Community (dictionary definition): Hie people living in one locality; a group of people having cultural, religious, ethnic or other characteristics in common. Community (governmental definition): Anything that suits us, provided it gives the impression of a united co-operating and supportive social unit.
Of all the politicians’ buzz words “community” is one which has been in use for a long time and which shows no sign of dropping out of fashion. A month or so ago John Major was trying to enthuse the Carlton Club (which is its own community of a particular kind) with phrases like "an unbroken chain of community” and “little unions of communities”. A few days later John Smith ranted about “your communities . . . our communities . . . together in our communities”. This abuse of a very useful word has something of a pedigree. In the 1960s the Liberals won a lot of votes through a bit of electoral sleight-of-hand called community politics. In what they call the war on crime the police have named some insignificant rearrangement of their system community policing. The notorious Poll Tax was officially known as the Community Charge, as if it was something we all contributed to for the common benefit. We should all be on our guard whenever we hear the word: after all the Nazis’ name for the carriage of mentally ill people to the extermination camps was The Community Patients Transport Service.
Care
For some years now we have been hearing a lot about something called community care. What this has often meant in practice has been the closing of mental hospitals, which has released some very valuable sites for profit-hungry developers, and the ejection of the patients into—well, into the community. Often the result of this has been that a lot of people who are so damaged that they have disabling problems in coping with the everyday stresses of working-class life in this so-called community have been thrown on to their own, very inadequate, resources.
In many cases they don't make it, they don’t find a job or get somewhere manageable to live or settle down with a partner or with friends. They descend into vagrancy or alcoholism or psychosis. At the extreme they commit suicide or kill someone else—like the young woman in Yorkshire who randomly stabbed an 11-year-old girl to death in the street; or the Sussex mother who drowned her two small children in the bath. Whatever argument there is in favour of closing mental hospitals and substituting "community care” for the mentally ill it is not the motivation behind the policy. What has counted here—as usual—is cost; "community care” is cheaper and has the bonus of profitably developing the buildings and the grounds where the patients once lived and strolled about.
The latest episode in this saga has been the new Act which has transferred responsibility for community care from the Department of Social Security on to the local councils. This has serious implications for the most vulnerable and needy people. Smooth-tongued ministers justify the change on the grounds that local councils can deliver a better service because care and treatment which is locally-based can be tailored more suitably for each individual.
To the unfortunates on the receiving end this may sound reassuring until they come up against the fact that the responsibility which has been passed to local councils is not just a matter of provision but of finance as well. And there are strict limits on what councils can spend on it. For example, three London boroughs have pooled the funds available for the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction but they are still between £1 million and £1.5 million short of what they need. So in those boroughs about one-fifth of those who ask for treatment for their addiction won’t get it.
Local authorities as a whole are complaining that funding for community care is over £200 million short of what is needed for proper care to be provided. Of course, addicts do not rate too highly in public sympathy. But what about old people, who represent what one writer has called a "big financial mountain"? The outlook for them is not reassuring; as a TV programme recently pointed out, local authorities are already exerting a lot of pressure on relatives to pay for their care. In this pitiless game these are among the losers. The winner is the DSS. who stand to reduce its expenditure to the tune of millions of pounds.
Degrading
The new policies on community care mark another retreat from the promises which were so plentiful during the war, that the lessons of a miserable past had been taken to heart. Politicians who were anxious to get the greater commitments to the war effort from the working class were very free with their assurances that never again would poverty be left to chance. In future the state would make it its duly to look after all the most needy people—the old, the sick, the homeless, the children . . . To all those millions of people who did not understand how capitalism works, how it must condemn the majority to poverty, what is the nature of that poverty and the true function of political parties, it was seductive stuff. Out of that auction in electoral bribes the so-called welfare state emerged.
Since then one government after another—Labour as well as Conservative—has pledged to keep the “welfare state" in being while they have been busily considering and implementing plans to dismantle it. If this Tory government has been particularly active and more open about this it is because British capitalism is in slump, which means that the lowering of workers' living standards is that much worse for the most impoverished. What is happening to old people is especially bitter and poignant because these are people whose lives have been devoted to being exploited to make profits for the class whose interest is represented by the government. There could be no better example of how capitalisms class system operates, how it enriches a minority while it degrades the majority, and to call it community care illustrates how sickeningly capitalism degrades the very language we use.
Community is a mellifluous word. What is implies—social cohesion with mutual co-operation and support is not only desirable to human beings but vitally necessary to them. But it is a contradiction to use the word about a social system which essentially divides the human race on the basis of what they own. Capitalism adjusts to such contradictions by distorting the meaning of the word to the point at which it is unrecognizable. Anyone who looks beyond the superficial issues of capitalism to a saner and more competent social order should concern themselves to defend such words, as a start to building what will properly be called a human community.
Ivan.
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