The Green Party got over one million votes in the general election.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-green-party-got-over-one-million-votes-in-the-general-election-but-they-counted-for-only-one-seat-10236055.html
The Green Party has seen its most successful election ever, drawing (at time of writing) 1,139,682 votes, dwarfing the 265,187 it garnered in 2010.
“The Green Party are the only party that truly stands up for what they believe in and I am delighted to see our commitment to deliver a fair economy, a public NHS and a safe climate has resonated with so many voters. The people have demonstrated their desire to see real change for the common good.
These election results show that the political landscape has fractured and we now live in an era of multi-party politics where the politics of the future no longer has to look like the politics of the past.
The fact that we have achieved over one million votes yet not been rewarded with more MPs draws into sharp focus just how unfair and outdated our winner-takes-all voting system is.
Our fight for a fairer, more democratic voting system – one which recognises the will of the people rather than entrenches the established order - begins today.” - Chris Luffingham
Caroline Lucas said: “In 2010, Brighton Pavilion showed that a different kind of politics is possible. That you can stand firm by your principles and still be elected.”
Over one million votes for the Green Party. These votes are more than numbers, they are values, they are votes “for” a positive, feasible, desirable alternative, demonstrating a commitment to a society of social and environmental justice.
And they count and mount. Co-operation is central to my politics. My ideal is that old one of the co-operative commonwealth, going all the way back to the Rochdale pioneers, Robert Owen and way, way further back. We have been living in an age characterised by the enclosure of the global commons, getting individuals to compete with each other for scarce resources. It’s a system which generates scarcity, not just material but psychological. And this will get worse as the pressure on resources mounts.
“You take my life when you take the means whereby I live.” (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice).
I remember reading this quote in my signed copy of Workers’ Control by the wonderful Ernie Roberts. He was deselected by the Labour Party back in 1987. So many great principles neglected, undeveloped or plain trashed over the years. What is principle without power, asked Tony Blair. PFI, dodgy dossiers, illegal invasions and financial crashes – we saw that a state subject to corporate capture and systemic imperatives gives neither power nor principle.
That kind of politics is a dead-end, we need to look elsewhere.
As more and more people are being deprived of ownership and of control over their material life-processes, association is a social force that remains within our power. Our capacity for social combinations is crucial to the associative conception of democracy I affirm. I heard this figure of over one million people voting Green and I couldn’t help but think of a politics outside of the conventional political sphere, the politics of the cooperative commonwealth. I am thinking of the original co-operators and 'the mighty power of the million pence'.
'Everyone who had nothing brought it together and it made a lot'. The lesson is that you 'make yourselves powerful by your united strength if you cannot be powerful by your separate strength'.
The first two phrases are from W. H. Brown, The Co-operative Manager, Manchester, National Co-operative Managers' Association, 1937, p. 15, and Co-operative News, 25 April 1891, the opening of CWS Flour Mills, Dunston on Tyne. The last one is from The Co-operator, March 1863, Address to Co-operators from Rochdale Pioneers, accompanying a set of model rules they issued following the passing of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1862.
Here's the point of my reference to the Rochdale Pioneers and the Manchester Cooperators - a person with one pence is small and powerless, but put a million pence together and those small and powerless persons become big and powerful. And that same reasoning applies to the million votes for The Green Party - put together as a million eco-citizens, these individual voters make themselves into a powerful collective force.
These are the human roots that feed politics, the kind of roots that conventional politics and parties have long since lost touch with. Joining together, combination, union, co-operation, may be seen as part of the power inherent in the human social character, potentially usable for itself, expressed within the forms of an associative democracy, rather than, as at present, being hijacked for private ends in the process of capital accumulation.
Here is my take. There is more to politics than votes and elections in the conventional political sphere. Democracy concerns more than the act of voting in periodic elections, or membership of and support for political parties. More important than these are the conditions which make for a democratic way of life. Raj Patel argues ‘that democracy's triumphs come not from the ballot box but from the circumstances that make democracy possible: equality, accountability, and the possibility of politics.’ (Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing 2009: 193).
The key words here are the ‘possibility of politics’. The ‘possibility of politics’ amounts to much more than ensuring the conditions for democratic elections, rights, opportunities for alternative viewpoints, as important as all these undoubtedly are. I argue for ‘the political’ in the expansive sense of creative human self-realisation, the conditions, social forms, virtues and capabilities required for the turning of healthy potentialities into actualities – politics as politikon bion, the social or public life required for human flourishing. And that includes the conditions for planetary flourishing.
“We need to see, value and steward the world in more democratic ways, realize that property and government can be much more plastic than we'd ever thought possible. This, ultimately, will be a collective enterprise, tough but infinitely more rewarding than today's market society. Our happiness cannot come from its solitary pursuit, but from the liberty of living together and engaging in the democratic politics that will help us value our common future.” (Patel 2009: 193).
Back in the 1980s, political theorist Norberto Bobbio argued for the completion of the democratic revolution, affirming an ascending theme of power as something that flows upwards. His case was for the representative principle in extending the right of free organisation and decision from the political ballot to the basic units of practical existence, work, leisure, home, education, wherever - a crucial rider - this extension is feasible. 'The present problem of democracy no longer concerns "who" votes, but "where" we vote’ (Bobbio Which Socialism? 1987:114; The Future of Democracy 1987:56). For Bobbio, this development is already in process: 'quite traditional forms of democracy, such as representative democracy, are infiltrating new spaces, occupied till now by hierarchical or bureaucratic organisations'. Bobbio believes that 'it is justified to talk of a genuine turning point in the evolution of democratic institutions' (Bobbio FD 1987:54/6). Bobbio was a critic of participatory and direct conceptions of democracy, and so he locked the ascending theme up within sterile forms. But that idea of the “where” we practise politics, opening up new spaces, is a valuable one. It is a conception that leads us to examine the contexts and conditions of democracy.
In arguing for what he calls ‘strong democracy’, Benjamin Barber makes the point that the conditions of democracy matter more than the expression of democratic will. If those conditions are lacking or constrained, the democratic will expressed in elections will be hobbled. (Barber, Strong Democracy, 1984).
Developing an ecological sensibility is crucial to immunising us from the politics of manipulation and management, underscoring an emotional and intellectual development rooted in place. In my work, I write about the virtues, their acquisition and exercise, conceiving ecological virtues as qualities for living enabling us to flourish well on the planet. And this requires appropriate social practices and transformed social relationships. As a result, we get the change in behaviour we need for a politics that respects planetary boundaries. It’s about good habits. The problem, however, is that we have become so habituated to seeing the world second hand, through the distorted channels of the mainstream media and conventional politics, that too many, subject to a dependence on ‘the economy’, that slippery euphemism for the profit system, the wages system, have acquired a dangerous tolerance of the empty promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’, and are thus all too prone to be swallowed up within the institutionalized forms of the common lie. We remain trapped within narratives of our rulers’ making.
Ben Barber identifies what is truly at issue here – the conception of human nature at the heart of politics. He defends a particular kind of politics, in all its complexity, “on the grounds that it reflects and cultivates human nature in its most admirable form(s). The truth or falsity of the entire political theory stands or falls with the conception of nature upon which it is built.” (Barber 1984).
And the politics of individual voters voting for self-interest – what else in this context could they do? – expresses the atomistic conception of an instrumental, commercialised society in which rationality is identified with self-maximisation. Each sees the other as a means to private ends, so that the public realm and the common good is dissolved in a congeries of private goods.
We have been, as the title of Ben Barber’s book has it, ‘Consumed’. (Barber 2007).
We are being beguiled by notions of market citizenship, of a property owning democracy, and a consumer republic, destroying the real conditions of citizenship whilst pretending that consumers and citizens are one and the same. They are not. And, for all of the justification of private liberty and choice, atomised individuals shifting for themselves on the market will find themselves to be powerless against the unrestrained, irresponsible, alien power that puts itself in the place of a genuine public order. This all began when neoliberals succeeded in convincing too many people that the problem is not this or that form of government, but government itself. And the reversion to a negative conception of liberty has enabled those behind the privatisation strategies to devalue and delegitimise the ‘we together’ of the citizen body by defining it as an external ‘it’, the ‘them’ of the state, big government, bureaucracy; the privatisers have turned the public realm – the space where we exercise moral freedom in association with each other – into the enemy of freedom, choice and happiness.
And, of course, this strategy has not delivered on its promise of market citizenship, only used ‘the market’ as an anonymous, irresponsible, neutral mechanism behind which to secure control over public interests and common resources. A market society, in any case, is undesirable and unattainable. The title of economist David George’s book sums the dehumanisation up succinctly: Preference Pollution: How Markets Create the Desires We Dislike. ‘Preference pollution’ is an apt phrase, in light of both the marginalist revolution, which replaced value in economics with subjective preferences, and the disenchantment of the world, which dissolved morality into a cacophony of value judgements. Either way, the result is that we live in a world of irreducible subjective preferences, with no way of determining the general interest other than by money and power. And these things are asymmetrically distributed. And individuals ‘vote’ the same way.
To be anything more than a claim against power and against others, liberty requires positive forms of political expression, as constitutive of a collective power with others. Advocates of ‘consumer democracy’ have been attempting to have their civic cake by eating the public realm whole. The shift from public to private happiness has been associated with the shift from an active and productive orientation to the world to a passive and consumptive approach. Whatever else this is, it isn’t citizenship and it isn’t democracy. The idea of a ‘consumers republic’ (Cohen 2003) is an oxymoron. Worse, the mere fact that such a notion could even be entertained indicates the extent to which we have fallen in our political ambitions. A mass of individual consumers is not the same thing as a citizen body. Consumers cannot be understood as citizens, for the reason that individual choice and desire cannot in themselves constitute the common good. A public good requires more than the aggregation of private wants.
It seems that we have become so forgetful that we need to go all the way back to Plato and re-learn some very ancient lessons. The term ‘republic’ is derived from res publica, meaning ‘the things of the public’. By definition, what is public amounts to much more than adding the sum of private wants and desires. (Surowiecki 2004: xix). And public good amounts to more than rational choice. That a society of self-maximising rational choosers could ever exist is a doubtful proposition; the choices of such individuals could never constitute a public life. Any general interest or common good that would emerge from such individual choice could only be indirect, an unintended consequence of private actions. The idea that the private choices and wants of discrete individuals pursuing self-interest could, in the absence of relations of trust, communal ties and moral codes, issue in the public good represents the triumph of faith and dogma over historical experience. But as an ideological project rationalising the private power of some over the social power of others, the notion of an illusory general interest formed out of individual liberty is a perfect political cover for private power.
David George shows how ‘the market’ satisfies – or, rather, panders to – immediate wants, often stimulated by advertisers, whilst ignoring the more substantial needs we have, those things that make for a genuinely fulfilled life. Whilst engaging in ‘unrestricted persuasion’ in order to stimulate wants, these manipulators of taste and producers of waste employ the language of liberty and free will in their justification. (George 2001: 13.) But it is a freedom that chains us to a false necessity. Thomas Jefferson warned of the dangers of ‘manacling the people with their own consent.’ (Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804). The point applies to economics as well as to government and politics, with individuals as consumers becoming manacled by their own wants. Or, more pointedly, by wants that have been externally stimulated. In The Overspent American, Juliet Schor thus explains ‘why we want what we don't need.’ (Schor 1999).
A bigger question for me is ‘why we don’t want the things that we do need’. And that gets back to the way that desires and appetites have been manipulated, distorted and canalised into sterile channels by the way our material life-processes have been arranged. That gets back to how we conceive human nature, and the expansive conception of politics as concerning the appropriate regimen for creative human self-realisation.
Combining social and environmental justice, seeing human and planetary flourishing as proceeding hand in hand, the Green conception sees human beings as social and natural beings, living in a condition of interdependence – dependent upon each other and dependent upon nature.
Human flourishing is more than a matter of individual autonomy and personal likes and wants. Flourishing concerns the whole human being, and this requires that a whole range of social and natural factors are acknowledged.
Terry Eagleton rightly points out that whether we are healthy, happy, at ease with ourselves and others, enjoying life, working creatively, emotionally caring and sensitive, resilient, capable of fulfilling friendships, responsible, self-reliant and the like depends upon things that are not and can never be wholly within our control. And an appreciation of this undermines the central category of modern moral philosophy, the free, independent, autonomous individual. ‘You cannot be happy or at ease with yourself just by an act of will. It requires among other things certain social and material conditions.’ The attainment of a moral life, as a fulfilling life proper to the condition of being human, ‘depends in the end on politics.’ (Eagleton, After Theory, 2003: 128).
That claim is likely to be misunderstood if one identifies the political with the sphere of parliamentary debates, party conflicts, elections and the organised management and manipulation of ‘the people’. I am referring to politics in a much more expansive sense than this, politics as what Aristotle called politikon bion, or public life.
Barber himself is an adherent of politics in this sense. His case for ‘strong democracy’ is made in terms of what it is to be a human being: ‘without participation in the common life that defines them and in the decision-making that shapes their social habitat, women and men cannot become individuals’ (Barber 1984:xv). That common life is a democratic life which is lived in recognition of ecological conditions.
Constraints of space mean I can’t elaborate here, but part of establishing the conditions of democracy, so that we get a genuine democratic expression untainted by the constraints of economic interest, involves addressing the logic of collective action, identifying the problems generated by individual actions which are socially, morally and politically unconstrained but at the same time constrained by asymmetries in resources and economic imperatives. And it means examining the collective mechanisms and relations required to resolve these issues. It means examining the ‘the tragedy of the commons’, ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’ etc etc with a view to establishing the conditions of the cooperative society based upon reciprocal relations.
The difficult part lies in creating the conditions of and the frameworks for effective action. From the need for action it does not follow that any action will do. It has to be the right action, deploying resources effectively. There is a need for effectiveness. Stern wrote clearly and well on this. Since the environmental crisis is global in its origins and its impacts, it requires a global deal concluded at the supra-national level. Stern sets out the terms of this deal. ‘That global deal must be effective, in that it cuts back emissions on the scale required; it must be efficient, in keeping costs down; and it must be equitable in relation to abilities and responsibilities, taking into account both the origins and impact of climate change’ (Stern, Nicholas., 2010. A Blueprint for a Safer Planet).
Effective, efficient and equitable – these set the terms of collective action that is comprehensive and coordinated, across and between all sectors, a common ethic that applies to, obligates and inspires all equally.
But, with respect to games theory, I would emphasise this point – games theory presumes the very thing that should be in question, the motivations of the players. In card games, this assumption is unproblematic. In society, where there are conflicts between self-interested agents, where individual freedom entails a self-cancellation, we need some way of forging new ties and bonds between individuals so as to generate new motivations. And that implies the acquisition of the virtues, good habits, appropriate character and new patterns of behaviour. And then, with the appropriate social identity in cooperative social relationships, we may respond and give positive, full, social expression to our cooperative capabilities and sensibilities.
We can’t go round the conventional political sphere, but we can encircle or embed it through establishing, entrenching and extending associative and cooperative connections and practices. And in so doing, we re-conceive politics as something in tune with human and planetary flourishing. And that entails creating and sustaining an active eco-citizenship, something which builds the character, conviction and commitment in the heartlands of our everyday life.
The idea of the Ecopolis expands the boundaries of the ‘political’. By bringing science, ethics, planning and the creative arts into relation with everyday life, we not only achieve an integral approach, we underscore the conditions of democracy as a practical experience. The fundamental assumption and value of the ecological concern is the awareness that a meaningful and enduring social transformation requires imaginative vision and courage. If we are to succeed in resolving the twin crises of social decay and ecological destruction, we will require the ‘ecological imagination.’ (Worster 1993: 209 210).
In July, 1885, William Morris defined his position on socialism, parliaments and politics in Commonweal. His words are pertinent:
“It is a new Society that we are working to realise, not a cleaning up of our present tyrannical muddle into an improved smoothly-working form of that same ‘order’, a mass of dull and useless people organised into classes, amidst which the antagonism should be moderated and veiled so that they should act as checks on each other for the insurance of the stability of their system. The real business of Socialists is to impress on the workers the fact that they are a class, whereas they ought to be Society; if we mix ourselves up with Parliament we shall confuse and dull this fact in people’s minds instead of making it clear and intensifying it. The work that lies before us at present is to make Socialists, to cover the country with a network of associations composed of men who feel their antagonism to the dominant classes, and have no temptation to waste their time in the thousand follies of party politics. If by chance any good is to be got out of the legislation of the ruling classes, the necessary concessions are much more likely to wrung out of them by fear of such a body, than they are to be wheedled and coaxed out of them by the continual life of compromise which ‘Parliamentary Socialists’ would be compelled to live, and which is deadly to that feeling of exalted hope and brotherhood that alone can hold a revolutionary party together.” (Morris, ‘Socialism and Politics’, July Supplement, 1885).
We can argue about conventional politics and parties. Morris evidently thought parliamentary politics was a waste of time. I remember him wanting to turn parliament into horse stables. The most important lesson I take from this passage is this notion of ‘making socialists’. This a lesson which goes back to Rousseau:
"There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards." (Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy)
This is where my emphasis falls, on making citizens, citizens who are more than atomistic voters making individual choices between pre-selected parties, politicians and policies, but as citizens able to make common cause in determining the nature of the political community. In making eco-citizens, seeing Green voters as actual or potential agents of the ecological transformation of politics, creating in our communities the contexts and conditions for the acquisition and exercise of the ecological virtues, building the Ecopolis, forming its active democratic content.
I’ll end with a quote from a very enjoyable book:
“Changing the world is a team sport, and there's a spot on that team for every person on the planet, though finding our spot can be damn hard. Learning what we can do is not easy in itself, but discovering what each of us feels called to do, in a way that only we can do it, is one of the hardest tasks life has to offer. In these times, the question "What will I do?" is one of the toughest we may ever ask ourselves.” (World Changing Alex Steffen ed 2008 Abrams New York).
Joining together, we can make a difference, and make our lives, not just our votes, count.