WHEN IN MANCHESTER

Where is agency and politics at a time of crisis?

Book reflection: Out of the Wreckage by George Monbiot (2017)

Author’s documentation.

Finally caught up with reading again.

While it first came out of necessity, or an overdue necessity since I should have read this prior to completing my draft, the book thus far turned out to be an interesting read. The paragraphs were written as if story-like, with simple words used to describe hefty themes such as the rise and fall of neoliberalism.

In a sense, such wording did make it more legible for the necessity-driven reader like myself. But at times I thought it left some arguments to be simplistic and lacked the much-needed agency to complement. Nevertheless, to the defense of the book I only managed to go through the first few chapters and the conclusion thus far!

The purpose of my writing here is to share Monbiot’s main arguments, my thoughts and pretty much just structure them into writing so I remember them. Here are some points to recap.

1. The book starts off quite strange. I say strange because it is an interesting and also alien concept for me, having never thought of correlating political discourse with psychology. From the perspective of politics as a discourse, it first talks about the change of human behaviour from being beings that are intrinsically altruistic to one that is competitive and individualistic. Further propelled by an economy that prizes the invisible hand of the market, favouring those already equipped with access to it, Monbiot correlates competitive and individualistic politics with the rise of loneliness and depression, making us “even more disconnected than ever before”.
2. Globalisation accelerates inequality and despite going through the horrors of financial crises, the reproducing neoliberal values remain, if not grow stronger. What makes today’s case different to the Great Depression of the 1930s is that at that time, people had already thought of centralised state planning as key to bring welfare back to the people. When the golden Keynesian days ceased in the 1970s, there was “no alternative” but to adopt neoliberalism, as it remains to this day.
3. Yet Monbiot’s critic does not necessarily lean on the glories of the state either. He acknowledges that states presence has been weakened through the processes of globalisation and neoliberalism, and along with it, room for politics. He states that “as the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts” (p. 38). In its place, consumerism dictates planning. Consequently, this leads to the disempowerment of marginalised groups.
4. In order to reclaim “happiness” and “our course of life”, Monbiot finds agency in the community that we live in. Close-knit relations based on common altruistic virtues allow for the creation of what he calls the “politics of belonging”. The management of local resources foster bottom-up politics to eventually create a real democracy where people design their own system to get themselves out of depression, loneliness, alienation, competition and individualism. Might be a tad simplistic here but that is the rough idea.

My preliminary concerns with this book is two folds.

First, it overlooks community agency to the point that community politics is unrealistically altruistic. You can, and usually find, village elites demarcating land and planning infrastructure to benefit their own crop. Factions in village councils want different budget allocations. It is not uncommon that these interests conflict with one another. And that is fine. That is what makes each community thriving with agency and why community politics is far from altruistic.

Second, complementing the first concern, as community agency may well be thriving based on local virtues, should it even be as unrealistically altruistic as Monbiot states it is, it does not eliminate its relation to external forces — rendering any community agency left to not be purely based on community values. Back in the times of Indonesia’s New Order, “village governance” were seen as extensions of the state. Even with decentralisation, village governance is all the more merrier with external pressure from state and non-state entities from various scales. Hence, the politics of belonging is essentially not just believing in your own community level agency but also harnessing that agency and contending in larger political networks.

Regardless, the book does provide a solution to the current corrupt system, I can give you that.