Many voices, one journey – an open letter about human politics
True economic reform means systemic change, which needs a convincing, identifiable, named alternative system that is “oven ready”!
This letter can be downloaded in pdf format here.
Dear Reader
As we look beyond Covid, many are asking – what next? -, urging that we build back better and not return to the way things were.
- The Covid crisis has reminded us that life, family, community, relationships, good health, and a safe, sustainable environment are far more important than the accumulation of money for its own sake.
- It has shown us that a choice between paying rent and buying food is not one that any family should face in such a wealthy society and that given the political will a fairer distribution of money is both possible and necessary.
- And it has demonstrated the true value of our shared resources. We have seen the vital importance of investing in the nurses and doctors of the NHS, in the teachers in our schools and in the many others in public service who have worked so tirelessly to help us through the crisis.
But although boosted by the Covid crisis, this desire for a new direction is not new. At least since the crash of 2008 it has been widely talked about, while its roots go back to a counter-narrative emerging in the 1980s to the neoliberal, winner-takes-all policies that were then taking hold.
Challenging the back-to-front economy
Now, in Britain, there are hundreds of groups and organisations all working for a political economy that places people, communities and relationships at its centre. Around the world there are thousands more. They reflect a growing realisation that real value is being lost in a back-to-front economy that puts money before people, that fetishises money accumulation rather than treating money as a tool with which real wealth can be created.
The work itself ranges from campaigning to research, education, training and outreach. Most organisations have a specific focus: climate change, environmental destruction, housing, food poverty, inequality, tax, banking, social enterprise and public services are among the key concerns. The larger organisations work across these issues, relating them to one another to build a context for a more systemic change.
Taken together the total effort is enormous, and the demand, according to opinion polling, is equally great. But although some organisations are working hard to join the dots, the overall effort is still too disparate and disconnected to manifest as a truly transformative force. A shared picture is missing from the messaging, something around which that demand for a new approach to economic policy can form a distinctive identity.
This is wholly understandable. For a start, everybody is short of time and funding, so the focus is naturally on immediate tasks and objectives. For those working on affordable housing it may not seem a priority to spend time on the way that the economy is measured, even though the two issues are closely related at a meta-level.
A further issue arises from the diverse ecology of the change movement, which ranges from well-funded academic groups and policy think-tanks to small, local campaigns and interventions run by volunteers. In between sits a number of more or less well-established groups campaigning, facilitating, educating or researching in a particular area of interest or expertise.
To add to the difficulty, most of the funded groups and organisations have charitable status. This makes it easier to raise money but places limitations on what they can do politically, with evidence emerging of increased political and government hostility to charitable activism. In principle political activity can be carried out by a charity to support the delivery of its charitable purposes. But it cannot be party-political, which can cause problems if one party is associated most strongly with the economic and social status quo that charitable campaigners are seeking to change.
The entrenchment of the status quo has other consequences. The government recently issued guidelines to schools that, on the face of it, would outlaw the use of some teaching materials with an anti-capitalist perspective. Like most -isms, capitalism is an imprecise term; it comes in good and bad versions that need careful dissection. But what this recent government guidance points to is an attempt to establish a political and economic status quo that is no longer negotiable.
This goes to the heart of the challenge that any change movement faces, namely the way in which an entrenched status quo generates an “immune response” to change proposals that are not in keeping with its own principles. For example, any proposal that could significantly lower the cost of housing is automatically resisted by the neoliberal system because it treats housing as an investment asset. Recent government policy in this area, therefore, has focused on making it easier for people to borrow even bigger sums of money, to buy houses. This pushes up prices still further, to the profit of landowners, developers and lenders and the cost of families in need of a place to live.
Nonetheless, a desire to close down debate is generally a sign that a position is weaker than its proponents would like to believe. Hostility to charitable activism, taken together with those contentious and now-to-be-reviewed school guidelines may, therefore, be straws in the wind suggesting a loss of confidence in a system that is so palpably failing. In order to exploit that weakness a robust and highly visible alternative is needed. And this is where the UK’s vibrant economic reform movement has more to do.
The hierarchy of change
Change operates at different levels, for example systemic, policy and reactive. To bring about change it is essential to know at what level one is working.
Often the reactive level is the only one that is available. It offers a quick fix in response to events. It means that a group campaigning to keep open a local youth club will settle for a year’s stay of execution as an immediate objective.
Policy is about stated intentions – an aspiration (or a promise) to do something the outcome of which depends on personalities and circumstances. For example, personalities and circumstances turned Brexit into a particular policy, but what effect it will have on people’s lives is something that the policy can’t dictate.
It is the system level that dictates what actually happens, since this is what directs the normal flow of decision-making. When the rules of the system change, things happen differently because decision-making is rerouted to different outcomes. Systemic change is rare, but highly consequential. It ushered in the welfare state after 1945, and neoliberalism in the 1980s.
To achieve change at reactive and policy levels, campaigning, in the sense of “asking emphatically”, can be effective because it is relatively clear where the levers of change are located. But systemic change is different because it is not controlled by a conventional set of levers and there is no one to ask.
System change becomes possible when it is widely recognised that the current system is not working. Something moves in to fill the vacuum, but it is not necessarily a better system. The vacuum is filled by whatever most effectively asserts its claim. In the aftermath of 2008 that claim was asserted by austerity. The effect was that the wealth of the asset-rich increased greatly while those whom neoliberalism had failed were encouraged to take solace from a cultural nationalism for which the economic case was never seriously made.
To what extent the economic reform movement could have asserted itself after 2008 to fill that vacuum more productively is a moot point. But now the vacuum is recurring. The reality of Brexit may be blunting that cultural nationalism, while Covid has changed our perception of what an economy is for. For the economic reform movement, the post-Covid reconstruction offers a real opportunity.
It is useless to campaign to “change the system” because there is no lever that does that. What is required is a convincing alternative that already exists in concept. From there it must be talked into being through the projection of a new normal that is establishing itself and will continue to do so as the vestiges of the old order die away. This is the most important task for the entire reform movement at this crucial moment of opportunity.
This new normal appeals to common-sense, lived experience and a hunger for something more nourishing and less exhausting. It is what should be happening in quite an obvious way. To achieve this status it must be part of the currency of general discourse. To put it at its simplest, it must be a thing. This, as a minimum, calls for a clear identifier framed in terms of a simple description.
Talking the new system into being
At present, when it comes to identifying what a reformed economic system will look like it is often easier to name the problem. Terms such as climate change, pollution, food poverty, inequality, tax avoidance, cuts to public services, the housing crisis and worker exploitation all describe issues that most people would like to fix.
Problems are easy to campaign on, but solutions are more nuanced. It is one thing to be concerned about climate change; quite another to give up meat, or short-haul flights. Exorbitant rents are definitely bad. Lower house prices? It depends on your circumstances. Inequality is a social evil but “equality” begs a host of questions.
Furthermore, when an issue is framed as a problem the solutions most likely to gain traction are those which can most simply be stated. Anti-immigrant sentiment is not likely to be the solution to anything, but the idea that immigration depresses wages and increases demand for housing has an intuitive logic that is simple to convey.
The truth is rarely so straightforward. The economic reform movement has been going for so long that it has serious, well thought-out and appropriately nuanced policy proposals in every area. But when the solution to a problem requires the close attention of the listener to a balanced argument it becomes difficult to make headway on a wider stage. This is why economic reform campaigners refer to “the bubble”: the group of people they talk to regularly among whom the essential principles of reform are generally understood.
Talking a new system into being requires a simple descriptor of something that exists, at least in concept, that people can intuitively embrace. With this in mind some ingenious ways have emerged of expressing a problem as a solution. The term degrowth is one example. Other terms, such as wellbeing and sustainability, have a much more positive energy, while still leaving the problem to be inferred.
Wellbeing and sustainability are both essential reference points for a reformed economy, but they are vulnerable to co-opting by the current system using its immune response trigger. Just as the neoliberal solution to affordable housing is greater borrowing, its answer to the sustainability problem is private capital investment in “green” technology. In the same vein, its approach to wellbeing has been to compartmentalise it as a distinct aspect of people’s lives. Instead of using the term holistically to describe a fully lived experience, wellbeing in the neoliberal framing becomes, like healthcare, something to be bought and “consumed” in one’s leisure moments.
For similar reasons terms such as green, inclusive and fair are now so widely used as to have lost much of their impact. The word “human”, however, still has potency. That is partly because it has not commonly been used in this context. A web search for “human politics” or even “human economics” turns up very little. Almost the only use of “human politics” refers to our own work.
The power of the word “human” is that it is real, it is simultaneously strong and vulnerable, and it goes to the essence of who we are. In economic terms it is almost the only quality that outranks money. Unlike liberty, freedom, opportunity, health, equality and prosperity, humanness cannot be bought, owned, traded or commodified.
Humanness dictates values that arise directly out of human needs. Food, clothing and shelter from the elements are non-negotiable requirements. A system in which people are unable, despite their best efforts, to feed, clothe or house themselves adequately, as several million are in Britain and hundreds of millions are across the world, is not rooted in human politics because it does not prioritise these fundamental human needs.
The values of humanness include both autonomy and sociability. The capacity both for self-direction and for willing interrelation is what allows people to live the life of the human that they are. A system that enslaves people – either literally or figuratively – to the demands of others is not rooted in human politics because it does not prioritise what it means to be human.
This is why we are offering human politics as a descriptor for a new system that we must talk into being. The values of humanness are not something we need to conjure up. They exist. They are normal. They are universal. They are more powerful than the values of money. Human politics encapsulates those values. It is time for it to find its place where the decisions that direct our lives are taken.
Beyond neoliberalism – what human politics can look like
The term neoliberalism has undergone various shifts in meaning. These days, however, to quote a definition referenced in Wikipedia, it is “used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as ‘eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers’ and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.”
In relation to the many, well-recognised problems arising from out-of-control capital and ill-regulated (and rigged) markets, neoliberalism effectively characterises much that the economic reform movement is opposed to. It is a useful identifier because it describes a system that has come about through political intent.
In practical terms human politics identifies as a counterpoint to the money politics of neoliberalism and as an answer to what lies beyond that failed approach. It is politics because there is no economic reform without a political intention. It is human because we can no longer go on making policy as if people are self-interested economic units – homo economicus, in the economists’ jargon. It is not an organisation, a proto-party or even a movement in its own right. It is an identifier that is made for sharing.
Just as neoliberalism refers to a set of market-oriented principles that defer to the power of private capital, human politics references a set of people-centred principles that defer to the boundless human potential to create the real wealth of human and environmental wellbeing.
These principles serve two purposes:
- They speak to a fundamental reappraisal of the way the economy operates. The focus is on the role of money in the economy, and by extension the role of money in shaping policy;
- They illustrate descriptively how a reformed economy would differ from the current system, in terms that people can more easily relate to.
Because they are illustrative rather than definitive, the principles are not intended as a checklist of objectives to be ticked off. They have been selected to cover the main areas of focus in the movement for economic reform – land and housing, corporate governance, money creation and banking, public services and the way the economy is measured – with the recognition that an economy that is shaped in this way will achieve all the objectives of the reform movement. They are set out as follows:
- That land ownership and use should create real value for people and communities, including truly affordable housing;
- That corporate governance should prioritise social and environmental values;
- That money creation and banking should prioritise real productive value over the accumulation of money-assets;
- That public services such as hospitals and schools should be treated as benefits to be maximised, not costs to be cut back;
- That the way the economy is measured should be changed to prioritise truly productive activity over resource depletion, environmental destruction, asset price increases and unproductive work.
As an example of how these principles relate to campaigning objectives, it is increasingly clear that affordable housing cannot be achieved within the current neoliberal system. All the pressure in the system is to keep housing costs high, and even the official definition of affordable housing, which is still not affordable, can do nothing to reverse that. So the most the present system can deliver is for a smallish percentage of new homes to be less unaffordable in some cases.
An economy that embraces all the principles of human politics, however, will deliver truly affordable housing because every other aspect of the system will be driving in that direction. Money will no longer be directed into land as an investment asset, corporate developers will no longer focus exclusively on money profit and rising land values will not register as a positive outcome in national accounting.
Similarly, in relation to climate change, it is an existential truth that an ecosystem that supports life is the most valuable asset that the human race possesses. The preservation of the eco-system should be the first priority of economic policy, which means that the current priority of maximising money wealth at the expense of the destructive exploitation of natural resources is incompatible not just with human politics but with the survival of humanity.
These principles, therefore, describe a policy framework for an economy in which the values of humanness are placed front and centre. It does not have to be about equality; but it has to ensure that everybody has enough to thrive. It does not deny the human need to do and make, and the wish to consume. But it seeks to place the maker and the consumer in a relationship born of their mutual respect and freedom. Its relationship to the political economy that has preceded it is best described in the following reworking of the four pillars of neoliberalism.
The four pillars of human politics
Neoliberalism was constructed on the four pillars of individual freedom, strong defence, free markets and small government. These were not new ideas, but established principles that combined in the post-war period to distinguish Western liberal democracies from repressive, centralised regimes.
In co-opting them to the commercial interests of capital-owners and investors, neoliberalism gave them a particular spin. “Individual freedom” meant the rights that derive from ownership; “strong defence” favoured the military-industrial complex; “free markets” permitted winner-takes-all exploitation of people, resources and the environment and “small government” meant low taxes and light regulation on business.
The four pillars remain valid, but human politics frames then differently.
- Individual freedom depends upon having the space in which to exercise it. People have basic needs in order to flourish – homes to live in, resources to live on, personal autonomy, options for productive work and time not devoted to drudgery or financial subsistence, otherwise they are slaves to the system and not free in themselves.
- Strong defence is about much more than guns, soldiers and military hardware. A safe and resilient society is built on mutual support, shared interests and economic and environmental, as well as physical, security. A fractured society cannot defend itself effectively, if it has lost touch with the values it is seeking to defend.
- Truly free markets are open, fair and accessible – where people are free to participate on equal terms to their mutual benefit. At their most effective they connect the producer and consumer as closely as possible, minimising the transactional costs extracted by intermediaries as goods travel long distances and change hands many times.
- Small government means the primacy of personal autonomy, placing authentic human relationships at the centre of the social system. It means cultivating an administrative state that empowers human connection and relationship, listening to grassroots movements and people’s assemblies while reducing the influence accorded to corporate and institutional entities.
Next steps for human politics
Change happens in response to our expectation of what is normal. In the neoliberal economic system poverty is stigmatised as an individual failing that is “not normal”. This encourages often-heard (if contradictory) views – either that people are responsible for their own poverty or that they are not really as poor as is claimed.
In 2012 George Osborne spoke in the midst of austerity of “the shift worker leaving home in the dark hours of the morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of the next door neighbour sleeping off a life in benefits”, as if poverty is an aberrant lifestyle choice for the workshy.
This is untrue. Most poor families are in work, but the work does not pay them enough. In the neoliberal system stress, overwork, low pay, insecurity, inequality and outright want are not aberrations, but normal outcomes.
Transitioning to a new normal, therefore, requires two key messages:
- The failings of the current system are normal for that system. Prioritising money accumulation over human wellbeing will always produce worse human outcomes. Talk of fixing that system is the wrong terminology because the system is not broken in its own terms. It is doing what it is designed to do.
- Because of this we need another system that brings a different normality, in which money works for people rather than enslaving them. That system has a name. We call it human politics.
In other words, a task for the whole reform movement is to talk human politics into people’s consciousness so that they come to see that there is a clear choice. Naming the new system makes this task much easier because it helps to make it real.
When it happens, change often happens quickly. In 1988 Section 28 of the Local Government Act prohibited “the promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. Margaret Thatcher said at the time: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.” Sixteen years later that “inalienable right to be gay” was established in the Civil Partnership Act of 2004.
The financial crash of 2008 stripped away the last vestiges of respectability from the neoliberal system. That was 13 years ago. So 2024 is an informal deadline to reach that “civil partnership” moment – the moment when society turns round and says that you were right all along. Or it may take a little longer for the scales finally to fall – it was only in 2009 that David Cameron formally apologised for his party’s introduction of Section 28.
The fallout from the 2008 crash is still with us, and the intervening period of austerity has left Britain’s public services in a reduced state to deal with the Covid crisis and its further economic and social consequences. So this does feel like a tipping point, at which a majority of people are open to the possibility of something different. The economic reform movement can meet this openness by joining in a concerted effort to talk a new normal into political reality.
Using the phrase human politics helps build the expectation that politics can be human-centred rather than money-fixated. It does so using one of the most powerful descriptors that we have. The term “human” connects the many elements of the economic reform movement by offering a positive picture of what an economy can and should do. It also makes explicit the link between a new economic system and the different kind of politics with which it is associated.
Our request to everyone working for economic and political reform is, first of all, please don’t stop what you are doing. The movement is stronger than it has ever been and depends entirely on the great diversity of campaigners, researchers, thinkers and teachers who sustain it.
Second, please consider framing your work within a distinctive, shared identity – one that is accessible to people who do not yet know that a different economic system is possible, let alone that it already exists. It can start with something as simple as a hashtag. Currently #humanpolitics is hardly used, so our movement can take ownership of it.
Talk about human politics as if it is a thing, and it will become a thing. We need to insert the term into the language so people hear about it, journalists write about it and broadcasters talk about it. All of that helps build a picture that a different model of political economy exists and is ready to go.
Start a conversation within your own circles about whether human politics resonates. Ask people to share their own stories of how human politics is needed now. Might you help curate or otherwise contribute to a conference that gives human politics maximum exposure?
Please respond to this letter and share it widely within your networks! We are not an organisation or a campaign but we can be a resource to collect reactions and collate activity. Give us your thoughts via the #humanpolitics website or share on social media using #humanpolitics. To contact us directly there are details on the contact page of the website, too.
Thank you for reading.
Martin Whitlock, martinwhitlock.co.uk
Joshua Malkin, @JPMalkin