INDIVIDUALISM: OUR VOLUNTARY VULNERABILITY TO OPPRESSION

Although our main political parties cluster around the same policy chest, there are few who would consider that our political, social and economic systems are ideal or truly appropriate for the future challenges we face. The UK has an enormous dependence on imports of food, energy, raw materials and manufactured goods which it pays for, in large part, from precarious earnings from finance, weapons and medical drugs. It's economic model is driven in large measure by the need to generate turnover with doubtful added value in order to meet the demands of finance. This results in vast numbers of people being employed, often for low wages to create a delusion of added value that conceals wasteful consumption. The wasted resources and the wasted lives involved in sustaining this illusory system should under any circumstances be a concern, but when faced, as we are, with both the vulnerability of our economic model and all the challenges of sharing a resource finite world with a vast and growing population, it is madness.

Almost everyone is in a position to see some part of this madness. They can see it in the absurdity of their work systems. They can see it in the impulse ebay purchase flown in from Hong Kong and delivered by courier. They can see it in their supermarket packaging. They can see it in the quantity of cloths they buy and throw out. They can see it in the pointless gifts they feel guilt obliged to share at Christmas. They can see it in the courses they study to half gain unwanted skills. They can see it in the over priced coffee from Starbucks. It goes on and on.

Even though people can see that they are part of a madness, much of the madness is dressed up as cultural necessity. Through adverts and the media we learn how to express ourselves as social beings through our consumption. We learn what our homes should look like. What our cars say about us. What our holidays and interests say about us. We become unable to separate our passion to engage with the world in a particular way from the development and management of our self image. This is not a confusion that has evolved, so much as been constructed by a market economy that needs consumption in order to finance itself. This is not something that could have happened if the merchants had to negotiate with people with clear and strong cultural identity. It has required that the merchants have had the power to define cultural identity as a product that we consume. It has required that the merchants have the freedom to negotiate with each of us as vulnerable individuals, rather than as communities. This is the true meaning of individualism. Sold as a state of freedom and strength, individualism is in fact the means by which we become complicit in our own powerlessness.

Alongside the emergence of consumerism and individualism, we have seen the vast increase in the power of the centralised state and major corporations. This is not coincidental. It is part of the same process. The underlying drive has been to create the systems of production and distribution of goods and services needed to provide for a large population, while exploiting the advances in knowledge and technology. How to determine what constitutes need and the best way it can be satisfied has been one of the key idealogical battles between command economy communists and capitalists. Communists have argued that to allow the private profit motive to drive a supply and demand market for goods and services creates a society that is socially unjust and wasteful. Capitalists have argued that the complexity of competing needs and possible ways they can be satisfied requires a dynamic and fluid system and that government can intervene to manage social inequality.

The capitalist model has certainly proven itself capable of creating a complex dynamic system to meet the demand for goods and services, however, it has also undermined governments ability to effectively manage social inequality issues or address needs and priorities that are not marketable. While this may just reflect the low calibre of political leaders, it also reflects the powerlessness of individuals, be they consumers, workers or voters. The decline of trades unions has reduced the pressure for wages to keep up with living costs. The withdrawal of government from the productive economy has made maintaining full employment an impossibility, so creating a body of people effectively excluded from the jobs market and the cultural engagement that goes with it. The capitalist system has extended its potential for short term gains to the extent that it is in a state of perpetual instability, meaning that government has few policy options if it does not want to risk some degree of collapse. It therefore is not possible for individuals to exercise their vote to push for systemic change. And finally, as consumers, there is almost no infrastructure for collective action to challenge the corporate supply systems. As a consequence, the rational behaviour of individuals is to take the best paid job they can get, regardless of how boring or pointless the work is, not to vote and to develop a consumption pattern that follows the crowd.

This is what the majority of people have opted for and it is around this pattern that the capitalist system has shaped itself and taken itself to the point of instability. The government therefore has to see its role as being to keep people on this powerless treadmill so as not to add to the instability of the system. To this end it is increasing the fear of the consequences of unemployment by lowering benefits and increasing the needs for ever greater compliance. Instead of a political discourse to address the systemic problems, the discourse that is open to public debate is almost exclusively focused on creating social division, with benefit dependence and immigration topping the bill. Protest demanding systemic reform is increasingly dangerous and demanding if it is to go beyond ineffective ritual, with government armed with the legal and police infrastructure for selective oppression of dissent.

It would be easy to conclude that as citizens we are powerless, but this is not the case. Our powerlessness is derived from our willingness to comply with the expectation that we negotiate as individuals, not as large groups or as communities. It is derived from our acceptance that we need to manage our money through financial institutions. It is derived from our complicity. If instead we were to form buying groups to negotiate bulk purchases of the goods and services we all need and used our savings to invest in co-operatives that meet our shared needs, our dependence on both corporations and the state would begin to decline. If we used local currencies to decrease the amount of our wages that pass out of our local economy, we can create local jobs. If we use the autonomy that these steps could give us to define our own cultural identity, we can undermine the roots of our vulnerability. It is in the end our own lack of faith that we can work constructively together in a spirit of cooperation that makes us vulnerable and powerless, not just to the oppressive constraints of a capitalist market economy, but powerless to shape the kind of society that might survive the challenges the world faces in the years ahead.