PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT 3. WHAT MUST WE DO?
return to top pageTo state that humankind is at a crossroads which will determine whether in the immediate future civilisation will survive at all, is but a statement of the obvious: The imminent global threats of nuclear and biological war, the sustained barrage of environmental hooliganism now characteristic of industrialised societies, food prospects and population pressures, which can only herald an era of mass starvation or numbers decimated by disease, and the murder of man's creative role in work and in social and political structures, should, if there were any common awareness or concern, be prompting a whole series of emergency conferences across the globe to meet the challenges they present.
Instead, for the most part, there is ignorance, passivity, and unconcern at every level of society, whilst avarice in the name of economic management, and power-seeking in the name of government, bestrides the world like a colossus.
Yet it must be said, and it is surely imperative to note, everywhere there are signs of life-affirmation against a prospect of what The Duke of Edinburgh has called 'a winter of death' to which he claims mankind is moving. Everywhere there is resistance, and the number of grass-roots organisations across the world which have been formed in recent decades to give voice to peoples' concerns about the general drift of affairs now runs into many thousands.
A great many of these organisations are focussed on the effects rather than the causes of the global crisis, so that we have organisations opposed to war, opposed to chemical farming, opposed to corporation-style capitalism, opposed to the europlot and to the multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), opposed to the destruction of the rain forests, opposed to oceanic over-fishing, opposed to big government oppression of small nations (Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kurdistan, etc, etc), opposed to gender discrimination, opposed to the animal cruelty implicit in factory farming, opposed to genetic engineering, opposed to large dams, opposed to armaments and so on and so on.
The full list is as extensive as it is remarkable and commendable; indeed one cannot but be profoundly grateful that these numerous bodies exist at all.
Yet it has to be said that overall they are having only a marginal effect on the general drift to disaster and the reason for this may well be because they are largely concerned with the effects of the abuses of power, abuses that have created the crisis, rather than its causes.
All too often these multitudinous campaigns stem from a quite unfounded assumption that the problem does not lie in the general scale and structure of society, or in the general body of values on which it operates, but in the failure to adopt the particular reform the campaigners may have in view.
This is the principle reason why all this diverse and altruistic activity, often promoted with tremendous idealism and devotion, is yielding so little of decisive effect. In consequence the global crisis does not abate, rather does it increase at an accelerating rate.
Why? The Russian Revolution of 1917 was, after all, largely the work of a mere handful of dedicated zealots and is by no means an isolated example of how a tiny minority has succeeded in imposing itself on a huge majority.
There is no call here for anyone to impose anything on anybody, but if the Bolsheviks initially lacked numbers they lacked neither clarity of aim, however mistaken, nor unity, however rigidly imposed, whereas today the movement for radical reform suffers both confusion of aim and a general lack of adherence to a common purpose.
Is it possible that a firm affirmation of the imperative need for localised, non-centralised decision-making in village-sized communities across the globe, as being the indispensable basis for democratic government and democratic control of events, might repair these two lacks?
return to top page