What Can We Do?

What Can We Do? #1

‘What Can We Do?’ is my free weekly newsletter covering case studies of collective organising from around the world.

“How do you stay hopeful?”

As someone who writes about the failings of capitalism, I’ve been asked some version of this question more times than I can count. I used to respond with a quote from my favourite politician, Tony Benn: “There is no final victory, just as there is no final defeat. Just the same battle to be fought over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.”

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These words seemed to satisfy my audience for a time. But then the unthinkable happened: despair came for me.

If had understood Benn’s words correctly, despair was a sign of weakness. It was the job of a good activist to develop the kind of strength and fortitude shown by the heroes of their movement – those who had withstood shame, intimidation, and even torture to secure for us the rights that we now take for granted.

Refusing to give into despair felt like a rebellion. Those who derive their power from domination – from corrupt politicians, to exploitative CEOs – want us to feel small, hopeless, powerless in the face of their totalising control. But when we remain strong, steadfast, and determined in our resistance, we’re able to reclaim some agency.

So, when I started to feel hopeless, I felt like I had failed. There wasn’t one single thing that brought these feelings about. I had been very involved in Labour’s election campaigns in 2017 and 2019, and certainly felt depressed in the wake of such a significant defeat. But, in true Bennite fashion, I reminded myself that the socialist movement is global and a loss in one place has to be set against victories in others.

I held out hope for Bernie Sanders in the US, for the European socialist parties that had emerged out of the anti-austerity movement, and for a return of the ‘pink tide’ that had swept Latin America in the 2000s. At times, this hope felt immensely personal, like when my friend Walden Bello ran for Vice President of the Philippines in 2022 against the son of the country’s US-sponsored former dictator.

These hopes were dashed one by one. Then came more defeats. The pandemic did not, as Indian novelist Arundati Roy hoped, provide a ‘portal’ to a new world – it allowed imperialist states and big tech companies to consolidate control over our lives, while increasing support for far-right extremists. And the cost of living crisis didn’t create the mass unionising effort that many had anticipated, it simply exacerbated people’s hatred towards migrants, the disabled, and the unemployed.

As the pandemic came to an end, feeling bereft and hopeless, I opted for the capitalist solution to all one’s personal problems: therapy. Perhaps it was time that I, like everyone else, learned to adjust myself to a broken world, rather than trying to change the world to fix my own problems.

A few weeks in, my therapist said something that stuck: “Grace, you can’t process all your emotions on your own.”

At first, I was sceptical. Processing emotions felt like pretty much the one thing that you could and should do entirely on your own. What else was I going to do? Break down in tears every time I suffered a minor inconvenience?

But the statement seemed to follow me around wherever I went. I started to see the words of my therapist in the faces of all the people who would stand up at the end of my talks and ask ‘how do you stay hopeful?’ How could I look them in the eye and tell them to ‘toughen up’ and get organised, when I felt so weak, and so alone? They probably felt just as weak and alone as I did.

This realization was hard to square with my politics. I’m a socialist – I’m supposed to believe in the power of collective organising. I had spent years inveighing people to get involved in political movements, to join unions, to become community organisers. But it was hard to see how people could ‘get organised’ if they felt completely isolated from everyone around them. Even if people did manage to join a movement, mistrust and competitiveness were likely to tear these groups apart eventually – as I had witnessed in my own political organising.

I started to see the these feelings of isolation everywhere I looked. At first, I thought it was just projection. But when I started to discuss these ideas with friends, at public events, and with other organisers, I realized what I was saying had struck a nerve.

The idea that we’re all alone, and that we have to fight to survive, seems to have become commonplace. People don’t join unions anymore because they think that the only way they’ll win a higher wages is through competing with those around them. People accept growing inequality because they believe that, if they compete hard enough, they might just end up on the top of the pile. People have stopped resisting government policies that harm their interests, because they can’t imagine what it would be like to take part in a movement that could challenge decisions made by the powerful.

What if we have all internalized the belief that we are entirely on our own, and that interdependence and cooperation are signs of weakness? That would be a pretty good way to create a society devoid of any form of collective organising; devoid of much real hope.

As I mulled these ideas over, I received an unexpected email. Dr Karel Williams, an academic at the University of Manchester, opened his message matter-of-factly: ‘Grace, as you are half Welsh and take Christian social teaching seriously, you should come to the launch of the Blaenau report on March 18.’ Karel informed me that he had been studying a town called Blaenau Ffestiniog that had transformed itself from one of the poorest places in the UK to a hub for community enterprises – all through the cooperation and determination of its residents.

To be honest, in the past, this was the type of email that I would likely have read and then ignored. I would have been too busy debating big, important policy ideas to take much interest in local political movements. But look where that strategy had landed me. Karel seemed very optimistic about what was going on in Blaenau, and I needed a little injection of optimism at that particular point in my life. It helped that Blaenau was about half an hour away from the Welsh town in which my dad grew up. If nothing else, it’d be nice to take a trip to North Wales.

It ended up being a trip that would change the way I think about politics forever. Blaenau’s residents had become so sick of politicians promising money and investment for their ‘left behind’ community that they decided to take matters into their own hands. They set up a series of social enterprises that created jobs and reinvested in the local community. They challenged the power of the big multinational corporation exploiting the hydroelectric resources in the area by setting up a community energy company. And then, they brought these enterprises together to figure out how they could work together to solve their towns problems, creating everything from a food bank, to a youth centre.

I interviewed dozens of people who had been involved in the project – from the ageing Welsh socialist who wanted to talk to me about Marxist theory, to the young former musician who wanted to talk about how his youth centre was helping young people pursue their dreams. There were disagreements about the nature of the project, not to mention significant constraints on peoples’ time and resources, but these challenges could not undermine the energy and determination of the people involved.

Having spent a lot of time travelling around places labelled ‘left behind’, what struck me about the residents of Blaenau was how empowered they seemed. The anger and despair I had so often heard in the voices of people lamenting that ‘politicians are all the same’ and ‘things are never going to change’ was absent here. In its place, there was a sense of collective empowerment that seemed almost contagious – it wasn’t long before other towns in the area started to implement the model themselves.

Like many on the left, I had up to that point been pretty cynical about human nature. Studying the crimes of corporations and the corruption of politicians doesn’t exactly leave you with a positive view of humankind. And this cynicism informed my attitude towards activism. If those at the top defended their regime of terror with brute strength, then those who wanted to change the world had to be even stronger; tougher; harder. This is what I thought Tony Benn meant when he told us all to toughen up.

But what I saw in North Wales was one of the most profound examples of political transformation I had ever seen with my own eyes – as opposed to those I’d read about in the pages of old books. This was, in my mind, a form of living, breathing socialism: a world in which people were coming together to solve their problems, challenge the power of elites, and look after each other.

I started to realize that I’d been looking at everything all wrong. Socialist transformation wasn’t going to come from people ‘toughening up’, shutting others out, and trying to solve the world’s problems on their own. It was only going to come from people trusting each other, supporting each other, and learning to work together.

It was at this point that I knew what I needed to do next. I wasn’t going to help bring about the revolution by continuing to write about the problems created by capitalism. I knew that the only way I could truly contribute to our movement would be to shine a spotlight on all the incredible, diverse examples of collective organising that exist across the left today.

And that’s why I’ve started this newsletter - to bring you stories of struggle and resistance from all over the world.

Because it’s time we stopped looking at the world’s problems and asking ‘what can I do?’ Instad, we need to get organised, realize the scale of our collective power, and start asking ‘what can WE do?’

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