In spite of all the horrible news we are daily faced with, from climate change to Panama papers and terrorism, there is also some hope that, yes, indeed, another world is made possible.
The neoliberal consensus is slowly fading away, people start to realize there are many alternatives that would allow for better lives on a sustainable planet.
An important role in the emergence of new perspectives is being played by the young generations, all over the world. Their protests have taken on new forms, they got rid of the paralyzing ideological and often sectarian conflicts of their parents and grand-parents, they tackle problems immediately themselves, they experiment with new ways of living, working and … of doing politics.
‘Be the change you want to promote’ is an important slogan, in the same way as ‘you make the way while walking’. Objectives and strategies do not have to be fully developed when starting on a new road towards a better world. Local initiatives are the way to build something new, bottom up. Your personal experience and your individual betterment are important stepping stones toward a better society.
These same young people are experimenting with co-housing, urban agriculture, community building, fablabs and repair shops and are more reliant on themselves than on the state. They distrust free markets and commercial attitudes towards things they can perfectly achieve in cooperation with their neighbours and friends. They reject the old paternalistic welfare state and prefer a basic income that would give them more freedom. Flexibility at work is a must for their personal emancipation. What they preach is empathy, love and solidarity.
In these experiments, procedures and ways of doing are as important as the content of the acts themselves. All hierarchies are rejected, representation and delegation are distrusted, horizontalism and equality are promoted as conditions for democracy. ‘Nuits debout’ (Nights Up) is the latest experiment going on at this precise moment in Paris. A ‘new constitution’ is the not so modest but rightful demand of the young people on Place de la République.
These attempts at re-founding democracy and re-shaping societies and states have to be admired. What they show is in the first place the fact that young people understand perfectly well how the basis of our political, economic and social systems have been eroded. There is little democracy left in our election based political systems where the same men keep trying to fight each other and where the interest of the many is buried under layers of elitist complacency. Our economies are strangled by the quasi-monopolies of tax evading transnational corporations and an insatiable hunger for profit. Our societies are challenged by huge migration flows and complicated protection systems that exclude the ones who most need them. The social dimension of globalisation, the easiest and most attractive one, is faced with the biggest hurdles.
Young people know all this and seek solutions. They know the post-war (for the North) and postcolonial (for the South) solutions will have to be abandoned, or at least seriously re-visited.
The latest tax scandal - the Panama papers - shows how daunting the task is. One may preach empathy and solidarity, but this is not how rich moguls are going to be convinced they have to pay their taxes. The same goes for corporations that fight for patents and rights to sue governments. It even goes for individuals who, think they do not need to respect speed limits … what I mean is: we need rules and rules have to be respected, we need institutions and these have to be created.
Writing a new constitution is not easy and it will not work on a pure horizontal basis. You necessarily need elections for a constitutional assembly, you need to work on a text for the whole of the population, which means you need to make compromises, you need to know you live on a threatened planet and a globalised world, so you necessarily have to take other populations and other generations into account. Sign language may help on the squares, I doubt it works in a parliament.
Moreover, there are some pitfalls. It is understandable some people want to make our rules and systems more democratic, transparent and simple. Young people today are often inspired by libertarian or anarchist philosophy. But we should know this can also have the effect of strengthening neoliberalism instead of abandoning it.
Take the basic income and our social security systems. Financially, they cannot be combined. So choosing one means abandoning the other. Neoliberals would be all too happy to abandon unemployment insurance and to privatize health care. They prefer these individual solutions to the collective solidarity of welfare states, and this is what we possibly end up with. Another risk is that you have to live with a very small amount of basic income, in which case it becomes a wage subsidy. Progressive people defending the basic income solution should think twice before they continue to do so. Receiving a basic income in order to pay for privatized social services will not allow to tackle inequalities.
Another example is the work of citizens and volunteers. Yes indeed, it is so valuable when citizens can organise themselves in order to have libraries and kindergartens, or even to help refugees. But not only is this a responsibility for public authorities, we also should ask ourselves what will happen once right-wing citizens’ organisations take on these tasks. Kindergartens for white children? Censorship in the libraries? The same goes for the careless way ‘the commons’ are sometimes being promoted. Can gated communities be ‘commons’? ‘Financial stability’?
Finally, a last example concerns the volunteering and unpaid work that is being done by people, mostly women. We surely have to thank them for the time and energy they spend on often very valuable projects, but what if public authorities just abandon their tasks for collective social services? What if unpaid citizens’ work becomes the only viable solution? This surely cannot be satisfactory. What if the so-called P2P-work and the share economy become the hyper-capitalist alternatives for the wage labour so many young people reject?
In other words, there are a lot of very positive experiments going on, and it is right to say we have to look for new solutions to protect people and to organize our collective way of being. We now live in the 21st century which means people have new and other needs.
But it would be risky to just trust all citizen’s solutions, since all too often they are inconveniently close to neoliberal solutions. We will always need formal rules and procedures to find compromises that suit the whole of society. Because society exists, and we should protect it, in the same way as we protect individuals. Local communities can co-exist but cannot be an alternative. That is the new task. We should be grateful to young generations that they focus on what needs to be changed. But all changes will need formal rules and institutions.
Ethics, empathy and love can be the basis from which to start, they cannot be sufficient. Reciprocity based structural solidarity is what will have to be improved and enlarged.
