Alternative Editorial: People Power Is Not About Numbers
As we get on board the long run-up to elections in the UK and the US, the news media will be increasingly reading every world event in this light: which party benefits? In both these nations’ party-political cultureswith first past-the-post systems this will always appear as a zero-sum game between left and right or progressive v conservatives. Yawn.
So what might we have to look forward to, as AlterNatives on Planet A – meaning those of us who are intent on a proportional, future-orientated politics, preparing for ecocivilisation? One that will depend upon large scale, participatory, deliberative politics at the cosmolocal level?
Three articles we read this week point at the idea that, despite politicians still having the hard power to make decisions - the law and the money - it may actually be the people, living their ordinary lives in their communities that have the soft power, the abillity to shape and influence. As if the tail is increasingly wagging the dog.
The first by Sir Geoff Mulgan points at the failure of the government to judge correctly whether or not the Horizon software could do the job of running the Royal Mail post offices. Mulgan should know, as he advised PM Tony Blair at the time to reject Fujitsu as typical of the government's "monstrously big projects which didn't involve the users at all in the design process".
Drawing similar conclusions then that we might today - that the sub-postmasters are the front-line users and we should invest our trust in them he was also pointing to lack of intelligence in the system. In addition, he says, UK and US politicians rarely have any experience of running things in real life, on the ground: they tend to deal in theory and ideology, knowing what 'should happen' more than what is likely to happen in real time, when people are involved.
What Mulgan couldn't have predicted back then was the tragedy that would ensue when sub-postmasters were not believed about the misfiring - and bad management - of the technology. Nor that it would be public pressure, brought about by a successful TV series, that finally caused the government to admit its ignorance.
Nor that the Prime Minister would try to weaponise the tragedy by making promises to compensate the victims, without even consulting Parliament - the only recognisable instrument of democracy we have. At every stage in this fiasco, the politicians are failing in their service to the public, while nevertheless driven by their need to gain popularity from that public.
We can only surmise that politicians are still operating in the hard power paradigm - the belief that they can coerce the public, albeit with carrots as well as sticks. They have not yet discovered that the public, particularly when ready to come together as a collective intelligence, is constantly outsmarting them with soft power. It's that focused and intentional public - with the aid of corporations already wise to this development- that is setting the environmental and social justice agenda. The politicians are on the defence
An article in the Financial Times by Camilla Cavendish explores this idea with a look at the current state of civil society. She notes Sir Keir Starmer's attempts to please 'National Trust Woman' by backing the rights of staff and management to be allowed to make their own minds up about what does or does not constitute appropriate messaging to their members. Starmer’s defense came in the wake of Sunak’s government invoking a culture war between those who are 'woke' to historic social injustice and 'the people'—who apparently just want to stroll in the gardens without thinking.
While those reporting on GB News claim that no-one cares about past colonialism or extreme white privilege, Sir Keir claims this idea is the legacy of no-one giving the 'serving public' a voice at all. His pledge to build a much stronger sense of civil society as a shared project with the government is bold, but, as Camilla points out, lacking in substance. How does he plan to do that when citizens have so few mechanisms for real agency? One vote every five years, to choose between two parties in a first past the post system, makes most of our votes meaningless.
The likelihood is that the focus for participation will remain in the field of volunteering and free community labour - something much closer to David Cameron's Big Society concept. If he is tempted to revive it, Starmer should remember that BS failed badly—precisely because the government replaced much of the existing community wisdom with its own young turks, intent on their own version of “harnessing people power” (otherwise known as free labour).
If there is going to be any meaningful acknowledgement of 'the people' in a way that causes a new relationship with government - something our society badly needs - we need more than conjuring up images of servant communities. There has to be a shift in power, backed up by structure.
We've described many times before how the architecture needed to generate deliberative democracyamongst the people - what we call community agency networks (CANs) - already exists prototypically, in pockets around the country. Which party is going to invest in that development? Or, given that these communities are intent on healing divides caused by party politics, does something quite new need to happen?
It's not surprising that politicians shy away from such a shift in the same way that turkeys do not vote for Christmas. The collective intelligence of 'the people' when genuinely self-organised to include everyone, has so much more energy and creativity than governments largely made up of similarly educated and privileged elites. Yes, that includes those who started out from poor backgrounds, but spend their careers in the exclusive spaces and closed conversations of power.
When they occupy well-designed and facilitated spaces - diverse yet integrative, imaginative while rooted in action, respectful of the past while future orientated - people show themselves to contain multitudes. But let's not underestimate what a significant development of civil society would take; power cannot be handed over like a birthday present - there has to be a mature demand as well as an offer.
When Occupy Wall Street took over the public space and engaged people in decision making, it could only operate at base level ("what do we want?") Like two parts of a space-ship docking in outer space, the transfer of power has to be carefully designed, so that it can fit well.
When local councils decide the terms and conditions under which their constituents can develop their community, it's because the people are at the bottom of a steep hierarchy. Even when they develop a good relationship with their local councillors, those councillors will always be vulnerable to the Westminster party's decisions. The sudden shift in the policy on ULEZ is a good example.
While the environmentalists took years to craft the 15-minute city model, in the interests of public health and energy conservation, a poorly read by-election (hijacked by angry citizens, who had not been consulted on ULEZ) provoked the PM to suddenly switch national policy against it. Under the current political system, our future is a pin-ball machine of reactivity with little or no steady organising vision for future flourishing. As a polity, we are more like teenagers than adults: on our way to becoming more responsible but barely imagining such a possibility yet, nor wanting it.
Maybe this is why we need to think about the future not from the perspective of sorting politics and power, but of fulfilling our potential as a human species. All the elements of the polycrisis look like a permacrisisprecisely because we are caught up in the thinking of the mainstream public space, defined by the current power system, led by elites.
The thinking we need will not come from that elite pool, but from the much larger pool of people who have little formal power but a growing influence in the public space. Some of them may be reactionary - demanding freedom from the control of governments and corporations without any good plan to follow - but their desire for more autonomy and self-sovereignty plays a part in the waking up we're witnessing.
More important will be those who have worked for decades to carefully design alternative systems of co-operation and collaboration. They’re now moving into relationship with those who understand more about human diversity and capacity. These are people who have been deliberately weaving the plethora of socio-economic initiatives, rather than fixing problems from a single perspective. It’s those who feel capable of harnessing the power of technology to liberate human potential rather than accelerate capitalism.
