What is #humanpolitics?
#humanpolitics is a generic term for a core group of economic and social reform principles that support wealth-creation valued in terms of human and environmental wellbeing rather than the mere accumulation of money assets.
#humanpolitics helps build common cause and a shared identity of purpose for the many people, organisations and campaigns working towards an alternative to the current neo-liberal economic system.
This current system is increasingly recognised across business, civil society, local and central government as failing to provide effective solutions to the many challenges now faced by people, places and planet.
What can #humanpolitics do?
Worldwide there are thousands of organisations and groups advocating and campaigning for economic and social changes to help solve the problems created by the current neo-liberal, market-dominated system. In the UK alone there are several hundred, and each has its own group of members, participants and activists.
This all adds up to millions of people seeking to turn the tide of neoliberal market-based policy against which we are all swimming. Everybody is working to the same objective, but there is no simple way of describing what that objective is.
Every campaign has its a own name, but there is no name for the political framing that will make all their campaigning objectives possible. Human politics is our proposal for how that framing can be given a distinctive identity – a sort of glue to stick together a huge but compartmentalised campaigning effort.
Why is #humanpolitics needed?
Most proposals for reform based on human and environmental wellbeing are automatically rejected by the neo-liberal system, or are co-opted in ways that nullify their effect.
For example, neo-liberal economics favours high house prices, because it treats housing as an investment asset. So any proposal that could lower the cost of housing is automatically resisted. The only response neo-liberalism has to the housing crisis is to make it easier for people to borrow even bigger sums of money.
Similarly, it is difficult to promote wellbeing or environmental sustainability in a system which is designed to maximise financial transactions. The neoliberal system is skilled at co-opting these concepts, treating them as by-products of the money wealth that it prioritises rather then the true purpose of economic activity.
The only solution to this problem is to go beyond neoliberalism into an alternative political-economic framing, and it helps enormously if that new framing can be named and identified.
Why #humanpolitics, not #humaneconomics?
To make the case for economic reform, it is essential to convey that the economy is a designed system that we can redesign if we choose. But a designed system has to be designed by someone, which means that the way the economy works is a political choice.
There are plenty of alternative policy options that would work much better, if only governments had the foresight to adopt them. The more easily we can identify those options as part of a coherent strategy, the more chance there is that they will gain traction with the electorate and start feeding in to political thinking. Having a shared identity such as human politics can help with that.
And given that money drives politics, creating a society that prioritises human and environmental wellbeing over financial accumulation requires not only different political decisions but a new approach to how our politics is organised, too.
What are the core components of human politics?
- Land reform (including affordable housing);
- Corporate governance (controlling the way big business behaves and promoting social enterprise);
- Money creation and banking reform (sovereign money and regional / community banking);
- Public services (treating them as benefits to be maximised, not costs to be reduced);
- Beyond GDP: (changing the way the economy is measured by prioritising productive activity over resource depletion, environmental destruction, asset price increases and unproductive work).
Please look at the principles page for more information about each of these.
Why these principles in particular?
These principles combine to address the central failing of neoliberalism, which is to prioritise money transactions and accumulation over the real productive activity that improves directly the quality of people’s lives. They are among the key levers that can shift the points on the track, changing the direction in which the train of the economy is travelling away from exploitation and rising inequality towards human and environmental wellbeing.
What about the environment and climate change?
Climate change and environmental degradation (air pollution, rain forest destruction, mineral extraction, etc.) are all a consequence of economic activity. The only way to fix these problems is to do the economy differently. This means removing the incentives that the neo-liberal free market system creates to extract, exploit and destroy.
That system places no value on clean air, good health, sustainable communities and productive relationships, but is only interested in money profit. A healthy environment requires a different system of politico-economic values which the term human politics is designed to encapsulate.
What about the policy detail?
Human politics is about the direction of travel, away from the failures of neo-liberalism towards a new approach that values production in terms of the human and environmental wellbeing it creates, not the accumulation of money assets.
There are many academics, researchers and think-tanks working on specifics of policy, and the most effective solutions will emerge and can be debated once there is a wider understanding that a fundamental change in direction is both necessary and possible. The key task at present for campaigning organisations is to build that wider understanding, and this is where #humanpolitics can help by giving that change of direction a distinctive identity.
Is #humanpolitics party political?
No. Human politics should resonate right across the political spectrum, engaging anyone who seeks better outcomes for people, society and the environment.
What is the #humanpolitics website and how can it help my campaign?
This website is a resource that explains in generic terms what a people-centred alternative to neoliberalism (called human politics) could look like. It is intended to be illustrative, not prescriptive, containing sufficient material to provide food for thought but not force-feeding a specific ideology.
Adopting the term human politics as a generic point of reference and using the #humanpolitics hashtag can help locate campaigns within a shared movement for change.
Read about the core principles here, or read here about the four pillars of human politics