It’s Friday morning, the second reading of Clive Lewis’s Water Bill on Parliament Live TV. I hear Clive say that we need to be able ‘to imagine a better way.’ If my memory serves me (it often doesn’t) he was referring to our economic model. He reminded me of this, from Imarisha Walidah: “The decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.” Imarisha writes about visionary fiction as a means of unlocking our way to freedom because ‘we can’t build what we can’t imagine’. I agree. I think.
Returning to that meeting in the HOC, Jerome Mayhew (Conservative member for Broadland and Fakenham) retorted somewhat mockingly in response to Clive’s criticism of capitalism applied to public services, that he should know well that “capitalism has lifted more people in the world out of poverty and despair than any other economic system”.
Really? Doesn’t it depend on how you define poverty?
For example: “While lack of money and power combined was acknowledged as the basic problem, it was the impact of powerlessness – the emotional fallout – that was described as the hardest aspect of poverty with which to cope” (First Hand Experience, Second Hand Life: Women and Poverty. National Women’s Council of Ireland)
And as Mayhew should surely know, many eminent economists would argue that poverty has fallen despite of, not because of capitalism. According to Richard Woolff, if you accept the UN definition of poverty (as not having basic nutrition and normal life expectancy), the numbers and proportion of people in poverty has increased over the last four decades. The one country where poverty has fallen is China, largely through wide-ranging investment in social programmes and policies. “It will take (he says) 200 years to eliminate poverty assuming no recessions and if the global economy reaches 173 times its present size”. Which of course is improbable. Even the World Bank says reducing inequality by 1% a year would lift more people out of poverty than by increasing economic growth by 1% above current forecasts.
“No advanced economy has ever achieved low poverty rates without high levels of government social spending. Capitalists have always fought against those policies. Poverty has been reduced not by capitalism but in spite of capitalism. As long as we have a system designed around profit, that won’t change”. (Woolff)
So was Mayhew engaging in visionary fiction? Is capitalism the result of people applying their imagination to how to create a world without poverty and they just got it wrong? And if so, how can we imagine our way to something better and be sure not to be similarly deluded? Or more likely, did a class of people imagine a world that met their needs and then succeed in creating it? And if so, does it follow that we’re in with a chance, if only we can imagine what our better version looks like? And agree on it?
A few days earlier I persuaded my MP to put a written question to Rachel Reeves asking: what role do climate and nature scientists play in the creation of policy in the Treasury? For a couple of hours I admit, I was well pleased with myself. But not for long which is as well, because when the reply came back it was – as you, I’m sure, will have surmised – along the lines of (I exaggerate) ‘these specialists are involved at every stage and in every way you can imagine (if not more) in the formation of policy in the Treasury’. Oh really, I thought, and they’re backing Carbon Capture and Storage in Teesside to the tune of £22 billion of tax payers’ money? I don’t think so!
Or could it be that most scientists, like most people, no matter the evidence their science provides, fail to make the connection between a hegemonic economic model drawing its oxygen from everlasting exploitation, and the destruction of the living world?
I’m reading The Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe. ‘This (book) is an attempt to write neither a revisionist history nor a science textbook. Instead, it brings together historical evidence and scientific methods to ask urgent, philosophical questions about whether we want to live differently’. (my italics)
She calls out the limitations of Western science – founded on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism and ableism and its embedding in the neo-classic economics ‘designed to kill us’ and instead points to ‘other ways of breathing, of being, that require reciprocity and tuning in to nature. Once you tune in, you will not be able to unhear it’.
I am tuning in to Tao Leigh Goffe and I know I won’t be able to unhear her. She argues that the origins of climate and nature collapse lie in the economies and ideas of plantation slavery – the extraction of ore and the seventeenth century imposition of monocrop agriculture that stripped the soil of nutrients and destroyed ecosystems, the swift and mass burning of ancient woodlands releasing the carbon they stored to make way for the plantations and carried on the wind to this day, and the forced migrations not only of peoples, but of whatever satisfied the curiosity of the slaver or was required to grow the economies of Western nations. Such a small step – for me – to dead newts and frogs, new runways and a farcical CCS fantasy for Teesside. And sewage in the rivers…
So much for scientists holding the answer – even if we could get the Treasury to listen to them, they would be hearing it all wrong. Whilst ‘the US and the west bear responsibility for most carbon emissions, consume the largest share of corporate profits and control the environmentalist conversation’, other worlds and economies exist that don’t degrade the natural environment – they are more than possible; they are thriving. So ‘why do we refuse to heed the successes of green and sustainable island nation communities?’ she asks.
In Scientists on Survival – Personal Stories of Climate Action by Scientists for Extinction Rebellion there is a suggestion that since the science to policy process is broken, scientists should focus on bringing science to communities. Could we do that?
Imagine a better way. As the far right knows well, if you want to push things, you vocalise the most extreme opinion you can imagine. Not because you think it’s achievable right now, but because once it has oxygen, it flies. Bingo, two steps back from your Overton window and the previously unthinkable is up for debate. And in maybe ten years, you get your most outrageous scenario into the mainstream.
So unlock the imagination and let out those outrageous ideas! I’m imagining conversations where we listen to indigenous wisdom, and people including artists, scientists, your neighbours and friends, debate and agree a better way, and economists listen and write a strategy that makes it possible. Of course a man called Jeremy had a vision and policies to make it happen, but his timescale was weeks, not years. We could learn from that.
Judy Seymour is a Compass member. Judy got her introduction to politics on leaving university and as a member of a radical French theatre collective. Here, as well as getting into a lot of trouble, she experienced the role artists can play in campaigns for social change. On returning to the U.K., she moved to the north east becoming a founder member of Them Wifies, a feminist community arts collective working with young people. Fast forward to Northern Ireland where she led a women’s development agency tasked with growing the impact of women’s participation in civic life. Now retired, she spends her time painting, gardening and ranting. And as an activist for climate and nature.
Opinions in the above article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of Compass as an organisation. Compass seeks to platform a wide range of progressive viewpoints that reflect the diversity and plurality of the democratic left.