Participatory Practice
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Meanwhile, the UN highlights the global emergency: ‘there is a decade left to stop irreversible damage from climate change, to protect the climate for future generations according to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (UN General Assembly, 2019). The irony is that both human suffering and environmental destruction are neither natural nor necessary; they are human-generated. We have more than enough for everyone to live without hunger, with need but not greed. The problem is that we are choosing consumerism, a system that favours the greed of the privileged at the expense of the poor and the environment. The argument for economic growth as the route to ending poverty is not only a futile defence of capitalism, but is a trajectory that is killing the planet itself. The time for connected ideas is urgent: What we urgently need is an economy that replaces the universal of profit with a universal of care for both each other and the natural world which keeps us alive. (Swift, 2020: 26)
Kindness and kinship: a different lens for a decent future Values change life on Earth! Not only do they frame the way we see the world, but also they influence how we behave towards each other and how we treat the environment. Tracing a timeline from World War II to the present day illuminates the ways in which changing the values has changed the world. From a post-war commitment to the common good based on a natural propensity for people to be kind, caring and cooperative, the British welfare state was born. But within a few decades a dramatic change in values, driven by Margaret Thatcher, planted the seeds of a global neoliberal revolution, one that has now reached world crises of catastrophic proportions. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (Gramsci, 1971, quoted in Hoare and Nowell-Smith: 276) We find ourselves in that ‘interregnum’, the gap referred to by Gramsci where the current global social order is dying but the new has yet to be born. It is a space in which morbid symptoms erupt in the form of political, social and economic contradictions culminating in crises that cannot be solved by the existing social order. Consider just some: the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008; the rise of extreme right movements in Europe and the US; populist politics in the form of Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; the environmental crisis; the world hunger crisis; the crisis of misogyny as violence against women and girls escalates the world over; the crisis of structural racism; and the rise of xenophobia as millions of displaced refugees seek sanctuary from climate change, war and poverty … And, on top of all this, as this book 62
