Man or Superman?

In the wake of last week's riots there have been no shortage of supermen rushing forward to suggest how the rest of us might live. I have found many of the prescriptions, frankly, sickening. The focus on the failure of families is especially troubling, because it slides so easily into blaming women for their failure to be adequate parents.

I also find the use of the phrase 'underclass' troubling. Like the idea of the 'undeserving poor' that preceded it, it suggests a natural hierarchy in society that actually arises as a result of a capitalist economy. The easy way with which Duncan Smith and Cameron talk about Right and Wrong, as though these were generally agreed categories, identifies them clearly as members of the dominant class and its hegemonic ideology.

The Wrong values are, apparently, about selfishness and greed; whereas the Right values are about hard work and supporting your community. I can't be the only person who questions whether the wealthy are more likely to find themselves in the first value set or the second.

As Cameron styles himself as some sort of Nietzschean Übermensch, the 'creator of new values' striding forth to save us mere mortal from chaos, I am reminded of the balancing word Untermensch, and the danger of defining human beings into more or less worthy categories. How much more wholesome is the Yiddish word Mensch, that comes without qualification or hiearchy and means, according to the Webster-Merriam online dictionary: a 'good person, human being, person'.

That is where most of us are at: struggling to do our best in a hostile economic system and without the advantages of wealth or elite status. We haven't broken society and, through our daily acts of mutual kindness, we make and mend it anew. Tweet

Defend academic freedom

As soon as David Cameron uttered the phrase 'Big Society' I made a mental note not to use it. Giving currency to such banal phrases also lends them credibility, and is now being used as a justification for the AHRC, the body that allocates research funding to the arts and humanities, assigning it a particularly priority. The question that remains to be tested is whether research proposals excoriating the shallow ambiguity of the phrase are funded as well as those that lauds its prescience and political astuteness.

I have already had my say about the loss of academic freedom that has resulted from the political pressure on the UK funding councils. Professor James Ladyman, head of philosophy at Bristol University writes:

'If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards. The academic world has been watching this story unfold and I have received correspondence from all over the world about it. This is fight for the heart and soul of academia. Words matter, ideas matter and reason matters, and defending clarity of thought and expression and the political independence of research is our true strategic priority.'

Please take the time to sign the online petition.
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Unprincipled Universities

Although they are happening outside the arena of mass media, the discussions taking place over the threats to academic freedom resulting from the marketisation of our universities are anything but academic. They are a matter of principle, and in this case the principle has a name: the Haldane Principle. Rather disappointingly the Haldane in question turns out to be Richard Burdon Haldane, not the more glamorous and famous J. B. S. Haldane, geneticist and biologist, who was his nephew. The Haldanes were a family of Scottish aristocrats and the kind of erudite and radical men who we have often had to rely on to guarantee our basic freedoms.

Haldane established the principle that it should be those who do research who control how public funding is allocated, rather than the politicians who use their work. While this system has severe limiations, resulting in a club mentality and favouring the mainstream at the expenses of the cutting-edge, it has limited the influence of political bias in the allocation of research funds that come from the public purse. This system, which has operated since the establishment of the University Grants Committee in 1904, has now been abolished by stealth.

First we have the new delivery plan from the Economic and Social Research Council, with its key priorities clearly informed by the ideology of the government. The first priority to 'Enable the development of robust government and private sector strategies to ensure sustainable growth' leaves little space for an economist who might consider the encouragement of growth to be the primary threat to environmental and social health, while the suggestion that 'Social scientists also work directly with business to help people learn, enhance performance, innovate and deliver at speed' sidelines my key research question: 'What if business is the problem?'

In this context the second priority, 'Creating a better understanding of how and why people and organisations make decisions, and how these can be managed or influenced' and its supporting statement that 'research demonstrates and evaluates how interventions can promote a beneficial change in the behaviour of citizens' becomes rather chilling. Once it would have been the role of social scientists to ask what would be meant by 'beneficial'. Now this is assumed by the first priority and our job is rather to find the most efficient ways to manipulate citizens into the path chosen for them by the corporate-dominated politicians.

And now we reach the nub of the matter. Priority 3, 'Developing ways to enhance the role and contributions of citizens, voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises to create a vibrant national and global society' appears innocuous at first, but begins to seem more sinister once you read it alongside the phrase 'big society' and in conjunction with a recent article from the THES describing pressure that was brought to bear on the ESRC's oppo in the humanities field: the AHRC. A stronger article in Sunday's Observer is quite explicit about the pressure put on the AHRC to invest a significant proportion of its money into justifying the Big Society, at risk of losing its funding altogether.

The justification for the Haldane principle is that public money, raised from taxation, should be invested for the benefit of the public. It also assumes that researchers, rather than politicians, are best placed to decide how that benefit might be determined. Funding councils have assessed competitive bids for these funds on the basis of quality, not political acceptability. The abolition of this principle in favour of research priorities determined in Conservative Central Office gives an interesting new twist to the adage that 'knowledge is power'.
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Big Society or Big Profits?

In patronising mediaspeak we are to be told again today that the PM is failing to communicate effectively his vision for the Big Society. While he may be failing in the sense that we, who must be the big society if anybody is, are not following his line of argument, he is not failing in the sense that we are well aware what he is up to. A ComRes poll reported in yesterday's Sunday Independent indicated that 41% of people considered that 'The Government’s Big Society is merely a cover for spending cuts' with only 21% disagreeing, while half of those surveyed thought it was just a gimmick.

Those of us who work in and with co-operatives have long been suspicious of the government's support for social enterprise. Initially, co-operatives were not included in the definition of a 'social enterprise' because they were considered to be motivated by the interests of their members rather than wider society. The definition of a social enterprise is so notoriously vague - involving merely a commitment to the social good and some minimum level of trading - that major global corporations were claiming to be social enterprises while ethically driven businesses owned by their own members could not.

What is important, and can cut like a sharp scalpel straight through the tendentious guff, is the simple issue of ownership and control. A co-operative is a different form of business because it is owned by either its workers, or its customers, or some combination of the two. The value of its business stays with them. And decisions about how the business should work also rest with the workers or members, either directly or - when the co-operatives reach a certain size - through elected boards.

The difficulty co-operatives, and social enterprises, have faced in a capitalist economy is persuading those who control capital to lend them the small amount they need to develop and expand. Overseas co-operative movements have identified this weakness and become effective at recycling their members money, as in the Quebecois solidarity funds, or the Caja Laboral in Spain. The putative Big Society Bank, by contrast, is a capitalist institution, where external holders of capital can make profits from the work of others. The contrast between this the co-operative approach is clear when the discussion moves seamlessly on to a Big Society Stock Exchange, indicating that ownership, too, will be vested not in those who create value in the business but in those who merely trade in its shares.

The important political question is why, when it is the private sector that has demonstrated itself to be socially destructive and ethically irresponsible, is the government focusing attention on 'reform' of the public sector. A policy to facilitate the transition of businesses into co-operatives might be a much more effective way of enlarging society, while simultaneously making 'business' more responsible for social need.

And while this is a highly unlikely policy to emerge from either a Labour or a Tory government (although it would be high up the agenda of a Green one), we should content ourselves with supporting and most importantly joining the co-operatives that already exist. While the media is focusing attention on the People's Supermarket, the efforts of this struggling, individual shop in central London are quite unnecessary. We already have a people's supermarket: it's called the Co-operative.
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