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Some comments on the blue book on social capital.

Article Excerpt
Christopher Scanlon's Blue Book on social capital theory in Arena (no. 69) is a welcome opening to a discussion on this phenomenon, particularly in exposing how the concept of 'social capital' is being used by some to 'naturalise' a neo-liberal conception of poverty. However, I think we need to go further.

The debate around the concept of 'social capital' is an arena of struggle in which the Left can learn something--about the world, about ourselves and about others involved in trying to resolve the problems of poverty and exclusion--and in which we can find others with whom we can make common cause. We need to be present in this debate, even while we refuse to accept the validity of the concept of 'social capital.'

This problem is complicated by the fact that many of the participants in the 'social capital' debate do not use the concept of 'social capital' in any systematic way at all, rather seeing the term simply as marking out concern for maintenance of the social fabric. To use a term coined by Eva Cox, 'social capital' is 'econospeak' for community, presenting it as a form of capital in order to give big business and government a reason not to destroy it.

The environmental movement use the term 'natural capital' for largely similar political purposes. The strategy has its dangers, though. If successful, the entity in question may indeed get subsumed under capital, and this is not necessarily good news.

The central contradiction in this discourse lies in the quantification of important, but essentially qualitative, information. The guru of the statistical analysis of 'social capital,' Robert Putnam, now says:

Social capital is stubbornly resistant to quantification ... [and] we must take care not to frame questions about change solely in terms...

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