Blogs
On solidarity, and engineered separation
Noam Chomsky speaks eloquently, i think, about regulatory capture and the deliberate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. And that, among the first causalities of this "neoliberalism", is solidarity.
While here, he is talking mostly about threats to public education, labor unions and such, however it occurs to me that there is a striking and important link to my last post about the point of grassroots collaboration.
His narrative is this. With increasing inequality of wealth, as ordinary people struggle to achieve economic well being, there is a tendency to fear others, to atomise society and turn people against each other. According to his critique, this atomisation is not symptomatic, but manufactured. People are encouraged to see themselves not as members of a community but as isolated individuals, responsible only for their own survival.
"When he testified to congress, Alan Greenspan explained his success in running the economy as based on what he called greater worker insecurity". When labor is weakened, security nets are pulled away, and people are pushed into what Chomsky calls "precarity", there's a tendency to look at neighbors not as allies but as competitors for scarce resources. In his words, this is not an accident but a feature, the weakening of solidarity serves to maintain control. Divided, fearful, and isolated, we are less able to organize for system change.
Image credit: The NZ Herald
So, from this perspective, it kind of makes sense that at this time in history, collaboration is a significant edge for us.
Actually, if we go back to the project's origins, before the Collaboration Skills Course, before the Church Road housing coop initiative, a few of us had this wonderfully naive idea that covid-19 presented the perfect opportunity to create a mushroom circle of collaboration incubators. Where small groups could teach themselves to make decisions and do things together. To bring to life Buckminster Fuller's admonishment to build new models.
The mushroom circle idea was that each group would seed another group, in the same way that cohousing projects spread. Along the way, discovering much about grassroots agency and collective self-determination. A more concrete form of We the people.
What happened? While we did run an interesting pilot 'circle of six' (borrowing a term from Theory U), it became immediately clear that we had bitten off more than we could chew. And now it feels like we have been making a series of reductions back to simpler forms of the challenge, ever since.
Which brings us to today. The Connection Project. Building capacity. Building capacity to build capacity. Not just collaboration for collaborations sake, but lets not forget that it's also about building a better world. A more connected world. Will you join us?
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
(Nb: http://www.quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/12/change-world/ )
Read more:
- Requiem for the American Dream | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnv5I8Aq4I
Note that views expressed in blogs do not necessarity reflect the views of the Project. They are the blog authors version of truth.
