Trump and Brexit Should Give You Hope

George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author, has written a new book. Called Out of the Wreckage, it is relentlessly positive about the future we can create from the darkness of Trump, Brexit and austerity. But Monbiot's main gig is environmentalism and left-wing politics, so what's he got to be so excited about? Right now, there's a demagogue in the White House and the Tories are intent on throwing our economy down the drain.

Out of the Wreckage argues that now is the exact time we can start changing the world for the better. It's down to changing the "story". The most recent grand narrative was neoliberalism and how consumerism and individualism would save us all. According to Monbiot, now is the perfect time to change that story to one focusing on "Belonging" and "Community".

I talked to George to find out what exactly what he means, and how he thinks we could change the way we live.

VICE: For my generation, born and raised during an era of individualism, it's hard to imagine being part of some bigger "community". There might be a lot of people who are afraid of losing their individuality if we join what we imagine to be a communal society.
George Monbiot: Right now, we have the worst of both worlds: we have individuals without true individual expression. The grand promise of free market capitalism was that we would be free to become autonomous individuals. But the reality is that instead we are in a crushing regime of corporate bureaucracy, surveillance and monitoring, which forces us to conform more than ever. We have almost no autonomy whatsoever; all we have is atomisation. Our communities have been shattered. What strong community does, paradoxically, is create space for self-expression. In a situation where you are actively included, rather than forced to fit into a system, people flourish. It frees you.

The last two years have been massively unstable, full of anger and venom and dominated by Trump and Brexit. If anything, we are being made more suspicious of our neighbours. How is it that you are positive about the future?
My greatest period of pessimism was during the Blair and Brown years. On the surface of things, we seemed to be moving in a slowly progressive direction. But it was built on deregulation, massive tax cuts, powerful people free from the constraints of democracy and everyone broadly agreeing this was alright! Trying to find any space during that political consensus to tell a different story was almost impossible. Eventually something had to break. The agreements around these ideas could not be sustained. Political failure is, at heart, a failure of the imagination. Today, there is a sense of an opening that wasn't there ten years ago. Things have changed. There's a recognition the old system has failed, and there's a mass of people now clamouring for radical change rather than incremental change. That's what I'm excited about.

In your book you focus on the "revival of community" as the powerful force that can transform our society for the better. How is this different from Thatcher's "Care in the Community", or Cameron's "Big Society"?
What we saw with the Big Society and Care in the Community was simply social dumping. The government was no longer prepared to tax rich people sufficiently enough to support those who were in less privileged positions. Things like healthcare, infrastructure, education - the community cannot sort these things out; it's not big enough; it doesn't have the Civil Service. You need a strong state to be able to do that. But community can add all the things the state can't provide, such as social connection and a sense of belonging.

What do you mean by the word "community"?
In this case I'm talking about a geographical, location-based community, but not exclusive communities within that. Anyone who wants to is welcome to participate. Community is participatory culture. As many people as possible should be involved in projects which aim to solve their common problems. You start with some very low commitment activities, such as sharing cooking or sharing child care, or mending things together, sharing tools and knowledge, and things grow from there. Anyone can start a community project.

Further on, we must develop community economies based on commonly owned and commonly managed resources. This is "the commons". When we think of the economy we tend to think exclusively of the State and the Market, and we argue about how much the state should have and how much the market should have. In having that debate, we forget there are four sectors to the economy: the State, the Market, the Commons and the Household. There was a time when the Household and the Commons were by far the biggest parts of the economy. The Commons is crucial to well-being; it can take the form of land that is owned in common, water that is owned in common, software, hardware, knowledge that is shared on an equal basis.

But would you need state intervention to reclaim the "commons" for the public? So much of the UK is privatised. People want change, but most aren't willing to become insurrectionists.
You need to come at this from both ends. Firstly, by starting to build more robust communities in our neighbourhoods, building solidarity and social networks. We can do that tomorrow. But at the same time we have to capture the state, and we have to do so by changing the government. While I don't think Jeremy Corbyn has all the right answers, he's a lot better than the government we have at the moment. The current Labour leadership appear willing to hear a new story.

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There is a danger that communities can become conservative and socially repressive.
True community empowerment reveals the true identity of that community. And some communities are inherently conservative. If people want to be conservative, they can be conservative. However, I believe a lot of communities are more radical than they think, only that radicalism is constantly suppressed by the political and economic environments in which they live. The work by the Common Cause Foundation shows that if you create an economic and political situation which is harsh, people get a lot harder and less generous, less inclusive, less kind, less loving to others. But if you create a situation where no one is going to fall through the safety net and into the outer darkness below, then people's innate and intrinsic values of acceptance, empathy and kindness towards others become strongly reinforced in that situation.

For many of us, workplace is community. Why do you make geographic community the centre of your ideas and not the workplace? Can't we have both?
I'm not saying we can't. Where trade unionism thrives, apply it to the max. But even if we could go back to the workplace being the primary organising space, I would argue, would we want to? You are only a valid person if you are a worker. All those who aren't workers – the young, retired, unable to work, people who can't get jobs – are automatically excluded from that model of community. If the workplace gives you your political validity, there is also a danger that it gives you your social validity – so those who don't work have less social value. That exclusivity can become pretty dangerous.

@KitCaless

Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is out now on Verso