perspective is not welfare as such; it is the way in which over generous benefits and top heavy systems of provision depress competitiveness (Holzmann et al., 2008, p. 8). The World Bank notes that in ‘OECD-type economies’, where welfare covers such concerns as ‘active labor market policy, social insurance and social assistance’, the fundamental problem is rising cost with an ageing population causing particular concern. Social security is ‘reactive’ and ‘over-emphasises the role of the public sector’ (World Bank, 1998, p. 8). However, it is not as if the public sector needs to be squeezed out completely. Problems of cost can relate to poorly managed and constructed social assistance and social protection systems. Forms of purely public provision that the Bank feels are appropriate are narrowly focused on the poor. We might conclude, then, that SRM discourses preserve only the most minimal sense of a public sphere and move welfare away from anything like solidarity rights. However, while we should not perhaps jump to the conclusion that this language represents the final phase in the ‘economization’ of social policy, we can note that we have travelled a long way from

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Titmuss’ understanding of welfare policy. These discourses sponsor the contraction of public provision of welfare in order to further the perceived advantages of the market. In comparison with our analysis of solidarity rights, they do not preserve any real sense in which social security is a fundamental right. Perhaps we could conclude that SRM discourses have not only limited public welfare, they have ‘facilitate[d] the massive privatisation of public industries’ and ‘public welfare structures’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 138). The World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) do not preserve a public area of provision; rather, they want to put these ‘resources’ to work (Marazzi, 2010, p. 76). For Hardt and Negri, ‘[e]economic production is going through a period of transition in which . . . the results of capitalist production are social relations and forms of life’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 131). This is a provocative statement, but what do Hardt and Negri mean by suggesting that capitalism now produces ‘social relations and forms of life?’ What sense might this statement make for our analysis of welfare? We could certainly build on Hardt and Negri to suggest that SRM discourses seek to redefine social security by limiting the role of the state and moving the responsibility for welfare to individuals. In some ways, this might be seen as ‘production’ of ‘forms of life’. However, we do need to be precise. SRM discourses are addressed to the state. SRM is an element in a complex of international governance. It would be hard to argue that they directly make for the production of anything; although one could agree that they have an indirect influence on economic reform to the extent that governments take them into account. It seems somewhat reductive to argue that it is capitalist production that produces forms of life. Perhaps Hardt and Negri’s point can be rethought: we are concerned with discourses about human life in which economic relationships are at stake. The critical question for us could be put as follows: given that we are concerned with international governance, what institutions and discourses are available that might sustain an alternative understanding of the relationship between welfare and economy? In order to answer this question we must balance two competing concerns: we cannot underestimate the power of bodies like the World Bank, and we cannot misunderstand the complexities of international governance. In the next section of the chapter, we will draw attention to human rights arguments that are critical of SRM approaches. For instance, Lamarche (2002) cites the International Social Security Association (ISSA) report from 1995 which drew attention to the challenges that social security faced from the reduction of benefits, privatization and the impact of IMF/World Bank policies. She links this with the final report

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from the Council of Europe on Human Dignity and Social Exclusion. The report argued that problems of poverty and exclusion should be linked to policies that cut back state-funded benefits. It is as if, inspired by powerful international agencies, the debate on social security is being moved sideways; away from any consideration of rights, and towards SRM programmes that shift the burden of risk to the individual and break down the degree to which the provision of social security is regulated or controlled.15 So, could we assert that the human right to welfare could be used to counter and limit the effects of SRM discourses? It is worth noting that IFIs (international financial institutions) are not hostile or dismissive towards human rights. Indeed, they seize upon the possibilities that human rights offer as a way of embedding policies.16 It is very much a question of how the human right to welfare is interpreted, and the degree to which international law presents a way of thinking about welfare that is distinct from that of the World Bank and the IMF. In order to assess this argument, we need to turn to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We then need to examine the ILO Convention 102 and the relevant articles of the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. There are two articles which state the human right to social security in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 22 provides that ‘Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security’. Article 25(1) states that everyone has the ‘right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control’.17 These rights can be interpreted in a broader context, in particular by reference to the conventions promulgated by the ILO. The Preamble of the 1919 Constitution (the Declaration of Philadelphia) draws particular attention to ‘the prevention of unemployment’, ‘the protection of the worker against sickness, disease and injury arising out of his employment’ and ‘provision for old age and injury’ (p. 15). Alongside the 1919 Convention, the most important point of reference is probably the Social Security Convention of 1952. The 1952 Convention is based on a ‘broad conception of social security’ (Kulke, Cichon and Pal, 2007, p. 16) and points towards welfare as a ‘public service for the citizenry at large’ (Kulke et al., 2007, p. 16). Social security is presented as ‘a basic human right[s], and a fundamental means for creating social cohesion’.18 Cutting against the more cautious approach of IFIs, the ILO has stressed that the Convention requires the ‘highest priority’ to be accorded to the extension of welfare provision in those nations where it is lacking. Social security provision has to

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ensure that benefits are available to households and individuals through ‘public or collective provision’. Benefits have to be targeted, ‘protecting against low or declining living standards’ and must take into account ‘a number of basic risks and needs’ rather than the more narrow focus of wages (Lamarche, 2002, p. 97). The ILO’s model also has an institutional element. There are ‘two fundamental requirements’ for social insurance systems. They must take the form of ‘an association based on trust’ (Lamarche, 2002, p. 98) and an effective administration that can both collect and distribute benefits. In order to get a more detailed sense of the human right to welfare, we must examine Article 9 of the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. Article 9 of the Covenant is a right to benefits that are not provided in market terms: they are the claims that one has on common resources by virtue of one’s citizenship in a national community. Article 9 can be understood as recommending welfare as a solidaristic and redistributive mechanism: ‘[s]ocial security, through its redistributive character, plays an important role in poverty reduction and alleviation, preventing social exclusion and promoting social inclusion’. Article 9 places clear duties on the state to preserve social provision. Article 9 specifies that social security has to be deployed and operate within a supervisory framework. This framework ensures that benefits and services – whether publicly or privately supplied – are not ‘subject to arbitrary and unreasonable restrictions’ (General Comment No. 19, 2008, para. 9). Social security systems must be established under ‘domestic law’ with oversight provided by a ‘public authority’ (General Comment No. 19, 2008, para. 11) and must cover the nine areas specified by Convention 102. Moreover, there is a broad definition of the adequacy levels of social provision, which assumes the context of the Covenant (Articles 10, 11 and 12) and the fundamental concept of human dignity (General Comment No. 19, 2008, para. 22). This, in turn, presupposes that there is a network of rules that can protect ‘the right to equal enjoyment of adequate protection from social risks and contingencies’. It is worth noting the language in which the human right to social security is framed. It is very different from that of risk management. Article 9 expresses itself in terms of dignity and the socially meaningful nature of and gives a clear sense of the human community that it attempts to protect. There is nothing ‘anti-market’ in these terms. Article 9 appears to be completely consistent both with forms of pluralistic welfare provision and market economy.19 However, Article 9 goes much further than SRM discourses in preserving some sense of public provision.

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What do we make of these arguments? How do they operate at the level of international governance? Those who champion the benchmarking role of the Convention argue that it strikes the right balance between universality and flexibility, and serves to set achievable targets for ‘social development’ (Kulke and López Morales, 2007, p. 17) by specifying a ‘general level’ adaptable to different ‘social and economic circumstances’. That the European Code of Social Security builds on the Convention is evidence of its ongoing relevance. However, we also have to be aware that the Convention is limited. It represents something of a ‘compromise between the old “Bismarckian” social insurance for workers, and the “new” “Beveridgian” social security for all’. The latter tradition would perhaps be closer to the language of Article 22, which specifies the right of ‘everyone’ to social security. It is worth noting that assumptions about work, gender and the role of the state are open to question in this model of welfare provision (Van Langendonck, 2007, p. 7). For all its limits, though, the Convention is clear in stating an account of welfare as a condition for ‘the well-being of workers [and] their families’. It also stresses the basic economic argument: welfare has direct economic benefits and enhances productivity. Strengthening the right to social security is a response to structural adjustment and globalization. A ‘flexible’ and ‘mobile’ labour force can only be created through social investment, by both governments and businesses. There are other issues we should take into account. In relation to the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, the General Comment on Article 9 affirms that social security has to go beyond the concept of the male ‘bread winner’ in full-time employment. This is itself a broad theme, but we can note that the General Comment specifically mentions workers in the ‘informal economy . . . domestic workers [and] homeworkers’ (General Comment No. 19, 2008, para. 31). However, the Article is not without its problems. Van Langendonck is particularly critical of the weakness of implementation provisions under the Covenant. Although there is an obligation on signatories to the Convention to report to the UN, there is no court to monitor or enforce compliance. Lamarche also provides a subtle appreciation of the inherent problems of social security systems: they contain ‘their own potential for discrimination’ that makes the right to social security a ‘paradox’. Although the Convention aims at ‘universal coverage’ it ‘authorises ratifying states to halt progress at the gate of modern forms of exclusion’. However, at the same time, ‘only social security conventions incorporate technical benchmarks aimed at guaranteeing the content of an economic right’ and ‘the

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level and duration of benefit’. Lamarche’s argument can be understood as an aspect of immunization. The minimum content for social security as a human right affirms the need for ‘collective funding’ (Lamarche, 2002, p. 103). We can appreciate that the human right to social security thus preserves essential features of a system of public funding. If the right also stresses that social security must cover ‘risks associated with health care, sickness benefits, survivor’s benefits and maternity benefits’ then we can also perhaps appreciate that it preserves the sense of public responsibility for the well-being of citizens.

Immunity and the Right to Welfare In the final phase of our argument, we want to return to the problematic of immunity. The immunity thesis appears to have been developed almost entirely with reference to the nation state; indeed, it presupposes the structure of sovereignty as the site in which immunity is articulated. What is the relevant ‘frame’ (Fraser, 2005, p. 70) for immunity in a period of globalization? We need to confront a central dilemma. The rights that we considered above are focused on the citizens of a nation state while the social costs of finance markets and international trade are transnational in nature and effect. How can we conceive of the relationship between the national and the transnational in terms of welfare rights? The resolution to this problem depends, at least in formal terms, on the extent to which international welfare rights enter into the jurisdictions of nation states. Whether or not a nation state commits itself to welfare rights depends on the extent to which it can negotiate two potentially conflicting sources of international governance: the advice of the IFIs on risk management, and the more generous approach to welfare that comes out of human rights discourse.20 We concluded the section above by suggesting that international welfare rights lack effective compliance mechanisms. A great deal of ‘cosmopolitan’ analysis of the reach of rights thus seems inappropriate. Although writers on international justice have developed sophisticated ways of understanding the liability of powerful international actors, such an analysis is simply not relevant to welfare rights (Fraser, 2005; Young, 2007, p. 170). There are, of course, productive ways of approaching social and economic rights that locate them in the material contexts of being with (Bowring, 2008). It may be that, in recent times, a transformation in international law is underway. The rights we have analysed above shows that the field of international law now includes in its remit the ‘worldwide . . . economic and social field,

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beyond the sovereignty of States . . .’ (Derrida, 1995c, p. 84). It may also be that these transformations ‘limit the appropriations and violence of certain private socio-economic forces’ through the concretization of laws against poverty, but this worthy objective seems a long way away. We are left with a somewhat fragmentary sense of how the rights could be exploited to enhance the reach of national welfare states in the light of international norms. There are sources of hope. One can appreciate the importance of Ruggie’s concern that the welfare of citizens must be at the centre of international governance regimes. Unless it is possible to re-work at an international level something like the ‘domestic social compact’ that mitigated the worse effects of capitalism, ‘there is no telling what measures [governments] might turn to in [their] exasperation’ (Ruggie, 1994, p. 10). While Ruggie is stressing the link between ‘domestic stabilisation and international liberalisation’ (Ruggie, 1994, p. 11), there is perhaps another strand to this argument. Peter Townsend’s work on the relevance of human rights for tackling the ‘persistence of large scale extreme poverty in the world’ (Townsend, 2010, p. 577) reminds us of the more radical dimension of the immunity thesis: Working people responded to extreme individual need by combining in collective interest to contribute creatively to economic development and the alleviation of poverty of others in their midst, and contributory social insurance and group benefit schemes turned out to be favoured instruments. Collective protest and action led to the social good – often by the extension of the idea of representative democracy and citizen participation. (Townsend, 2010, p. 573) This understanding of social economy stresses that welfare was a collective solution to both the need for development and poverty alleviation. Note that the ‘social good’ that welfare supported is explicitly linked to ‘democracy and citizen participation’. The theme from Ruggie and the theme from Townsend thus emphasize the connection between two concerns that are bound together in the immunity thesis: a ‘developed’ economy will not function unless it is embedded in society and the associational context of ‘lives well lived’. To return to our analysis of international welfare rights, minimum standards of social security provide one way of moving the global economy towards more meaningful forms of social protection for the realization of a ‘decent standard of living, adequate nutrition, health care, education, decent

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work and protection against calamities’ (UN, 2000, p. 8). Social security has to be connected to work as the primary way in which people develop their resources and create ‘sustainable livelihoods’ (Copenhagen Declaration, 1995, p. 3). Underlying these notions is a fundamental concept of human capacity. This relates back to the human of human rights21 and takes us to considerations of ‘ontology’. In UN discourse, the human being must, first of all, be free from ‘starvation and undernourishment . . . preventable morbidity or premature mortality’ (UN, 2000, p. 19). We could link this theme back to our understanding of social freedom in Chapter 4. As we argued, social freedom requires ‘enabling opportunities’ such as schooling and a reasonable standard of health. Social freedom also takes us to the way in which the individual is part of a community. Welfare enables individuals to obtain ‘the capability to participate in the life of the community, to join in public discussion, to participate in political decision-making’ (UN, 2000, p. 19). Although it is perhaps too soon to speak in terms of international social justice or international solidarity, we can perhaps find the beginnings of such a way of thinking in those Conventions that promote an idea of social justice beyond the nation state and prevent the degradation of human being.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that the constitutive tensions within globalization open up the possibility that social rights can ameliorate the worst forms of market excess. In the narrow space allowed for a reaffirmation of welfare policies, Social Europe perhaps contains a vision of solidarity within the order of the market.22 The market can no more expel welfare than welfare can assert a viable notion of a ‘pure’ collectivized and public community. What needs to be seized and developed by progressive thinking is precisely this hybridity. The market might be an efficient way of distributing some resources but markets must be disciplined so as to promote those social values that either cannot be seen in economic terms or must be created by state intervention. While international law is undergoing a period of transition, it would perhaps be too soon to speak of a ‘right not to be poor’. However, perhaps the resources exist within international law for such a right to be promulgated. It may be that welfare can immunize itself against globalized capital.

Appendix: The Open We want to generalize our concern with the welfare community beyond the nation state and link it to the notion of ‘the open’. We are concerned

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with a way of thinking about globalization where ‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Thomassen, 2006, p. 212). The obscene spectacle of human suffering inspires the search for principles, for the invention of international anti-poverty law and the co-ordinated actions of international agencies, but, how can we think about this complex of themes and concerns? We will turn to Heidegger’s analysis of an untitled poem by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In Rilke’s language being’s venturing of itself as being is named the open. Being gives itself. The open is so called because it is without bounds, it is the ‘great whole of all that is unbounded’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 106). How can we understand this strange image? It is necessary, from the beginning, not to see it as an image of the open-ness of the sky, or a tract of land. The open suggests the total sum of all possibilities, as it allows those beings that have been ventured to ‘draw on one another and draw together without encountering any bounds’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 106). The giving of being in the open is the original distribution of being in the world. In Rilke’s words, ‘none have been granted special cover’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 102): all share the risk of being. The next image in Rilke’s poem is telling. The venturing of beings is linked to the German word for a balance, die Wage. The fate of those that are ventured is put into the balance. The balance as die Wage is that which ‘plays and balances out’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 103); a concern that echoes wägen/wegen (to make ones way) or even bewägen (to be put on one’s way). These etymologies suggest the sense of something that has been wagered or put on its way and thus both risked, put at stake, but also ‘retained in the venture’. We will interpret these etymologies as suggesting that we need to think about the open in terms of justice. This theme takes us back to Nancy’s work: ‘The world [. . .] is itself the gift. The world is its own creation . . . its sharing is at every moment put into play: . . . [the] infinite demand of justice’ (Nancy, 2007, p. 110). There is nothing beyond the world; no transcendent source of authority that will guarantee meaning. However, the sharing of the world, its given-ness, is also the demand for justice. Justice, in this sense, is part of the sense of the world; it is somehow ‘given’ in what ‘we’ ‘are’ as those who interpret the world. Justice ‘designates what must be rendered’. Justice must be given or done to each ‘singular existent’ (Nancy, 2007, p. 110). We must be careful with this argument. An existent is not necessarily a person, an individual or a subject. The problem is that we don’t quite know what an existent ‘is’ because ‘[b]y virtue of the gift of the incessant sharing of the world one does not know where the sharing of a stone or of a person begins or ends’

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(Nancy, 2007, p. 110). Is this an invitation to an ecological or environmental notion of justice? This approach would certainly not be ruled out. However, we are more interested in the suggestion that being is shared among social existents. In a social environment, we don’t know where ‘individuals’ begin and end.23 To think singularity is to think a network of singularities and how the world of sense is thus shared up among us globally.

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9 The Sense of Wel-fare Nothing but the touch, the spark of contact. That, no more. That, which is most elusive, still the only treasure. Come, and gone, and yet the clue itself. (Lawrence, 1981, p. 51) ‘We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous’ George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (Oppen, 1998, p. 162)

Introduction How can we develop the thinking of social ontology which our consideration of the open raised? We do not want to produce an account that collapses into the claustrophobic world of nationality; nor do we want to further an atomistic understanding of the fundamentally individualized nature of market actors. We are also looking for a way of thinking about social being that goes beyond formal terms like rights or citizenship. Our intention is to return to themes outlined in Chapter 1: our analysis of association and being with. The first part of this chapter concerns association. We develop an account of social ontology that takes the notion of the lifeworld as its point of reference. We adapt the concept so that it can describe those meanings that constitute our ongoing engagement with each other in a world we hold in common. We then pick up on notions of care and sympathy. These modes of being are related to primordial understandings of reciprocity, mutuality and wel-fare: our concern for the fate of others; a meaning of welfare still preserved in the term’s etymology: the hope that others fare well.

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These themes are inseparable from our analysis of being with.1 While being with is necessarily related to our ontology of association, it brings other themes into play. We will briefly engage with problems of negativity, the opacity and darkness of human being that cuts against our account of sympathy. Being with reminds us that there can be no simple institutional articulation of the way in which we come before others; no single account of community. It is necessary to show how the primordial exposure to the other can be correlated with an understanding of wel-fare. To elaborate this sense of wel-fare as being with, we will turn to Titmuss’ notion of the gift of welfare as a form of sympathy for others in the conditions of a complex, differentiated society; a relationship with anonymous strangers that makes wel-fare the bond that knots together community.

Association, Care and Sympathy Let us recap. In Chapter 3 we discussed how the humanization of economy could be linked to a particular progressive politics. We need to revisit this theme: One of the greatest legacies of the British labour movement has been a real commitment to . . . the enlarging of minds and feelings . . . So the question is how far economic decisions help or hinder a world in which that space for thinking things might be different is kept open.2 This is a rather unusual argument that sees the labour movement as responsible for changing the way in which people think and feel. We could perhaps play on the sense of the word association to elaborate how this peculiar way of thinking about the labour movement might make sense within the terms of this book. Association describes how people come together; how we are with each other. We have tended to think about association in the sense of a community of people who take on responsibilities for the co-production of welfare. The other important sense of association is perhaps more particular: the association of workers in a union; a term that could, at least in the British context, be traced back to the Webbs and the attempts to make sense of the phenomenon of trade unionism. However, the sense that we are after moves beyond the context of industrial relations. It seems to suggest that the experience of work or, rather, the struggle to humanize work, demands a different way of thinking about the terms of community that keeps open the sense that ‘things might be different’. That ‘things might be different’ takes us back to the very terms

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of association, and the way in which the labour movement has compelled not just a different way of thinking, but of feeling. We have to be careful with this argument. It appears somewhat vague, joining together ideas at an emotional rather than an intellectual level. However, it calls our attention to an important theme: the ‘enlarging of minds and feelings’ through, what the socialist thinker Eduard Bernstein called an ‘understanding and sympathy for others’. The association of those who work and organize collectively or communally, opens up a way of relating to others: ‘[i]f you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are being encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost or the pain of others’.3 These ideas correspond with our earlier arguments about economics. We are dealing with another way of conceiving reciprocity and mutuality, or, of working out how our sense of ourselves is bound up with the way that we relate to others. However, we are not concerned with positive laws, or the discourses of international institutions. Rather, we are trying to grasp at some sense of the social world. Concepts like rights, citizenship and the social market are important, but we need to locate our thinking in this chapter at a different level. In other words, there still seems to be something missing from our account of community. We could perhaps describe this missing something as what might mediate between concepts like rights, citizenship and solidarity and gesture at the way that life is lived: the complexes of thought and feeling that characterize our relationships with other people. Association is plural and multitude: ‘almost everyone is conscious of a widely diversified and ceaselessly varying social environment of which he forms, for his fellows, a part’ (Cole, 1921, p. 5). It is worth noting the concern with perspective in this rather elegantly phrased sentence. We are concerned with the perception of diversity: to be conscious of yourself as an individual is to be conscious of your place within social networks. Your existence for others, likewise, is to come into focus against this fundamental background of ceaseless variation. This sense of association is, in part, described by a notion of membership. Membership in a community is based on patterns of communication; of thought, feeling and experience which are not ‘fi xed states’ (Williams, 1961, p. 98) but point towards ‘ways of thinking and feeling which will enable us genuinely to know each other in the other’s terms’ (Williams, 1961, p. 98). This thinking is useful because our communication with each other describes an ongoing involvement in institutions, symbols and ‘structures of feeling’ that define commonality (Williams, 1961, p. 113).

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Thus, ‘[e]ach one of us’ can be seen as a structure of experience, ‘observing, selecting, comparing, adjusting’. These forms of perception and action are ‘in radical ways continuous’ with our life with others. Membership can be related to an idea that we have already discussed when we examined solidarity: the Habermasian concept of the lifeworld. The lifeworld certainly builds on a notion of association. Neither concept can be explained through monetary exchange or commercial behaviour. Explanation of association or the lifeworld in legal terms such as rights and duties is also too reductive. The concept of the lifeworld is particularly useful in further elucidating association because it is based on ‘mutual understandings’ and ‘common definition of situations’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 119) that take place between people. Habermas’ example concerns a group of workmen on a building site. Conversations move from subject to subject. The ‘horizon’ of meaning shifts as ‘mutual understandings’ and misunderstandings continue throughout the day. To generalize from Habermas’ example: the lifeworld is the site of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organised stock[s] of interpretive patterns’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 124) within which ‘speakers and hearers’ are always located. In the lifeworld, people appreciate that they ‘owe their mutual understanding to their own interpretative performances’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 133). Self-understanding involves the location of actors in their own personal narrative spaces that orientate them to both individual development and historical events; it articulates the sense of one’s own personal ‘identity’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 137). The lifeworld is composed of those myriad encounters where the individual is linked into a community, where individual actions are adapted to those of others on the basis of participation (Habermas, 1985, p. 137). So, the lifeworld carries the important sense in which individuals are embedded in social contexts. However, on closer examination, we need to re-work the concept to make it more appropriate for our account of association. The lifeworld is rooted in Habermas’ understanding of the reproduction of the social world. Although it is irreducible to other ways in which reproduction takes place, in particular through administrative and economic forms of organization, the lifeworld is fundamentally a concept that concerns reproduction. This is precisely the problem. As Gorz writes, Habermas examines ‘activities only from the angle of their social function [and assumes] that the individuals concerned [have] no reality other than that which is socially constituted’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 174). There is more to the activities that take place in the lifeworld than the part they play in the social reproduction. We are concerned with forms of

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communication, linguistic and non-linguistic that ‘do not consist solely in the transmission of cultural knowledge nor in an act of comprehension or mutual understanding’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 174). These ‘reciprocal’ understandings and exchanges between people ‘are situated as much, if not more, at the level of the unsaid and the unsayable [rather] than at the level of speech’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 174). The ‘unsayable’ is explained as the sense of those ‘affective relations’ that ‘create bonds between persons’ that are ‘deeper than understanding or agreement about practical tasks or the values that should govern actions’ (Gorz, 1996, p. 175). This is not a notion of ‘affective citizenship’. It has nothing to do with how ‘intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments’ (Johnson, 2010, p. 495) as it takes place at a ‘level’ remote from government, or at least a conventional notion of government (Foucault’s concept of the care of the self might be more appropriate, but we are not going to take up this argument here). The unsayable, and the bonds it creates between people, also escapes from a ‘politics of recognition’ (Mookherjee, 2005, p. 31) as it is located at the disjuncture between language, symbols and a sense of something being awry; in Gorz’s expression ‘[t]he non coincidence of the individual subject with his social being’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 177). The unsayable is an experience that is ‘inexpressible . . . within the framework of a given culture’. We can adapt the concept of the lifeworld from the problematic of the unsayable. We want to retain the sense in which social reproduction is necessary, but, supplement this functional notion by hanging onto the idea that a great deal of communication is not instrumental and is the essential minutiae of the everyday. In other words, not all our activities are geared towards reproducing cultural or social patterns. They cannot be understood in terms of this deep, sociological logic. However, this is not to reject the notion of reproduction. We have, of course, made use of just such a concept in this book. For us, social reproduction is linked to our concern with social recognition. How do we hold these two themes together? In Chapter 4, when we discussed the theory of equality, we were very much aware that the citizen is one who has to appear in public before other citizens; a theme that we traced through Tawney and Rawls. Our present consideration of association is another way of looking at this complex phenomenon of social being. We are trying to describe the nature of being with others that underlies our discussion of recognition. This is, of course, a peculiar theme to grasp. It requires us to think about

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social behaviour, but not perhaps as sociologists or psychologists; rather, through a concern with the innately meaningful quality of the everyday. The meanings that pass between us certainly do refer to the ways in which we reproduce ourselves, but they go beyond any single function. Association, then, must relate to something primal and general to the social world: we could call this sense. Sense circulates among us. The world makes sense to us. Others have meaning for us in the social world. We want to clarify the sense in which we are speaking of a social world. Why not, for example, simply refer to a world? The social signifies a concern with what is not natural and given. Natural objects exist for us in a spatial and temporal sense. The world is the totality of such relationships between objects and the perceiving subject. The social world is different because others do not exist for us in the same way that objects do. While natural objects are simply ‘there’, other people are like us to the extent that they are interpreting consciousnesses. We have to acknowledge that people are different from things. However, we do not need to presuppose anything like a collective conscience or some sort of inter-subjective or even prelinguistic empathy for the others that we encounter. Rather, it rests on the more minimal acknowledgement that there is a difference between those things that appear to lack consciousness, and those others that seem to be something like ourselves. This way of thinking appears difficult, because it is trying to grasp at something extremely hard to define: what is shared, rather than centred either with the self or the other. Indeed, it is only on the basis that one understands others that one is capable of understanding oneself. Understanding is ‘a form of participation [. . .] whereby one [. . .] being can enter into the life of another one’ (Scheler, 1954, p. 224). However, there is no ‘intrinsic’ identity between the ‘I’ and the I of the other; the ‘alien I’ (Ranly, 1966, p. 30). Other people are part of the world that I, as a person, experience but they are (to me) other ‘I’s – nodes of thought and feeling that are closed to me despite the fact that I am among them. We are together and alone. We are in a world in which we encounter others that have consciousness like ourselves. The problem for thought is that our ‘grasping’ of meaning cannot be understood as if it was a process which ‘we’ could stand outside of and observe. Elaborating this problem takes us to the claim that meanings ‘circulate’ in a ‘social world’. Do these terms have any precision? We feel that ‘circulate’ captures some of the sense of the social life of meaning. The circulation of meaning is not meant to suggest a limited circuit around which words run like athletes on a track; rather, each meaning-giving act

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opens onto a possibly infinite series; as if the athletes and the spectators all begin running together in different directions. We now want to make a second point that takes us to the sense of sympathy or concern for others. Certain events, feelings or confrontations provoke feelings of concern for others, which might then become more formally a matter of thought, reason and action. Perhaps we feel sympathy or compassion for an individual, or the fate of many. At the same time, though, there are distractions. The response to the plight, privations or suffering of others is obscured. This is one of the risks of association: it is an unstable structure. One might respond sympathetically to a person, or one might not. The very regard that makes a concern for others possible can also undo it if this concern is somehow ‘taken away’. Furthermore, anxieties and fears for others can easily be turned into fear of the other.4 We will return to this point in a moment. Could we say, though, that the positive moment of this engagement, this being in reach of each other, is care?5 We need to remember that the word care is not being used in its conventional sense. Rather, it underpins our argument about a structure of life with others; about how others count, or come (in Tawney’s phrase) ‘in reach’ of us. Care, in this sense, is understood as ‘[m]eaningfulness’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 68). To care is to direct one’s attention to something, to the things and people that ‘one encounters’ in the world. Of course, we cannot conflate this technical meaning of caring with what we take ‘care’ to be in an everyday sense: but we can follow a line that allows a more phenomenological orientation to care as a concern for the other person.6 Care can be related to solicitude (Heidegger, 1962, p. 157). Solicitude translates the German fürsorge, which is glossed as ‘welfare work’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 158). The translation stresses that we are not concerned with care for an individual but with a general expression of care. In English we would ‘speak of welfare work or social welfare’ (Heidegger, 1962, fn. 157). So, the care we are analysing is general in its expression, public rather than private. Where does this analysis take us? We have discovered that there is a relationship between the notions of care and welfare. Care is a meaning of association with others, but it comes and goes depending on our mood and on our engagement with the world. Our analysis needs to further develop the relationships between care, welfare and sympathy. Perhaps one of the most celebrated attempts to think about sympathy can be found in Adam Smith. It might be surprising to come across Smith in the context of this book. However, we are interested in Smith because he provides an account of ‘common life’ (Smith, 1976, I.ii.5.2) that resonates

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with a great many of our concerns.7 Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with the assertion that even though men are selfish, there are other principles of human nature that interest people ‘in the fortunes of others’. So, although Smith is an apostle of the free market and the ‘atomistic selfishness’ of the market individual, he is in fact also a thinker of association. For Smith we are always part of a common life, and the opinions of others matter acutely to our sense of self. The human propensity for sympathy causes us to share in another person’s happiness and to feel sorrow in the presence of another’s sadness. This sentiment is shared, in greater or lesser degree, by all. It is not a preserve of the virtuous. Even the ‘greatest ruffian’ can be struck by the sorrow or happiness of others. Smith defines sympathy as ‘fellow feeling’ (Smith, 1976, I.i.I.3 at 8).8 Fellow feeling presupposes that we are among fellows, and that their impressions of us are important.9 Through the sentiment of sympathy we ‘naturally’ feel ‘joy’ at the spectacle of another’s wealth. Because the wealthy perceive our joy for them, they ‘glory’ in their riches, feeling that their wealth ‘draw[s] upon [them] the attention of the world’ (Smith, 1976, I.iii.2.2). Smith is not suggesting that this is acceptable. The rich would do well to be humble and to learn self-command. However, this is not our point. We are more interested in Smith’s account of the sympathy we show for those who are suffering. Smith argues that those who become objects of our sympathy in their suffering are somehow diminished. As others think less of them, they think less of themselves; ‘[t]he poor man is ashamed of his poverty’. This is why one must conceal one’s poverty from public view: ‘[n]othing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to the view of the public’ (Smith, 1976, I.iii.2.1). Poverty ‘places’ the poor ‘out of the sight of mankind’ (Smith, 1976, I.iii.2.2). Smith lays bare a point that more radical writers have also made. As Coates and Silburn ask in their account of slum life, ‘what is the power of the wearer of old clothes?’ (Coates and Silburn, 1973, p. 74). The disappearance of the poor is as much a moral problem for Smith as it was for Orwell and other thinkers on poverty that we briefly examined in Chapter 4. How one responds to the social death of one’s fellows, though, is a matter open to question. We are not too concerned at this point with the issue of why some show sympathy and others do not. We are more concerned with a notion of sense that underlies sympathy.10 The meanings by which we define ourselves pass through the lives of those we encounter or with whom we share life in common; we are concerned with the poverty of others because they are diminished and, so, in some sense that is hard to pin down, are we. Does this mean that, because at least some of us are

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sympathetic to the plight of others, we are all potentially united together in some oceanic sense of mutual concern? This would probably not correspond with most people’s experience of sympathy and make the concept way too remote from an experience rooted in the messy compromises of everyday life. There is a second problem that will force us to confront the problematic aspect of association that we outlined above. So far we have talked of sympathy as if it was the only way in which we related to others. This is not the case. Sympathy has to be understood alongside emotions such as jealousy, loathing, contempt, boredom and indifference. To make sense of sympathy, we would have to study fear and hatred of others. We do not have the space to engage with these complex matters. Suffice to say that we would take our cue from Heidegger and argue that the different modes of being in the world provide an insight into these different forms of affectivity. In the terms of this chapter, our analysis of emotion requires further engagement with the element of being with that we have associated with the unsayable. In crude outline, this takes us to a theme that runs through the philosophy of community and has perhaps been most memorably described by Hobbes: political community is what save us from ourselves; from what Gorz calls the ‘ferment of negativity at the heart of all culture’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 177). This point takes us to the unsayable, the problematic non-relation that lies at the heart of association. Community, from this perspective, is inseparable from those agonistic differences where we do not correspond with each other; indeed, where we are antagonistic to others. If one accepts that the unsayable remains within us, there is always some aspect of our thoughts or feelings that we cannot put into language, or which resists the norms to which we are subject. As a description of emotional modes of being, this might be a useful way of thinking about the nature of rage and hatred (but, as we will argue, the unsayable could also describe those powerful experiences of connection, sympathy or solidarity with others). Thus: ‘[s]ocialisation prevents us from belonging entirely to ourselves, but we would not have belonged to ourselves if it had been different, or even – though this is impossible – if there had been no socialisation at all’ (Gorz, 1989, p. 177). This negativity, or this paradox, remains within our psyche. We are creatures who suffer from the malady of sociality, and for which there is no cure. The pathologies of social existence constitute the inherent negativity of our condition from which we are immunized by community. This recalls Esposito’s thesis. Indeed, it allows Esposito to claim Hobbes as a forerunner

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of the very themes that we are considering. For Hobbes, ‘sharing and refusing to share, attraction and repulsion’ are ‘at . . . origin, the same element’. Hobbes senses that there is ‘something within us’, something that we are, that could ‘take us over completely’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 20). Th is is why the Leviathan must be raised above us to save us from ourselves. What we also find in Leviathan is Hobbes’ concern with the opacity of the human being, an opacity that is also the condition of community. Hobbes writes that community require that man must read the sign of himself: ‘Nosce te ipsum, Read thy self ’ (Hobbes, 1988, p. 10). Speech is ‘peculiar to man’ (Chapter IV) and allows ‘understanding’ although the signification of words can never be entirely relied upon to deliver the ‘interest of the speaker’. So, Leviathan begins with the secret of man’s inner nature. However, the unsayable or unknowable secret within men is also the precondition of their fundamental community. If the wise man reads himself he discovers the similarity of his thoughts and passions with those of other men, for the passions are what bring us together. The wise man must go beyond ‘dissembling, lying, counterfeiting’ (ibid.) to what is only ‘legible’ in the ‘heart’. Others remain a mystery, because we have no real access to their thoughts and desires, even though they might be similar to our own. What brings together the one and the many, if anything can, is a faith in ‘similitude’ beyond dissembling. He that is to ‘govern’ a community must know this, but more so: ‘he must read in himself, not this or that particular man, but Man-Kind’ (Hobbes, 1988, p. 11). We cannot follow this analysis into the covenant that creates the community, but we are familiar enough with the main theme. Leviathan, the sovereign power, ends the war of all against all, and preserves civil peace. The pathologies that are part of us, that are inseparable from the unsayable, require the Leviathan to rule over us. However, at the same time, the exposure to others opens us to mutuality and sympathy. We cannot re-construct this theme in its entirety. It does, however, follow from ‘the secret of man’s inner nature’ that we outlined in the paragraph above. The darkness of our hearts hides both our dissembling and our similitude. Moreover, it is worth remembering that the rule over us of the Leviathan is founded on a covenant, an agreement about the terms of association. Indeed, it would seem that mutuality precedes the Leviathan. The principle of mutuality states that an individual should give up his ‘right to all things’ if all others do likewise. The contract that legitimizes the sovereign rests in this agreement. Intriguingly, Hobbes cites the authority of the Gospel to confirm the principles of mutuality: ‘Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, then do ye to them’ (Hobbes, 1988, p. 190).

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Men thus appreciate that the very possibility of peaceful co-existence is concerned with reciprocity. The essential concern with reciprocity can be seen in the principle of compleasance, or, that ‘every man strive to accommodate himself to the reste’ (209). Leviathan may be about controlling the dangerous violence excesses of the human creature, but, the very condition of the Leviathan, the very agreement that ends the war of all against all, is mutual understanding; a sympathy for our common plight. Contemporary thinking is still grappling with these issues. We do, of course, have sophisticated ways of understanding how gender, ethnicity, class and religion structure complex senses of antagonism and compromise ideas of community. However, our point is that while an understanding of the conflicts of the social world is necessary, we also have to maintain some sense of shared membership in a political community; Bernstein’s ‘lively sympathy’ between people. As we argued in Chapters 1 and 2, and in a slightly more focused way above, although association with others is characterized by the antagonisms and pathologies that striate the social world, our exposure to others does not prevent us from understanding what is shared: what passes between us in mutual understandings. We can thus read Hobbes as a theorist of the complex that takes us to welfare; or, rather, Leviathan opens the space in which the sense of the community of welfare becomes thinkable. We do not mean that Hobbes had a concept of the welfare state. Rather, that the mystery of the human heart holds the clue to our associational life of which welfare is part (if only we could read ourselves). The final part of our argument turns to these themes: in particular the relationships between mutuality, reciprocity and welfare.

Association, Being with and Wel-fare We can re-discover in the etymology of words senses that have been lost or obscured, and whose recovery might be necessary for a better understanding of ways in which experiences have been conceived. What might welfare tell us? The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the following definitions of welfare. Welfare is an expression of good wishes: ‘may it go well with you’. This relates to the more modern sense: ‘the state or condition of doing or being well; good fortune; happiness; or well being – to thrive, be successful, to enjoy prosperity’. This extends to: ‘maintenance of members of a group or country in a state of well-being organized by legislation or social efforts’. As this definition suggests, the issue that we encounter is the contemporary link made between welfare and the state. Welfare becomes

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almost entirely to do with the sense in which social policy can achieve the ‘well-being’ of its objects. Our argument does not seek to destroy this link, or even to suggest that welfare is not properly the concern of the state or other agencies. However, any return to this complex of meanings can only take place after a recovery of the root meaning of the word. The first step in this argument, then, is to look at the first part of the definition: the hope that ‘it may go well with you’. Let us elaborate this original meaning. Welfare is a conjunction of two words: well and fare. Limitations of space prevent us from tracing the etymology of ‘well’. However, as our argument can be followed if we accept its conventional present usage, we can concentrate on the ‘fare’. Fare derives from an Aryan root meaning to pass through, to go or to travel. It is related to the Greek word for a way, a passage or a ford and to the latin portare – to carry. The sense of the word can also perhaps be glimpsed in the Old Norse, Swedish and Danish, where it relates to a parting or a leave taking. These meanings filter through into English. In 1377 Langland can write, ‘frendes, fareth well’. In the sense of faring, the word can be related to ‘making one’s way’; and to the idea of how one conducts oneself or behaves. Thus Malory in 1470 can write: ‘Ye fare as a man’. Cognate senses relate not so much to conduct or behaviour, but to events; the way things fall out or happen. An example from 1481 would be the phrase ‘so faryth by me’ – an experience of good or ill fortune; a usage that is still clear in the expression from 1607 – ‘to fare the worst’. From this complex of associated meanings, we can perhaps derive a common sense: wel-fare expresses a desire that others enjoy good fortune and that things turn out for the best. This sense of wel-fare maps onto our discussion of care above. To wish another well suggests that one has a special regard for them. In the modern usage of the word, wel-fare is perhaps the kind of regard that one shows to strangers rather than friends. It is public in the sense of fürsorge discussed above. Titmuss is helpful in identifying this sense of welfare as that which motivates us to ‘help . . . the stranger’. The stranger is ‘not the person’ who is related to us ‘by personal bonds’. We are concerned with what passes between us; with a ‘social distance between helper and helped’ (Titmuss, 1987, p. 283). Perhaps, at root, it is the desire that fate should treat others well. With the development of structures of welfare as ways of lessening the impact of misfortune and ill luck in social life, perhaps this sense of well wishing becomes lost. However, perhaps if our arguments are accepted it can be recovered as the token of relationships of public concern that pass between us.

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There is a second important point. Wishing someone well takes us back to a notion of reciprocity. I wish you well in the same way that you wish me well; a reciprocal well wishing. We want to develop this point to suggest that the encounter in which we wish that the other goes well, in which we express a concern for his or her welfare, is linked up with reciprocity and mutuality, hence our common life together. Reciprocity derives from the Latin reciprocus. The word is composed of the prefi x ‘re’, which means ‘ back’ (as in return) and ‘pro’, which indicates a number of concerns, including what is thrown up ahead (as in pro-ject). Might we catch some sense of the notion of sharing outlined above in this elaboration of the term? Reciprocity operates within a mutuality which can be seen as our ‘predisposition for a communal mode of life’ where we are ‘adapted’ to each other. This rather general sense becomes a little more elaborated in the orientation of the term to some sense of mutual relationship. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines mutuality as: ‘relations, sentiments, actions, possessed, entertained or performed by each of two persons towards or with regard to one another’. The closeness of mutual and reciprocal can also be seen in the Latin root, mutuus, which carries the meaning of borrowed and thus returns us to this dynamic, inter-space where something is shared or where being together is shared out. However, even in mutual adaptation, there remains something of a person’s ‘privacy’ (Ranly, 1966, p. 66). We will never even know even if our feelings do correspond, outside of our articulation of them; outside of any exchange to others that describes our feelings. The ‘uniqueness’ of ‘personality’ is ‘essentially impenetrable’ (Ranly, 1966, p. 67). Reciprocity understood in this way provides some notion of how sense circulates among us in a life in common that is lived with each other. This is a form of reciprocity: in crude terms, ‘I recognise you because you recognise me’. Those that recognize each other create a communal life from their own power. They define themselves the very living of a life in common. The human cannot be posited at all outside of this circuit of ongoing exchange.11 Perhaps the primordial meanings of reciprocity and mutuality thus carry the sense of a movement out towards the other, and a return from the other to the self. Rather than the self as a perfect unity, though, the other remains within; preventing the self’s relationship to self. Reciprocity, then, is entirely consistent with the ‘fold’ of consciousness, where the exteriority of the other folds into the interiority of the self. To be in a state of reciprocal effect is to be held together by relationships that are immanent to being with where we influence and are influenced in turn.12 The reciprocal relationships that share out the world of sense do

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not reduce us to an essential community where self and other are identical and reflect each other’s similarity. This is why our account of association is allergic to any mystic sense of belonging. We are always separate and different. There is always a distance between us (Ranly, 1966, p. 64). Sympathy for another person comes out of ‘the reciprocal awareness of separateness’ (Ranly, 1966, p. 64). Despite our feeling for the other and the other’s feeling for us, we remain entirely separate and distinct.

The Gift of Wel-fare This brings us to the last part of our argument. What we have said about welfare and reciprocity in this chapter operates at what we could call a depth level; it describes something about human being. This analysis is quite remote from (and also completely involved in) the conventional world of institutions, politics and policies: it takes us to being with. Being with can be understood as the ‘relationship’ with exteriority that founds the ‘impossibility’ of community and prevents community cohering around similarity. The problem that we now face, however, is to co-ordinate the sense of wel-fare with being with. A host of difficulties present themselves that are focused on being with as a profound realization of the unsayable. As we argued above, the unsayable carries with it the darkness and mystery around which community both comes together and is held apart. The unsayable provokes the said; opens the infinity of sense and the grappling with the meaning and definition of who we are; creatures who are a question to themselves. How can we relate this problematic to wel-fare? We can begin by discounting certain ways of interpreting being with. Being with is not necessarily an ethical phenomenon. Whatever we have said about being with, or the sense that passes between us, does not mean that this sense is encoded in any particular way: being with does not equate with either morality or ethics. We could even see different definitions of ethics and morality as different attempts to provide content for being with.13 In the same way that being with cannot be co-ordinated with an ethics, it cannot be co-ordinated with any positive or institutional articulation of our common life. It is not possible to argue that being with requires a welfare state ‘to look after us’. This is not to say that being with does not provoke such an articulation. The difficulty is moving from the myriad sense of being with, to any (provisional) understanding of the positive structures that it should assume. For us, this is precisely the problem with which Titmuss grappled at the end of his life. What drives his work on welfare is a subtle appreciation of

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the ‘hundred and one detailed acts of imagination and tolerance’ (Titmuss, 1958, p. 275) that define a ‘compassionate society’ (Titmuss, 1958, p. 275) and relate in complex ways to the institutions that give at least some form to that compassion. Titmuss saw welfare as the art of giving, an opening of ourselves to the plight of others. The gift of welfare was founded on altruism. In technical ethical terms, Titmuss’ theory is based on ‘ultra obligations’. The obligation to be altruistic, to give to those less fortunate than oneself, falls short of an ethics where rights correlate with duties. There can be no obligation placed on an individual to perform the duty to give and there is no possibility of criticism for a failure to perform the duty. We could say that an individual feels that it is his or her obligation to give. This obligation does not correlate with rights that others hold. Titmuss relates the altruistic art of giving to the voluntary donation of blood.14 The gift of blood is an act of ‘creative altruism’ where ‘the self is realised with the help of anonymous others’ (Titmuss, 1958, p. 275). This does not presuppose face-to-face or intimate relationships. Blood donation takes place between strangers: it is ‘anonymous helpfulness’. This is a strange and provocative way of thinking. It is based on an absolute faith in human nature: the sense that people will give even if they are not compelled to do so. Titmuss’ understanding of this ultra obligation is cleverly related to the symbolic aspect of blood donation: the gift of life itself; a giving that cannot be compelled. The gift of blood is a figure of being with. Our blood is within us, circulating through the chambers of the heart and the long dark corridors of our veins and arteries. Kay Titmuss reminds us that blood is inseparable from the most intimate of relationships between mother and child. Of course, the blood that is our own is also from elsewhere; from our ancestors. Blood, in this sense, is always someone else’s: the intimate presence of the other person in our veins. Blood – one’s blood – is the token of one’s authenticity and belonging – a blood line and an inheritance that relates one to one’s family, and to all others. Titmuss’ genius is to see that transfusion or gift of blood as the point of admixture where the authentic, the token and sign of identity and self, is given to anonymous others. Wel-fare, the mixing of blood irrespective of race, gender, age and nationality. Help for the anonymous stranger. The gift of blood as being with is thus a token of what is unsayable and unknowable within us – and which through transfusion passes in community between us. To give one’s blood is to be sympathetic to the fate of the other person, to want things to go as well as possible for them: the gift of wel-fare.

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While we have to stay with Titmuss’ provocation and work out what sense its challenge might make for us, it would be hard to present his account of blood donation as a coherent theory of the legal or moral obligations that lie behind welfare. One might suggest it is simply too demanding. It is also difficult to link the duty to pay taxes to the voluntary impulse to donate blood. Blood donation appears to have little or no relevance to the positive duties to ‘give’ that underlie the taxation structures on which the welfare state is funded. We would also find it hard to square Titmuss’ claims about ultra obligations with the argument about limited altruism presented in Chapter 6. However, to remain with these objections would be to misunderstand our argument. The gift of blood is a figure of the primordial nature of wel-fare. It is a figure of the community of welfare that exemplifies a relationship of being with that must be read against the image of the Leviathan, that other iconic image of the darkness of the heart. The gift of blood is a figure of the unsayable of association. While our pathologies are never far from us, the gift of blood is a realization of a going out to the other that merges and re-arranges the boundaries of what we are in recognition of a shared plight. There are some other important themes. Titmuss stresses that blood donation falls outside of privatized commodity logics. Blood is not ‘a consumption good indistinguishable from other goods and services in the private economic market’ (Titmuss, 1970, p. 58). Titmuss proves that voluntary blood donation is much more efficient than privatizing transfusion services. Money cannot mediate the relationship of wel-fare that is the gift of blood. Moreover, donation is not based on a ‘one-toone’ relationship. Blood is given in circumstances of anonymity. It is entirely part of the kind of social relationship one fi nds in a contemporary society. The gift of blood can be encouraged by ‘institutions that create integration and discourage alienation’ (Titmuss, 1970, p. 279). Welfare is driven by the identification of ‘states of dependency’ that should be ‘recognised as collective responsibilities’ (Titmuss, 1968, p. 46). States of dependency arise when those that are subject to them are not able to ‘earn life’. Thus, in ‘industrialized societies’, states of dependency arise ‘naturally’ (as in the case of child bearing, childhood and old age) or they may arise through ‘physical and psychological ill health and incapacity’. There are other states of dependency that are created by the social and economic factors themselves: from unemployment to under-employment that interfere with the ability of individuals to earn their living and, furthermore, impact on those who rely on the wage earner to cover their own needs.

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This takes us to the central problematic of welfare: the more individualized we become, the more socially dependent we fi nd ourselves. Again, we need to distinguish between what is of its time, and what can be carried forward in Titmuss’ thinking. It is difficult to follow Titmuss’ own understanding of the institutional structure of the welfare state. It may be that his belief in collective provision has, at least in part, become unsustainable. However, what remains of continuing relevance is precisely Titmuss’ understanding of the inseparability of being with from an account of welfare. The voluntary act of giving blood, or wishing someone well relates to ‘an awareness of the worth of their neighbour and the need to cherish him for himself’15 (Titmuss papers, box 3/370). The sense of the worth of one’s neighbour is not something that can be legislated. It can never be a formal element that defines the welfare citizen. However, it needs to be asserted; the worth of the other needs to be rooted in our social life; our common life together.16 Welfare is thus a condition of thought and being in which ‘man becomes more aware of what has caused his dependency’ and more conscious of the need to provide collectively for the inherent insecurities of market society. Titmuss’ work suggests that welfare can indeed alienate and frustrate, but it is the condition in which we think and act out the terms of our own dependencies. Rather than simply asserting that welfare leads to the becoming anonymous of responsibility, Titmuss forces us to think through the necessity of rules, and the extent to which they also run the risk of creating and defending structures of power and knowledge. Titmuss suggests that welfare, both existential and institutional, defines our social being. Although these terms might be lacking in precision, they have a resonance as a description of the precariousness of life, and the fragility of the sense of self. So, returning finally to our meditations on Leviathan; would it be possible to argue that the ‘with’ of being with, expressing itself as wel-fare is some form of bond or covenant between us? At best, the term ‘social contract’ would be a crude way of thinking about this primordial exposure to the sense of the world. We can only offer a brief concluding outline of this huge theme. If the covenant that founds the community is a ‘bond’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 34), then it is a question of how this bond of being with can be articulated or symbolized. Etymologically, the word symbol expresses ‘making a connection or joining’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 34) and the ‘giving face’ to this joining through an image (Nancy, 2000, p. 58). This relationship is entirely imaginary – its reality exists in this representative order – and the extent to which it can create affects in the ‘real world’.

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In the bond figured by the gift of blood, we get behind the ‘theme of the individual’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 6). The ‘here and now’, or the ‘just once, this time’ (Nancy, 1991, pp. 66–7) in which we are concerned for the wel-fare of the other happens when a being enters into a relationship with another being through an act of sympathy (une seule fois, celle-ci). The here and now of the well wishing is the clinamen, the hanging together of beings, something that ‘happens’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 7): ‘Community is what takes place always through others and for others’ (Nancy, 1991, p. 5). The radical nature of this bond can be seized by turning to the cryptic idea that the bond knots or laces together terms that are immanent to it. ‘Sociality’ or ‘association’ is a knotting of elements that are immanent to it: the knotting of wel-fare between us.

Conclusion We have been concerned with an outline for an ‘ontology’ of association that can underpin our arguments about the need for a thinking of the common. Association is found in what is shared between us. Association is not exhausted by the community of the nation state, the impoverished social life of market operators, or the social fissapartion of communities of difference. We argued that association can be understood through sympathy, reciprocity and mutualism. This took us to a discussion of being with as a primordial realization of the gift of wel-fare; an articulation of the sense in which we are exposed to each other and knotted together is a sharing out of concern or care for our common fate. This notion of wel-fare was linked to the symbol of a social bond that is the sense of our common life.

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Conclusion The Shared World Meanwhile, what of Socialism? (Orwell, 2001, p. 123) ‘ You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition’ Eugene V. Debbs We now want to sum up the main terms of our argument, but we will do so from the perspective of the last chapter and cast a backward glance over the road that we have travelled. In elaborating our account of wel-fare, we hope that we have shown that the concern for others is a fundamental meaning of social life. We have argued that the ‘in common’ that welfare helps to define immunizes the community against the market. We examined how this process of immunization plays itself out at both national and international levels. It is necessary to sustain the important sense of the common; even if it is located in the contradictions of late or even mature capitalism and its privatizing logic. At the risk of being obscure, we want to assert a single point. Democratic socialism is (and perhaps always was) an aporetic politics that builds on the immanent contradiction of community in and against capital. We can perhaps appreciate the nature of this peculiar politics if we examine another term, which has been used to describe the same problematic: market socialism. Market socialism states the contradiction of welfare. Given time, we could trace this theme through the very notion of a revisionist or democratic socialist tradition. As we cannot do this in anything other than the most basic outline, we will make reference to Eduard Bernstein, one of the first thinkers to articulate the aporia of democratic socialism.

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Crudely, we could say that Bernstein imagines socialism as a form of partnership. The welfare society, as envisioned by democratic socialism, is a shared world located in the actions and meanings that circulate among people. To take one reference point: Labour and the New Social Order frames Labour politics in terms of collective effort harnessed towards ‘the advantage of the whole community’ (The Labour Party, 1918, p. 124). Social organization requires ‘common institutions’ meeting ‘common needs’ and providing a source of ‘common enjoyment’ so that ‘accidents of birth and family are not definitional of an individual’s life chances’ (Tawney, 1964, pp. 55–6). We have been concerned with the way in which this vision can be updated. We have argued that neither democratic socialism nor welfare provision need to terminate in the state. Indeed, on one possible reading of the term socialism, it relates to the very sense of mutualism1 that we have been studying above. To what extent can mutualism provide a new way of thinking about Labour politics?2 A theme from Esposito might be helpful. Esposito argues that the root of the word for mutualism relates to the modern English word for friend. Mutualism is a politics of friendship (with all its attendant risks). This provides a useful way into thinking about discourses on solidarity and fraternity; the friend as brother. Solidarity as fraternity takes on a very specific meaning: a ‘classless society’ or ‘one in which every man and woman would see each other as brother and sister, sister and brother, as of equal worth’ (Crick, 1984, p. 159). Such language might seem strange; not just strange, at worst, gender biased and presumptuous. On whose terms are we included into a family of brothers and sisters? A valid point, but let’s try and see beyond the narrow sense of the invocation of brotherhood. In a fraternal society, ‘everyone would not be exactly equal in power, status, wealth and acquired abilities’. Differences between people would be ‘less intense and less fraught with drastic consequences than today’ (Crick, 1984, p. 159). Fraternal society is, in other words, one of complex equality: ‘perpetually ambiguous, open, flexible, debatable, a moving horizon that is never quite reached, irreducible to either economic formula or legislative final solutions’ (Crick, 1984, p. 159). We want to offer a concluding comment that borrows from Bernstein. Eduard Bernstein showed that the root of the word socialism is socius: a partner. This avoids the claims to friendship or brotherhood. Socius as partner is a less loaded designator of what is shared in partnership, communicating with Raymond Williams’ notion of membership in a society where we recognize each other as citizens: . . . we; wel-fare; in common . . .

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Notes

Foreword 1. The River Medlock, Manchester City Council (no date), p. 1. 2. The Wicker Man is also a Hammer Productions fi lm about sacrifice; its sense of paganism and renewal is deliberately echoed by Pulp’s lyrics. In the context of this book, this opens up a further strange communication between Bataille, the industrial revolution in the north of England, orgiastic rock and roll music and Sheffield Wiccans.

Introduction 1. For a definition of primordial, see Chapter 1. 2. Bishop William Temple is credited with coming up with the term ‘welfare state’. Temple, writing in 1942 was seeking to capture a sense of how the democratic state could be contrasted with the communist and fascist versions of the state. More broadly, Temple can be seen as naming the peculiar conjunction of forces that in the immediate postwar period produced an understanding of politics, economy and social organization where the state assumed responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. We can get a good sense of the objectives and range of state provision of welfare from Briggs’ classic definition: A welfare state is a state in which organised power is deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions – first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their work or property; second, by narrowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and families to meet certain social contingencies (for example, sickness, old age and unemployment) . . . and third, by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services. (Briggs, 1961, p. 228)

3. The foundations of the British welfare state were laid by the Liberal Government of 1906. The 1911 National Insurance Act put in place a health insurance scheme based

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on compulsory flat rate contributions from wages and supplemented by contributions from the state and employers. Maternity benefits were also provided. A contributor was entitled to sick pay for a limited period, medical treatment and, if necessary, disablement benefit for as long as was necessary. Part II of the 1911 Act introduced insurance for unemployment. The scheme was compulsory in certain trades and industries (those particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the trade cycle such as shipbuilding) and, like health insurance, based on contributions from workers, employers and the state. In the event of unemployment, benefits were themselves limited to a statutory period. 4. This sense is encapsulated in Marshall’s concept of the social citizen. Marshall saw social citizenship as a historical product of the conjunction and development of three sets of rights. Civil rights can be defined as the basic civil liberties of speech, association and conscience. Within this list the right to ‘due process of law’ is privileged as it allows the articulation and defence of civil rights. Political rights define the ‘right to participate the exercise in political power’ and relate essentially to the right to vote. Social rights ‘range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage’ and are linked to education and social services (Marshall, 1950, p. 8). 5. Barry provides a useful insight: The modern concept of social justice . . . meant . . . that a challenge could be mounted to the power of the owners of capital, and to the dominance of the entire market system within which capitalism was embedded. The justice of the unequal relations between employer and employees could be called into question, as could the distribution of income and wealth arising from the operation of capitalist institutions and the part played in people’s lives by money. (Barry, 2005, p. 5)

However, while there certainly is the sense in which social justice carries the radical meaning that Barry gives the term, the ‘challenge’ to the market posed by social justice does not necessarily suggest that welfare or social justice is incompatible with capitalism. As we will see, third way or centre left thinking sought to combine social justice and a commitment to liberal market reforms. This re-defines some of the central assumptions of social justice. The ‘core concern’ becomes the idea that the individual, rather than the state, assumes responsibility for their own welfare (Giddens, 1990, p. 65). Just because government has responsibilities towards citizens does not mean that, as old social democracy was want to conclude, these are ‘unconditional claims’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 65). Rather than speak of the right to unemployment benefit, one has to understand that it is conditional on the responsibility or the obligation to ‘look for work’ and government must ‘encourage’ this quest. Miller’s recent work provides a further elaboration of a contemporary sense of social justice. Miller (1999) follows, in part, a thematic developed in his earlier study of social justice to make for a pluralistic understanding of the term by reference to three key principles: needs, desert and equality. Miller’s pluralism can thus be contrasted with Rawls’ assertion that the underlying principle of justice is fairness. The applicability of a principle of

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justice to different social and economic circumstances depends on what Miller calls a ‘mode of human relationship’ (1999, p. 26). There are three modes of human relationship, the solidaristic community, instrumental associations and citizenship. In a solidaristic community, resources are distributed on the basis of need. Instrumental associations are defined by collaborative relationships towards specific ends. The ends of a particular association define the terms in which individuals are rewarded on the basis of desert through criteria that relate to performance. Miller sees citizenship as a complex of rights and duties that requires all members of a political community to be treated equally. For us, Miller’s principles of justice can be understood as an attempt to state formally the terms in which the market must be immunized. 6. Solidarity, as compared to associated concepts like liberty and justice, is something of a Cinderella term in modern social theory. However, solidarity has its place in sociological and political literature and has generated a plethora of rival meanings. As Bayertz writes, the notion of solidarity can be traced to the Roman law of obligations and the obligations of a family or social group to pay common debts. Th is is solidarity as ‘cooperative liability’; a legal articulation of the principle ‘one for all, and all for one’ (Bayertz, 1998). Bayertz also points out that solidarity has resonances with notions of ‘civic friendship’ that can be traced back to Aristotelean notions of human association within the polis. Perhaps our main point of reference, as stressed by Brunkhorst, is the centrality of the term to the French revolution, and the constitution of 1793 (Brunkhorst, 2005, p. 2). In Article 34, solidarity is interpreted through the ‘republican principle of public life’ where the well-being of one citizen is linked to the well-being of all; themes that can themselves be followed back to Rousseau. The significant articulation of the concept as ‘mutual responsibility’ occurred in the 1800s. 7. In Foucauldian terms, welfare is a distinct practice of power; the elaboration of a particular ‘rationality’ that is specific to an idea and practice of governance aimed at the control and management of the population (Foucault, 2010, p. 100). Foucault also makes the link between welfare and capitalism. The latter would not have developed ‘without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’ (Foucault, 2010, p. 141). This presupposes ‘. . . numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and control of populations’. These techniques of power allow ‘the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit’. Techniques of welfare go alongside the development of the ‘language of statistics’ which ‘provided a pragmatic interactive medium for relations between social forces’ (Donzelot, 1991, p. 173). From this perspective, a concept of solidarity would have to be related to techniques of governance. We can get a clearer sense of what might be at stake if we consider Foucault’s analysis of the 1945 reforms of the British Labour government and the concept of ‘social policy’ that was inseparable from state welfare provision (Foucault, 2010, p. 189). Foucault argued that rather than being an expression of socialism or solidarity, social policy operated within a space ultimately defined by the truths of political economy. State provision of welfare did not make for ‘the socialisation of consumption and income’ (Foucault, 2010, p. 143). There

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is no real sense in which ‘society as a whole’ took on the responsibility to protect individuals against risks of unemployment or ill health. On the contrary, the welfare state ensures that ‘every individual has sufficient income’ to enter into insurance schemes that allow the creation and maintenance of ‘private reserves’. Social insurance schemes do not serve as real re-distributions of income: insurance accords ‘everyone a sort of economic space within which they can take on and confront risks’ (Foucault, 2010, p. 144). The ultimate justification for such limited interventions is ‘economic growth’. Social policy is not strictly ‘social’ at all. It is a way of encouraging economic development and enabling ‘individual or familial capitalisation’ to deal with the risks attendant on economic activity. 8. For Offe (1984) the contradiction compromises social democratic governments that have to sustain market relationships that allow the extraction of surplus value while seeking legitimacy through the distribution of non-commodified benefits through the welfare state. 9. While this work would not claim to be Marxist, we take the following points from Marx’s account of capitalism; points that are consistent with Polanyi’s understanding of the way in which a market abstracts from society. Capitalism is a process that operates to a specific and immanent logic (or set of logics). From a historical perspective, we are concerned with a process that can be dated to the sixteenth century and the creation of ‘a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market’ (Marx, 1975, p. 247). From a more technical and economic sense, the process of self-valorization is peculiar to capital. This is itself a complex idea, but can be simply put as follows. The capitalist does not seek to make a profit on a single transaction, but to realize the ‘restless neverending process of profit-making alone’ (Marx, 1975, p. 254). Marx notes that while the miser seeks to hoard his money and remove it from circulation, the capitalist ‘throws’ his money into circulation, in the hope that it will be endlessly augmented. Capital thus itself appears to be ‘an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn’ (Marx, 1975, p. 251). This is clearly an inadequate description of Marx’s understanding of capital; but, it points towards two main themes in this book. One has already been mentioned and relates to abstraction; the other relates to the tendency of capital towards financialization; or, to capitalism’s drive to realize its most profitable forms. This is arguably the process that lay behind the banking crisis of 2008. Finance capital developed increasingly subtle forms of profit making and became divorced from productive economy. From a critical perspective, we can thus begin to appreciate Marx’s ethical case against capitalism. Capitalism is unjust because it ‘subordinates human needs to the profit motive’ which itself ‘triggers crises and contradictions’ that, in turn, ‘limit the scope for the reproduction of capital’ (Saad-Filho and Fine, 2004, p. 89). We will pick up on two other important themes drawn from Marx in the footnotes of this book. Our theory of recognition owes something to Marx, as does our theory of labour. We want to stress, though, that we are not seeking to consistently apply Marx’s theories of surplus value. For us they point to themes that we take up primarily through Jean Luc Nancy’s work in Chapter 5.

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10. In third way thinking, the market is seen as an efficient way of distributing resources, operating through ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘consumer sovereignty’ (Giddens, 1999, p. 127). However, the market must be disciplined, so as to promote those ‘social values’ that either cannot be seen in market terms, or must be created by state intervention. The state can ‘widen access’ to ‘productive resources’ which would allow those lacking wealth or opportunities to make use of market mechanisms. Th is approach represents a revision of conventional defences of the market which stresses that individual freedom demands a small, non-interventionist state. State intervention can be justified on the basis that ‘impediment[s]’ (Giddens, 1999, p. 45) to individual freedom such as unemployment or social marginalization are themselves restrictions on the freedom of individuals. Refusing to intervene in economic processes on the grounds that individuals must look after themselves cannot be justified. Although individuals may indeed have a duty to ‘mitigate’ their personal circumstances, there is a broader institutional responsibility for systemic failures that produce aggregate constraints on the ability of individuals to act for themselves (Giddens, 1999, p. 43). 11. This basic definition must be qualified by reference to the ‘varieties of capitalism’ debate. It must also be borne in mind that there are varieties of welfare capitalism that are not defined by reference to Keynesian economics and a social democratic consensus. 12. Later in this book we will look at the ‘post-Washington’ consensus, and the commitment to social risk management that runs through the discourses of the World Bank and the WTO. We will also be concerned with the development of centre right versions of mutualism under the Big Society agenda in the United Kingdom. 13. Gilbert (2002) defines solidarity as ‘an integrative bond – a sense of belonging – that connects individuals by creating group loyalty, trust, and mutual obligation, which lubricate collective action’ (Gilbert, 2002, p. 156). He goes on to argue that there are two forms of solidarity, which he refers to as the conventional solidarity hypothesis (Gilbert, 2002, p. 157) and the conditional hypothesis of solidarity (Gilbert, 2002, p. 160). The former concept is linked to Marshall and privileges a ‘generous welfare state’ that is ‘strong on universal entitlements’ and ‘heightens social solidarity’ (Gilbert, 2002, p. 157). The latter concept, developed in Durkheim’s work, sees solidarity coming out of the ‘common risks, economic interests’ that are themselves rooted in ‘the patterns of daily interaction of occupational groups’. The interactions of groups ‘give[s] rise to a level of social homogeneity that promotes identification and mutual trust’ (Gilbert, 2002, p. 161). Gilbert sees Durkheimian solidarity as more relevant to the contemporary welfare state. Indeed, precisely because it develops outside of state bureaucracy, the ‘conditional hypothesis of solidarity’ is promising because it provides the ‘seedbed of social and cultural homogeneity’ (162). Social homogeneity generates the norms of ‘fairness, justice and social protection’ that provide popular support for the welfare state. We broadly agree with Gilbert’s thesis. We will outline a slightly more precise sense of how Durkheim’s influence might feed into a way of democratizing welfare in Chapter 5. However, we will disagree with Gilbert’s link

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between solidarity and social capital (Gilbert, 2002, p. 157) for reasons explained in Chapter 6. 14. However, as Baldwin points out, social insurance is ‘mildly re-distributive’. This is because public social insurance schemes (as opposed to private insurance schemes), factor in of the ability of individuals or groups of individuals to bear costs. This makes for the ‘mildly redistributive’ element in social insurance. Baldwin goes on to associate social insurance with a sense of mutually shared responsibility precisely because it spreads the burden of risk across the working population (Baldwin, 1990, p. 12). Defert (1991) outlines the basic terms in which ‘popular life’ becomes a set of actuarial risk categories. Populations are conceived as ‘a homogenous series, established in purely scientific terms’ that ‘are not grounded in traditional social or moral imperatives, but in technical modes of knowledge’. 15. Habermas’ account of solidarity is founded on the process of ‘rational will formation’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 234). Solidarity is an essential element in his wider account of political community where individuals come to agreement about the terms of their common belonging through argument rather than shared feelings. One can appreciate why such an account might be necessary. Solidarity can easily fall into an exclusive celebration of blood and soil, underpinned by the ‘forced willingness of sacrifice’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 245) to the leader who speaks for the ‘group’. Solidarity could also collapse into a narrow and restrictive notion of class. Habermas argues that the best way of preventing such a collapse is discourse ethics. Discourse ethics ensures that any articulation of solidarity has to operate in such a way as to exclude narrow factionalism or the creation of a community that is not as inclusive as possible: ‘only those norms may claim validity that could find acceptance by all those concerned as participants in a practical discourse’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 235). Discourse ethics is, then, a way of thinking about ‘justice and the concern for the welfare of the other’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 235). There are undoubtedly themes within this account that resonate with our arguments. In particular, Habermas’ account goes beyond the justice enjoyed by the formally equal subject of law. This argument has certain resonances with our argument about social freedom in Chapter 4. We would agree with Habermas that justice must become linked to arguments about distribution of resources in the interest of the ‘general welfare’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 237). Habermas is also concerned to show that discourse ethics provides a theory of recognition. We are also concerned with ‘relationships of mutual recognition’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 240) that go beyond the minimal sense of community as a collection of ‘isolated, private, autonomous, self possessing subjects involved in market exchanges’. However, we disagree with Habermas’ account of solidarity because we feel that we require more than a procedural account of norm formation. We need to engage with substantive arguments about social and economic organization. We will clarify our other disagreements with Habermas in Chapter 9. 16. Tönnies’ (1974) influential distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft is relevant here. Gesellschaft is characterized by impersonality and the legal regulation of a relationship. Examples would be the kind of limited solidarity generated by a

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18.

19. 20.

NOTES contractual relationship; and the term is thus suited for describing the kind of commitment parties make to each other in commercial relationships characterized by self-interest and the desire for personal gain. Gemeinschaft, on the other hand, can be best represented by relationships between parents and children. These are supposedly motivated by the desire to take into account the welfare of the parties, and are emotionally based on personal commitments or even conventions that stress something other than an economic relationship. Gemeinschaft relationships are supposedly stronger than Gesellschaft relationships because they are not defined by self-interest and are not ‘open’ in the sense that market relations are. This distinction produces the following continuum of relationships characterized by solidarity: relationships between kin are stronger than relationships between neighbours, which are in turn stronger than those between acquaintances. The weakest of all are relationships between strangers. Stjerno (2005) and Esping-Andersen (1990) stress the different ways in which different traditions compose the notion of solidarity. Esping-Andersen argues that in the ‘statist tradition’ of welfare thinking, as exemplified by Bismarck or von Taffe, the state provides various schemes of pension and social insurance in order to guarantee the loyalty of the working classes, and of a middle class charged with running the administrative machinery. Stjerno stresses, among other concerns, the influence of Catholic social thinking on both statist welfare thinking and on the development of wider themes about the dignity of labour and the importance of the family and the Church as institutions of solidarity. Both these expressions of welfare articulate the requirement for benefits to be provided on a non-market basis, reflecting either sentiments of noblesse oblige, state solidarity or that of the community of believers. There are significant overlaps between Foucault’s and Habermas’ approach to the welfare state. For Habermas, welfare is driven by the prerogatives of ‘bureaucratic implementation that serve to abstract from social contexts, and reconfigure in administrative terms in such a way that serves centralized agencies rather than clients themselves’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 362/3). The legal/administrative terms in which the welfare state operates is encoded either in terms of cash benefits, which may not adequately compensate for ‘retirement or losing a job’, or ‘therapeutic assistance’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 362/3) which, by operating through expert discourses and administrative fiat, tend to limit the client’s ‘independence and self reliance’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 363). At very least the use of these administrative and legal discourses serve to ‘redefi ne everyday situations’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 362). At worst, they prevent ‘reactions to the causes of the situations requiring compensation’ (ibid.). They serve to build resentment and opposition to a ‘therapeutocracy’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 363) that spreads a ‘network of client relations’. These processes can be linked to increases in the complexity and ‘density’ of the administrative systems that superintend welfare. http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/10/299066.html E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class could perhaps be read as a kind of genealogy of these alternative welfare traditions organized around Chapels,

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22. 23.

24.

25.

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Unions and Friendly Societies; a kind of ‘prehistory’ of a left before socialism or Marxism. There is a large literature on reciprocity. We cannot review this in any detail, but we do want to offer some orientating point for the way in which we use reciprocity in this book. The literature on welfare and reciprocity is something of a sub-genre, and we will indicate how our concerns relate to this literature presently. Mauss’ work provides perhaps the key contemporary reference point for both a general theory of reciprocity, and, indeed, an understanding of welfare as reciprocity. We deal with these points in Chapter 3. As far as the wider contemporary literature on reciprocity is concerned, Becker’s work is a useful starting point. For Becker reciprocal relations are social structures that enable a culture to be built up around the identification of those exchanges that are deemed to be socially worthwhile (Becker, 1990). How, then, can we understand what is ‘socially worthwhile’? These points are dealt with in detail in Chapters 3 and 6, and take us to the heart of the debate on welfare and reciprocity. In general terms, Sahlins’ typology of reciprocity frames this debate. In Sahlin’s terms, our primary focus is generalized reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity covers a wide range of transactions ‘on the line of assistance given and, if possible, and necessary returned’ (Sahlins, 1974, p. 194). We can appreciate, then, that at root, reciprocity is based on the potential that a gift should be honoured, rather than any assertion that in all cases reciprocation will actually take place. The prime example is ‘the suckling of children’ where ‘the expectation of a direct material return is unseemly’ or ‘at best implicit’. We need to appreciate, then, the different ways that ‘allow people to live as reciprocators’ (Schmidtz, 2006, p. 87). This taps into a long line of thinking on welfare and needs. See Doyal and Gough (1991) and Dasgupta (1993). There is a different sense of freedom that runs through this book. We argue that freedom, thought through Heidegger and Nancy, relates to this original ‘distribution’ of Being as beings (Being distributing itself as being). These understandings of freedom are quite distant from the liberal discourse on freedom and liberty, but, echoes remain. In Chapter 4 we pick up on Esposito’s reading of freedom as a ‘flowering’ (Esposito, 2007, pp. 71–2). Although this notion is primarily developed as an understanding of capacity at this point in our argument, and thus remains largely within a liberal political/philosophical paradigm, it could be developed in biopolitical terms. We do not, however, take the argument in this direction. For clarification, it is also worth pointing out that the notion of freedom as the original distribution of being (also not necessarily a biopolitical argument) relates to being with; hence, in the terms of our argument, the condition of community is the distribution of embodied being. Crick has a robust principle: ‘some [inequalities] can be justified, some not; and more not than otherwise if one adds the vital condition, that the disadvantaged are actually asked’ (Crick, 1984, p. 158). These themes can be elaborated by a brief reference to Walzer’s work. For Walzer, neither state nor market can be thought of as ‘a complete distributive system’ (Walzer, 1983, p. 4). Market distribution is, however, preferable to state distribution,

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

NOTES as the state would require invasive and commanding power in order to ‘regulat[e] all patterns of sharing, dividing and exchanging’. Walzer elaborates this argument to conclude that there is no ‘single criterion’ that would provide a universal medium for justice. The worker must then ‘reproduce’ not only the capital that has been spent on wages, but also surplus value, or profit, for the capitalist. This is the process that transforms wage labour into capital – and so it could be said, that ‘wage-labour is productive’ when it ‘produces capital’. Labour thus ‘reproduces’ the capitalist’s outlay on an ‘enlarged scale’ – labour produces a ‘value greater than its own’. If a worker simply worked to keep him/herself alive, to allow the reproduction of his/her own labour power, then the worker would say that she/he was being productive. However, the reproduction of labour power does not create surplus value. Thus, the capitalist must make sure that the worker create surplus value – or realize more labour time in the product than in merely keeping him/herself alive and able to work: ‘[i]t is this kind of productive wage-labour that is the basis for the existence of capital’. The theory of surplus value has a number of problems. It, of course, assumes an ontology of labour. Chapter 6 picks up on this point. The ontology we present in this book does not rest on labour, although labour is one of the ways in which sense circulates, and is important for an understanding of productive labour and community. In this sense we perhaps touch upon Marx. Whether or not labour is the only way in which value is produced is another question. Our arguments about reciprocity would perhaps point elsewhere. Whether or not this is consistent with an ontology of labour must be left for another time. In political economy, community and human nature is defined through ‘exchange’ and ‘trade’ which creates both ‘mutual integration’ and makes everyone a ‘merchant’. Marx makes use of a Hegelian re-working of the way in which property is a mechanism that provides self-definition. Marx’s own theory of recognition turns Hegel on his head; labour becomes the authentic human power that allows us to ‘posit’ ourselves. To this extent the theory of recognition draws on Marx (drawing on Hegel); but, as with our concerns with labour, these points are read through Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of sense. Social rights are defined as ‘special rights’ – and, as such, fall short of ‘moral’ or ‘human rights’ – as they are entirely dependent on certain social and political structures. As Shue has argued, ‘the very most “negative” seeming right to liberty . . . requires positive action by society to protect it and . . . to restore it when avoidance and protection both fail’ (Basic Rights, 53, cite by O’Neill, Bounds of Justice, 135). Even civil liberties, the freedom of speech, for instance, require institutions to be put in place to sustain and protect them. This is not to say that it cannot resonate within a kind of thinking. Nancy himself stresses that his thought comes from ‘the left’ (Nancy, 1991, p. xxxvi) while being careful to disassociate this term from any simplistic party political sense. Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 560, col. 579.

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Chapter 1 1. But, see also Vincent, J. M. (1991, p. 49). Vincent stresses that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is fundamentally ‘ambiguous’. Vincent argues that although there is a ‘reactionary solipsism’ in Being and Time, ‘but it is also possible, drawing support from the analyses of being-with-others . . . to make of these forms of retreat the initial moments of a critical re-examination of sociality . . .’ 2. For Esposito immunization is a ‘paradigm’ that explains, and in some sense carries forwards, Foucault’s concern with biopolitics. This is a rather complex debate and only its outline need detain us. In the main text we outlined Foucault’s concern with a form of governmental power that is linked to the development of the welfare state. Foucault, more generally, was concerned with the way in which the body itself became the object of governmental power which effectively defines ‘life’ in terms of an object to be managed, defined and controlled. In this sense the body as a biological phenomenon is defined and encoded through forms of power/knowledge. It is as if power thus creates ‘life’ as its object. The paradox, of the ‘fold’ that Foucault’s work reveals, is thus that of how life is ‘sheltered’ by the very forces that ‘interdict its development’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 56). Esposito argues that rather than being a specific condition of modernity, this paradox might even be traced back to Plato and perhaps even suggests ‘a Greek genesis for biopolitics’ (Esposito argues, 1998, p. 54). Esposito rejects the thesis being put in such strong terms, but does suggest that the problems raised by immunity indicate that ‘modern politics’ is defined by the problematic of those ‘artificial procedures’ that ‘order’ life and save ‘it from natural risks’ (Esposito, 1998, p. 55). 3. Of course, anarchists would object to the state, democratic or otherwise, as a structure of human association. It would be a mistake, however, to see anarchism as necessarily an account of the ‘innate’ goodness of human nature. Human nature is nothing, or, rather it is in a constant state of becoming. One comes into being only through the acknowledgment of others to the extent that one can only be free in the relationship with other wo/men who reciprocally recognize each other as free. These themes can be found in Kropotkin and in Bakunin. Indeed, this is why, for both thinkers, it is necessary to ‘revolt against oneself’ and become, as it were, born again into one’s freedom. It is also worth remembering that Rawls stresses (all be it in a different context) the importance of reciprocity for recognition and self respect (Rawls, 1971, p. 178). 4. We can clarify this essential theme by referring to a brief passage from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. In The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel traces the great odyssey of the subject’s development of a sense of self and other. The individual subject must develop from an awareness of self to the realization that his/her own reality must be ‘brought out’ or confirmed in another (Hegel, 1967, p. 375). To be certain of the self is to be certain of others (Hegel, 1967, p. 378). This meeting of self and other can only be realized when individual consciousness is united with all other consciousnesses, and thus finds its own reality reflected back to itself (Hegel, 1967, p. 378). This is the ‘realm’ of the ‘social order’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 375). The social order is that structure of customs that

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makes the individual part of a whole by sharing in the traditions of a group of people. At its most realized, the social order is articulated most completely in the ‘life of a nation’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 376). Interestingly for us, the key to the form of the social order is ‘reciprocity’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 377). In the nation, the individual feels at home because it has been produced through the ‘actions of themselves’ and is ‘the work and product of their own activity’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 377). In working for the nation, the individual works for him or herself: the ‘whole’ becomes ‘in its entirety his work’; and precisely because of this, the individual receives ‘back’ his ‘own self ’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 377). This is inscribed in the ‘laws’ of the community (Hegel, 1967, p. 377) of the community. It is not for nothing, then, that the wise ancients affirmed that ‘wisdom and virtue’ are found in ‘living in accordance with the customs of one’s own nation’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 377). 5. Emile Benveniste’s celebrated work Indo-European Language and Society (1973) has shown that immunity is part of a network of words in Indo-European languages that are based on the radical mei. Mei – in Sanskrit – carries the meaning of exchange. It is rendered in Latin as munus: ‘an honorific post implying an obligation to reciprocate’ (Benveniste, 1973, p. 71) or, more generally, ‘the sense of a duty, a public office’ (Benveniste, 1973, p. 79). As communis, it relates to the German word gemein or ‘common’. The issue, then, is how the notion of ‘charge’ or ‘responsibility’ can be related to the word for exchange. One way is to follow Festus, who argues that if munus is defi ned as a gift made to an official, then we have the sense that the magistrate is obligated in a mutual exchange: he may have the powers of office but, in turn, he is obligated to provide ‘expenditure’ on ‘games and spectacles’. Thus: ‘if munus is a gift carrying the obligation of exchange, immunis is he who does not fulfi l his obligation to make due return’. From this it follows that ‘communis’ is not one ‘who shares duties’ but ‘he who has a munia in common’ (Benveniste, 1973, p. 79). Th is would allow us to see a community as that which is united by a ‘bond of reciprocity’ (Benveniste, 1973, p. 79). 6. Esposito relates the immunity thesis to the work of the negative in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy (Esposito, 2007, p. 47). Hegel certainly remains central to any contemporary approach to community. His philosophy is also bound up with the problematic of the welfare state. For instance [Moon argues that . . . . etc.]. Moon argues that Hegel identified ‘a deep moral contradiction’ that followed from the ‘organisation of economic life through the market’ (Moon, 1988, p. 28). Justifications for market organization are ‘based upon the conception of the individual as an agent, capable of choice and deliberation, and entitled to certain rights and to be treated with respect’. However, ‘this justification . . . is weakened if the normal operation of the market deprives some people, through no fault of their own, of the very means of survival, not to mention the possibility of maintaining their well being and dignity’. Most importantly, poverty ‘represents an undeserved exile from society’ (Moon, 1988, p. 29). Hegel ‘failed to solve’ this problem. Moon’s analysis suggests a discovery of the immunitary paradigm; a kind of paralysis of the dialectic. 7. Lévi-Strauss (1969) provides a way into this understanding of reciprocity. For LéviStrauss the exchange of women provides the basis of social order. Th is is not because

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women are treated as objects: quite the opposite. The exchange of women defi nes a social order based on a deferral of value or, rather, a deferral of the entire point of the transaction: sexual reproduction. Th is can only take place through the coupling of men and women in ways that are sanctioned by a social order. Th is process of substitution leads Lévi-Strauss to speculate that there is a passage from ‘alliance’ to ‘speech’. Thus, ‘[t]he emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1969, p. 496). The exchange of words, instead of things, is based on the substitution of women for signs, and the deferral of satisfaction (reproduction) that is the mark of culture. 8. Nancy’s approach is consistent, at one level, with Godelier’s reworking of Mauss. Godelier argues that behind exchange, whether of gifts or through markets, is something that remains unexchangeable; outside the circuits of gift and countergift and allergic to market transactions. To explain this point, we need to take a couple of steps back. Godelier is addressing the so-called end of history in 1989; the triumph of market capitalism. What lies outside of market exchange, yet enables the system to operate, is the fact that the human-being cannot be owned: ‘the individual as a person cannot be transformed into a commodity or gift object’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 206). Godelier generalizes and asserts, on an analogy with the inalienable body, that the ‘constitution is a social reality, a common good, which, by its essence, cannot be the product of commercial exchange’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 206). Most importantly, as far as Mauss’ thesis is concerned, ‘it is a gift which free men and women bestow upon themselves’ and which constitutes ‘their public social relations’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 207). This is undoubtedly the question of solidarity or, rather, for Godelier, a kind of exhaustion of solidarity, a ‘permanent deficit of solidarity’ because market society is fixated on ‘negotiated contracts’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 210). It might be that, therefore, what remains outside is not simply the unalienated body, but ‘all that goes into the bonds between individuals, all that comprises their relationships – public and private, social and intimate – all that means that human beings live in society but that they must produce society in order to live’ (Godelier, 1999, p. 210). 9. In Scholtz’s typology, there is a distinction between social or civic solidarity and political solidarity. Political solidarity is distinct from the other two forms: rather than being based on ‘dependence and group control’, it ‘highlights individual conscience, commitment, group responsibility and collective action’ (Scholtz, 2008, p. 33). Scholtz’s reluctance to engage with socialism or this history of the welfare state (Scholtz, 2008, pp. 27, 48) perhaps obscures the extent to which her analysis of solidarity might be relevant for this book. However, if we bring together social/civic and political solidarity, then we can get a useful sense in which the ‘measure of the interdependence among individuals within a group’ has to be ‘mediated by institutions’ which are political creations. The extent to which solidarity is also fused with social control is dealt with in the main text of this chapter.

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Chapter 2 1. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml 2. In the General Election of 1945, Labour secured ‘the largest section of the popular vote’ and also ‘won a majority of support from all age groups and from both men and women’ (Looker, 1995, p. 28). Looker provides a sober assessment of the myth of the ‘golden past’ that presents 1945 as an achievement of the Labour Party and ‘the British working class’. Looker argues that the reforms of 1945 ‘tried to distance and insulate significant areas of working-class life – health, education, social security, housing – from the logic and imperatives of capital and the market’ (Looker, 1995, p. 39). However, the ‘contradictions’ in such a project mean that it is important not to cover up the real ‘ambiguities and tensions’ and require a nuanced understanding of the relationship of democratic socialism to the welfare state. 3. The Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services was set up during the Second World War under Sir William Beveridge to review the existing schemes of insurance and associated provisions, such as unemployment and ill health, and to provide recommendations for ‘reconstruction’ of existing forms of piecemeal provision into a coherent whole. 4. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml 5. Pemberton, Whiteside and Thane, History and Policy Memorandum, 3 at http:// historyand policy.org/docs/pensions 6. The commitment to Keynesianism and the funding of welfare provision that both main parties shared was perhaps a product of the ‘long boom’ between 1950 and 1960 (Glyn, 2006, p. 9). Wages had steadily risen approximately ‘4% per year in the early 1970s in the OECD countries’ (Glyn, 2006, p. 5) – an effect of general economic growth which sustained the demand for labour, as well as strong unions and government policies committed to demand management and full employment. However, once economic growth stalled and labour productivity fell, the need to increase taxes to fund welfare development had a negative effect on wages, which in turn acted as a brake on consumer demand (Glyn, 2006, p. 163). This led to a general slowdown in economic growth and falling profits in commercial and financial sectors. 7. http://www.conservative-party.net/manifestos/1979/1979-conservative-manifesto. shtml 8. When German ordo-liberalism and Anglo-American laissez-faire liberalism rediscovered the ‘truths of the market’ in the early decades of the nineteenth century, they were inspired to do so as a response to the social democratic ‘ascendancy’. Thus, when the Weimar economist Wilhelm Röpke denounced state provision of welfare as leading to ‘ever more social insurance . . . bureaucracy . . . ever more seals to affix . . . ever more concentration of power’ (Foucault, 2010, p. 189) he had in his sights the British labour government. 9. There are a number of ways of accounting for these figures, but, the most compelling analysis for our argument is that ‘public expenditure . . . did not decline automatically in line with the withdrawal of state provided services’ (Lowe, 2005, p. 335). Moreover,

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

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private industry proved reluctant to take over a number of responsibilities from the state. Lowe specifies industry’s failure to provide funding for city technology colleges in 1986 and the banks refusal to take control of student loans in 1988. The risk profi le of and administrative responsibilities of pensions were not attractive. (Lowe, 2005, p. 370) quoting The Times, 21 April, 1999. Targeting resources on those ‘truly’ in need allowed the Conservatives to argue that they were actually using welfare more efficiently to ‘encourage thrift’. A claim made in the 1983 Election Manifesto. See http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110859. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml The Commission’s report represents something of a mediating point between the end of ‘old labour’ politics and the re-articulation of a progressive left of centre ‘third way’ position. See Tim Evans, Socialism without the State, Political Notes No. 99, at http://www. libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin099.pdf. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1998/mar/26/welfare-green-paper Workfare could be contrasted with subsidized employment or ‘work for wages’ where a participant’s benefits are paid directly to his or her employer or unsubsidized employment, where a participant is paid benefits on top of any remuneration from an employer. The 1996 Act set up the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) scheme which mandated a 30-hour engagement with ‘work related activities’ for a large proportion of a state’s welfare claimants. Precisely because PROWRA was aimed at a state level, and different states created different TANF schemes, workfare packages came in many different forms. www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare- reform/legislation. . ./freud-report/ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/24/notes/division/2/1 Ibid., 126. Independent research suggests that New Deal Programmes did reduce the numbers claiming benefit (NAO, 2007). In the period from 2005 to 2006 over 3.6 million people obtained work and numbers of lone parents entering work also increased. There is evidence that the time that individuals spend claiming benefits was also shortened. The problem, however, was that those who have passed through training programmes did not appear to be retained by employers. On the strength of the fi ndings of the National Audit Office (NAO) ‘jobseekers’ ‘cycle between work and benefit’. One-third of all new Jobseekers allowance claims were from those who had been unable to stay in work for longer than 13 weeks. Interpreting these figures is difficult. The NAO stress that there is always a degree of movement in and out of work, but that this pattern may be unnecessarily high for jobseekers because of the kind of work available. A large number of Jobseekers (40%) stated that they had only been able to find temporary work; over 70 per cent also reported that ‘family responsibilities, low skills or disabilities’ had made it difficult to find work that they could do – and also meant that it was hard to stay in work once they had found a job.

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23. Ibid., 162. 24. http://www.labour.org.uk/gordon-brown-speaks-to-fabian-new-year-conference 25. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7689481/General-election-2010Labour-has-lost-and-the-Conservatives-deserve-a-chance-to-govern.html 26. http://www.labour.org.uk/uploads/TheLabourPartyManifesto-2010.pdf, at 0.3. 27. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/29/davidmiliband.labour 28. Sunder Katwala, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/05/labour. gordonbrown?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487. 29. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/ourkingdom-theme/the-challenges-formilbands-progressive-fusion 30. These problems are to be resolved by ‘the Universal Credits Scheme’ (Centre for Social Justice, London, 2009, p. 25). This is modelled on two subsystems: a universal work credit, which replaces a raft of existing work related benefits, and a universal life credit. Taken together, the universal credits will ensure ‘continuity of income’ (Ibid., p. 27) between work and benefits. On the projections made by the Centre for Social Justice, once universal credits are introduced the lowest waged will see their incomes rise by approximately £1,000 a year and over half a million households will move from benefit dependency to work. Universal credits will allow significant numbers of people to be raised above the poverty line, including over 200,000 children (Ibid., p. 28). The effect of the formerly unemployed entering work will raise an additional £1.1 billion to national earnings; the reforms themselves will become self financing over the medium term (Ibid., p. 30). 31. http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/universal-credit-full-document.pdf 32. Iain Duncan-Smith is the present Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He was leader of the Conservative Party during 2001–3. 33. http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jonathan-rosenberg/if-thou-wouldstwhat-true-freedom-is-thou-shalt-see-it-lies-in-take-bi 34. http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/our-events/56/big-society-publicservices-welfare-in-a-big-society 35. Jonathan Freedland, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/14/ gordonbrown.labour. 36. http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2011/02/11016/

Chapter 3 1. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/767/human-well-being-andeconomic-decision-making 2. See Neva Goodwin’s discussion of core economy at http://neweconomicsinstitute. org/content/new-economics-21st-century. 3. Neva Goodwin at http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/content/new-economics-21stcentury. 4. This is a question over the terms in which economy is embedded. Dale sees ‘the liberal market’ as ‘embedded’ to the extent that it is ‘instituted’ (or takes an institutional

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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form) but it is ‘disembedded’ at other levels. This is coherent with our argument to the extent that there are distinct ideological positions that justify more or less extensive intervention in market processes, and minimal or more pronounced versions of the welfare state (Dale, 2010, pp. 201–2). http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/content/new-economics-21st-century We should not underestimate the gravity of the situation: the economic crisis has ‘no precedent in our generation’. It is the ‘deepest and most widespread in the post war era’. In Europe GDP as a whole fell by 4.2 per cent in 2009, returning to the levels at which it was 10 years ago. Twenty-three million people or 10 per cent of the workforce are now unemployed. In the United Kingdom, output plummeted like a stone. By the latter part of 2009 it was 6 per cent lower than the previous year. At present, there is hesitant growth (0.2% in the first quarter of 2010) – but the United Kingdom still remains very weak (UN/DESA Briefing World Economic Situation and Prospects, June 2010, at http:// www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wesp/wesp_mb/wesp_mb20.pdf). Our main concern is the impact that this has on jobs. For instance, youth unemployment (among 18–24-year-olds) has risen much more steeply than that among other age groups (from 12.2% in the first quarter of 2008 to 17.7% in the first quarter of 2009. This compares with a rise from 5.2% to 8.0% among all other age groups). There are particular concerns over poverty among working-age adults. This group has been badly affected by the ‘longerlasting, dynamic, effects’ of recession which include loss of skills. Loss of skills makes it difficult to find new employment opportunities, or even to transfer to a different industry. Finally, the recession has brought the inherent problems of encouraging temporary jobs rather than investing in human capital and stable employment into sharp relief (Bell and Blanchflower, 2010, 3). Although the reasons for the banking crisis of 2008 are complex, a strong case can be made for the argument that it was the result of the failure to regulate finance markets. The crisis and the ensuing recession were the outcome of neo-liberal policies of deregulation and over-reliance on finance capital to fund economic growth. See Gamble (2010). The FTSE provides various indices of profitability for investors. Its name is a contraction of the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange, who are joint owners of the FTSE. http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2011/02/10842/ http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2010/08/unemployment-clegg-rise-fiscal http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/education-jobs-middleclass-decline http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/26/cost-of-living-crisis-housing These are defined as between £12,000 and £30,000 for a couple with no children and up to £48,000 for a couple with three children. It would have taken on average 10 years to save the relevant figure in the 1980s and 1990s. Figures from the Office for National Statistics cited by Peter Wilby. http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/education-jobs-middle-class-decline. Ibid.

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17. However, as Laclau and Mouffe have pointed out, the commodity theory of labour has obscured a critical understanding of labour power’s role in production (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 78). Labour power cannot be simply purchased like any other commodity. The capitalist who purchases labour power must ensure that it is actually productive. Labour power cannot be simply purchased like any other commodity. The capitalist who purchases labour power must ensure that it is actually productive. It is thus necessary to analyse the various ways in which labour is disciplined or managed. Braverman’s analysis offers a starting point. His thesis is that the capitalist management entails a distinction between those involved in the conception and oversight of work and those involved in its execution. Whilst this is perhaps accurate as a description of certain forms of industrial mass production, it is too narrow to describe the subtle forms of discipline and control presently exercised over work. Furthermore, while Braverman’s analysis of industrial capitalism (Taylorism) as the ‘degradation’ and ‘de-skilling’ (Braverman, 1998, p. 78) of workers is insightful in some respects, his thesis would need to be re-thought to apply to the contemporary concerns about workfare, training and the need for the ‘discipline of work’. 18. There is a large literature on these themes. Ford recognized that increased productivity required ‘a disciplined and motivated workforce who would not only work harder and longer, but spend their wages on the very commodities that they were producing’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 303). Within sophisticated mechanized production, the exacting nature of work, its physical and intellectual demands, require skilled operatives whose very efficiency contributes to the overall profitability of production. 19. Thinking about the relational nature of mutualism would allow us to distinguish the solidaristic sense of the concept from a version that stresses individualism and selfreliance; see Schwartz (1927). 20. A variation on this point can relate to the issue of middle-class involvement and support for welfare. The middle classes derive benefits from the welfare state. This theme has a number of dimensions. The welfare state employs a great many people in what most would consider middle-class jobs: from teachers, through to doctors. Middleclass involvement in welfare does involve certain trade-offs. It may be that different classes, and different groups of people are entitled to different benefits There is a certain force to this argument but popular commitment to the welfare state has increasingly emerged as a significant factor in the general success of more targeted provision of benefits to those in need. Recent research suggests that ‘welfare systems which are focused on addressing “poverty” do worse in poverty outcomes than broadly based systems which aim to reflect a shared sense of citizenship across society’ (Horton and Gregory, 2009, p. 10). 21. Miliband (1985) provides a useful discussion of the revisionism. Writing at the time of the second Conservative election victory in 1983, he attempts to define the terms of a new revisionism that passes through the work of Hall, Hindness, Hirst, Mouffe and Laclau. Among its defining features are a retreat from or, rather, a redefi nition of, the idea of class. Miliband asserts that while the working class are being re-composed,

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27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

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they have not disappeared as a group. This point is associated with the need to define a new politics of the left that speaks to a working class that still votes Labour. Miliband is also keen to forge an alliance between working-class politics and new social movements. Revisionism is ultimately understood as a kind of intellectual justification for the Labour Party’s move to the right, and its abandonment of a struggle for socialism. A socialist Labour Party would set its face against ‘social democracy and its will to manage a capitalist social order without ever seeking in practice to bring about a radical transformation of any of its basic features’. Ultimately, the revisionist case and that of the socialists is rather similar: the need for an alliance of interests to further a progressive politics. The disagreement is over the terms of the alliance and the nature of the interests it could bring together. http://www2.labour.org.uk/ed-milibands-speech-to-the-fabian-society/2011-01-17 http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2011/03/11246/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1306579/Ed-Milibands-attempt-woosqueezed-middle-class.html#ixzz1FYdmidfB http://www.smith-institute.org.uk/growth The degree to which such ideas had received official recognition is indicated by the IMF report of 2010 which proposed a financial stability tax and a tax on financial activities. Although the IMF drew attention to the practical difficulties of a tax on financial transactions, it did not completely rule out the possibility of imposing such a tax. http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-17345-f0.cfm. HMRC have estimated that corporate tax avoidance cost between £3.7 and £13 billion. A Commons Public/ Parliamentary Accounts Committee stated that lost revenues amounted to £8.5 billion. There is, in general, a lack of transparency in the accounts of hedge funds and an awareness that the applicable tax regime could be tightened significantly, although this would require co-ordinated international action. It is estimated that reform of the corporate tax regime could raise as much as £7 billion. http://www.smith-institute.org.uk/growth A particularly demonized aspect of this political era is the social contract. The social contract was framed by Labour ministers and the TUC Liaison Committee and attempted to create agreements over wages, industrial growth, employment relations and economic productivity. The social contract expressed itself as a concern for ‘justice, equality . . . and protection of the lower paid, the needy . . .’ See http:// www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1974/Oct/1974-oct-labour-manifesto.shtml. Agreements also covered welfare benefits and rent controls (Taylor, 1993, p. 238). Commenting on the militancy of the unions in resisting calls for pay restraint from a Labour government, Eric Hobsbawn stated that the workers themselves had put their economic interests above ‘social solidarity’ (cited in Taylor, 1993, p. 57). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12759902 Maurice Glasman, cited in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12759902. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/03/28/uk-britain-post-office-idUKT RE62R21V20100328

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33. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml 34. Sunder Katwala, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/05/labour. gordonbrown?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487 35. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7689481/General-election-2010Labour-has-lost-and-the-Conservatives-deserve-a-chance-to-govern.html 36. http://www.labour.org.uk/uploads/TheLabourPartyManifesto-2010.pdf, at 0.3. 37. See also Neva Goodwin at http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/publications/essays/ goodwin/neva/from-outer-circle-to-center-stage-the-maturation-of-heterodoxeconomics. See also John Crudas’ argument that the stream of ethical socialism flowing through Labour politics is ‘profoundly Aristotelean’ and centred on ‘self realisation through a virtuous life’. Cruddas links this with Thompson’s line of analysis in The Making of the English Working Class (and in a different way with the work of Raymond Williams). This is a productive line of thinking, but, perhaps the opposition between Englishness and empiricism, cosmopolitanism and ‘theory’ needs to be rethought. 38. http://www2.labour.org.uk/ed-milibands-speech-to-the-fabian-society/2011-01-17

Chapter 4 1. What do we mean by equality? The word is difficult to define. Equality can be related to fairness. Hare has suggested that there might be an intuitive sense that anything less than equal distribution is unfair. This would entail a principle requiring equal distribution unless there are compelling reasons to make an unequal distribution. We will pick up these arguments when we look at Rawls’ difference principle. However, note that Hare argues that there are many principles of distributive justice – and it is an ‘open question’ whether they are ‘preferred to alternative in-egalitarian principles’ (Hare, 2002, p. 124). It is thus unlikely that any formal argument would demonstrate once and for all that egalitarian justice was preferable to in-egalitarian justice. 2. Julian Glover, ‘The Left should recognise that equality is undesirable’, The Guardian, 11 October 2010. 3. Consider the following description of the experience of poverty, drawn from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Describing a miner suffering from an industrial disease going to claim his compensation from the colliery, Orwell notes that he ‘was struck by the profound differences that are still made by status’ (Orwell, 2001, p. 44). Although entitled to compensation, the miner could not ‘demand his pension’ (Orwell, 2001, p. 43): ‘He had to go to the colliery once a week at a time named by the company, and when he got there he was kept waiting about for hours in the cold wind.’ This is then generalized: ‘[t]his business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working class life’ (Orwell, 2001, p. 44). A man is ‘pressed into a passive role’ or ‘He is acted upon’. 4. We deal with these issues in the appendix to this chapter. The poor man is a ‘phantom man’ (Wallace, 1965, p. ix). ‘Life on the dole [is] a very little life’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 18). The sense that runs through these depictions of poverty is that of the failure or lack of ‘resources for participation in the life of the community’ (Campbell, 1984, p. 17).

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5. The Human Development Index (HDI) takes as its main point of reference three factors of human development: ‘a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living’ (United Nations Human Development Report, 2000, p. 17). It considers these through three ‘variables’: ‘life expectancy at birth, educational attainment (this is assessed by ‘adult literacy and the combined gross primary, secondary and tertiary enrolment ratio’) and GDP per capita’. Th is is supplemented by a Gender Development Index (GDI) which makes use of the same variables to produce a measure of gender inequality, and the Gender Empowerment Index. Other indices allow reference to the mortality rate, the adult illiteracy rate and the percentage of people without access to health care services or safe water. The percentage of underweight children is also used as an indicator. Social exclusion can also be measured. Th is is a subtle measure because, although it includes some idea of poverty, it goes beyond a narrow focus on income deprivation and uses a number of interrelated standards. 6. See White (2010, p. 92). White points out that there are powerful arguments to suggest that income levels can be correlated with capabilities. Income levels also remain an important indicator of the access and availability of resources to an individual. Th is is entirely coherent with the argument that well-being goes beyond income. 7. This orientation towards participation is certainly important, but in our assessment of the credentials of this model, we need to be critical about the form of participation encouraged. If the creation and delivery of welfare institutions is designed and operated through citizen participation then the model represents a significant movement forward. If, on the other hand, there is still a fundamental divide between ‘government’ and welfare clients then it would be hard to understand how participation has been enhanced. 8. Although there are practical problems with comparing the various indices that constitute a definition of well-being between individuals, there are a number of possible approaches. The first would allow each index of capability to be given a ‘weighting’ based on preferences between different functionings. This would draw on techniques used in public health questionnaires. While a weighting would give some impression of the relative importance attached to each capability, it would tend to reduce the ‘plurality’ of the indices to ‘preference accounts’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 85). An alternative approach would not seek to rank different capabilities but focus on individual ones so as to show whether or not progress had been made in relation to ‘each functioning’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 86). However, this approach has weaknesses in policy application as it dis-associates different functionings that should be thought about as interrelated. It is precisely capturing these inter-relationships that would allow more focused application of resources. Wolff notes that Nussbaum’s notion of ‘threshold levels’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 86) gets round this problem to some extent, but is compromised by not providing non arbitrary determinations of threshold levels. The solution of Wolff and Wolff and de-Shalit (2007) is to concentrate on ‘improving the lives of the worst off ’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 86). Wolff and de-Shalit argue that some of the more theoretical problems about comparing groups of functioning can be resolved in practice, especially because

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the evidence indicates that there are certain groups who fail badly on numerous indicators such as health, educational attainment and experiences of crime and material deprivation. In other words, indices can be developed that respond to the fundamental problem of clustered disadvantage that make less pressing some more abstract considerations of how the indices operate. 9. Rawls is building on the Kantian privilege of the idea of autonomy. Rawls argues that for Kant a person is acting autonomously when ‘the principles of his action are chosen by him as a free and equal rational being’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 252). These principles are not derived from status, position, any particular social norms or any object of desire. These would be entirely contingent grounds. In Rawls’ elaboration, this is worked up into an argument that because selves are equal, any principle chosen must be ‘acceptable to other selves’. Because all are ‘free and rational’, all concerned must have ‘an equal say in adopting the public principles of the ethical commonwealth’ (ibid.). The freedom of selves throws them all together, binds them together as a condition of the ‘ethical commonwealth’. We would not suggest that we are building a theory of an ethical commonwealth, nor are we committed to Kantian analysis (although we do make use of certain insights in the spirit of bricolage). 10. Matt Carter, ‘Lessons from Labour’s Past: R. H. Tawney’, at http://www.openleft. co.uk/2009/11/27/history-tawney/ 11. The original position provides an understanding of ‘the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 11). The veil of ignorance ‘operates’ in the original position. It is a device that allows Rawls to provide a reworked notion of the social contract. The veil of ignorance models the choices people might make about a future form of social organization. Precisely because those behind the veil of ignorance do not know what social roles they will fulfi l, what talents they will have or how wealthy they will be, they have to choose principles that determine the ‘best worst possible option’ among a number of choices (Hayden, 2002, p. 20). Those in the original position have an incentive to ensure that they are in the best possible condition if it turns out that they do not have talents, resources or wealth. 12. ‘First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 60). 13. Let us clarify our position; we do not want to engage in any arguments about the veil of ignorance and the state of nature. This is probably the weakest part of Rawls’ thesis. We are also not particularly concerned with primary goods, and would prefer to speak in terms of the way in which goods are used; the way in which resources are turned into the ability to achieve ends. The argument in Rawls’ work that we think is the most compelling is that inequality must be justified. 14. There are other points of reference for the radical charge of the difference principle. Allowing equality of opportunity requires ‘compensating persons’ for the differences

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over which they have no responsibility, and which affect their chances and opportunities (Romer, 1996, p. 164). 15. The rejection of meritocracy as a way of conceiving equality and social justice runs through Third Way and post-Third Way thinking. Giddens’ understanding of meritocracy sees the term as entirely synonymous with dis-proportionate distributions of resources and downward mobility (Giddens, 1999, pp. 101–2). If a meritocratic society rewards those whose abilities appear most meritorious, then small differences between people have consequences disproportionate to their relevance. The maxim ‘winner takes all’ is not a good principle on which to found a social order. Furthermore, unless there are fundamental changes in existing structure of employment and opportunity, meritocratic principles cannot themselves create the good society. Rather, they might encourage significant downward mobility, with all its socially disruptive consequences. Finally, meritocracy does not in practice achieve equality of outcome because of the tendency for generational injustice. Those who have achieved elite positions are likely to favour their children or associates at the expense of those who claim on grounds of merit the right to take over positions of privilege. Arguments against the meritocratic idea of equality are also used to undo the old distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. The first important point to bear in mind is that most of the relevant commentators would agree that there can be no strict distinction between the two terms (Giddens, 1999; Miliband, 2005). For instance, research suggests that parental income is significant in determining the opportunities that children enjoy. If income is considered to be an outcome, then this would suggest that ‘one generation’s outcome is another generation’s opportunity’ (Miliband, 2005, p. 47). It would be hard to assert, then, that income levels have no influence on the life chances open to people. These arguments point at a ‘redistribution of opportunities’ that goes beyond mere ‘tax and benefit redistribution’ (Miliband, 2005, p. 47). Connecting these arguments back to our concern with income inequality suggests that it is necessary to work on two fronts; to improve the conditions of the disadvantaged it would be necessary to raise their levels of income as well as the opportunities open to them. 16. The application of the ‘broad’ reading of the difference principle resonates with recent arguments about the relevance of ‘sufficientarianism’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 79). As an approach to social inequalities, this way of thinking stresses that it is more important to ensure that ‘everyone is above a particular level’ (Wolff, 2010, p. 85) or, in Rawlsian terms, that there is priority to the worst off in policy making, rather than mandating a more maximal approach. This suggests that the focus of egalitarian policies is not so much ‘the gap between the rich and the poor’ but the opportunities and resources of the poor. The approach does beg the question of benchmark: the level at which sufficient resources and opportunities are to be defined. As this is context specific, it does not present particular problems. For instance, the definition used by New Labour when in government was to define child poverty in terms of parental income being 60 per cent less than the median rate (Miliband, 2005, p. 48). However, there are problems with sufficientarianism. It could distract from a more sustained

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

NOTES attempt to lessen inequalities and, most importantly in our argument, to secure the real reach of common institutions. At very least it provides an ‘ordering of priorities’ (Miliband, 2005, p. 48) for a pragmatic government that would set its targets on alleviating the condition of the worst off and, only if and when these targets had been achieved, tackling other inequalities. So, Rawls’ theory can be read as suggesting that a government ensures that the market takes into account needs and well-being. Its role is to guarantee a minimum level of income. To satisfy the principles of justice, it would have to guarantee that the ‘total income of the least advantaged is such as to maximise their long-run expectations’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 277). Longer term objectives are gradually to equalize holdings of wealth in order to achieve ‘the wide dispersal of property which is a necessary condition’ of the just society (Rawls, 1971, p. 277). Government revenue raised through general taxation are directed towards the just use of ‘social resources’ by allowing government to ‘provide social goods’; practices of government which are coherent with the difference principle (Rawls, 1971, p. 278). Governments of both the left and the right have sponsored individual asset ownership through schemes such as MIRAS and other tax incentives that have allowed individuals to own property. For the right, asset ownership relates to ideas of personal responsibility and self-reliance. Encouraging asset ownership inspired Conservative policy in the 1980s on the ‘right to buy’ council houses. For the left, the asset-building agenda is linked to notions of communal solidarity. Of late, progressive thinkers have perhaps rediscovered the egalitarian possibilities of asset ownership, galled, no doubt, by the fact that in 2000 over a fi ft h of all personal wealth in the United Kingdom was held by 1 per cent of the population (Paxton, 2003, citing Inland Revenue, 2002). La Poste in France is a good example of such an institution – it also shows the difficulties that such forms of banking encounter. Although a large number of people still make use of cheque and savings accounts, there is a great deal of ‘rigidity and bureaucracy’ that discourages more efficient use of the services offered by La Poste (OECD, 2003, p. 15). Furthermore, the financial advisors employed by La Poste are often poorly paid and de-motivated; more experienced advisors are often ‘poached’ by the banks. Banks have either ‘abandoned poorer markets’ or charge such high ‘risk premiums’ as to put their services beyond reach. Banks have also blamed ‘high transaction costs’ as a reason not to operate ‘small investment schemes’ (OECD, 2003, p. 14). Asset-based welfare has fed into policy. Child Trust funds were set up in the early years of the millennium, as were individual-ownership accounts for children born after 2002 to give a ‘financial asset’ that would ‘accumulate’ until its holder reached 18 and could spend or invest the fund as she/he saw fit. The government also set up a saving gateway scheme to encourage investment among the ‘low income adults’ (Paxton, 2003, p. 4) by matching individual investments with public funds. Gordon Brown’s government also attempted to address the legacy of the right to buy. Proposals to allow tenants in public housing to acquire equity stakes in the houses and flats in which they were tenants were intended to encourage ‘buy in’ into public housing

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rather than diminish the available stock further through private ownership (Paxton, 2003, p. 12). 22. Dworkin prefers to model an egalitarian account of justice on market exchanges. Dworkin argues that: [The market] enters because it is endorsed by equality, as the best means of enforcing, at least up to a point, the fundamental requirement that only an equal share of social resources be devoted to the lives of each of its members, as measured by the opportunity cost of such resources to others. (Dworkin, 1981b, p. 296)

The only way in which rational individuals could achieve some sense of their plans and goals in life would be to have some sense of the resources they would be entitled to receive. Suppose that this could be resolved in a more or less trialand-error manner, through individuals making some adjustment of their holdings. Th is takes us to the ‘ambition sensitive’ (Dworkin, 1981b, p. 311) nature of the market and an idea of distribution that can reward those who choose to save and work hard, as opposed to those who prefer leisure and profl igacy. However, at the same time, any understanding of what is fair must be ‘endowment sensitive’ and make allowance for ‘differences of ability’ among those who make the same praiseworthy choices as to how they are to lead their lives. Dworkin suggests that the way to balance these two requirements is for a ‘periodic redistribution’ in the form of income tax (Dworkin, 1981b, p. 312); this ‘compromise’ requires those who have benefited from ‘genetic luck’ to allow a distribution of their wealth to those that are deserving of such benefits. 23. Suppose that, through complex calculations, it was possible to determine premiums that would pay out if people of ambition and ability did not achieve their desired position and remuneration. The argument begins by asserting that insurance against bad luck would be available and would offset any inequalities without distorting the process of equitable distribution that operates through market mechanisms. The amount that any individual spent, and indeed whether or not she/he took out insurance, would reflect the different priorities that would attach to paying insurance premiums. Equality of resources would not require redistribution from the person who had insured to the person who had not. If it was possible to calculate the risks of such handicaps developing, and the premiums that a reasonable citizen would take out to cover his or her own disability, then it would be possible to compensate those who do develop them, to the extent that they had been insured at the requisite level and were able to claim on their insurance to compensate themselves (Dworkin, 1981b, p. 298). It is arguable that this insurance system might prove a fair distributional mechanism, and would help lessen the gap that develops between the very rich and the very poor. The elaborate limitations on the market are perhaps an admission that it is very difficult for a market to achieve forms of equal regard, unless it is heavily regulated. 24. Dworkin also relies too heavily on a notion of insurance that classic welfare thinking always found to be unsuitable to the job of providing public protection against the risks of capitalism. He does not cite any evidence that information flows more freely or more equitably through private insurance markets.

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25. Present government thinking makes use of asset-based welfare arguments, even if it remains dismissive of the complexities of New Labour’s approach to tax credits.

Chapter 5 1. The Webbs were interested in ‘dividing up the functions of government’ (Barker, 1984, p. 34). Perhaps the Webbs cut off the head of the King in their thinking a long time before Foucault sharpened the axe. Barker has argued that ‘[t]he Webbs were attempting with their differentiation of functions to have socialism without what would normally be thought of as a centralised collective state’ (Barker, 1984, p. 30). 2. Hugh Gaitskell was leader of the Labour Party (1955–63). 3. To use a Habermasian term, we might say that friendly societies were located in the lifeworld and provided shared meanings that structured the everyday. From an anthropological perspective, it would even be possible to argue that they preserved notions of common belonging around the primordial focuses of death, burial and the shared feast; a persistence of pre-modern patterns in the industrialized world. The fact that friendly societies often met in public houses meant that they provoked fears of both drunkenness and public disorder, as well as fears occasioned by working men meeting together. 4. Moreover, friendly societies were ‘fiercely independent’ – if not opposed to the ‘paternalism’ of the state (Gosden, 1973, p. viii). For example, when the idea of a state pension was mooted at the end of the 1800s, some friendly societies were vociferous in opposition to state ‘interference’ (Gosden, 1973, p. 279) in their affairs. 5. http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/global/glossary.html 6. See Warren (2001). De Toqueville is central to the modern thinking of association. Warren finds the spirit of De Toqueville alive in more recent attempts to reinvigorate civic culture and sees his work as providing a forerunner of the idea of ‘social capital’. Warren locates De Toqueville within the general liberal suspicion of central power but stresses that constitutional guarantees are not sufficient to ensure the good society. Warren, in keeping with the associationalists, argues that democracy requires the existence of groups that ‘mediate’ between the state and the community. 7. As Offe argues, associations as organized groups have two main advantages over actions by individuals. Associations can ‘pool individual resources’ and thereby achieve ‘scale effects’; they can also be astute at articulating the interests of their members in direct ways (1984, p. 118). 8. Oakeshott’s notion of societas provides an important orientating point for this argument. Societas described a formal community defined by rules. The consistency of the societas is assured by a common agreement on the ‘authority’ that defines the group. 9. Identities become ‘frozen’ as groups cohere around notions of their ‘difference’. This process cements hierarchies and creates divisions between ‘ethnic communities’ (Cohen and Rogers, 1995, p. 243). It also and retards change, diversification and adaptation.

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10. Hoggett and Thompson make use of the work of Hirschmann in this context. See (Hirschmann, 1970). Hirschmann argues that one of the main problems in building institutions that have popular support is the withdrawal of ‘loyalty’ by those who feel ‘dissatisfied’ with institutional performance. They thus stop supporting the institution and effectively ‘exit’ from the terms of the benefits and services it offers. The political right have made use of such arguments in relation to the supposed ‘exit’ of the wealthy from the support of institutions like the NHS in favour of private health arrangements. Hirschmann contrasts exit with voice. Institutions and groups need to be responsive to the ‘voices’ of their members or users to prevent exit and to create long-term relationships of loyalty. Associationalists see this as a thinking of how groups should be responsive to their members. This is then ‘scaled up’ into a broader understanding of how services can be provided by groups in a democratically responsible way. 11. The influence of the Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCAP) is acknowledged by these groups, as an inspiration to both tactics and organization. The OCAP came out of resistance to the welfare reforms of the Liberal government in the late 1980s. What distinguished the OCAP was a focus on militant direct action, as opposed to consultation and co-operation with local and national government. As well as organizing mass demonstrations at welfare offices, the OCAP have also taken direct action against landlords and local authorities. They have occupied buildings to provide accommodation for the homeless, and sought to embarrass government ministers by organizing massive ‘tent cities’ to draw attention to the conditions of the homeless and the unemployed. OCAP have sought to work alongside other political organizations in an attempt to universalize the struggle of the poor and the unemployed, and to create alliances with workers’ movements, as well as those organized by first nation peoples. 12. http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/10/299066.html 13. See, in general, the discussion of poverty, pp. 88–91. 14. Pestoff and Brandsen make a distinction between co-governance, co-management and co-production. The first two terms describe the role that voluntary and third sector organizations can play alongside the state in the design and delivery of public services. Co-production describes the role that citizens play in the actual production of resources. 15. See Brandsen and Pestoff (2009). 16. Anna Coote and Jane Franklin, Transforming Welfare: New Economies, New Labour and the new Tories, at http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/fi les/ Transforming_Welfare.pdf ). 17. http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/speakupmutualism.pdf, page 1. 18. http://w w w.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/02/~/media/Files/ Downloadable%20Files/powertopublicsectorworkers.ashx 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid.

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21. Public sector productivity has fallen since 2007, while private sector productivity has increased 1.5 per cent per year over the last decade. See Public Sector Productivity, Office for National Statistics, September 2009; http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/ labour-market/people-in-work/productivity 22. Ibid. 23. Ellins J. and Ham C. NHS Mutual: Engaging Staff and Aligning Incentives to Achieve Higher Levels of Performance. The Nuffield Trust, 2009.

Chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

http://www.caseplace.org/usr_doc/GoodwinMarketFailureFinal2005.pdf http://www.caseplace.org/usr_doc/GoodwinMarketFailureFinal2005.pdf See Taylor (2011) for a useful critical review of the recent literature on well-being. Despite the doubling of economic output in the United Kingdom over the last three decades, life satisfaction has remained flat (Shah and Marks, 2004, p. 4). The measurement of well-being raises some important issues. Well-being is defined by reference to measures of ‘satisfaction’ or happiness. However, these need to be supplemented by other indicators. Fulfilment of capacity and ‘flourishing’ are also relevant. Capacity and flourishing can be related to measures of mental and physical health, but also takes into account the extent to which a person is engaged and fulfilled by the work that she/he does. There is no single psychological indicator, but reference can be made to notions of engagement with life and the tasks that one undertakes; indeed, the extent to which life is experienced as meaningful. Particularly useful is Csikszentmihalyi’s (1997) idea of ‘flow’. Well-being also takes into account the degree to which a person leads a ‘socially useful life’ (Shah Marks and Westall, 2004, p. 4) and feels part of a community. Attitudes towards others are also relevant to this measurement of well-being. See Shah Marks and Westall (2004) on life-satisfaction data and other measures of well-being. The well-being of the unemployed is not just affected by loss of income; it is impacted negatively by ‘loss of meaning, identity and social relationship’ (Shah and Marks, 2004, p. 9). See also Argyll (2001) and Di Tella et al. (2003). Recent research suggests that suspension of benefits as a result of failing to meet targets set under the New Deal schemes in the United Kingdom hit hardest those who were already socially and economically marginalized. See Vincent and Dobson (1997). Thus, Barbalet (1988) writes: ‘[c]itizenship can readily be described as participation in or membership of political community’. For Parker, citizenship relates to ‘the rights and duties that govern social relations; it defi nes the way that people behave to one another and their obligations and expectations in relation to the major social institutions, the state, the family and the market’ (Parker, 1988, p. 10). Peter Kivistso and Thomas Faist (Kivistso and Faist, 2007) make explicit one of the key themes of the literature: ‘citizenship inevitably involves a dialectical process between inclusion and exclusion, between those deemed eligible for citizenship and those who are denied the right to become members’ (Kivistso and Faist, 2007, p. 1). This distinguishes our thinking from welfare economics and utilitarianism.

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9. Reciprocity requires that if ‘A does good for B, then B does good for A’. Mutuality describes a similar relationship: ‘A has rights against B and B has rights against A’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 76). Most importantly, however, mutuality goes beyond reciprocity: as they are ‘owed to all persons as agents’ they do not depend on whether or not some benefit has been ‘antecedently conveyed’. 10. While some welfare theorists have downplayed the relevance of reciprocity to welfare, this concern with mutuality redefines the terms of the argument – and places welfare in a normative context that determines the way in which a society reproduces itself. 11. This is not necessarily to accept the kind of Kantian arguments about the nature of rights developed by Gewirth. At least in crude outline, we would prefer to read this theme through Hegel or to see Hegel’s thinking as a way of placing Kant’s arguments in an explicitly social context. Mutual recognition can only be realized when individual consciousness fi nds its own reality reflected back to itself, to the extent that it is possible to say ‘I see them as myself, myself as them’ (Gewirth, 1996, pp. 377–8). It is important to stress that ‘reciprocity is key to the form of the ethical community’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 377). In reciprocal relations with others, individuals feel at home because they have been produced through the ‘actions of themselves’ and are ‘the work and product of their own activity’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 377). In working with others, the individual works for him or herself, receiving ‘back’ his ‘own self’ (Gewirth, 1996, p. 377). 12. The real issue is thus not so much to do with dependency as such, but with the ‘risk of its corruption through exploitation’ (Goodin, 1998, pp. 366–7). The moral problem for the welfare state is not people depending on each other or on state or private agencies, but the issue of how to protect people who are so dependent from ‘exploitation’ – it is necessary to ‘prevent them from being in a relationship of peonage to those upon whom they depend’ (Goodin, 1998, p. 367). This is where mutuality comes back into the argument: ‘if each depends on the other, then neither has any power to exploit the other’. Goodin asserts that ‘public welfare programmes can be justified in precisely these terms’ (Goodin, 1998, pp. 366–7). In other words, ‘we never know when we might need them ourselves’ (ibid.). However, it is the case that relationships of mutuality and reciprocity are absent in the clientistic relationships on which welfare states operate. For Goodin, there is nothing inherently wrong with client/patron relationships as long as they are not open to exploitation. In those cases of abject dependency, those who are not able to reciprocate are protected by ‘legally codified rules governing entitlements’; rules that prevent their exploitation. 13. There has been research on human psychology which draws on evolutionary theory and game theory to show how reciprocity can be understood and how it might influence the design of welfare policies (Wax, 2000). Wax refers to Robert Sugden’s mutual aid game in which individuals contribute to a common ‘pot’ as donors and are then allowed to receive benefits from the fund if they suffer from ‘misfortune’. Players develop various strategies over the course of a number of gains in order to maximize the benefits that they receive. Over time ‘strong reciprocity’ tactics merge, where donations are only made on the basis that others co-operate. Those who receive benefits

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that they have not ‘paid for’ are punished when a later round of the game is played. This reflects the fact that there are ‘collective action’ problems. Players want to maximize their own gains and discourage free riders in a context where there is no guarantee that the players will co-operate with each other. Strong reciprocity tactics feed into common mores that determine the rules of the game and enable the mutual aid schemes to operate. Wax has argued that this suggests that individuals cannot simply receive welfare without also contributing to the common fund. Axelrod’s use of the prisoner’s dilemma game to study the dynamics of reciprocal behaviour suggested that a strategy of ‘tit for tat’ was the most successful. This could be interpreted to provide evidence for self-interested behaviour: weak, rather than strong altruism. It is worth remembering, though, that Axelrod’s experiments concerned computer models, rather than actual human subjects. Other forms of game suggest otherwise. The so-called dictator game involves two volunteers, one of whom is given a sum of money and asked to give a certain amount to the other. In general, the donor does in fact give a non-negligible proportion of the money to another; a course of action not taken by an individual whose only motives were self-regarding (Axelrod, 1990, p. 42). These findings have been substantially supported by experiments carried out by James Andreoni at the University of Wisconsin. Although Andreoni used a different kind of game, he found that non-contribution to a common fund was motivated by the desire to punish those who were free riders. Other studies confirm these results. Free riders will be punished even if those seeking to punish incur costs that will not be repaid. Historical and sociological scholarship has drawn attention to the persistence of relationships of ‘mutual obligation’ in different cultures, and has even suggested that sentiments of breach of reciprocal relations are the motivation for revolt and insurrection. From a somewhat different perspective, work done by primatologists and anthropologists has both stressed the evidence for ‘egalitarian behaviour’ among groups of early humans in the early paleolithic. Contemporary field research on the Ache tribe in Central America has come to similar conclusions. Studies of Ache nutrition have shown that a large percentage of the food needs of individuals are obtained through networks of sharing that extend beyond the group of the immediate family. Such research is not meant to suggest that egalitarian attitudes and practices are merely evolutionary; studies of more recent cultures suggest that egalitarian social arrangements are actively sought and promoted. Interestingly, Bowles and Gintis place Polyani’s argument about the response to the social fractures of industrialization as one further exemplification of the diverse patterns that strong reciprocity can take (Younger, 2005; Hill et al., 1986). 14. Although Mead’s work has been influential in American politics, his impact in Britain has perhaps been less marked. While there were paternalistic elements in New Labour approaches to welfare, Mead’s radicalism was not adopted. Welfare paternalism, as a general tendency within welfare thinking, certainly has its adherent on the right of the Tory Party and in the popular press but it appears quite eccentric to mutualist arguments. 15. The reality of workfare packages in the United States are subjected to informed critique in Collins and Mayer (2010) and Morgen et al. (2010). The former book focuses

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17. 18.

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on claimants in Wisconsin, the latter on Oregon. Collins and Mayer show how female claimants find it difficult to meet the conditions that they have been set for a variety of reasons such as affordable child care and transport, poor educational achievements and mental and physical health problems. Morgen et al. show a similar picture, but also stress the way in which the requirements of workfare itself create stigmatizing and time-consuming layers of bureaucracy. Bush’s review of the two texts draws attention to ‘the market fundamentalism’ that has dismantled ‘both social programs and the century-long “family wage” bargain’. The result of neo-liberal reforms is to place the ‘costs of uncertainty and responsibility for care work’ on individuals rather than the state (Bush, 2011). This takes us to some complex considerations about reciprocity. Reciprocity is concerned with ‘discrete acts of giving and receiving’ that must be re-integrated into a context (Weiner, 1980, p. 71). Weiner argues that this context is one of reproduction. The reproduction model claims logical priority over any thinking of reciprocity because it establishes the norms and obligations that allow a society to reproduce itself; the very structures that enable reciprocity to take place and have a much deeper ‘social priority’ (Weiner, 1992, p. ix). We will pick up on this theme in Chapter 8. It suggests that reciprocity must be placed within a social, economic and political context. See Chapter 3. Cangiani comments on the influence of the Czech ‘sociologist and philosopher’ Josef Fischer on Polanyi: ‘[a]ccording to Fischer, individuals should regain control of the means and modes of life, starting with their own work’. Thus, ‘development of democracy implies the overcoming of the autonomy of economy’ (Cangiani, 2000, pp. 33–4). It might be tempting to think this problem through using Negri and Hardt’s concept of multitude. The notion of multitude, and the associated concept of the common, are understandings of the way in which work is controlled and exploited. The multitude cannot be thought of in terms of conventional ideas of the working class but can be understood as ‘an ensemble of singularities whose life tool is the brain and whose productive force consists in cooperation’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 209). Multitude, then, tends to describe those assemblages that bring together people, in discrete but interrelating forms of work that allow the co-ordination and exploitation of socialized ways of working. Multitude also extends to those performing ‘affective’ labour, also described as the ‘becoming woman of labour’. Domestic and familial reproduction, as a condition of the reproduction of social relations (long a concern of Marxist thought), can also be thought of under the sign of the multitude and further stresses its biopolitical dimension. While multitude is an interesting concept, it would perhaps require a much closer study of its dynamic and operation to apply it to present economic changes. As this task is outside the scope of this book, it should be pursued elsewhere. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/767/human-well-being-andeconomic-decision-making

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21. Consider the following argument. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain was still the leading capitalist economy in the world, ‘life expectancy at birth was lower than the average life expectancy for low income countries today’ (Sen, 2001, p. 49). Over the course of the twentieth century, life expectancy ‘rose rapidly’ as a result of ‘social programmes’. Underlying these improvements in public health were social attitudes about ‘sharing’ (Sen, 2001, p. 48) that were partly a product of national unity brought about by war, and encouraged by the social programmes of the welfare state. The important point is that this rise in life expectancy had very little to do with growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It was not as if the changes in health and social opportunities were brought about by ‘economic growth’ (Sen, 2001, p. 53). Rather, they were achieved through programmes that operated in terms of need and sought to build the capacity of people around provision of social goods on a nonmarket basis. 22. The distinction breaks down, especially if we allow that repetitive drudgery has at least some relation to social reproduction. In this admittedly indirect sense, the drudge is involved in the ongoing creation and re-creation of the social and economic order. This seems to raise the issue of the meaning of work; an issue that problematizes the labour/work distinction. The poesis/praxis distinction is also important. A proper engagement with it is not possible within the terms of our argument. However, one can sense a way into these concerns in the following brief extract. Vincent is discussing the passages in Capital on ‘factory despotism and co-operation’ (Vincent, J. M., 1991, p. 76). The organization of the factory tends to privilege ‘command in production’ and ‘the organisation of actions from above’. As a consequence ‘[c]o-operation, that is, communication . . . among people . . . is relegated to a position of secondary importance’ and prevented from becoming ‘a framework for permanent dialogue about the performance of tasks and prevents individuals from using co-operation as a means of re-inventing networks of symbolic and material exchange and thereby reconstituting themselves’ (Vincent, J. M., 1991, p. 76). Vincent can be understood as arguing that even within the factory, work can become a site of meaning. The co-operative networks that develop within work provide the means for people to ‘reconstitute’ themselves provided that the workers make it so. The constitution of self through the associational possibilities of working with or alongside others strikes us as precisely the blurring of the boundary between homo laborans and homo faber, between labour and work that we pointed out above.

Chapter 7 1. Drucker (1976) is seen as one of the more provocative texts. Drucker argued that pension funds could play a central role in economic regeneration and that as employee pension funds had large shares of most US corporations, they could be used for ‘the achievement of social goals and the satisfaction of human needs’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 11). Blackburn also points out that Drucker anticipated another important feature of the pensions debate: the issue of the savings crisis and the under-funding

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3. 4.

5.

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of retirement provision. Interestingly, Drucker’s book was also critical of banks as pension managers and proposed that only professional trustees could achieve the realization of ‘investment led growth’ (Blackburn, 2002, p. 12). Analysing pensions through a distinction between public and private forms of provision soon breaks down. The contemporary reality of pension management also means that most pensions have both state and private aspects, conventionally described as ‘basic’ and ‘supplementary or complementary’ (Minns, 2001, p. 5). The key factor is the degree of government involvement, and the extent to which pensions involve investments on capital markets. http://www.etuc.org/a/5697 State provision is composed of a basic state pension (BSP) based on National Insurance Contributions over an individual’s working life. In the event that these contributions do not reach a minimum level, means tested benefits become available. From 1948, a National Assistance Scheme has been in place; this was replaced by supplementary benefits in 1966 and by income support in 1988. In 1999, a Minimum Income Guarantee Scheme was created by the Labour Government, and was replaced in 2003 by Pension Credits. Alongside the BSP, there is a second tier of provision based on the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS, which ran during 1978–2002) and the State Second Pension (2SP) that became available in 2002. Th is re-structuring of pensions follows World Bank recommendations. The World Bank argues that pensions should be based on three tiers of mixed provision. Each tier represents one of the functions that should be present for properly managed and funded universal pensions: redistribution, savings and insurance. The fi rst pillar should be mandatory and publicly funded from general revenue. It provides minimum benefits and satisfies the redistributory function of the state. The second tier is mandatory and privately managed but regulated by the state. Th is third tier – also privately managed – satisfies the savings aspects of pensions management. The World Bank recommends that pensioners also make use of capital markets to ‘top up’ their savings. Beveridge’s pension reforms were built on existing foundations that can be traced to the early 1900s. The Old Age Pension Act 1908 set up a pensions scheme based on ‘means tested, non contributory benefits’. This was modified by the Widows Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925. While a contributory element was introduced, it was not universal, and was only compulsory in certain low-waged occupations. Beveridge’s thinking was very different from that underlying these earlier Acts, and was based on a social insurance model that would provide universal coverage. However, the level of benefits was low, and not meant to replace income lost in retirement. Beveridge’s intention was to provide a ‘flat rate income’ as ‘a safety net against old age deprivation’ (IFF, p. 8). The flat rate income was calculated on payments made over a working life. The Government acted on some of Beveridge’s findings (Walker, 2001, p. 124). PAYE effectively severs the link between the contributions that an individual makes from their wages, and the benefits that they will receive once they have retired. The

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

NOTES rates of contributions are established by actuarial calculations that relate to the ‘overall budgetary needs and distributional objectives’ of the scheme at any given time (Joyce et al., 2010, p. 8). There is thus no direct link between contributions made and the level of pension benefits an individual will receive. Academic analysis moved in a similar direction. Olson (1982) pointed out both the influence of the ‘medical-industrial complex’ on the investment of pensions and the potential that pension investments could be used to achieve ‘a fundamental transformation of society’ (Olson, 1982, p. 13). See also Shragge’s explicitly socialist analysis of pensions (Shragge, 1984). In the post-war period, the Conservative desire to develop a distinct thinking on pension provision can be traced to the end of the 1950s. In 1958, John Boyd-Carpenter, the Minister for Pensions in the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan, championed private pension schemes against state provision and Labour plans for an earnings-related state pension. Boyd-Carpenter’s arguments did not persuade either the Treasury or the Cabinet. The National Insurance Act of 1959 created a graduated system of contributions administered by the state. The 1973 Act was not implemented, but the 1975 Social Security Pensions Act which introduced SERPS did include elements of Keith Joseph’s proposals. In particular, Barbara Castle’s Act made use of provisions which allowed contracting-out from SERPS. As Araki explains, the contracting out provisions were a compromise. Labour supporters of the Act saw the provisions as the price to be paid for a second tier state pensions system; Conservatives welcomed the proposals as a further encouragement of the private pensions industry (Araki, 2000, p. 607). The green paper of 1998, ‘Partnership in Pensions’, proposed the replacement of SERPS with a 2SP, which represented something of a safety net for the poor and low waged. These proposals took legal form in the Welfare and Pension Reform Act of 1999 and the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act of 2000. Stakeholder pensions are not compulsory, attract tax and NIC rebates. Although they are managed by private sector institutions, there is a cap on the fees that can be charged, and employees are also required to meet running costs. An important influence on pensions policy that served as a justification for allowing the private sector to take over pension provision was the World Bank’s understanding of the pensions ‘crisis’. We can get a clear sense of what was at stake by referring to the World Bank Report, Averting the Old Age Crisis. The Report drew attention to demographic patterns in the developed and developing world that showed an ageing population and a declining birth rate. The report predicts that by 2030, the population of the world over 60 will increase threefold to 1.4 billion (The World Bank, 1994, p. 27). The report insists that an ageing population will put increasing strain on health care and the use of government resources. Furthermore, as state-funded pensions are costly to administrate (the report gives the example of Zambia where half of all the contributions went to meet administration costs in 1988) and not indexed to inflation, pensioners will find that their savings are not worth as much as they should be

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15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

223

when they retire. The World Bank supported these claims with wider arguments that funding pensions through payroll taxes decreases growth rates and distorts labour markets (Ibid., p. 28). Disney et al. (2007, p. 11) report that the take-up of 2SPs among middle-income earners actually fell in the two years after their introduction and that ‘the general consensus in the finance industry was that Stakeholder Pensions had little or no effect on retirement savings or pension plan coverage’. However, relying on research by Chung et al. (2008), the authors argue that the changes in the tax regime associated with 2SPs actually did encourage the uptake of private pensions, especially among low earners (Disney et al., 2007, p. 12). Figures suggest that ‘gross international finance flows’ have expanded. In 1996 they were worth 164 per cent of the GDP of the United States in comparison with 9 per cent in 1980. Trade in currency stood at $1,200 billion a day in 1995 in comparison with $190 billion a day in 1985 (Minns, 2001, p. 29). We can illustrate these arguments by referring to a World Bank publication on the consequences of financial crises on emerging markets. Although emerging markets are not necessarily synonymous with developing and middle-income nations, they are located within Central and Southern America, Africa and parts of Asia. Defining developing markets is a complex matter, but we can focus on the extent to which they can attract private investment or ‘flows’ of private capital. According to World Bank figures, these rose by over $100 billion dollars in the period between 1986 and 1996. These figures also demonstrate the decrease in investment by government bodies in the same 9 years, to the extent that by 1997 private flows were ‘six times greater’ than ‘official development finance’ (Minns, 2001, p. 132). Another significant figure is the decline of foreign direct investment (FDI) in comparison with private capital. By 1997, developing markets had increased their share of ‘global capital investment’ by 30 per cent. At the end of the 1980s, the figure had been as low as 2 per cent. ILO Socio-Economic Security Programme; Economic Security for a Better World; Fact Sheet No 1: Income Security – Neglected Aspects of Poverty and Inequality. The ILO Report is based on an international study of household and workplace surveys ‘covering 48,000 workers and 10,000 firms’. The Report studies figures during 1960–2000. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/ses/download/docs/sheet_no1.pdf In the Anglo-American model, private control of pensions and investment in capital markets is privileged. The state is given a minor role, or indeed seen as imposing ‘burdens’ on the efficient functioning of the market. The European model is focused on the role of the state, although there is some private funding. This model takes different forms in France and Germany. In France, employers and employees operate payas-you-go systems that offer supplementary benefits. In the German Direktzusage system the contributions to pensions are seen as part of corporate funds (Minns, 2001, p. 12). The ‘distrust’ of the stock market means that state pensions are funded out of taxation, social insurance contributions and general public expenditure. The effect of this is that ‘pensions are paid as they fall due’ (p. 12) or the working

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20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

NOTES generation pays for the generation that has retired. These features are also marked in the Eurasian model as it applied in former Eastern bloc countries, with entirely publicly funded pension arrangements. Th is Eurasian model also include ‘urban China’ (Minns, 2001, p. 7). The fourth model describes arrangements for pensions in the Asian Pacific region, where a mandatory savings scheme or ‘provident fund’ is operated by the government, and may be invested in ‘government securities’ (Minns, 2001, p. 13). In 1995, four were US registered, three registered in Switzerland, one in Japan and France and one US/UK joint venture. These firms ‘managed $3,600 billion in funds’ (Minns, 2001, p. 28). These patterns can also be observed in reforms in the US system of social security (OASDI: Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance). Prone to funding crises throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it was successfully argued in the 1990s that it was no longer possible to continue funding through taxation. The solutions suggested by the Advisory Council on Social Security (1994–96) all involved a greater involvement of the private funding – although the action that Clinton’s Government finally proposed in 1999 embraced private provision enthusiastically. Government was, however, to retain control of the investments. This upset certain influential figures and vested interests who saw this action as potentially making for public political control of ‘apolitical’ capital markets, and the plan ran into concerted opposition. The largest fund was that held by Calpers (California Public Employees Retirement System) which had $15 billion in assets. We are thus considering a broad structure that reflects the managerial revolution and the transformation of nineteenth-century capitalism. The managerial revolution explains those commercial and historical processes that resulted in the creation of a class of managers who were not normally (at least at first) owners of the capital invested in the businesses they ran. See (Harvey, 2010, pp. 7–8). John Monks, ‘Globalisation and Social Justice’, at http://www.etuc.org/a/5697. http://www.etuc.org/a/5985 Ibid. Hutton argued that media driven arguments about vastly inflated public sector pensions are far from the truth. Most public sector pensions are ‘modest’. Hutton stressed, however, that there was a disparity between private pensions and the marginally more generous pensions to which public employees are entitled. On average public sector employees receive a pension income of roughly £7,800 a year. Around half of public sector pensions are worth ‘less than £5,600’, see http://www.hm-treasury.gov. uk/indreview_huttonspeech_071010.htm. http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-19288-f0.cfm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-18897-f0.cfm http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/indreview_huttonspeech_071010.htm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-15845-f0.cfm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-10882-f0.cfm

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34. 35. 36. 37.

http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-15106-f0.cfm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-15106-f0.cfm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-17280-f0.cfm http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-18822-f0.cfm. A good example of recent activity in relation to union involvement in pensions’ administration is an initiative to analyse the voting decision of fund managers as supplying important data on corporate governance. The data shows that union concern about employment rights issues are being considered by investors and shareholders. However, as there is no legal requirement for publication of voting records, it is difficult to obtain a coherent understanding of this aspect of corporate culture. See http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/ trusteenews_winter2010-11.pdf. 38. The NPC produce figures that show that there are ‘between 5 and 6 million unpaid carers looking after a relative or friend, at least 3 million of which are aged 50 and over. This work currently saves the UK economy an estimated £87bn a year’ (Valuing Carers, Carers UK, 2007). 39. John Monks, ‘Locusts versus Labour’, http://www.etuc.org/a/4882. Monks goes on to say that New Labour ‘threw its protective cloak’ around banks in a way that it never would have done for industry. In terms of Gordon Brown’s five-point test for joining the Euro, the preservation of the status of the City of London as a financial centre was mentioned, but the interests of other industries were absent.

Chapter 8 1. A fi nal note of clarification is in order. In this chapter we will refer to welfare rights. Given space limitations, our analysis focuses on solidarity rights in the European Union and the international right to social security. There is clearly more to welfare than social security. While this meaning is perhaps captured in the notion of a solidarity right, such a concept does not exist outside of the jurisprudence of the EU. So, when we refer to the right to social security as a welfare right, it must be remembered that a proper understanding of welfare rights would not be limited to social security. We would have to take into account other rights (such as the right to education and the right to health care). 2. Statement of the XIII Conference of the Socialist International, Setting the Global Economy on a New Path, at http://www.socialistinternational.org/viewArticle. cfm?ArticlePageID=1267. No page numbers. 3. Globalization is a contentious term, but we can outline some of the themes that are of relevance. Our working defi nition is as follows: ‘globalisation characterises the increasing scope and intensity of commercial, communicative, and exchange relations beyond national borders’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 66). State sovereignty has been compromised by its location of networks in global trade and fi nance. Protectionist policies, aimed at demand creation at a national level, are no longer workable or politically acceptable (p. 52). See

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

NOTES also Scholte (2000, pp. 15–16). Scholte stresses the central role that liberalization of trade and fi nancial markets has played in globalization. For a critical approach to globalization, see Hirst and Thompson (1996). As Hirst and Thompson point out, in some ways the world economy is ‘less integrated’ than the early years of the 1900s, when the gold standard was a common reference point. See also Rosenberg (2000) for a critical approach to globalization. The collapse of the Keynesian consensus is related to the power of ‘disorganised capital’: ‘[t]he global operation of economy is sapping the foundations of national economies and nation states[.]’ One marked feature of this is the displacement of labour. Precisely because Western labour markets are regulated and costly, ‘corporations can shift their manufacturing branches to parts of the world where such constraints do not exist’ (Beck, 2000, p. 2). See Scholte (2000). Certain phenomena resist the transformations of globalization; for instance, sovereignty survives the ‘super-territorial space’ that globalized processes bring into being. See also Weiner (1999, p. 188). The threat to the stability of international financial systems has also been dealt with at the domestic level. See Scharpf and Schmidt (2000, p. 335). Concluding their study of advanced welfare states from the 1950s to the 1980s, the writers conclude that: ‘the loss of national boundary control is not tantamount to a loss of salient policy choices’. Scharpf and Schmidt argue that the welfare state provided ‘more security and a more equal distribution of life chances than could be expected from the unfettered operation of capitalist economies’ (Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000, p. 7). The European Social Charter sits outside the EU structure and we cannot assess it in detail. However, its core values feed into the structuring of the approach to welfare in the EU. Parties to the Charter have to enter into the relevant agreements and treaties in order to co-ordinate welfare systems. Article 12 specifies that there should be ‘equal treatment’ between nationals and the nationals of other European states with respect to ‘retention of benefits’. In other words, assessment to benefits in one nation would have to include ‘employment or insurance periods’ that the individual had built up in another country. This does not mean that states cannot impose minimum residence or work requirements in relation to non-contributory benefits but other forms of discrimination would be in breach of the Charter. Unemployment benefit is also excluded from the category of ‘exportable’ benefits. ‘Protection of fundamental rights is a founding principle of the Union and an indispensable prerequisite for her legitimacy. The obligation of the Union to respect fundamental rights has been confirmed and defined by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. There appears to be a need, at the present stage of the Union’s development, to establish a Charter of fundamental rights in order to make their overriding importance and relevance more visible to the Union’s citizens.’ Cologne European Council, Conclusions of the Presidency, June 1999, at http://www.europarl. europa.eu/summits/kol2_en.htm#an4. Article 27 specifies a right to consultation with the employer. Article 28 asserts the fundamental right to collective bargaining and action and Articles 29 and 30 relate to

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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rights to placements, and legal protection from unjust dismissal. Article 31 provides for fair and just working conditions and Article 32 prohibits child labour. Article 33 provides protection for the family. There are two understandings of rights and obligations in Europe: the stakeholder and the integrationalist model. In the stakeholder model, the emphasis is on business entities and entrepreneurs sustaining their ‘competitive business advantage in global markets’ (Veit Wilson, 2007, p. 69). This can be contrasted with the European Social Model which gives ‘the general population’ rights against the state for social security. The state’s task is to preserve incomes levels for both workers and the unemployed and ‘protect the population from global trade exigencies’ (Veit Wilson, 2007, p. 70). Udo Reifner, Financial Crisis and Consumer Protection, at http://www.globalfairfinance.net/media.php?t=media&f=fi le&id=3767. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/19/greece-financial-crisiswill-hutton http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/eu-crisis-catastrophicconsequences See Taylor-Gooby (2011). Research has been done to date on local initiatives that encourages communities to use their own resources to fund welfare services and to incentivize these efforts through ‘local community funds’. These experiments in healthcare provision make use of mechanisms that are recommended by SRM. As such, they move away from ‘traditional local solidarity practices’ (Lamarche, 2002, p. 99). The critical question is whether such schemes are put in place through the ‘choice’ of those involved or through ‘default’ because of the failure of more conventional governmental action. If ‘public capacity’ has failed, can private schemes provide anything other than the most basic safety net? One of the major problems is the accessibility and transparency of community provision. Can any form of ‘accountability’ for private schemes be put in place? (Lamarche, 2002, p. 99) In a recent policy document, the World Bank has argued that human rights are an essential part of the economic development of poorer countries: ‘[b]y placing the dignity of every human being, especially the poorest, at the very foundation of its approach to development, the Bank helps people in every part of the world build lives of purpose and hope’ (Akerman, 2005). See also Leite (2001, no page numbers): ‘If one looks below the surface, all of the IMF’s activities contribute directly or indirectly to reducing poverty and fostering human rights’. In working to create macro-economic stability, the IMF’s policies help the poor because, while the rich are protected against inflation, the poor see their wages reduced. Inflation also serves to reduce the resources that could otherwise be used to decrease poverty. We have had to exclude a great deal from our analysis of rights to social security in the interests of preserving the general sweep of our argument. Important matters of detail have been left to one side. For instance, a proper analysis of the international right to social security would have to include Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration. Our analysis of Article 9 of the Covenant would have to be supplemented with a

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18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

NOTES consideration of Article 11(1). There are other Conventions that would also have to be analysed, in particular 26(1), 27(1) and 27(3) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) would also be relevant. ILO, Social Security: A New Consensus (Geneva, 2001, p. 1). For instance, Mary Robinson has pointed out with reference to human rights law and trade law that ‘[b]oth seek to improve standards of living, the one through recognition that a life of dignity includes the right to an adequate standard of living including decent employment, access to the highest attainable standard of health, to education, to food; and the other through the practice of free trade leading to economic growth so vital in generating wealth to improve the well-being of individuals, communities and nations, including through funding essential social programs.’ Mary Robinson http://www.eginitiative.org/documents/wtocancun.html. But, see also Fisher and Ponniah: ‘The impact of trade liberalisation on fundamental human rights is very serious. Yet, the international legal regimes governing trade and human rights have been developed on parallel tracks, separately and sometimes inconsistently’ (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003, p. 313). Th is mode of analysis takes us towards Derrida’s notion of the ‘auto immune’ nation state. Autoimmunity is a ‘perverse’ structure that is inseparable from the tension between ‘freedom and equality’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 34) and recalls our arguments in Chapter 4 . It would certainly seem that Derrida is working within the problematic of immunity. The sovereign nation state provides ‘in certain conditions’ a ‘bulwark’ against ‘capitalist . . . hegemonies’ (Derrida, p. 158). Auto-immunity is a way of thinking about the way in which ‘formal, rights thinking’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 93) has been compromised by ‘techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital and fi nancial capital . . . State capital and private capital’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 85). We cannot outline Derrida’s notion of the autoimmune within the limited space of the present text. See Ward (2003). For Ward, the new world order demands a new form of humanism, ‘a jurisprudence of compassion’ that is, in part, a ‘public philosophy’ that ‘balances sense and sensibility’ (Ward, 2003, p. 162). These are profound claims that deserve an extended engagement, not least around the issues of a jurisprudence as a public philosophy and the need to bring into communication emotion and reason. There are certain resonance between Ward’s work and that of Wright (2001): ‘Human rights are not about creating a paradise on earth. I do not believe in Utopian ideals. What they do promise, and might achieve, are processes of respect and responsibility that can create the conditions necessary for humane standards of living and behaving on a global basis for all of us’ (Wright, 2001, p. 225). Significant problems remain. See Veit Wilson (2007, pp. 57–83): European nations have committed themselves to many declarations of social rights as human rights and while these are not ‘idealistic fantasises’, giving these commitments concrete form would require a ‘review’ of administrative practices in human rights terms. The political will to achieve this goal is probably lacking. At present, most commitments to social rights thus fall short of ‘enforceable and justiciable claims’ (Veit Wilson,

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2007, p. 62) and their implementation in national constitutions is ‘patchy and incomplete’ (Veit Wilson, 2007, p. 63). 23. Further consideration of the open would take us into a difficult set of themes around poverty, sociability and justice. Agamben has drawn attention to Heidegger’s thinking of poverty as central to the distinction between human and animal (Agamben, 2004, pp. 49–56, 57–62). However, there are numerous limitations to this analysis. Th is is a complex theme that we cannot develop in this book. We can, however, make one brief illustrative point. Any recuperation of Agamben/Heidegger’s consideration of themes of sociability, animality and justice would have to take account of the Epicurian argument that animals engage in reciprocal behaviour (Buchanan, 1990, p. 227). Th is could be developed by returning to Kropotkin’s analysis that we touched upon in earlier chapters. For example, consider a theme from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Mutual aid in animals is apparent in the care that they take over their progeny. Sociability can be illustrated by the burying beetle or Necrophorus. Individual beetles work together in securing the right conditions for the burying of larvae; and evidence can also be given for sophisticated forms of co-operation between termites, ants, bees, birds and fish. Kropotkin recounts how he witnessed crabs in a tank in Brighton Aquarium working consistently to help a ‘comrade’ who had fallen upside down. His observations of bird life and the ‘swarming’ life of the Siberian plains further confi rm what has been documented by zoologists and naturalists: one can speak of a ‘law of mutual aid’ that reaches its best expression in the ‘higher vertebrates’. Kropotkin acknowledges that it might push this principle too far to speculate as to the development of a sense of ‘justice’ or ‘compassion’ among animals, but an evolutionary account does require some sense of how ‘the higher moral sentiments’ develop (Kropotkin, 1995, pp. 35–39). We don’t mean to suggest that evolutionary biology is necessary to any Heideggarian appropriation of these themes. Indeed, the whole account of both Dasein and mitdasein cuts against ‘biologism’ (Agamben, 2004, pp. 49–56).

Chapter 9 1. As we outlined in Chapter 1, our analysis of being with builds on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Being with is a translation of the German mitdasein, and is central to Nancy’s re-reading of Heidegger. Elaborating this context would take us beyond the terms of this book. However, in a general sense, this re-reading of Heidegger is perhaps necessary to any thinking of social being that moves away from Habermas’ rationalist proceduralism. Through Heidegger, Nancy grasps some sense of the way in which we live with each other that cannot be described in entirely rational terms. There are many difficult issues at stake. We can only glance at them. The main direction of Nancy’s argument is away from the individual consciousness as a source of meaning, and a resistance to notions that reduce community to some common essence. 2. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/767/human-well-being-andeconomic-decision-making 3. Ibid.

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4. We fi nd a peculiar response to this problem in the work of Luhmann (2000, p. 79). For Luhmann, the moral system is inadequate; it has no purchase on a world of events and cannot create a meaningful way of representing reality. Th is is due, in part, to the combinations of moral and media systems and the ‘boundaries’ that they draw; the ways in which they allow the world to be experienced. Morality only responds to pathological events mediated by television and presented to a passive audience (Luhmann, 2000, p. 80). We can read this as a re-tread of certain themes in Heidegger. The system of the media spectacle is an updated way of thinking about the failure of authentic responses. We come across a sense of the fall of a culture that has lost itself in a stupid mass. It is this very passivity of a ‘they’ that has led to the impossibility of solidarity based on anything like an authentic compassionate response to others. Precisely because morality has lost itself in a passive ‘they’, any expression of solidarity is beyond most people. Solidarity can only ever be articulated by fundamentalist groups who speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. These pathologies of solidarity have resulted from the separation of social interaction from social systems. In distinction to the Heideggarian analysis, which does have the sense in which the response to ‘the they’ has both authentic and inauthentic modes, Luhmann’s analysis reveals a lack of faith in the everyday and the pessimistic abandonment of sympathy or compassion. 5. There are important links between Heidegger’s use of the term ‘care’ and contemporary developments of care ethics: ‘[o]n the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That would includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life-sustaining web’ (Engster, 2007, p. 24). Th is language is interesting. The claim that caring is a species activity could be placed within the context of our argument above. Caring, understood in this way, is peculiarly human; one might even suggest that it is related to our exposure to each other as language-using creatures. Of course this does not explain why we should care for each other but this is not the point. The fact that care is meaning must come before any explanation as to its normative structure. Care is immanent to the meanings that exist between us. Care is a matter of bodies and environments, and of a desire to carry on existing. Th is is how care opens us up to the world and brings us before others. 6. Essential to care is ‘unrest’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 70). Unrest is related to the ‘the undecidable’ and the ‘between’. These terms are then linked to notions of the ‘shared world’ and ‘individual world’; this ‘shared world’ is the world in which the ‘ego’ or the ‘myself ’ emerges as both constituted by, and (we might say) given to unrest by the fact that ‘one’s own world’ is always present with ‘the shared world’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 71). 7. Smith has a novelist’s eye for human behaviour. He is concerned, for instance, with an analysis of seemingly mundane social events, such as the feeling occasioned when, in company, one fails to make others laugh: ‘A man is mortified

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9.

10.

11. 12.

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when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and sees that no one laughs at his jests but himself’ (Smith, 1976, I.i.2.2). Smith also provides a compelling analysis of why we curse inanimate objects that have ‘hurt’ us. A thinker with an eye on such central events of being is certainly worth reading. Scheler also has an account of sympathy. The German meaning of ‘feeling with’ stresses something lost in the English translation. The ‘with’ suggests a certain indirectness, a certain distance that exists between people. Mitgefühl has ‘no immediate English equivalent’ (Ranly, 1966, p. 76). If one refers to the Greek roots of the English word, it can be split into sym or ‘with’ and ‘pathos’, suggesting a meaning of ‘feeling with’ or, in terms of Scheler’s English translator, ‘fellow feeling’. Smith’s account of the moral sentiments is not simply one of sympathy for others. His ethics require another value. Fellow feeling is moderated by ‘self command’. One can fall into moral error if one feels too little for others, or too much for oneself. The person in control of their feelings is able to restrain their selfishness and ‘indulge’ in ‘benevolent affection’ (Smith, 1976, 1.i.5.5). This ability to ‘perfect’ one’s own nature is itself an innate ability and suggests the grand design of God who has created man and nature. This is Smith’s interpretation of the golden rule: the ‘great precept of nature [is] to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour’ or, he adds as a caveat, what effectively means the same thing: to love our neighbour ‘as our neighbour is capable of loving us’. Smith’s re-inscription of the commandment to love one’s neighbour in the social structure of recognition clearly roots his ethical sense in being with: love of one’s self is love of another, who returns our love. We come to this sense of self in this circuit of meaning; through this return of sentiment. We cannot go into great detail on Smith’s understanding of the virtues, as we are not attempting to expound a moral or ethical theory. We are interested in ethics to the extent it tells us something about the sense of recognition that characterizes the social world. Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (1992) makes the claim that ‘people should see themselves as sharing responsibility for various harms perpetrated by or occurring within their communities’ (May, 1992, p. 1). It does not contain a detailed analysis of sympathy, other than defining it as the ‘capacity to be affected by the suffering of others by identifying with or accepting the expressed wants of another person’. Sensitivity, as opposed to sympathy, requires a ‘critical distance’ from the sufferings of another person (May, 1992, p. 58). It is the opening of the social: even before the very ‘contract that marks out the unnatural’ social space of obligations from nature. See Derrida (2005a, p. 69). These points would take us to the question of Nancy’s relationship to the immunity thesis. Th is is a complex matter, and falls outside the main concerns of this text. However, in order to clarify our argument, it is worth at least sketching the relationship of being with to immunity. Esposito comments that the immunity paradigm is related to an epochal and radical break in a theological world view; Nietzsche’s death of God. Th is is where ‘modern man originates’ and is ‘faced with a life . . . exposed [to the world in the absence of God] and “completely delivered over to itself ” ’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 55).

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13. We are not arguing that sympathy is a source of moral obligation. This would certainly bring our argument very close to Michael Sandel’s understanding of solidarity and ‘[how one’s] life story is implicated in the stories of others’ (Sandel, 2010, p. 225). In Sandel’s work, the socially embedded individual is a creature of both reason and emotional passion; a theory of moral sentiment that would certainly update the arguments we have been discussing in Adam Smith’s work. However, despite superficial similarities, our approach in this book is quite distinct from that of Michael Sandel. We are entirely agnostic as to whether or not solidarity creates moral obligations. To stress: thus far, we have tried to elaborate a sense of sympathy that falls short of clear moral terms. In the last section of our argument, we point out that a political account of solidarity might make use of moral arguments, but, for us, this is a particular construction of being with; a particular imposition of meaning on the flux of thought and feeling. 14. Mauss, and those working in the tradition he established, sought to extend his studies to ‘our own societies’ that ‘are still permeated’ with the ‘atmosphere of the gift’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 83). As we suggested in Chapter 1, the study of the gift was motivated by a need to look behind the world of the market and utilitarian calculus. So, in turning to the ancient logics of gift giving, we can discover a different way of relating to each other that remains with us; for ‘[w]e possess more than a tradesman morality’. Titmuss generalizes the logic of the gift and uses it as a figure of altruism. 15. A proper engagement with the gift of welfare would have to take into account Derrida’s approach to the gift of being. This takes us to Heidegger’s expression ‘Es gibt das Sein’: ‘Being gives of being’; Being gives itself as being. This is because Being lets beings be; it is not so much that it ‘gives’ being: it is ‘the letting be through which some thing is’. The world is given to us. We are ‘abandoned’ to a ‘generous generosity’: being. We simply are. Our being is without condition, without guarantee. The gift of being refers, then, to our embodiment as beings, and as different beings; with diverse capabilities and capacities: always already a being of gender, of race, of ability or disability. To invoke, along with Derrida, the Heideggarian/Rilkean concept of ‘the open’ is to talk of this sharing of being which has nothing to do with us, but which nevertheless creates us, and allows us to talk of our being. 16. Derrida’s thinking of the gift appears to contradict our thesis. We have asserted that the gift relates to reciprocity and community. Derrida, on the other hand, suggests that there is an ‘idea’ of the gift that is somehow impervious to exchange and equivalence, while, at the same time, making these practices possible. We have to follow this argument quite carefully. If, for example, we start with the intention of the giver, then, from a common sense point of view, we could hold that the giver ‘intends’ a gift, and this renders the giving possible and meaningful as such. However, the impossibility of the gift, the ‘limit’ of the gift rests not so much with the intention of the donor, but with the effects of the act of giving (Derrida, 1995, p. 13). For there to be a gift, for the gift to be given as gift, there can be no exchange. The gift must be given as gift without condition, without the hope for a return that would invalidate free giving. The gift must therefore be dis-associated from debt, contract and restitution

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(Derrida, 1995, p. 13). The gift as gift, then, obliterates exchange at the same time as it is exchanged. To give in the spirit of the gift is to give without any hope or intention of return. We cannot go into the subtleties of Derrida’s argument, but we feel it does not contradict our position on generalized reciprocity. Homo reciprocans enters into bargains which always run the risk of non-reciprocation. Underlying generalized reciprocity is thus the risk that the gift is not returned; or that return is indefinitely delayed. Our account of generalised reciprocity remains, in certain respects at least, related to Derrida’s position.

Conclusion 1. Mutualism has its roots in working-class organizations in the late 1600s and early 1700s; in particular with the rise of corresponding societies in the wake of the French Revolution. E. P. Thompson has argued that the Corresponding Societies were crucial in organizing and sustaining networks of working men who discussed political events, disseminated works by the likes of Paine and Spence and provided an opportunity for self-education. Corresponding Societies also helped inculcate a self-conscious identity, which, while not perhaps working class, was focused around notions of fraternity among those who were developing a sense of a shared perspective on politics. As Thompson notes: ‘working men formed a picture of the organization of society, out of their own experience and with the help of their hard-won and erratic education, which was above all a political picture’ (Thompson, 1980, pp. 711–12). 2. In Cole’s presentation of the origins of the Labour Party, the growth of Robert Owen’s ideas and influence combined with mutualist currents of thought and organization in the early decades of the 1800s. Importantly for us, Owenite and mutualist activities expressed themselves in welfare activities: ‘the building of social clubs or almshouses’ (Thompson, 1980, p. 790) and also self-organization in industry. Owenism and Trade Unionism also led to the development of different forms of distribution and exchange and provided something of a precursor for the organization of co-operative societies that both marketed and sold what they had produced. In turn, this saw further links develop between trade unions and the co-operatives societies (Thompson, 1980, p. 78); currents of thought that fed into the beginnings of the Labour Party.

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Index

Abel-Smith, Brian 65 on pensions 133–4 altruism 15 limited altruism, Bowles and Gintis’ account of 122 anomie 117 Arendt, Hannah, distinction between work and labour 127–8 homo laborans and homo faber 127–8 on public realm 131 asset based welfare 85–6 association, and being with 18, 180–7 and care 171–80 and lifeworld 173–4 and membership 172–3 and ontology 31, 170–87 and self help 9 and sympathy 171–80 and trade unionism 171–3 and wel-fare 180–7 associationalism, and Big Society 105–10 Cohen and Rogers’ account of 100–3 and mutualism 92 and political community 94 Schmitter’s account of 102 and self help 93–105 and social freedom 94 and welfare 103–5 associationalist theory 15 and mutual aid 15 Attlee, Clement 2

Attlee’s government’s approach to pensions 133–4 banking Crisis of 2008 19 banks, Bankers bonuses 61 Barlcays 61 Goldmann Sachs 61 Lehman Brothers 61 Policy of Coalition Government 68 and Robin Hood Tax 68 Royal Bank of Scotland 61 Barber, Brendan 69, 148 basic income 83–5 Bataille, Georges x being see also Dasein civic being 13 being with 9 see also mitdasein and association 18, 180–7 and community 9, 10 and immunization/immunity 9, 20–33 as the in common 21 see also mitdasein and mutuality 10 and reciprocity 10 and solidarity 18 and sympathy 10 and wel-fare 180–7 Benn, Tony 136 Benveniste, Emile 200 Bevan, Aneurin 144 Beveridge, William, Beveridge Commission 36–7, 202 and pensions 134, 221n. 5

249

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250 Big Society viii, 4, 11 and associationalism 105–12 and Blond, Philip 105 and Cameron, David 109 and co-production 105–12 and mutualism 12, 96 and New Labour 11 and welfare reform 51–5 Biopolitics 199 Blackburn, Robin 17, 142–4 Blair, Tony 11 legacy of 11 and New Labour government 43–51 Blanchot, Maurice x the insufficient self 23 blood see gift of blood Borrie Commission on Social Justice 44–5 see also social justice Brown, Gordon 51–2, 55, 111 Cameron, David 12, 52 and Big Society 12 capacity, and well being 13, 14 capital, arbitrage capital 138 control of 17 flight capital 17, 139 and pensions 17 capitalism 4 and banking crisis 56, 68 and immunity 3 Marx’s account of 193n. 9 pension capital 138–41 welfare capitalism 2, 4 and welfare state 17 care, and family 13 Heidegger’s account of 176–7 meaning and sense 176 and sympathy 171–80 and well being 13 Castle, Barbara 135 Chicago School 3 citizenship 1 and associationalism 92 and civic being 13

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INDEX and co-production of welfare 106–9 definitions of 216 and equality viii, 14 feminist approaches 119–20 Marshall’s account of 114, 191 and mutual aid 95 and productive agency 115–16 and productive capacity 115–16 and recognition 13, 15, 113–21 and rights 15–16, 113–21 and social freedom 14 and solidarity 13 and well being 13, 79–80, 115–16 Coalition Government viii, 4, 11, 34 and policy on banks 68 welfare reforms 52–4 Cohen, G. A. 8 on equality 82–3 on difference principle 82–3 on midfare 78–9 Cole, G. D. H., on association 172 on basic income and asset based welfare 83 on Labour Party 233n. 2 community x contradictions of 9 and economy 58 and immunity 25–8 and language 9 as legal order 3 phenomenology of 18 post phenomenological philosophy of 9 and Rawls 8 and social justice 4–11 of welfare 1 community of welfare 1 and gift of blood 11, 18 conservative government 4, 34 of 1979–97 40–3 defeat of 11 Pension Policy under Heath 136 under Thatcher and Major governments 136–7 welfare reforms 40–3 contextual economics 13, 57, 58 and negative meta-externalities 57–8

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Index and Neva Goodwin 58 co-operation, Bowles and Gintis’ account of 122 and mutualism 12 and reciprocity 12 and self help 12 co-production 60 and welfare 66 core economy 57–9 and well being 68 Crick, Bernard 14 Crossland, C. A. R. 19 Crossman, Richard 94, 135 Dasein 20–4 and mitdasein (being with) 21–5 Delaney, Shelagh 24 Derrida, Jacques x and fraternity 31–2 and freedom 32 on the gift 232n. 14–16 difference principle 14, 82–3 Cohen’s interpretation of 82–3 directors’ bonuses 61 discourse ethics 5 Donzelot, Jacques 7 Duncan-Smith, Iain 53 Durbin, Evan, care for the good of others 121 Durkheim, Emile, on division of labour 121 on secondary associations 99–100 Dworkin, Ronald 86–7 economy, as socially embedded 113 and well being 115 Engels, Friedrich x–xi, 84 equality, Bowles and Gintis’ account of 122 Cohen’s account of 82–3 complex equality 14 and co-operation 12 Dworkin’s account of 86–7, 213n. 22, 213n. 23, 213n. 24 and income distribution 13 and justice 15

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and mathematical division of resources 13 and mutualism 12 Roemer’s account of 13 and self help 12 and social freedom 14 and solidarity 13 substantive equality 14 Tawney’s account of 80, 88 Walzer’s account of 87 and well being 13 Esping-Andersen, G. 11, 15 Esposito, Roberto 2, 3 see also immunity biopolitics and immunity 199 on freedom 78 on Hegel 200n. 6 and Hobbes 179 and the immunization thesis 9 and Polanyi 26 European Commission, approaches to social security, welfare and financial regulation 156–8 European Union, the, Habermas on 150 social policy of 18 and solidarity rights 150, 154–6, 225n. 1 and welfare 153–4 Fabian Society, The, Fabian thought and the Labour Party 37 Fabianism and the state 37, 54 Laski and Cole as ‘heretical’ Fabians 94 Miliband, Ed., speech to Fabian Society, 2011 67 Field, Frank, welfare reforms 97–8 Figgis, John, Neville, on communal personality 98–9 and social relations 115 finance capital 138–44 and Polanyi 132–3 politics of 146–9 regulation of 133, 141–4 Foot, Michael 55

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252

INDEX

Foucault, Michael 7 account of welfare state 192n. 7 and genealogical thinking 8 and the immunity thesis 8 and solidarity 7 Fowler, Norman 136 friendly societies 95–6 and lifeworld 214n. 4 and mutualism 96 Gaitskell, Hugh 38, 94 Gewirth, Alan, on rights 217n. 11 Giddens, Anthony 44, 45, 51, 52 see also Third Way gift, the see also wel-fare, as the gift of blood Derrida on 232 Heidegger on 232 Glasman, Maurice, on capital 63 on the labour movement 64 globalization 1, 17 and immunity 152–3 and nation state 152 and welfare 152–3 Godelier, Maurice 201n. 8 and Nancy 201n. 8 good society 9 and good life 14 Gorz, André, on the commodification of labour 59 and community 178–9 criticisms of Habermas 173 on the un-sayable 174 Gould, Carol C., on social freedom 76–8 Gray, John, on common culture 87 Habermas, Jürgen 5 account of lifeworld 5, 173–4 and discourse ethics 5 and solidarity 5–6, 195n. 15 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 161, 219n. 19 Heath, Edward 136

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Hegel, G. W. F., on recognition 199–200n. 4 Heidegger, Martin x on care 176–7 and Dasein 20–2 on fürsorge 181 the gift of being (es gibt das Sein) 232n. 15 on mitdasein 229n. 1 and the open 167–9, 232n. 15 on poverty 229n. 23 and Rilke 168 on unrest 230n. 6 Hirst, Paul Q., on associationalism 98 on ‘in common’ 102 Stears’ critique of 98 on welfare state 93 Hobbes, Thomas 24–5, 179–80 human capital 115 see also social capital Human Development Index 209n. 5 human rights 15 and reciprocity 118 and recognition 15 as social and economic rights 15 to welfare 15 and women 120–1 and World Bank 227n. 16 Hutton, William, pensions review 145–6 immunity, and association 29 and being with 9, 20–33 and community 9, 25–8 and globalization 150–69 and the in common 2 and right to welfare 165 and solidarity 26 and welfare 2, 26 and welfare capitalism 3 institutions, common institutions 3, 13 and community of welfare 11 and economy 27 interiority, and communication 22–2, 172–4

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Index and community 10 and ‘the fold’ 22 and the unsayable 174–85 International Conventions, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 2007 155–6 Constitution of the Interntional Labour Organization, The (the Declaration of Philadelphia) 1919 162 International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, 1966 162–5 International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 1952 102, 162 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 162 International Monetary Fund 18, 136, 151, 159 Jones, Jack 135 Joseph, Keith 136 justice, and equality 15 Nancy’s account of 168 politics of 15 Kant, Immanuel, Gewirth on 217n. 11 Rawls on 210n. 9 Keynes, John Maynard 4, 40, 151 Kinnock, Neil 55 Kropotkin, Pyotr 24–5 labour 17 commodification of 59, 114, 124 as exposure 129–30 and Fordism 63 and industrial revolution 59, 62 Laclau and Mouffe on commodity theory of 205–6n. 17 and Polanyi 59 and reciprocity 60 role of labour in economy 124 and sociability 64 socially necessary labour 129

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and Taylorism 62 and Toyotism 63 value of labour 128–30 Labour government 1945–51 2, 35–8 pension policy, under Attlee 133–4 under Blair 137–8, 147–8 under Wilson 135. Labour movement, relations with mutualism and co-operativist currents of thought 94 Labour Party, Blair and modernization of 67 as centre left political party 67 and common good 57 as grass roots movement 67 and Miliband, Ed 55, 67 mutualist and co-operativist elements 60 and post war settlement 4 proposals for public sector reform 69–73 and social contract 39–40 and solidarity 4 and third way 67 and trade unions 68 leviathan 10 and immunity 24 Levinas, Emmanuel x liberal democrats, and coalition government 52 liberal government of 1906 and foundation of welfare state 190n. 3 liberation welfare 92, 106–7 and co-production 107 Malthus, Thomas 59 Manchester School 3, 60 market, and co-production of welfare 1 Dworkin’s account of 86 ontology of 3 Polanyi’s account of 13, 26 as self regulating 3 and social relationships 13

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254 Walzer’s account of 197–8n. 25 and welfare 3 well being and market behaviour Marshall, T. H. 2, 5, 16 on the social citizen 114 Marx, Karl x, 17 and being with 30, 129–30 and commodification of labour 59, 63–4 and exposure 129–30 and the ‘in common’ 130 and Polanyi 29 production as species activity 129 social nature of labour 129–30 true community 130 work and meaning 128–30 Mauss, Marcel, and Godelier 201n. 8 on reciprocity 64, 197n. 21, 232n. 14 Mead, Lawrence, impact of in UK 218n. 14 on poverty and dependency 123 on workfare 122 meritocracy 211n. 15 middle democracy 101 midfare 78–9 Miliband, Ed, on equality 67 on Labour Party as grass roots movement 67 on meritocracy 211n. 15 speech to Fabian Society, 2011 67 on squeezed Middle 67 Miliband, Ralph 206n. 21 Minns, Robert 17 analysis of pensions 138–41 Mitdasein see being with Monks, John 132 mutualism, and Big Society 12 mutuality and social rights 15 and reciprocity 17, 28–31 and social freedom 14 and solidarity 28–31 Nancy, Jean-Luc ix–x and dignity 29

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INDEX and Godelier 201n. 8 and Heidegger 20–3, 229n. 23 on impossible community 128–9 on the ‘in common’ 130–1 and ‘the left’ 198n. 29 and life amongst others 23 and the market 29 and mitdasein 21, 229n. 23 and ontological sociality 30 and the open 167–9 and Polanyi 28 and reciprocity 130–1 and rhythm/ spacing 30 on sense 174–6 sense of work 127–31 and sharing 30 on signification 130–1 on singularity 129, 168 on social character of labour and sense 129–30 on un-working 128 National Health Service 36–8 National Insurance contributions 133 New Labour 4 and Big Society 11 and duties of citizenship 114 government of 1997–2010 34 legacy of 12 and mutualism 12, 96–8 New Deals 46, 49, 203n. 22 and progressive thought 12 public sector reforms 12 welfare reforms 7, 43–51 and workfare 123–4 ontology ix of association 170–87 of work 126 open, the 167–9 and Rilke 168 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 159 Orwell, George 8, 36–7, 77, 89–90, 208n. 3 Owen, Robert 95

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Index pensions, Basic State Pension 137 and Beveridge 134 Blackburn’s theory of 142–4 crisis of 144 Ghilarducci on 139 Graduated Retirement Benefits 134 Hutton’s Report 145–6 ILO’s research on 139 law relating to 141–2 and Meidner’s pension plan 141–2 Minns’s theory of 138–9 models of 140–1, 223n. 19 National Pensioner’s Convention 148–9 Occupational Pension Trusts 145 PAYG (pay as you go) 133 privatization of 133–8 regulation of 17 social investment 17 stakeholder pensions n.222 State Earnings Related Pensions Scheme 135 Titmuss’ approach to 135 United Nations Environmental Programme’s Finance Initiative 146 Polanyi, Karl 3 and Esposito 26 and labour 59 and market 27 political community ix, 13 and associationalism 94 and solidarity 30 and well being 13 post office 5, 85 poverty, child poverty 50 and dependency 79, 118 and the elderly 149 and ‘in common’ 177 as limitation of social freedom 77 Mead’s understanding of 123–4 as negation of being 88–91 as social death 79–80 productive agency 15 and reciprocity 15

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and social and economic rights public services, and Big Society 12, 53–5, 105–10 Labour Party proposals for reform 69–73 and mutualism 110–12 in relation to co-production 110–12 Rawls, John, account of original position 80, 210n. 11 on autonomy 210n. 9 and Cohen 8 communitarian critique of 8 and difference principle 14 on recognition 80 on shame and self esteem 80 on social justice 80 and solidarity 8 Theory of Justice, A 9, 14 recession 19 reciprocity, Bowles and Gintis on human disposition to 122 and co-operation 64 definitions of 17, 197n. 21 Durkheim’s account of 63 and economic relationships 121–6 empirical research on 217–18n. 13 and equality 118 etymology of 182 homo reciprocans 16 Lévi-Strauss on 200–1 Mauss’ account of 64 mutual recognition 15 and mutualism 12, 64 and mutuality 17, 28–31, 118 and productive agency 15 and self help 12 and sense 130–1 and social freedom 14 and social justice 12 and social relationships 117–18 and social rights 15, 16, 118 and solidarity 28–31 and value 130–1 and welfare 16, 122–3

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256 recognition see also Social Rights and Human Rights and citizenship 13 Hegel’s account of 199–200n. 4 right to welfare 165 rights 13, 113–21 rights and duties 114 and well being 13, 15 Robin Hood Tax 68 Roemer, John, account of equality 13 Sandel, Michael 32 on solidarity n.232 self help 8 and association 8 and associationalist theory 15 and Field, Frank 97–8 and mutual aid 15 and mutualism 12 Sen, Amartya, and complex equality 14 on human diversity 78 on human need 78–9 Smith, Adam 116 on common life 176–7 on sympathy 176–7 social capital 99 social contract 39–40, 207n. 29 social democracy, and Labour Party 38, 67 and Trade Unions 68 social freedom 75–83 and capability 76–7 as a claim on resources 78 and equality 77 and mutuality 13 and reciprocity 13 and well being 78–9 social insurance 5, 195n. 14 social justice see also Borrie Commission Barry’s theory of 191n. 5 and community 4–11 Giddens on 191n. 5 and interiority 10 Marshall’s definition of 2

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INDEX Miller’s theory of 191–2n. 5 and mutualism 12 and recognition 117–18 and rights 15 and social rights 116–17 and solidarity 4–11 and sympathy to others 91 and welfare viii social rights viii, 15 definition of n.198 legal and political nature 116 and reciprocity 15 and recognition 113–21 and social justice 116–17 welfare rights 15 Social Risk Management 18, 150, 159–62 socialism, aporia of 188–9 Bernstein, Eduard, definition of 188 and Christianity 117 Crossland’s account of 37 democratic socialism 188–9 and mutualism 181 and welfare state 94 solidarity 1 and being with 18 Bodin’s theory of 32 and citizenship 13 definitions of 4, 192n. 6, 194n. 13 and equality 13 Esping-Anderson’s account of n.196 Foucault’s account of 7–8 Habermas’ account of 5–6, 195n. 15 and Labour Party 4 and law 5 and lifeworld 5 and mutual attachment 5 and mutuality 28–31 and norms 5 and Polanyi 9, 11 and political community 30 and Rawls 8, 9 and reciprocity 28–31 and recognition 13 Sandel’s theory of 232n. 13 Scholtz’s typology of 201n. 9

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Index and social justice 4–11 as sodalitia 31 Sterjno’s account of 196n. 17 and Tawney 9 and welfare community 2 sovereignty 32, 94 Stears, Marc 8 criticisms of Paul Hirst 98 sympathy, Bernstein, Eduard’s understanding of 172 mitgefühl 231n. 8 and reciprocity 18 Scheler, Max’s theory of 175 Smith, Adam’s account of 176–7, 231n. 9 and solidarity 64 Tawney, R. H. 9 on common culture 80, 116 taxation 13, 142–3 Temple, William, on welfare state 190n. 2 Thatcher, Margaret 11, 34, 40, 42 third way see also New Labour thinking on welfare and welfare policy 44–5 understanding of market 194n. 10 understanding of workfare 123–4 Thompson, E. P. 196–7n. 20 Titmuss, Richard 5 on friendly societies 95–6 and Gift of Blood, The 11, 18 the gift of blood as wel-fare 183–7 and mutual aid 95 mutualism and self help 96 Tönnes, Ferdinand 195n. 16 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 56, 57 and pensions 144–6 and welfare state 68 trade unions 17 and banking crisis 69 and Conservative Party 40 and co-operative practices 95 and employees voice European Trade Union Federation 132

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257 General and Municipal Boilermakers’ Union 144 and Labour Party 68 and pensions 144–6 and social contract 39–40 social control of conditions of work 116 Transport and General Workers Union 135 UNISON 144 and welfare 116 and working conditions 95

UK statutes, Education Act 1944 36 Family Allowances Act 1946 36 Friendly Societies Act 1875 96 Housing Act 1949 37 National Assistance Act 1948 37 National Health Service Act 1946 37 National Insurance Act 1911 190n. 3 National Insurance Act 1946 36 Pensions Act 2007 137 Pensions Act 2008 138 Social Security Act 1973 136 Social Security Convention 1952 162 Town and Country Planning Act 1947 37 Welfare Reform Act 2009 47 value, not reducible to market terms 114–15, 128, 130 Van Parijis, Philippe, on basic income 84 wages, compared to returns to capital 62 decline of middle class wages 62 income insecurity 61 inequality of 61 Marx’s account of 198n. 26 and value 114–15 Webbs, the 38, 171, 214n. 1 welfare, and associationalism 103–5

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258 and common good 64 and co-production 66 and democratic socialism 188–9 as distinct from welfare state 66 etymology of 181 popular support for 65 and reciprocity 122–4 and social risk management 159–62 Wel-fare 170–87 as the gift of blood 183–7 welfare economics 14 Welfare, State 2, 4, 15, 27–8 and associationalist theory 15 definitions of 190n. 2 egalitarian welfare 13 Foucault’s understanding of 192n. 7 foundation of 11 Habermas’ account of 196n. 18 reforms, New Labour 7 welfare community 5 and well being 13 well being, as being, doing and capacity 14 and care 13 and citizenship 79–80 and core economy 58 and egalitarian welfare 13 and equality 13 indices and measures of 209–10n. 8 and market behaviour 14 and political community 13, 79

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INDEX and productive agency 115 and recognition 13 and skills 13 and welfare economics 14 and work 13 Williams, Rowan 56, 115 on Christianity and capitalism 58 on labour movement and trade unionism 171–2 on a life well lived 58, 73 and Marx 57, 11 Wilson, Harold 19 Government of 1964 135 Wilson Commission 136 work, changing nature of 123–4 and core economics 58 and dignity 114 knowledge work 62, 125 ontology of 126 and productive agency 114–15 productive work 13, 121–7 sense of 127–31 and well being 13 World Bank, and human capital 99 and human rights 227n. 16 and pensions 222–3n. 19 and Social Risk Management 159–62 World Trade Organization 18

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