“The propaganda of ‘British Values’ is a distortion of history.
What does it mean to be British? Many things have apparently come to define British values Winston Churchill, the monarchy, Empire, received pronunciation, aristocracy, whiteness.
But some of the people of this island have a much more interesting, subversive, countercultural set of traditions buried beneath the surface. These traditions don’t fit the elites message that they alone are responsible for everything that’s good in society. Therefore it’s no surprise that most of us learn more at school about Henry VIII’s marital dramas that we do about the Peterloo Massacre. These are the traditions embodied by striking miners, peasants revolting against private tyranny and by the suffragettes. Also embodied by William Cuffay (Kofi) the disabled black man from Kent who lead the 19th Century Chartist movement for free speech.
A tradition embodied by the John Brown Women’s society from Sheffield, who refused to make manacles for factories that supported slavery, but because they were poor and women to boot, their names have vanished into history.
A tradition whose legacies include Notting Hill Carnival, Europe’s largest street festival, which was born out of multicultural, anti-racist activism in what was, 50 years ago, one of London’s poorest areas.
Today these traditions are embodied by activists, youth workers, school teachers and nurses that go that extra mile for the people they are trying to serve.
These traditions have often been persecuted and even labelled anti-British or anti-state until they bear fruit that the state then wants to claim for itself, such as poor people getting the right to vote or the abolition of child labour. These gains are then presented as the result of inherent British values rather than as the results of serious political struggle that they in fact were.
Whilst I’m not a nationalist, how national peoples and cultures see themselves undoubtedly has real world implications.
The question in these tumultuous times, is which of the traditions of the people of this island will you be drawing on and identifying with? The one that promotes and reinforces race and class oppression and explains away the genocide of Empire as a civilising mission? Or, the one of relentless activism that secured for us the very fragile freedoms that we have today.
Written by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk, originally posted at The Rules
What do rising sea levels in Bangladesh, the break up of public utilities in Ghana and austerity in the UK have in common?
They’re all symptoms of the same disease: neoliberal capitalism.
This is not the story we’re most often told. Instead, we’re encouraged to see the many economic, political, environmental and societal crises faced by communities around the world as separate. In this story, rising food prices in Kenya, for example, have nothing to do with exploding student debt in America. But this simply isn’t true. They are both inevitable outcomes of the same neoliberal logic that says that life must ultimately serve capital, rather than the other way round.
It’s only when we connect enough dots that we can expose the deep logic and rules that govern the whole global economy. Rules like, “material growth, everywhere, at all costs”; a ridiculous idea on a planet with finite resources. And it’s only when we connect the dots that we can see that the people who have the most power in this system aren’t the most thoughtful, talented or worthy, but merely those who most effectively obey these rules.
Like all stories, the way to undermine its power is to be conscious of it. Understanding and then exposing the deep logic and rules of the global system is one of the most important political acts we can engage in. It’s the beginning of our own de-programming, and it leads us to alternative solutions to these whole-system problems. Alternatives like strong local economies that can bypass debt-based currencies, and food sovereignty approaches that challenge the monoculture model of neoliberal ‘development.’ Alternatives that are already to be found all around us; from the Brixton Pound in Britain, to the Zapatistas in Mexico, to Rojava, the Kurdish free state in northern Syria.
The mainstream media is not set up to see these shifts and so continues to push the old story of “growth at all costs”. It’s up to us to connect the dots. To expose how oppressions around the world are connected. And to recognise that something wonderful and powerful is emerging all around us, outgrowing the cruel limitations of neoliberal capitalism by embracing life in all its glorious, indescribable diversity.
Will you help us connect the dots and build the alternatives before it’s too late?
Here’s how you can help:
Watch and share our short video to keep #ConnectingDots between our global oppressions:
Keep connecting dots
Saying “everything is connected” is pretty popular these days. ‘Intersectionality’ is the latest buzzword. ‘Systems thinking’ is the discipline du jour. Everyone, it seems, is trying to make sense of this dawning awareness that the challenges we face do not stand alone. Climate change, for example, is not just about carbon emissions but also economics, race relations, patriarchy and power. There is no line of disconnect, except where we draw it with our minds.
Starting with How
Simply saying that everything is connected doesn’t get you very far, though. The real challenge is to understand how. When it comes to the root causes of inequality and poverty, many of the all-important hows are not only to be found in every national economy, but transcend them all.
Globalisation is a word that’s been in common use for at least thirty years. At this point, It feels old hat; the 90s version of the social justice struggle.
But that sort of easy dismissal surrenders crucial intellectual ground. It removes from view not just basic facts – e.g. global trade is the lifeblood of most national economies – but some critical realities about how the world works.
The first critical reality is that, in the most practical and important sense, there is one global economic system. There are networks of national systems within it, but they are all part of, and increasingly subservient to, a single mother-system.
This is an astonishingly important idea to get our heads around. Instead of starting with, for example, the US or Greek economies and then looking for where it links to the global system, we start with the global, look down at the US and Greek economies and start to connect dots to see how they are similar.
You don’t have to work from this perspective for long to recognise that there is a single set of rules. They may be implemented in different ways or clothed in different language, but they are as true for the US and Greece as they are for China and South Africa.
The second point is that this one system, with its single set of rules, is being governed. There are people who see its wholeness clearly and operate from that perspective. Right now, most of these people, unsurprisingly, sit in organisations that have genuine planetary reach; private corporations, international institutions like the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, and a small number of large NGOs.
This leads to the third truth, which is that the people with the most power in the global economy are those who align with its interests. Which is another way of saying that they effectively promote and implement its rules. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, merely a truth about the nature of complex adaptive systems. The top priority of any system is to survive. Once a network becomes sufficiently complex, it becomes self-organising. From that point on, it will always ‘want’ to survive. One way the global economic system does this is to draw into positions of influence those people who best serve that purpose. A capitalist system, whose Prime Directive is the production of capital, will work constantly to refine and improve its ability to do just that. It will continue until it is stopped by an external force of some kind, or it collapses under its own weight.
Connecting these dots leads us to one very important realisation: even the most powerful people in the world have no choice but to obey the rules as long as they want to be rewarded by the system, with more power or wealth. In other words, unless a politically significant mass of people actively choose otherwise, the rules of the system will govern us, not the other way round.
The system itself will not see human suffering as an imperative to change its rules as long as those rules serve its immediate survival. It has no inherent predictive capacity. It is self-organising but not independently sentient. It can no more ‘feel’ human suffering than it can foresee its own destruction at the hands of climate change. Only us humans, with our predictive capacities, can do that. If the rules are to be changed, we cannot expect the system to auto-correct. We must change them manually.
Growth as Given
There are few rules of the single global economy more fundamental than growth. The mantra that “growth is good” has been repeated so often that it has the feel of common sense. It is almost impossible to think of how economies might work, let alone how inequality and poverty might be reduced, if we aren’t growing the amount of capital there is in the world through ever-increasing production and consumption.
This logic pervades all international debates and plans. Take, for example, the recent “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs). They rest on the fundamental assumption that every country, every company, even every human being, must grow their material wealth over time, as a precondition to anything else. This is measured in GDP for countries, and profit for businesses. In other words, they obey the rule that the global economy must grow continually through the perpetual growth of all of its parts.
But what if there is a fatal flaw in this logic? What if this rule is not fit for the purpose of guiding us into the future? What if, instead of being a panacea for all that is good, it is a driver of so much that is bad?
The evidence is clear. Totalitarian growth of all parts of the system has not only led to destabilising the climate by making sure consumption is always increasing, everywhere, but has also created vast amounts of poverty and inequality. This might sound counter-intuitive at first glance – doesn’t more money mean less poverty? But consider this: since 1990, global GDP has increased 271%, and yet both the number of people living on less than $5 a day, and the number of people going hungry has also increased, by 10% and 9% respectively. Add to that the wage stagnation across the developed world, and increasing inequality both within and between countries pretty much everywhere, and the shakiness of this basic logic becomes evident. Aggregate economic growth does not translate into less poverty.
Maybe this would only be problematic, something that could be fixed by tweaking the growth model while keeping the basic imperative in place, were it not for the second part of the problem. The imperative for every part of the system to constantly grow its material wealth is destroying us, in the most real and painful way. The consumption-driven mechanisms we use to achieve it, and the GDP measure we use to define it, have us locked on a path to ruin by actively encouraging us to treat finite natural resources as if they were infinite, and prioritize the growth of the money supply over everything else. Said another way, the perceived moral imperative for economic growth actually contradicts the laws of nature.
It is only by connecting dots that we start to be able to see the true shape of the challenges we face. We all face. Whatever our issue-focus, there are underlying rules and norms that affect every facet of human life. Growth is just one.
At first glance, connecting dots in this way might make the job of radical change feel more difficult. We struggle hard enough to affect change locally, let alone nationally, let alone globally. But something liberating and empowering happens when you start to connect the dots to see what’s going wrong; the same process also allows you to connect the dots between the struggles for making things better. We start to see that what’s driving the destruction of the rainforest in Indonesia is the same basic set of rules that are causing rising food prices in Kenya, and the explosion of student debt in America. We become connected, in very real and actionable ways, by a realization that we are all being screwed by the same basic set of rules.
Most importantly, we start to see new and different solutions. Ideas that previously seemed to only mitigate one problem can start to be seen to mitigate all.
For example, strong local economies with independent currencies and food sovereignty challenge the monoculture model of ‘development’. Gift economies that deny the commodification of life disrupt the system’s rules by their very existence. As we contract new types of relationships, with each other, with our communities, with Nature itself, we will usher in new types of social relations based on a vast range of diverse and mutually-supporting solutions that will render the old paradigm, with its slavish adherence to ideas like perpetual growth, wholly obsolete.
These new models and experiments are already taking place all around us. From the Brixton Pound in Britain, to the Zapatistas in Mexico, to Rojava, the Kurdish free state in northern Syria; a new breed of post-capitalist thinking is taking hold and spreading through networks of conscious citizens. However, the mainstream media is not set up to see these shifts. They are pushing the old story of growth, lifting boats, charity and ‘financial access’. And in their blindness lies our opportunity. The antidote lies in our ability to see how the old system is connected, while recognising the patterns in the diversity and wellspring of wonder and power that is filling the void of the crumbling edifice of growth-based capitalism. The question is, will we connect the dots before it’s too late?
Does anyone singing this song realise how much they (we) are part of the problem, or that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are NOT going to fix a system that has inequality and oppression built into it?
I don’t really want to give this any more oxygen. But. Really?
“They seek Africa as a territory to try and help solve the problems they created. When they propose mechanisms like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) they are actually trying to carbon colonise the continent using our forests to sink, to sequestrate the emissions, the carbon that they create in the Western world. I think they are using Africa the same way they used Africa in the past, to colonise it, to subjugate their people.”
Mallence Bart-Williams talks to Berlin about Sierra Leone – the richest country in the world, in nature, people, culture, treasures, minerals…and stamps.
“Of course the West needs Africa’s resources, most desperately. To power aeroplanes, cellphones, computers and engines. And the gold and diamonds of course. A status symbol to determine their powers by decor and to give value to their currencies.
One thing that keeps me puzzled, despite having studied finance and economics at the world’s best universities, the following question remains unanswered. Why is it that 5,000 units of our currency is worth 1 unit of your currency, where we are the ones with actual gold reserves?
It’s quite evident that the aid is in fact not coming from the West to Africa, but from Africa to the Western world. The Western world depends on Africa in every possible way, since alternative resources are scarce out here.
So how does the West ensure that the free aid keeps coming? By systematically destabilising the wealthiest African nations and their systems, and all that backed by huge PR campaigns, leaving the entire world under the impression that Africa is poor and dying and merely surviving on the mercy of the West. Well done Oxfam, UNICEF, Red Cross, Live Aid and all the other organisations that continuously run multimillion dollar advertising campaigns depicting charity porn to sustain that image of Africa globally.”
“Our world has never been more connected or more prosperous than it is today. Yet right now, one in every three of us alive today does not have access to the most basic needs for a decent life – food, education, medical care, a safe environment.
The good news is that for the first time, ordinary citizens like you and I have the power and ability to change the rules that are creating these injustices. Technology and the shift of global power mean that we can now demand our say in decisions that have traditionally been made by elites behind closed doors. But the truth is, these things will only change if we demand it.
That’s why we invite you to join /The Rules. If we work together, the voices of the world’s majority are too loud to be silenced. Change the rules, and we change the world.”
Thank you Health Poverty Action (HPA), for your genuinely groundbreaking report pointing out something that is painfully obvious, but that a lot of ‘us’ won’t see or admit. That $192 billion every year is lost from Africa to the rest of the world – almost six and a half times the amount of aid given to the continent.
On Tuesday the charity, alongside a number of UK and African NGOs, released the report, Honest Accounts? The true story of Africa’s billion dollar losses, as a first attempt to calculate Africa’s losses across a wide range of areas. The calculations included illicit financial flows; profits taken out of the continent by multinational companies; debt repayments; brain drain of skilled workers; illegal logging and fishing and the costs incurred as a result of climate change.
The huge disparity between aid and resources leaving Africa is an issue that I’ve been wanting to tackle ever since I started this blog. The fact that we continue to fight in the UK to get the government to keep its commitment to allocate 0.7% of the budget to aid when we take so much from developing countries is shocking; the fact that ‘we’ consider that generous is abhorrent; and when you couple that with the fact that ‘aid’ is often spent to better our own national interest it’s another galling matter entirely (and definitely another blog post on the long list of topics and issues I’d like to explore).
HPA and its partners are calling on the UK government to reassess its focus on ‘aid’, which:
“paints a misleading picture of the UK’s ‘generosity’ towards Africa, and take urgent action to address Britain’s contribution to Africa’s poverty.”
HPA Director Martin Drewry calls it ‘sustained looting’ – the opposite of generous giving, and argues that the City of London is at the heart of the global financial system that facilitates this (NB: The HUGELY unfair global economic, social and political system that was built and is run by and for the West on things like greenhouse gases, tax haven networks, valuing money and power above all else, trampling all over the rest of the world, Western ideology, patriarchy and corporate greed etc etc etc). Agreeably he calls for change from NGOs too and asks them to move beyond their focus on aid levels to “communicate the bigger truth – exposing the real relationship between rich and poor and holding leaders to account”.
This is a start but I want to take things further. I want governments across the world to take notice of this report. All those governments who give a pinch with one hand while taking a fistful with another. We don’t need to ‘save’ ‘developing’ countries and we certainly can’t use aid to do so. We need transparency and honesty, we need equality and a level playing field and we need countries to stop pretending that they’re ‘helping’ others when it’s really a smokescreen for actions taken in their own self interest. Not asking a lot huh?
Another key element to our aid issues is looking at how Africa (and other developing continents) are portrayed as a continent in need of help. There are a lot of harmful stereotypes and misconceptions about Africa and Africans in particular that need to be challenged and banished as they undermine the continent’s truth, dignity and ability and contribute to the dominant Western narrative that portrays Africa as the grateful beneficiary of the rich world’s generosity. I’m currently working on a little something with some pretty inspiring people that might go someway to kickstarting this, so watch this space. Let me know if you’re interested in finding out more!
I’d love to hear of/from others who have thoughts on this subject and of any articles/posts/books on this topic. Recommendations and comments welcome as always.
developmenttruths 