Mike Grimshaw: It’s the (social adhesion) economy, Stupid!

One of the on-going issues of modern life, identified from the rise of industrial and urban society in the early 19th century, is the sense of insecurity, of a lack of cohesion within society. New Zealand prefers not to think with Karl Marx; but if we go to Marx for description, not prescription – that is, go to Marx to get an on-the-ground sense of what was happening with the rise of modernity (not to go to him for answers) – then we can recognize that much of what he declared in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto holds true today…even in New Zealand:

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Modernity is constantly accelerating yet at the same time constantly de-stabilizing and our challenge is, as the great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted, that of how to live within what he famously termed liquid modernity.

We live within a market-economy system and society, but in doing so we tend to too often and too easily ignore what Adam Smith described as the need for empathy for others as the basis for a social order. A market order without a moral social order is not a society.

This is why we see the rise in concern regarding social cohesion because it’s a fundamental question (if not often explicitly acknowledged) of what is the moral social order of the society?

In many liberal democracies the welfare state was enacted as a state response to provide a form of moral social order; that is, as the basis for what we would now term social cohesion. It’s why I constantly go back to sociologist Allan Levett’s description in the NBR in 1979 of the 1930s NZ welfare state’s aim of ‘unblocking opportunity’, across all of society and across the economy.

I’d suggest that unblocking economic opportunity is crucial because in the instability and liquidity of accelerated modernity, unblocking economic opportunity is the one cross-societal solidity we can, could and should offer. That is, if our social plumbing is based in the empathetic moral order of unblocking for others, not just for ourselves and our family.

The decline in social cohesion is tied not only to a decline in such an empathetic moral order but also, I’d argue, the collapse in social adhesion; an adhesion that is an economic opportunity and participation one.

Before cohesion comes adhesion…or rather, it is adhesion that enables cohesion.

Social cohesion requires a sense of locatedness, a sense of meaningful participation and value and meaning; of experiencing and not only perceiving opportunity being unblocked. We could suggest social cohesion requires a sense that the economy is being done with and for and by you, not just to and against you. A sense that your opportunities, across the economy and society are unblocked; not that they are blocked…perhaps permanently.

Adhesion is what locates you and connects you and provides a sense of solidity and order within an economy and within what we call the social.

The most obvious signal of a lack of adhesion is the decades-old brain and skills drain of New Zealanders overseas, primarily to Australia. There is insufficient economic adhesion to keep them within the social order of New Zealand. But it’s too easy to just focus on the brain drain; the real issue is those who can’t or don’t leave and yet experience a lack of social cohesion. So our bigger issue, as identified by the social cohesion reports, are those who either feel ambivalent within our society or those who feel alienated from it.

I’d suggest much of this ambivalence and all of this alienation results from a lack of social adhesion; a social adhesion that is missing because they feel economically blocked.

In our modern market system it is economic participation, economic value, economic hope that provides the foundational social adhesion that enables you to feel, enact and experience social cohesion. That’s why the role of the welfare state is to unblock opportunity across all of society and all of the economy. It is, I’d suggest, the role of the welfare state, as economic and social plumber, to provide the empathetic moral order of unblocking opportunity: an unblocking that provides the social adhesion required to enact social cohesion.

If you pull back the welfare state, if your market system blocks more opportunity than unblocks it, then where is social moral order to come from in liquid modernity? Too often we confuse a community or individual moral order with a social moral order. So you might experience community adhesion and cohesion, or even individual adhesion and cohesion… but what about those who do not, who cannot? Do you have empathy for them? Does the state? Does the welfare state in its actions, not just its rhetoric?

If we desire social cohesion, if we wish to grow and expand social cohesion then we need to start with social adhesion and that is an economic participation and opportunity action and focus.

Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is associate professor in sociology at the University of Canterbury. This article was sourced HERE