Alternative Editorial: Slow Motion Implosion
Have you ever watched a video of a tower block being demolished? It's a feat of engineering which ensures that the monstrous edifice does not simply fall over and destroy the surrounding area. Instead of explosion, the principle is implosion. Controlled explosives are planted on selected floors all the way up to the top of the building, which are then remotely triggered to go off in a predetermined order. The result is a relatively gentle collapse of an old construction, caving in on itself.
All the while that preparations for that building to come down have been going on – meaning where to put the dynamite - parallel plans for its replacement have been shaping up elsewhere. Scheduling is everything as planning permission has to be won for a better building to replace the old one, well before demolition can occur.
Any time lag between the old building coming down and the new one going up makes the new one unaffordable. At times, this requires an act of faith on behalf of the investors - that all the actors can deliver well on their piece of the puzzle. Architects, suppliers, recruiters—all will be working in the dark for a period of time, not knowing whether the vision will be realised. Meantime, the offices and flats promised in the new building are already on sale.
Some of you will know where we are going with this: watching a building being replaced safely and effectively can be misleading. How often have you come back to a town or even neighbourhood and been shocked by the changed landscape: where did those shops/flats/office blocks come from?
The same might be said of social change: how did we 'suddenly' become the society of 2023 - for good or bad? Why are we constantly talking about 'woke' and mental health, small boats and giant conspiracies, or more recently artificial intelligence? When did we move into multiple gender identities, ecocivilisation, nomad passports? In reality, all of these changes took time and multiple forms of action across many groups of actors.
Cause and effect is not linear
No single cause leads to a simple and direct effect - all our actions are entangled in contexts and timings. Nothing genuinely new arises from a linear set of scheduled events: there are always a number of different actions that have to happen at the same time to get the envisioned result.
In Buddhism this is called co-dependent origination: everything arises out of complexity. For a system to change, each part of the system should be implied - both top and bottom, inner and outer, individual and collective. This can manifest in relatively small patterns of relationships between different parts of the system. But they have to be fractal - like microcosms within macrocosms - so that the ripple effect ends up affecting the whole.
Over this past weekend we saw many signs of a 'tower block' in the early stages of coming down, with small explosions happening on several floors of our current socio-economic-political structure. On the one hand, results of the local elections across England resulted not only in a significant shift in power but the slow collapse of first-past-the-post voting.
Unspoken, local alliances between progressive voters led to the first ever Green Party council majority in mid-Suffolk and, elsewhere, more surprising gains for Lib Dems. While Labour was the outright winner in these elections, becoming the largest party of local government, their gains do not yet point to an overall majority in a General Election. To govern, it’s likely they will need an agreement with the smaller parties.
The Labour Party itself is unconvinced about the power of a Progressive Alliance. While the unions and the party membership have voted in favour of moving to a proportional system, the leadership is resisting. It is still reeling from the major divides it opened up by expelling former leader Jeremy Corbyn from the party, a move aimed at establishing itself as the centre party of UK politics.
More party in-fighting among the Conservatives and the SNP suggests the kind of implosion of party-politics that a tower block requires to collapse effectively. But only if the voters themselves persist in their unofficial self-organising. A vacuum in power is dangerous and too easily filled by polarising energy. A vision of a better political system needs to be framing any collapse of an old one.
Top floor implosions
More small blasts took place right at the top of our metaphorical building. Whatever your view on the Royal Family (see our Editorial on Queen Elizabeth's passing), the Coronation of King Charles III revealed some interesting deshifts at the heart of UK's power structures. While a solid - though shrinking - majority of popular support ensured a 'happy and glorious' public event, several sticks of dynamite imploded, and others lie smouldering.
Most obviously, Prince Harry has taken up the mantle of his 'activist' mother, Princess Diana. He stood well back from the front row at the Coronation, yet uses his continuing status to crusade against the media's role in destroying our collective mental health. It's most likely that his persistence - intentionally or not - will keep undermining the Firm, but he has a new family now. Was the inclusion of a black choir in Westminster Abbey and a reggae choir in Buckingham Palace his father saying "I see you"?
Also, King Charles' well known commitment to the environment will slowly eat away at any pretence of harmony between the government and the Palace. If he still has the loyalty of 62% of the people and the largest political party never gets beyond 44% of the popular vote, the cognitive dissonance of our public space is likely to continue fracturing. It's significant that young people are very keen for the King to become more, not less, political.
Less obviously maybe were two smaller acts of rebellion by Charles on his biggest day. The first was to ditch his military uniform - despite every picture of him leading up to the ceremony suggested he would wear it. Until now we haven't seen any explanation, not even any press curiosity. Yet it's a subtle snub to the military tradition on mighty display throughout the streets of London that day.
Secondly, the 'ceremonial food' for the Coronation Street parties was vegetarian. Not only does this underline Charles and Camilla's commitment to the environment but also made community parties instantly more inclusive. Small details to most of us: huge snub to the meat industry.
Thirdly, perhaps more tendentious - far-fetched maybe - but in the spirit of the Charles's favourite comedians, the Goons. For those travelling on London Underground, he and Camilla recorded a voice-over reminding everyone to 'Mind the Gap'. Yeah right, we might say - yours is a gap it would take a revolution to breach.
At the same time, recent speeches from Charles welcoming the independence of commonwealth countries, the commitment to reparations and the shrinking of the monarchy might suggest King Charles should be watched carefully over the next few years. In that sense, 'the people's Princess' Diana's presence was still looming over the gathering: her legacy only gaining strength.
What's already in planning?
But what signs of the new building already in planning? As ever, it was hard to see in the mainstream press. There was welcome, if minimal, coverage of republicans arrested before the ceremony, simply for stating their identity on a t-shirt or banner. It's a good reminder that the law is increasingly being used to suppress citizen re-action of even the mildest kind.
That these same citizens were being conjoined to 'serve the public' as community organisers in the Big Help Out on Bank Holiday Monday was another sign that the authorities - both Royal and political - are largely middle-class and conservative. In the age of foodbanks, enforced energy metres and the collapse of the NHS, the notion that 'the people' need to be asked to care for each other is misguided.
Mutual aid networks in neighbourhoods around the country are only the latest formation in the permanently exhausted voluntary work force - led by unpaid women - that have held society together throughout the long history of inequality.
Readers of The Alternative Global will know that you have to look beyond the mainstream press or institutional narratives, to see the deep mycelial networks underneath the 'tower block' now imploding. Outside of the spotlight, people have been organising to reclaim their self-sovereignty - both individual and collective - in ways that will regenerate both the environment and the social imaginary.
We can see them in the phenomenon of community agency networks (CANs) but also in enlivening spaces of other kinds - markets, festivals, learning initiatives, re-imagining gatherings, independence drives.
These movements are shifting the ground upon which the tower block was originally built, bringing the land back to life on new terms. It is organising itself autonomously - more like a parallel polis - not waiting for permission from incremental local authorities to move into greater integrity with people and planet. The Unitarian Church's invitation for each of us to design our own Oath (see our blog this week), or the 'Homage From the People' suggested by Plymouth environmental law lecturer, Mothiur Ramen, are the small signs of the land rewilding before any new concrete is laid in. It's unlikely a new replacement tower block is in the plans.
Spirit of autonomy
Remarkably, it is this very autonomous spirit, deeply connected with the land and community, that made Charles so very different from his siblings and parents and for so long, the laughing stock of the mainstream. It is not easy to see how these elite and grassroots forces meet to generate something wholly regenerative for the wider society: the standard media story will keep them pitted against each other.
At the same time, the architecture for this regenerative future is already in design (see our six years of reporting, now integrating through our four incubators. At times like this - like the act of faith required by the investor giving the nod to the demolition expert - the best we can do is to get stuck in: designing, resourcing and attracting occupants for all that is envisioned.