CRISIS COMMITTEES HOUSE
(cf. Companies House)being an open letter from John Papworth to the Independent News Cooperative
1. All of us who are members of INK are presumably aware there is a global crisis and presumably we are engaged in seeking to raise consciousness of it in one way or another. This is not to say that we are all agreed on the nature of the crisis and how we should be seeking to resolve it. (Perhaps if we were there would be no crisis!).2. It is for this reason some of us have been wary of supporting any specific political stance by INK, knowing any attempt to project one would be divisive and be that much less effective in consequence. But perhaps the worst thing we could collectively do in relation to the crisis would be to do nothing. What then do we do?
3. It is suggested that INK should encourage the promotion of bodies in each neighbourhood, many of which under a variety of names, are already up and running, under a general umbrella name of 'Crisis Committees'.
4. The objectives of these groups would be:
a) To seek to establish the cause of the crisis.
b) To promote greater awareness of the crisis.
c) To link with others of like concerns at neighbourhood level.
d) To promote ways and means of countering the crisis.5. This is not a proposal to start a new national, or even international, organisation, nor is it concerned to act in rivalry with other bodies. The role of INK here would be to act as a non-partisan facilitator. It would do this by urging a need for positive concern and by maintaining a register of 'Crisis Committees' under whatever name they may choose to operate.
6. The register would then be a means by which members of INK, who alone would have access to it, could supply those on it with a constant updating of their particular concerns and provide them with whatever relevant back-up materials on which they wished to attract greater focus.
7. Why this approach? A major aspect of the crisis is the degree of abuse of political and economic power which is involved. Despite a nominally free press and the freedom to organise and to demonstrate, to say nothing of nominally free election procedures, many of us must be aware that the ability of ordinary people to influence the passage of events is virtually nil. The policies of the main political bodies are remarkable for their similarities rather than their differences and all share a common non-responsiveness to the gravity of the general drift of global affairs to ultimate forms of warfare, to economic collapse, to the ruthless and suicidal despoliation of the environment and the general disintegration of the social fabric.
8. The dominant forces now running amok on an increasingly global scale have clearly hijacked the electoral process by their assiduous promotion of consumerist and self-regarding values. Hence masses of people vote on the basis of an unquestioning acceptance of these values regardless of the profound moral and material forms of degradation involved.
9. It is this which raises a question of leading concern on whether traditional forms of mass political action and campaigning can have any more than a marginal effect on the crisis. It is in this light that what is proposed here is not mass action, but small-scale local action which can be endlessly multiplied in democratic terms around the world. In current parlance it involves an organic, multicellular approach which acknowledges the extent to which the controlling forces of any mass form of society are effectively beyond the reach of the normal canons of democratic responsiveness and which is seeking a restoration of democratic involvement by means which are themselves inherently democratic.
10. The advantages to INK members here is that a new channel is being created which avoids the obstacles and pitfalls of mass media operations by giving them access to numerous bodies of locally involved people to whom they can direct their particular concerns. In this way they will be achieving their principal aim of joining INK at all by establishing means of increasing the number of their readers.
11. The advantage to INK itself is that it would be developing a role which gives both strength and meaning to its identity and which enables it to serve its members to far greater effect on an otherwise non-party political partisan stance.12. There is the further general advantage to us all of being able to do something to put the brakes on a general accelerating drift to disaster, and enabling us to justify our role in the concerns we have chosen with positive action and the prospect of positive results.
13. If INK were to adopt this strategy it would have to devise its own means of implementing it, but this is not to suggest for a moment it would be working from scratch. The global crisis is reverberating at an accelerating rate into peoples lives in many ways and the general awareness that there is something profoundly amiss with our entire way of life is also growing rapidly. There must be very few places today where there is not a nucleus of people who are aware, informed and concerned, and who would not hesitate to respond to a clear-sighted lead which has a full measure of integrity and respect for democratic usage.
14. In doing this we cease to engage in the futilities of mass campaigning, when all too often we, a pronounced minority, merely end up taking in each other's washing. We are here attacking the soft underbelly of the whole system, so that instead of no less futile efforts to capture the central redoubts of power from which so many abuses are sprung, we are laying the ground for the fragmentation of power to determine and control events from a multitude of local centres.
15. Such an approach may fail, but our present strategy assuredly will. It is possible to go further and declare this alternative is the only strategy that could succeed.
16. With clarity, persistence and a due measure of determination, who dare put any limits to what might be accomplished in rescuing these many people from the sense of powerlessness and helplessness that so often suffuses them? Giving them a worthwhile prospect of working in league with others with no diminution of their own democratic prerogatives, but with a renewed sense of mission, of hope and of purposeful action?
We of INK are in a position to give that lead, we surely dare not fail to give it.May 14th 2002
copies of this document may be obtained from 26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com