Mutual Aid

My brilliant friend Karla casually remarks on LiberFaciorum that she’s ‘contributing voice talent to an audiobook of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread’, and quotes from him, in the context of a discussion about the horrors of Brexit and the divisions consequent on the Referendum; I think it precisely summarises the distinction, and distance, between representative democracy and genuine empowerment:

The people commit blunder on blunder when they have to choose by ballot some hare-brained candidate who solicits the honour of representing them, and takes upon himself to know all, to do all, and to organize all. But when they take upon themselves to organize what they know, what touches them directly, they do it better than all the “talking-shops” put together.

As I mentioned a few days ago I am ploughing through the Book of Wisdom at the moment.  This morning brought chapter 38 to my attention, an interesting passage as it’s the only point where the Bible – albeit a disputed bit of it – discusses ordinary working life at any length. It’s not entirely positive; the argument is basically ‘Nobody can be wise if they have to work too much. Artisans have a great deal of skill about particular things, but you don’t ask them to run anything, do you? You need leisure for that, to devote yourself to thought.’ But the text does concede that the labourers – the ploughman, the seal-cutter, the smith and the potter – are not only necessary for the life of a community (‘without them no city can be inhabited … they maintain the fabric of the world’), but know best about their own crafts.

Here is a point of agreement with Prince Kropotkin. Ask the people in a referendum whether the country should leave various international agreements it has entered into, and the answer they give cannot help but be uninformed because the question is too big. Gauging the impact of such an action depends on a whole series of enormous sub-questions about which there can be no agreement: there is an excess of information, pointing in various different directions; there are too many precedents. Reason breaks down because data proliferates beyond its grasp. However, ask a factory worker how to improve her environment and she’ll know a lot about that. This is why representative democracy is not the end of enfranchisement, but its mere beginning; when people begin to control the landscape around them, whatever it happens to be, is when they begin to change. And once they get accustomed to the process of self-organisation in one area, so it may develop into others.

It’s hard work, though, and it’s much easier to delegate decision-making upwards to ‘some hare-brained candidate’ who can be praised or blamed as required. Here, I’m trying to edge the church into the habit of thinking about what it wants to do as a community of Christians, but that doesn’t come easy. Even a little tick-box exercise which says ‘these are the options for action, which do you think are the most important?’ seems to be something people are very happy mentally to put to one side. It creates the possibility of disagreement and the necessity of negotiation, and that’s a bit scary.