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April 9, 2007
In his article in the current issues of the CIS Policy entitled Families under Capitalism that I mentioned in this earlier post Peter Saunders contests the Marxist argument that economic forces drive social and cultural change. His argument is not very good.
Saunders says:
We now know he was wrong, but Rudd is still making much the same assumption, for his argument that free market capitalism necessarily undermines families and communities is a clear example of the sort of ‘materialist’ and ‘determinist’ thinking that Marxism popularised.
How do we know that Marx is wrong? Because it is materialism? Or because it is determinist? How then is Marx a determinist? Wasn't he meant to be dialectical? Wasn't it the dialectics that was the problem for the Popperian empiricists? What we have is an assertion by Saunders, not an argument. Saunders hasn't shown that Rudd's assumption is wrong.
Saunders' counter argument is that it is the welfare state of social democracy that is the problem, not free market capitalism:
Rudd wants to use the power of government to limit the market and to protect family and community life against ‘unrestrained market capitalism’, but historically, it is the expansion in the powers of government that has been a major factor undermining family and community resilience.
The issue is posed. Social democracy's understanding of civilizing capitalism does involve restraining free market capitalism and creating the welfare state. So what is Saunder's argument for the claim that is the expansion in the powers of government that has been a major factor undermining family and community resilience?
Saunders explains:
The rise of the centralised state directly challenged and undermined the traditional authority of church, family, guild and local community, for it offered an alternative source of identity and social unity. It destroyed the ties binding people to their traditional social groups by assimilating them into a new, monolithic political community of ‘citizens’. Old collective identities were supplanted by new individual rights and duties, and the State increasingly assumed responsibility for most of the things people used to get from their family, church and local community memberships. The result today is that families and other small-scale primary groups have been left with very little to do. They are ‘increasingly functionless, almost irrelevant’, and because of this, they no longer command our enduring allegiance. As Nisbet warns: ‘No social group will long survive the disappearance of its chief reasons for being.
Some quick points. First, citizens are not the state. Citizens are introduced to step beyond the sphere of civil society to the political sphere of the liberal democratic state. Secondly, it wasn't the state that was responsible for the new individual rights and duties, it was liberalism. Thirdly, there was not a new, monolithic political community of ‘citizens’ in Australia in the 20th century as Australia was a federation of different states and a commonwealth government. Australia of the 20th century was not a centralized state. It has increasingly become so under the Howard conservatives.
It is unclear how did the (presumably liberal) state destroy the ties binding people to their traditional social groups by assimilating them into a new, monolithic political community of ‘citizens’? Surely, the Australian people were continuing to live in families, participating in the market and acting as citizens? And they are living in families because the family is seen as important and crucial form of ethical life.
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