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From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, pp. 28–29.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Community Decay
Jon Rowland
Penguin, 50p
AS A BOOK on ‘deprivation’ this is no good. It compares very badly with, say, Ken Coates’ study of Nottingham, which is readable, informative and useful. Community Decay is none of these. It is jargon-ridden to the point of being unintelligible to the general reader, and the statistics and tables only prove what we already know. It hardly needs ‘in-depth studies’ to tell us that poor people live in slums because they can’t afford anything better, and that factory work is exhausting and degrading.
Rowland contradicts himself in several places. For example, after a dozen pages explaining how slum living and bad schooling give school-leavers hardly any choice but a dead-end job or the dole, Rowland goes on to say that ‘those with initiative’ get out of the deprived areas. The dice are heavily loaded against you, but if you don!t get out, it is because you have no initiative! A personal failure, not the fault of an unjust society. This is the basic weakness of Rowland’s thinking – he wants to help people but he does not want to change society.
In his conclusions we see clearly his faith in capitalism as a rational system, and his naive belief that it can be manipulated to the benefit of the ‘under-privileged’. He is swept away in a whirlpool of daydreams. Community councils of representatives, from each street, with power to decide how to spend money from the rates, together with co-operative housing associations and large government grants would, he believes, give people the encouragement and ability to improve their environment. They probably would. But it is unrealistic (and contradicts much of his foregoing investigation) to think that a ruling class which cannot pay workers decent wages, and which is prepared to cut the NHS and social services to a minimum, will offer such power to the people.
By looking at people’s misery through a microscope, researchers like Rowland fail to grasp the fact that capitalism cannot solve the problem of poverty even if it wants to, because the essence of the system is that all production must be justified by profitability, and satisfying the needs of the poor is hardly profitable compared with other ways the money could be spent. For as long as capitalism exists, all these well-meaning proposals will continue to fall on deaf ears.
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Last updated on 2 March 2015