My Brexit Vision - Part 1

 

Free Food Grown by Local Volunteers in the Park

 

In the absence of any positive political and/or economic consideration of the possible benefits of Brexit, I've assembled a few thoughts on the current state of the play as I see it, as an anonymous member of the  public, in an invisible drive-by town in the English West Midlands.

 

The level of psychological warfare and nudging activities show desperation tactics from the persuasion industry presently working 24/7 to reverse democracy and hand all power to an unelected elite that in turn feeds PsyOp industry shills, starves our people and mounts full spectrum infowar here at home and all across Europe and the world.

For the moment I will bracket the rise of the Gilets Jaunes in France and the withdrawal of the French ambassador to Italy for the support the French Revolution in progress has received from the Italian Five Star Movement in coalition with the League, who openly support Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National, the rebranded Front National main opposition party to the government of Emmanuel Macron.

Although it is tempting to look at Brexit in this pan-European perspective as another existential threat to the EU project, in this short blog I'm going to look beyond all that to what a progressive post-Brexit Britain could look like.

All politicians in the mainstream are guilty of failing to have a coherent vision of post-Brexit UK and the opportunities it affords, choosing rather to take a reactionary stance across all the mainstream parties, only ruptured by the Tory rightwing Brexiteers wanting to scrap all regulation by making Britain a slave economy and gangster haven of corruption, indeed much as it is now, but even more sleazy - well they are Conservatives after all aren't they?

So, to get away from the angst, I'm going to abandon all the negativity, self-interest, disinformation and backbiting that characterises the mainstream corporate media and the entire political establishment to attempt to sketch a Communicipalist vision of post-leave Britain, whatever the other countries in Europe (or beyond) hope, want or expect of it. 

First off I am imagining a Corbyn-led coalition government replacing the Tory/DUP minority regime currently in power after the next election.

We have to start somewhere in all the uncertainty so I'm starting here.

If we are going to see a progressive, sustainable future a lot of things need to happen very quickly for this to take place and to hold. The most fundamental shifts have to be at the grassroots - people have to believe in the future and be prepared to use their energies and creativity to overcome the immediate difficulties we will face from some other countries, unhappy to see direct democracy prevail. There will be many enemies within attempting to sabotage the project as we know all too well from our recent experiences anyway.     

It is a fundamental principle of the Communicipalist Creed that community sector responses are the critical point from which change can only grow, attempts to implement change from above will create immediate resistance. The role of central government is I think to stimulate and nurture problem solving and creativity at the coalface. Every community should be invited to participate in a skills audit identifying existing capacities and talents available for grassroots development and sustainable growth.

At the level of the state central government would provide the utilities and infrastructure, both physical and economic, to make these changes possible. This would include taking energy, transport and health and social care into public ownership.

A national investment bank of the sort John McDonnell is currently advocating would be the vehicle for pump priming enterprises so that 'a thousand flowers bloom' in our run down and impoverished neighbourhoods to quote the author of McDonnell's famous little red book, Mao Zedong. 

It is not however, envisaged that such a reconstructive and sustainable development orientated government would mean the abolition of capitalism, as I'm sure the scaremongers and propagandists in the corporate media will be quick to assert.

This is not communism and least of all it's not Maoism - I am talking about a polity fit for the 21st century starting from where we are at and where the world is also at in 2019. 

However the new government would need to centralise transport and energy planning, industrial policy and the welfare safety net, but at the community sector level and overarching that at the higher finance/banking co-operative level, a new social relationship must now be forged to give bankers a human face at last.

There is an element of what both Vladimir Lenin and US social ecologist Murray Bookchin called dual power at work here I think, the development of a separate and parallel economic structure that is not part of corporate globalism and therefore the crisis in capitalism and which may, or may not, have varying degrees of contact with the corporate globalised world system.

There is much more to say on this than I can reasonably fit into a short blog.

The overall task is I believe to redefine 'wealth' in order to ensure that it is more equitably distributed than is currently the case, as a central building block for the rebuilding of society after Austerity and protecting the ecology in a much more sustainable, zero carbon and planet friendly sort of way.

There are already lots of actually existing exemplars of what post-Austerity Britain could look like if we take the bull by horns and act upon the logic of sustainable diversity across all of nature including human societies.  

So what I will do now is post two short videos to illustrate some of the points I am trying to make here about how the future must be different to the present and the past. There is to me no choices in this it is I believe an urgent matter of life and death.

   

First video then looks at a big co-operative operation of values based finance where diversity is the watchword, an example interview with Tamara Vrooman, President & Chief Executive Officer, Vancity (Canada).

The second shorter video is from the other side of the world and the other side of the community sector spectrum. Meet Women Transforming India 2017 winner Kamal Kumbhar (English subtitles require full screen).

I have attempted here to post a very brief glimpse into what could be and what should be happening in post-Austerity, post-Brexit, post-Digital Industrial Revolution Britain.

With the help of new urban farming techniques, especially flat roof urban aquaponics, but also hydroponics, community gardening, wastelands however small turned into food production units and also sustainable mainstream agriculture the UK can guarantee our food security without thousands upon thousands of food miles feeding the global pollution cycle.

Brexit is at this time a clean sheet - at the moment it's little more than a playground for military and civilian PsyOp jockeying and a political football in Westminster - but within all the doom laden prophesies of Project Fear and self interested manipulations by anal oligarchs there is a promise of a better, more connected and harmonious future, where poverty is abolished from below and its abolition facilitated by both the state and the co-operative sector, rather than the merciless plunder of a neoliberal dystopia.

This is just a small fragment my vision of a green Brexit, because we simply cannot go on as we have done before, its not sustainable, zombie capitalism is killing our planetary life support systems with a rapacious pathological greed that must be ended soon. Brexit is to me, a step in the right direction, but it requires belief, commitment and that rarest of phenomena at the moment - a little bit of optimism amidst all the gloomy propaganda of the rearguard apologists for a failed and disastrous socio-economic system.