Occupy London Stock Exchange

When London rioters rioted and Occupy Wall Street protestors occupied, time and time again, incredulous journalists, snapping at the heels of their temerity, would scoff: ‘So what’s your programme? What do you propose? How would it look?’ And, more often than not, this intentionally terse line of rhetorical questioning derails the receiver, and the revolutionary media moment is smothered.

Its on!

Perhaps the most well-known recent example of this was when the normally loquacious Russell Brand sidestepped these questions in his showdown with Paxman, and as a result was summarily dismissed by mainstream media for his inability to provide a viable alternative beyond the need for a revolution.

If only he’d handed Paxman a copy of Dan Hancox’s The Village Against the World, published in the same month as the interview, and said “How about Marinaleda Jeremy? They’re doing things a bit different, and you know what, it seems to be working!”

Marinaleda. A small village in the Andalusian region of southern Spain that has held out as an island of Asterix-like defiance in a sea of Spanish and Western European capitalism that has done so much harm to so many, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession.

A staggering 400,000 Spanish families have been forcibly evicted from their homes by mortgage lenders since 2008 and a further 20,000 are estimated to be living on the streets. Contrast this with the situation in Marinaleda, where the majority of houses are beyond the clutches of speculators. Owned by the local village cooperative, no-one has the opportunity to accumulate capital on the properties, and thus to speculate on and profit from the housing market. These three-bedroomed houses are designed and constructed by residents using materials and architectural support provided for free by the regional government, and come with 100 square metres of outdoor space. The houses require no down payment, and have mortgage repayment rates of just 15 Euros a month. It’s hard to imagine forced evictions taking place here.

Workers at the farming cooperative in Marinaleda

Any thoughts on that, Jeremy?

Along with the forced evictions, unemployment remains at 27% and a crushing 55% for those under 25. What would happen though, if you make society’s primary organising principle the maximisation of jobs, and not profit? This is how the village cooperative in Marinaleda operates. Any financial surplus created by the co-op is reinvested to create more jobs. Labour intensive crops such as tomatoes and artichokes are intentionally preferred to less labour-friendly alternatives. The result of this simple switch in priorities is an unemployment rate in Marinaleda since 2008 that hovers around 5%, compared to 40-50% in the surrounding Andalusian region.

So Jeremy. How does that sound to you?

And it doesn’t stop there. Workers at the village cooperative earn more than twice the Spanish minimum wage, and can pay just 1 Euro for plates of tapas, coffee, beer, or a glass of wine at the local bars and cafes (alongside their 15 Euro a month mortgages). Computers and Wi-Fi internet access are freely available across the village. There are leisure opportunities and facilities equal to a village five times its size. Crime is so low – partly because the community is so tight-knit – that there are no police. Weekly assemblies open to all residents run the village through simple ‘hands up’ voting, taking decisions on issues from the town council budget and taxes to when and what kinds of crop to plant in the fields.

Of course, it’s not all roses, and the book doesn’t shy away from the tackling the complexities, such as the younger generation’s desire to leave the fields and seek a brave new world elsewhere in Spain, Europe, or beyond. Or the political opposition who feel marginalised and outcast by many of the villagers. Yet Marinaleda has and continues to follow Spanish electoral law to the letter, and its victories have all been won through democratic means. The Collective for the Unity of Workers, the ruling anarchist party in Marinaleda (to the left of Spain’s communist party), has continually won elections since its inception in 1979 following the end of the Second Republic. Opposition parties exist; they just haven’t managed to win an election in more than 30 years.

High salaries, low cost of living, low unemployment, direct democracy, and a close community. Sounds pretty good, right? How can we get in on the action? This is the sticky part; through solidarity and struggle. The people of Marinaleda have engaged in decades of political organisation and non-violent resistance (grounded in Gandhian pacifism and philosophical anarchism), during which “they occupied airports, train stations, government buildings, farms and palaces; went on hunger strike, blocked roads, marched, picketed, went on hunger strike again; were beaten, arrested, and tried countless times for their pains.”

They have fought long and hard for their victories – most notably forcing the Spanish government to expropriate 1,200 hectares of the Duke of the Infantado’s fallow land, which has since become the cooperative’s fertile farmland – and the struggle never stops. The book’s underlying but unspoken message is that if we want to see progressive change in our lives and in our communities, we will have to do the same. It’s not enough to dream. As Sanchez Gordillo, the village’s charismatic mayor, has put it:
“We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick… We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present.”

Mayor Manuel Sanchez Gordillo

Ultimately, if we don’t actively engage in the world, then someone else will build it for us. And currently, the guys working the cranes have already taken us beyond three of the nine planetary boundaries that must not be crossed for Earth to support human life.

But the cranes’ foundations? They belong to us. They are us.

Author Ben Radley is a researcher and activist currently affiliated to the ecosocialist working group of SolidaritéS, a political party in the French-speaking region of Switzerland. He recommends the following as examples of actions we can all do to help create change in the world (tack on your own in the comments section below):

1. For as little as £1 a year, get politically active at the local, national, or international level by joining a political party.
2. Join a trade union and get active in the fight to maintain decent work and living standards for all.
3. Get online and search for organisations active in your area that align with your environmental, social, or political interests, give them a call, and see where you can help.
4. Start an online petition in a matter of minutes to address an issue close to your heart, using 38 Degrees’ awesome free resource Campaigns By You.
5. Not happy with what’s out there? All movements are started somewhere by someone, and there’s no reason it can’t be you. Get cracking!

8 Nov 1989 – Margaret Thatcher Speech on Global Environment to United Nations General Assembly

Many people’s first exposure to climate science was when they saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Gore took a topic that was beyond most people’s comprehension and made it easy to understand. Back in 1988, however, it was a different politician who put the science of climate change firmly on the global agenda. Unbeknownst to many, that person was Margaret Thatcher. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, she presented a series of high profile speeches on the topic of climate change. Armed with a degree in chemistry from Oxford, her scientific expertise enabled her to speak from a position of strength and knowledge about climate-related issues. She used that knowledge to act as a champion for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personally opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (the UK’s foremost climate change research centre).

Margaret Thatcher and her environment secretary Nicholas Ridley did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda and swell the membership of groups like Friends of the Earth.
“Things really took off during Mrs Thatcher’s short-lived green period. From 1987/1988 when she started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree- hugging weirdos thought, ‘ooh, it’s Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious’.
“She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people. Nicholas Ridley was one of the best recruiting sergeants we ever had. He was always on the wrong side of the science and public opinion. We always had a fantastic response every time he talked.”

Video put together for the MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College London.

It is possible to draw up extensive scary lists of all the out of control and dangerous natural phenomena happening around the world right now but what is the point? If you want to check the science then these recent papers bring it home in: Scientific American, Nature   and even the World Health Organisation. The main thing to realise is that it is happening and that this changes everything.

When I was still a child twenty years ago, decisive action could have averted dangerous climate change. That window was missed but the things we need to do remain the same. When your lying in the bath and you realise it has suddenly got too hot you don’t say “oh well – I might as well just leave the tap on then” you move fast so you don’t completely stew in your own juices.

The time lag for an understanding of climate science to seep into the mainstream has not applied to an active minority group who have made it their business to become expert in exactly what we should do. The practical safety measures are not rocket science. We need to, for example, mobilise armies to plant millions of trees – these will soak up carbon dioxide as well as reduce flooding. We need to cover every suitable roof in solar panels, insulate all leaky homes and take every other available action to ensure we burn less oil. Top priority is to preserve wild spaces, the ultimate natural buffer against planetary change.

The mission is planetary-scaled but we rise to it like a lunar voyage. Not only can it pull the diverse peoples of the world together at a time of mass disharmony and doubt but it offers vast arrays of new jobs which can lift millions out of poverty and help create a new kind of economy that all of us, not just financiers, are invested in. This is a great historical moment when the human species, recognising it power to change the world, takes on new responsibility as planetary stewards and adjusts its governance, philosophy, ethics and law accordingly. Nation states are required to take bold, coordinated action, united at last by our shared atmosphere and destiny.

As it becomes increasingly obvious, even against the distracting wail of the corporate media, the kinds of things we have to do to respond to dangerous, climate-activated, natural phenomena the actions of this Tory government are perceived on a par with the lackeys on the Titanic who locked the poor people below deck. Not only are they still failing to take action to protect the populace against climate change they are using tax payers’ money to sponsor their friends to frack the English countryside. This isn’t “just politics”, it is inhumane, stupid and grotesque.  It is exactly the wrong thing to do.

The fact that Cameron and Osborne think they can get away with it reveals how out of touch they are. They refuse to aknowledge the simmering anger that is mobilising great swathes of humanity all around the world. They still sing to Margret Thatcher’s hymn sheet while the rest of us have moved on. Of course there is society, we are it and we know what we want – health, happiness and enough environmental stability that we might consider bringing children into the world.

Steadfastly pushing through their grim, selfish ideology of disaster capitalism while trampling on our last chances to make a better world must surely drive the long awaited lurch to the left? By running roughshod over the English countryside the tories finally show to everyone they really do not care about anything other than the concentration of wealth.

Imagine this future scenario. Years from now David and Sam Cameron head out from their town house, defended, not just by police with machine guns – as in the case of the delightful Mr Blair, but also lines of riot cops. The populace will leer and shout – “why didn’t you do anything while we still had a chance!?” David’s callous eyes, as dark as the infinity of space, will never flicker, staring straight out of his grey, sallow face. SamCam, the English Mrs Assad, will lean into his fur-lined coat and shudder, hissing through her collagen-pumped, pursed lips “we did it for the money you idiots.” They have to be stopped, we can’t let this happen.

Human numbers are projected to swell to 9 billion and 90% of large fish have been extracted from the ocean, it is clear that to stop fisheries terminally collapsing all of us are going to have to eat less fish. However, it is vital to realise that each of us making this ethical choice will not, in and of itself, be enough to stop the over-fishing driving the death of the oceans.

Corporations are pulling the most fish from the sea. To stop them we need laws to limit their activities. Wild species need space to live, so just like on land we need large wild areas protected from human interference. The excellent video above outlines how such agreements come into being. I was disturbed when i checked out the comments underneath True Activists posting of the video. The most liked comment read “you could waste your time talking to politicians.. or you could just stop eating fish..”

I think this shout out strikes to the core of our challenge – it is not just ourselves we need to worry about – there is everybody else as well. The human superorganism isn’t just the sum of its parts just like an ant colony is more than just a lot of ants. Novel functions emerge out of the complex interaction of differentiated parts.

High-tech, corporate fishing fleets navigate by satellite are partly funded by governments and generate wealth for shareholders. A reduction in demand for their product in one market is not going to stop them. They will just increase sales in other markets, create new products, aggregate demand or genetically engineer “super-pigs” that grow twice as fast when fed congealed fish balls. Corporations don’t back off. They only move forward and those at the wheel only want to move faster.

The threat of a complete and devastating collapse of global fisheries requires us to consider the worst. If fishing fleets continue to extract fish at existing rates we will see extinction events like the loss of North Atlantic Cod. This is devastating economically, reduces a crucial protein source to billions of humans and may fundamentally destabilise ocean ecosystems leading to unpredictable run-away changes.

Overfishing by Alex Hofford

If we are motivated to protect the ocean and preserve the fish that live within it we have to organise to stop fishing fleets and create large-scale marine reserves that are policed. The tools we have to do this are limited. We can occupy the land and boats of the fleets to stop them sailing but we have seen how governments will violently protect corporate interests. Is anyone going to try something similar in Russia any time soon? Anyway, if one corporation is stopped another will step up to seize the resource. We need to get to the heart of the problem and change the rules of the game.

If we pull back into space we clearly see the problem. The algorithms determining the functioning of the human superorganism are out of sync with our planetary circumstance. The dials are still set as if we were small and growing into an abundant and limitless frontier – like back in 1831 when Darwin sailed on the Voyage of the Beagle. There were only one billion humans on the planet and everywhere they stopped they were met by the extraordinary wildlife of a thriving biosphere.

200 years of human population growth compounded with surging levels of consumption have created a very different planet. The cavernous excavations of natural systems have left them teetering on the brink, meanwhile, the wealth-concentrating function of corporations has created a remote elite with vast hoards of capital running organisations that span the world and answer to no one.

We need to adjust the controls of our superorganism so that it: stops expanding outwards, consumes less, functions more efficiently and produces less pollution. We can achieve this by, for example, shifting to an interest-free monetary system, limiting the economy, giving legal rights to natural systems and passing global treaties to limit pollution and ban war. To achieve these ends we must address governance issues and politics.

It isn’t just naive to think changing the behaviour of some individual ants will fix this situation it is disastrous because to protect what is left of nature we need to move quickly and decisively. This is the problem with environmental organisations that solely emphasise lifestyle changes – they distract us from the main causes of harm and let the powerful off the hook.

If we have reached the conclusion that our politicians have simply become administrators for large corporations and will work to concentrate wealth further even while the planet dies then surely then answer isn’t to back off and leave them to it!? If politicians are banqueting with bankers on the bones of our dying world lets not retreat into a muggy haze of personal development. Lets not kid ourselves that individual actions are enough. We have to get organised and change the system – thats called politics.

Vote here to stop the industrial destruction of the deep ocean.

If these men were typical of the wider populations they are supposed to represent there would be absolutely no doubt that our civilisation is doomed to imminently collapse. However, the political elite is actually veering off on extreme tangents that in no way, comes even close to the pretence of serving the needs of the people any more.

Perhaps they sense the game is up? They are in the midst of a mad scramble to line their pockets before we execute the imminent flip to more equitable, sane and satisfying ways of living and organising ourselves on planet earth. They are the last stand of the old guard – totems of the final days of the industrial era when corrupted governments fought wars for oil rather than preserve our precious planet.

A large and growing proportion of global citizens realise that things have got to change radically and rapidly. The disparity between the mega-rich elite and the poor majority is cavernous; global ecosystems from fisheries to rain forests are stressed and failing; key resources like oil are running out and the denialists look increasingly insane – it is quite clear to everyone that the climate is changing with potentially catastrophic implications for vast swathes of humanity.

What is happening is our global civilisation is pushing up against planetary boundaries. We are learning what happens when 7.125 billion humans eat fish, drive cars, use phones and shop in supermarkets. This unprecedented flow of energy and natural resources is now greater than the natural ecosystems servicing us can sustain.

GDP Machine

Almost every historic human civilisation has hit resource constraints and collapsed as described vividly in Jared Diamond’s book of the same name. The Romans, Aztecs, Easter Islanders and Norse all peaked in population and expanse before dying off in a variety of unpleasant ways. That book, better technology and a planetary perspective should enable us to avoid the same fate. We know how to keep this civilisation going; we have to stop it growing.

Every threat our civilisation faces is driven by conventional growth and every solution is based on the flip from constantly increasing quantity to improving quality. We must learn how to improve our lives without cutting down more of the Amazon, removing more fish from the sea or burning what is left of fossil fuels. On one level this is a seismic transformation, on another it is natural, instinctive and easy; but what we need is a new type of leader to guide the transition.

If your civilisation is expanding outwards you may want gung-ho males in charge, tough pioneering types who are not hesitant to rupture the earth or steal their neighbours resources. If your civilisation is intending to put down roots and sustain itself for millennia you need more wisdom, less muscle. Managing the global commons like the oceans, atmosphere and Amazon cannot happen whilst nation states are locked in competition for resources. We must establish widespread peace, distribute resources fairly and empower healthy local communities to look after their own affairs. That is, we need a shift from centralised power and control to distributed, autonomous networks.

Locally, there are changes we can make to our daily lives. The amount we move around and per-capita resource use must reduce. We all have to work less – switching to a four and then a three day work week. We our compelled to spend more time in our local communities building resilience, this means making suburbs, gardens, roofs and patios ecologically productive. All of us can spend more time growing food, composting and caring for the people we live near – helping with child rearing and the elderly. This can improve our lives. Doing things collaboratively again, with the people we live near, is the resurgence of community we need to overcome contemporary epidemics of apathy and depression.

The industrial age pulled vast swathes of humanity out of poverty and built the infrastructure of the civilisation that now sustains us but it never could be an era that would last for long; it is too extractive, polluting and expansive. Also, the economic processes that co-evolved with industrialisation have led to corporate monoliths that have grown more powerful than nation states and the democratic processes that should govern them. These concentrations of wealth and power have a corrupting influence that has drawn a certain type of man to power.

Mindful of what has happened we can respond. Overall, we need to limit the global economy and manage our global commons. To do this we must break up multinational corporations and bring politicians back under the control of the people and we must live differently. To achieve these ends we need a new kind of leader that is wiser, thinks longer-term and is capable of seeing past the hubris of continuous growth and expansion.

We need Scandinavian-style leadership, female leadership and spiritual leadership. We need a revolution in kindness and compassion to pull poorer nations and other species into our concerns. We don’t want distant leaders with too much power we want local leaders with mud under their finger nails. Lets bypass the bastards who are currently leading us to a fiery armageddon. Peace, abundance, quality of life and an infinite potential for thriving awaits us in the Ecological Age. It is our generation’s challenge and privilege to get there. We are the leaders to make it happen.

More Brand!