Place, Power, Transition & the Uncut Movement

To resist the attempts of those who seek to drag yet more wealth away from ordinary people to fill the coffers of those who brought us the financial crisis, we need to clarify our understanding of how the system as a whole is changing and needs to change, fast; and create the spaces for prefiguring the kind of society we want.

That prefiguring can come in many ways. I want to look at just two. Firstly, practical on the ground community initiatives – and in particular look at criticisms of the Transition Town movement; and secondly, look very briefly at organised civil disobedience.

(i) Practical on the ground community initiatives such as Transition Towns, Development Trusts, and the Land Reform movement, all of whom demonstrate that communities can take back power into their own hands and succeed where an atomised society of isolated individuals has failed.

The Land Reform movement that has helped restore community ownership in many crafting communities on the west coast of Scotland can be criticised as being limited only to those areas, but it is helping to generate a movement that is seeking the right for communities across Scotland to regain control of crucial local assets.

The Development Trust movement can be criticised for being focused on enabling communities – especially poorer communities – to succeed within the current economic enterprise paradigm, but only communities regaining their confidence can provide a basis for a more radical rethinking and regaining of power.

But the movement I want to focus on here is the Transition Town movement – can such movements really help bring into being the kinder society we need?

The Transition movement is criticised by the mainstream for being peripheral to the system – for not being mainstream enough; it is also often criticised by those campaigning against the system for it’s refusal to attack that same system.

In their critique of the transition movement –The Rocky Road to a Real Transition: The Transition Towns Movement and what it means for Social Change’ – Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler distinguish between the lasting systemic changes they argue we need to work towards, and what they see as the less substantial place based changes the Transition Town movement encourages people to focus on. They argue that “changes to place don’t really add up to a long lasting and substantial transition, not least globally” (2008: 33). They argue that the Transition Towns movement focusing on locality can deflect people from pushing for the systemic changes that are urgently needed, and they argue that these Transition initiatives carry the potential of inadvertently absolving the welfare state of its responsibilities by themselves taking on community service roles.

Their 2008 critique is even more resonant in the UK today where, against a backdrop of draconian and unprecedented cuts in public spending, the Conservative-led government uses its ‘Big Society’ rhetoric to encourage communities to step forward to voluntarily take on roles which public sector workers were being paid to undertake. At the same time communities are being encouraged to step forward and buy crucial local amenities which will otherwise be sold to private companies for private profit. One example being when the people in the Forest of Dean were – like communities surrounding all government-owned Forestry Commission land – asked to step forward and buy what they already own. The attempt to enclose the commons continues apace.

In his response to the argument that the Transition movement should be taking an explicit anti-capitalist position, Rob Hopkins writes that Transition

“…doesn’t start with a belief that growth, capitalism, whatever, are morally bankrupt and ethically malevolent,”  rather that “ . . . in the light of peak oil and the economic meltdown, their implosion is inevitable and we need to engage the same creative thinking that got us to this point in designing a new approach.” Rob continues: “I am taken with the idea of Transition coming in under the radar, and my experience is that the people who are picking it up and running with it are, in many cases, not people with a long background in anti capitalist work, but just people who often perceive themselves as apolitical and are taken by the vision of the whole thing.”

Although in theory these understandings of power appear to be diametrically opposed, this may be more because we can experience power in very different ways rather than because one analysis of power is right and the other is wrong. When Chatterton and Cutler write that “Transition Towns are ultimately subject to the same order of oppression, class structure, entrenched power and vested interests [as everywhere else]. . . each place and locality is woven together by networks of power which have been forged over centuries” (2008: 34). they are prioritising the existence of coercive power – a reality we can all surely recognise.

However, when Hopkins highlights people’s ability to engage in creative community projects that can transform their neighbourhoods, this is also a reality many of us can recognise. Hopkins analysis highlights the existence of a very different sort of power: there is not just coercive power, but also a very different power that is grounded in real relationships of care, one which is most evident in the connections people have with place and with each other – one that Commons systems seek to amplify and renew.

Having looked at community-grounded initiatives, let’s look very briefly at current more organised acts of civil disobedience or mass mobilisation.

(ii) Civil disobedience such as UK Uncut here, or mass mobilisation as evident in the extraordinary scenes in Spain, demonstrate a completely different part of the way forward. The ability of UK Uncut to mobilise huge public sympathy behind their insistence that the rich should also be paying their way has been impressive. In Spain, with hundreds of thousands taking to the squares in entirely unexpected, creative non-violent protest, or in Greece where the gatherings in Syntagma Square in Athens perhaps shouldn’t have surprised everyone with their extraordinarily democratic approach, people have demonstrated far more public ways to seeking to prefigure and bring into being the kinder society we want.

But as Albert Bates writes of the protests in Spain:

“While the young, unemployed protesters camped out in Puerta del Sol demanded “Democracy Real Ya” (“real democracy now”), right-wingers, some of them previously under indictment for corruption, swept the democratic vote.

“Spain is now as forked as Ireland. It not only has all the problems of a crumbling paradigm — the religion of endless growth — but it has elevated the high priests of that paradigm to its seats of power.

“Will the protests grow? Yes.

“Will they spread to other countries? Probably.

“Do the protesters have an achievable goal, some realistic strategy to get their countries out of this huge bind? No.”

And this is where a clear flexible routemap is vital to show a way to disentangle ourselves from the machine we have been convinced we are wedded to.

This is the eighth in a series of ‘Case for the Commons: the kinder Society we want’ – the ninth will look at how any such routemap has to be grounded in a very different paradigm, a very much more accurate understanding of what it is to be human.

 

Comments (7)

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  1. vera says:

    So, Justin… are you just another academic who talks AT people and never WITH them?

    1. carandol says:

      mmmmimmm……why so tetchy…’time for a seat and a pint methinks – although this will just hae to do…….as an aside why can twa wifeys gossiping o’er the greeny fence ne;er hae a rational argument ??????

      why no matter how hard they try they aye start it up frae entirely seperate premises .. 😉

  2. J McIllaney says:

    What an odd response Vera – why don’t you engage with the arguments being made?

    I think it’s a useful structure to set up counterposing the two tracks of a movement as dual strategies Justin, but I wonder if TT people see it that way? A friend recently described transition as ‘lots of people with PHDs collecting botttle tops’. It does seem to inhabit an almost wilful inability to have consciousness of power.

    The danger with TT and Uncut is that they operate seperately. One organising as if capitalism doesn’t exist – the other as if it’s the only thing that exists.

    The point is made by Hopkins about apoliticality – he sees this as a positive when in fact consciousness has to dawn…and soon.

  3. vera says:

    J, I did engage with the arguments in past posts (of the series) as did others, but he never bothers to come and talk with the commenters here.

    TT, I think, is not meant to ignore power, but they are very careful to not be drawn into the protesting, “anti” culture. They want to do stuff that is doable and practical. I think they are right in that sense; my problem with them is that they are doing a lot of talking and writing and “planning” while the doing part seems pretty thin.

    Personally, I don’t think the protesting culture (resistance activism) accomplishes much, in the long run. And Albert Bates is right… all that energy in Spain and elsewhere, and no idea what to do with it.

  4. Justin Kenrick says:

    Hi Vera,

    I thought your earlier comment (on the Change: Accelerator post) was great, and didn’t need a response – sorry if I misread that. I have been responding when I can but am on a much needed family holiday camping (and nowhere near internet connection most of the time for a couple of weeks). I was a paid academic for some years but gave it up to focus on community level resilience work (unpaid) and working with communities facing climate change in Africa (sporadically paid). Hope that answers one of your questions! You seem to think Transition is mostly talk and little action (it’d be interesting to know what action you are doing and what we can learn from that) but our experience in Portobello is that it takes a huge amount of behind the scenes ongoing work over many years – work which is invisible to those not involved. Over 5 years we got to the point where the community orchard was in place, the garden swaps working, the monthly Market off the ground, and the community owned turbine getting closer to reality. For many years, some people were very vocal about ‘those Transition people’ being all talk and no action, but that was because they weren’t doing and seeing the work involved – and what’s really funny is that now that we are being visibly (as opposed to invisibly) effective, they are exactly the people who leap in to talk about ‘our success’! When I was teaching in University, I always warned students that they’d know they were being effective in changing the world when other people took credit for their effectiveness, and that the trick is to applaud (and be grateful to) those who get involved late.

    J McIllaney – I think you hit the nail on the head. The crucial thing – from my point of view – is to follow a twin track strategy: (i) creatively and positively building community resilience, and (ii) resisting the abuse of power that is capitalism. Transition tends to do the former, protest tends to focus on the latter. The key is not to merge these two strands (they involve fundamentally different sorts of power) but to act on an awareness that the two are equally crucial. I hope to come back to this as soon as I get time, space and an internet connection to rewrite the next post in the light of the really useful comments I am receiving. Thanks!

  5. vera says:

    My goodness, I got a rise out of ya, Justin! I am delighted. Will be looking forward to more interactivity when you are able.
    I am glad to hear that your community seems productive in terms of transition. I recently read that it took people over 4 years to craft the EDAP, and I am still reeling from shock! 😉 But I am a fan, overall, and believe that for all the shortcomings, TT does good stuff.

    What TT in my view does not have a handle on is the problem of power. Building resilience is good, but the system chews up resilient communities, when it chooses. That is what obsesses me. Also, I will shortly be staying with a community here in the States that imitates the Amish lifeways. My personal belief is that minor green adjustments are simply not enough — needed though they are.

    As for resistance activism… what you resist, persists. Come visit my blog sometime! I have written several posts on that theme recently. All the best — V.

  6. garrett says:

    “What you resist persists”? Really? Did Gandhi then perpetuate the Empire by resisting it? I don’t believe so.

    I suppose that’s influenced by permaculture…but even in our gardening, while there are some weeds that are judged to be useful, and some to be harmless, we know there are some that are simply intolerable and need to be culled. In society, capitalism is one of those invasive weeds.

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