The antidote to Neoliberalism: Fellowship

“There is always some  new horrible thing happening. The  other day someone wrote to me about the Bangladesh Muslims trying to get  rid of Buddhist Hill Tribes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts through genocide.         

Then we hear about Iranians trying to eradicate the Bahais… it goes on endlessly.  

The Sinhalese and the Tamils… There’s always this clash between groups…. one trying to take over another’s land or power.

This has been going on since who knows when. There’s always  been someone trying to exterminate someone else since Cain murdered Abel  – and that was a long time ago!”

This quote is from the website of Amaraviti – a Buddhist retreat centre and comes from the teachings of Ajahn Sumedho a famous Buddhist teacher.

Its haunted me for years. Always someone trying to take over someone else’s power. Its human nature and I feel hopeless and disempowered in the face of our long history of power struggles against each other.

If one examines the dominant power of modern life it is unquestionably the political and economic forces clustered around neoliberalism.

The financialization of every aspect of our daily lives and the increasing dominance of a super-wealthy asset owning class. The environment is being degraded, the poor are being demeaned and trampled on and there seems to be no political movement with the coherence or energy to stand against  the powerful coalitions of self interest that tell us ‘there is no alternative’.

Maybe this is just inevitable – and if this coalition of the wealthy wasn’t doing it then some other ghastly totalitarian power would soon emerge to replace them.

I can’t subscribe to this bleak view. In fact this is exactly the kind of cynical despair that the neoliberal elites are falling over themselves to encourage. Look in the corporate-owned media every day and you’ll find endless stories designed to whip up hatred between different groups of people.

The working poor against the unemployed poor is a favourite tool of division – or the working poor against immigrants – or the UK against Europe and so it goes on day after day, headline after headline.

Not so the wealthy – they coalesce quietly and efficiently to undermine democratic oversight, weaken trade unions, lobby for tax breaks for the rich, shout down calls for a more equal society and they never stop aspiring.

The rich have a unifying principle – money and the quenchless thirst for more money. That doesn’t give them a social solidarity but it does mean that they have an organisational solidity that flows from having a set of coincidental aims. it is through this coalition of the greedy that they have been able to achieve stunning victories for the ultra-rich that trade unions can only dream about.  Victories ironically that owe everything to state power, solidarity and activism – the rich have out-done the trade unions at their own game and cleverly disguised it as the triumph of a free market.

But armed with this knowledge (and it really isn’t difficult to figure out) the rest of us should surely be able to do better than we are doing in our opposition to the fallacy and poison that is neoliberalism.

For the answer to neoliberalism is with deep irony again supplied in abundance  by its proponents every day – for they label calls for a fairer society ‘class envy’ and therein lies the key.

Because I think we are envious of their social class – and its not just the money, its the coherence, the direction, the social structures and crucially their success at dividing US while THEY stay united.

‘Resistance’ to neoliberal policies seems to be everywhere – there must be a million Facebook pages of organisations opposed to neoliberal values, there are thousands of campaigns, tens of thousands of petitions, political groups etc etc.

I am bombarded by the clamour for change and a move away from neoliberal values on dozens of different topics every day.

This  morning I have e-mails imploring me to save dolphins, fight on behalf of the disabled, resist fracking, stop online censorship and reform the pornography industry. For the most part all of these things are worthy endeavours and I am not against any of them.

But I am tired of the language of RESISTANCE. It never seems to lead anywhere except to more e-mails, more demos, more facebook pages, more websites and er more resistance.

I have come to wonder just who are we are mounting this resistance against? Nobody needs to convince me of the need to defend disabled people against the lies and benefit cuts of this soulless coalition – so why petition me about it? The people who are doing it don’t give a flying fuck what people like me think and I don’t need convincing anyway.

Opponents to neoliberal looting are fragmented into a million separate competing causes and they all want my time, my money and my anger – and deep down I have little faith that any of these endeavours on their own will create the kind of social solidarity that could rival the potency of the established asset owning class.   

So what is the answer?

Fellowship.

Not a word you see bandied around much these days and its easy to see why. Fellowship is the most powerful of human binding agents and can sweep away all manner of totalitarian and unjust social systems.

Fellowship can sweep away neoliberalism because people who are bonded in fellowship will not easily be persuaded to exploit each other – and without our cooperation neoliberalism falls.

Let us stop then RESISTING by fragmenting into a million competing pressure groups  – let us resist by urgently building networks of fellowship and deep warm human connection.

Let us decide not who we are going to stand against because that is obvious and actually getting us nowhere – let us decide instead who we are going to stand WITH.

In the words of John Winthrop:

“We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”

Utopian? Not at all – because if neoliberalism has taught us anything it is the power of a conscious intention to rally together as a community to achieve shared aims – oh and you thought neoliberalism was about a free market? grievous error – neoliberal ideology is a con trick – the rich get together to use the power of the state to defend and extend their interests – the free market stuff is left for us fools. The rich know the value of communal organising and an interventionist state.

So with all the corrosive attacks on working class fellowship (and the vast majority of us are working class) how can we rebuild fellowship and a sense of identity?

Stay tuned readers – the Haze will have some more thoughts on that tomorrow.