What Progressives Are Missing

We progressives urgently need to pick up the pace of change, and to do that, we need to do much, much more than just vote. We need to acknowledge that most political power worldwide is firmly in the hands of an elite who are happy to control most of the world’s wealth and power and use it to acquire even more. Some of those wielding that power masquerade as progressives — running under Liberal, Democratic, Labour or People’s party banners, and talking a moderate progressive line just before elections, but their actions, most of them quiet and done in back rooms or written into legislation no one reads or understands, are designed to retrench, to prevent substantive change. Even more of the world’s political power is in the hands of those who are not elected at all — corporate leaders who simply buy politicians, and buy mainstream media, and with them, acquire far more political power than is represented by the ballot box. 

So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since in the meantime the corporate and political elite will be busy dismantling, rolling back, bribing their way out of, and circumventing laws and regulations, a much easier process than getting them passed, and enforced, in the first place.

As much as I admire what George Soros and Daily Kos are doing, it is largely futile. I would guess that the money leveraged for neo-conservative and neo-liberal causes of all kinds, when you add in those of right-wing religions, big corporations looking for concessions and favours, and anti-regulation ideologues, would have to be at least a thousand times greater than what the handful of rich altruistic progressives like Soros could muster. And the progressive political parties and the progressive blogosphere are utterly preoccupied with getting people who they think represent their values and interests elected, which, even if they were wildly successful, which is doubtful given the agnostic political realities of the day, and even if most of those politicians didn’t turn out to have a very different and more status quo-preserving agenda from what they campaigned on, would not begin to offset the political power of the unelected.

Progressives need to find another way to bring about change. The effect of strikes and demonstrations, the traditional progressive alternative means of expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo, has been reduced to the point of impotence by anti-democratic laws, anti-democratic enforcement authorities, and media propaganda. Case in point: the response of the majority of Americans to the Latin American demonstrations in the streets earlier this year was to become even more xenophobic and favour more draconian anti-immigrant legislation. So I’m not talking about rallies or sit-ins either — even when the police open fire on demonstrators and when it’s caught on film, the media still spin it is a defensive response to ‘provocation’.

What we need to do instead is starve the status quo. The existing political and economic power structure is like a black hole — it has an insatiable and ever-growing need for consumption to keep it growing. Its Achilles’ heel is that if it stops growing, it dies. It is terrified of anything that threatens its growth, which is why when eBay and Amazon created a vast market for used goods, and file-sharing took off, legislation was quickly introduced to try to kill the Internet by allowing the telecom monopoly to favour big corporations (who pay for the privilege) in the allotment of bandwidth, and to charge huge tolls for all high-bandwidth applications. The fight for what has come to be called Network Neutrality is now the pivotal political battle of our time, ultimately more important than any election. We must not lose it.

Here’s what else we must do to starve the status quo:

1. Stop working for it. If corporatists are your employers or your customers, you are defeating your own progressive cause.
2. Stop buying from it. Buy local, from small, independent producers. Buy from sustainable organizations that demonstrate social and environmental responsibility. Buy used. Trade. Share. Go NoLogo. Buy stuff that lasts. Make it yourself. Do it yourself. Fix it yourself. Unless you know the supplier is organic and animal-friendly, don’t eat meat. Don’t buy stuff made in China, or stuff that is overpackaged, or overprocessed. Don’t buy toxins — they only make you and the world sicker. Buy less.
3. Stop investing in it. Get your savings, your pensions, your investment funds out of investments in anti-progressive companies and governments — especially if they’re denominated in US dollars. Instead, invest in local entrepreneurs and coops who you do business with. They need the money, they’ll look after it because you’re a customer, and they’ll pay you more than the bank.
4. Turn off the mainstream media. You’ll save lots of time and you won’t miss a thing.
5. Get out of debt. As long as you owe The Man, you’ll be addicted to what he’s selling.
6. Get unaddicted to oil. Insulate your home properly. Use more energy-efficient appliances, and use them sparingly. Buy green energy if you can afford it. Sell one of your cars, and keep the other one fine-tuned and with the tires properly inflated. Walk (or bike) instead of driving — every minute spent walking adds three healthy minutes to your life, so walking ‘takes’ no time at all. Find or create a job where you don’t have to commute. Then sell your other car.
7. Get informed. Learn what’s going on, and what you can do beyond just voting for or against a particular politician.

This seventh point is the one that drives me crazy, because you’d think with the Internet it would be easy. But the truth is, most of us unwittingly contribute far more to, and hence support, socially and environmentally irresponsible governments and corporations far more than we think. We buy stuff from companies we don’t realize are opposed to everything we believe in (usually because the parent company’s name is deliberately unpublicized). We have no idea what our investment funds are actually invested in. As customers, we are deliberately deceived and lied to, but in the face of that we are utterly unorganized. I buy Consumer Reports because it teaches me a lot about shoddy products and practices, but they can’t even afford to put their information up online free for subscribers. When we shop, we have no way of knowing by who, how, or sometimes even where products are made, and whether we’re helping or hurting working people and the environment when we buy them.

What we need, as I’ve argued before, are networked but local free-for-all consumer information exchanges, that tell us our choices and the impact of what we plan to buy, and share information and experiences with other consumers about the quality and responsibility of products, services, and the companies that provide them.

What we need as well are networked but local free-for-all citizen education exchanges, that allow us to learn from other citizens, at organized face-to-face meetings and seminars, what’s really going on in the world, what we can do about it, and how we can become more self-sufficient and wean ourselves off our addiction to the systems and suppliers who oppose and undermine everything we believe in.

I spend a lot of time online, researching and checking out resources that readers and friends have pointed out to me, to become more self-educated about what I can and should do. But I’m constantly finding more, and I am overwhelmed at the amount of information that is available and the extent to which the vast majority of us are ignorant of it. I recently got some material from Berrett-Koehler publishers*, a small and distinguished independent publishing company that “advances social and economic justice…through a unique combination of thoughtful analysis and progressive alternatives”. They have a partnership with the Social Value Network, a community of socially responsible entrepreneurs that, like BALLE, I bet you’ve never heard of. BK are best known as publishers of the work of David Korten, Thom Hartmann, Ken Blanchard and Henry Mintzberg, and the recent best-seller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But here’s some other titles they’ve published that I’d never heard of, and wish I had:

• Repacking Your Bags by Richard Leider and David Shapiro. How to develop a practical strategy for achieving your own vision of a good life “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose.”
• Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. A book for procrastinators in the vein of Getting Things Done, with a process for accomplishing what’s important, not just what’s urgent.
• A Peacock in the Land of Penguins by BJ Hateley and Warren Schmidt. A fable about the need and process to be yourself in a world of daunting conformity.
• The Power of Purpose by Richard Leider. Discovering your Purpose, something my regular readers know I’ve written a lot about.
• The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block. I’ve written about Block’s work before. This new book is about getting past the paralysis of fear and allowing our ideals and aspirations to guide us to do what we were intended to.
• The Power of Serving Others by Gary Morsch and Dean Nelson. Getting past the uncertainty and conflicts that block us from getting started making a difference in the world through activism and volunteerism.
• Values-Driven Business by Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick. How to start an ethical, responsible business, by the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s.
• True to Yourself by Mark Albion. Entrepreneurship that combines “profit with purpose, margin with mission, value with values”.
• Growing Local Value by Laury Hammel and Gun Denhart. Creating a responsible business that contributes to the community, and the rewards you reap in return.

We need to know this stuff! And there are other publishers like Chelsea Green (whose purpose is “to stop the destruction of the natural world by challenging the beliefs and practices that are enabling this destruction and by providing inspirational and practical alternatives that promote sustainable living”) and New Society Publishers (whose purpose is “building an ecologically sustainable and just society not just through education, but through action”) who also have a whole suite of books that all progressives need to read and know about.

So progressives are missing two important things:

1. A program, and a capability, to do things beyond simply participating in the normal political process, to make the world a better place; and
2. An effective network to capture, filter, share and deploy all of the critical, high-quality resources that are available to help us do so.

The first thing, the program, needs to be built around starving the status quo. That is something that is practical, effective, and well within our power. It begins with working to ensure Network Neutrality is preserved, and then using the seven points outlined above, as individuals and as communities, to liberate ourselves from the political and economic machine that is leading to our collective ruin, and starve this machine to death.

The second thing, the network, needs to be built around better information management. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the Wisdom of Crowds has its place, but coping with the vast firehose of information available to us today is not something that can be left to collective wisdom (del.icio.us and its well-intentioned kin notwithstanding). We need to create a bottom-up network, global in scope but locally-focused, that (a) reviews, sifts and evaluates all of the information available to progressives, and creates dynamic libraries of the best available resources on each front of activism, and (b) shares and deploys the learnings from these information resources, not only by promulgating the best available resources lists, but by face-to-face seminars and meetups that teach us all how to make use of this information, and facilitate collective organization and action to make it happen.

Perhaps we could create a model that would enable the authors of this information to be funded to travel from community to community to help in this sharing and deployment process. Imagine Jim Merkel (Radical Simplicity) visiting your community to explain how others have reduced their wasteful consumption of resources and achieved a happier and more fulfilling life. Imagine Ben Cohen or Laury Hammel working with you and others in your community to help you create a sustainable and responsible business. These wouldn’t be book tours, but rather change tours.

If we really want to make the world a better place, we have to start doing these things. Otherwise we’ll just be fighting a continuous rear-guardaction against a much more powerful opponent.

* Full disclosure: BK are seriously looking at publishing my book, The Natural Enterprise. But I’d be praising them even if they weren’t.