OUR WORLD IN CRISIS

John Papworth

Disease, hunger, poverty, violence, sickness, crime, drugs, youth alienation, family breakdown, social collapse, all these are but the more immediate manifestations of something deeply amiss with our whole way of life. Yet they are part of a bigger picture of a world where war is constantly being waged, where vandalism against the natural world is dangerously rife and which is savagely depleting entire species of flora and fauna, where industrial excess is causing a rapidly increasing melting of the polar ice caps, which in turn will drown many coastal cities and create unprecedented wind-storms and climatic disruptions, where economic forces are making life increasingly impersonal and divorced from the realities of personal relationships, as well as our relationships with the natural order, where the same economic forces have become so large as to be beyond control and are now dominating political processes in ways which exclude moral, spiritual and aesthetic considerations.

We just cannot go on in this way. We have produced the first ugly civilisation and, for all its technical wonders, the first boring one. Modern architecture has become a mere cost-effective exercise with results which demean us; the architecture of our modern state schools, which might be inspiring the imagination of the young with beauty and the joy of life, are bleak repudiations of any concept of human dignity or nobility and, like so many other public buildings, a repudiation of standards of excellence established centuries before.

What is to be done? We are not advancing civilisation, we are abandoning it, and unless we change course profoundly, extensively and rapidly, we are transmitting to our children a world which cannot fail in the most literal terms to be, a hell on earth.

The traditional political and social institutions which formerly safeguarded our heritage have obviously ceased to function, they are not working except in ways which are promoting or consolidating an ever rising tide of evil mischief; they can no longer provide solutions because they themselves have become part of the problem, and a big part at that.

The crisis is, above all, a crisis of values and a crisis of democracy. Over the last century or more many new forms of power have erupted such as transport, communication and power supplies, for which established democratic procedures have failed to provide an adequate degree of citizen participation and control. This in turn has produced a quite colossal democratic deficit. As Parliament has assumed ever increasing control of these new forms of power the authority of Parliament itself has been greatly undermined by at least two factors.

One is the effect of the sheer weight of the legislative burden involved and the consequent oversight required of numerous matters, properly the responsibility of local councils, so that individual MP's, have become de facto welfare officers for such matters as health, education, social security and so forth. The burden of correspondence and the general role of representation in such matters is at the expense of the proper surveillance of such important state matters as foreign affairs, economic policy and questions of war and peace.

One effect of this enormous and quite needless burden is for an equivalent increase in the power of the administration. The citizen today is not being governed by his elected representatives, he is being made subject to the power of administration by unelected officials.

The decreased power and status of elected MP's is reflected in the growing power of the Prime Minister, for it is he who, with the enormous consequential powers of patronage at his disposal, is able to establish important policies and initiatives which pertain more and more to an authoritarian ethos which is utterly at odds with ordinary democratic practice.

This is reflected in the other factor which has already made Parliament a cypher of other forces and debilitated its authority to a quite extraordinary degree. After the bombing attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept 11th 2001, the American President embarked on a policy of war. The British Prime Minister, with no attempt to consult Parliament, at once presented the nation with the fait accompli of a war alliance with the United States. The rights and wrongs of this decision to 'stand shoulder to shoulder' with the USA need not here detain us, what needs emphasis was the unilateral abuse of office involved in hi-jacking the proper powers of Parliament to decide. The same high-handed policy is even more in evidence in the Prime Minister's approach to the question of EUrope and its effect on Parliamentary prerogatives. His policy is one of full membership of a union of the states of EUrope into an agglomerate which can only prevail by reducing the powers of Parliament to that of a parish council.

Again, the rights and wrongs of this policy are not here our chief concern, what needs to be noted is that he has no mandate from the people and no democratic authority to pursue this policy, which is indeed in defiance of the findings of a considerable number of opinion polls. What people want, especially when the power and the credibility of their own Parliament is at stake, is irrelevant, what is relevant is the power of a Prime Minister to deploy the powers of office and of a complaisant party machine to override the people's wishes and to destroy Parliament itself.
The theory that people elect representatives to execute policies they wish to see implemented by Parliament has been upended so that the chief elected representative, the Prime Minister, now decides policy and uses Parliamentary prerogatives to impose them on people.

If there is to be a change of course it must come not from great leaders or the giant centralised forces operating on a mass basis which are doing so much harm, but from ourselves in our own local communities: communities able to establish a moral consensus which will take precedence over all other factors now dominating our affairs so disastrously. If we do not want war, massive economic disruptions, the mad industrialised assaults on natural life which are now imperiling all human existence, the boundless waste of resources involved in promoting economic 'growth' regardless of morals or aesthetics, the debasement of the quality of life, we must imperatively take our destinies in our own hands while there is time.

A NEW RADICAL STRATEGY

Attempts to create a broad-based, centrally controlled mass political organisation to counter the totalitarian drives of mass centralised governments and their global economic henchmen are not only futile, they betray a profound ignorance of the lessons of radical and reformist history and a failure to grasp the realities of the play of power when conducted on a mass scale.

That history is eloquent of the extent to which such movements whether revolutionary, reformist, pacifist or anarchist, on a mass scale, are foredoomed to failure on three grounds. They either cease to have any impact on the popular consciousness, if indeed they ever achieved any to begin with, or if they succeed they become victims of their success by being coopted by the forces they set out to oppose, as the record of European Social Democrat or Labour parties amply demonstrates. The third path to failure, as illustrated by the fate of the French and Russian revolutions, is that having destroyed the old order they become even more horrendous exemplars of its worst vices.

It is true that totalitarian governments of small states can be as repressive and ferocious as large ones. The point is they can also be benign and tolerant, whereas those of giant states have no option, they cannot avoid the need to create a murderous straightjacket of political repression. The gap between government and the governed is so enormous that it can only survive with a huge army of impersonal intermediaries who in turn must follow the book, the fúhrer or the party line if they are to gain promotion, or even just keep their jobs, to say nothing of their lives.

This factor of scale, so long neglected or dismissed as being of no account has become the problem of the modern world. On a small, human scale governments can be abominable, but the same scale can enable human decency to flourish; it has indeed given us some of the greatest glories of human civilisation as, for example of the Renaissance.

But the spirit of the Renaissance went down the drain with the advent of the giantists - Cavour, Garibaldi, Bismark, Napoleon and others. The power, the independence and the pride of local city-state government was sucked into the mighty maw of giant states, into 'Italy', 'Germany' and other uncontrollable entities which led directly to monster world wars and global economic upheavals, so that today, instead of a honeycomb world of tiny city-states each giving the possibility of full citizen control, and in consequence, the genuine play of democratic power to determine moral objectives, the individual citizen has become a puppet animated by the controlling strings of giant centralised political and economic forces, which are now arming the world with thermonuclear weaponry and other monstrosities which, if not soon checked, will surely destroy all that human creativity down the centuries has accomplished.

So the principal problem confronting us today is not one of moral campaigning, whether in terms of 'peace', economic justice for the third world, GM crops, anti-globalisation, anti-nuclearism or any other eminently worthy objective, it is one of power. Power out of control, power running amok, power bent on militarism and economic aggrandisement at whatever cost to the environment, to human social structures or even to human destiny itself, because the scale on which it operates is too large to enable genuine democratic control to be exercised.

And the problem of power can only be resolved, not by mass revolutionary upsurges, nor by mass political parties, whether reformist, 'labour', Green or any other colour, such mass approaches can only replicate or increase the dangers they ostensibly seek to counter, but by a new awakening. It will be one that grasps the relationship between the centralised mass form of power and the abuse of power, and which perceives these abuses can only be checked by the rejection of the mass itself in favour of the small, the local and the human scale, if only because it is a scale which enables the citizen to exercise precisely those forms of democratic control the mass inevitably denies.

A strategy which accepts this principle as being basic to its objectives will thus need to operate as a matter of course itself on a human scale basis, even if it is one which will incorporate in broad terms the aims of the many initiatives which have erupted across the world in response to the global crisis. Its aim will be nothing less than the reempowerment of the citizen in small structures of localised government, structures which will embody the power of ordinary people to control and determine their own human-scale policies and destinies.

What is involved here is a charge on every person with a concern to counter the forces of the global crisis to act in a new way. It does not involve the individual joining an organisation but in starting his or her own. The global crisis threatens everyone and a new awareness of its dimensions and its import is making the ensuing transformation of consciousness one of the major unmarked milestones in contemporary human development.
It is this new consciousness which provides the basis for a new approach, one which increasingly recognises the scale factor as a major cause of the global crisis and will act accordingly by seeking new/old forms of local empowerment as a primary response. The need then for a crisis grouping in every locality in every land is thus the primary radical need of the day. It will, if it is wise, avoid forms of expression which smack of 19th Century lost causes which, with their sweeping, all-embracing import, divide rather than unite people, and to adopt a general title which will enable different forms of a potential local consensus to find expression.

Hence it will not be a campaign for 'socialism', or 'market freedom' or 'pacifism' or 'anarchism', it will be a campaign to unite people to confront the common danger of power overreaching itself and overcentralising itself in ways which are enabling every form of abuse of power to flourish at the price of liberty.

Liberty itself implies the freedom to act and decide, and the new consciousness is now increasingly aware that the power to do so can only meaningfully be deployed in local terms. Power cannot be in two places at once and the power of giant governments and corporations to wreck the environment, to embark on global wars and other insanities is power the citizen does not have.

Hence the primary policy objective of CRISIS COMMITTEES in every neighbourhood will be a need to assert the neighbourhood's own power and to deploy it for sane social purposes, and to seek to extend that power to maximum effect.

Perhaps the honeycomb principle is as meet an analogy as any. Some local 'cells' may opt to use their power to establish local socialist communities, others may seek to promote local free trade or local capitalism. Important as these questions may be they are secondary to the main one, who decides?

There is no point in arguing whether this can be done, it is now a matter of civilised human survival that it must be done, and done with a due sense of urgency. The signs of social disintegration are all around us, they are multiplying and they are the direct consequence of excesses being promoted by powerful topside forces out of control. The hedonistic and immoral play of market and political giantism, which behaves towards the environment, towards animal life, towards the soil, the seas, the very sky, and towards the fragile traditions embodied in our social structures, with no regard whatsoever for moral principle or moral consequence, is amply reflected in the collapsing standards of moral behaviour in the general citizen body.

One of the most familiar political adages declares that all power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Part of the modern tragedy lies in the fact that it is also the most widely ignored. Our societies are everywhere dominated and saturated with corruption to an extent that the generality of people are largely unaware of its extent or the way it affects their lifestyle. So devout Christians will motor, perhaps from the necessity created by insane national transport policies, to church services, shop at supermarkets, campaign ardently for one mass political party or another, freely purchase chemically adulterated and devitalised foodstuffs, go on packaged holidays, or journey around by air, with no more awareness of the degree of moral corruption involved than a bird in flight may be aware of air.

Nevertheless that awareness is there, it pertains to a modest-sized minority, but it is a minority which has grown and is continuing to grow and the question before us is how can we impel it to grow more and faster.

This is why CRISIS COMMITTEES are important. Four or five people meeting in a coffee bar or someone's home to discuss the affairs of the day may appear of trifling consequence, but meeting regularly, with a direct focus on the global crisis, seeking to elucidate its causes and how they may be countered, multiplied around the world can yet, with clarity, vision, persistence, determination and no lack of moral courage, save it.

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