I feel a bit of an obligation to do a bit of a Pollyanna at the end of today. During the break people were making the comment that it’s all looking pretty miserable. I do agree that there are a number of problems and I do agree with the comments and the diagnosis that people have put forward in the last couple of days. In particular I think the biggest problem confronting us is the rise of the authoritarian state. This is made much easier by the interesting marriage between neo-liberalism and what a lot of people are calling risk society – the construction of our lives as extremely risky and that allows the state to come in. Jude McCulloch and people in the session on terror made a number of interesting comments about that. The question that then has come out of everything is what can we do? Were do we go? Somebody in the session yesterday made the comment, ‘it’s so easy, it’s so simple, why is it that people are not doing anything? Why is that people don’t realise what’s going on?’
I think Ted Murphy made the comment that it was to do with the media. It’s the ideological context in which we’re operating. Rob Watts this morning spoke about the need to reframe our understanding of issues within our own terms of reference. One of the things that I’ve found through my research is called TINA – There Is No Alternative. And I think that this is what the purpose of this session is, fighting Tina. I think it’s really important that we say there are real alternatives. When you talk about alternatives there are two levels. There’s a level of vision, and some people have talked about the need for vision. But there’s also the level of practice. Practice can be very straight forward. It can be very simple things that we actually don’t do for a number of reasons. One I think because we are so caught up in a number of other things. I think Frank’s point about just wearing a badge or putting on a bumper sticker. These are practical things that we actually can do now.
What I want to begin with is some of the studies that I have been conducting. One study is on so called active citizenship. Which can be code for neo-liberal obligation to the state, it can be code for responsibility individualisation or it can be a code word for activism as we know it, left activism. The struggle is on about how you might think about active citizenship. One of the projects that I’ve been involved with has been dealing with so called active citizenship from our perspective and our framing, in the Netherlands, Russia, Australia, Sweden, UK, Indonesia and Spain. We are still dealing with the information that is coming in, but the information on Australia is really interesting. When you look at it Australians by and large seem to understand that things are pretty crook. The question, and this involves both surveys and talking to people, they ask is “but what do we actually do? What do we do on Monday morning?’ Then people say ‘ you can go to these demonstrations, you can join these campaigns, you can get onto this website.” Sometimes they do that and sometimes they don’t. I’m not sure that that’s enough.
The other study that a lot of people have missed is Michael Pusey’s follow up to his original book where he fore shadowed the growth of what he then called economic rationalism, which we’ve come to call neo-liberalism, and how that permeated the bureaucrats in Canberra. This study was done at the end of the 1980’s. He followed that up with a study on what are the effects of economic rationalism or neo-liberalism? In talking with middle class Australians, he found that there was a great unease. People were not happy. It’s not as if there’s not an unease, it’s what happens with unease. One of the things that we should be beginning to do is to look at things that have succeeded, look at things that people are actually doing to change things. I disagree slightly with Rob’s point that grass roots is not where it’s at. What I believe is that you work at the level at which you can work best. This is where you’ve got the confidence, the networks, you know what you are doing. There is no privileged area which you can work in. When we talk to people and say “What was it that moved you to go to a demonstration or get involved in things?” what people say is “I got involved in the first place and realised that I could do it.”
That’s what you can do on Monday morning. You actually do something. As I said before, the alternatives approach, there’s one – vision, and two – practice, and the importance of actually getting the practice of doing things. If you look around in Australia there are hundreds and thousands of projects where people are actually getting very small wins. It’s amazing just with small wins that people get the practice and the confidence to go on and do more. It’s not a matter of saying that everything is terrible and we need to this. That’s absolutely right, but you’ve got to engage people so they are prepared to be engaged at some level. The other thing I would say is that it’s not just a matter of working within national boundaries. This has been a theme of the conference. And we’ve talked about some of the problems of what’s happening with national boundaries but those alliances across the world, they also give you that practice and they also give you the experience and also that notion that you might have got somewhere. That’s so important. Some of the examples – I have been working in Aceh, with NGOs and it’s just horrific what’s going on. We got some networks going between NGOs in Australia and NGOs in Aceh. They’re doing amazing things. The conditions of the civil war and the Indonesian government and the politics of aid, stuff about disaster capitalism and what Naomi Klein has been saying. But you’re also working against all odds.
I’ve also got contacts in a place that a lot of people haven’t heard of, Khrgyzstan. There they organised, against all odds in the immediate post-Soviet period. After some period there was a peaceful change of regime. In the capital of Bishkek there were are a number of groups concerned environmentally in the mountains that are de-nuded of trees. They entered into alliances, particularly with French NGOs. They got the technology and the support to create mobile solar panels, because they move around. They then got in contact with other groups in the old soviet Republic. And networks develop from something very small. In Russia a small group of people in an ngo, artists and who worked with a local institution, they call it a mental institution, for children with difficulties. Out of that there is a whole mental health project where they are attacking, or reframing as Rob Watt’s would say, the whole concept of disabilities and intellectual disability. This has taken off. They are now influencing some of the developments in America. There are many examples around the world, where you can say that here’s something that started off small and it grew out of these small projects. And you can see what might be possible.
And I haven’t even mentioned what’s happening in Australia because we’ve run out of time. But there are also many projects in Australia where you can say, look these are small things. As yet we don’t have a revolution where we’ve thrown the Government out, but there are also sorts of ways we can develop at the grass roots level. And it is something positive, it’s not just talking about all the problems. You’ve got to talk about the problems because they are there. But what I am saying is the international linkages and the small things do make a difference.