While we say hands off, we also need hands on to address our planetary crisis

We need to take power in the places where we live

Hands off rally at the Washington Monument. Credit: G. Edward Johnson, Wikimedia Commons

7 minute read

The contradictions of Hands Off

The massive crowds that came out for this past weekend’s Hands Off protests illustrate the vast contradictions in which we find ourselves.

As people who believe in the need for profound changes in society, we are driven by Trump’s radical eviscerations of vital government functions to defend existing institutions. The very framing, Hands Off, expresses the defensive nature of the protests.

Many of us are seeking a more decentralized order of things, rooted in bioregions, in the places we live, with power rising from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down. Yet we are reminded by Trump’s attacks that in the current order we need what centralized states provide, including basics such as social benefits, environmental protections, postal services, weather forecasts, and scientific research. In this moment, we need to say hands off these vital services. While undertaking an exploration of how we would provide them in a more decentralized, confederal order.

That gets to where change really originates, and how to move forward against the headwinds of a reactionary administration. Let’s be honest with ourselves. We can only go so far with protests such as took place last Saturday. Having mass numbers turn out on the streets is important, and gives us hope and courage in the face of deeply disturbing and potentially disheartening events. But ultimately, to turn back Trump’s depredations, we must go further to mass nonviolent civil disobedience and strikes, interfering with business as usual in ways that shake the oligarchy of wealth and power.

But unless there is a vision for deep change behind such actions, we will be left with the fundamental problems that have brought us to this place. Trump is only a symptom. For decades, wealth has concentrated in the upper realms, with most in a tiny sliver at the top. Tax cut after tax cut has further concentrated wealth. The money power has developed networks of think tanks and media to forward its agenda of corporate rule free of democratic control. Supreme Court decisions have allowed unlimited spending in political campaigns, buying politicians in both parties. We are in a situation where people in fact have little real power at the federal level.

Under the current circumstances, we cannot look for progressive change to come from Washington, D.C. The most for which we can hope is for the Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives, to hold back the worst of Trump’s ravages. It is typical for the opposing party to gain control of the House during the midterm elections of a presidential administration. With Trump’s actions looking to crash the economy, it is even more probable. But control of both houses of Congress is almost certainly out of the picture. The anti-democratic arrangement of the U.S. Constitution that gives small states equal representation with the larger makes it almost impossible for the Democrats to take the Senate.

And with Trump ruling by executive order, whether the right-leaning Supreme Court will tie him back in any real way is open to question. Early rulings that pause lower court decisions on firing of federal workers and deportation of innocents to El Salvador are not a good sign. We are even left with the question of whether Trump will openly disobey court rulings, as did one of his presidential heroes, Andrew Jackson, on a Supreme Court ruling upholding the rights of the Cherokee Tribe not to be driven down the Trail of Tears.

The need for radical change

Thus, we are confronted with a reality that has long been building, of the deterioration of whatever we have had of democracy in the United States, and the increasing power of the corporate oligarchy vis-à-vis people as a whole. This should tell us, if we did not already realize it, that the power to effect change through conventional national political circuits is for the moment significantly spent, and that we need to think in deeper and, yes, radical, ways. As much as we need to defend what we have, to say hands off, we also need to channel the tremendous energy we saw last Saturday to achieve fundamental change. We need a place to put our hands on the levers of power and move things in a profoundly different direction. That brings us closer to home, to the places where we live.

At the deepest level, we need to create an ecological society and economy. We are in a condition of ecological overshoot, as I often note in these writings. An increasingly disrupted climate is in the foreground. We just learned that Arctic sea ice cover has reached its smallest maximum extent before spring and summer melt in the 47-year history of satellite observations, with implications for massive disruption of global weather patterns. That finding comes from NOAA, one of the federal scientific agencies Trump is slashing. One wonders if we will continue to receive such reports.

But climate is only one of 9 planetary boundaries “within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come,” the Stockholm Resilience Center notes. We have already exceeded 6 of them. Humanity is saturating the planet with pollutants, exhausting water resources, and degrading lands and biodiversity. On the track we’ve been following, we are leaving a legacy of breakdown for our coming generations. The major reason we are on this pathway is because the oligarchy of wealth and power finds it profitable, and profit is the prime driver of the system. Trump intensifies these trends, but they were accelerating well before him.

So where can we put our hands on this system and turn it in a direction that provides a sustainable basis of life for ourselves and the other species with which we share this planet? As I often write, we must build the future in place. We must find ways to take power where we live, in local communities and bioregions, in towns, cities and states (or provinces). We must begin to deal with the most planetary of issues in the most local of ways, both to reduce human impacts to the greatest degree we can, and to build community resilience in preparation for the disruptions that are now inevitable.

First and foremost, we must regain power over money through building public banks and enacting just, progressive taxation on wealth. We must use this money to create social and economic institutions that have as the prime goal not profit but the sustenance of human and other natural communities. These include worker coops, circular economies, social housing, community energy networks, public broadband, community media, and provision of basic income. For long term sustainability, it will be vital for institutions centered on community to spread and become the prevailing form. But truly transformative change begins in specific places which offer fertile ground for new departures. Massive change begins in small ways and cascades outwards from there.

Of course, facing a reactionary administration, there will no doubt be efforts to hinder the power of cities and states. Trump’s recent executive order seeking to push back state climate laws such as the carbon limits in California and Washington state are an example of this. While the order is on specious grounds exceeding the power of the federal government over states, and likely to be turned back in court, nothing is certain. If it stands it would be just another illustration of oligarchic power that will spur widespread resistance. The harder Trump pushes his outrageous assertions of executive power. the more it will drive movements to overturn them. He may even cause substantial dissolution of the current federal system, with states refusing to comply.

Seeing two overlaid maps

In a way, this is a paradoxical process. We must leverage the power of existing local and state governments to create an order based in communities and bioregions. The idea of dual power is vital in this regard, of creating community assemblies and popular councils that exist alongside existing governing bodies, building consensus and gaining legitimacy for new ideas and approaches. Ultimately, we may redraw political boundaries to reflect bioregional realities. But for the time being we must work within existing boundaries. Artificial as they are, they also reflect powerful social, economic and political realities. Seeking greater regional autonomy, the pathway is to build institutions of economic and social self-reliance, based on dual power exerted in existing jurisdictions.

I think part of the issue is our Western civilizational tendency to bound everything in the same framework, to have one uniform system of doing things. It originates in our monotheistic religious tradition, which over the centuries transmuted into such hegemonic ideas as the nation-state and capitalism, in many ways taking the place of God in our western psyche. We must somehow transcend this.

The world as it is presents us with increasing contradictions, as the present political moment illustrates. We must both defend existing political institutions, saying hands off, and put our hands on the wheel to build new institutions that truly address the planetary crisis. We need to keep two ideas in our head, and work on them in parallel. In our current situation, we need to see two maps overlaid on one other, that of the political units in which we take action, and that of the bioregions where we live.

While we defend institutions and services vital to us, we must foster a vision for the world we want and need, one in tune with ecological realities and planetary boundaries. In the spirit of that saying originating in the ‘90s movements against corporate globalization, “Another world is possible,” I will in coming months be reviewing a series of books and other sources which present such visions, under the theme, Possible Worlds. Some new. Some relatively recent. Some classic. All highly relevant to our situation.

Facing the onslaught of a reactionary government, we need to stand up with courage, both for the present we need to preserve and the future we need to build. We need vision to guide the way. I will try to contribute to this in the best way I can, to help us negotiate the path between our very challenging current situation and a future that works for us all.

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