IN THE Sunday Times Sarah Baxter relates a little story about being invited over to Etzioni's restaurant table after his Times lecture.
The topic of conversation was the new Clause Four. "Etzioni immediately recognised its 'on the one hand and on the other' quality", she recalls, "and claimed it as his own. 'It is a communitarian document' he explained. He was right."
All the themes are there: rights and duties, nuturing families as the agency of stability, decisions being taken "as far as practible by the communities they affect".
Blair has put his reading to good work. He has picked out communitarianism as a mobilising ideology for his new party.
It is clear that Blair has no meaningful policy alternative to the new capitalist offensive. The Labour Party leadership have capitulated on every issue that counts.
But whereas Kinnock attacked the left because he was -told to, Blair has a much more conscious project.
At its centre is a massive "shift to the right. As the Daily Telegraph writes "He does not try to persuade Conservatives to stop being Conservative, only to stop voting Conservative".
He is having great success - the Liberal Democrats are dead in the water. The Lib- working class base. Lab coalitionism that the left feared through the 1980s has been carried through without having to formally announce it: every political programme, bar that of the far right, is now to be found in in place. the Labour Party.
In order to carry the prosive and comforting, but that will not challenge the programme of European capitalism he wants to adopt. A Blair government will carry on the attack on the welfare state. It will do nothing to reverse unemployment and poverty. It will deliver no substantial reTorm Communitarianism provides the means to justify all this. Etzioni fan: David Blunkett Its themes of home and ject through he has to immo- hearth offer a reassurance to bilise the activists in his own middle income families who party, end the trade union link are beginning to feel the and break Labour from its pinch, who are concerned that the homeless will start If he smashes up the La- camping on their front lawn, bour Party as we know it he who are aghast at the prospect will be forced to find a new of their children having to go social base to rely upon. It is to the same school as the offa credit to his farsightedness spring of the chronically that he is beginning to put it poor.
In this sense then commuThis base needs a set of nitarianism is also the ideolideas that will sound progres- ogy of middle class despair.
Thus its attacks on the traditional targets of the right: single parents, drug users, those who don't join in with "normal society". be the ones to protect you from the nastiness of the world outside" says Blair.
Marginalised
For the poor and the dispossessed, for the marginalised and unemployed, for those permanently threatened with losing their jobs, those struggling on low wages, communitarianism has nothing to offer.
It is a response to moral panic. Because it does nothing to confront the power of capital and the deunionised, deskilled, privatised, market regulated economy the bosses are imposing on us, it will not be able to even begin to address the crisis.
This suits Blair down to the ground.
That the empty phrases of communitarianism are the "We will best he's got to offer should reassure us a little. Nevertheless the new ideological block that is being constructed around anti-labour movement ideas is an obstacle that must be seriously confronted by the left.
Communitarianism throws down a gauntlet to socialists. We need to come up with answers that are not only more persuasive, but that show their value in the struggle to reorganise the world.
Theirs is a mobilising ideology for the current attack on the labour movement. This is its danger. That Blair has already been able to win his communitarian clause on the Labour Party NEC is an indication of its effectiveness. We cannot ignore it.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 80. March 25 1995, Page 14.