A-Infos (en) FPI: ++ Volume 2 Number 3

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                       F R E E D O M   P R E S S
                       I N T E R N A T I O N A L 
                           Volume 2 Number 3
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                               CONTENTS
                               --------

1/  NETNEWS FROM ANGEL ALLEY
2/  TRUST AND RESPECT IN URBAN LIFE
3/  SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL....
4/  CLASS MATTERS 

1/  NETNEWS FROM ANGEL ALLEY

A few articles for you from the current edition of FREEDOM.
These and more are available at our website:

http://www.tao.ca/~freedom/Trans/feb98.html

2/  TRUST AND RESPECT IN URBAN LIFE


Writing in The Guardian's 'Society' pages recently (14th
January) Ken Worpole criticised a body called the Urban
Design Alliance, which consists of "the heavy guns of the
architectural, property and design world and seeks to
persuade govemment that the answer to our urban ills is
more and better design." 

Rightly, in my view, he sees this as a glib and
technocratic approach to the social polarisation of cities
and the failure to tackle the "seemingly intractable issues
of social exclusion, poverty, degraded living environments
and the breakdown of trust". And his concluding rhetoric
called for a movement towards the development of what he
describes as a "deliberative democracy" in which "citizen's
juries, focus groups, consensus-building or broad-based
organising are all forms of widening the debate between
people as to how they might take greater control over their
neighbourhoods - and ultimately their cities". 

I have written before in this column about Ken Worpole' s
recent work about the public realm of British towns and
cities, an aspect of urban life that has been dwindling
away before our eyes, often unnoticed, in the glorification
of the market as the ultimate value. His report that became
the book Towns for People examined town centres, "shopping
and commercial centres by day and nearly deserted ghost
towns at night". A further report and a book looked at the
future of public libraries, starved of finance even though
used by a wider crosssection of the local population than
any other element in town centres, followed by a similar
study of the public park, fought for in the last century,
in opposition to the glib assumption that we can all buy
our social needs in the private market. There were then
further studies, also with Liz Greenhalgh, of urban
graveyards and of The Freedom of the City. 

He has been working on a further study for Comedia of The
Richness of Cities: Urban Policy in a New Landscape, and
they have just issued this programme's second working paper
by Worpole with the title 'Nothing to Fear? Trust and
Respect in Urban Communities'. I daren't recommend you to
buy it as it costs f7.50 for 24 A4 pages (from ECO
Distribution, 117 Main Street, Woodhouse Eaves, LE12 8RY),
but would urge you to watch out for the book version when
it appears, since this report reads like a modern footnote
to Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, as you will see from its opening
sentence: "Lost in a strange city, we ask strangers for
directions, assuming that they will come to our aid. If we
couldn't in practice trust strangers to be helpful and
truthful, then everyday life would quickly grind to a
halt". 

But paradoxically we also assume that it is worth our while
to pay people to supervise public spaces and services, yet
every employer, public or private, seeks to reduce the
number of people employed. Worpole cites example after
example of the results of these politics:
One-person-operated buses make bus travel even less
attractive, and "the deserted station is a poignant signal
of neglect, and for the bereft passenger the experience may
range from the uncomfortable to the nightmarish" as a
report by the London Regional Passengers Committee
concluded. 

Worpole and his colleagues had shown in their park study
how disastrous for "these immensely important outdoor
spaces" and he stresses the immense cost in human misery as
well as money that results from the withdrawal of paid
residential caretaking staff on housing estates. Noting the
link between the opportunities for play, for
self-expression, for childhood independence and freedom to
explore, and civic behaviour, he argues from the ParkLife
that parks were still places where "the indeterminacy and
inconclusiveness of daily life is suspended" and that
"people's behaviour changed once they had stepped into the
park from the surrounding streets, becoming much more
relaxed, gregarious and sociable". 

The library study taught him the same "longstanding
understanding and expectations of appropriate behaviour",
and explaining that "in such settings the majority of
people do still subscribe to the values of respect for
other users' interests and needs, waiting one's turn, not
greedily dominating particular resources, observing the
formal and informal rules of quietness, queuing or sharing
space, which largely stem from a sense that these are goods
and services held in common. 

He warns that these accumulated habits are fragile: "The
success of parks and libraries (as well as town centres and
other key public settings) depends on the richness of the
mix of those using them. Social pluralism is one of the
strongcst civic glues ... diversity of uses and users
appears to be a pre-condition of establishing a trustworthy
space. Mono-cultures are inherently unstable and
self-destructive". 

These thoughts lead him to the need to build up unofficial
forms of citizen organisation outside of politicians,
"recreating democracy not as a hierarchical set of
formalised agreements or power relationships but more as a
continuing conversation between equals". So he sets out a
series of guiding principles for "creating trust in
non-compulsory settings", leading to the call for the new
forms of social organisation I quoted above from Worpole's
Guardian article. And this is precisely the same as
Kropotkin's insistence that we will be compelled to find
new forms of organisation for the social functions that the
state fulfils through the bureaucracy, and that "as long as
this is not done, nothing will be done". 

Colin Ward 




3/ SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT MEDIUM-SIZED COULD BE VIABLE


A major problem of the nation state, one among many, is
that it is usually too large and impersonal to provide its
citizens with any real sense of belonging or of being in
control of their individual destinies. But even the most
dedicated utopian anarchist would be hard put to formulate
an instantaneous process whereby enormous, notionally
democratic, nations such as India with a population
approaching one billion or even less populous ones like
Britain, France and Italy with roughly sixty million each,
will somehow wither away and be superseded by small-scale
anarchist communities. Nonetheless, it is possible to
envisage a situation wherein even large estates could
initially be replaced by groups of 'intermediate societies'
which would represent way-stations on the road to the ideal
community. 

It is a little known fact that approximately one-third of
the two hundred or so member states of the UN contain a
population less numerous than that of Wales (some two and a
half million). Over the past decade I have spent a
significant amount of time in one of these mini- states,
the Republic of Malta, and much of what follows is based on
my personal observation of that society. It seems to me
that Malta in its present form may represent a fair working
model of the 'intermediate society'. Its greatest asset is
probably its small size, consisting as it does of two
islands: Malta itself and Gozo, plus two virtually
uninhabited islets, together covering an area of 122 square
miles. The total population of this minuscule archipelago
is in the region of 450,000 rou ghly equivalent to that of
one of the larger London boroughs, such as Croydon. Unless
as a result of current explorations for oil on Gozo it
becomes a kind of mid-Mediterranean Abu Dhabi, Malta's
smallness dictated by the natural boundary of the sea and a
general lack of material resources means that a population
much in excess of 500,000 would not be readily sustainable.


Despite the pressures resulting from an increasing reliance
on tourism and the concomitant process of modernisation,
the inhabitants appear for the most part to have retained
the instinctive anarchism of the peasant. As one foreign
resident has written, "You can never get out of debt to the
Maltese''. A small but telling example of this in-built
communitarian spirit is personified by my aged parents'
Gozitan cleaning lady. She invariably turns up for work
bearing garden produce and home-made wine to the rough
value of the wage she will earn on that occasion. Anyone
who has visited Malta will be a source of similar
anecdotes. 

Because it is a small and still fairly homogeneous society,
everyone knows, or indeed is related to, everyone else.
Thus the islands appear to be governed by a species of
informal bureaucracy. While this leads to what in more
formal and puritanical societies would be called
'nepotism', from a rather different perspective this could
be viewed as a manifestation of mutual aid. At the same
time those in power have to behave themselves because there
is literally nowhere for them to hide. I'm not for one
moment suggesting that Malta is paradise on earth - the
Catholic church has too much power for that - but the
inhabitants are generally pleasant to one another, the
crime rate is negligible and you never see young women with
babies begging on the streets. 

Ordinary people do seem to have a need to belong to a
small-scale and well-defined community, and perhaps this is
one of the contributing factors in the current middle class
preference for living in rural areas. 

On a broader canvas there is evidence of a global trend
towards smaller societies secessionist movements are
endemic appearing in places as far apart as Sri Lanka and
the former Yugoslavia. Twentieth century English literature
and drama emphasise this tendency: The Napoleon of Notting
Hill (although it ends badly in an outburst of rampant
nationalism), Passport to Pimlico and a recent television
series (whose name escapes me) about an autonomous republic
in East Anglia, are all constructed around this theme. 

So perhaps our 'intermediate society', as suggested by the
Maltese experience, is not an impossible dream. Obviously
this could not be achieved in one fell swoop, but perhaps
Britain (having freed itself from the Irish entanglement)
could sensibly and logically be divided into Scotland,
Wales and the original Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex,
Mercia and Northumbria. A fair beginning and a move towards
proving small is beautiful but medium-sized could be
viable. 

Adrian Walter 





4/  CLASS MATTERS


Three or four years ago, with the gap between rich and poor
becorning ever wider and with the sheer extent of
Thatcherism's deliberate re-creation of poverty becoming
apparent I received an extraordinary manuscript for
comment. 

Central to its thesis was the idea that class analysis had
no explanatory value and that class itself was an outmoded
concept in the late twentieth century, that it was best
discarded in any discussion of either the dreadful present
or the ghastly future. The gist seemed to be that
anarchists and the libertarian left should drop the term
leaving it to Marxists, sociologists and other riff-raff.
The author was apparently unaware that a similar debate
(along with some first class research) was going on within
sociology itself. At the same time over in the camp of
academic Marxism (and there was no other significant kind
by this time) the rejection of the theoretical base
bequeathed by the Second International had rid its theories
of vulgar determinism at the expense of turning the domains
of base and superstructure into a metaphor for the social
structure itself. Thus nothing could be known until
everything was known. We were back where we started. 

Class Repression and State Violence 

Class is admittedly a notoriously slippery concept. However
a time of income polarisation and growing disparity of life
chances, a period when the forced growth of inequalities
was creating rapidly growing discrepancies in health,
opportunity, and life itself, hardly seemed the time to
throw the baby out with the bathwater. This was a period
which had seen a section of the population "not governed
but subdued"' by cavalry charges reminiscent of Peterloo.
It was a time which had seen peaceful demonstrations about
poll tax broken up by colonial policing methods which had
always been designed to stifle protest and discredit
protesters. 

It was a period when even Tories began tum away from what
was being done in their name. Ian Gilmour followed
Galbraith in attacking the government' s underlying
assumption that "the rich should be made richer to make
them work harder and the poor be made poorer to achieve the
same result". This former Tory cabinet minister went on to
say "their policies were unrelentingly divisive and
discriminatory against the poor, whose human dignity was
relentlessly ignored". He quoted Hume: "That policy is
violent which aggrandizes the public by the poverty of
individuals" and added "still worse is one which
aggrandizes the rich by the poverty of the poor. Whether or
not Thatcherite social policy added to national violence by
provoking riots and increasing crime it was, in
 the sense used by Hume, undoubtedly 'violent'."2 

What is happening? 

The situation has changed little, and not eased at all
since the heyday of Thatcherism. Increasingly it seems, the
gestures toward egalitarianism made in the last hundred
years erode, vanish or are obliterated, as if welfare
capitalism was an aberration, a blip, created and
maintained only because of a perceived threat from the then
USSR. American hegemony,the growth of multi-nationals not
responsible to any control, and the increasing irrelevance
of large sections of the population to the maintenance of
contemporary capitalism, suggests that even the faulty
welfare society of postwar Britain constituted a kind of
golden age which has gone for good. Indeed the
institutionalisation of insecurity generally, something new
this century among large sections of the 'middle classes'
makes one wonder whether Marx' s vision of
proletarianisation may not have been too hastily dismissed.
Certainly there are problems of inequality and justice in
contemporary society which cannot be ignored however much
ambivalence there is about the nature of stratification,
the various inequalities that most perceive, and from which
increasing numbers suffer. It is the very seriousness of
these issues that make it important that some of the work
done be available to those who do not read the sociological
journals. 

This is the professed intention behind David J. Lee and
Bryan S .Turner' s collection Conflicts about Class:
Debating Inequality in Late Industrialism (Longmans, 1996).
It is indeed welcome, although the technical nature of some
contributions means that it is unlikely to reach an
audience outside those who take sociology seriously. Which
is a pity, as while some contributions have probably been
written with the aim of gunning down an opponent in the
learned journals, others provide good analysis and valuable
ammunition. Anyone prepared to do a little serious reading
will find it a useful source book. 

In particular part three of the book, 'Class Research and
Class Explanations', has intrinsic informative value. John
Westergaard's survey 'Class in Britain since 1979: Facts,
theories and ideologies' is particularly helpful.
Westergaard starts from the curious situation that while
inequality has widened quite dramatically since 1980, over
the same period fashionable theories and influential
ideologies have appeared to say that nothing of the sort is
happening. "While rich and poor have grown farther apart"
writes Westergaard, "both predominant ideology and social
theory have set out to dismiss this; or to argue that it
doesn't matter anyway".3 

Yes it does 

Of course it does matter. It matters because of the self
perpetuating nature of these divisions. It matters because
of the crippling of health and life inequality creates. It
matters because of the lirnitation of the sense of the
possible that restricts and stunts every individual in a
world where ascription defines and largely prescribes life
chances. It matters because of the persistance of "power as
money" (to use David Lee's telling phrase4) and not least
it matters because an adequate analysis is a prerequisite
to changing anything for the better. 

Westergaard' s definition of class is a commonsense one. He
uses the term to refer to a set of social divisions that
rise from a society's economic organisation: for its
arrangements for command over, and benefit from, the
deployment of scarce resources. People may said to be in
different classes insofar as they occupy - and generally
continue to occupy - distinct and unequal places in that
economic organisation. He goes on to suggest that the
debate between Weber and Marx, or rather between Weberians
and Marxists, is more apparent than real. Thus he points
out that even if Marx emphasised place in production as a
class determinant, he was equally concerned with
distribution via his discussions of surplus appropriation
and labour exploitation. Similarly Weber whose work has had
far reaching effects on ideas about class - even down to
market research level - emphasised distnbution when he
wrote about unequal life chances of people in different
classes but nevertheless saw those inequalities as the
result primarily of differences of place in production. 

It's the economy, stupid. 

Lee's position is that class - "like many other social
phenomena - must at some point be understood as a property
of social relationships per se - and is not simply
reducible to the situations and actions of individuals ...
It shapes and constrains, and so to that extent accounts
for the individuality of particular actors be they persons
or groups of persons." The constraints of which Lee writes
become ever more severe. To take only the most short term
ones. In Bntain at the moment at least two million children
are suffering from ill health and stunted growth from
malnutrition while the Treasury is awash with money it
refuses to allocate to the poor. Widespread anaemia is
apparent and consequently rickets has reappeared, TB is now
more prevalent than whooping cough, and the appalling Blair
wants to cut benefits further. The long term effects of
this sort of inequality once provided us with a model to
avoid. Today it doesn't appear to matter because capitalism
and its wars can operate without the people it once needed.
In America welfare cuts are a matter of pride while the US
Conference of Mayors hardly a left wing cabal) is warning
of terrible destitution, affecting hundreds of thousands,
when the new US benefit cuts come in. Meanwhile the
proportion of Federal Revenue derived from corporate taxes
has dropped by four fifths as the conglomerates move out of
the control of national governments altogether. 

This book, as one of its editors notes, is written by a
contention of sociologists. It is in part a debate about
concepts and the lay person may find some of that tedious.
But it also illumines the nature of the debate and
summarises some excellent research. It is a handbook for
study and reference and is highly recommended to those who
want to understand the debate and its urgency. For we live
in depressingly interesting times. Globalisation, political
corruption, monopolisation, immiseration, technology and
human redundancy, the effects of power on choice, were all
studied by Marx and his observations were translated by
Bakunin. Obscured by reformist governments for much of this
century they are back again as major problems. However
different our solutions we
 ought to look again at the analysis. For the problem
 remains capitalism 
and however we define it class perpetuation is a function
of capitalism's operation. 

John Pilgrim 

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