It’s a bright sunny morning and I move into my new house. The study’s a little dark so I go to flick a light on. Nothing happens. I flick the switch on and off and on. Still nothing happens. I try another switch. Nothing. Everything looks normal – there’s a beautiful chandelier on the ceiling and there’s plenty of bulbs in it. But still nothing.
Then I take the switch off the wall. There’s no cable. Nothing leads back to the main power supply. When the house was built, the electrician did the “second fix” – they attached the lights to the ceilings and the switches to the walls. But the electrician decided not to install the cables that would bring power to the switches. They didn’t do the “first fix”.
Our world is like this house. On a first look it seems normal in every respect. But the cables that connect us to power have all been removed.
Every time we protest we hit the switch, and the objective of our protest is the beautiful chandelier.
But if we want the world to light up, we need to deal with the disconnection. We need to do the First Fix.
Or we can just keep hitting all the different switches and hope for a different result. The mellow afternoon sun drifts silently down to the horizon. Night is falling.
There are many alternatives to the current system including the economic solutions proposed in the previous two chapters. But they are Second Fixes, They are defined as secondary because they rely on going through a separate, second party, i.e. the Government, who we require to permit them to come into being. Any proposal that requires a Protest Movement and Government action to make it happen is a second fix.
A First Fix is that type of activity that does not require external consent, i.e. you can do it yourself without anyone’s permission. For example, Workers may start up Co-Ops, Citizens may set up Citizens’ Assemblies, workers may organise Strikes, groups may instigate Direct Action – usually non-violent acts that attempt to inhibit the flow of business as usual. And of course as we have seen, people may have revolutions.
While we exhaust ourselves with protest – and there may be some limited Government response (ineffectual Public Enquiry, watery and unenforced legislation etc) – as the decades roll forward we end up back where we started.
In our times, racism and sexism have mutated into different forms and expressions but they have certainly not gone away. Governments are dragging their feet in tearing down glass ceilings but on the other hand very quick with shock and awe. Deregulation and privatisation happen almost instantly. And yet at the same time we see an ongoing struggle for women to be paid the same for equivalent work as men. So much for the Equal Opportunities Commission.
One might wonder (in a liberal type of manner) why one enormous endeavour, expensive and onerous, is so instantly achievable and yet the other, on the face of it a much more simple task that relies pretty much only on the stroke of a pen, takes infinitely longer to achieve. You will find no liberal hesitation from this author in offering an explanation of why that is so.
Second fixes remain without any effective conclusion until First Fixes are done. It is all very well making demands – and even this concession from Government to grant us the right to to peaceful protest may not last much longer – but the first thing we must do is create power for ourselves.
First Fixes do not require an exhaustive process of lobbying and we rely only on ourselves to enact them. The problem is that how may we upscale this approach so that it finally wins us control over our lives – so that we may then instigate all of that long, long list of second fixes that we have fought for in vain?
Strikes can upscale into National and then General Strikes when an entire Nation State may be halted, but even these stop short of actually taking back our share of power from existing Institutions. Instead they simply compel the Institution to improve wages and conditions. A hard won gain that will be rolled back later by the State at its leisure.
Revolutions would appear to be the only mechanism that may truly upscale to a national level but they can be bloody and will usually be met with international responses from over the border that undermine their efforts to achieve self-determination – Cuba had the US Marines; Nicaragua had the contras, armed by Reagan; Iran had Iraq, sponsored by Reagan and George Bush Snr.
And furthermore, the revolution is succeeded by the subsequent formation of a new national Government that maintains near enough the same fundamental operational structure of all those preceding it. You will have no extra power beyond your vote in bringing your Government to account, but trust us we’re on your side now. A true revolution will hand everyone an equal share of power.
We can bring our wishes into reality without needing to twist the arm of someone else who has little interest in listening, let alone acting. Furthermore we can do so without having a traditional revolution. This is why I write. To offer back up into the light of day the universal social structure that gave us power in many millennia past.
It is not revolution that we require, nor is it the other of alternative offered to us – reform. What I propose is Social Evolution.
We will approach this completely upscaleable First Fix in Book Two.
In the meantime and in the current situation, we are still sharing a planet with those people who still consider that the current institutional structure is the best way forward. They muscle to the front of the queue, with a bulging school satchel full of badges that declare their unparalleled expertise, and they offer their services to their Queen and Country and Industry.
The career professionals amongst us take the short cut. They are less interested in changing the political system and more interested in just getting their cut and securing their own future. But does this choice secure a happy ending? Let’s take a look.