Papworth: Political Progress

Political Progress
by John Papworth

ON OUR immediate concerns, first things first. If we are to make any headway out of the morass that now envelops all our lives it is imperative that we have a clear theoretical grasp of our problem and that we have a clear strategy for resolving it. Currently we have neither.

The problem is one of power, power out of control and largely in boardroom hands and which, even though such power has now come to dominate all our lives, is itself in the grip of propensities which recognise no moral code of restraint and responsibility as it blindly pursues goals of pecuniary profit.

The key to its power is of course the sheer scale which, on a mass basis, enables it to ignore any moral code, even though any such code must be the operative basis of any civilisation that seeks to survive. It can do this because morality is a function of personal relationships, whereas its own commercially motivated propensities are only able to operate by denying the significance of personal relationships and promoting impersonal relationships based not on any moral code but on power.

This boardroom power now has civilisation by the throat and has brought it to its knees. The key to its capacity for the suicidal mischief it is promoting lies not so much in its manipulation of monetary mechanisms as in its ownership and control of mass organs of information and opinion, a factor which enables it to make or break any political leader or reputation.

It is this crucial factor which destroys the validity of any strategy to promote sanity and progress in any field which is based on seeking to mobilise mass opinion from one centre as a means of implementing progressive political action.

That basic assumption was blown sky high when the masses were in fact mobilised and when two million ardent peace seekers marched through the streets of our capital city to register their opposition to the projected Iraq War. For all the effect they had they may as well have stayed at home in their beds. But of course if the assumption that inspired their mobilisation was proved false, it was based on another assumption no less false; that such action was an effective lever for persuading political leaders to respond in democratic terms to people's desires. It is an assumption which fails to recognise that such leaders are no longer calling the shots. Far from being masters of the political scene they are now the satraps of the boardroom bosses who own and control the media on which their own election now depends.

Hence any strategy for change which ignores these realities is irrelevant and diversionary. Whether we seek peace, social justice, ecological sanity or any other desirable social objective; if we play the traditional political game of mobilising the masses from a single centre, or seeking to influence political leaders, we are simply putting our own heads on the block. This is the lesson of our failure to stop the Iraq War from starting and why such means have no hope of halting its continuance. It is also the reason why no elected leader can make any real moves to halt the rapid expansion of European economic Fascism based in Brussels, despite the general unpopularity of its moves to abolish European national sovereignties.

It underlines that a strategy for genuine democratic change can only be based on the empowerment of countless local communities so as to establish an organic structure of power which enables people's moral and cultural judgments to prevail.This is of course the soft underbelly of centralised power; don't seek to capture it, the boardroom boys have got it first and you can only dislodge them by becoming like them – a lesson the modern history of Britain's Labour Party makes unambiguously explicit.

The party which was founded to oppose capitalism is now an executive promoter of capitalism's scheme to subordinate Europe's independent national sovereignties to its profit promoting purposes. At heart we are engaged in a battle between the power of morality and that of money. We can only win by making the local community, the place where personal relationships can prevail over impersonal mass power relationships, a significant core of decision-making power.It is a conclusion demanding a vast educational effort to resolve the multitudinous problems involved in the restructuring of power in society from the ground up rather than the top down.

… It is imperative that (we are not) diverted from the programmes of vitally needed publications, lectures, study groups, conferences and other educational efforts to promote what one day will be a global democracy based on countless centres of independent local community power and responsibility. The alternative to a policy of fragmenting the overlarge and over-centralised power that prevails today is to be destroyed by it.

John Papworth
Political opinions expressed are those of the author.