Alternative Editorial: Where To Look
Two Boys On A Soccer Team Look Down At The Ground by Shannon Wheeler
Week 13, and as the Covid lock-down evolves into the Covid bubbles, what are we noticing and noting?
In a very short space of time, we’ve moved the focus of political debate from Brexit, to climate, to pandemic and now to racism. Implied in each of these are complex, whole-society issues that leave us questioning everything. Each crisis implies the issues of the others – but also the culture and socio-political structure that upholds the present.
While there is a lot of acknowledgement that we can’t go back to ‘normal’, just being aware of that is not enough. We’ve been in numerous massively well-intentioned conversations – but many of them cannot see how to get from the normal we have all been living throughout our lives, to anything convincingly better. In this past week, several big companies have been taken to task for joining in Black Out Tuesday while failing on promises made years earlier.
It’s as if we can entertain a better life in our minds, but the personal and social – or psychosocial - infrastructure is not there to hold it in place and give it traction. Some believe and act as if everything can be solved by simply working harder at a defined problem, to which we bring more resources. Not unlike building a house quicker by doing longer hours, with better machinery - only to discover that, in doing so, the workforce was badly rewarded and only one person gets to live in it. The builders go home, having missed putting their children to bed who then grow up deprived of attention. Net gain, zero – or worse.
In the case of the pandemic, the ‘work harder’ theory might mean giving more money to the NHS and having a better tracking and tracing system – clearly two vital ingredients for success and a popular demand. But neither of those two solutions address why those actions were not taken by the UK in the first place (meaning a level of institutional preparedness and resilence which many other societies, not just so-called “advanced” economies, have shown themselves capable of). Therefore what chance do we have of succeeding over these bio- and eco-shocks in the long-term - which are much bigger issues of power and governance?
If we are not tackling the bigger issues, we are likely to keep finding ourselves in the same crises. Party politics tends to give competing versions of those bigger issues: intentionally polarising the voters as a means to get elected. That’s us, in our current state of affairs: divided and conquered by a system that has destroyed the planet; a juggernaut implacably en route. Is it too complicated to work out?
This dilemma is familiar to readers of The Daily Alternative, who will know that we initiated this project to re-start the big questions from perspectives that exist outside of the party-political discourse. In the broader society, the question of ‘what do I want?’ or ‘what can I do’ is constantly asked – which party politics barely answers. Voting once or twice over a five-year period is not enough for people who want more control over their lives, better conditions for others and a dramatic improvement in the fate of the planet.
Does that imply that people are ready for more and more referenda? Do we want a system of ‘liquid democracy’ in which we’re constantly being asked to make choices that affect national outcomes? We’re not sure that either Brexit or the Scottish Independence Referendum has made that more likely.
Switzerland’s democratic model, in which citizens vote directly on laws proposed by parliament, would be hard to replicate here. Its federal system is built on ‘cantons’--regional units that are small enough to allow some form of collective identity to develop, substantial enough to be granted a degree of sovereignty and jurisdiction over its territory. (Having said that, some of the cantons remain quite disconnected from the others: in Appenzell Innerrhoden, women only got the right to vote within the canton in 1991).
Either way, it becomes clearer by the day that we are missing the effective personal (agreed ways to manage our internal lives), social and global infrastructure that help individuals and communities to experience and manage their collective agency well. This means in ways that ultimately benefit the whole population, nationally and globally: because we now understand better, that our flourishing depends on the whole flourishing.
Imagine a national structure within which communities could say: “After appropriate deliberation, which considered the impact upon our community as well as the broader impact upon the global environment, we the people of [fill in the name of your town or city here] have decided to hold a festival / house the homeless / trial a basic income / prioritise local produce…”
Reading that might make you smile – it sounds so far-fetched. But don’t we already have the technical resources to work out ‘good practice’ for the interconnected, interdependent, I-We-World? If you doubt that, check out the Permaculture Association. What we lack is the organisation to do so. If more towns and cities committed to these practices locally, the national and international bodies would bend towards them.
As it stands, many companies have adapted to the understanding that people like more green practices through the virtue-signalling of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). But those that have gone much further to completely change their way of operating, in order reverse the effects of climate change, are now beginning to shape new and growing markets. From the rapid re-shaping of South East Asian markets to the growing popularity of stand alone businesses like this one in Patagonia. While political parties vie to champion these changes, the self-sabotaging political system we have is not able to deliver on it. The Green Party has one seat in Parliament after 20 years of contending.
Instead we have the growth of people’s power, from the ground up, but with global connectivity and resonance. It’s not yet coherent or integrated, but it is creating fractal patterns of change, trying to collaborate better, capable of complexity. Take for example Open Platform’s Murmurations project in which Oli Sylvester Bradley compares the thousands of small projects, sharing the same values and idea of agency, to starlings creating beautiful patterns in the sky. He’s not dreaming; he and his peers are building the tech.
Or Neighborocracy - a global platform that links 30 households at a time to each other, using sociocratic methods – at a regional, national and global level. Most ambitiously, these take shape as local parliaments in which every man, woman and child takes responsibility for one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It’s early days (only 400,000 groups so far, mostly in India).
Both of these are evidence that a new architecture for transformation is appearing.
This kind of non-party, more autonomous, social power often describes itself as anarchic: a word that can strike fear in people. However, the perception of anarchy from the outside is quite different from how it is seen from the inside. It’s common for the media, for example, to describe loss of law and order or open defiance of the prevailing system as anarchy. Even today the disruption of the Black Lives Matter march in London was described by the Mail on Sunday as “descent into total anarchy”.
But there are many anarchist movements that are less focused on destroying existing structures and more on designing original ones that preserve the freedom of individuals and communities, imagining them capable of making decisions without elaborate national bureaucracies.
From Bret Hennig’s “The End of Politicians” which imagines countries run by randomly selected groups of citizens taking it in turn to make policy, rather like the Jury system. All the way through to the confederal anarchist experiment in Rojava, where refugees under siege had to design their own governance system. Modern anarchism is a fully contemporary experiment.
While on the one hand, those new structures seem Utopian, the amount of turbulence in the public space today suddenly brings the possibility of change closer.
Why did George Floyd’s death have such an impact, when many, many, such deaths had occurred before? Possibly because during the lockdown phase, more people have experienced their own vulnerability more acutely.
Or because we have lost some of our previous clarity about the lives of others—for example, assuming there are reasonable limits to the extent we can respond to the urgent needs of those beyond our intimates. Understanding better the impact of one’s own behaviour on others – wearing masks, isolating to protect your vulnerable neighbour - may have played a part in understanding better the impact of one’s own actions in a racist culture.
These may not be simply serial realisations about specific issues – poverty, racism, environmentalism – but a more fundamental development of our understanding about what our personal agency means. We are beginning to wake up to the fact that our behaviour – in all its specificity – makes a difference to the whole outcome. Here is a brilliant – if challenging – New Zealand video about racism that brings it home.
These micro shifts—revealing to us our personal agency in the outcome of national and global issues—could have a profound impact on how we shift from one system to another. In the 60s, it suddenly became universally understood that ‘rather than give a person a fish, it is more effective to teach them how to fish”.
The equivalent in the 2020s is more like, ‘rather than try to control the life of every person from the top, encourage relational infrastructures across the globe, within which we can organise ourselves better, together’.
Or more simply, bring on the culture and structures “of the people, by the people, for the people .. and with the planet”.