What to Do Instead of Talking About Politics
there's lots to do!
My book has been out in the world for two and half weeks now. I am very happy with it, on the whole. I like what it says. I like what it does (and books can do more than they say they’re doing.)
There is, however, something the book didn’t always manage to do, at least for some readers, which is to thoroughly and obviously answer this question:
Ok, so if I agree just talking about politics doesn’t do much and is even counter-productive, what should I do?
This question comes up all the time, actually – in most podcast interviews I give, in most book launch events. It is arguably the most important question. (In fact, I wanted to subtitle the book “and what to do instead” but that got nixed by the booksellers).
So I’m going to answer this question very briefly here, in a format that makes it extra clear:
Join a consumer union/coop with your neighbors
I did (of course) give some examples in my book. Over and over again, I find that people love hearing about the food co-op as an example of doing politics with actions and relationships, not words:
Food co-ops are, in a way, very simple: once people join, they take turns purchasing the food in bulk for the group for that week, bargaining with local stores and distributing to their neighbours. The result, especially when donations of food are included, means that many people can get [much of] their groceries for as little as £3 a week. In the process of buying and distributing, members gain new knowledge and organizing skills. For not only does organizing a food co-op look a lot like, well, organizing people for political action, but along the way many members witness first hand how broken the food system is. As they bargain with local stores for batch prices, buyers learn how much food is wasted because supermarkets are overstocked with excess produce, which is generally thrown out, all to ensure complete and constant availability of every fruit or vegetable.
They also know not just one another’s fridge contents but their families, hopes and worries. And they look out for each other. I learned that when an older woman in the food co-op fell, hurt herself and couldn’t get up, and her family didn’t know what to do, it was other members of the food co-op who noticed the woman’s husband was coming by himself and asked gently but persistently until they discovered the issue and sprang into action to get her medical care. People look after one another in practical ways, which builds commitment to everyone’s well-being. And this, Shiri notes, means ‘when they come to demolish the [housing] estate, we’re already organized.’ Indeed, when members have faced eviction, their fellow co-op members have shown up to guard the home and prevent it.
Shalmy notes that, in a lot of traditional models, getting people to care about political issues happens at a point of conflict: when the landlord raises the rent, when the employer cuts hours and so on. It is only then that people who may otherwise have been disengaged, overwhelmed or unmotivated join struggles and dive into political action. Cooperation Town, and projects like it, are powerful because they rely not on a point of conflict but on fulfilling basic human needs. ‘It’s an easy point of entry for getting people into organizing,’ says Shiri. For it to be relevant, ‘you just need to eat and have neighbours.’
Why not create or join a consumer co-op? After writing about it, I actually joined the co-op I wrote about in my book – a food coop that is part of Cooperation Town.
In fact, my friend Tom created a group for our neighborhood.
All of us live about five minutes from each other and every couple of weeks we do a big bulk purchase together and end up saving a ton of money on groceries. But of course it’s not really about that, although that is a nice thing. It’s about knowing your neighbours; it’s about hearing about their lives. It’s about having the capacity to think about their financial circumstances, their family life and so on from a comfortable but meaningfully close distance. It’s about helping each other when things get hard. Personally, I hope to expand this work in my own life by building a library of things for the community and then probably organising some other communal resources. I think this is a necessary baseline for those who want political change. I don’t believe that we can do progressive or radical politics without living out cooperative living in a daily way. The political world is the shared world, and to do better, all of us, we have to practice living in it intentionally together.
Create “gateway actions”
In the book I described how people’s beliefs often change because of their actions, and not the other way around. People shift their views on abortion based on whether they were able to access one when they needed one (and not in the way you’d expect). People believe in climate change more when they experience it. And, notably, people come to care more about an issue when they take a small step towards it. People who recycle, for example, are more likely to care about the climate after--it doesn’t assuage guilt, it gets them interested.
So if you care about an issue, you might want to see if you can build a gateway action for people to try out that is small but meaningful. If you work on migrant rights, for example, you and your group might first collect supplies for migrants (it’s easy enough to get a neighbor to give away some clothes…) and then from there see if you can get people to come to an event and from there ask them to help run the event and then see if they want to also petition for a change in the laws.
(Re)build a third place that is actually accessible to most people
I don’t just mean this in terms of disability, although that is an important thing to consider. I mean this, frankly, in terms of class. There are always third places for people who can afford them. And the research on social atrophy suggests that wealthier people are less socially atrophied, less isolated, less lonely, less alone. But we need third places that are affordable for anyone to go to and relatively accessible given things like transit, the cost of living, driving abilities, having children with one and so on.
Unfortunately, year after year we’ve seen the closing of these third places in the US, in the UK, and in Europe.
I often see the impulse in people like myself – people who think they have the best intentions and progressive/radical values, people who perhaps have a few extra resources - to start a new third place from scratch. This makes them feel good about themselves. It makes them feel entrepreneurial. It makes them feel strategic. And that’s very nice, but I think this (often) is the wrong move.
Firstly: there are already so many social spaces that are just barely getting by, and often these spaces need our support more than they need us to provide a competitor for them.
Secondly: people “like me” often build social spaces that are in fact only for people like me. The new spaces then are filled with gong baths or nice talks on the poetry of ecology and they don’t bring other kinds of people in. (To be clear, I love the latter eg. niche poetry; but this point still holds).
Obviously this is situational - I am not saying we should never build a new or interesting third place, and there are a few particularly like in London at present - but if you’re interested in this problem of social atrophy and political trust in a community, what I’d suggest is that you help to program an existing third place that is important to your existing local community, and work to make it accessible and interesting for everyone. (And hey, if you for some reason have money to help with this, subsidise it!)
Spaces like this are the heart of political life at the deepest level. And if you need good examples, I really encourage you to listen to the podcast Now Here which gives tons of really interesting examples, from pie shops to laundromats, all of which are about left behind places in the UK places that don’t necessarily have a lot of money to begin with.
Organise movements (and join movements) that don’t just engage in demonstrations, and which ask a lot of you
As much as I like to champion civic spaces and third places – which don’t necessarily have an immediate political agenda – at the end of the day we need political movements to change the world.
We especially need movements for the dismantling of capitalism (and in the meantime, the reigning in its worst actors and the softening of its most harmful effects). We need social movements that can immediately address issues of climate change, racism, war-mongering, imperialism and more. And right now many of those movements are struggling. This is true for a lot of reasons – but one that I explore in the book is the prevalence of movements that are organised online and largely ask that members come to demonstrations, without then recruiting them to do anything further. As I argue in the book, this means that people’s beliefs change less (after all, there are fewer actions they’ve taken to shift their beliefs), and fewer relationships made (and it’s our relationships and actions that change our politics).
What we need instead, I argue, is movements that hold us close, asking a lot of us on a regular basis and creating close bonds between members.
“But I’m tired!” you might say. “But I’m busy!” Yes, me too, I absolutely feel you. Does it help to know activists have happier, more meaningful lives than those who hold the same beliefs but do nothing? So many of us are willing to put so much into our careers, our families, even our physical wellness. I see this as a similar type of commitment. And it contributes to our wellbeing just as those things can and often do.
So I would suggest that you join a political movement but you look for one that does two things. First of all it does something other than demonstrating (even if it also has some demonstrations as part of what it does). And secondly it asks of you that you make a significant change in your life.
Caveat: I am not saying that you should join a cult – and some left wing movements do become cults! I am not for example not saying that you should sacrifice your existing relationships, or not have other things in our life. Be especially on the lookout for dynamics that create sexual harassment, abuse, or power imbalances, or that take up more and more of people’s money over time. Avoid these types of organisations!
But do join a movement that asks you for a bunch of your time and energy, that has people who check in on you, and who ask you to be accountable to others in general, and vice versa. What I am saying is that I think we need to consider being part of a movement, committed, tied in, obligated, as a fundamental part of living the good life. And that requires a change in the way we operate. It will also mean that we can then have movements to have a much larger impact on the world.
I hope this is a helpful starting point. Some other resources I’ve found helpful are Grace Blakely’s Substack, which has a bunch of examples of successful movements and responses to isolation and alienation, and Anand Giridharadas’ Substack/really a full on Media platform, The Ink. Please do add more suggestions below.