Labour and the English Commons

If part of the English question has become how to decentralise political power (see previous posts by Peter Hain and Graham Allen) to become more representative then this will only become meaningful if it is linked to broader attempts to renew democratic forms of engagement. Here I argue that the idea of the English commons has a long history and speaks of a more communitarian set of understandings often missing from liberalism. The commons is not only about a sense of lived connection to the natural environment (see previous post by Ruth Davis) but just as importantly about more bottom-up forms of control and expression. As the New Left in the 1960s well understood unless the democratic settlement is revised within contemporary contexts then the working population are likely to be subject to increasing control from unaccountable forms of power from above. Here I seek to explore the role that the labour movement might play in reformulating this debate in the future. Growing up in Derby in the 1960s and 70s the prevailing culture communicated a sense that Labour stood for poor working-class people. My parents assumed that the slum house they moved into would eventually be knocked down and they could realise their dream of a council home. This however would only happen some 17 years later after a resident’s campaign successfully mobilised the working poor of the area. While Labour was seen as ‘on our side’ they seemed remote and distant. During the early 1980s working in a social security office I joined the party after the sudden spike in unemployment. The people I met each day at work were mostly frightened, desperate and shocked that the cumbersome bureaucratic machine that was state welfare treated them as ‘undeserving’ citizens. Notably the mostly poor working-class people only became empowered in this process if they were accompanied by a member of the claimants union. From both of these experiences I took the view that while the state is important so are citizen’s campaigns and more direct forms of democracy. Much of the writing on the Left can be understood under the banner of ‘how to get Labour elected and then hope for the best’, but really what we should be trying to do is decentralise power and control. Much of the current Brexit campaign (whatever your views on the EU) has struck a chord because it at least seeks to address the overly centralised nature of modern politics. The question of authority, control and power goes to the heart of what we mean by more meaningful forms of citizenship. In the modern globalised world power and control has been lifted out of the hands of ordinary people and into the board rooms of financial institutions and distant corporate elites. There is then a need for a vision of the political that seeks to reverse this process that prioritises ecological and social justice while reviving more democratic and responsible ways of living. However if we are to do this we need to rethink what we mean by freedom. English Freedom A few years ago I wrote a short book on the subject of freedom. As I did my research what struck me was how many English authors were exercised by this idea. At the time I was especially interested in the contributions of Mill, Hobhouse, Hoggart and overwhelmingly George Orwell. These debates seemed to span both liberalism and more social democratic debates on the subject. Orwell is a complex writer, but his struggle for a less hierarchical world (discovered in the Spanish civil war) remain with us today. When I looked for more contemporary debates on freedom I was surprised to be met by what felt like a deafening silence. The assumption coming from some quarters was that we now live in a far more conservative age with many people becoming increasingly concerned about questions related to security. Not surprisingly that in the age of ‘the precariat’ many associate freedom with the movement of capital or with an everyday sense of disconnection and fragmentation. Freedom is understood mostly within individualistic terms and had little of substance to offer the Left who are mostly concerned with the threats posed by globalisation. Of course the current debate is more complex than this but as a short-hand it is not far from the truth. The other reason for a lack of interest in freedom is not simply insecurity, but the deep sense of pessimism that tends to dominate political debate. If asked to think about the future then many people on the Left feel overwhelmed by a sense of global crisis whether it is in the shape of refugees, the instability of the economic recovery or welfare cuts. Perhaps inevitably, the state is presumed to be the mechanism to protect citizens against the radical changes ushered in by an increasingly marketised and globalised world. More communally defined and bottom up versions of freedom in relation to the commons are likely to play an important role in this process. The English Commons Here I want to suggest that progressive movements have a great deal to learn from the rise of the alter-globalisation movement and the idea of the commons. These campaigns centrally raise questions of authority, control and freedom. The Occupy protests, radical ecological concerns and attempts to save public libraries can all be potentially linked together through the idea of the commons. Historically there is nothing new about the commons, and it remains connected to radical currents within English history and writing on freedom. The Diggers and the Levellers during the English civil war offer perhaps a different historical root in terms of ideas on freedom. The writing of Winstanley and others situate the question of freedom with the need to defend common land and resources against forms of enclosure and theft from above. This is suggestive of a different narrative to those who primarily see freedom in more individualistic terms. Here the idea of freedom is caught up with the struggle of commoners who seek to defend what is rightly theirs against the ‘theft’ of the privileged classes. In terms of the commons then the popular sentiments it is most connected to is either ‘get off my land’ or ‘stop thief’. These features have become especially pressing after the 2008 financial crisis where many have perceived global elites to be both unaccountable while plundering and privatising the common realm as a response to the failure of the banks. The historian E.P.Thompson added to this history by recovering the lives of the common people from below who sought to resist the class theft implicit in the enclosures movement. In this sense, we might view privatisation initiatives and the ways that our public institutions are governed from above by distant elites as new forms of enclosure. The first waves of enclosure that came along with the rise of capitalism not only produced workers for the factories but sailors for the ships in colonialism and simultaneously disposed women from their role as healers, herbalists and mid-wives. If the enclosures enforced acts of dispossession they did so not simply in terms of their eviction from the common land, but also broke the people’s spiritual and material connection to the land. The land was not only a source of independent livelihood but also sustained an identity and more communal cultural activities. Freedom in this setting was something experienced in common with others and sought to resist the dispossession that emerges when control becomes either overly centralised or hierarchical. Similarly today the shrinking of the welfare state, surveillance of the internet and the exploitation of the earth can be equally seen in terms of questions of theft. The poisoning of the air, the closing of libraries and the disappearance of the civic city in favour of the shopping centre can all be viewed under a rubric that removes cultural and natural resources from local forms of democratic control. As our identities become increasingly commodified they progressively lack a sense of meaningful attachment to the locality as citizens seek to commodify themselves fearing losing their jobs. The key intellectual figure in helping keep alive more communal understandings of freedom is E.P.Thompson’s great hero William Morris. Morris’s best known work ‘News from Nowhere’ remains required reading for all of those who continue to search for more communal definitions of freedom. The novel is often remembered as a work of utopian fiction but should be just as easily understood as telling a story about the commons. If the commons is taken to mean all that we own and share then this helps us understand the world being imagined by Morris. The future communally based society imagined by Morris was actually a return to the pre-capitalist commons. If in the imagined past the right to the forest had granted the people a place where herbs could be harvested, food cultivated and game hunted then life after capitalism could return many of these freedoms. While a generation of scholars dismissed Morris due to his moralism there is a need for those rethinking the traditions of English socialism to critically reappraise his work. This would involve thinking again about the shared ecological commons we can experience through parks, countryside and nature reserves, but also the cultural commons like libraries, internet and schools. The idea of the commons would mean readdressing not only questions of ownership and control but also ideas of co-operation. This would always struggle under capitalism given the economic systems need for hierarchical control and its insistence upon competition which would inevitably lead to civic forms of strife and war. Instead the commons offers a vision of co-operation, peace and friendship. The commons then sought to imagine a world beyond hierarchical control and wage-slavery. Of course there is no easy return to Morris in the context of a post-industrial society built upon consumerism, but he needs to be reimagined in our technological and individualised times. Raymond Williams often pointed out that Morris was an important eco-socialist but that he needs to be read cautiously. Williams was especially keen to emphasise that a future technologically based society of the commons would be more complex than capitalism. Morris he felt retained a sense of rural simplicity that was damaging to socialists. A more decentralised and democratic society of the commons would by introducing different ownership arrangements beyond the direct governance of the state and capital offer more popular forms of control that more were messy than the present. Ultimately if everything that we share is brought under the control of large corporations and the need for profit then in the short term our lives in common will become poorer while in the longer term humanity will perish. Perhaps one of the lessons many socialists have learned since Morris is that these ideas are unlikely to flourish in a world where they have been imposed upon other people. Despite the radical nature of the alter-globalisation movement there was no attempt to seize control over the state and impose more co-operative forms of working. With good reason many associated with the idea of the commons are suspicious of state power. Does this mean this generous vision has little to offer the Labour Party and Englishness? No is the short answer. Firstly there are parts of the commons that cannot operate without the state and policy frameworks. Decisions to outlaw fracking, and preserve our libraries and parks all have implications for state policy. The idea of the commons also moves us away from the more pessimistic assumptions that neoliberalism makes about human nature. The idea that human beings can indeed govern their own affairs without hierarchical control and intrusive monitoring is likely to be dismissed by many, but is a life worth living really possible without them? Finally the commons opens up the possibility of the people actively creating their own alternatives without always relying upon the state to do it all for them. This vision of course will depend upon the state playing its part, but it will mean opening up questions about how we might remake our town and cities to reopen them as places shared by everyone and not just those with wealth. The commons is ultimately about more local and decentralised forms of control. This would mean re-addressing questions that enable the decentralisation of political power, giving people a greater sense of control over their working lives. Here we need to think about how the state might best support self-employment (there is no reason why the political Right should control the debate on this question), the setting up of co-operatives and discussions around the basic income. Schools and the Revival of Democracy The idea of the commons is clearly related to a number of policy questions, with potentially most significance for schools. If people’s first encounter with institutions outside of the family is one of being disconnected from the community to study subjects that seem remote and disengaged then they are unlikely to become the democratic citizens of the future. The current academies model increasingly centralises control thereby disempowering teachers, parents and students. In contrast a commons network would develop of schools with different emphasises and specialisms that respond to the creativity and dynamism of the young. The main problem with schools is not their inability to communicate basic skills but that many young people find them boring. School should be a place you can go to discover your own talents without fear of being judged too harshly should you fail. More crucially the art of building relationships is often lost in big structures governed by large academy chains. If the comprehensive era has come to an end then the schools of the commons should, with a minimum of state interference, be both small and personal while under local forms of control. The central control of the curriculum and top-down regimes of measurement and management has not only deprived people of their creativity, but of their sense of connection to the locality. Most civic pride in this sense is not national or global but local. If the ultimate lesson of citizenship is that you can change the landscape then this can only be learned close to home. By this I do not only mean simply school councils and democratic structures, but also the idea that the locality should be seen as an important (if not the only) educational resource. If education was really based upon breaking down the walls between schools and the locality then this will mean not only local structures, but also the attempt to turn what is near-by into a resource that can be investigated. This is obviously a different model of education to the one that keeps children inside sweating away seeking to pass standardised and often meaningless tests. If the precious gift of education is ever to mean anything then it can only work once the curiosity of the children has been awakened. An English education of the commons then would need as much genuinely local flavour to sensitise our children to natural landscapes to understand the complexity of where they live and look at how local democracies function. The danger is of course that this will offer a narrow regionalism not fit for the globally inter-dependent world of today. However this need not be the case as the cosmopolitan mix of local cultural identities and natures becomes the focus of study. Further the technological revolution represented by the internet and more local television stations needs to be utilised giving children the direct experience of constructing new forms of culture. The school standards movement that has successfully colonised the political imagination of education policy makers is currently far too restrictive in the way that it imagines cultural literacies. Schools for the commons need to unlock the latent potentials of the present allowing for a diversity of cultural expression and more arresting forms of cultural production related to the contemporary experience of young people. The Commons and Democratic Futures The reform of schools and education take on a renewed importance within an increasingly post-democratic context as everyday life becomes drained of opportunities to exert meaningful forms of control. Arguably as power has shifted away from the places in which we live (witness how difficult it is for local authorities to oppose fracking) then the more the citizenry has become invested in the forms of anti-politics represented by UKIP. A world without a grass roots democracy and sensible debate and discussion is a world increasingly likely to be attracted to authoritarian solutions of both the Left and the Right. If the idea of the commons is to be revived in our technological and fragmented age then Labour along with others could play a role as local communities across the planet deeply resent the extent to which globalisation and elite controlled politics has taken away their power to control their daily lives. This process is only likely to be reversed through measures that make more democratic forms of citizenship meaningful in the places in which people live. This post was originally published by the Labour and England Seminar Group 2016.