CHANGE AND CONTINUITY

It has long been the objective of radicals to work for ‘social change’. Fairness, more equitable distribution, an enhancement of the life-chances of the poorest – all these things have been at the root of agitation for significant social and economic shifts that will permanently alter the social order.

 This is built into the rhetoric of dissent. Things must change. It cannot go on like this. The gulf between rich and poor has become intolerable. Radical, fundamental, even revolutionary change is perceived as the only way to bring about the desired end.

Yet this language has had a relatively faint echo among the deprived and unprivileged of the world. The call to action, the clenched fist, the blazing eyes, the fervour and the red flags have been confined to a small, though passionate, minority, whose influence has sometimes been disproportionate to their numbers; and the mass movements of which they have seen themselves the vanguard, have, as often as not, melted away at the crucial moment, or have failed to materialize, showing themselves to be a ghost-army.

Perhaps those of us who remain dissatisfied, both with the existing order, and with most efforts to overthrow it, should look again at what we are proposing on behalf of the people who are to be the supposed beneficiaries of the changes we would like to bring about.

For perpetual change is also at the root of the system to which we are implacably opposed. Convulsive, unchosen and driven change lies at the heart of the global capitalist enterprise, which has caught up a whole world in its unquiet compulsions. Everywhere, people are being torn up by the roots, sent on long involuntary migrations – sometimes across national boundaries, often illegally and at risk to their lives – in search of livelihoods that have been ruined in the places where these people have lived for millennia.

Upheaval, discontinuity, violent re-shaping of people’s lives – this has been the experience of many hundreds of millions of human beings in the turbulence that began with the industrial revolution. People have been systematically evicted, displaced, sent on a perpetual pilgrimage in the quest for a better life, which remains curiously elusive, even though they may acquire more money in the process. The majority of the world’s people do not know what it means to enjoy a moment of peace and stability, where they can bring up a new generation with security, an assured livelihood, and instruct them in all that is most generous and noble in being human. They must be constantly moved on, urged to prepare themselves for the latest demands of a global economy, which no one can predict or anticipate. People are compelled to leave ancestral land which has become unproductive; their self-reliance has been undermined, subsistence has been taken away by changes over which they have no control. Even when they go to squat in city slums (and the United Nations estimates that two billion more people will be forced to seek a kind of refuge in these inhospitable places in the next thirty years), they are not even permitted to remain on the marshy or stony land where they have tried to make a home, where the mudslides or floods, the extortions by goondas, slumlords or drug-dealers, make their lives a misery. Their modest hutments are as likely as not to be swept away by bulldozers one fine day, and they will find themselves removed to some arid treeless periphery, without shelter or livelihood once more.

When people seek to escape these scenes of squalor – perhaps by paying agents and contractors to enable them to reach the forbidden lands of plenty in the West – they may well find themselves in leaky boats that go down in the Medieterranean or Adriatic, or in burning container lorries which deliver a cargo of corpses to Dover or Rotterdam. Even when they do successfully reach the shores of privilege, they are humiliated and exploited, made to feel they can never belong; their skills go unrecognized, their contribution despised.

With such changes dominating the lives of the peoples of the earth, why should it surprise us if they remain deaf and indifferent to the clarion calls to yet more ‘change’ from activists, from those who call themselves the friends of the people? The truth is, the population of the whole world has had too much change. Humanity has been buffeted this way and that, forced to yield to the dictates of a global market, has been left without pause or rest. Of course they are not going to respond to the eager urgings of those telling that all that is required is yet one more change in their lives, and then everything will be fine. Indeed, this has been the message of globalization – a promise of wealth, a promise of well-being, if only people will listen to the promptings, not of their own needs, but of the necessities of the global market.

So what should be the response of radicals to this apparent immobilism of their project of change?

In order to resist the convulsive forced changes of globalism, a quite different response is required from that of the empty sloganising and tired rhetoric of the activists and agents of change. Indeed, what people want is less change in their lives. What they require is a time of stability and reflection, a moment of sufficiency and calm – the very things which globalization, with its busy, accelerating tempo, its urge to consume more and more of the resources of a wasting earth, cannot permit; since such things would interrupt its hyperactive version of progress and its search for quicker bucks and faster profits. A wasteful, prodigal squandering, both of human energies and of natural resources are essential in this form of continuous unending change.

We have to tell another story, and offer another vision of human welfare, one which has nothing to do with the imagery of perpetual luxury and vain promises of wealth that turns to ashes in our hands. What is urgently needed is a true opposition to this story of continuous change. Perhaps the most hopeful formulation we can make to the suffering and wondering peoples of earth is that of a ‘conserving radicalism’. For the present conservatism of the world is intent on conserving only one thing – that is the privilege and power of the already powerful. Indeed, all the unwelcome changes forced upon people have this as their sole conserving objective – to keep the rich and powerful in their place. What better method than keeping the poor in a state of constant and unremitting movement and change? Secondly, in the interests of this sublime ideal, the resources of the world and the labour and the vigour of the people are used up heedlessly. In such a context, to conserve is to be radical. The resistances to be built are precisely those which defy the dynamic of present mainstream, which set limits to its predations upon our energies and construct defences against its invasion of the heart and spirit of humanity.

It seems that many of those committed to the improvement of the wretched fate of the poor and excluded have, not for the first time, failed to perceive the nature of the forces they are fighting. The most effective way of combating the ideology of constant economic growth is to concentrate on the capacities for human growth, which can recuperate self-reliance and sufficiency without becoming dependent upon a global industrialism for their sustenance and survival. The most effective mechanism for undermining existing inequalities is to rob the powerful of their power – and that can best be done by taking back into our own hands our ability to answer our own needs and the needs of our neighbours from within our own resources. A project of disengagement from a hyperindustrialism, which has convinced us that it alone is the instrument of hope and deliverance, is a more hopeful and helpful form of activism than the old urgings to tear down, uproot, destroy, smash, break or any of the other calls to destructive action, with which radicals have burdened themselves, and to a large degree, alienated the people they profess to care for.