Variations on a theme of ransom

What do you do when an entire city’s transport system is totally disrupted because there is another all-out strike? You stress, you curse, and you wish someone would end this nonsense.

Then you hear about others, baggage handlers at airports, even prison officers, going on strike, causing so many problems for other people. And you think it’s the unions. You don’t see those without a strong unionized workforce going on strike. They just get on with it. Whereas those backed by the power of their unions are quite ready to hold the rest of society to ransom. Meet our demands, they declare, or else there will be unpleasant consequences for you all.

So when the leaders of society stand firm and pronounce such actions irresponsible, if not outright contemptible, people look up and welcome their intervention. At last someone to protect us from those who use their power to secure what they want at our expense. It is outrageous that some people can keep playing the “or else” card to force us to comply with their preferred scheme of things.

But what protection are we getting? Let us take a closer look. When those who are in fact the most economically powerful proclaim that in their scheme of things, they must have an utterly disproportionate share of what they in conjunction with numerous others produce, what happens? Do we hear resounding condemnation of these corporate barons? Do we hear revulsion that they are getting away with establishing a society where they can pay themselves millions, and further year on year increases of 10%, 20%, 30% and more above the rate of inflation, when many ordinary workers find that their pay does not even keep pace with inflation, their jobs are constantly under threat as management might sacrifice them to boost share prices, and whose pension terms are deteriorating when their bosses are getting extra benefits in every conceivable way?

What we do hear is this: “we must accept this, because …” wait for it, “or else”, yes, that’s the crunch point, “or else, they would leave and take their skills elsewhere, and we would all lose out”. In other words, out of fear that these corporate barons would do a walk-out – which of course is precisely what they threaten to do every time someone questions the absurd benefits they award themselves – nobody dares to challenge them.

This is mistaken on two counts. First, it is a myth that people, even the most greed-soaked ones, are only motivated by getting hugely more money all the time to do what they love doing anyway. Look at the top footballers’ contracts. None of them seriously thinks that they could not be bothered to fight hard to win a competition because they are not paid another million pounds on top of the X millions they are getting already. But it does become a problem if a few super elite are getting another million, then they want it too. What’s the driver here? A need to minimize differentials – not to maximize.

Secondly, when the powerful at the top are left unchallenged, vulnerable individuals have no choice but to band together to protect themselves. Unions are to workers as Robin Hood and his followers are to the exploited folks of old Nottingham. And there is a crucial difference between the Sheriff of Nottingham holding wretched peasants to ransom lest they allowed him to grab his grossly unfair share of what the people had produced, and Robin Hood holding the good Sheriff to ransom lest he agreed to let them live a decent life. It can be summed up in one word. Justice.

The Crisis of Civic Disengagement

So what if people are less inclined to band together to shape the decisions that affect them? Fewer and fewer people join political parties or trade unions, organise themselves in deliberating and questioning public policies, vote or stand for public office. Some embrace this phenomenon as a minor side effect of the spread of consumerism. But for those of us who have not forgotten how throughout history the powerful few get away with exploiting the many when the latter give up on collective action, it is a serious crisis indeed.

The Roman Republic and the early days of America witnessed citizens who were similar in status, working to achieve comparable rewards for their families, and were thus willing to take action through their public institutions on terms of mutual respect. But when those with the military strength and corporate muscle started to amass power in themselves at the expense of others, republican virtues gave way to irresponsibility, inequalities, and imperialist hubris. Powerful elites know that by fragmenting the public into strangers separated by widening gaps of wealth and social standing – from those too rich to have to worry about being accountable to anyone else, to those pushed so far down the hierarchy that they feel they have nothing to lose however self-destructively they behave – they can dissolve the citizenry into a multitude of disconnected individuals.

For too long, society’s readiness to allow those at the top to secure better and better terms for themselves while making lives for those at the bottom more precarious and insignificant, has left those lower down the towering pyramid with dwindling self-worth and deepening alienation. Not surprisingly, rights for workers to seek better treatment are now branded costly red tape to be cut, while rights for employers to exploit the weak bargaining position of others are celebrated as essential freedom to be enhanced.

The problem of civic disengagement we have today is not going to be solved by encouraging a few young people to volunteer to help run the odd charitable projects, or enticing a few more rich philanthropists to donate to good causes. It is a manifestation of the onslaught on civic cohesion at the heart of the rise of global plutocracy. We need to stir our democratic conscience and challenge the hegemony of the so-called ‘wealth creators’ – the corporate elites who between them dominate the private media, the lobbying of lawmakers, the consumerist industries, the arms and surveillance business, and much else besides. To adapt Niemöller’s observations, doing nothing is not a sustainable option:

First they came to strip the trade unions of their power,
One did nothing,
One was not a trade unionist.

Next they came to halt state bodies from interfering with their ‘wealth creation’,
One did nothing,
One was not a member of a state body.

Then they came to undermine the authority of public broadcasters,
One did nothing,
One was not a public broadcaster.

Finally they will come for the rest of us,
If one still has not done anything by then,
It would all be too late.

What’s wrong with being all-powerful?

Take a house with a dozen people, a neighbourhood with a few hundred, or a country with a few million, would it be better if in each case one single person is all powerful and everyone else is to live or die depending wholly on this person’s mercy, or if power is more evenly and fairly spread so that no one has to bow down to the commands of any almighty despot, regardless of how benevolent the latter is supposed to be?

Anyone who has any historical knowledge of the exploitation, oppression and injustice which come from power being concentrated in the hands of someone who is not accountable to anyone else will have no doubt which is preferable. Absolute power does not only corrupt its holder, it enslaves those subject to its exercise. If this observation holds for a house, a neighbourhood, a country, then surely it holds for the entire universe.

The world would always be better if there isn’t a single person who possesses limitless power to dominate everyone else. If God is the embodiment of perfection, it would follow that God cannot be an all-powerful entity unaccountable to no one else. As power is better distributed in a progressively more equitable manner amongst all those who can be affected by that power, perfection is reached when power is shared out so evenly that all can decide for the good of all, and none can arbitrarily dictate to the detriment of any single one.

The primitive infantile mind craved for a powerful parental figure to look after everything and projected God as an all-powerful being. Fixated on this naïve premise, theologians and their critics, for centuries argued about whether there is proof that an all-powerful being rules the universe. But what they have in fact arguing about is the likelihood of, not God’s existence, but cosmic tyranny. Perhaps all concerned can now wake from their intellectual slumber and recognise that what moral goodness calls for is not the absolute concentration of power in a single being, but its very opposite – the fair dispersion of power to everyone on equal terms.

The erroneous conception of God as all-powerful has for centuries lent itself to be exploited as a justification for papal, monarchical, patriarchal, fundamentalist oppression at every turn. Only a ‘God’ so twisted in its core meaning can be invoked to back wars, tortures, and suppression of love and free-thinking. God, properly understood as the ideal state of power shared by all in a just commonwealth with no boundaries, is real in so far as it is the guiding principle for life.

So it’s time to put aside flawed theology and invite the religious minded to embrace God as the path to a fairer society. Forget about worshiping all-powerful tyrants disguised as saviours. The only future worth striving for is the one where the gap between the powerful and the powerless is finally closed.

Together We Can

Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ continues to resonate down the age. It is so true that when citizens give up striving to hold the powerful to account, and allow themselves to be tricked or bribed into leaving those in command of their fate to act without due public constraint, they end up weak and vulnerable. Without a collective platform to challenge, and if necessary, halt those with power from charging forward, they become mere pawns in someone else’s game plan.

And tyranny adapts with time. If the first half of the twentieth century was still stirred by rallying calls to band together against Caesar-like dictators, the contemporary world is seeing a multiplicity of social, political and corporate leaders who seek to control others by fostering fundamentalist beliefs, handing the public realm to creeping private interest, and promoting addictive consumerism. There is no single imperial figure to confront, but a shifting alliance of the rich, the irresponsible, and the ‘let’s invoke God when it suits us’ brigade.

Against this chameleon axis of oppression, what can we do? In England, an initiative which began in 2005, is proving that solidarity can be cultivated through the focused collaboration of both the state and citizens. The Together We Can campaign, developed to encourage and support active citizens and public servants to cooperate in finding solutions to public problems, brought 12 Government Departments together with a shared commitment to improve citizens engagement with the development of their policies and services. The annual review of 2006 featured the Secretaries of State of all those departments reflecting on the diverse achievements, from citizenship education for all pupils, through greater local say in setting policing priorities, to wider adoption of deliberative engagement in developing environmental policies (see http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1502653).

Now an interactive resource on the web has been launched to enable all those, who believe that citizens can together exert far greater influence than acting alone, to utilise, contribute to, and promote ideas and practices which will strengthen that influence (http://togetherwecan.direct.gov.uk).

Together We Can cultivates a robust civic culture, to give citizens, from an early age, the skills, confidence and opportunities to work together in raising issues with and getting answers from with public institutions. Of course, this will not by itself prevent democratic life from being damaged by those who want to infect the public realm with their brand of ‘spiritual’ or commercial values, but it is an important inoculation against civic atrophy.

For example, approaches like participatory budgeting are spreading and people who had previously been sceptical about the prospect of civic solidarity have not just witnessed, but deeply moved by young people changing their minds and switching support to back projects which were to benefit primarily the elderly, and ethnic groups voting on spending priorities irrespective of racial factors. Women who had been marginalized, and people with learning disabilities had acquired new skills and confidence to make their voices heard.

Without fanfare, but with quiet determination, a new generation of civic-minded activists are coming through. Together they will stand up to any modern Caesars, in whatever guise they may appear, who threaten the precious solidarity of democratic citizenship.

Long live the Con

When so many commentators in Britain and America are queuing up to congratulate France for electing a President who’s prepared to drive through ‘reforms’, take the ‘tough decisions’, and bring about ‘greater flexibility’, you have to start worrying for the French people. What have they done?

They have for decades struck a nice balance between work and life – producing sought after designs and goods all round the world, and enjoying a decent quality of life sustained by economic security. What exactly went wrong? In short, they began to be undercut by corporations which made more money by squeezing their employees dry. Corporations which are celebrated by Anglo-American pundits for ‘thriving’ in the global marketplace by being utterly committed to cutting back on employment protection, demanding longer hours, polarising between the bosses who could do more and more as they please, and the dispensable workers. The message to France and other socially minded countries in Western Europe has been simple: embrace this style of governance or perish.

But why would the citizens of any democracy, in France or anywhere else, give up the power they have through their state and let new leaders dismantle the precious apparatus for securing liberty and equality for all? Well, you have to use the old divide-and-rule trick, but give it a contemporary twist.

Here’s the new con – a compassionate one as some like to put it, for it hinges on showing how caring you are – challenge people to choose between trusting themselves or some faceless public institution. Put this to them bluntly: Wouldn’t you rather trust yourself than somebody else? To keep your destiny in your own hands, you must distrust, nay, reject anyone trying to regulate things on your behalf. Keep these meddlers away, and what happens in life would be down to your own efforts. You can’t get fairer than that.

Once the gullible bites, you can feed them the rest. Why pay ever more taxes to the state when you know better how to spend your own money? Why let anyone dictate to you how many hours you can work, or indeed what conditions are acceptable for you to work under, when all that would do is to hamper you from earning what you deserve? Why allow busy bodies to interfere with what can be sold to you, or how it should be sold to you when it would just add to the costs of what you want to buy? Why do we have to pool our resources to invest in schools and hospitals for everyone, when we should be able to choose the health and education services we want from successful private companies?

Con artists at the service of plutocratic barons have refined their message with a reference to globalization here, and a nod to post-modernity there. But their intent is the same as it ever was – ensure those who have amassed wealth and power over others can take the fullest advantage of them without any intervention from collective forces acting in the public good. They want people to see taxes, civic institutions, public standards, state inspection regimes, regulations and controls as all inherently bad. They invite to us to cut them right back, so that we can be more free, more flexible, more ready – to be picked off one by one. They are counting on each and everyone of us to be foolish enough to be tricked into enslavement in the name of individual freedom. Vive le con.

Give restorative justice a chance

I have heard so many people say that the youths of today are getting out of control. They cannot be made to behave and they ruin the lives of others, old and young. The ‘tough’ proponents argue that the only solution is to target those who are threatening others with much more stringent measures. Punish them, and possibly their parents too if they are to be found, with eviction from public housing, cuts to their benefits, and prison sentences. Hit them hard until they submit.

The ‘soft’ advocates, on the other hand, maintain that more support should be given to parents and children to help them cope with living in a society with relentlessly growing income inequalities. More supervised time for out of school hour activities, more play facilities, more leisure events which are affordable without being branded as second class, and generally better response to the unmet needs of the marginalized.

But between the tiny minority of young people who really require the most punitive treatment to prevent them from harming others, and the general needs of young people who would otherwise be made to feel neglected and insignificant, there is a substantial group of youngsters who deal with their own deficiencies and low self-esteem by being unpleasant to others. There is no evidence whatsoever that either the tough or soft approach is necessary or sufficient in changing their behaviour.

The only evidence that anything would make a real difference is that gathered by the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales on the impact of restorative justice in schools. Schools in many different areas were introduced to the practice of restorative justice where teachers, and in some cases pupils, were trained as facilitators to bring perpetrators of undesirable behaviour and their victims together to talk through the problems. Crucially the process was to guide the perpetrators to see the hurt they have caused, make a sincere apology, and offer to behave differently. At the same time, it would give the victims an opportunity to have their say, and secure for themselves the assurance they needed.

Apart from the most serious, though thankfully few, cases of violent behaviour, all forms of insulting, bullying, teasing, aggravating behaviour were picked up by the restorative justice approach, and in 93% of the cases across the participating schools a resolution was reached with an agreement signed up to by the perpetrator. But are these agreements worth the paper they were written on? Does anyone take them seriously, you ask. Well, 96% of the agreements were honoured. No wonder, pupils and teachers alike were delighted with the improvement to their schools and confident that they would be sustained. In some schools, the pupils who had trained and practised as facilitators asked their head teachers if they could offer their support to other schools as the problem of abusive and bullying had virtually vanished from their own schools.

So why shouldn’t we have restorative justice practices in every school? Apparently some of those who favour the tough approach believe that they absolved the perpetrators of blame for their bad behaviour and should therefore be rejected as a legitimate way to deal with wrongdoing. But the essence of restorative justice is the recognition of blame and the embrace of personal responsibility to rectify past wrong. Let’s cast dogma aside and give restorative justice a chance.

Weapons of mass confusion

What is it about America and weapons? Why does this country stockpile more weapons of mass destruction than anyone else and yet is permanently poised to strike at any country thinking of acquiring a few of their own? The biggest threat to its own citizens in terms of being injured or killed by gunfire comes not from abroad but their fellow Americans. And what is the American response when the umpteenth tragedy strikes with more of their own slain by some gun-obsessed shooter? That it is a fundamental right of the American people to bear arms.

But why should this peculiar right be so important in America, when it is utterly alien in every other civilized country in the world? It may have something to do with the culture of distrust that goes right back to the origins of the USA. People who did not want to live under various European regimes migrated to America, and when the British government tried to retain control over their affairs, they took up arms and declared themselves independent. But once their own system of government was put in place, the American people were not prepared to surrender their weapons. Even with one of the most elaborate checks and balance form of governance, individuals wanted to have ready access to their own guns should they fell out with those they put in temporary charge of their collective affairs.

To this day, the deal remains that whoever runs the American government has to acknowledge that its own citizens rightly cannot trust it with sole possession of weapons. It is odd then that it should expect the rest of the world to trust it with having the most powerful weapons imaginable. Is it because feeling impotent in relation to its own arms-loving citizens, it wants to exert control over people outside its borders? Or is it trying to translate the historical belief of American people that only they can be trusted with weapons into a global policy of preventing non-Americans from having powerful weapons of their own?

Yet, just when one thinks any of this might make sense after all, we are reminded of the fact that the world’s leading exporter of arms is none other than the United States. Not only do American weapon makers dominate the international market for destructive instruments, their government faithfully supports them by cultivating new buyers in its tireless sales pitch to foreign states. So whatever their rhetoric may be about weapon proliferation posing too great a risk to peace and security to be tolerated, they in practice do more than everyone else combined in arming the world.

Logic of course cannot by itself make sense of the actions of people who are seriously disorientated. A symptom of persistent distrust is the spread of paranoia eroding the capacity to work with others collectively to find sensible solutions. Why sit down with others to seek to reach an agreement on a way forward when one can shoot down any opposition (real or perceived). The infantile American colonies of the 1770s, feeling in turn neglected and repressed by the father figure of a deranged monarch, grew up into a 21st century superpower who celebrates the freedom to wield weapons everywhere so long as the deadliest weapons of all stay in their own hands.

To be fair, a significant number of people in America – derided as liberal or progressive – have over recent decades developed a much more mature outlook which recognises that juvenile macho obsession with weapons has to be displaced by proper controls nationally and internationally, and pressed for reining in arms sales at every level. But until they become the majority, America and the rest of the world can expect many more innocent people to pay the price of this armed mayhem.