ARCHIVE - Confessions of a Class Traitor

In November 2009 I joined a collective column on the Eastern Daily Press called the One World Column, alongside a crew of progressive thinkers and writers from Norwich. Our main topics were centered on social justice, globalisation, peacemaking, human rights and the environment. I was asked to cover the Transition movement and sustainable food systems. The column was axed when a new editor took charge, but continued as a blog. This was a post written as the nation took to the streets to protest against the cuts to public services in 2011.

Where you are going is overwhelmingly dependant on where you are from. Just before the last election OWC columnist Lee Marsden wrote a perspicacious analysis of public school education and the class system. If the Labour government had hidden their Etonian and Oxbridge advantages, it was clear the next millionaire cabinet were going to flaunt them. We were entering a very different political period. A moment of turbulence in which we were all about to be thrown out of our comfortable seats.

During the last 30 years as the global finanical credit bubble swelled, many people in Britain improved their material lives. Everyone it appeared was able to buy houses and go on holiday. Shopping became a national pastime. In 1998, in a shocking report on poverty and prostitution, Dark Heart, the Guardian journalist Nick Davies looked at the hidden cost of that improvement, the demolition of the working class and the creation of an invisible underclass, a quarter of the population who served as scapegoats for the rest, and most particularly the governing elite.

We imagine that class has disappeared from modern consumer society, but of course it hasn’t. It operates insidiously as a signalling sysem, through language and behaviours, to establish who we are and where we figure in the pecking order: the people who take charge or who obey, those who bask in the limelight, or act out the collective shadow. In spite of what we do in our adult lives we are strictly labelled according to our childhood circumstances and education.

“Daddy, what class are we?” “We’re professional class,” replied my father, once a lawyer. “If anyone asks you tell them you are a professional.” I’m standing outside his old chambers on the Victoria Embankment and a group of socialist lawyers are gathering under a banner in wigs and gowns to protest against the cutting of the court services. It’s March 26 and thousands of workers, students, unemployed and sympathetic protesters are massing beside the Thames. I’m talking with Gurkas, London fireman, librarians from Manchester, engineers from Birmingham, student nurses, actors and coastguards. There’s a strong feeling of solidarity in the crowd I haven’t experienced for a very long time.

My father was born (illegally) in the Inns of Court and spent his whole life behind these gates, defending the innocent and the guilty, pornographers, murderers and fraudsters. During the day he battled against censorship, at night he told me stories about the woods and birds from his rural childhood on the Sussex Downs and about the protagonists of the French revolution. The liberation of Paris obsessed him. Allons citroyens!

We are made of the stories we are told. Sometimes we are told them in order to live them out. And sometimes we are born to end them - not just our personal narratives but the ones we tell ourselves as a culture, as a people. The most enduring story we are taught is that some people are better than others. Better fit to rule, better fit to live in splendour, more intelligent, more evolved. I was raised to believe that “lower” class people were poor because they were stupid and when workers went on strike they were holding the country to ransom. But this wasn’t the story my life followed.

At the age of 19 I found myself living in the slumlands of Birmingham with working class students from the North, who unlike me, had struggled hard to get here. It was the mid-1970s and all our world-views were being challenged. In the red-light district of Balsall Heath amongst the immigrant sweat-shops, I learned about Diggers and Levellers, studied Chomsky and socio-linguistics, stood by ASLEF workers and against the National Front, and when I faced a police charge realised I was in a country that bore no relation to the one I had been brought up in.

Those years changed everything. At the age of 35 I sold everything I owned and went on the road, compelled, like many of my contempories in the 90s, to reconnect with the earth and with people in a way that broke with our conventional upbringings. Today I’m about to march past the offices where I once had a successful career as magazine journalist. Fortnum and Masons, where I used to meet my grandfather for tea, is about to be filled with the tax-dodger protesters from UKUncut. It’s another England. I’m no longer inside those gates.

Like many people I'm struggling to co-create a new narrative, one of equality and fairness - not just for myself among the crowd in Hyde Park and the millions dependant on the welfare state, but also for the invisible people of the global South, on whose natural resources and slave labour the global North depend. In order to write a new story I need to deconstruct a very old one.

The coalition government are made up of the kind of people I was brought up amongst: proud, ritualistic, acquisitive, obsessed by form, terrified of losing face, with a horror of the masses, all fellow feeling having been ruthlessly bullied out of them. In order to hold its superior position, the ancien regime needs to continually push others down. The more equality and fairness exerts its pressure within the collective, the harder they push. They are, as George Orwell points out in his peerless study of class, Road to Wigan Pier, terrified of losing control and falling. In this they are as much at the mercy of this heartless system as anyone else.

In order to deconstruct a story you have to know what it’s made of. The institution of class is ancient, stemming from the Aryan caste system, established in India thousands of years ago and upheld by the powerful few within all Empires from Assyrian overlords to corporate CEOs. It works its restrictions through all our lives, born high or low. The barriers between us are kept in place by hatreds, by humiliation, by blame, by revenge, terror, hostility and mostly by ignorance. In 1975 in Birmingham Mel Foster railed at me. An ex-miner, he had gone through Trades Union college to study for a degree and was cracking under the strain. Like many of his working class peers he was loathe to betray his origins by becoming educated and thus middle class. "You have destroyed the Hull fishing fleet and all our livlihoods!" he yelled.

He knew nothing about London. I knew nothing about Hull, but I did know I had a legacy, A crooked inheritance I had to put straight. We all have that legacy. And in this the working class is no more exempt than any other section of society, for it too has its whipping boys - the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless Orwell once walked amongst. Everything in our consumer society is a product of the exploitation of our fellow human beings, from the child slaves of the African cocoa plantations to the Chinese IT factory worker. None of us has impunity.

To break out of our historical mould we can’t identify with the class we were brought up in, hold on to our positions as victims or conquerors, as righteous Conservatives, as ideologially pure Socialists, we have to let go of them and come together in a new and fluid way. We have to see the world from a common perspective. Because, if we don’t, the corporate elite will push us all down as far as we can go. We will lose everything our ancestors fought for so hard - all our freedoms, all our public services. If we separate and attack each other, we play into their hands. United, we can exert a force that could change how we live on this planet as a people forever.

Part of that unifying future story, that radical shift, is that we have to listen to each other’s stories. We have to know what it’s like to be in other people shoes whoever they are, and when we understand begin to act from within a deep frame of change. And this is why I am telling you mine. I fell and failed. I quit my position, my house, my job. Contrary to the cautionary tales was told I did not die in destitution as my great-grandmother did in a workhouse on the Isle of Wight. I found that people are kind and fair and intelligent everywhere you go, so long as you don’t give way to your hatred or rage or self-pity, or close down from fear. What matters is that you give that natural empathy and desire for liberation a chance. History does not need to repeat itself. The French revolution, like all revolutions that followed in its wake, ended in the Terror and the brutal reinstatement of another kind of hierarchy. We don’t need another revolution. We don’t need class war. We need to evolve.

Complete list of OneWorldColumn posts (18) from Avatar to bio-tech

Photos: March for the Alternative, Victoria Embankment, March 2011; looking outside the door, Kent, 1958; Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth behind Hidden Britain by Nick Davies; coming together to discuss civil liberties and economic system, Transition Norwich, Aladdin's Cafe, Magdalen Street, Norwich, April, 2011.

A Tale of Two Cities . . . . and a new newspaper

Last Saturday in Norwich a demonstration gathered in Chapelfield Gardens and made its way cheerfully and noisily towards City Hall. This was We are Norwich, a coalition of trade unions, community and political groups, protesting against the English Defence League, who were marching for the first time in the city. As the two marches converged they were separated by barriers in front of the steps. On one side the gloomy fascist contingent in dark coats and a sound system blaring harsh anthems. On the other the colourful counter-demonstration with rainbow-coloured faces, banners and laughter. Outside the War Memorial the two groups, faced each other and jeered, like two stags with invisible antlers, unable to lock horns.

Only a couple of streets away there was, however, a different story.

"What we need is not confrontation, but to be able to work together," said someone at the Long Table in the aisle of St Lawrence's Church. This was The Common Room, a prototype day organised by Social Spaces and 00:/  in collaboration with the Churches Conservation Trust. It's a social enterprise that helps communities in different UK cities make and shape a shared space in which to meet, learn skills, barter knowledge, run on the principles of co-operation, connection and resourcefulness.

Great ideas, projects and enterprises seldom originate from a single person working in isolation. For stimulation, enthusiasm and collaboration, people need to work in an environment full of fellow entrepreneurs, ideas, learning, conversation. On Saturday you could share your ideas for what you might do if you were a member of The Common Room Co-operative, take part in a Trade School class by exchanging food, items or advice for new knowledge - from herbs for resilience to time skills to social media - host a conversation, or drop in to bake bread or build a web app.

In the common room I discovered aspects of people whom I already know that I hadn’t seen before. Although I’ve known Mark for about a year now, I’d never really heard him talk in-depth about his practice with plants. In discussions I was able to draw on knowledge shared with friends to benefit the wider dialogue. It was as if the place allowed us to apply ourselves in ways that we can’t always do in other public spaces (Jeppe Graugaard from Place Which Connects)

The EDP covered the first story, but the second went unreported. Clashes between people are news, people getting on and creating a friendly future are not. As a result the world we read about and perceive all about us is skewed by an often hostile political paradigm.

Good news from the Common Room

So this is a story about The Story that is Not Being Told. Since joining the OneWorldColumn in 2009 many of the stories I have been reporting on have stemmed from the Transition movement which I have been active in for the past five years, both with local initiatives, Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay, and as part of a national network. This spring several of us decided to launch a national quarterly newspaper to gather these stories in one place and distribute them throughout the UK.

When I joined OWC it was a weekly column on the EDP. It became a blog in 2011, when the column was cancelled after six years. Although on line communications and social networking form a strong messaging system, the physical printed page still commands greater attention. Print goes places that computers do not go and has the great advantage of putting a complex narrative in one place, directly into your hands, which one-page-at-a-time virtual media cannot replace.

Mainstream papers, severely hit by the recession and loss of advertising revenue, are shrinking their staff and increasingly publishing stories from “the wire” and press releases, rather than real-time investigation. Stories are judged not by their merit, but by on-line readership figures. As a result the mainstream press often sinks to the lowest common denominator and defaults to the governmental, or corporate, line. The smaller and more progressive stories disappear altogether. Celebrities and violence prevail and “reality” becomes defined within these very constricted parameters. Increasingly too many people now consider communications to be something they can get for free. So though this is probably the most challenging time to be launching a new national newspaper, it will not lack for stories, nor will it lack for a readership keen to hear the good news from places the mainstream media does not go.

Stories about the people, for the people, by the people

My first column on OWC was about Leaving the Pleasuredome and preparing for a low-carbon future, shifting away from the dominant narrative, to what Charles Eisenstein calls " a new story of Self and a new story of The People."

The Transition Free Press is based on this premise. After publishing our preview issue in the summer, the need for new media now seems more relevant than ever. As peak oil pushes unconventional oil and gas extraction to new extremes, as climate change brings storms and food crises in its wake, as the economic recession brings many countries to their knees, so our desire increases for alternative solutions and a kinder, more generous culture that can look the future in the eye.

Our small, resilient paper will champion communities and projects that often get missed by mainstream media. We’ll be holding up a beacon in the potentially dark and difficult times ahead. Where the breaking story is of confusion and greed, we aim to bring coherence and  the gift economy into play, where there is fantasy we will bring grassroots reality, where there is loss we will show the opportunity for well being and knowledge share. And most of all where there is silence, we aim to bring words and listen to the voices of people who do not normally get heard. 

We’re planning to run four issues during 2013, starting on Feb 1 2012. Our 24-page issue will follow the blueprint of our preview issue and contain a colourful mix of news, reviews and features, dedicated pages to energy, the land, people, economy, food, well-being,  the arts, cartoons and a unique Transition agony column.

In these four pilot editions in 2013 we hope to bring together in one place the stories that help us navigate the times of downshift, stories about people by the people who are coming together in their neighbourhoods and initiatives, starting up food projects, alternative energy schemes, and thinking within a broader, deeper and more meaningful frame. To show, as Mark Boyle said recently: “Different ways of being human”  other than the self-obsessed consumer model we see promoted everywhere else.

How you can help launch a paper

This week sees the launch of our first Transition crowd-funding appeal with BuzzBnk , an on-line crowd-funding platform that brings social enterprises “looking for start-up or growth capital together with like-minded people keen to participate in a new way of funding social change”. So now in this 90-day campaign we hope to raise the funds to enable us to send out the good news throughout the UK (as well as on-line everywhere else). You can buy an annual subscription for £15 or give a higher contribution (£50-£750) and receive gifts, from an ecologically-sound T-shirt to a whole Transition library.

Can you help by buying a subscription, giving a donation, or joining our distribution network?  Could you spread the word, through blogs or social media or word of mouth? Funding a newspaper is a big challenge, but we are determined that the word will get out there, on city streets, neighbourhoods and social spaces everywhere.

Thank you in advance for your generosity. Charlotte Du Cann (editor)

Our 2013 pilot editions will include local stories and projects, including the Magdalen Street Celebration and Norwich FarmShare. The first issue will be published on 1 February 2013. Follow us on Twitter transfreepress and Facebook.You can buy an individual subscription, or make a contribution to the enterprise on our crowd-funding page here

www.transitionfreepress.org

Images: We Are Norwich sets out (Bill Smith, EDP); The Common Room, St Lawrence's Church - Long Table and Herbs for Resilience workshop (Jeppe Graugaard); potato day at Norwich FarmShare, copyright Tony Buckingham; High Street group proceess, Transition Conference, London 2012 (Mike Grenville)

Hard rain on the parade

The flags hang limply in the rain down the High Street. No one has removed them after the Jubilee, as this summer it appears the populace are in a continual celebration of the Kingdom. Last week the Olympic Games and its £27 million opening gambit were heralded by torch-bearers running through the town. As I write the sound system at Latitude booms in the air from several miles away, and everyone has been locked into the site due to the weather.

But my attention is not in these places. I'm watching the rain. The shop keepers are watching the rain, as the holiday makers stay away from the beach and their tills. The farmers are watching the rain as it soaks the corn and the potatoes. The trees are empty of fruit down the lane, the grasses high as houses. There are slugs everywhere, devouring produce in the fields and gardens (£8 million's worth) like an apocalyptic curse.
We don't have sun, but we do have water. In other places it is the opposite.



At what point do we wake up and put our attention to where it really matters? At what point do we look at the corporate shaping of the Games, its private armies, its eviction of peoples, the lockdown of the city, and come to our own conclusions? At what point do we stop worshipping the rulers and behaving like grateful servants, and start to recognise our own beauty and significance? At what point do we stop distrusting and being hostile to our neighbours and our countrymen, and stand by each other, side by side? At what point do we stop believing in the magic spell of money and privilege and realise that the plants we depend on need both light and water? At what point do we realise that everything in our "civilised " world - our energy, our food, our life - comes directly from the planet? And when we do, when we connect the dots, what are we going to do about it?

Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, who is speaking next week in London, says we have a task ahead of us: to transform the damage that has been done by industrialisation and reclaim the land, as well as our true sovereignty, the commonwealth of the people. From an old paradigm, standing in the High Street, disconnected, it seems impossible, but from another perspective, standing on the earth, looking at the future, it looks like the possibility of starting again.

History depends on our attention. Where we place our attention confers value and significance. That's quantum physics and human nature. Attention can keep the flags flying and the illusion of supremacy going, it can hold people on pedestals up as small gods. Or it can focus on the real facts of the matter and see climate change happening in the backyard. Distracted by entertainments, you can't see what is happening in front of your eyes. You don't notice the weather. You don't see the London allotments torn down to make a hockey stadium, the people displaced in Guatemala for EU biofuels, you don't see the treatment of the cows, or the dairy farmers, when you buy your cheap milk, you don't see the scam of the banks who have created 97% of our money supply out of thin air.

The nationalistic parades and the media that trumpet them are the circus that keeps an old story in place. The Athenian civilisation that bequeathed us the idealistic sporting arena, also gave us a skewed "left hemisphere" way of seeing and a "democracy" that works for the rulers, rather than for the ruled. It has made the culture of the City superior to all lifeforms on earth, a legacy we have inherited and still uphold to this day. But this cultural story, with its fairytale shows and bloody arenas, is not the only narrative that is going on right now. It has never been the only narrative going on. People have been holding a torch inside them for hundreds of years in the mountains and the fields, as civilisations have risen and fallen, as they have sent their armies to conquer the world for resources and slave labour. At some point the people start watching the rain and realise there is another task at hand. For the planet and for ourselves.

When you do, you discover you are not alone. There are millions of us out there. Some of us saying one thing, but thinking and feeling another. Some of us are finding our voices and speaking out. Some of us are listening, turning out attention away from the parade. We're not just in the town, or the city, we are in all lands. The empire dominates, as it has done though history: it crushes protests, wins arguments, forces people off the land, ignores the heart. But one thing it has no power over: it cannot force our attention. It can't buy love.

And it can't stop the rain from falling.

From One World Column

Images: cover of Sacred Economics; protest in the Amazon against the Belo Monte dam.

ONEWORLD NEWS: Welcome to 2012!

Today's post looks at some of the subjects we will continue to report and reflect on during this crucial year.

As the struggle for global resources - energy, minerals, agricultural land, water - increases we'll look at the widespread pressure for social justice and protection of the earth. As the corporate control of the world tightens (1%), we'll reflect on the collective movement for democratic change that began in 2011 with the (99%) protesters of the Arab Spring and continued with the indignados of Spain and Greece, and the occupiers of Zuccotti Park in New York and hundreds of cities around the world.

As the government continues its austerity drive and support of the City of London and the banks, we'll keep supporting those involved with land rights, community ownership, and defence of our public services. As well as facing the hard and difficult issues, we will include the positive moves that are changing the restrictive patterns within our social fabric. We'll be looking at the grassroots movements that create an alternative infrastructure as the global economic systems falter, a "downshift" culture of sharing resources and skills: neighbourhood energy schemes, alternative currencies, community kitchens, CSAs.

We will be looking at the bigger picture set within a local framework and highlighting subjects that are often ignored or minimised in mainstream culture, from climate change to nuclear energy. We will be making links between all these subjects in order to further strengthen our common intent to bring about a fair, sustainable and connected OneWorld. We hope you will join us!

Writing on the Edge, 2011

In 2011 we relaunched ourselves as a blog with a party at the EPIC Media Centre in Norwich and decided we would keep posting our columns each Saturday and also invite guest writers to contribute and include occasional news and events posts.

We started the year reporting from the front line of the cuts, as the February demonstration in Norwich rallied on the steps of County Hall. Guest writer, Andrew Boswell, wrote about the closure of essential child protection services, Jan Ainsley about the threatened NHS and Mark Watson about the Lowestoft Against the Cuts Public Workers Strike Rally later in November.

2011 was an activist year, in which progressive groups came together as never before, and though we continued to write on traditional OWC issues, such as military power and parliamentary reform, there were unexpected events appearing in the world and in our columns - most strikingly the people's movements in the Arab nations and the Occupy movement in the West. Trevor Philips wrote from the squares in Athens, Charlotte Du Cann from Hay Hill about Occupy Norwich. It was a year where the word capitalism no longer belonged to the rhetoric of the left. People started to look at the economic system by which we have lived our lives, discuss systemic collapse, responsibility and solidarity. Mark Crutchley reflected on financial tipping points and peak oil, Rupert Read asked: Are we a consumerist or a producerist society?

None of us had any anwers.

But one thing we knew: like all civilisations who have risen and fallen, our future will be determined in terms of our relationship with food and energy. As land grabs increase in Indonesia, Africa and China and climate change destabilises the growing patterns of many of the world's staple crops, we looked at the depletion of fish in the oceans, the diminishing water tables, protests against the proposed introduction of GM farming into Britain and the agricultural lobbying that goes on behind the scenes. Marguerite Finn looked at the way food is treated as a commodity and speculated on in the global markets, as we considered the warning signs of collapse in the decline of bees and the negative effects of factory farming on our collective health and well being.

Some of our 2011 posts concerned peak oil and looked at the accountability of the companies still making huge profits from fossil fuels and the cost to the environment, the climate and local people. At the same time we celebrated the resistance to this, such as the KEYSTONE XL Pipeline campaign. This protest against tar sands oil had its first success last year as 10,000 people surrounded the White House and the proposal to run a pipeline from Canada to Texas was delayed, awaiting further research. This was the biggest environmental protest in the United States since the 1970s and over a thousand people were arrested including 350.0rg organiser Bill McKibben and James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist.

There was also widespread protest mounted against the equally "unconventional" shale gas extraction, a process called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", which halted excavations in many places in the US and also in Britain where the process is being trialled in Lancashire. There were several national campaigns launched, as the countryside came under further threat for housing and road development (not least in the local NDR proposals) and bio-mass and biofuel power stations, planned to be built around the British coastline. Increasingly it became clear that these moves were sparking a popular re-engagement with politics and ethics, that had almost disappeared from contemporary culture. Reflecting on these shifts, we considered putting ourselves on the line and creating an alternative to the mainstream media that insists that the world will thrive when economic growth returns in a business-as-usual paradigm. We know it won't.

But it might just thrive for other reasons.

If you would like to contribute news or features to the OneWorld Column please get in touch at oneworldcolumn@gmail.com

Occupy Earth poster at Keystone Pipeline protest outside the White House; the ST Valentine's Unneccesary Massacre; Amazon Watch; Occupy Norwich discusses monetary reform; protest against GM potatoes, outside the Forum; Chevron lawsuit in Ecuadar; the AIRPLOT at Heathrow, reclaiming the field by Grow Heathrow.

On a friday night in Norwich, November 2011

By Charlotte Du Cann

It's nine o'clock and eleven of us are discussing climate change. So far we have agreed that in order to mitigate the effects of modern civilisation on the planet's atmosphere we have to powerdown to a low-carbon economy, de-industrialise our agricultural system and bring equality to bear in all aspects of the human world. You might think this is taking place in a warm lecture hall or meeting room on this November evening, but we are far from such venues. We're meditating on the vicissitudes of financial power under the statue of Sir Thomas Browne at the Haymarket. We're sitting on a quincunx of (very hard and cold) granite shapes, inscribed with the names of his philsophical examinations upon life and death. Occupy Norwich is holding one of its evening talks and I've come to spend the night here amongst the tents. Like thousands of others I've been following the activities in Zuccotti Park and Finsbury Square on-line and I want to find out what it's like to occupy a space in physical reality.

Earlier in the week I took part in the general assembly at the Occupy London site at St Paul's where a sea change had just occured. The Church, having originally joined forces with the City of London Corporation to evict the protesters, decided not to go ahead. Clerics resigned from high places as the dilemma presented by the presence of 200 tents in the financial district forced the church to have a change of heart and threw light on the customary obscure power play of the Corporation.

As you weave between the tents you are first amazed by the camp's organisation- the field kitchens, information booths, rota of night watchmen, co-ordinators and working parties - and then by the intensity of the dialogues. In sharp contrast to the shoppers and office workers wrapped up in themselves on their journeys home everyone is talking and listening - a media team sitting in a circle outside the coffee shop, workshops on inner change and the NHS in the meeting tent, a soapbox exchange on industrialisation and slavery by the church railings. It feels modern and yet historic, significant in all ways. St Paul was famously a tent maker, this site was once a place for radical and popular debate known as the folk moot. It's as if all the spiritual and political contradictions about Western culture have been thrown up into the air, in these squares, on the these steps, for a radical re-examination. Not by the 1% who rule but by the 99% - the people who serve its complex machinery. Ourselves.

Philosophers, since the first Athenian city-state was created, have provided politicians with rational justification for all their red in tooth and claw deeds. Political ideas, sanctioned at universities, have justified all the empire's violent acts from the shock doctrine meted out in South America to the rationale behind the atrocities of the Khymer Rouge. In spite of the call from the "thinking classes" for a full-scale manifesto of economic demands, the Occupy movement is taking time to self-organise and find its own directives. Directives that are not just dictated by "left hemisphere" reason and force.

New kinds of street university are springing up around the world. These exist so people can get together and decide on the intellectual and ethical base behind their actions. Most of us have not met before and certainly not in these configurations. We are strangers bound together by a common cause, by our sudden realisation about the global banking system. We are used to living and thinking individualistically, within a hierarchical structure, sanctioned by the official bastions of education. Now we are coming together and learning to think and come to conclusions as a group, creating a new narrative. In common with other occupations, we use the tools of consensus decision making, skill-share, assembly and co-operative agreement.

"What we need is a maxium wage," declares one of the climate change debaters.
"What we need is a fair society," added another,
"What we need is a society," says a third and everyone laughs. A student called Sam writes everything down. All our names. All our conclusions.

It's a Friday night in Norwich. At the FoodCycle Cafe at the Friends Meeting House the long queue for the free weekly meal has now dwindled. At the Forum a Cafe Conversation on Philosophy and Depression organised by the UEA is winding up. We're just getting going. It's a debate that will go on until eleven and then continue around the camp kitchen until 1.30am.

* * * *
In 1992 a German professor from the University of East Anglia walked from Norwich down the coast of Suffolk. His meditation on life and death begins with Sir Thomas Browne and ends in the streets of London, following a train of black funeral silk woven in this city of silk-weavers. The Rings of Saturn charts the intricate wheel of history as it holds us ransom in its grip. In their seats of power, the 1% preside, like dragons with their hoards, coveting form, bringing death and ruin on the world. As I lie on the cold hard ground, next to Sam and Victor and Nick, I'm wondering what it would take to break that pattern, bring warmth and life back to the people, to get us off the wheel.

* * * *

There is the most terrific din outside as the street sweepers and dustbin collectors storm down Gentlemen's Walk. Someone is speaking loudly to an itinerant man with a flying helmet. It's six o'clock. I climb out of the sleeping quarters I've been sharing with the others curled up in sleeping bags in one of the communal tents. I greet the dawn watchman of the camp and walk out towards the loud speakers sitting under the plane trees.

One of the most challenging things about the camps is confronting the hard edge of our city culture, for this is no summer festival in a green and pleasant English field. In common with other protest camps Occupy Norwich has a no alcohol, no drugs policy, but that doesn't apply to everyone else out on a Friday night. As well as keeping yourself together physically, you have at all times be ready to converse with everyone that swings by and cope with both the positive and negative responses to the occupation - not just the ordinary shoppers and workers, but the police, the Street Pastors, the homeless, the bitter and confused and angry, the mentally challenged, curious and cynical teenagers, merry pranksters celebrating the end of another hard week. What is striking is the camp's general friendliness and openenss towards the people who turn up. The way strangers respond to one another generously, bringing not only free food, but their knowledge and time in order to articulate the complex web we are all caught in. We are the 99% means difficulties have to be dealt with rather than pushed away or dismissed in the heartless manner of all Empires.

The itinerant man starts to reel down the steps, singing a military song in German. "People are sleeping!" I tell him, but he is oblivious. Heil Hitler! he shouts as we stand under an umbrella in the softly falling rain.

"I don't think we want any of that around here," I say and laugh, and direct him back to the street where he disappears into the day. That's when I remember it's the 5 November, why everyone has been wearing those masks and transfering their money out of the Big Six banks. It's a quiet revolution that's taking place in the cities, that burns within the right governance of all our hearts.

If we can hold out against the repeating hostilities of history, we might just make it to a future.

Sir Thomas Browne and young protester at Occupy Norwich, October 15 by Ruski Fari; group in discussion on those seats (blipphoto.com); the camp (South Norwich News); Guy Fawkes masks.

The Writing on the Wall

By Charlotte Du Cann

The future is fraternal John Berger (Hold Everything Dear)

Last night I went to a meeting about the Dark Mountain Project in Norwich. This literary and intellectual movement revolves around a manifesto written by ex-journalists, Paul Kingsnorth (The Guardian) and Dougald Hine (BBC) who, like many writers, artists and contemporary thinkers have "stopped believing in the stories our civilisation tells itself".

In response people are gathering in order to create a new cultural narrative. As Paul Kingsnorth explains in a recent interview in The Ecologist:

We’re an open space in which people can gather when they stop pretending that everything will be all right – that the world can be ‘saved’, that climate change can be stopped, that governments will start being nice if we shout at them loudly enough, that the world will change for the better through the sheer force of rational argument, that all the trends which are currently converging towards collapse will be magicked away if we work hard enough. Once you feel ready to step into that space, we ask people to look honestly at the way the world is, and where it is going, and to respond to that culturally and creatively.’

What is clear is that a space is being opened up, a vacancy in which a different configuration of people, thoughts and ideas can come together, a state in which the old dominant paradigm can be dissolved and a new one created.

On the streets of cities this is the #occupy the world movement. Inspired by the social uprisings that began in Tahrir Square in the Arab Spring of this year and later in the indignado movements in Greece and Spain, the #occupywallstreet campaign that began on September 17 is a direct reflection of this kind of cultural alchemy. It's a protest against the existing order but it's also a creative process in which the voices and feelings of ordinary people converge in order to find a way of expressing and manifesting social change. Real democracy and real solutions to our living on a planet in a state of crisis.

At present the prevailing "official" culture is rooted in a Western business-as-usual view of the world, that denies rather than reflects systemic collapse. However the structures on which this culture is based, the myths of endless growth and that special "celebrity" people (1%) have the right to rule and possess great riches, is being eroded as people throughout the world (99%) are waking up to the reality that words belong to everyone and that we need a new story that includes us all.

To criticise these occupations for not having a clear political agenda is to miss the point. Creativity has to allow a certain period of flux and uncertainty, where new forms appear unexpectedly, that don't fit the known or make sense, that appear random and most of all don't obey the existing rules.

You could observe that the #occupy events in New York and cities elsewhere are gimmicky, short lived, or not properly organised, but these leaderless, non-violent gatherings are key in that they focus fearless attention on what is described as "an entity of tremendous power which the mass of people resent and fear: the financial industry". They have also highlighted the extent to which the police will violently defend the existing story (women kettled and pepper sprayed, independent journalists arrested for filming) and the mainstream media are reluctant to relay a new one:

As a result people are now starting to realise just how corrupt and unfair the system is, and are choosing to join the movement which is sweeping across America (70 occupations in different cities and towns in the USA and several cities in the UK). Trade unions and other progressive organisations have teamed up in support and the numbers of people taking to the streets and campaigning online is increasing.

Meanwhile back at the neighbourhood pub in Norwich we discussed how we might go forward as a group of students, thinkers, artists, clowns, writers and community activists. We're going to organise an event in the Spring, write a journal, start creating a culture that does not just reflect the status quo bolstered by historical precedent. But first we are going to meet in an open space and see what happens when we come together.

Because the future is an ensemble act.

OCCUPY NORWICH Occupy Norwich is inspired by Occupy Wall Street, a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders, abilities and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.

Come on down on to the Haymarket on October 15th from 2pm. bring your placards, bring food and drink and warm clothing if you intend to stay. We don’t know how long this will last, but the first step is to get ourselves down there together, talk and plan, make friends, reconnect with our local community, and make it OURS!

UPDATE! (via @NaomiKlein)"After cops raided #occupysf and tossed their stuff in the dump, garbage workers returned it to the protesters, saying "we r 99 % too, And in NYC, transit workers say they don't want to drive the paddy wagons taking protestors to jail, because they too are the 99 %"

Photos from occupywallstreet and occupymanchester.

Putting Ourselves on the Line

By Charlotte Du Cann

This column is usually reflective of world events. We talk about the big subjects – Libya, the London riots, nuclear fallout in Japan, global peak oil and environmental degradation - but we also record the stories we come across as citizen journalists, as activists and writers within an international progressive culture.

We do this is because amongst the constant chatter of daily news and the distraction of entertainment the smaller and more radical stories are not told or given proper focus. Because we don’t see them or read about them, because they are not highlighted and given weight by professional commentators people think these stories do not exist. Or they don’t matter.

Whereas in fact they are key.

Today I want to highlight three of these stories you might not read about in the mainstream media. Because as every storyteller knows, it’s the listeners that make the story come alive. It’s paying attention to what is being said and making connections that makes the subjects of these stories enter the consciousness of the collective and change the course of history.

On the Dark Mountain

I am at the Uncivilisation Festival on the Hamphire downs. It’s the last event of the weekend. Jay Griffiths, author of Wild, is introducing Benny Wenda An independence leader from West Papua. Like most people in Britian I know nothing about the genocide in West Papua (though I did once watch a three hour documentary on East Timor and the Western media by Noam Chomsky). We have just watched a film made in this country that has been occupied since 1962. Benny Wenda in a headdress of bird feathers sings his Cry for Help, a song for the 250 tribes now being exterminated by the Indonesian armed forces, as Rio Tinto and BP ravage his ancestral mountain. He sings for the earth, for the soil, for the birds of paradise we are all losing.

“I lead my people with a tear,” he says.

Standing in the Square
I am at the Transition Conference in Liverpool. Last year the financial commentor, Nicole Foss was the breaking news. Her analysis of spiralling house prices in a devolved economic future sent everyone into a crisis. This year the key words are calm, focused, mature. Everyone is discussing collaborative methods of powerdown and community action. On Sunday night however while most people are enjoying an open mic session, activists from Transition Barcelona were showing videos of uprisings that have been taking place in the main square. How thousands of people in response to the financial and political crises of the time met and started to discuss a different way of doing things.

When the police forced the people out of the Plaza Catalunya the spirit of what had taken place went into 23 neighbourhoods in the city. People came together to prevent the police evicting their neighbours (thousands of homes have been repossessed by the banks). Groups went into the countryside and took the news of what was happening which had not been reported by the mass media. Indignados are walking now through Spain, going from village to village telling the story and also to the EU government in Brussels. It is estimated that 10 percent of the country has been involved in this “real democracy” movement.

Against the Wall
I am at home in Suffolk skimming tweetdeck. Lists of tweets flash by like so many newspaper headlines. It’s the holiday season and the feeds are quieter than normal, but here is one story that keeps grabbing my attention. A civil disobedience action now in its last day of action in front of the White House. The heads of the largest environmental organizations are calling for the President to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline, planned to run from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, citing dangers to climate, the risks of disastrous spills and leaks, and the economic damage that comes from continued dependence on fossil fuel.

Over the two-week sit-in 1,252 people have been arrested, including top climate scientists, landowners from Texas and Nebraska, former Obama for America staffers, First Nations leaders from Canada, and individuals including Bill McKibben, former White House official Gus Speth, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, actor Daryl Hannah, filmmaker Josh Fox, and author Naomi Klein.

“On an issue as complicated as climate, there will often be disagreements over tactics and goal” said McKibben, one of the organizers of the protests for tarsandsaction.org. “But there are some projects so obviously dangerous that they unify everyone, and the Keystone XL pipeline is the best example yet.”

This is not the only action taking place in a nation that seems so rigid and militaristic that protest appears impossible. On the 17th of September, 20,000 nonviolent civilians will swarm Wall Street and set up an indefinite occupation - complete with free kitchens and doctors, tents and communal childcare - until their demand for real democracy is met. Inspired by the radicalism of Tahrir Square and Plaza Cataluna, the aim of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET is to save democracy “from the combined threats of plutocracy, oligarchy and corporatocracy. And with global climate change accelerating, there isn't a moment to lose.”

What connects these stories? We live in an institutionally separated world. Our media is highly selective, fuelled by base and reactive emotions. We are engineered to see news as discrete one-off events, whereas they are intimately connected with the fabric of the world and set within a deep framework of time and Empire.

There is a story about butterflies that is often told amongst people who campaign and put themselves on the line for a very different future. Here it is: when the caterpillar transforms into an imago it enters a state of complete dissolve within the cocoon. As it dissolves imaginal buds which create the new butterfly begin to emerge, which the immune system of the caterpillar violently resists. At the first attempt the buds are defeated. But at their second attempt the buds change their tactic. They are the same discrete units as before, but this time they start to connect with one another. It’s this combined network that holds out against the resistance of the old and brings the new form into being. What links the buds is communication.

That’s why the story goes both ways.

Photos: Forgotten Bird of Paradise, 2009; placard in Barcelona, May 2011; sit-in outside the White House, August 2011; tar sands in Alberta before and after; on-going demonstrations for social justice in Tel-Aviv

ONE WORLD EVENT! New film and discussion evening Little g presents the documentary, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein on 16 September at the Friends Meeting House, 6pm. All welcome.

When the Chips are Down

It’s noon on Saturday and a small and buoyant crowd of people are gathering for a rally outside the Forum. Activists from France, farmers from Norfolk, campaigners on bicycles with placards saying Stop Gambling with our Chips!, children riding small red tractors piled with red and white tubers from Wales. A waitress from The Greenhouse is handing around (delicious) organic chips to passers-by. I’m taking pix and speaking with Brenna and Tierney and Christine from Transition Norwich, Becky and Hayley from GreenGrow outside Bungay and the people from Growing Communities in Hackney. We’re all here to champion the potato, that key staple veg of all our allotments, gardens and fields and protect the land from the invasion of GMOs.

For the last ten years the Sainsbury laboratory at the John Innes Centre has spent £1.7 m of public money researching (so far unsuccessfully) a potato that is resistant to blight. During this time the UK has successfully resisted the introduction of GM food into its stores and supermarkets. But the laws in Europe are now changing, making it easier for GM crops to be grown and the debate is back on the table for both growers and consumers. Already the seed merchants and pharmaceutical companies are pressurizing farmers in East Anglia to adopt them and this event is bringing this into public awareness. At 1pm a red tractor will drive through the streets of Norwich to the John Innes Centre and deliver a load of conventionally bred blight-free potatoes in protest at the research and trials taking place there.

“It’s becoming impossible for farmers in Canada to be organic," reported one of the speakers (this week a farmer in Australia is suing a bio-tech company as their seeds have entered his crops and he has lost his organic status) as we listened to speeches from the Soil Association, local farmers and national campaigners outlining the main reasons why public money should be spent elsewhere.

“It’s complex,” said Josiah before he went on BBC Look East to discuss the GM potato trials at the Centre. Scientific research and the debate around it is complicated, but the decision to allow GM trials is simple. You either believe that it’s OK to radically interfere and manipulate the structure of plants and sow the land with these invasive artificially-bred organisms.

Or you know it isn’t.

The real complexity here however is not this decision, but in arguing from different paradigms. One where corporations seek to control and exploit the natural world for profit and to drive the industrial food machine to every corner of the globe, and the other (of which Transition is part) where individuals and groups seek to establish a small-scale agriculture that works with the natural world, to prevent waste and relocalise the food chain. Josiah who has worked with local growers for years (including FarmShare) and knows his potatoes (as well as the research behind them), faces the same difficulty all of us do in facing that argument.

The people who push for GM are smart and aggressive and have little conscience about these matters. Their decisions are based on conquest and profit. They also fund the academics who can argue cleverly on their behalf. Those who oppose GM have gut instincts, a knowing in the core of themselves that bio-tech crosses a certain line and a feeling they do not want to eat food grown in this way, anymore than they want to eat cloned animals.

The majority of people in the UK have those same unacademic feelings and instincts and do not want to put “Frankenfoods” in their shopping baskets. Corporations seek to persuade everyone to buy bio-tech by claiming it will banish the spectre of future World Hunger, mostly in Africa. The reality is that there is already famine in Africa, as there are massive land grabs by UK bio-fuel companies (a main cause of rising food prices). There are also studies that prove growing organic crops is a far better solution to food security than global industrialised farming which dispossesses and exploits people, drains water tables and destroys local eco-systems. The “opposers” are in fact not so much against GM and its consequences but for everything it takes away, including social equity.

The difficulty is that it is not really an argument we need to be having. Arguments reduce issues into black and white boxes and exclude the ur-complexity, which is not the Byzantine line of scientific reasoning, but the richly-woven web of life, the way everything on the planet is connected and in relationship. The dominating “left-brain” mindset of Empire goes way too fast for this complexity to be seen or heard. It deliberately compartmentalises each issue, so that its contradictions never confront each other. It reduces communication into superficial feel-good spin whilst keeping the depth discussion of real-world ethics and social responsibility at bay. It reduces the globe to a soundbite. A few short moments on a television broadcast.

GMs have been in use in North America for years now. The crops don’t give the great yields that are promised (and sometimes fail), use more pesticides, and the seeds (which farmers can no longer keep themselves) have increased dramatically in price. Economically many farms are struggling. In spite of all the scientific research there has been no study on its effects on people’s standard of health (the US has one of the worst in the Western World). There are plenty of good reasons why we are outside the Forum today in defence of the real potato. But the underlying force that brings us all together has been the subject I’ve wanted to pay attention to this week on This Low Carbon Life.

Because ultimately there is a decision that we all have to take at some point down the line, as the Artic melts, as the environmental storm brews all about us: whether we follow the reason of the mind or the logic of the heart. This ultimately is a question of allegiance. Not just to the beating engine of our bodies, to the profound feeling intelligence of our beings that informs every great thing that we do, but the heart that is the natural order and organisation of all life.

The earth is not made of the human mind. Cities and civilisation are constructed of the human mind, but the natural world and everything we depend on for life is not. Air, water, plants, pollinators. Our minds tell us we can control what gives us life, in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary, and forget one essential fact. The earth is a creation of heart.

We just have to reassemble the letters.

The gathering outside the Forum; chips from the Greenhouse; Brenna on her bike; Jack from GreenGrow with the red tractors (small version); already blight-free potatoes from Wales.

Power of the powerless

By Charlotte Du Cann

It’s daybreak and a small bird is tapping at my window for insects. Rain is sliding down the panes and the droughted barley fields that surround the house are drinking in the wet. It’s difficult looking outside to connect the physical presence of roses and a cloaked summer sea with the statistics of climate change and peak oil that keep appearing on my computer.

I close my eyes to know what to write in a time of confusion: the tweets and blogs of the week flash past my mind - the UK government's suppression of the facts about the future of oil, the increased militarisation of the US police force. On the surface the dazzling images of eternal growth, presidents, celebrities and omnipotent armies continue; underneath the facade everyone else raises the alarm. The world is running out of time.

Who is it who will join up the dots, connect one statistic with another? What is it in ourselves, raised to think in discrete and separate units, to defend ourselves in dualistic arguments, in flight-or-fight antagonisms, that has to break out and empathize with our kin? It's becoming clear we cannot hold on to the mindset that created these global problems we now face. We have to contact something else entirely in ourselves. Something the world's media rarely mentions.



What is the right response to the news for example that America houses 2.3 million people in gaol (up from 400,000 in 1980) and that those prisoners work for 35 cents an hour refashioning toxic weapons without any protection or rights? What is the right attitude when we we learn that jellyfish in the world's oceans are devouring vast amounts of plankton, affecting both the marine chain and the carbon in the atmsophere, that the bellies of fish everywhere are filled with plastic? What do we do with the conflicting stories inside that tell us about the land of the free and the plenty of the sea that anything is possible and there is always toast for tea?

Do we turn our faces away and say with a shrug: what can we do? Do we feel helpless and afraid and stop reading these reports? Or do we continue to read and see everything we do in the full awareness of the systemic breakdown and then take a radical step in our own lives?

"We are all part of the machine", said Theo Simon from the radical folk band, Seize the Day. We were under canvas at the Sunrise Festival in Somerset and the tent was packed. Simon was telling us stories of resistance - singing for the striking wind turbine workers at the Isle of Wight, taking part in the anti-cuts demonstrations in London - and how crucial it was we remember to connect with ourselves as workers, as cogs in this machine, because it does not work without us (and that the popular revolutions that overthrew tyranny in the Middle East only happened when the ordinary people joined with the students and activists). And most of all that we care for each other, that we come from heart. Even as we face the helmeted forces on the police line.

ii

At the same time America was beginning to intensively incarcerate and tyrannise its own people, a movement began that David Korten documents in his book The Great Turning. To turn means to “walk away from the king”, to deliberately disengage oneself from the clutches of a 5000 year-old Empire. It is an act of dissent that seeks, on a personal and social level, to expand beyond the bullying imperialism of modern culture, in order to see life in terms of consequence, how every action we take affects our fellows and all living systems. It is to actively shift "from empire to earth community", inspired by what some might call the imperative of conscience.

In a time of increasing oppression and planetary fall-out, a decision becomes necessary: a decision only our hearts can make. We are not taught to value the intelligence and fair play of the heart. We have learned to like theories, the ideas of democracy, of love, of freedom, and play with these things in our minds, as if they were arbitrary, as if we had a choice. And perhaps at one time, we could fool ourselves we had a choice. But now, we realise if we are smart that we do not. Instead we have a decision to make: about integrity and the part we play.

In a state of fragmentation you need to hold fast and make meaning. In a restless time, you need to be still, to secure a foothold in whatever place you find yourself. In a present in which the future has been erased, you need to remember, to look forward. As the shock doctrines of the world exact their penance from the populace, an act of disobedience may be necessary. In such moments of extremity, you learn not to hold on to the grandiose abstractions of the mind, to textbook ideologies, but hold dear the things of the real world - the small move, the valuable encounter, the fragrance of the morning, the flower as it opens, the people who still walk beside you however hard the wind blows.

To live in harmony within the collective there has to be relationship and fellow-feeling. Communication between us cannot shut down. The empire depends on those feelings of helplessness, on our desire to escape and our lack of connection with one another and the planet. The heart is the only power within us that can break the mindset of empire. But to find the heart, we have to lose the one thing we are trained to believe is more precious than anything: our separateness.

Inside the mind there is a hostile god telling us: you are different and alone. But we are neither different, nor alone. We have been condemned to become the very people we once exiled ourselves from, trapped in what W.G. Sebald called in his peerless metaphysical work on history and landscape, the rings of Saturn. The Hebrews have become Egyptians, constructing watchtowers, oppressing their slaves, building ghettos. The Christians have become Romans treating the world as their bloody arena. Everywhere there is a consolidation of power, of elite, of privilege, of masters and the master races. The god’s voice dictates the minutes of every meeting, burns down the world with his apocalyptic thunderbolts and ire. What do you or I have? Nothing, except the diktat that enslaves us and keeps us apart.

To discover the heart and re-enter the living systems, we have to let go of the god that rules the mind. We have to let go of our house rules, our temple rituals, our positions of absolute control. We have to have the courage to enter a state of not knowing the way all writers do when faced by a blank page and the fire of inspiration has yet to come. We have to let go of form and experience feeling, let the words arrive in a different order.

I open my eyes. The sun is flashing on the ocean, the wind rippling through the green cornfield, the bird is in the air.

I walk out this Midsummer morning.

Video based on Bill McKibben' op ed Keep Calm and Carry On; police raid on Transition Heathrow; wild rose and solstice sunrise, Suffolk by Mark Watson