In this last editorial before our annual recess – Week 66 of The Shift — we wanted to pull some threads together. We have been engaging recently with ‘community agency networks’ (CANs) in Plymouth and Birmingham, South Africa, Scotland and Mexico. But this week, our work was suddenly brought into sharp focus by none other than Dominic Cummings, who until very recently was Boris Johnson’s right hand man in Downing Street.

For those who haven’t heard it, Cummings is interviewed by BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg for an hour in the aftermath of his departure. Over sixty minutes (edited down from a few hours), Cummings lays bare what he describes as the dysfunctionality of government and, in particular, the incompetence of his boss. While many accuse him of simply taking revenge for his dismissal, his points do not come as a surprise to critics of Johnson, or similar personalities that inhabit our political culture and structure. Yet the scale of the deliberate lying and manipulation of the public — in which Cummings was deeply involved, right up to his departure — is breathtaking.

When a self-confessed liar claims he is now telling the truth, it’s important to stand back and not get drawn in. Kuenssberg, shocked by his candour about his own flagrant abuse of democracy, asks him repeatedly “can you hear what you are saying”? Even so, at the end of his performance, Cummings begins to make some observations about British politics that are hard to ignore. For example, “the party system is a closed power system and has to be rewired” – something that A/UK has argued for too. But when Cummings talks about what is new and possible for the future of politics, it sounds—at first take—very like ours.

In the face of a broken political system in which both parties and the civil service are unable to reinvent themselves, Cummings suggests “a different kind of networked power that ends up assimilating or disrupting” the current system. “Clearly it’s possible to build something that solves problems for people outside of the existing power structures” he says. Kuenssberg doesn’t pick him up on this – she is still focused on his fight with Johnson – but says instead: “You’re not done, are you?” To which he nods.

We were quite taken aback here. At the very same moment that A/UK has been seeing ‘these new forms of networked power’ arising in many ways, Cummings and his band of disruptors (the mysterious “we” he refers to throughout) are also seeing the same thing, the same objective political landscape - but with very different eyes.

Both of us seem to be envisaging what Indra Adnan in her book The Politics of Waking Up describes as “dual power” or a “parallel polis” - in essence, a new kind of organised agency taking shape outside of the party-political system. Our vision sees people power and self-organization joining together to create a network of commons; shared and localized resources that are capable of steering us away from the cliff’s edge of climate catastrophe.

In our reading, Cummings looks at the kinds of networked community power we’re interested in — and takes it as an opportunity to capture behavioural data. This would be fed to a super-talented “cognitive elite” of “forecasters”, who would crunch the numbers and deliver radical solutions back to a grateful multitude. All of this is in search of new forms of productivity and growth for the sovereign UK — with the toxic externalities of such growth a decidedly minimal factor, compared to the “disruptive” innovations Cummings seeks legitimation for.

And even if you think disruption is in itself a good thing, listen to this interview again. Cummings’ kind of disruption includes deliberately misleading the public to get a result, or hyping up fear to cause disorientation amongst those he considers ‘duffers. In both cases where these strategies were deployed — Brexit and Covid — the outcomes have changed the trajectory of our nation.

So, should The Alternative UK avoid looking in the same place as Cummings for clues to the future? Or should we contest that space? Two recent events leave us in no doubt that we can — and must — step up our efforts in that very space, to be ready for anything Cummings and his power base might be plotting. Not necessarily to oppose him, but to have done enough groundwork, trajectory-plotting and narrative-shaping to be able to receive whatever he is offering on our terms, not his. In short, we must become response-able.

CANs, cosmolocalism and Plymouth

The first event which suggests such a response was a four week exploration called The State Of Us: Powerful Communities and Economic Democracy, hosted by The Real Ideas Organisation and Co-produced with the New Economics Foundation (NEF), Plymouth Social Enterprise Network (PSEN), Power to Change, Coops UK, Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), and Stonehouse Voice (SHV).

Over the four sessions, The State of Us looked at Plymouth in its global context through four lenses. Firstly, The State of Work: this brought together social enterprise, cooperative and union activists to explore how people are seeking to build power within, through and beyond the workplaces.

Secondly, The State of Places and Spaces, which focussed on the unequal distribution of ownership and access to land and property as one of the critical areas of structural inequality and exploitation in the UK. With a particular focus on local, migrant and worker-owned businesses, this explored how citizen-led community and social enterprise can counter this poor distribution, and the role local institutions can play as partners.

Thirdly, The State of Resilience (Making and Production) asked how we can ensure sustainability is at the heart of the struggle for autonomy and how community enterprises and initiatives are making this happen, despite their distance from standard models of growth.

Finally, The State of Us Plenary explored the experience of both new and more developed municipal movements. The aim was to identify new areas of activity, new groups, collaborations and networks and initiate practical next step actions to widen community power and economic democracy. [For more detail on who participated, see our detailed report in the coming week].

As many of you will know, AUK has spent a lot of time in Plymouth – it was the location of the first (as well as the most recent, on-line during Covid) collaboratory we did. Plymouth is a place that embraces imagineering, bringing people together post-Brexit, fully facing the multiple crises of people, community and planet. What we saw there was the capacity for generating cosmolocalism: an alternative socio-economic-political system, driven by a multi-layered community agency, borrowing freely from both global and local intelligence.

Within that, over this conference, we observed at least four distinct voices, with many actors holding more than one of these voices

· social justice actors – decolonising, giving rights, identifying needs

creative entrepreneurs – solution finders

· community builders – building relational and social capital

· fractalizers – finding new patterns of relationship between groups within the city, linking to others globally and establishing partnership with the old system through finding common language, translating terms

In the final session, speakers from En Comu in Barcelona, Makers Valley Partnership (part of the Cape Town CANs movement we blog here) and Cooperation Jackson looked at whether or not we could describe what is happening in Plymouth as municipalism. From the evidence, there are three kinds of municipalism emerging globally. One, the managed platforms, like Barcelona, that occupy the state at scale. Two, the autonomist movements that (like the African CANs) are forging ahead regardless. And three, the independent movements like Cooperation Jackson that could be seen as both beyond the state, and sometimes against it, holding it accountable for its failures.

Where did this leave Plymouth? As a reasonably well-developed mixture of all three. In his role as chair, RIO’s Ed Whitelaw asked many of the pertinent questions. “Municipalism is really the politics of place and proximity – everyday democracy. People talk about the idea of self-love and social love… We all want a meaningful job that creates some income and meets our needs, but also we need to have, as human beings, a wider sense of purpose. To be creating value, to be valued in our communities, and to be recognised for that. So how can we grow that and give it greater form?”

In many ways, Ed’s questions hold the key to ensuring that whatever Dominic Cummings (and his crew) unleashes on these local communities, they will be ready. Social technology is undoubtedly being designed to disrupt their old ways of working and engender new ones under his direction. However, the relationships and shared purpose they are now forging, if strong enough, will help them temper that experience and allow them to choose what to accept and what to refuse.

But nothing can be taken for granted. As The State of Us reveals, there is much work to be done to build the sorts of containers that can really incubate and nurture these neighbourhood-level, town-and-city networks. For example, while the neighbourhood mutual aid networks, emergent during the pandemic, showed exactly the kind of patterns of connection and relational culture we need to build the CANs, they have since retracted somewhat — for want of a wider context and setting to grow.

Small green shoots need good soil to take root – which is exactly what a well constituted CAN offers. Membership, learning clubs, discussion spaces but also opportunities for work (not just volunteering), services and exchanging. Something to belong to, generating real economy as well as social capital. At the same time, if they are overly related to the state – dependent for funds, media or leadership for example – they will find themselves quickly beholden to the old system (the one that Dominic Cummings is trying to outwit).

Circling the Civic Square

Which brings us to another of our long-term interlocutors: Civic Square, a smaller but more intentional CAN which arose out of the Impact Hub in Birmingham a 6000 sq. ft collaborative space acting as a physical and social habitat for projects, practices, organisations, events and ideas.

The Hub was a 5 year R&D project exploring the Town Hall model from the city centre. Civic Square took all the learning – which included being part of the global movement of Impact Hubs - into an actual neighbourhood setting. Partly to see what could take root, partly to make sure the intelligence arising from the grassroots is actively integrated into these new systems arising. Here is Co-founder and Director, Immy Kaur describing some of their principles.

In the interregnum between the two forms of CAN – intended to be months, but turned into two years by Covid – Civic Square gave birth to the Department of Dreams. In so doing, they’ve created a permanent alternative to reacting to the mainstream news agenda as the basis for future planning.

“While investing in the dark matter of large scale system change, we must also invest in the dream matter – the artists, writers, designers, dreamers and creative visionaries”, writes Immy. “Those who dare to dream up bold new futures for humanity, and have the capacity to stretch our imaginations further than we ever thought possible.”

In some ways, we might say this is what Dominic Cummings is also thinking of as he plans his new networked power system: he insist we should be led by the most creative and brilliant minds, maybe even the “weirdos and misfits”. Yet by embedding this imaginative energy in the neighbourhood square, supported by the cosmolocal CAN, Civic Square is enacting a much more radical democratic innovation.

Last week’s event at the Square – the first since the relaxation of Covid rules – was a small but fractal gathering. Meaning a neighbourhood experience that was nevertheless cosmolocal and system-conscious. Kate Raworth, author and founder of Doughnut Economics, gave an exploratory workshop on gamifying new economic practices. Participants played their way into new economic behaviours and helped design a board game on the way. A/UK’s Indra Adnan was in dialogue with 22 year old Zoya Ahmed about The Politics of Waking Up – focusing on how RegenA could develop response-ability (podcast to come). Each member of the audience had their own innovation to share, their own exploration to bring to the discussion.

While Cummings wants to separate the ‘brilliant minds’ from ‘the duffers’, CANs culture sees brilliance everywhere, taking many more forms than the growth economy elicits. This gives rise to a very different future – not just a faster and bigger one.

In summary, it could be that over the next five years we will see not just one but two distinct forms of dual power develop. The first may well have that Leninist ambition of disrupting the public space sufficiently to create an entry point for a very different kind of political party – something Cummings alludes to repeatedly in the interview (but frustratingly not followed up by Kuenssberg). The second is more like Vaclav Havel’s idea of a parallel polis, structures that carry the will and creative imagination of people, giving rise to new forms of society, economy and democracy. Able to be in a generative partnership with the state.

With his current resources and networks, Cummings’ version would be much more visible than the version we are championing — and will appear more quickly. At the same time, the first need not cancel out the other. Like two cogs spinning at different speeds, the movement of CANs can work within Cummings’ disruptive new politics (if he gets it off the ground), making it easier for cosmolocalists to set the agenda in the places where people live – all over the world. The point is to be strong and autonomous enough to be able to create value out of whatever Cummings has to offer.

If you want to know more about CANs and the possibility of a dual power system, why not read The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age while we are off-screen in August? (Buy here) On our return we will have a book club available to talk through the main points of socio-economic-political change described, through observation, by The Alternative UK.

Alternative Editorial: The Political Opportunity