The Family Life of Old People, by Peter Townsend

[p033] The Family Life of Old People. An Inquiry in East London, by Peter Townsend. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 30s.) SOCIOLOGY was a long time getting established in this coun- try; it sounded like socialism, and the people who talked about it seemed to be always somewhere on the Left. Born as it was *n the period of greatest success of private enterprise, of laissez-faire individualism, sociology’s stress on institutions and on ‘the group’ rather than on the individual and his interests was enough to delay its breakthrough for many years. The development of sociology and anthropology from their warfare with theology has not yet been completed, and in Britain the present state of the social sciences reflects very clearly an adaptation to the particular character and mode of development of British imperialism. The author of this book correctly acknowledges his debt to two traditions in the ‘social sciences’: ‘I have learned most about the discipline of research from Professor Titmuss and his predecessors in the best tradi- tion of English social empiricism . . . but also from the writings and teachings of British social anthropologists.’ Here Towns- end summarizes the end-result of the process of adaptation of his subject to its social environment. One needs more than the space of this article to fill out the process by which British empiricism (muddling-through etc.) found its haven of rest in the Fabian Society. These Fabians were representatives of the most limited interests of ‘the most bourgeois working class in the world’. Gradualism and reform- ism, adaptation to that national capitalism which depends on a privileged position in world markets and the possession of a vast empire; these were the nursery not only of Mac- Donald, Attlee and Gaitskell, but also of Rowntree, the Webbs, the London School of Economics, and now Titmuss, Crossman, the Labour Party pension scheme, and the Institute of Com- munity Studies, of which ‘The Family Life of Old People’ is the second product. In this tradition of research particular problems are surveyed intensively with a view to making detailed reforms in the area of the limited problem—social insurance and the poverty line, pensions, housing development, educational selection etc. Vv Social anthropology, properly the comparative and historical study of societies at the earlier levels of economic development, has similarly adapted itself to British imperialism, but in this case much more directly. Where the old anthropology, both materialist and idealist, stressed development and change, the - modern school, doing most of its research in colonial areas, insists and for many years there must be an empirical basis of limited field-studies of the way particular societies work. Then perhaps we can draw some ‘generalizations’. Of course these will normally be of the kind ‘in no society does the husband get on well with the mother-in-law’ or ‘interaction tends to create solidarity’. Social anthropology in Britain to-day is is little more than a guide to district officers in the colonies. Of course a large amount of material has been collected by the ‘monographic method’ and awaits historical and theoretical analysis on a materialist basis. With these two sources of inspiration, Townsend approaches the agonizing problem of old age in capitalist Britain. Both the virtues and the limitations of the book can be traced to the author’s method. He has gathered together many examples of situations and attitudes which working-class readers will find very familiar. So far as is possible this information is subjected to statistical analysis as a test (sometimes adequate Book Reviews but sometimes, as the author honestly admits, necessarily crude) of its typicality. Working-class readers will recognize the examples as authentic without referring to the tables, which in any case are admirably simple and oyght not to put anybody off. As in the work of Booth, Rowntree and others, we have a convincing and often very depressing picture of the problems of old people, and no deliberate attempts are made to run away from this. But old age is not a problem in itself, and the ‘extended families’ of the old community studied in Bethnal Green do not constitute a society, and are thus not a proper framework of explanation of the social problems of old age. The tendency of British ‘empiricist’ social research to concentrate on par- ticular ‘problems’, and of Townsend’s teachers in social an- thropology to take ‘the community’ as the unit of study are at the root of the trouble. Vv While it is certain that for old people family ties are of much greater importance than for those of working age, and that in a long-established community like Bethnal Green local family ties over three or more generations tend to persist more easily than in normal urban conditions, Townsend’s stress on the family and ‘kinship’ seems to be something of a residue from social anthropology’s concern with tribal societies. In a society based on a backward subsistence economy, very often ‘the community’ was identical with ‘the society’ because of the smallness of scale dictated by the level of production and the size and density of population. Thus ‘community-study’ was a relatively useful approach. Secondly, in such societies, in the absence of private property, division of labour or class differ- ences, kinship structure was the framework of social organiza- tion and contained the principles on which all groupings were based. The individual in such a society depended above all on integration in his kin-group, and was scarcely differentiated from it. His daily experiences, in work, ritual, love, were more or less coterminous with the traditional culture on which his society depended. Here then a description of family and kin- ship structure was the key to the understanding of the society and of the individual’s place in it. But our own society is structurally completely different; the interaction of factors (capital and labour, class and class etc.) which determines its structure and development takes place at a level much higher than that of the experience of any individual worker or em- ployer. The understanding of this society requires a study of political economy and the history of classes and institutions. Marx founded the scientific method of study of society. Central to his approach were (a) the understanding of the class rela- tionships based on exploitation of a definite historical type, as against individual motives and interests, and (b) the need to study a society in its whole development, since no one part of a society developed independently for very long, and the character of the parts, or of particular problems, was to be understood only as part of the whole. It is just these two basic propositions of social science which are ignored by the empiricists, who borrow mechanic- ally from Marx his rigorous respect for the facts, and even his stress on the economic basis of social development. As in dry theory, so in politics: reformism bases itself on just this empiricism, revolutionary working class politics on the class struggle and dialectics. Just as social anthropology is the theoretical counterpart of ‘indirect rule’ in the colonies,- so ‘sociological ‘empiricism’ is the counterpart of bureaucratic reformism. It provides factual material for the smoother and quicker handling of administra- tive problems within the basic framework of capitalism, of 61 -

[p034] LABOUR REVIEW the status quo. What are Townsend’s conclusions, for example? Policies must be devised to make families capable of succour- ing their aged relatives, because it is old people cut off from their families who are the main recipients of State assistance. In order not to make this more difficult, other areas of public policy, such as housing, must not be at cross purposes with family integration; the ideal arrangement is nearness to aging relatives, but with cmplete domestic independence. These sug- gestions are based on field-work conclusions about ‘the social anatomy of successful family life’. One is tempted to ask: may it not be that the social system we have is capable of providing only a certain number of families with even what Peter Towsnend calls ‘successful family life’, so that trying to spread this condition is trying to cover up the spots rather than purify the blood? At least the investigator should con- sider this possibility and tells us why he regards it as outside his scope. Empiricism, the concern with limited problems and areas, while superficially it looks like a ‘straightforward’ facing up to the facts, is in fact an escape from the real problems,,. those rooted in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not these real problems which are tackled in this book, and one admits that it is perhaps unfair to criticize a book for something that it is not about. For example, at the begin- ning of his tenth chapter, Townsend is concerned to answer an objection to his foregoing analysis. Perhaps he has exag- gerated the importance of family life to old people in Bethnal Green? He sets about defending himself by showing that in fact contacts with non-relatives and extra-familial activities are less numerous and less intense than those with relatives. Very well, but the author’s first question should have been a bigger one. Has he exaggerated the importance of ‘the family’ old working-class people? What the individual in his daily life in a society like ours finds important to him is by no means the same thing as what the sociologist may find to be in fact most important in determining the character and de- velopment of the society and the class of which that individual is a part. A simple point, but one which is neglected at great risk. Incidentally, it is because of the failure to appreciate this distinction that sociologists are so easily laid open to the charge:that they only tell people what their own eyes have told them already. Vv The best section of the book, the one which exemplifies most clearly the points just made, and the one which provides the best and most convincing factual evidence, is that con- cerned with ‘retirement’ and its problems for old workers. Here the class differences are inescapable; for the business or professsional man, retirement is normally something to look forward to, a time to indulge his pleasures. Townsend states categorically that for the worker retirement is a tragedy in the full sense of the word. ‘Their life became a rather desperate search for pastimes or a gloomy contemplation of their own helplessness, which, at its worst, was little better than waiting to die’. The old friendships prove impossible to maintain or re-create, the solidarity of feeling based on work is lost, the independence of a job and a wage has vanished at one blow. As one man said to Townsend: ‘You remember the song “When you’re down, the world don’t want you”.’? An- other rejected and oppressed group, the Southern Negroes, had its equivalent: ‘Nobody knows you when you’re down and out’. In these later chapters the real theme is the oppression of the working class; exploitation is so thorough that it chokes a man off at 65 without ‘savings, without developed personality or tastes, without even the means of a decent independent existence; yet the same exploiting society tells him all his life of the virtue of independence, pride and ‘success’. It is fashion- able to dismiss with a smile Marx’s idea of ‘alienation’, but is not the whole phenomenon personified in our old workers? Working men in our society produce the means of high culture and civilization, of education, of contact with the 62 March-April 1958 highest achievements of the human hand and the human spirit. But the way to these is barred for the real producers, who are another ‘cost of production’ to be thrown on the scrap- heap when they become worn out, inefficient, ‘depreciated’. This is alienation: the gap between what a man produces, what he puts into life, and what he gets out of it, thanks to the restrictions of the property relations of capitalism. Let Townsend’s evidence speak again; his witnesses ‘were forced to recognize that it was not their working life which was over, it was their life’. Exactly. So far as capital is concerned, a man’s life is his life as the bearer of a commodity, labour power. Some of Townsend’s secondary information is very signi- ficant. He estimates that there are 750,000 old people in this country who never leave their homes. He shows that on ‘retire- ment’ there is a fall in income of over two-thirds for single people and over half for married people. He paints a simple yet terrible picture of the ‘desolation’ of many old people, and of the conviction among them that death is much more likely once they give up work: ‘the possibility of sudden physical degeneration, after retirement, for men, and after bereavement for men and women’. He suggests that the longer expectation of life among women is at least partly a social phenomenon as well as a sociological fact. The difficulties: faced by a working man in acknowledging his uselessness and unwantedness are no doubt a contributory factor, and may also partly explain the higher incidence of suicide among men (p. 180). Vv The author might reply to my criticism that his concern was with only a limited area of problems, and that he col- lected and analysed the data available on these limited prob- lems. But he is drawing conclusions for social policy, implying that on the basis of such limited studies the ‘problems’ can be ironed out. From a working-class point of view the con- clusions from his description of the social death of retired workers are revolutionary; one must condemn such an in- human society and work for its overthrow. From the study of such atrocities one must move as Marx did to an under- standing of the motive forces in the economic system which produces them. Yet Townsend says only: ‘The obvious implication for policy is that there is a major need for occupation for old men.’ Really he remains within the ethos of bourgeois society, showing no breadth of vision of hurnan potentialities. Yet even from this narrow viewpoint he sees the limitations in- herent within capitalism. ‘One thing has to be faced. The problem cannot be solved by normal employment practices.’ It cannot be solved within any of the ‘normal practices’ of capitalism, but requires the treatment of men. as human beings; and that is impossible so long as the working class remain an oppressed class. CLIFF SLAUGHTER A Study of Personality