Towards a Chapter 1

Gosh, I haven’t posted on here for just over a year – 377 days to be precise, far too many of which for my liking have been spent in the arcane and abstruse (even for a wannabe leftwing theorist) world of internet publishing. Meanwhile behind the scenes, away from the attentions of my mass readership (/irony), my ideas have been percolating away; the book is fully mind-mapped and numerous written passages litter my file system waiting for their day to appear in halcyon WordPress type.

Spurred on by the anniversary and by imminent attendance at another (Happy 40th, Verso!), and after my third login attempt, here is a copy-paste of my work in progress for chapter 1, section 1, or, if you will, the Introduction.

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Our course is ruinous. On every front, the indications that we’re heading for disaster are multiplying.

Our civilisation is destroying the natural environment: we’re passing the thresholds where we won’t be able to halt runaway climate change, which ultimately threatens the ability of billions of people to secure water and food; species are dying off; key ecosystems – the rainforests, the seas – are being destroyed. Global climate accords, the consensus is, have failed – the last chance may have been at the Copenhagen conference in December 2009, where no meaningful deal was reached. The leaders of the world have shown that the interests of the stability of human civilisation, as well as countless lives cannot outrank for them the imperatives of financial markets and the interests of global corporations.

We are using up non-renewable resources at an alarming rate; we are approaching or passing the halfway mark of the bellcurve of our oil supply, meaning oil will become progressively harder and more expensive to extract. Oil powers our civilisation, our glittering consumption, vistas of shopping malls and suburban spread, instigated by and profiting energy companies. Relatively cheap and stable access to it has been procured through invasions and destabilisation in the middle east, costing millions of lives, as well as propping up corrupt regimes. And as well as oil, we are passing the peaks in supply of other minerals we have come to depend on – etc. The industrial age has seen an exponential ramp in resource consumption and throughput – the sheer rate at which we use stuff and turn it into waste, never to be able to put it back, or to restore it to nature.

Access to water, and arable land to grow food, are likely to be resources as contentious in the near future as oil has been to date. Water tables become depleted beyond the point of renewal, and climate change interferes with water sources. A decade into the 21st century, famine is still a live issue; usually though the issue isn’t that there isn’t food to buy, but that there isn’t currency to buy it; or that the fertile land which could have grown food, is given over to undiversified production of crops for export.

Intractable imperialist military operations and occupations are underway in three countries in the Middle East, and a fourth in Iran, a fifth in Lebanon are threatened; the Middle East being the location of large reserves of oil, and the theatre of a so-called, self-fulfilling (profitable for the war machine) clash of civilisations.

As resources become tighter, the processes already underway of ensuring their supply by military means, and suppressing the resistance to the latter both domestically and onsite will become more pronounced; Guantanamo and the black sites, the practices of rendition and torture haven’t been wound down. Techniques of military control through physical means, surveillance and propaganda are tested in military settings and deployed in the west.

Inequality is growing – the last thirty five years have seen advances in productivity, but the stagnation of wages in the US and to a lesser extent the UK; as this trend continues, the necessity of keeping immigrant workers out, or a number of them in unofficial conditions ideal for value predation will increase. We will have a world even more of militarised borders, of slums and gated compounds in stark juxtaposition.

The world emerges from a 2 year recession but the threat of a double dip, that the deep structural problems have simply been temporarily patched over only to return with a vengeance, still attends us; capitalism showed again its inherent propensity to blow bubbles and for them to explode with ruinous consequences, with a housing bubble underwritten by cheap credit (itself compensating for the static wages of workers), and the spreading of widely-invested-in poisonous assets leading to a credit crunch in interbank lending and knock-on recession in the real economy. The bailout showed the control exerted by banks over government. Those who have paid and will pay, with welfare and social provision cuts, are not those who caused it, who have already returned to profitability.

So far a depressing picture; but can we approach it with clarity and hope? In these disparate domains, can we discern some common threads to begin to understand the causes?

The context in which the issues occur is one of unfettered, unrivalled capitalism. The last few decades have seen the ending of the power of the labour movement among the working class as an effective counterbalance to capital.

The power of the working class and the equitable distribution of society’s product were at their apex just after the second world war, when reforms and provisions which had been sought for a long time were won, in the form of the welfare state. In the context of the booming economy of the US and to a lesser extent Western Europe through its reconstruction, for the first time the majority of workers were able to share in the fortunes they created – were able to live comfortable lives, to be homeowners, to afford health and some luxuries, to send their children to college. More than that, to be able to be optimistic about the future.

All concessions to labour historically have been bitterly contested by capitalists as directly impinging on their profits and competitiveness, and the attempts to roll them back usually start up straight afterwards. In the 1970s, neoliberalism was embarked upon which saw the rights and protections of workers further rolled back; unions were attacked, and the stakeholder society was rolled out, where people’s pensions were invested in and therefore they had a personal stake in corporations. The neoliberal ideology is opposed to concepts like social provision, or a duty of care, and arch conservative concepts of individual responsibility and jeopardy, the freedom of the markets to take their course and freedom from regulation for corporations.
Under the globalisation of the economy, where deregulation and lowering of trade barriers (primarily from southern to northern countries) means a context of heightened competitiveness and jeopardy for each national economy, the imperative of financial profitability becomes even greater.

In all, neoliberalism and globalisation results in the removal of levers for society and politics to control the economy and finance. So if we want to change direction as a society, for example to institute climate controls, we find we can’t because to do so would be financially therefore economically ruinous in the short term – a very real threat which cannot be shrugged off.

What we’re seeing is what the world looks like when the imperatives and properties of capitalism are given free rein and expression, without effective counterweight or opposition. When the need to expand under competitive pressure, by maximising profitability by minimising costs and expanding sales, expanding markets and tapping new sources of resources and markets, when all considerations of social or ecological good can only be secondary, this is the world that is created. And the future as envisaged and forecast by the documents of the elite and their advisors, promises more of the same.

Today’s deep ecological and economic problems threaten the horizon of hope for all which it might once have been possible to believe in; a life within the status quo must conflict with the health of the ecology, with the objective of equality. And just at the point where one is needed more than ever, we find that truly we have no alternative. Each actor, from the individual to the national and the supranational, is locked into conforming to the imperatives of the market, surrendering independence, integrity and social considerations to it at every turn.

When social provision is reduced, the incentive and imperative for the individual to conform is that much greater, and this is why it has been so helpful for social control. If you don’t have social resources to draw upon, if there’s no security blanket, the harder you have to work to stay afloat. As great as this is for productivity and profits it means that for those who necessarily fall through the cracks – for, iceberg-style, some must always be submerged – the human suffering is acute. And the less, objectively, you can become involved in political activism. Meanwhile at the same time subjectively, the less you can be involved in your work and not have to worry that it’s harming its contexts including the future.

What’s interesting is we’re seeing if not the dissolution of, then the severe shrinking of access to, the liberal perspective. The liberal or middle class perspective is one which conforms to the imperatives of the market in its subjective identifications and values. It is optimistic, idealistic, progressive, forward looking; believes in the ability and duty of the system to provide for all as it grows. Unfortunately, in the context of a system which categorically doesn’t work like that, whose modes are competition and exploitation, liberals, for all the undoubted value of the reforms they have instituted, are those who supply allegiance, acquiescence, aspirationalism, as a social mass, as a profession, as an example; they have justified the worst evils in the name of ostensible ideals, sometimes in flagrant hypocrisy, more often unwittingly. Because outside the liberal perspective, for those whose access to it has been lost, or never existed, the system is one which tramples, is unfair, is genocidal, tosses people into the dustbin of history. The novelty of our era is that because of increasing global constraints and differential exploitation the crisis is being visited on the domestic middle class; and as CH persuasively argues, because of the liberal class absconding its post of defending the social values it claims to hold, first the working class was able to be superexploited and now it is the LC’s turn. All of society suffers as a result. More and more will there be a divide between the elite and their agents, and the poor. But the liberal class’s absconding was because they are subject to the same imperatives as people in other positions – forced to be ever more rapacious (willing to partipate in rapaciousness) in order to maintain their standard of living.

The Alternatives Project – introduction

Can we find another way?

I’m on a mission to explore the question of alternatives, both in theory and practice – to visit and interview practitioners of alternatives, local and global, who offer us examples of alternatives in practice – and review the history and theory of alternatives in every sphere – political, economic, practical, philosophical and spiritual.

Please read the rest of the introduction here.

On this blog, I’ll be posting a mixture of my own writings on alternatives, and clips to news and feature articles discussing all aspects of a) the need for alternatives (i.e. evidence that there are serious issues with the current system and that the solutions offered within it won’t suffice), and b) theoretical alternatives and c) actually existing alternative models, as well as d) aspects of the dilemma facing us as we try to develop alternatives.

Q & A with me, by me, about the crisis and why we should be hopeful

Why do you speak of crisis?
The situation is that we face multiple crises, which, sharing causes and intertwining and mutually feeding each other, threaten to become a culminating crisis:
– Climate change is potentially so dangerous as to threaten the end of civilisation itself; certainly it augurs massive ecological stress and great difficulty in food and water supply for large numbers of people.
– “peak oil” – we are reaching the halfway point in exploiting oil supplies, with the result that oil will begin to get more difficult and expensive to extract, with disruptions in supply, and the interruption of the complex systems that feed us and depend on oil, the likely results.
– The financial crisis; though this and the recession seem to be passing (though that’s by no means assured), hardship and debts public and private will linger for a while to come. Capitalism is fundamentally prone to crises of this kind; a business as usual recovery now seems to be underway, but as it’s founded on the same high oil consumption pattern as before, there are questions about how viable any economic prosperity will be. As always crises involve transfers of wealth upwards, rich investors profit on the way up and the way down.
– The water and food crises; this year has seen marked lack of food and water; crises in various areas; as always the problem is not lack of physical availability of food in the country or region affected, but lack of purchasing power of those who need it the most.
– Wars; the war in Afghanistan is now 8 years old; arguably the middle east wars, especially Iraq, were wars fought for resource control, among other reasons.
– Resources and pollution; name a valuable resource used by humans – from fish to topsoil to indium, used in LCD TVs (13 years of current usage left) – its being depleted.

Indicators such as oil discoveries declining, emissions rising, debt rising, etc all on exponential curves, all show an unsustainability about our situation, show that some sort of correction is likely soon. Hard limits, of supply, of ability of climate or human society to absorb our actions, are being hit.

All of this paints a picture that is so gloomy, that it is natural to turn inwards, or turn away from it. To concentrate on our own lives where we can make a difference, rather than face a complex and intractably difficult situation.
Especially as normality mostly persists in terms of our experience of our daily lives.
We just keep going; our response has become one of hoping for the best. Of keeping our head in the sand. As well as not helping the situation (by contrast with what an engaged citizenry could do), it’s stressful – stressful to have issues on one’s mind which one isn’t facing up to; to not feel able to engage fruitfully with the situation. And to carry that burden of stress alone.

Or we can take refuge in a faith-based approach – believe that technology, enlightened leaders, philanthropic corporations or renewed economic growth will save us.

But a key point to remember here is that our agency has been reduced by the same causes as those which brought about the aspects of crisis listed above. So another aspect of crisis which we could add to the list above is the reduction in agency, or diminishment of democracy – with all the feelings of impotence to address the issues, which flow from that. We’ll develop this more below.

So how do these issues arise?
Well this is at once hugely complex and fairly simple. Certainly in terms of climate change, you can begin with the material cause – exponentially increasing greenhouse gas emissions – and point to all the processes which create them – industrial production and transportation, etc, as well as deforestation.

You can even make a pretty clear case for a deeper cause – that it is capitalism which leads to this ever-rising production and consumption, which drive those processes. This is its selling point after all, its benefit – improving material standard of living (i.e. increasing production and consumption).

Businesses expand, consolidate, innovate, advertise, create new markets, develop new technologies, create desires via advertising and fulfil them via marketing; they employ workers, who can then purchase their products; countries give them footholds to produce their goods or markets of consumers to purchase them and reap the benefits in investment and development. All is good, ostensibly – this is capitalism.

But in its relentless drive to expand, in turn produced by its imperative of reinvestment for profit, it necessarily creates ecological destruction. This is borne out today empirically as well as implied logically.

Profitability means keeping costs down as much as possible, and relentlessly expanding; into new markets, new sources of labour and resources.

In the last 30 years or so we’ve seen the successful expansion of the doctrine of free markets, of deregulation and liberalisation, which has meant companies ever freer to carry out these actions, unconstrained by regulation.

This has been pushed to the limit by lobbyists. In terms of both climate change and the waxing of the housing bubble which fed the financial crisis, there is a sordid history of corporate lobbyists working assiduously to get regulation which could (have) help(ed) to bring the issues under control shelved or repealed.

What has gone on also is weakening of the working class of the ability to respond – indeed this is constitutive of it; this is what it is; and why it is successful, and desirable, for those who push it through. The working class wasn’t defeated by being won over by arguments, but in many cases through violent coups and repression, especially in the south.
The wave of neoliberalism has attacked alternatives, whether through defeating unions or overthrowing social democratic governments in the south – producing the reality that the alternatives are now weak; a reality which many people perceive (without necessarily seeing the history) and which is therefore a factor in people feeling disempowered.

It’s also created an ever greater divide, greater inequality – for example the notorious fact that incomes for the majority have stayed stagnant in the US in the last 30 years despite all the wealth that has been created (and part of this aspect of inequality is that only some lose out, not everyone; banks not desperate homeowners were bailed out and bankers are receiving record bonuses this year, while the pain on the high street and in the housing sector continues). Greater relative power accumulates to the institutions of the status quo, including power to shape people’s aspirations, priorities, impressions of the world. With the social security safety net withdrawn, the penalties for not making it in an economy and job market shaped by the requirements of profitability for corporations, are ever greater. And to do so, not only your actions, but also your attitudes – your preoccupations and your consciousness – must be aligned to those requirements. So that even though one might be aware of a need for something different (as a result of the empirical evidence that this is the case, i.e. the evidence of the crisis), functionally we have to behave as though we weren’t.

Because we live in a world of big corporations supplying our jobs and being invested in by our pensions, our loyalties are naturally shaped and moulded by that.

The crisis might not be real for us yet; it is hitting other people now, and stands to hit us in the future; in the meantime, it’s possible to remain, and to feel, relatively insulated from it.

Furthermore the media plays a big role. The media presents distracting entertainment; exudes a sense of consensus normality; paints alternatives as anomalies; when it does discuss aspects of crisis, they’re presented in a passive format; we consume despair fundamentally and remain just as disempowered as before.

Furthermore there’s widespread evidence of the closing down of our consciousness, of blinkers which limit our ability to be aware of our situation, and of its broader contexts; the carefully constructed sensory pathways of consumption transactions; individualism keeping us segregated from each other and from our inherent social nature. It’s difficult to cleave to reflective activity, spiritual or intellectual, when society has become an enormous marketplace; the baubles of commodification surround us, distract us and entrain us in limited awareness.

So there is a combination of factors giving rise to the subjective predicament we face:
– Awareness that the crisis is going on – but what can I do about it?
– The need to be realistic within our current context – I need to focus on my own life, where I can have some control, rather than the issues, where I can’t
– The diminishment of our consciousness – we don’t feel the motivation to do anything about it.
– The awareness of the lack of alternatives – there isn’t anything we can do about it

The above have to do strictly with subjective factors; as soon as we take a more objective view, some of the hard aspects of the impasse can begin to be dissolved. For example, awareness of how the situations are caused – awareness of the drivers of all four of those aspects – enables us to begin to get some clarity on our situation, rather than having our picture of where we are and what we can do, be driven simply by subjective impressions of it.
There is, though, a forcing of subjectivity in our culture – for example, when we’re entreatied to simply feel optimistic if we are depressed or worried about issues, instead of empowering ourselves by looking at their causes and the potential opportunities which might exist for addressing them (Laurence! ;).

Awareness of (the objective existence of) alternatives plays a transformative role here. Because if there really isn’t a possibility of a different way of doing things, we have to be resigned to the status quo, and perhaps softening the edges of whatever vicissitudes the crises will create.

If however we feel we can do something about the issues – that a radical shift of the order needed is possible; a negation of the drivers of the crises – this sense of capability, feeds into motivation to do something. And, because all that needs to happen in order for change to happen is for enough people to demand it (the mechanism for doing something is the assertion of a counterbalance to deregulated capitalism in the form of a social, labour response, which is constituted by all of us), then motivation potentially feeds in turn into capability.

There is a need for people who are not yet affected by the crisis to such a degree that affective allegiance to the system is negated (perhaps the majority in the developed countries), to be aware of it, even before it hits. So, now, the crisis affects others elsewhere, and will affect us in the future. However action is required now. However, the impact of the crisis is not present yet now for us; so an empathy is needed.

[Marxist aside: This is a tall order – the middle class (which arguably is the majority, broadly defined, in the north, at least by standards of access to consumer goods and therefore being able to construct a screen off from the crisis), taking a role as the carrier of revolutionary hopes and therefore social progress, vacated when the proletariat (the previous incumbent in this role) was crushed or offshored – through, no less, an extension of empathy, imagination and desire to look into the future, all of which are worked against in capitalist culture – but this is the task at hand and arguably not a lost cause; as the crisis hits further, awareness can build; subject to working against all the ideological forces outlined above]

For all the motivation we might achieve to look beyond the status quo, we will probably remain nevertheless compelled to cleave to the status quo, in terms of our actions (i.e. working to earn a living), and by conforming therefore to the hard requirements of capitalist realism. This is true, but a useful concept could be the distinction between public and private duties advocated by Kant (as Dan Hinds represents it, if I remember right): where the former entails the citizen attending to the duty of bettering his/her society, while the latter is to do with him or her doing whatever job they have to do to maintain their family. Though these might contradict each other (e.g. corporate employee by day, climate change activist by night), the reality of impending crisis affecting all humans necessitates this, where it is no longer a sanctionable disloyalty, but a necessary work for all our futures to be viable.

So the first alternative is taking an objective, historical perspective on our situation, rather than being beholden to our subjective experience of it; empowerment, as an alternative to its opposite. And the cause for hope is that the actors which act as a counterweight to deregulated capitalism, the cause of the crisis, can exist and be built up even if they are in abeyance today – social movements, unions, workers in general, human consciousness, etc. The knowledge that a solution is possible even if difficult is surely better than the idea that no real solution is possible and we have to contend ourselves with false measures in its stead (such as the terrible egregious online game which has just come out, where for every answer you get right, “10 grains of rice are donated to a hungry person” in the developing world).

But what then, are the concrete alternatives?
Well the way we’ve set it up points to the following measures: reining in the market through regulation; increasing democracy and the political power of the working person.
We can join to initiatives in these areas. Campaign for them.

Then, there are bigger, more ambitious alternatives – in politics, ways of social and economic organisation, as well as technologies. And alternatives pursued in policy or by people putting things into practice themselves.

There’s lots to talk about in that area, so I look forward to writing something about those areas soon……..

The economic crisis, and alternatives

Alternatives in the wake of the crisis.

In the wake of the meltdown of the global financial system, and consequent recession, still ongoing and with a prospect of a long slowdown ahead, numerous proposals and voices are raised calling for an alternative. From socialists arguing that this is the time to mobilise class struggle, to establishment commentators such as Martin Wolf leaning towards Keynesian solutions, change is in the air, and a sense that a new order is needed pervades.

In order to set things right, we need to know what went wrong. As critics put forward their version of events and alternative proposals, different understandings, perspectives and descriptions of the course of events collide, often fruitfully. Inevitably the question is political even in terms of understanding – clarity and understanding are at a premium here, as is truth. What I will attempt here is an exposition of some of the main accounts, and of the alternatives offered.

So what went on? Most commentators are agreed on a version of the following: from 2000 onwards, mortgages were increasingly offered to subprime borrowers – people of low income who formerly wouldn’t have been able to get a mortgage. The housing boom surged, and new builds went up all over the place. 100% and more mortgages were available. As people’s assets rose in value with the boom they were able to borrow more and felt more confident – continuing a longer term trend for stagnant income to be supplemented by borrowing. Eventually the boom had to crest and break, and as it did so, more and more people defaulted on their mortgages. Soon prices were spiralling down, and people were in negative equity and losing their homes.

Meanwhile the subprime mortgages had been packaged up by the lenders and sold on, into the financial markets, through an innovation called CDOs, a type of derivative, the idea being that this spread the risk around and diminished it for individual lenders. What happened instead was that, following a valuation of two hedge funds controlled by Bear Stearns’ derivatives which placed them far below the expected value, leading to their collapse, everyone realised at once that these derivatives might be worth much less than expected. The toxic debt as it was called, was held widely in the economy, and caused the failure of several enormous institutions, such as Lehman, AIG, Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, which had to be rescued (Lehmans excepting, which meant its bankruptcy, and shockwaves rolling through the financial world) by emergency government bailout programmes. Banks went bust and were swallowed up, other banks merged; banks’ balance sheets shrunk like icebergs in a desert. Credit markets froze for a long period; affecting the manufacturing and industrial economy.

The situation in the financial system seems to have stabilised again. Credit is flowing now; the consolidated banks are open for business. However the “real” productive economy has been badly damaged by the period of low credit; businesses were forced to lay workers off, and maintain or reduce wages for remaining employees; the resulting lower demand has wounded businesses badly in turn. The effects will linger a long time according to economic forecasters, and the Bank of England. The pain is felt in high streets, job centres and homes. What form will the economy regroup and reform itself? In the UK we have been a nation of house and finance speculators; manufacturing jobs have declined 1/3rd under New Labour. We are in no danger of meeting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Happiness is at an all-time low. The crisis in its severity and starkness gives us a chance to offload the old and bring in the new – but what we see instead so far is a consolidation of power by banks; the avenues for exploration of different systems closing. the interests of others, and never of the bankers, pick up the tab. Ostensibly the city of london is too big a revenue puller for the whole economy for it to be reined in; but we see the effects as distinctly negative rather than positive here.

The background to the crisis, factors which helped it come about include: the deregulation of banking practices – from Reagan and Thatcher on, as part of the practice of neoliberalism, the ideology of free markets, banks were increasingly allowed to engage in speculative activities – especially in the US with the repeal of Glass-Steagall which enforced separation of functions between commercial and investment banks in 1999. This in turn was not just a product of ideology but also the result of the swelling Eurodollar market as London was opened as a centre for US offshore banking operations – which created strains on the international currency system, (leading eventually to Nixon coming off the dollar) and external competition for US banks forcing their deregulation to survive. Additionally, as banks were regulated, a ‘shadow banking system’ emerged – composed of mortgage lenders, insurance companies who would provide the borrowing banks wouldn’t. In David Harvey’s account, the growth in derivatives (the exotic instruments banks have increasingly generated, speculated with, and reaped profits from), has come about in part as finance, seeking the 3%/year growth which capitalism requires to thrive, has run out of profitable investment opportunities (as limits are reached of new pools of labour, environmental resources, etc to exploit) and has needed to invest in itself.

Built onto the account above, numerous structural aspects are pointed to, and opinions diverge as to the accuracy and relevance of these factors. First, the crisis as outlined above, took place predominantly in the US and UK, in the Anglo-American economies where deregulation and financialisation have been pioneered and pursued most strongly.

Geopolitically, the crisis in the Anglo-American heartland of the capitalist world system perhaps signals a shift in the balance of power, eastwards; for a long time, the rest of the world economy has been hooked into the American economy. Developing countries have been indebted to US-dominated agencies; their debts denominated in dollars; or as with China, exporting countries have run up trade surpluses and ploughed them into dollar-denominated assets; all of which artificially supports the value of the dollar, allowing the US to run big trade deficits (i.e. to consume more than they produce and experience a disproportionate standard of living, at least as measured in consumer goods, as a result) – whereas this would normally cause their currency to be devalued with negative effects. Meanwhile actions by the US monetary authorities and banking sector first exploded third world debt and then used it as a lever into making those countries into profitable investment and speculation destinations, frequently to the ruin of the latter, as in the East Asian and eventually Latin American financial crisis of 1997. The US has maintained full spectrum dominance in terms of economic (in part bought by this dollar tribute system), military, and cultural hegemony. Competitors to the dollar are beginning to be mooted in part as a response to this system, and in part because of the dollar’s potential weakness (as a result of those enormous deficits), which could end those financial advantages and accelerate the shift in power. The hope is that the period of exploitative hyperglobalisation over (not because of more enlightened policy, but because of diminished potency), countries including the US could return to more stable and balanced domestic manufacturing and international trade complexes.

With the bailout and the arrival of government policy in response to the situation, the controversy began. Some analysts say the bailouts – unimaginable amounts of taxpayers’ money going to shore up banks’ balance sheets – were, not necessary as claimed to save the economy, but a class-based capitulation by the Fed to banking interests, rescuing those who had created the situation through their profitable and greedy wrongdoing, over and above the interests of the people. The Fed being staffed by Goldman Sachs alumni lends credence to this. They point out that other solutions might have been possible.

Commentators are split between those who feel the system has taken a bash but will return to an even keel, that doing this is the only course to take; it’s just a question of policy attempting to achieve this as painlessly as possible; and those who feel that the crisis is an opportunity to change a system which is fundamentally unviable anyway. Both feel crisis is part of capitalism’s cycle, part of its nature; the first group feel that this is an aspect to be managed (and that the severity of the current crisis is in part because of policy mismanagement); the second that crisis is a “straw that broke the camel’s back”, a feature which creates mass suffering and which gives sufficient reason, and opportunity to overthrow it.

Other controversial aspects and explanations

Some such as Costas Lapavitsas, point to the increasing self-sufficiency, in financial terms and for financial activities, of corporations since the 1970s and 1980s; banks, turning for alternative sources of custom and revenue, looked to individual borrowers. With advances in technology, they now had the means to advance money to borrowers based on credit score rather than personal relationships, enabling them to broaden their base of borrowers; and progressively the credit score threshold was lowered in order to obtain new customers.

Alternatives

What alternatives then are advocated? Let’s begin with those advocated by people close to the system, and expand outwards to more radical visions.

(re)Regulation

Numerous commentators call for increased regulation of the sector – imposing restrictions on banks’ ability to engage in the kinds of activities which led to the crisis, such as gambling on derivatives, commercial banks engaging in investment banking operations, etc.

Regulation is argued against as an appropriate response by people who say that it won’t be enough, that banks will (again) find ways around it, perhaps coopting regulators, and eventually to dissolve it, as they did with the previous regulation (such as Glass-Steagall) which was introduced after the Great Depression.

Imposing capital adequacy ratios, etc

Regulation with bite, is that which enforces certain minimum capital requirements on banks lending money; so they can’t lend amounts which vastly exceed their reserves. This would halt the kind of irrational excessive lending which caused the initial subprime crisis.

Taxes

Some call for taxes on speculative activity; such as the longstanding Tobin Tax proposal, to tax currency speculation transactions a very small amount, which both slows their pace a fraction and generates vast revenues, because of the scale of these operations. It has not succeeded in passing into statute, for political opposition. A related proposal calls for progressively greater taxes as a currency falls under speculative attack, thus diminishing the incentive for traders to continue shorting it.

Monetary management

The regulators (most notably the Fed under Greenspan) are accused of having permitted low interest rates and easy money to continue for too long – removing the punchbowl only long after the party had stopped. Interest rates should have been raised sooner. Now that they are low, other forms of quantitative easing are advocated – pumping money directly into the economy.

George Soros calls for regulators to have a better understanding of the reflexivity of markets, and prices – the concept that markets are influenced by people’s perception of markets likely future progress

Regulation based on a hypothesis of market equilibrium, which holds for goods, doesn’t hold for assets; instead Minsky’s hypothesis of booms and busts holds. As assets (e.g. stocks, or houses) increase in price, the expectation is of future rises, encouraging holders to hold and buyers to buy; so price rises become self-perpetuating. Regulation which assumes that markets will find an equilibrium is therefore unable to deal with – to understand or to influence beneficially – reality.

Keynesian solutions

The government spending policies associated with John Maynard Keynes, include massive government spending to lift the economy out of the doldrums – providing work, putting money in people’s pockets to spend in the economy. This is also seen as an opportunity to invest in ecologically sustainable infrastructure – as in Green New Deal programmes. The problem is to work out where the money will come from – as the government is so massively indebted as a result of the bailouts coming on top of previous deficits.

Monetary reform solutions

This leads us to another type of solution advocated at a more fundamental level. Monetary reformists point to the way money is mostly created in the current economy by commercial banks and the Federal Reserve Bank, rather than by the government. The process for injecting money into the economy involves the US government issuing bonds which are purchased by the Federal Reserve Bank with money the latter creates from thin air; the government then has to repay these bonds over a period of time, which means for all money which is created this way, the government carries spiralling debts – to a privately owned banking system. In this way the banks maintain a grip of tribute and policy control over the productive activities of the economy and the general surplus. Similarly commercial banks and mortgage lenders create money whenever they loan money to a customer; to them goes the power to do so and the financial benefit from doing so. Crucially, only the principal is created on these loans, and not the extra money required to pay interest – which each borrower must compete with others to obtain, in a game which like musical chairs necessarily leaves some people standing, bankrupt, and the rest (both businesses and individuals) perpetually slaving away (the horrific metaphor is deliberate) working off debt – hence, the generally unrelentingly increasing pace of economic activity. The results are continually increasing debt, public and private, a paucity of money leading to effects like simultaneous unused productive capacity and desire for goods (i.e. supply and demand meeting at a lower level than they could for higher availability of currency to consummate them).

Marxist solutions

Marxists analyse the crisis keenly; they are, naturally, perennially vehement critics of capitalism, and the crisis vindicates their criticisms and seems to provide an opening for their theories to gain ears more widely.

Marxists have always pointed out the proneness to crisis of the capitalist system – Marx and Engels wrote during the mid-late nineteenth century when deep crises occurred every ten years. Engels appeared to believe that capitalism’s inherent susceptibility to crisis would lead to its breakdown and extinction. This hasn’t eventuated, because of an adaptibility and mutability which Engels wouldn’t have been able to foresee. Nevertheless crises are a recurrent feature and wracked the world on many occasions in the twentieth century, arguably accelerating the rush to the first, and instigating the rush to the second, world war. Crisis theory is a thriving school of Marxism, and I present some of its analyses below.

As well as the causing factors cited above, some Marxist analysts point to the falling rate of profit in the capitalist heartland – the fact that since the 1960s, the US has managed to obtain less return on investment than previously during the long postwar boom. This has had to be supplemented by increasing financialisation, and therefore the building up (and bursting) of progressively bigger bubbles.

David Harvey as mentioned above, shows that capitalism has needed 3% growth since its inception, and the crisis is the result of increasingly desperate and self-feeding attempts to obtain this; a target which will become anyway for reasons of reaching ecological limits, unaffordable and unsustainable.

The bailout, which in Marxist, left-leaning and libertarian eyes, transferred wealth en masse from the future toil of taxpayers to the unearned restitution of bankers, was framed as a class issue; shunning populist anti-banker campaigns the more sensible spectrum of this type of opinion nevertheless calls for struggle along class lines – for making the crisis, and the banking and credit systems a political, class issue. They call for money which is put up for bailouts instead to be spent on helping people not to lose their homes; on public works programmes improving health, education and other social services; all of which could cease the negative knock-on effects of the financial collapse (placing human needs and wellbeing above financial) and begin to revive the economy. The instruments advocated here are the traditional ones – strikes, organising, campaigning – but also moving beyond striking in production and interrupting/alternating money in circulation, and the credit system.

The economy more broadly

The crisis has simply highlighted in extreme form, issues with the economy in general. Factors such as failing to meet human needs are brought to a head in a crisis situation – but are present much of the rest of the time too. Problems with social welfare, happiness and life fulfilment, and ecological issues occur as a result of the working of the economy in general, for a variety of reasons, and numerous alternatives are proposed depending on the diagnosis. the Affluenza syndrome identified by Oliver James, etc.

We will look at these in two broad schools, policy ideas, and community-based people power alternatives, where a group gets together and implements an alternative, either instead of or in parallel to advocating policy change.

Among the former we can mention, ecological policy instruments, alternative institutions, alternative measures of GDP, and Islamic finance. Among the latter, local exchange trading schemes, alternative currencies, credit unions, microfinance and cooperatives.

Tax

Moves to levy tax on activities we want to discourage (pollution, etc) rather than those we want to encourage – labour, through the income tax.

Ecological policy instruments

Taxes, quotas and regulations can be used to achieve ecological goals. In the ecological economics school, the market economy is judged to be a highly effective allocator of resources, but to fail on other counts, with compensation and steering needed to adjust this failure. For example, Herman Daly stresses that there are three variables for an economic system – allocation, distribution and scale. The market is good at the first one: at the allocation of society’s resources between production of different goods (in other words production will take place to meet demand, broadly speaking, save for important distortions created by advertising, etc); but is not good at achieving a just and equitable distribution, because instead distribution is governed by purchasing power, i.e. by possession of capital. Most importantly for him though the market economy has no means to assess an appropriate scale – and lends itself to continual expansion of economic activity, which within a finite ecosystem will lead to excessive scale and ecological disaster.

Policywise, the use of regulation, taxes, and quotas is discussed. Regulation is deemed effective where for instance we want to reduce usage of an overwhelmingly undesirable substance, e.g. a pollutant, by banning it for example. Taxes (and subsidies) can reduce externalities – where for example a company produces too much of a polluting substance because they do not have to pay the full cost of the pollution, so production is still profitable even where the profit is less than this cost. For example, a Pigovian tax, reflects the cost of pollution so that the polluter pays that cost, and production is reduced accordingly. Finally and most approvingly, quotas at source are advocated – which impose hard limits on the amount of a substance which can be mined, thereby reducing pollution at the end of the pipe too.

Ecological economics gives us a way of thinking about the economy which allows the usage of the market mechanism but subordinates it to the reality of ecological constraints; built from the logic of the status quo, its different conclusions are nonetheless a profound challenge to it.

Alternative institutions

Institutions which render necessary economic services to people rather than professing to do so while in fact exploiting them and being highly privately profitable are advocated by a number of thinkers. The New Economics Foundation is a leading thinktank in this area. Its proposals for a more human-centred economy include post office banks, public pensions, an overhaul of taxation,

Alternative measures of GDP.

GDP is an ubiquitous goal, as a catch-all measure of an economy’s performance, and by extension, people’s wellbeing. The belief is that with greater GDP, more will trickle down. However this is quite a leap – as it measures, roughly, simply the volume of products and services produced or consumed in a year. No accounting is made for whether these goods and services contributed to or diminished wellbeing – in other words the measurement is purely quantitative and not qualitative. Chopping down the Amazon rainforest or paving over the greenbelt to farm beef or build a shopping centre, all contribute to GDP, though they might diminish wellbeing. The leap has been challenged – but a survey in the 1970s found a slight correlation in the postwar period between GDP and human welfare, so the question was laid to rest; however a more recent survey found the two diverged after that point. In the absence of an objective, quantitative way of measuring human welfare, GDP has been used. Comparisons are made between countries for a year, and for a country between years to establish relative success. Rising GDP and everyone is happy and politicians can parade their economic success. So the importance is undoubted. The singularity of the yardstick and its concentration on a financial numerator is also conducive to financial power interests holding sway.

Numerous initiatives have been launched to advocate reform of GDP. Some economists have focused on refining the measurements; on devising measurements which more accurately and more completely reflect human wellbeing. Notable here is the Max-Neef scale which rates human wellbeing according to eight different variables.

Others have called for GDP to measure benefits and costs separately, so that costs are not added up to benefits to produce a larger figure.

In many countries, GDP doesn’t include public assets, such as roads and hospitals, which contribute to the productivity of the economy; while the debts racked up to build them are accounted, so that they show as a cost, rather than an asset. 170 governments at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 pledged to overhaul GDP national accounts. Such moves were also recommended by the

convention of statisticians of sustainable development and Quality of Life (ICONS) in Curitiba, Brazil in 2003. Brazil has also persuaded the IMF to trial registering its public infrastructure as assets.

Islamic finance

Islamic finance has attracted attention as an alternative. It famously prohibits usury as did medieval Christianity. The latter’s workaround was to allow a community of non-Christians, the Jews, to charge interest and act as moneylenders. The Islamic method in some quarters today is to have banks pay an apportioning of profit in instalments, acting as interest in all but name. A range of Islamic financial products is offered by many banks to suit the Islamic market, which of course encompasses burgeoning economic centres such as the Gulf oil states, Dubai, Malaysia, etc.

However Islam’s economic alternative to capitalism potentially goes a lot deeper than that. For a start ethically Islam makes a virtue out of consideration for one’s fellow man, and a vice out of greed (as, again, does/did Christianity and other religions, which of course are supplanted by or merely complement the secular market religion).

“What is known as Islamic banking and Islamic finance is about individuals or groups attempting to generate profits in the current system without breaking the shariah rules such as the prohibition of Riba. However today I’m going to focus on the Islamic economic system as a whole which is much wider than this and is the true alternative to the Capitalist system”

In contrast to the productivism of capitalism (and of socialism), where as much economic growth as possible is aimed for, in the hope or belief that in this way the majority will benefit as there will be more wealth to trickle down, the Islamic system focuses on distribution.

The Islamic state is enjoined to look at the human being as a person with basic needs which must be fulfilled absolutely.

The Prophet (saw) said, “The Son of Adam has no better right than that he would have a house wherein he may live, a piece of clothing whereby he may hide his nakedness and a piece of bread and some water” [Tirmidhi]

Circulation of wealth is required. Hoarding is forbidden. Zakah, a tax of 2.5%/annum is levied on savings to encourage spending, as does the prohibition of riba (interest).

Rather than interest whereby a lender profits from exploitative extraction of interest, there is the Mudhabarah concept where money is advanced, and labour supplied by another party, and the two share profit and loss.

The Islamic economy doesn’t include a concept of stock speculation – the focus is on the ‘real’ economy of production and manufacturing. Stock ownership entails a direct role in the ownership of the company not a distant one which can see stocks traded in the space of minutes, as in the western system.

Further there is no concept of Limited Liability Companies, a key milestone in the development of western capitalism which enabled investors to take risks with enterprises and companies to access more funding. Islamic finance prohibits these and curtails those risks.

As our guide here, x, points out, no pure implementation of Islamic finance principles at the state level exists, so the above is pieced together from the Qu’ran and sayings of the prophet and his companions. However numerous voices claim Islamic finance could offer an alternative which would rein in capitalism’s excesses and orient the economy to human, social and ecological ends rather than values of pure profit.

Basic income

A strong movement in the early twentieth century was for a basic income payment, also known as social credit. The principle is that society’s productivity has been increasing steadily since the advent of industrialism, yet this benefit – which is social, involves all of us, depends on gains made which are general rather than the result of individuals (nobody alive today invented the railways for example), is narrowly shared out; in general in fact being paid as a dividend to holders of capital. Social credit argues that instead this social benefit should be distributed equally to all members of a population, regardless of wealth or income. So for example all UK citizens might receive a £2000 annual payment. This is levied via x; the idea is people spend it, boosting the economy. It’s equitable.

Community alternatives

Local Exchange Trading Systems

A great example of economic alternatives springing up from the grassroots, is Local Exchange Trading Systems. Here a community short circuits the financial system, and its control over the spigot of credit, which in turn meters access to means of productive trade and exchange; and decides to get together to trade its own products and services and thereby exchange skills and assets to the benefit of all.

LETS schemes were created by Michael Linton in Comox Valley, Vancouver, in 1983. The idea is an electronic exchange is set up, in which all exchanges of services are logged. A hairdresser cuts your hair and accumulates some points to spend on somebody else’s services in designing his website. This is a way to access all the services available within a community, without money being required.

LETS money doesn’t need to be earned before spending; so credit can in effect be accessed without incurring a debt or proving any ability to repay.

Time banks are similar to LETS, the difference being that in the former, contributions are valued equally, or calculated and exchanged in terms of hours of time spent, regardless of the vendor’s skill type.

A successful LETS scheme was run in Nottingham in the UK, and in Australia; these attracted at their peak hundreds of members.

LETS schemes tend to wind down, even the most successful of them, as members come to exchange services reciprocally, and cease to use the formal mechanism of the scheme.

LETS and alternative currencies are felt to be anti-capitalist because they go outside the money system (though there was, as for example in the scheme described by North, a divergence between those espousing anti-capitalist values and those simply trying to maximise uptake and utility and gain acceptance and respectability. Local governments have endorsed them.); “money” spent in reciprocal exchange is money which isn’t spent in the dominant money system, reducing circulation, reducing corporate revenue (corporate acceptance of alternative currencies is very low). Their ability to challenge the system is low, (either directly or by example) though they provide means to bring communities together, allow people to access services they wouldn’t otherwise, and get people thinking about money in a more critical way.

The numbers involved are small; there are problems – it doesn’t quite fit the bill of a mass alternative; however it gets people thinking about money and the economic system, tapping into their local community and resources, and feeling more connected to their place, all of which works against the logic of capitalist relations. And it is potentially an arrangement which will grow in the future as a means of community insurance against economic and other problems.

Alternative currencies

Some small communities have launched alternative local currencies, which are redeemable in local shops. The idea is to encourage buying goods and services in the community so that the money remains there.

In this form, it’s less radical than LETS, as you still have to exchange your standard currency for the alternative one, to begin to use it (unlike LETS where you can earn credit by offering a service). However, in the form of scrip money, the iniative begins to take on a more radical form. The classic example here is the Worgl case, where in the face of hyperinflation, the Mayor issued an alternative currency; it was circulated among local businesses and consumers in preference to the worthless official money, and led to a phase of prosperity before being outlawed by the government.

Greenbacks were issued by the government of the Northern US states before the civil war. These were fiat paper money, backed by the government’s promise to pay, rather than redeemable in gold; so the government could issue as much as it liked. As debts to the government were repaid, money was retired, to avoid inflation. This, again, led to a period of prosperity, before the greenback too was stamped out, this time by bankers’ interests, who got the US back on the gold standard.

As mentioned above, issue of alternative national currency in this sense is advocated because it enables a sufficient supply of debt free money to circulate for productive capacity to be utilised, for people to work and earn a good wage and spend it on consumption further boosting the economy.

Microcredit and credit unions

Microcredit in the south and credit unions in the north, afford poorer borrowers access to

Cooperatives

If the Thatcherite norm was the individual taking ontological priority over society, then cooperatives are the ultimate answer. In fact cooperatives have operated since the dawn of capitalism as a response to and a protection from its isolating impacts. A group will pool its resources – as a productive cooperative to gain bargaining power and access to markets; as a consumer cooperative, to gain purchasing power. They have a venerable history in the UK and other countries, and persist in the form of the Cooperative Bank for example.

Community alternatives afford people a means to wrest economic control over their lives from the central financial and economic complex. To the extent they succeed, it shows the power of community ideas and resilience; to the extent they fail it shows the limits of these kinds of intiatives which seek to change the world without taking power.

Academic economics

Status quo economics, the management of the economy as we know it, are products of a complex mix of power differentials, ideas, and ideas affected by power differentials (ideology). The deregulation of the period since the 1970s, generally referred to as neoliberalism, draws its academic grounding from neoclassical economics, which is the dominant strain of economics taught in universities today. It’s important because its vision is that which guides (and blinkers) policy, as its graduates are issued into high stations of counsel with confidence in a worldview and paradigm which they see as scientific but which has been shown to be anything but. These graduates have been sent round the world like ideological agents, such as the Chicago School (a bastion of neoclassical economics) graduates who were sent to be economic advisors to Latin American rightwing coup regimes.

As a relic of 19c positivism, neoclassical economics is easily lampoonable. It sees the human subject as an isolated self-interested profit-maximising individual. It sees nature as a resource to be exploited if financial profit can thereby be maximised. Notions of society, or of more cooperative emotions are foreign to it. It is excessively mathematical and fancies itself as a science rather than a profession, whose practitioners can secure good lifestyles from their service.

Numerous critics have called for alternatives. A group which is gaining momentum is the former Post Autistics Movement, now renamed the Real Life Economics movement. This began when a group of French economics students went on strike and called for more reality to be taught in the subject they were studying.

Some call for economics to reflect a systems view and yang values (Capra), as part of a general shift from Newtonianism in social sciences to a complex, multi-layered and relational view, as pointed to epistemologically by relativity and quantum physics. Members of a similar school include the Schumacher crowd and people like Hazel Henderson, who feel a solar age is on the verge of being ushered in. Others, as in the advocates of the Other Canon, such as Erik Reinert, lament the consigning to the discipline’s dustbin of the heterogeneous economics thinkers who focused on innovation as a driving force in the economy, rather than the material antics of capital and land. They call for the disinterring of Friedrich List, Joseph Schumpeter, even Nietzsche, as economics thinkers.

Feminist economists point to the patriarchal values espoused by mainstream economics.

Ecological economics advocates an epistemological change, whereby we view the economy as a subset of the ecosystem, rather than consituting the whole sphere of our calculations, considering only economic ends. The economy is a sphere of human activity which takes place non-negotiably within a larger ecological realm which it depends upon. Ecosystems can constitute funds of natural resources, and/or providers of ecosystem services; the challenge is for market activity to go on such that we use each within sustainable bandwidths. Instead, what often happens is that depletion of natural resources occurs to the extent that nature’s ability to supply ecosystem services, upon which we are utterly dependent, is harmed.

Daly also makes a forceful argument against determinism (believing there’s nothing we can or should do to influence outcomes, instead yielding to market forces) and relativism (where no goal is necessarily more desirable than another), describing these as tempting academic vogues, but essentially non applicable for guiding policy. He also has us consider ultimate means and ultimate ends; arguing that the ultimate means is none other than the ecology (i.e. we rely on it utterly, depend on it and do nothing without it); and the ultimate ends, is an unknowable or undecidable but suggesting that the penultimate ends is doing nothing to foreclose the continuation of society towards fulfilling the ultimate ends. He encourages us to understand that all human activity is polluting to an extent, so that we cannot eliminate this entirely; we simply have to find ways to achieve sustainable levels; and nothing less than a paradigm shift is needed and possible to achieve this. Another principle, which Marxists would not agree with, is that disruption to existing balances of power should be minimised, in order to make the policies as realistic as possible.

As economics is the prism through which policymakers view the world, its blinkers are theirs. Negative outcomes can be traced to the assumptions, premises and prejudices of the mode of thinking, and more enlightened policy, in turn, can arise from a better view of the economy and the tools needed to influence it.

However ideas aren’t changed only by better ideas winning out in some even playing field, fairly arbitrated. Instead the ideas of neoclassical economics have won out because they are sponsored by powerful institutions – by foundations, government bodies, corporate sponsors, etc.

Conclusion

The economy is crucial; it is how we survive, how we live, who we are, what we do; how we relate to each other socially, how we exercise our physical, mental and spiritual faculties in the material world. Our economy is subject to significant path dependency; our actions are often automatic, whether governed explicitly by a belief in the automatic advantage of the market or implicitly by unthinking following of the existing paths and guiderails; the way we live and interact has been influenced by ideas, by power struggles, by interests, entities. We approach it free of means of production as Marx said, to all practical purposes innocent of historical antecedence; and in doing so are governed by these historical plays. The economy is a social construct embedded in broader society, and even broader ecology, the internal laws of motion of the first impacting the others, and being impacted in return. The prism of our ideas about economics has a real consequence; but might not be able to be changed through better ideas winning out. Alternatives at the policy level could change the ballgame, but require political pressure to push through; community alternatives illustrate in a very visceral way the way dynamics of money and credit affect production and exchange, but do little to change the overarching policy they are always subject to.

Transition Towns – a local, practical alternative

A key part of the move to a new basis for society is practical, ecological initiatives – one of the most recent and exciting of these is transition towns. Here I describe the movement in outline and mull over its political implications.

A transition town is a locale which is in the process of moving to a sustainable footing for all its needs – which is becoming less climate changing (greenhouse gas emitting) and oil dependent; making a transition to a future where the realities of climate change and peak oil are part of our landscape.

Transition town movements operate alternative, and sustainable, means for securing the needs of the town in every area – food, water, energy, transport, education, etc. They form taskforces to take charge of these areas, and generate and implement ideas for fulfilling them sustainably and locally.

Crucially, the initiative is bottom-up: a transition town is born when a group of residents gets together and decides to make their town a transition town. A steering committee is formed, the parent movement is consulted, the blueprint is referred to and an “energy descent action plan” (e.g. this, the plan for Kinsale) is drawn up; and then there is the great kick-off, known as the “unleashing”, which brings all the participants together and galvanises their enthusiasm for the roadmap they have created, which will be gradually implemented.

From there on out, it’s up to the participants’ energy to carry it forward, meeting once a month to discuss their progress and ideas. The organisation is decentralised, and any and all ideas can be brought forward for consideration.

This is seemingly a shining example of local community action, and it’s attracting and facilitating a lot of attention and engagement.

The movement has burgeoned from its inception in 2004 in Kinsale in Ireland, and by September 2008 there were around a hundred communities recognised as transition towns, in countries around the world. It has been getting some profile in the media, with writeups in the national press.

Examples of the types of initiatives involved include, for food provision: garden buddies (community members can be put in touch with volunteering expert gardeners), local food branding initiatives (food grown locally is promoted as such in the local shops), permaculture and forest gardens (encouraging members to grow food using these techniques, and developing communal model gardens based on them), teaming up with local food growers to supply needs locally; local currencies; energy associations with sustainable and renewable energy suppliers; car clubs, and so on. The key is approaching the task of fulfilling local needs with imagination and creativity.

A key factor is that the initiative provides a way for people to do something practically about issues which otherwise seem bewildering and impossible. Adrienne Campbell, one of the founders of Transition Town Lewes, told me about the ethos behind the transition town movement: “rather than being overwhelmed and depressed about the situations we face, this is about empowering the local community, unleashing and harnessing the ingenuity and creativity present in it. It’s about irresistible optimism.

Austerity is a difficult message to sell, while on the other hand practical projects like this give people cause for enthusiasm.”

The concept seems to be taking off in market towns such as Lewes and Totnes, which in the not-so-distant past perhaps functioned on a model which had something in common with the direction of transition towns; but it’s not restricted to them: Transition Town Bristol has recently also been “unleashed”.

Likewise, in London, there are at least three nascent concerns at the district level: Brixton in south London had its unleashing last year. So how does the challenge differ here? Obviously you can’t grow enough food within Brixton to feed the population – so the group is looking to source food from farmers just outside London. This is what it’s all about – creative solutions.

There is also a movement in Belsize Park, northwest London (Tooting is the other one), which so far hasn’t had its unleashing and hasn’t got further than organising (expensive) organic food workshops and wild food foraging tours. I can’t complain about this, as it’s my local movement so it’s up to me to improve it!

So how is the movement performing, against its objectives of greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and fossil fuels energy input replacement? Perhaps it’s too early to say, although Ashton Hayes village apparently reduced its carbon footprint 20% in one year (pdf). But while the quantitative objectives are critical, even more important, perhaps, is the way the movement empowers people. Rather than simply reading about climate change and oil depletion, and feeling paralysed by them, they can do something practical here and now; and in a way furthermore which forges rewarding connections with neighbours and co-residents. So the movement is a success perhaps, as soon as it facilitates this motivation in someone, as it has done already for many people.

Political aspects and implications

The idea is it’s a start. It’s the “every little helps” model. However, as with all local, practical responses to big issues, while it contains the immense advantage that people can get involved with immediate impact, it has the downside that unless it operates with an awareness of and interaction with the bigger picture, its good work can be undone, it can hit a dead-end or be marginalised, or simply become coopted. This doesn’t need to be the case – instead, for movement members,  involvement with issues at a local level can be an introduction to the broader issues, and act as a motivation to act on the policy which determines them; but it’s present as a risk.

For instance there is the possibility of contradictions internal to the project – such as that in the interests of a purist focus on localism, solutions could be adopted which are more energy-intensive than alternatives which are sourced from beyond the community; as after all our consumption and production remain irrevocably and inextricably linked with global or national systems. At a meeting of Transition Town Brixton I attended recently, it was pointed out that the environmental impact of westerners giving up meat for one day per week was greater than the benefit of growing all our fruit and vegetables locally. Of course, doing both is even better.

Then there are the external contradictions – How much can transition towns on their own change? How much are they contradicted by the larger political and economic realities?

There are contradictions inherent in the participation in the broader economy. Private land is still needed to grow food locally for instance; this limits access to those who have the capital to afford it. Having said that, there are initiatives aiming for sourcing public land, so again it comes down to creativity in approaching these constraints.

How we source food and energy, as well as other aspects of our living and working arrangements, for most people, are overwhelmingly configured by the corporate form, by the fact that corporations are economically dominant and politically influential (their interests being paramount in policy – with the corollary that the health of the economy is bound up in their financial health, etc).

Transition towns don’t address this directly: they don’t work against the access of corporate power to policy, or increase the political counterweight to it, at least as viewed traditionally, in terms of the strength of the labour movement. But they do in the sense that they begin to set up a production and consumption platform which is at least partly outside its logic; each person who grows their food themselves is one fewer customer for Tesco.

From one perspective, because this reduces tax receipts, jobs, etc, it’s bad for the economy and therefore for all our livelihoods – but bad for the economy as currently conceived – whereas transition towns, with alternative currency and barter schemes, with production for need not exchange – potentially prefigure another type of economy which implies less dependence on corporate profits for general prosperity and food security.

To the extent public demand for this alternative local economy continues to grow, under the impetus of increasing awareness of the severity of the issues we face, it will become increasingly beneficial for politicians to endorse it, and the weight of this interest (i.e. pressure from voters) can act as an increasingly strong counter-balance to the interest of e.g. fossil fuel dependent corporations.

How democratic is the concept? Power is somewhat reclaimed by citizens; in a sense this is undemocratic in that it arrogates some power from elected bodies, to a group which is not elected and not representative; but in another sense it’s democratic as it offers an alternative to entrenched administrative structures, subservient to national policy; also they offer a direct expression of popular will; are open to all who wish to join and decisions are made democratically. The movement indicates a willingness not to stay wedded to a model of voting in politicians who represent us, but rather to make change happen now. It’s a direct confrontation with the technocratic idea that officials and experts know best and people should stay out of making decisions about how their communities are run.

As the movement grows, its ability to offer a living example of an alternative, not created by a company Corporate Social Responsibility scheme or a government policy, but by people working and acting together, will give hope to more and more people that they can actually do something about the issues they’re otherwise confronted with passively in the TV news and newspapers, and as such bring them to the work of building a sustainable society in the midst of the current unsustainable one.

More about my book – why we need alternatives

Climate change, world poverty, environmental disaster – the world is crying out for alternatives. In this short piece I set out in very broad brushstrokes, some of the ideas I’ll be exploring in my book, about how the issues are caused, what we can learn from alternative models, and what lies in our path as we attempt to make the transition. First I look at each of the issues in turn and how they’re caused by our economic and social system:

Climate change – demands something our system isn’t capable of delivering. It requires a certain level of reduction of carbon emissions (an objective constraint), while our system is based on economic growth (an imperative to surpass that constraint). While governments sign up to reduction targets, we continually exceed them. We’re travelling in the opposite direction to the one we need to be going in, and the brink of runaway climate change draws ever closer.

World poverty – the number of people around the world in severe poverty continues to increase, intractably. Hundreds of millions of people suffer lack of access to clean water, and daily hunger, while millions die from preventable diseases. A lot of this is down to trade policy. Our northern developed countries have been rapacious in pursuing our interests against those of developing countries, beneath the veneer of ethical rhetoric.

The environment – we’re exhausting the world’s reserves of resources – from fish to minerals, especially oil; we’re polluting the biosphere. The Amazon rainforest is dying off.

Doesn’t there seem to be a compulsive necessity behind the production of these issues, so severe and occurring on so many fronts (otherwise why would we be so, not just unethical and immoral, but irrational and self-endangering?)?

And indeed there is such a suspect – our economic and social system. Our system relies on growth – producing more goods and services each year – in order to give us our jobs and livelihoods; so it needs consumption; consumption is its fuel. Consumption, as well as giving us “stuff”, and jobs producing or marketing it, entails carbon emissions; unfair trade agreements and sweatshop labour; environmental degradation; and social alienation besides; as well as periodic economic crises such as the one we’re seeing today.

These issues are the effects of consumerism. We can’t complain about them or stop them while maintaining the system. This would be like complaining that our car needs petrol and spews out exhaust fumes. This is the nature of the capitalist system, objectively – even its supporters agree with this; they just say it’s better than the alternatives.

But is this the final word? Surely it can’t be. Surely at this stage in the proceedings, given the severity and urgency of the situations, we should question whether this system really is both the best and the only one possible.

So many voices compete for our attention on these issues – we read newspaper articles and feel moved to action and disempowered in equal measure. The context in which all of these issues are getting worse, is one in which our political power, our power to resolve them, is reduced, because of the weakening of democracy in the recent period of neoliberalism (because of factors like passing control to the market and away from we the voters; like the weakening of trade unions and parliamentary socialism; like the unification of all parties around a business-friendly consensus). So we feel disempowered because we are.

Our recent political history, gives us both an explanation for how we feel, and what can we can do about the issues.

So we could work to resolve the issues by reversing the trend of diminishing democracy; by increasing our political engagement and access. The process of becoming involved in this way will further enhance our consciousness. By being involved not just by being on the receiving end of consumer-presented information, but by working as democratic citizens. Of course this is easier said than done.

Democracy was defeated in the struggles between capital and labour in the last thirty years. In a very real sense, democracy itself is an alternative to the status quo – both because our status quo is undemocratic at home and has consistently worked against democracy abroad. Democracy is best instanciated in the places the status quo doesn’t reach. So we look to alternative models, examples of democracy, as material for inspiration as well as ideas to use in our struggle for greater democracy.

Alternatives of theory and practice can come in many forms. Political and economic, ecological, philosophical, spiritual.

Political and economic
Here the classic historical alternative is socialism, and perhaps we need to rehabilitate socialism, and remake it for the 21st century, in democratic form. Socialism as it existed in the 20th century was in some cases horrific – cases which show us the dangers of state totalitarianism. It could be that these were only the first attempts, made under adverse conditions (frequently of interference by capitalist powers). The renewed iniquities and ruinousness of capitalism throw us again onto the project of evolving our society to create a greater democracy. To create a society which favours the social, people and the ecology, and not capital; which puts all of our hands back on the levers of power: which we can call social-ism or not, but we still need to build it; it’s not a case of whether, but when.

In some of the “peripheral” areas of the world system (peripheral to the “centre”, i.e. Anglo capitalism), we see socialism has been able to take a foothold, and advance positive programmes; in Cuba, and in Venezuela and Bolivia; in Kerala state in India. In the US and UK, the heartland of free market capitalism, we see that the social movements, the trade unions, the political parties on the left, are weakened and eviscerated (while in mainland Europe, they are stronger).

Planning, the role of the market, placing institutions under democratic control; participative rather than representative democracy; all these seem to offer reasonable strategies which would provide answers to the social and ecological issues we face.

We also shouldn’t forget that many of the positive aspects of modern life we take for granted – regulations on working hours and other determinants of well-being, a welfare state, free education, even the abolition of slavery and womens’ rights – were first demanded by socialists and communists, such as Karl Marx. We don’t live in pure capitalism but in a mixed society, where the social aspect is imperilled at the moment.

Perhaps, as David Graeber put it recently, communism is the natural way, as we see in infinite examples of human cooperation, ranging from everyday sharing and teamworking, to open source software, and capitalism – whether free market, or state capitalism – is just a really bad way (inefficient, alienating, violent) to manage natural communism.

Ecological – projects such as permaculture and transition towns.

Permaculture is design of food and living systems for sustainability, biodiversity, symbiosis, and low resource-input. It’s utterly opposed to commercial agricultural monoculture, which attempts to grow one crop en masse and devotes enormous amounts of energy to pursuing this nature-defeating strategy.

Transition towns are initiatives where groups of people in a particular town get together and work out how they can fulfil their needs locally and in an ecologically sustainable fashion; how to transition to a sustainable way of living which is viable in a post-cheap oil future. They form taskforces to work out how to source food, energy and other needs; they’re open, inclusive, cooperative, democratic and improvisational.

These ecological initiatives are usually in the first instance apolitical, and practical, and this is their beauty and their strength, although in time they may encounter and confront aspects of the dominant political and economic system which then act as an imperative to engage with it, to change it.

Permaculture’s immediate contradiction is that you need to own some land to practice it and the vast majority of people will still be able to access food only from corporations sourcing and distributing it in the usual way.

Transition towns also face a challenge in making a difference on a large enough scale, but they really do seem to offer a genuine bottom-up collaborative alternative, the kind which increases civil society and community resilience, as well as being fantastically empowering for people, and that’s exactly what’s needed.

So perhaps these ecological initiatives offer the seeds of the new society within the old, and offer an alternative path to the new society to the traditional one of revolution.

Philosophical and spiritual
The most important thing to say here is that our society is the incarnation of a certain set of ideas, and encourages a certain level of consciousness, and these both seem neutral and structure our lived reality; but they are specific, historical and in some way deficient, or are only part of the story; they entail a reduction, a narrowing and partialising. And some philosophical and spiritual wisdom and practice, experience and techniques offer us in some ways, ways to critique and transcend that state. And in doing so provide a basis for a more integrated, better balanced society in better relationship with its ecology. The problem with this gap between where we are and where we would like to be, in terms of philosophy, and spirituality, just as with the ethical, and material imperatives presented by world issues, is how to make them consequential, how to actually have them motivate us to effective action, and carry through the specific forms of that effective action.

On the basis outlined here, I aim to travel to see alternative societies, and to meet policymakers, experts, and ordinary citizens, and ask them about their aims and thoughts and experience; to assess their lessons in terms of aspects of an alternative model, or simply to add some diversity to our discussion. I want to see how these alternative societies fare in terms of stewarding the environment, and in terms of their citizens’ self-determination and fulfilment. I want to travel to see not just alternative models but places where our system has less traction and older values of human society and ecological stewardship have more hold.

From such an exercise we take these strands of alternatives, and use them as examples, as inspiration, as ideas for our own movement towards alternatives. We also simply benefit from understanding the multiplicity of social forms, historically and today, and seeing our own society in perspective and contesting its neutrality and ahistoricity.

What stops us moving to alternatives? Let’s go back to the causes we looked at which have to do with consumerism (from a broad-brush perspective). We’re not consumers by nature, but rather as a result of a long historical process, the evolution of capitalism. Most latterly consumerism serves the interests of private profit entities, corporations, which influence policy in their favour, and against the health of society and the environment (for instance in pushing to repeal environmental regulation).

So the question of how to resolve the issues comes down in part to a question of our motivation (or lack thereof) to oppose the interests of corporations. We citizens have the theoretical say over what they do and how, and even whether they exist. But this is tricky – we’re, our fortunes are, bound up in the health of leading corporations, as workers, consumers, shareholders. At every point, in diverse ways, our material interest aligns with that of the corporations (and this frequently underwrites our ideological allegiance to them).

Our material interests, backed up by the messages in the media, the example of our peers, all encourage us to do what’s rational for ourselves as individuals in the short term, which is simply to get on with life. We have to do this simply to survive anyway: to work within the system, because the system is in existence, it’s dominant. But we should consider devoting some part of our surplus resources and time to developing, not solutions within the system, but alternatives.

Because while our short-term personal material interests might be best served by “just getting on with it”, we see that actually, our long-term ones are significantly endangered by doing so; as well as our ethical principles which have been rather endangered throughout.

The whole situation seems unreal – it’s hard to shake the air of unreality about it. We’re aware of the objective and empirical nature of the information coming to us about the issues but for the most part they confront us inexplicably, as perturbations we experience in counterposition to our immediate horizon of relative peaceful stability.

How can the world have gone so wrong? How can it be that, while we’ve been working hard, tending to our lives and our futures, the macro picture got so irrational? Who messed up? But the reality is this system has an innate tendency to mess up. It’s our impression of stability which has been the temporary (limited temporally and geographically) anomaly.

It’s been harsh on the poorest and weakest throughout; in the North we’ve been relatively protected in the recent period, at the expense of others, but we see that period running out and the effects are coming home now.

We in the developed countries have existed mostly in the safe centre of the system, where we’ve been insulated from the effects; they’ve mostly gone on “out there”, unless we experience them directly (as we do periodically – when we or loved ones lose our jobs or our homes, go to fight in illegal wars, go insane because of the contradictions of modern life, die of cancer caused by the proliferation of carcinogens or stresses in our environment, etc). With the ecological crisis, and with the economic crisis, we see the effects returning home in a way in which as a society we have truly to face up to them.

At a certain point in each person’s life, we reach a difficult stage of necessary growth, where the examples of others can only get us so far and we have to face ourselves with honesty and decide what we want to live for. Where we have to take account of self-destructive behaviour, and accept some objectivity about our actions and their effects. To look beyond ourselves to learn something about ourselves while relying on our own motivation to actually use that awareness to advance ourselves. This is the point our society is at today. There are myriad examples of alternatives out there, but none serves as a model for what an evolved global world system would look like, because this has never been achieved before. The fact is that we, our global system, the one which formed our consciousness and loyalties, lie in the way of it. Like Dr Jekyll we realise that we’re the perpetrator and we’re just not conscious of it most of the time. And the power and responsibility to evolve lies with us as citizens of the democratic countries who are the protagonists of globalised capitalism.

If society is relying on us achieving some kind of transcendent consciousness, then the prognosis, perhaps, doesn’t look good – because after all when it comes to issues like climate change, the reality of the situation will only hit with enough people, who have enough means to do something about it, when it’s too late (in general, as with the other issues, people have the means to do something, in inverse proportion to the amount they’re affected – this is a structural dynamic which points in itself to the undesirability of our current system – because this pattern will always be created: the situation will move until it has been).

This is quite a gloomy prognosis, but there is another tendency manifesting itself, and this is the desire for alternatives, countering the logic of the system – inchoate, diffuse, not yet coherent. There’s something more than people just playing out their roles as consumers. There’s a philosophical evolution waiting to happen. We’re not happy with society as it is.

This sense of desire and hope for a different way is touching more and more people. Look at the upswell of popular support for change which elected Barack Obama in the US a few months ago.

Most people deep down want the same things: for themselves and their families, and society more generally, to be happy, safe and fulfilled. We’ve just been persuaded these are best served by a social configuration which is in fact ruinous; and which in any case we’re materially hitched to, so we don’t feel we have a choice. We’re locked into these destructive patterns for unnecessary reasons; for ideas which can be argued with and their power over us undone.

If we can overcome the effect of all of that, if only tactically at first, we can, in fact, devote some of our time to creating an alternative path.

After all, we are each of us, minds, hearts, souls, bodies; we can operate in ways not channelled to capital’s favour, with all the ruinous effects. “Hugs are free” as the wino’s placard goes.

More and more people are coming to feel that an alternative world is not just possible, and not just imperative, but joyful, and that’s the shift which is needed.

Human aspiration – an interview with James Heartfield, 23 April 2009

“There is a [perennial] tension between human aspiration and moderating human aspiration. Today I think there is too much moderation and not enough aspiration.” – James Heartfield

Climate change was the issue that got me into politics, or reading about politics at any rate, and by a circuitous route to the Alternatives Project, and thence to Archway, famous north London junction and kebab mecca. Archway is home to and playground of James Heartfield, renegade architect-philosopher, advocate of suburbia and scourge of environmentalists, and it is where I will find my thoughts about climate change examined and burned by unseasonal sunlight under a scintillating lens of existential metaphysics and labour and housing history.

We grab a coffee in the cafe outside Archway tube after James’s school run for his two daughters. James is a classic friendly academic, saying “that’s what they’re for” as I spill coffee into his saucer trying to fit myself between the gridlocked metal tables and chairs in front of the cafe, and I feel instantly at ease.

A scruffy author type in a leather jacket walks past and backslaps him. As a scruffy author in a polyester jacket, I feel upstaged.

James asks me about my project. He’s sympathetic as I blather something about a normal guy feeling something’s wrong with the world and going out to find out if there are other ways of doing things. I mention I’m talking to someone about Transition Towns soon. He says “ah yes, the parallel state – that’s the Leninist idea”. Lenin in Lewes – I suppose to myself they haven’t thought of that tagline. He suggests a parallel with Tamil Eelam, the world’s last autonomous region – soon to disappear perhaps. After he tells me Sri Lanka is near India, I realise I have to raise my game in terms of displaying my knowledge of the issues.

Gesturing at a young well-built guy in an SUV in traffic, who’s looking at us non-plussed, he says “Look at him, are you going to argue we should take his car away?”. “No”, I say hurriedly. We’re discussing James’s plans for suburbia.

Apparently environmentalists, and environmentalist socialists have split themselves off fom the working class – at various points working class aspirations and socialism have coincided– 1968, 1945 – but now they diverge. The working class has become richer, has had a better quality of life than they could have hoped, and some of them have houses with gardens, and cars. People don’t take well to being told they should give those up because of a middle class cause, especially when those advocating the cause are frequently living in nice houses themselves.

Back at James’s nice house he apologises for Cheerios on the floor, byproduct of his aforementioned daughters.

James tells me about his own political trajectory, and about the defeat of the working class and labour movement in the UK in the 1980s.

His view is, “putting things a bit metaphysically”, that “the working class’s political challenge is the most important factor not just for the working class, but for the whole of human civilisation, so when it was defeated, it was disastrous for all of us”. “Though, to put that in some sort of bracket, we’re much better off than we expected we would be”. So the defeat has had grave consequences in terms of social integration and human solidarity, and this ressentiment – “loss of trust, feeling of being exposed”, reflected in crime statistics even – “minds concentrated on themes of cynicism towards politics, distrust, family breakdown” are a result of that.

This is so because, after all, “the working class is the majority of society”; and their class opponents, even, are disciplined by the struggle of labour – the coherence of the right stemmed from that of the left, from the need to respond to the left’s challenge, so that the 1950s model of society was a pattern of club membership on the right and the left – small battalions of scouts, Christian communities, Womens Institute, the right wing equivalent of the left’s Clarion Cycling Club etc.

Personally I feel there’s a lot in all this – that our society sustained a defeat of its progressive force around the early years of my life would rather seem to explain quite a lot, in terms of our widespread cynicism, alienation, passivity, inability to effect change, and our deep lack of interest in politics, as well as our lack of happiness and social engagement. I take a sip of tea.

I ask about the Put People First movement and what prospect that has for being the carrier of our society’s progressive evolution.

“Look, 30,000 people attended the Put People First march, and 4,000 went to the G20 protests. Yet which got the most coverage? The G20 protest. That’s how politics is done nowadays – by appeal to the elites.”

“How do they weigh differently? It’s a class thing. I find Put People First a bit wishy washy, but it mobilised working people. That’s of no account [to the media]. Meanwhile a minority hijacking [the agenda] is more photogenic. Mass politics is automatically the wrong thing [for the media].

James also mentions the Tamil protest the following weekend, attracting 10,000 people, and a large protest in Northern Island against terrorism, which was again both “popular and unreported”.

“The media are not interested in mass protest, to them it seems outré. In the end politics is reduced to a competition for elites, for attention to causes”.

“I find Put People First quite interesting. They are in a difficult position, trying to square the circle, marrying two distinct attitudes: firstly, the trade unions, which are saying, we won’t pay for the crisis caused by bankers, which is a good idea, I agree with that. Secondly, though, there’s the environmental NGOs which are saying, “the trouble is we’re consuming too much, we’ve over-reached our resources, and the banking crisis is a manifestation of the greater problem” – which I don’t agree with.”

“It’s the appeal to the deracinated petty bourgeois – trustafarians – like [those who say] “we’re all so greedy man”; it usually means “they’re all so greedy”. The examples of excessive consumption which are given are always working class rather than middle class.”

And for a second I feel, well, described, in three words, not just me but my entire peer group, as a torrent of thwarted entitlements, career confusions, and family tree exercises flashes before my eyes. Maybe I should rename my blog The Deracinated Petty Bourgeois Project.

The ambitions of environmental groups have changed over the years. “Sustainability is a hybrid concept” – the concept in the 1970s was steady-state, and then they had to change that to fit with the development movement which was campaigning for third world development, so they had to come up with sustainability – which is kind of “development, but only to the extent it’s sustainable””.

I resonate with that, as sustainability is a word often taken for granted, but actually quite hard to define.

“There is a, not natural, but, given tension, between human aspiration and moderating human aspiration. Today I think there is too much moderation and not enough aspiration. What is it exactly that’s unsustainable?”

“It doesn’t mean to say that there are no natural limits, but it strikes me that all natural limits are relative. There was a point at which the sea was a limit on our passage, but then we made boats and they became a means. Limitations are real at any given level of technology, but as technology develops, what was a limit becomes a means.”

“It may be that we are really facing environmental catastrophe, and that there are no fixes at our level of technology, and that it would have to be thousands of years in the future before we could address it (in which case, we’re buggered)”.

“So there are no absolute natural limits, there are only relative natural limits. But also there is a greater predisposition to see limits where there are none – that has always been a preoccupation especially of middle class people. And if you think of their existential position, you can understand it. Their whole life is knocked about, buffetted by forces beyond their control.”

“You know, you’re neither the captains of industry, who actually make the decisions, nor the members of the “big battalions” of organised labour – your whole experience is of being pushed this way and that. It means that the intellectual world of that benighted centre, is precisely one where they experience everything as a force outside their control.”

Again, that feeling of my number having been got.

“And they’ve had a thousand different versions of it, whether it’s race suicide which was a very strong theme in the early 20c – the idea that we’d be outbred by the underclasses, or nuclear winter – the nuclear contest seemed especially to middle class people to present this extermination prospect, which didn’t seem to bother other people quite so much, because that wasn’t their experiential world, it didn’t relate to them in the same way, because it was too distant, it was too intellectual, it wasn’t real, they had practical problems they had to deal with. Whereas if you’re in a middle class position you’re much more prey to those fears.”

“One of the weird things in the contemporary world is that middle class worldview is everywhere – in social terms – we feel ourselves buffetted by forces beyond our control – and we project that fantastically onto nature. So everytime there’s a blizzard, it feels like it’s the end of the world.”

Could it really just be that? Has James just solved climate change? Of course it’s not quite so simple – as James acknowledges, there could well be an ecological crisis – perhaps it is indeed beyond our possibilities of technical development to address climate change at the moment – but I take his larger point which is, I think, that a solution to the ecological crisis which mobilises society, which it’s going to need to, is best served by both a technological solution, and by a more progressive and equal society – which returns us to the question of how progressive change occurs, and the key role of the working class within that; and involves a reduced role for the middle class moralising which occupies front and centre in broadsheet discourse.

The climate change denier, in the flesh, in front of me (not how I imagined him – brash, Texan and with Exxon painted on his side – instead, articulate, personable, and sincere). Well, not exactly climate change denier, but the-importance-of-going-to-rallies-about-climate-change denier. Having been involved in climate change rallies for four years, attended meetings about them, handed out leaflets for them, got up in fancy dress and served tea in Grosvenor Square to promote them, and running a blog and making a webpage for the campaigning group, I felt distinctly deflated, but existentially elated at the same time.

I’ve got enough to think about for a while so I’m glad when James says, “sorry, I’ve got to kick you out”.

James Heartfield’s personal website is here and professional website is at www.audacity.org.

He is author of:

• The Death of the Subject explained – which I’m reading now having come away with a copy – it’s fantastic.
• Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance
• Let’s Build!: Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the Next 10 Years

How do we solve the world’s problems?

Phew… today I finally finished an essay I’ve been working on for a long time, and am incredibly relieved to have it out the way, though it’s by no means where I wanted it to be.

It’s sort of the theoretical engine of my project of looking at alternatives – looking at what we are creating alternatives to, and why; which values we seek in our alternative; and the subjective dynamics and dilemmas of experiencing both the status quo and the quest for alternatives.

I’d be so grateful for any constructive feedback and criticism either on the content or the craft of the arguments, either in the comments box, or to my email at hardwin1@googlemail.com.

You can download a .pdf file here.

Right, on with the book project! 🙂