Unnecessary Suffering

"Glasman is the perfect person for Sen to be having a conversation with. Maurice would argue that liberalism, as expressed by people like Rawls, has a huge amount to teach us, but starts from the wrong place – from individuals rather than from relationships. He would argue that almost all of what matters in life is about relationships – family, love, culture, community, place. Written in 1996, the book is proleptic about what it might see as New Labour’s tendency to welcome change at any price. The book draws inspiration from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation which said that the greatest cause of suffering is change that we can’t control. This is a beautiful book, a human book. There is suffering we can’t avoid, like death and love, but there is also suffering we can avoid like unemployment and famine, and that the responsibility of politics is to protect us from such unnecessary suffering. Well, Glasman is very involved with London Citizens, which is a branch of Obama’s community organising, based on the ideas of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky wrote a book that would have been my sixth book – perhaps I will sneak it in here. It’s called Rules for Radicals, and Alinsky was the original community organiser, who felt that the 1960s American student radicals made a lot of noise but didn’t achieve much change. This community organising was what Obama did in Chicago – organising ordinary people into a common purpose and a common effort so that they cannot be ignored, for example getting the housing organisation to admit to asbestos poisoning. The other big community organiser is Marshall Ganz, who is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard and was in there when Bobby Kennedy was shot. He was very influential in the Obama campaign. The idea of the Glasman book then is that government should be able to run the state without the state becoming dominant. Market and states can both bully people, as can society (think about the Deep South in the 50s, for example). They all need to be strong to keep each other in check."