By Manthan Pathak.
If you haven’t watched Ken Loach’s final film, The Old Oak, it tells the story of a village divided by the arrival of a family of Syrian immigrants who are greeted with tremendous hostility, but build friendships as they work with the community to save the local pub and only public space.
It is above all a tale of compassion and solidarity, dissolving the social barriers between the working class and asylum seekers through mutuality.
It provides a useful starting point for a reflection on our collective failure on the left to present a united response to the crisis we currently face of the fascist rise across the world, but specifically here in the UK.
I approach this problem, as we all do, through the lens of our own experiences and the values we hold. As a seasoned anti-racist and climate activist – as well as being a subscriber to broadly socialist principles – I see a very definite alignment in the collective consciousness of these three often dislocated groups.
Within the climate movement there is a burgeoning awareness that migrant justice equals climate justice — the disproportionate effect of the climate crisis on the least responsible countries for the cumulative historical emissions that have brought us to the precipice of catastrophe. These effects produce two outcomes relevant to anti-racists in this country: extreme weather events and resource-driven conflict (every conflict is to varying extent born of the struggle for resources). The natural response is migration, as it has been throughout history, but the extreme circumstances brought by a warming planet accelerate and exaggerate this response, one that will be magnified in the future as temperatures further increase.
We know that there is a gaping hole in international human rights law where protection for climate refugees should be, and while we can perhaps mitigate the rate of societal collapse as the climate crisis deepens, we cannot reverse it. Our response to increased migration flows from the majority world will determine our capacity to withstand the climate crisis as a whole.
From the 1980s to today, far right politicians have employed a simple rule: every time they downplay or deny climate change, they make a statement about immigration (read White Skin, Black Fuel by Andreas Malm for an excellent record of this). It’s important to note they have not deviated from this tactic in decades.
The logic is this… climate change is a contestable, nebulous threat while immigration is a plague that brings the real devastation that can be felt in the everyday experience of crippled public services, increased levels of crime, and unemployment. Despite record levels of flooding and wildfires sweeping through Europe, inexplicably it appears to be a credible argument for many.
Worryingly, the capacity for climate scepticism and denial has grown into a legitimate political movement — see the widespread resistance against 15 minute cities, net zero targets, and, in particular, the establishment of the UK branch of the Heartland Institute, with links to the Trump administration and connections to Farage, Tory MPs, and which will be run by the ex-UKIP leader, Lois Perry.
These intersecting issues represent an obvious coalescence that demands a coordinated response by a willing coalition of climate and anti-racist activists. In considering this response, informed by my experience of co-founding and coordinating Southampton Mutual Aid Group during the pandemic, I looked to the socialist writing of Peter Kropotkin (Mutual Aid: a factor in evolution) and the work of Murray Bookchin, author of the Ecology of Freedom, a formative environmental text. Bookchin builds on Kropotkin’s idea that mutual aid is the true expression of consciousness in human evolution, a firm rejection of social Darwinism and the concept survival of the fittest.
Bookchin articulates the imperative for us to create post-scarcity communities that move away from the plundering of natural resources and towards inter-dependency within communities. It’s my belief that building resilient communities based on mutual aid can form a central pillar in our resistance to the climate crisis, and to fascism. Integral to Kropotkin’s thinking is the idea that mutual aid is a working class act of resistance to oppression from above, and in the context of today we can most obviously identify that oppression as vulnerability to oligarchic power. For socialists, I think it represents a compelling call to action.
The idea of mutual aid is much older than its present resurgence. Cooperation, after all, has been fundamental to human history. And mutualism, as symbiotic cooperation is called in biology, is vital to life itself.
The climate movement’s recognition of civilisational collapse as the climate crisis unfolds has already given birth to support for a nascent network of community-building that models self-reliance built on an ethos of compassion and the common good, a forsaking of the primacy of the individual, and local democracy in the form of community assemblies for decision making.
The scope of self-reliant communities can extend as far as imagination allows: mutual aid networks provide the model for shopping trips, collecting prescriptions, food sharing, gardening, pooling of DIY tools (our mutual aid group in Southampton facilitated 8,000 recorded acts of giving during lockdown). Examples from elsewhere in the UK illustrate the potential for even greater cooperation and self-reliance, including community gardens for local food production, local currencies and even community-based ‘microgrid’ electricity networks.
If this sounds like an impossible dream, we should remind ourselves that when the pandemic gripped the country and lockdown ensued, 4,000 mutual aid networks sprang up throughout the UK in a matter of weeks, and many endured beyond lockdown. Under the spectre of brutal discrimination, consider the survival programs introduced by the Black Panthers in the US, built on mutual aid principles, enabling people to meet their basic needs and breaking down social isolation.
Before COVID in this country, mutual aid groups existed. In 2018 Mutual Aid UK (based in Nottingham) became established as anti-racist platforms dedicated to support marginalised groups, led by people of colour. Their belief is that “separating money from mutual aid is classist, racist and oppressive”. In other words, financial transactions automatically assume a higher value than acts of giving or exchange where no money is involved, and it’s an assumption that mutual aid can effectively challenge.
As a response to fascism, communities built on mutual aid are inarguably more resistant to far right tactics of division. by placing deliberate emphasis on cooperative practice that in turn recognises the value of individuals based on an abiding principle of interdependence.
In order to resist the individualistic mindset that compels people to place blame on others for the scarcity of resources — the very fuel of racism — we must present a serious alternative. When individuals feel their lives are poorer as living standards deteriorate (as they are predicted to), enriching our communities must be that alternative. Clearly then, community-building can be conceived as a political reaction to a political problem.
As an anti-racist activist for many years, I’m aware that nothing can be a substitute for the robust opposition to the far right by groups like Stand Up to Racism, which has successfully mobilised on the streets up and down the country over previous decades, and notably in response to the anti-immigration riots last summer. We will always need that level of physical determination to push back against the fascist tide, to vividly express our steadfast commitment to resisting racism in this country through strength in numbers.
We also need to recognise that the far right has stubbornly persisted as a political force in the UK despite these efforts. That suggests that fascist ideas have become embedded in the social fabric of the country and in our communities, and so we must be willing to accept a plurality of approaches in resistance.
And if a hard right government seems unthinkable, it’s also a terrifyingly real prospect. Reform lead at least one national poll at the time of writing, and their ascent to power will enable and embolden the far right on the streets to a much greater degree than anything we have witnessed so far. In a little over four years, they could conceivably preside over a society whose fault lines have been further exposed by a worsening climate, abetted by the hateful politics of Trump and Elon Musk. In other words, there is an undeniable urgency to creating a movement capable of decisively changing the course we’re on.
My proposition is simple: that socialists, climate activists and anti-racists work collaboratively to create communities built on the principles of mutual aid that can demonstrate how we represent a force for social good, and model the type of communities that – through a sense of common purpose for common benefit – can effectively repel the fascist and hard right threat before us. Put simply, at this most precarious of times when our communities are vulnerable to hateful tactics of division, the strongest possible response is to build stronger, more resilient communities.
We can look to the existing Lifehouse network in this country, to models of solidarity networks elsewhere in the world, and to our own communities during COVID and beyond for inspiration and support. Now is the time for us to make real on the eternal promise that it is we the people who construct society, and reject its imposition upon us.
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