Responsibilization

The notion of ‘responsibility’ lies at the heart of what one might well call our suppression of the social. Whatever it is we seek to understand – ranging from the reasons for personal distress to the ‘evil’ of spectacular crime or the failure of public servants to avert some social disaster – it is always to an unanalysed and unanalysable individual, internal world (where ‘blame’ is harboured) that we turn our gaze. This evasion of the obvious – that it is the way our society is organized and structured that constitutes the main source of our difficulties – is understandable only in terms of the extent of the powers which are deployed to maintain it. This can be seen very clearly in current political discourse.

Abstract	Concrete
As essential cogs in the vast economic machine designed to extract profit for the minority at the top of the social pyramid, politicians have an important role in representing disadvantage as personal moral failure. How wittingly they perform this role is open to question but, as a matter of ‘commentary’, is a question of little interest. The distal pressures on the advocates of the ‘third way’ to reinforce an interiorized view of responsibility are enormous. Policies of ‘naming and shaming’, the imputation that inadequacies in health and education are somehow due to the unwillingness of individual teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., to apply themselves to the full, linkage of ‘rights’ with ‘responsibilities’, and so on, all help to constitute the political paradox that those in the position (or so it would seem) of being most able to shape distal influences, expend the greatest energy in representing them as proximal (indeed internal). In fact, of course, national politics does not so much exercise power as serve it. Where multinational capital dominates, the local political role becomes that of obscuring the true sources of power and the effects these have on the objective and subjective wellbeing of the citizenry. ‘Politics’ has become a form of management that itself actually destroys the public space in which political activity can take place. Our possibility of playing an active part in influencing those social structures that ultimately impinge intimately on our lives is whittled away to nothing, while our relative immiseration becomes internalized as personal fault. Poverty, for example, is represented in ‘third way’ politics not as an evil that causes social disintegration and personal emotional damage, but as an unwarrantable ‘excuse’ for individual moral failure. The crumbling of public services, increase in crime, etc., are represented as the result of the incompetence, intransigence and irresponsibility of public sphere workers and of the ‘evil’ apparently endemic in the ‘criminal element’ of society.	As I write this, an outcry rages in the media about a little girl who is brutally abused and finally killed by her deranged carers. Yet another example of official failure, apparently. Who's to blame here? The doctor who misdiagnosed her injuries? The child's social worker? The social worker's managers? The police? Dismay is widespread that ‘the system’ still fails after all the previous enquiries and reports following similar instances. Absolutely nowhere have I seen in this discussion a cool appraisal of the society in which this family was located, of the sheer weight and number of desperate circumstances like these, of the fatigue and overwork of those struggling to operate the under-funded and under-valued public services. No one draws the obvious inference from the dreary repetition of such cases that they are bound to be a regular feature of a society which tolerates such high levels of deprivation. Books like Nick Davies's Dark Heart are vanishingly rare, and when they do appear seem hardly to be noticed. In typically Orwellian manner, the conditions in which responsibility can and should be exercised become inverted, and ‘third way’ politicians preach responsibility for those who have no power while utterly disregarding the duties to society of those who have. Entire communities (miners, steel workers, auto workers) can be thrown on the social scrapheap in the interests of profit, and the only official talk of ‘responsibility’ is for those whose lives have been shattered to accept whatever scraps are thrown to them and sort themselves out as best they can without disturbing the peace.

Abstract

Concrete

As essential cogs in the vast economic machine designed to extract profit for the minority at the top of the social pyramid, politicians have an important role in representing disadvantage as personal moral failure. How wittingly they perform this role is open to question but, as a matter of ‘commentary’, is a question of little interest. The distal pressures on the advocates of the ‘third way’ to reinforce an interiorized view of responsibility are enormous.

Policies of ‘naming and shaming’, the imputation that inadequacies in health and education are somehow due to the unwillingness of individual teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., to apply themselves to the full, linkage of ‘rights’ with ‘responsibilities’, and so on, all help to constitute the political paradox that those in the position (or so it would seem) of being most able to shape distal influences, expend the greatest energy in representing them as proximal (indeed internal).

In fact, of course, national politics does not so much exercise power as serve it. Where multinational capital dominates, the local political role becomes that of obscuring the true sources of power and the effects these have on the objective and subjective wellbeing of the citizenry. ‘Politics’ has become a form of management that itself actually destroys the public space in which political activity can take place. Our possibility of playing an active part in influencing those social structures that ultimately impinge intimately on our lives is whittled away to nothing, while our relative immiseration becomes internalized as personal fault.

Poverty, for example, is represented in ‘third way’ politics not as an evil that causes social disintegration and personal emotional damage, but as an unwarrantable ‘excuse’ for individual moral failure. The crumbling of public services, increase in crime, etc., are represented as the result of the incompetence, intransigence and irresponsibility of public sphere workers and of the ‘evil’ apparently endemic in the ‘criminal element’ of society.

As I write this, an outcry rages in the media about a little girl who is brutally abused and finally killed by her deranged carers. Yet another example of official failure, apparently. Who's to blame here? The doctor who misdiagnosed her injuries? The child's social worker? The social worker's managers? The police? Dismay is widespread that ‘the system’ still fails after all the previous enquiries and reports following similar instances.

Absolutely nowhere have I seen in this discussion a cool appraisal of the society in which this family was located, of the sheer weight and number of desperate circumstances like these, of the fatigue and overwork of those struggling to operate the under-funded and under-valued public services. No one draws the obvious inference from the dreary repetition of such cases that they are bound to be a regular feature of a society which tolerates such high levels of deprivation. Books like Nick Davies's Dark Heart are vanishingly rare, and when they do appear seem hardly to be noticed.

In typically Orwellian manner, the conditions in which responsibility can and should be exercised become inverted, and ‘third way’ politicians preach responsibility for those who have no power while utterly disregarding the duties to society of those who have. Entire communities (miners, steel workers, auto workers) can be thrown on the social scrapheap in the interests of profit, and the only official talk of ‘responsibility’ is for those whose lives have been shattered to accept whatever scraps are thrown to them and sort themselves out as best they can without disturbing the peace.