Call to Freedom

Last night I attended the first proper meeting of Transition Wootton. Wooton-under-Edge is a delightful small town in semi-rural Gloucestershire. No doubt people there are as concerned as people everywhere about the reality of climate change. They would be willing to do their bit, make the necessary sacrifices, given the right political leadership.

But I must admit I came away from the meeting feeling alienated and depressed. The level of disempowerment amongst the 30 or so people attending was palpable. The two most enthusiastic discussions were about the technical aspects of energy generation (this is largely a displacement activity in my view) and a shared whinge about public transport.

A significant minority were for lobbying our local authority - around half of whose members are the Tory friends of big business who got us into this mess. My own suggestions for actually doing something - the something in question ranging from joining the car club to setting up a community farm and switching from buying a sofa to paying for a weekly massage - were dismissed as anarchism. Anarchism, it was pointed out as though this were holy writ, doesn't work.

Aside from my gloom at the self-imposed oppression of many of the people there I was hugely flattered to have been dismissed as an anarchist. What a noble tradition that is! From Kropotkin's ideal rural communities to Shelley's calls for non-violent action right up to Bob Marley's demand that we 'liberate ourselves from mental slavery' it is those who can shake off the shackles of received opinions who most powerfully change the world.

Shelley ends his rousing poem 'Call to Freedom' with these lines:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

You can find the whole poem on this blog.

Shelley is gorgeous. I first came across him in my teens when a boyfriend who is sadly no longer around to cause consternation to the bastions of authority gave me a book of his verse. I immediately learned Ozymandius by heart. Who could resist a poem that begins 'I met a traveller from an antique land' and includes the line 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone'?!

Of course it is anarchism that won't work. The system of authoritarian control, injustice and inequality is working very well. That is why we see children starving and the planet burning. What further evidence of success could we require? Tweet

Call for the Abolition of Wage Slavery

The conventional mindset loves to make clear distinctions, to paint the world in terms of black and white, to establish absolute dates when eras or cultures began and ended. As though the Neolithic, whatever 'new stone age' might mean, ended 5,347 years ago, in the middle of June, around teatime. Of course such chronological control does facilitate the celebration of historical landmarks, such as the era of slavery which is being greeted with much high-blown and self-righteous joy today.

The world does not in reality divide itself neatly between good and evil. Nor did slavery end in 1807. Even the formal historians point out that it was only the state-sanctioned market in human flesh that was abolished at that time. Slaves continued to be owned in the British Empire. But more than this, the consequences of the enclosure movement and the rapid development of an industrial system of production created what the man with the beard justly called 'wage slaves'.

As we come to face difficult decisions about a truly post-industrial age, not one where we simply export our dirty work overseas, we can reckon that the industrial age has lasted about 200 years. The era of the ending of slavery coincided with the invention of machines that could turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy. Climate change has put an end to that stage of capitalist development so where do we go next?

My suggestion is that we start asking important questions about ownership. It is because those who control the economic system we are forced to live with demand an unfair and excessive share of resources that the pressure on the planet arises. Self-providing communities will have to learn to share resources and work fairly if we are to live in balance with nature and in harmony with each other.

I think this helps us to understand how the globalised trade system is inherently linked to the solution to climate change, as the Contraction and Convergence model links the two at a policy level. Because of the pressure to extract profits and rents for the wealthy, capitalism has been marked by schemes to avoid the natural limits of ecological and social reality. Fossils fuels and human flesh have both enabled the ungrounded and unbridled greed of the spoilt child that typifies capitalism.

To switch attention to wage slavery is not to belittle the suffering of the slaves of our own era. The suffering and exploitation of forced prostitutes and forced labourers in factories and fields persists in every country. We have used our organised political power to ensure for ourselves one step up the ladder so that our exploitation is restrained and decent. But while we work in a firm we do not own we can never be truly free. And while we leave the structure of the economic system unchallenged we can be sure that the morally offensive exploitation of people and the planet will continue.

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