New Rulesfor Revolutionaries: Reflections on the Democratic Theory of Economic System Change

MARC STEARS

In January 2016, I took over the running of a large, left-leaning British think tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF). On the first day, I gathered the staff together, around 50 mainly twentysomethings, to find out what it was they wanted to achieve in the time that we were working together.

I rationalized it all at the time as the enthusiasm of youth, and I thought that it would die away fast enough. But now, six years later, the explicit, if still ambiguous, demand for a “new economic system” has gone global. From campuses to Capitol Hill, it is a commonplace to hear that we live in the end times for neoliberalism, possibly even capitalism itself. For the first time in generations, political candidates have designed bold and potentially trans­formative programs, from the Green New Deal of the USA's Justice Demo­crats to the on-the-ground transformations in cities like Barcelona.³ Within broader public debate, too, the shift is unmistakable. Where there were thin pickings only years ago, there are now airport best sellers on the end of capi­talism and a host of new journals and websites committed to “new economy” thinking and action, including Jacobin and Tribune.⁴ Even within the main­stream press, perspectives almost entirely unheard for a generation now en­joy regular columns in established newspapers.⁵

The demand for system change reaches into the most surprising of places.

For all of us committed to justice in political economy, there is much that is exciting in this new trend. Climate emergency, rampant economic in­equality, and the rise of far-right populist politics each demand an urgent and far-reaching response—a response that conventional social democracy has signally failed to provide. Seen this way, we are witnessing the creation of a vital force capable of generating the energy that our moment demands. This is in part political—with the arrival of new candidates and movements reinventing old parties and upturning old ones, reinvigorating the demo­cratic process across the world (with the notable exception of Australia, from where I am writing)—and in part intellectual, with a refashioning occurring in departments of economics and political economy around the world, which could surely not have come soon enough.

And yet the doubts that I had on that January day in 2016 at NEF stub­bornly refuse to die away. With Donald Trump in the White House and the reactionary right rampant across Europe, is this really the time to turn our intellectual and campaigning attention to the crafting of a wholly new eco­nomic system? What would doing so really mean? Is it even possible? More worryingly, we know that in the past the combined language of “system change” and “emergency” has led to an unbearable harshness in politics, an unwillingness to build consensus or to consider compromise, which in turn can lead either to political failure, as coalitions fracture and purism leads to the splintering of movements or, far worse, to repression.

In public commentary, this sort of debate swirls almost exclusively around the sharply pragmatic question of electoral politics. Will more radical candi­dates, those committed to upending the system, perform better than more moderate candidates? Or, in other words, is system-change politics the new route to power or, to use Bret Stephens's phrase, a “recipe for nonstop politi­cal defeat leavened only by a sensation of moral superiority”?⁸ This all too often collapses into the debate between backing one candidate for president over another—we have seen Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden, Elizabeth War­ren versus Pete Buttigieg—or takes the form of one of those aggressive Twit­ter spats about the electoral merits of particular policy proposals that such candidates make (e.g., Medicare for all versus Medicare for those who want it).

Important though these electoral elements are, they do not provide my focus here. Instead, I want to take one step back and examine the issue at a more fundamental level. What follows is, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, a pro­legomena to political recommendation rather than a political recommen­dation in itself.⁹ In what is to come, therefore, I ask: If we are going to try to shape what I will call a democratic politics of economic system change, what should its essential parameters be? What kind of constraints should struc­ture its campaigning style? How should its activists consider themselves and how should they think about their relationships to their opponents? From what democratic traditions should they draw? What moral mistakes are they most likely to make and how can they best avoid them?

I do not expect to answer all of those issues fully here, of course; in fact, I just want to make one major argument. But it is important to acknowledge too that as the movement is growing so fast, the large array of questions pos­sess an urgency of their own.

Essential Parameters of Democratic System Change

The emergent system-change movement has three parts, which I will call the intellectual, the practical, and the political. Some individuals and groups participate in all three, some in two, and others only in one. The movement discussed here is a loose one, and I do not expect that everyone categorized as belonging to it (or not) will be immediately satisfied with their assigned role. Nonetheless, the family resemblances between the different sections are strong and some fairly distinct patterns do emerge.

First, there is the intellectual labor, which chiefly involves economic anal­ysis. This work is broad and largely, but not entirely, takes place within the academy. It involves, at the very least, the questioning of fundamental neo­classical and neoliberal economic assumptions; the refashioning of economic analysis so as to include a greater reference to empirical phenomenon; the development of new macroeconomic models; and at least the initial stages of policy design. Participants range from those who are open about their ambi­tions to playing a part in the shaping of large-scale change—including the Next System Project, the heterodox economists' group Rethinking Econom­ics, and the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in London—to those who are more open-ended in their stated ambitions but whose work none­theless has a potentially enormously powerful and disruptive effect on or­thodoxies within the discipline—including the pathbreaking CORE program for reshaping economics curricula around the world.¹⁰

Second, there is the establishment of practical pilot projects designed to establish and to test ideas for “the new system.” Such projects have been an element of movements for system-wide economic change since at least the nineteenth century, with Robert Owen's ill-fated cooperative communities in the United States, Britain, and Australia continuing to provide an inspiration to contemporaries.

The third part is the one that most concerns me here. It is the political, campaigning element of the demand for system change. Emerging out of the ashes of the Occupy Wall Street movement, this has taken the mainstream political world almost wholly off guard over the course of the past decade. The approach is best captured in prose in Becky Bond and Zack Exley's Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything (where the title pretty much gives the whole argument away) and in Chantal Mouffe's For a Left Populism.¹² But its practical reach is far more impressive than either of these books allow. It gained huge energy from Bernie Sanders's primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in the USA; the anti-austerity campaign in the United Kingdom, which led in turn to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party; the creation of Podemos party in Spain and Syriza in Greece; and the municipalist movements that gained power in Barcelona.

The centrality of this brand of political campaigning to the overall system­change movement should not be underestimated.

The campaigning approaches advanced by these international system­change groups have many features in common, but two are of particular im­portance here. First, they are committed to “going big” and “going fast.” “You won't get a revolution if you don't ask for one,” Bond and Exley explain.¹⁴ Instead of a focus on individual policy asks or particular injustices, there­fore, Bond and Exley argue that public rhetoric should proceed straight to the large-scale and make immediate, urgent demands for systemic trans­formation. “People are waiting for you to ask them to do something big,” they explain. “Movements require clear demands for solutions as radical as our problems.” In order to “unleash the makings of a real political revolu­tion,” you have to “ask for one,” they write, outlining “the radical solutions our moments call for, not the tepid incrementalist compromises that most politicians think are all that is feasible.”¹⁵ It is crucial, the case continues, to emphasize the “life-or-death stakes of the most urgent issues of the day, from income inequality to immigration reform to climate change.”¹⁶

One consequence of this commitment is that system-change groups not only reject the standard social democratic policymaking of established po­litical parties. They have no time either for the slow, community-oriented approach to political organizing associated with Saul Alinsky and the In­dustrial Areas Foundation (IAF). The IAF's approach has, after all, long been skeptical of big, programmatic, and ideologically derived demands and has insisted that, because it takes time to build the trust required for sustained political work, relationship building should precede the taking of action. Within the system-change groups, this style of organizing is dismissed as “folk politics,” incapable of responding to the scale of the challenge our soci­eties currently face.¹⁷ Sometimes indeed, the charge goes further. Seeking to provoke as always, Bond and Exley describe advocates of Alinsky-style orga­nizing as “counterrevolutionaries” whose work can suck the energy, passion, and confidence out of a necessarily bold political moment. “Take note of the counterrevolutionaries when they reveal themselves. They're definitely not allies, and sometimes they even become enemies.” ¹⁸

The second characteristic of these political movements emerges out of the first. They possess a far greater willingness than is conventional in recent progressive movements to call out an explicit “enemy.” The system-change groups described here are wholly uninfluenced by the deliberative approach to politics that was dominant on the left only a decade ago. Not for them, the anxiety about making arguments that are grounded in public reason or for which they might expect broad support that crosses the boundaries of different sections of society with their own comprehensive conceptions of the good.¹⁹ They are equally unpersuaded by pragmatic arguments that rec­ommend building alliances with established power groupings, believing that such efforts are always bound to lead to a watering down of fundamental goals and also to wither away support, especially among the young. Instead, there is a repeated desire to build tension, sharpen cleavages, and mobilize support through an intensification of hostilities. Occupy Wall Street, of course, began this process with its willingness to name the “one percent” as the enemy of the people, but the tendency now goes much deeper and further, with clear enemies being regularly identified within even previously progressive alliances.

In practical terms, this commitment to heightening tension through the invocation of clear sides in political debate manifests in multiple ways. At the most straightforward, it leads to the kind of slogan-writing that is char­acteristic of the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn: “for the many not the few,” replacing the far more timid “for the many, not just the few,” that was occasionally deployed by his predecessor Ed Miliband. But more impor­tant, it encourages activists to take dramatic stands against social groups and institutions often previously seen as allies, neutral bystanders, or as simple annoyances rather than enemies. The repertoire of system-change political movements now commonly includes rhetorical and campaigning attacks on the “mainstream media,” including public broadcasters like the BBC; on cul­tural institutions like national museums that have collections derived from historic colonial adventures; established universities that accept corporate donations from the fossil fuel industry; and on the established NGO sector, which is often dismissed as being intent on ameliorating social injustice rather than being interested in challenging underpinning structural forms.

The training provided by groups such as NEON and funded by Partners for a New Economy focuses on just such elements, as does the Sunrise Fellow­ship, offered by the Sunrise Movement, the driving force behind the USA's Green New Deal. As with all forms of organizing, the most important ele­ment of the action is often said to be “in the reaction.” A high-profile case in an unexpected domain can both capture attention and sharply divide con­ventional opinion, drawing enemies to the surface and revealing once hidden friends. The intense public argument that the initial intervention provokes leads people to be more willing than previously to rally to the broader cause or at least to take sides. That way, the movement grows, and the end of eco­nomic system change—apparently—comes closer into view. By redefining the terms of political debate and shifting the boundary between the permis­sible and the impermissible, this tactic is often combined with the demand for radical policy solutions, especially those previously thought impossible because of entrenched opposition. This is said to broaden the range of po­tential political outcomes, a process system-change activists call “moving the Overton window.” ²⁰

In political theory terminology, the overall approach combines elements of political realism, agonism, and populism. As Chantal Mouffe has said, the emerging system-change movement “sees the public sphere as the battlefield on which hegemonic projects confront one another with no possibility of a final reconciliation” and that determines the ways in which they work.²¹ It is acutely conscious of the dominant role of power hierarchies in shaping political outcomes, enthusiastic about the place of the emotions and the pas­sions in political argument, and determined to draw energy from dividing lines between those who are “in” and those who are “out.”

Constraints on Campaigning Style

Whenever the question of system-change politics comes into view, my mind goes to George Orwell. No one captures my own paradoxical reaction to the movement as well as Orwell. For all of his adult life, Orwell was committed to the end of capitalism. It was, he argued, an economic order that had entirely failed. It was responsible for trashing millions of lives, despoiling the envi­ronment, and provoking military conflicts on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, however, he was entirely unconvinced that anyone had yet found a desirable way in which politically to campaign against it. The revolutionary politics of the 1930s and 1940s terrified him. Serving in the Spanish Civil War, he had seen the grand ambitions of communists used to justify horrific acts of political violence. But even before that he found the tendency of radical activists to discuss complex, concrete political issues in grand, vague abstrac­tions deeply off-putting. Such language obscured more than it enlightened, he insisted, and almost always resulted in empowering elites who were able to give their own very practical meanings to the generalized aspirations that they shared with others. He was also unpersuaded by the materialist founda­tions of Marxist and quasi-Marxist thinking and by their unwillingness to acknowledge that the future is, in many profound ways, essentially unknow­able. He was, as such, probably the only serious anti-capitalist to write a posi­tive review of F. A. Hayek's, The Road to Serfdom on its release.²²

These concerns are well recognized in the voluminous academic literature on Orwell. But the very heart of Orwell's objection to anti-capitalist politics is actually far more often overlooked. That was the belief, first fully advanced in his novel Coming Upfor Air but from then on ever-present in his work, that there is something in the everyday life of ordinary people that contains the source of great hope yet is wholly missed by both conventional capitalist and revolutionary anti-capitalist politics.²³ Even within capitalism, Orwell insisted, ordinary lives contain a fulfilling richness and a texture that mat­ter enormously to the people living them, including a sense of belonging to place, a feeling of community, a dedication to preserving the best of memory and past. Capitalism always threatens to erode these features with the pres­sures it places on ordinary life or to destroy them by seeking to commodify them.²⁴ But it has never managed to extinguish them. These aspects of life are small, not grand. They grow in parochial spaces and the familial. They are best described with texture and detail, not in the booming or the abstract. For Orwell, politics—whether of the left or the right—is destructive and dan­gerous when it does not realize all of this. It can be inspiring and fulfilling when it does. Both extreme market-fundamentalism and revolutionary, anti­capitalist mobilization, with its obsession with changing the system come­what-may, have a tendency to be unaware of these features of life, often even dismissing them as the products of false consciousness. But without these elements, life is not worth living.²⁵

This fundamental idea has recently begun to surface once again in re­sponse to our current political malaise. One of the most striking of these examples is the work of the British psychotherapist Adam Phillips. Phillips draws attention to what he calls the fundamental difference between “for­bidden” and “unforbidden” pleasures in the human psyche.²⁶ Although the terminology might be unusual, Phillips's description of it is profoundly help­ful one. The forbidden pleasures, he says, are those that get all of the atten­tion in public life. These are the boundary issues: the “what is permitted” and the “what is not permitted.” In the market, these issues reflect the major decisions of global corporations. In politics, they include issues like sover­eignty and nationhood, the constitutional rules governing decision-making, and questions of economic control, social justice, and the place of state and market in our lives. It is precisely the realm, in other words, of what Bond and Exley call “bigness.” Thinking about and acting on commitments surround­ing these concerns emotionally provides a sense of importance and conse­quence, the feeling of dedicating one's life to a mighty cause, like creating a better or fairer or greater world or preventing some grave evil. Rationally, it speaks to people's cognitive desire to create a blueprint for the future.

In contrast, what Phillips calls the “unforbidden pleasures” involve the bulk of what goes on in the everyday. Unforbidden pleasures are found in events like preparing and eating a regular family meal, meeting the kids at the school gate, having a chat with someone on the bus, walking in the park, checking in on an elderly friend or relative after work, going to the shops, planning a weekend away with friends. These pleasures matter to everyone enormously. They are the content of most of our lives and most of us are pleased that they are. When we look through our memories, whether cap­tured in photos, letters, diaries, or just at the backs of our minds, it is usually these unforbidden moments that loom the largest for all of us. They are the cause of the most intense enjoyment and sense of satisfaction. They reflect the connections and experiences that give meaning to our lives.²⁷ Even when we remember the “big events” of our lifetimes—the shooting of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or for a Brit, the 2012 Olympics—we do so through the prism of our own everyday experiences. That is why the saying goes, “I re­member where I was when ”

There are times when individual elements within the forbidden and the unforbidden switch. When governments attempt to prohibit everyday acts that have previously been taken for granted, then the unforbidden can be­come the forbidden. This was the cause of Orwell's deepest terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four. What would society be like, he asked, if basic, unremarkable, en­tirely everyday pleasures, like beginning a romance, telling stories to your children, buying a present for a friend, were suddenly prohibited by the gov­ernment, with your every effort to engage in them monitored and repressed? How intensely would we suffer? How could we plausibly resist? Likewise, there are also occasionally moments when the reverse occurs, when previ­ously deeply controversial practices cease to be controversial and forbidden pleasures becomes unforbidden one. Changing attitudes and legislative prac­tices about gay and lesbian relationships in many places across the world right now are an example of a once strictly forbidden pleasure now entering the realm of the unforbidden.

Even if the precise content of the categories can change over time, though, Phillips insists that the distinction itself remains crucial. And that is be­cause when it comes to politics, almost all of the energy and time tends to be sucked up in concern with the forbidden—the big—and overlooks the unforbidden—the small. But this is not without consequences. When hu­man beings spend their time thinking about the forbidden—what should and should not be permitted in society—they can become harsher, more de­termined, more narrow-minded people, more likely to see the world in “us” and “them” than when their attention is on the unforbidden. Phillips does not think the forbidden unimportant (turning one's attention there may be required from time to time), but it comes at a high psychological cost.

Moreover, if the focus on the forbidden can result in an increase in hostil­ity and conflict, it also has a tendency to draw attention like a magnet, de­priving people of the emotional and cognitive space to attend to other, more mundane, elements of their lives. “When it comes to the forbidden,” Phillips writes, “we are not supposed to let our minds wander; we are supposed to be utterly gripped, and in the grip of the law.”²⁸ The result is both that people's lives are impoverished—they are drawn away from everyday fulfillments that are just there waiting to be achieved—and, paradoxically, that they are not even able to function effectively in the realm of the forbidden, emotionally exhausted as they are from the constant pressure to be “on top” of what con­fronts them with no sustaining internal resource on which to draw.

Phillips, then, longs for an alternative. He wants people to find far greater space in their lives, including in their political lives, for the unforbidden plea­sures. He wants us to step back from the immediacy and urgency of the big arguments and to take time to revel in and experiment with the small and otherwise unremarkable aspects of our life. “Promoting unforbidden plea­sures means finding new kinds of heroes and heroines or dispensing with them altogether,” he says, and it “privileges the more ordinary at the cost of whatever we take to be the alternatives to the ordinary.” ²⁹ For Phillips, this begins with the power of everyday relationships. We should “start with the simple acknowledgment that it is extraordinary how much pleasure we can get from each other's company, most of which is unforbidden,” he says.³⁰

The idea of the unforbidden can also prompt system-change activists to look again at their own place in the shaping of a new order. Those who think mostly on the forbidden, rather than the unforbidden, often do so because they believe those are the things that really matter—they are the factors that will determine the lives we can all live in the future. At least occasionally, dwelling in the ordinary and the everyday, the small rather than the big, can deprive us of a sense that we can be a personal agent of great change. Some of us, especially those of us drawn to system-change politics, can find that an enormous psychological challenge. How can we give up the sense that we are personally responsible—at least in part—for the creation of a better future? The answer lies in an ability to extend what we are able to do, think, and feel in the present as opposed to in the future. Seeing the world through the lens of the unforbidden places the present far closer to the center of our concern. As the American sociologist Andrew Abbott puts it, seen this way the chal­lenge for our lives ceases primarily to be how each of us can play a part in improving an imaginary future state and instead becomes how we can learn to avail ourselves of every means necessary to extend our experience in the here and now and in the repeated nows to come.³¹

This is not best understood in a narrowly selfish or individualistic way. In­stead, it is a call on us to develop an ability to enrich both our experience and the experience of others in the here and now. Andrew Abbott believes that we best do that by cultivating a tenderness and curiosity that can expand our sense of the world and people around us. If, he explains, we cultivate “the habit of looking for new meanings, of seeking out new connections, of investing experience with complexity or extension,” then we can make that experience feel both “richer and longer, even though it remains anchored in some local bit of both social space and social time.”³²

What it does mean, however, is letting go of the hubristic idea that our personal role in developing our most desired future outcome determines the likelihood of that outcome and thus our future pleasures and the pleasures of others. Such a view overstates our own personal importance, the likeli­hood of our success, and the chance that even if we got where we wanted it would prove as worthwhile as we think. Moreover, by using the very idea of a singular point-in-time “outcome,” it presumes that there is some moment in the future more important than the present when everything will somehow stop. But that is clearly false. Even the future will be the present once we ac­tually arrive at it. There are no outcomes in human lives beyond death. Our task, then, at least in part, must be to know how to experience something meaningful and worthwhile now and in that “future present,” for ourselves and for those around us.

From a Focus on the Ordinary to Big Change

On the surface, this talk of the unforbidden can look like an abandonment not only of the populist drama of system-change politics but of the desire to change the system at all. Its celebration of smallness can look like a rejection of bigness. It can seem conservative, rather than radical, committed to see­ing change, at worst, as something to be regretted or, at best, as something that is shaped only by forces larger than ourselves. It can also seem woefully smug. It is all too easy, after all, for those who do reasonably well in the pres­ent social, economic, and political order to tell everyone else to sit back and enjoy the moment, rather than to join a struggle for change.

But this, I believe, is a mistake. A focus on the fundamental importance of the unforbidden does not preclude us from campaigning for wholesale eco­nomic change. Quite the opposite. The prevailing neoliberal economic and political order, after all, poses an enormous challenge to millions of people trying to prioritize the unforbidden pleasures in their lives. Neoliberalism has wrenched millions away from having the opportunity to do just that, because it denies people the space and the time they need if they are to settle into the local, the familial, or the personal. The lives we are able to lead in the current economic system are lives of overwork and underpay, of precarious family budgets, and of a decaying public realm.³³

There is, therefore, expansive potential common ground between those who are concerned about enabling people to enjoy the unforbidden pleasures and those concerned to see far-reaching social and economic change. To take a clear example, anyone concerned with promoting the unforbidden plea­sures will surely agree that the increasing social segregation of communities along lines of class and wealth, the shrinking of open-to-access public space, the increasing number of people unable to spend time with families and friends because of the demands of paid work, and the burdens of cutthroat competition in the workplace all provide serious and growing obstacles to their goal. As Eric Klinenberg has shown, a concern for enhancing the oppor­tunities for fulfillment in the everyday requires us to build real “social infra­structure,” including publicly provided, free-to-use spaces for people to meet and socialize safely and without fear. That means easy access to the beauty of the natural environment, be it in the form of urban parks or the expanses of the countryside. It also means schools that teach people more than just how to pass exams but also how to live well together. It means too doing what we can to reform as many workplaces as possible, so they are not alienating and hierarchical experiences that suck the life and soul out of us, but are places where we feel we can share a sense of purpose with others, learn and develop new ways of looking at the world, as well as making ends meet.³⁴ All of that requires real economic system change.

But if an emphasis on unforbidden pleasures does not tell us to stop seek­ing economic system change, it assuredly does tell us how we should proceed to do so. System-change political campaigning should at the very least be conducted in a way that does not undermine the crucial features of the ev­eryday. This form of politics must not further endanger citizen qualities like social friendship, care, and a sense of belonging to community, but it should seek to enhance them. Moreover, system-change political action itself might in fact most effectively begin in the everyday—be rooted in the realm of the unforbidden—and then move to the bigger realm. System-change campaign­ing might, that is, actually become stronger and more effective on its own terms as a result of beginning in the realm of the unforbidden. This is the no­tion at the heart of the IAF-style community organizing dismissed by Bond and Exley. IAF organizing prioritizes the building of connections between citizens in everyday settings over taking immediate political action like elec­toral campaigning, not because IAF thinks that campaigning is unimportant but because it believes it cannot be conducted effectively unless it is rooted in the everyday settings of people's lives. Relationship precedes action, in the IAF mantra, it does not replace it.³⁵ Beginning our politics in the unforbidden allows us to make meaningful contributions to debates in the forbidden.

System-change politics as currently constituted in most of the developed world has a strikingly poor record in this regard. The desire for speed, for big­ness, and the willingness to denounce enemies that is characteristic of many campaigning groups frequently leads them to denounce a host of everyday activities as, at best, irrelevant to the larger struggle or, at worst, a contribu­tion to the very injustices that should be fought. When I was at NEF, for ex­ample, the most ideologically committed regularly hosted all-staff meetings that they called “living our values.” Despite the uplifting name, these gather­ings too often descended into the voluble denouncing of those among them who continued to live their lives in a host of other very ordinary ways, such as buying their lunch at one of the major supermarkets rather than at the or­ganic deli. The unforbidden was morphed into the forbidden. Such practices will be well known to anyone who has spent time in an activist community of late; they are precisely what makes so many ordinary people so hostile to the woke.

All of this has to stop for a democratic politics of economic system change to take hold. The cynicism and contempt for people that are at its core are just too transparent. As the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams once argued, to find resonance in the world, political activists have to avoid mak­ing “the extraordinary error of believing that most people only become in­teresting when they begin to engage with political... actions of a previously recognized kind.” Instead, “if we are serious about even political life, we have to enter that world in which people live as they can as themselves... within a whole complex of work and love and illness and natural beauty.”³⁶

But despite the poor record, system-change political movements could take a lead in this regard. For decades now, the professionalization of politi­cal parties and the bureaucratization of government have also generated a cult of expertise and detachment, a sense that ordinary people do not under­stand their own lives, that the fundamental aspects of their affairs are better run for them from on high either by the officials of the state or the giants of the market.³⁷ If even a handful of campaigning groups made a genuine commitment to working against that trend, by working with the grain of the everyday rather than against it, they would surely see rewards. If they made conscious efforts not to criticize endlessly and condemn the ordinary lives of ordinary people, then positive change would be more likely to result. Bold change, in other words, is more likely to come about when actual power is shared and when the voices of everyday people play a larger role in shaping the circumstances of their everyday lives.³⁸

This would not mean, of course, that such groups need take a vow of si­lence on everyday practices that they find deeply challenging. No one is sug­gesting that anti-racism groups should fail to respond to everyday racism or that gender equality groups should reserve judgment in the face of everyday sexism. Nor should it mean groups shy away from controversy, from pick­ing a fight where fights are needed or by laying out arguments that radically break from the status quo. But it should mean that when groups do these things, they interrogate themselves in each instance and resist defaulting to destructive hubris and aggression simply because it is the standard mode of the conventionally political. Moreover, it could also involve a striking change of pace. As Sheldon Wolin once told us, within contemporary political life, the “mind is not given much to reflection or contemplation and does not easily give itself over to mental rhythms suggestive of calm and serenity.” ³⁹ But it is out of these moments of calmness, out of these reflections on the ordinary world around us, that can come the most humane of personal at­tachments and the most profound of political lessons.

A New Political Strategy for System Change

This an agenda for a democratic politics of economic system change derived from the belief that there is enormous untapped strength in the everyday. It is an agenda that shows how the style, policy content, institutions, and campaigning that make up our political lives need to be adapted better to reflect the importance of the unforbidden pleasures in the rest of our lives. It is undeniably hard. But it is also happening already.

At the outset of the chapter, I described the broader system-change move­ment as consisting of three parts: the intellectual, the practical, and the political. Within the second of those parts—the practical—real efforts are already being made that successfully capture the best of the pursuit of the unforbidden with the best of the pursuit of a new system. In Britain alone, the last few years have witnessed an explosion in practical efforts to work in just this way. One of the largest of these efforts is the Every One, Every Day initiative run by the Participatory City Foundation, masterminded by the so­cial entrepreneur Tessy Britton, in the East London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Founded on the idea that “what people do together every day matters,” Every One, Every Day fosters and facilitates “widespread networks of cooperation and friendship” in one of the most economically deprived and ethnically diverse communities in the whole of the UK. It does so in a host of projects, each and every one of which is codesigned and coproduced by ordinary residents themselves.

In its first year alone, funded both by the local council and a host of major philanthropic foundations, Every One, Every Day has seen at least 2,000 people involved in 40 different ongoing projects, including taking over shops on the high street and turning them into welcoming spaces for people to meet and socialize, cultivating disused public land as community gardens where people can grow food to eat, providing spaces and equipment for families from differ­ent backgrounds to cook together and to entertain their children, and opening a warehouse equipped with free-to-use tools, IT equipment, sewing machines, laser cutters, coworking space, financial advice, and a cooperatively run child care facility to help foster new community businesses. The ambition is enor­mous. “This is hope at last,” one participant told Guardian reporter George Mon­biot when he visited. “Hope for my generation. Hope for my grandchildren.” ⁴⁰

That hope does not just lie with Every One, Every Day. There is a simi­lar initiative in Wigan, in the North of England, where the local council has worked to create what it calls “The Deal,” which it describes as an “informal agreement between the council and everyone who lives or works here to work together to create a better borough.” Deal projects include programs for sup­porting community businesses and for enabling children and young people to exercise their own influence in shaping education and social services; an­other program is a wholly new way of providing social care to the elderly, developed on the principle that residents should never be approached as “a collection of needs and problems” but rather as “unique individuals, who have strengths, assets, gifts, and talents.” ⁴¹

The same principle motivates the “People in the Lead” strategy adopted in 2015 by the Big Lottery Fund (now called the National Lottery Commu­nity Fund), the largest community grant-giving foundation in the UK. “We want to start with what people bring to the table, not what they don't have, and from the belief that people and communities are best placed to solve their problems, take advantage of opportunities, and rise to challenges,” the Big Lottery's CEO Dawn Austwick insists. “From this everything else follows.” Similar declarations have followed from other multimillion-dollar philan­thropic trusts and foundations, including the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, as well as from think tanks and pressure groups, including Participle, whose founder Hilary Cottam has literally writ­ten the textbook on this new approach in her masterful Radical Help, and the New Local Government Network, whose new “community paradigm” is a long list of practical instructions to local authorities and service providers that has at its core just “one shared feature: handing power over to communities.” ⁴²

This is profoundly important work, connecting elements of the everyday to the deep business of system change. It is too early to evaluate the im­pact of each individual effort fully, of course. That will come sure enough. But at least it offers a new sense of direction. Despite all of this, it goes al­most wholly unnoticed in the world of politics in general, including system­change politics. No current political leader speaks of it. No one includes it in their manifestos.⁴³ Perhaps in the UK they are put off in part by the sense that it is too close to David Cameron's ill-fated “Big Society,” a much less forthright ambition with similar rhetoric. But the explanation also lies, as Adam Phillips tells us, in campaigners' psychological inability to take our eyes off the forbidden when we should be looking at the potential of the unforbidden. As David Brooks has perceptively explained, professional jour­nalists “barely cover” the efforts of these “social change agents” because they are dismissed as “goody-goody.” But, he continues, “these people are not goody-goody. They are raw, honest and sometimes rude. How do we in our business get in that spot where we spend 90 percent of our coverage on the 10 percent of our lives influenced by politics and 10 percent of our coverage on the 90 percent of our lives influenced by relationship, community and the places we live every day?”⁴⁴ The conservatively inclined Brooks still gets things a bit wrong, though. For this kind of grounded changemaking, with its roots firmly planted in community and the everyday, is not best seen as an alternative to politics. It should, instead, be understood as the beginning of a new political strategy. If it was seen that way, it could be one of the biggest sources of hope in a profoundly dark time.

Conclusion

Hope it might be. But what if it is too little and what if it is too late? What if the times are too dark for whatever light this kind of politics might bring? There is no doubt that we live in an era of enormous democratic disrup­tion. A time when populist forces, of both the right and the left, are ripping through the orthodox institutions, calling for the abolition of public broad­casting, the destruction of centuries-old legal conventions, and the abolition of crucial human rights. It is a time of deepening climate emergency, spiral­ing economic inequality, and rapid and disorientating technological change; a time when millions of young British people believe that they face a future without affordable housing, stable employment, or a secure safety net from the welfare state. And it is a time when politics seems incapable of respond­ing. It is a moment of Twitter wars and dark social media arts, of fake news on Facebook, of deep distrust of the new and the unseen, alongside rampant foreign interference in national democratic practices.

In an age like this, the demand that system-change politics should em­brace the mundane and the parochial, the ordinary and the everyday, can seem puny at best and indulgent at worst. Shouldn't we be trying, as my old boss Ed Miliband has argued, to get people on a “war footing” in response to these ills? Or, as Greta Thunberg even more evocatively suggests: Isn't the best response just to panic?⁴⁵

Such responses are wholly understandable—we really do live in frighten­ing times—but they also miss the point. For, as George Orwell knew, the quest to overcome our current ills and the effort to draw politics and the everyday closer together are intricately related. Our current age of despair is, after all, a direct consequence of the rupture of politics from everyday life in the neo­liberal era. If political parties, public-service providers, and campaigners had attended more to the unforbidden pleasures and ordinary rhythms of life in the last few decades, our nations would be less unequal, our communities would cohere more strongly, and trust in our institutions would be higher. The current system is falling apart precisely because we have failed to attend to its impact on real, everyday lives. It may turn out to be too late for this generation to change that—the climate emergency might determine that if the coronavirus does not—but it is certainly our duty to try.

Notes

I thank Will Brett, Rom Coles, Bonnie Honig, Amanda Tattersall, and all of the participants in the Political Economy and Justice workshop for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Particular thanks are due to Danielle Allen, both for inviting me to be part of the project and for her generous and insightful comments each step of the way.

1.

See Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015 (London: Palgrave, 2016).

2. I should not have been quite as surprised, as my predecessor as CEO at NEF, Stewart Wallis, had explicitly committed the organization to “systemic social, economic, and environmental transformation” and to building “the economic system we need” through a funded program called the “Great Transition.” See Stewart Wallis, “An Economic System That Supports People and Planet Is Still Possible,” The Guardian, November 4, 2014.

3. For examples, see the website of the Justice Democrats (https://www.justicedemocrats.com/home/);see also Masha Gessen, “Barcelona's Ex­periment in Radical Democracy,” New Yorker, August 6, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/barcelonas-experiment-in-radical -democracy.

4. For examples of varying quality, see Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (London: Verso, 2018); Naomi Klein, The Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2017); Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Es­says on a Failing System (London: Verso. 2017); Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter about the Economy (London: Penguin, 2017).

5. See, for example, the columns of London School of Economics academic Lea Ypi in The New Statesman and The Independent.

6. See World Economic Forum, “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” accessed July 9, 2021, https://www.weforum.org/focus/fourth-industrial-revolution.

7. See Partners for a New Economy, “Who We Are,” accessed May 2019, https:// p4ne.org.

8. Bret Stephens, “How Trump Wins Next Year,” New York Times, May 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/trump-elections-india -australia.html.

9. T. S. Eliot, “Preface” to Simone Weil, The Needfor Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (London: Routledge, 1995), xi.

10. See the websites of the Next System Project (https://thenextsystem.org), Rethinking Economics (https://www.rethinkeconomics.org), and the Uni­versity College London (UCL) Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/).

11. For a good survey, see Joe Guinan and Martin O'Neill, “From Commu­nity Wealth-Building to System Change,” Progressive Review, Spring 2019, 382-92.

12. Becky Bond and Zack Exley, Rulesfor Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016) and Chan­tal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).

13. NEON, “What We Do,” accessed July 9, 2021, https://neweconomyorganisers.org.

14. Bond and Exley, Rules for Revolutionaries, 11.

15. Bond and Exley, 11.

16. Bond and Exley, 116.

17. See Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future.

18. Bond and Exley, Rulesfor Revolutionaries, 164.

19. Contrast with, for example, Archon Fung, “Deliberation before the Revolu­tion,” Political Theory 33 (2005): 397-419.

20. See Maggie Astor, “How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Main­stream,” New York Times, February 26, 2019.

21. Mouffe, For a Left Populism, 93.

22. For examples, see George Orwell, “Can Socialists Be Happy?” available at the Literature Network (http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/895/) and George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” reprinted in George Orwell, Why I Write (London: Penguin, 2016).

23. George Orwell, Coming Upfor Air (London: Penguin, 1990).

24. See George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” reprinted in Orwell, Why I Write.

25. I develop these arguments in my own work; see Marc Stears, Out of the Or­dinary: How Everyday Life Once Inspired a Nation andHow it Can Again (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

26. See Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016).

27. The essays from Julie Rose and Deva Woodly in this book also point to the centrality of these experiences in their accounts of human flourishing.

28. Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures, 126.

29. Phillips, 162.

30. Phillips, 195.

31. Andrew Abbott, “Aims of Education: Address,” University of Chicago, 2002,

https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/aims-education-address-2002 -andrew-abbott.

32. Abbott, “Aims of Education.” See, too, Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resist­ing the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, NY: Black Inc., 2019).

33. See Benjamin H. Snyder, The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

34. See Eric Klinenberg, Palacesfor the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society (London: Penguin, 2018).

35. On IAF organizing, see Rom Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflectionsfor the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Jeffrey Stout, Blessed and the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

36. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Lon­don: Verso, 2007), 116.

37. See Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013).

38. See Danielle Allen, “Toward a Connected Society,” in Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversityfor Democracy and a Prosperous Society, edited by E. Lewis and N. Cantor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

39. Sheldon Wolin, “The Ordinance of Time,” in Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 258.

40. See George Monbiot, "Could This Local Experiment Be the Start of a Na­tional Transformation?” The Guardian, January 24, 2019.

41. See Wigan Council, "What Is the Deal?” accessed July 9, 2021, https://www.wigan.gov.uk/council/the-deal/the-deal.aspx.

42. See Big Lottery Fund, "Putting People in the Lead,” March 24, 2015, https:// bigblog.org.uk/2015/03/24/people-in-the-lead/;Hilary Cottam, Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State (London: Virago, 2019): and Adam Lent and Jessica Studdert, "The Community Paradigm: Why Public Services Need Radical Change and How It Can Be Achieved,” New Local, March 4, 2021, http://www.nlgn.org.uk/ public/2019/the-community-paradigm-why-public-services-need-radical -change-and-how-it-can-be-achieved/.

43. See John Harris, "For Real Change Labour Should Ditch Its Top-Down Thinking,” The Guardian, November 18, 2019.

44. David Brooks, "The Big Story You Don't Read About,” New York Times, May 16, 2019.

45. See Rob Merrick, "UK Must Fight Climate Change on 'War Footing' Like Defeat of Nazis, Theresa May Told,” Independent, April 29, 2019; and Greta Thunberg, "Our House Is on Fire,” The Guardian, January 26, 2019.

12