Just as Hardin’s later reflections on the commons point out that there is not a ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, rather it is systems in which people do not collectively decide on their use of resources that are the ‘Tragedy’, so at the end of his life Marx’s analysis became one that advocated not a march of modernising progress through capitalism to socialism, but that we protect commons regimes where they exist and restore them where they do not: Transition initiatives are doing just that.
What is power? Transition and the pleasure and power of place Challenging the system or reclaiming the place? In their critique of the Transition movement Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler distinguish between the lasting systemic changes they argue we need to work towards, and what they see as the less substantial place-based changes the Transition Town movement encourages people to focus on.60 They argue that ‘changes to place don’t really add up to a long lasting and substantial transition, not least globally’,61 that the Transition Towns movement focusing on locality can deflect people from pushing for the systemic changes that are urgently needed, and that these Transition initiatives carry the potential of inadvertently absolving the welfare state of its responsibilities by themselves taking on community service roles. Their 2008 critique is even more resonant in the UK today where, against a backdrop of draconian and unprecedented cuts in public spending, the Conservative-led government uses its ‘Big Society’ rhetoric to encourage communities to step forward voluntarily to take on roles which public sector workers were being paid to undertake. At the same time communities are being encouraged to step forward and buy crucial local amenities, which will otherwise be sold to private companies for private profit. The people in the Forest of Dean are – like communities surrounding all government-owned Forestry Commission land – being asked to step forward and buy what they already own. The enclosure of the commons continues apace. In response to the argument that the Transition movement should be taking an explicit anti-
60 P. Chatteron and A. Cutler, The Rocky Road to a Real Transition: The Transition Towns Movement and what it means for Social Change, Trapeze Collective, 2008. 61 Ibid., p.33. 62 R. Hopkins, Transition Culture, 2008. 63 Chatteron and Cutler, The Rocky Road to a Real Transition, p.34.
38
|
www.compassonline.org.uk
capitalist position, Rob Hopkins writes that Transition doesn’t start with a belief that growth, capitalism, whatever, are morally bankrupt and ethically malevolent [rather that] in the light of peak oil and the economic meltdown, their implosion is inevitable and we need to engage the same creative thinking that got us to this point in designing a new approach... I am taken with the idea of Transition coming in under the radar, and my experience is that the people who are picking it up and running with it are, in many cases, not people with a long background in anti capitalist work, but just people who often perceive themselves as apolitical and are taken by the vision of the whole thing.62
Although in theory these understandings of power appear to be diametrically opposed, this may be more because we can experience power in very different ways rather than because one analysis of power is right and the other is wrong. When Chatterton and Cutler write that ‘Transition Towns are ultimately subject to the same order of oppression, class structure, entrenched power and vested interests [as everywhere else]... each place and locality is woven together by networks of power which have been forged over centuries’.63 they are prioritising the existence of coercive power – a reality we can all surely recognise. However, when Hopkins highlights people’s ability to engage in creative community projects that can transform their neighbourhoods, this is also a reality many of us can recognise. Hopkins’ analysis highlights the existence of a very different sort of power: there is not just coercive power, but one grounded in relationships of care, which is most evident in the connections people have with place and each other. The urgent need to slow down into place, dialogue and respectful confrontation Can we respond to the urgency of the situation by acting in a way that reconfigures, redistributes and re-orientates power through remaining open to those who appear to still be holding all the power? Can we redirect mainstream structures and thinking in our society, while at the same time building alternative lifeways, and when