Give me something then. What should be done? It is fucking depressing reading this forum sometimes, because apparently everything is shit and hopeless and doomed from the start, apart from obscure workplace and community organising which not only seems to be achieving precisely fuck all but has scant evidence for even existing.
Are you reading the same thread as me? I'm not seeing despair.
If you're expecting sudden global change, then you really need to recalibrate your expectations. Not least because the superstructure in which you're putting your faith will not change independent of the base. Those structures - state, banks, political parties - service the property relations of our current mode of production. As
emanymton said, they won't turn up for a cafe reservation in the name of Yanis, and vote to change themselves.
Look at previous overnight successes: the Spanish revolution, which seems to many to suddenly spring into being as a reaction against the military putsch, is described in Murray Bookchin's book
The Spanish Anarchists: the heroic years 1868-1936. The title itself is a clue.
"Their movement's 'heroic years,' 1868 - 1938, were marked by a fascinating process of experimentation on organisational forms, decision-making techniques, educational goals, and methods of struggle". (p228)
In other words, there has to be groundwork. There has to be substance behind the ideals.
There
were working class networks in the UK, but Thatcherism deliberately destroyed them. She didn't believe in society. She wanted individuals out for themselves.
So we need to rebuild community as a concept, an ideal; the worth of community needs to be reestablished, as well as communities needing to be reestablished as functioning social organs.
But more than that: Thatcher destroyed community because she knew it was a bulwark against the changes she wanted to make. She needed to break down the post war consensus and establish a new 'common sense', and strong community was an alternative power base. Communities can foster their own values, allowing people to question the establishment values propagated in the media. That's their danger.
But this requires rethinking what you think of as politics. Politics as defined by the BBC is the coming and going of groups of managers in government. But what if instead it's the battle of ideas in the culture and life of society, fought by establishing alternative relationships and alternative loci of management and decision making?
So community as the concept of people who live together needs to be reestablished (rather than 'community' as an identity e.g. The gay community). And therefore within that, diversity as a lived reality needs to be shown to be
an aspect of community. This can only come by living together, cooperating in common cause. It can't be dispensed from above, like a jug filling a vessel.
