Anti-capitalist demonstrators, Blue Labour and Big Society

What have the anti-capitalist demonstrators, Blue Labour and Big Society got in common and why should it matter to campaigners?

The 99% campaign, and Occupy Wall Street have garnered world-wide coverage with their cry of ‘we will not pay for your crisis’. For campaigners it has been an object lesson in how to garner worldwide publicity through radical – yet diverging from some previous anti-capitalist campaigns - peaceful protest. As such it has clearly struck a chord with anyone who wants see those responsible for the current financial mess held to account. It’s also a powerful assertion of one model of society and community – ‘we the 99% are in this together against the 1% of financers that created the mess’.

If you see echoes of Ed Milband’s attempt to shift the debate onto good and bad business from his party conference speech you would not be wrong. The attempt to put community and the values we hope our community embodies is a singular thread that runs through different strands of public discourse at the moment. Blue Labour seeks to reconnect the Labour party with lost traditions of community and put the market at the service of the community. The Coalition Government looks to the Big Society to get the state off people’s back in the hope of enhancing community action and involvement as the solution to society’s problems.

The idea is that if we can enhance community and the values embodied by common action for the greater good the world would be a better place. Communitarianism is all well and good when focused on the traditional values of working class solidarity and mutual help in one narrative, or the virtues of self-help and community action in the other. Or even in bringing down the financiers. But what when those same values question the worth of outsiders, which has got Blue Labour in trouble on immigration, and community trumps individual rights as in the recent challenges from a different perspective on the Human Rights Act?

What both views sometimes forget is that it was the modern liberal state, not community, which secured us those protections. There is also the danger of looking through rose coloured spectacles at the past - the conditions that forged solidarity also form insularity. Those who extoll the lost virtues of voluntarism in contrast to the professionalised welfare state forget that the two often depend on each other.

The trouble with community is ‘which community, whose values’? Putting community above politics can be a way of getting away from the messy business of changing the political system to some purer expression of what we “the people” want. If only we could get rid of, financers, the market, managerialism, the state and so on. Just look the Tea Party if you want also an alternative vision of where a stress on the lost values of community can take you.

The thread running through all of this - putting back values back at the heart of a political discourse - is not wrong. But pinning that to different versions of a lost sense of community, needing only to be found again, dangerously simplifies the difficult business of looking forward to shape a future which will be different from the past.

Glassman and co make some powerful points about what we may have lost in the values of working class solidarity. However, the community against unproductive capital is an appeal as old as the early socialists and sometimes about as relevant. As Ed Miliband found out to his cost you need more than a vague notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ business to found a programme on. The new levellers of the 99% campaign are exciting and vibrant, but as Paul Krugman has noted, hardly yet the stuff of concrete demands and that could focus real change. A point that the Rebuild a Dream coalition, which is linked to some of the demonstrators, has understood well. Its bottom up economic manifesto may not have all or the right answers but it starts to frame the debate.

Political change may sometimes be brought about by modelling change at community level through our own behaviour and challenging injustice, but shaping national debate is going to take policy solutions as well. Speaking truth to power is not enough, the community also has to have answers to what happens next.