Alternative Editorial: From Activism To Activation
In our last editorial we queried what it means to move from the map to the territory, on the journey to socio-economic-political transformation. From a theory of change that is plausible, given the evidence of resources and ideas available, to actual change - which is difficult, given the unpredicted obstacles that arise when you begin to act.
When we presented our Planet A concept in March 2022 it was very much a map of possibilities. We showed six spheres of action that, when they interlocked, would lead to a regenerative future. They were:
· community agency networks (CANs)
· a learning journey to planetary citizenship
As we discovered over these years of system convening, people who are already deeply engaged in those six spheres of action can 'feel' that they are standing in the future, arising from beneath their feet. That's what is implied by Planet A - a sensibility that arises when you are fully invested in this possibility. The Alternative Global offers you access to that sensibility - a sort of citizenship of the future.
However, the vast majority of people - particularly those in party-political networks - could only see our vision as a distant opportunity. They would describe it as a 'bottom-up approach' - people acting without the direct enablement of the state: small, idealistic, relatively powerless. When they talk about 'the people' and communities they think local concerns: schools and homes, playgrounds and libraries, foodbanks and crime.
Our six spheres, however, pointed at whole system activity, occurring on the ground but drawing on an available cosmos of ideas and connectivity. We were assuming a 2023 world, in which every human with a mobile phone (65%) has access to the world wide web.
Their concerns are as much to do with planet - environmentalism, human movement across the globe, the changing nature of work and the reinvention of economy - as neighbourhood. Their daily activities occupy the interplay between them. We (in the wake of others,) call this social relationship cosmolocalism: a rapidly emerging, conscious global playspace that everyone can participate in.
Top down versus bottom up is the wrong paradigm
A failure to see the future from this perspective – that of an evolving personal and social agency in a massively connected world - leaves us with a power structure that emphasises top-down change: regulations, nudgesand hierarchies of knowledge.
The upside of this perspective is that those with conventional power - government, business, bureaucracies - take on the burden of collecting and distributing taxes, in order to provide structured resources of care, work and recreation. The downside? The relevant polity is imagined as passive, awaiting instruction and permission to act.
The limited agency offered to citizens in representative government - a vote every five years - gives rise to large swathes of the public engaging in protest against the government. Some of this follows the divisions set up by party politics: Left v Right or capitalism v socialism. Other movements call out the political classes as a whole: anti-nuclear, anti-military, anti-elites.
However, as Anthea Lawson described so well in her book The Entangled Activist, activism itself does not acknowledge the way each of us is inextricably part of the system we are trying to bring down. Climate protestors rely on the very oil and food systems that they are attacking. Yet they are not able - or sometimes even willing - to step away from them in sufficient numbers, at least in their own private lives, to cause a tremor in the establishment.
It is not simply material co-dependency that Anthea points out, but also emotional: the relationship to authority is similar to that of a child and its parent. Hoping that the one holding all the strings will relent and give into the demands of the more vulnerable. By contrast, in a relationship between adults, each has the opportunity to walk away and choose a different life: a new set of relationships leading to a different future.
The difficulty of going it alone
Of course this is not an easy option. When the SF giant Ursula Le Guin (in The Dispossessed) imagined a moment when those who rejected capitalism left Earth to start up on another planet, it was not a happy endeavour. Having to start from scratch with few resources, the people struggled. And having ruled out any top-down authority, their collective decision-making self-organised to suit their immediate material needs. Food and shelter became understandable priorities.
While social relationships were deeply studied and theorised on this new planet Anarres, individual needs for connection and belonging were put aside as if they had no intrinsic value to the whole. As a result the citizens became emotionally vulnerable and lacked joy.
There are many parallels with stories of autonomous movements that cut themselves off entirely from the old system to start anew. Individual internal needs are often marginalised--whereas one might say they are the key to success in any endeavour.
Cosmolocalism does not imagine starting from scratch: by contrast. the containers for any kind of citizen action requires the skills and commitment of the most experienced and resourced within them, as part of the mix. Its economy is more 4th sector, or socially entrepreneurial; designed to benefit the community within which its trading and exchange thrives.
Because a cosmolocal initiative sees itself as connected to the globe - both as a living, ecological entity and as a kaleidescope of knowledges - it prizes diversity within the community. Previously disconnected and appearing random within the community, the weaving-together of multiple forms of intelligence and agency give rise to new levels of energy, once they start to emerge from within this new container.
from Bonarjee site
Untapped energies
Artist Dominique Savitri-Bonarjee describes this kind of linking of multiple unknown quantities within a known space - maybe a community - as activation. In her PhD practice thesis called The Space of the Nameless, she points at the many elements - which, until now, have not been recognised or even seen as present within a system - as showing up, when given attention and engaged with. In the same way as electricity could not be harnessed without grids and conductors, so new futures cannot emerge without containers and attractors.
Bonarjee’s work reveals a practice for activation which begins with a shift in perspective: new ways of looking at time and space. What we do with our daily lives and how that renews our identity and agency. Add to that a radical appreciation of all that is on the planet with us humans - not only animals and plants but minerals and materials of all kinds in dynamic relationship. In a similar way that Newton named gravity as a force, Bonarjee-Mensch points at infinite 'nameless' energies as being latent within our world.
How can this radically different perspective talk to a traditional context? The latter operates from the belief that change happens primarily from the top downwards. Hierarchies of power intent on caring for, as well as controlling society - albeit meeting the relatively slow, bottom-up energies of people who are trying to defy the imbalance of power.
The former is connected to energies largely unacknowledged by the mainstream imaginary - individuals' innate creativity, communities capable of integrating their complex agency, within a much wider ecological civilisation, being activated by newly intelligent technologies?
While the top-down politicians, bureaucrats and business magnates imagine that they might champion those working from the bottom-up over time, the reality is that the inherent logic of vertical hierarchies constantly sabotages the energies of the wholists. Conventional powers imagine that unless they control 'the people' they will be overwhelmed by chaos. People 'need' a clear script for living, keeping us all safe and the economy growing, they say.
Meantime, the binary culture and structure - government vs opposition, left vs right, rich vs poor - all keep us in thrall to winning or losing. There is no coming together, no transcendence of our differences: the energy is lacking for emergence, but plentiful for protest.
The whole-system actionists, meantime, imagine they have to 'make the impossible possible' - to step outside of the current socio-economic-political system and (as Buckminster Fuller would have it) build the new one that makes the old one obsolete. To add pressure, there is an ecological imperative that cannot be ignored: the planet is shifting radically, in a direction that may not include us.
A further difficulty is to occupy such a future when the soft power of advertising, news media and colonial, europatriarchal knowledge still dominates. This calls for immense resources of inner strength - both individual and cultural.
There are concrete bits of architecture latent – see our incubators on the CAN of CANs, a media systemarising directly from that and disrupting the old - that would create a step change, but not yet in place. The trick is not giving into the old paradigm of winning versus losing: stay true to the logic of what you give attention to will take form.
Meanwhile don't think of the old as the enemy. Maybe think of it as the home you grew out of that will still be trying to influence you. Just as your parents might now be trying to understand your path and stay in relationship, so the party politicians are constantly trying to get your votes. Over the years, a broad public championing of gay marriage, the outlawing of cigarettes, and an interest in the survival of the planet has shaped policy, despite our apparent powerlessness.
Not under but parallel
In our New Political System incubator, we have seen this architecture as a parallel structure: two different systems running alongside each other. While they are currently unable to synch, lacking the structures for a new constitution, they can form a working partnership. That may be uneasy, but it would nevertheless offer traction in the face of multiple crises. When politicians have better ways of hearing from the citizens, who themselves have means of deliberation and space for personal development, there will be less division.
As Pat Kane, co-initiator of AG describes in The Play Ethic, adapting Chantal Mouffe’s distinction, our public space will become less antagonistic, while still retaining the capacity for being agonistic: meaning challenging, experimenting, daring.
What would make this flow better is if a piece of the new system were visible and active in the old one, constantly modelling the change possible. Like the imaginal cells in a caterpillar, already 'seeing' the butterfly coming into view. The political party Alternativet in Denmark was initiated with this intention. One might also say that is how Flatpack Democracy operates when it takes over the local council. That is, they operate as independent representatives of a more participatory political system and culture that expresses the community.
Rather than being vehicles for any national level party, they structure their agenda - personal, social and planetary - according to the cosmolocal vision of the citizens they represent. Thinking actively about the future for their children and the planet upon which that depends.
Given that Flatpack Democracy is not yet visible at higher levels of government, our New Political System incubator is currently exploring what might such a new political initiative look like at the national level. Should there be a party whose remit is to deliver on citizens' structured deliberation? Given that it would not thrive in a first past the post system, in what polity might it first begin to take shape? And what might its relationship be to similar initiatives happening globally?
Big questions that some might already have the answers to: if that is you, do join us in our regular meetups, currently meeting on Zoom here.