The School of Life

Roman Krznaric on Why We Should Re-Invent The World Cup

As football fever envelops the planet, with all eyes turned towards South Africa, I want you to imagine a different World Cup. Each country sends their national team as usual, but then all the players are pooled together and divided into teams based on their astrological star sign. So Virgos play Leos, and Aquarians are pitted against Aries, with each team having players from a mix of countries. Who would win overall? Perhaps the power of Taurus, the bull, would be no match for the sharp sting of Scorpio. We might imagine other World Cups, where teams are based on shoe size – the clodhopping size elevens against the nimble-toed eights – or maybe the favourite colour of each player.

If this sounds ridiculous, it is no more absurd than dividing teams on the basis of something as arbitrary as the nationality of the players. This strange practice involves determining team members by where they happen to have been born on a particular land mass, which citizenship document they have managed to get hold of, and where the national frontier is at the time of play.

We should remember that nation-states are historical inventions, mainly emerging since the eighteenth century. Only one hundred and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as Germany or Italy; these states were an agglomeration of principalities. Up until World War One, Europe was dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose frontiers enclosed Slovenia and Slovakia, both of which countries are now playing in South Africa. Serbia would not be battling for supremacy in Group D if had not been for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The artificiality goes further, in the sense that every country has relied on a barrage of invented traditions and other propaganda devices to generate its national identity. The Scots – who failed to qualify for South Africa – take pride in their apparently ancient Highland dress, but according to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the wearing of ‘traditional’ kilts and tartans was an invention of the mid-eighteenth century, partly as a protest against the Union with England. The English are so proud of their red-on-white St George’s Cross, which I see fluttering out of windows and tied to car aerials in the town where I live. But few people realise that St George himself was born in Palestine in the third century, and that the flag was already in use in the fifth century by the Georgian King Vakhtang Gorgasali. Children in the United States have national pride injected into them in school every morning when they swear allegiance to the country’s flag. No community is more deeply imagined than the nation-state.

None of this would really matter if nations were innocent actors on the world stage, but we know that this is not the case. There have been no major wars between armies representing different signs of the zodiac. When it comes to warfare in the past century, nationalism reigns as the supreme culprit. From the two world wars to the conflicts in Yugoslavia and the ethnic violence that flared up this week in Kyrgyzstan, nationalism has been one of the most destructive forces in modern human affairs.

How does this all relate to football? In some ways football tournaments like the World Cup – and sport more generally – can encourage a healthy form of nationalism that forges unity in countries with significant social divides. Brazil may be plagued by horrendous wealth inequality and racism, but its disparate citizens rally together to support their national team. South Africa itself found that holding the Rugby World Cup in 1995 helped create a unified national consciousness and heal the wounds of apartheid, generating empathy between black and white.

But football also plays a role of legitimising and exacerbating divisions between nations. This is not simply visible in the extreme form of hooliganism, but in the more everyday way that people generally support their national team, rather than those of rival nations. Football, like national flags, is part of the ideology that generates the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which ultimately cause so much violent conflict and human suffering. As the sociologist Richard Sennett has written, ‘we’ is a dangerous pronoun, since it necessarily involves the ideas both of inclusion and exclusion. Shouting for your own team also means not shouting for the opposition.

I can appreciate that football is much more about skill and beauty than about creating dangerous forms of nationalism. Football also has the capacity to replace violence with a more gentle ‘war by other means’ – kicking a ball around on some grass. But nationalism has a history of being a dark force, and we should make our best efforts to erode its power and presence. So if you are about to watch your national team play in South Africa, at least consider giving your support to the opposition. In the end, however, we would be much better off with a World Cup that was based on star signs rather than nation-states.

Roman Krznaric is a writer and teacher on creative thinking about the art of living and social change. His new book, Empathy, will be published by Acumen later this year. He is also the author of The First Beautiful Game, and Work and the Art of Living.

William Higham on a shameful week in British politics

Sometimes – like today - I wish I could find a big jar of gloopy political apathy in the supermarket, placed between the toothpaste and aspirin on the shelf. I would go home and smoother myself in it, sleep better and live a happier life. But people like me are well-named political junkies. Politics sits on the centre spot on the heart’s mantelpiece where better adjusted people might store their affinity for their football team, their hobby or their passions.

There are great highs, but they are few. Most of the time party politics brings a grinding sense of moral strain, as you sign up to the collective line. And most of the time is haunted by failure, compromise or the fear of failure.

And how do you explain what’s going on within British politics? If you don’t care about party, but feel politics should be rising to the challenges facing the country, is there any explanation that could excuse the sheer self-indulgence and navel-gazing we’ve seen out of Westminster?

These are tough times in Britain. There are some 600,000 people more unemployed than last year. Last year 40,000 homes were reposed and bankruptcies rose from 15 to 20 thousand. It’s hard to comprehend these numbers – even before you add the ripple effect of families, partners and dependents who find their security, prospects and standards of living dragged down too. But politics seems to have turned in on itself, indulging in introspection, faction and at picking its own scabs formed by the Telegraph’s devastating expenses scoops.

There is something incorrigible and toxic in the way that the Labour party seems only able to fight about its own leadership and itself. Like a doomed couple who pledge each time to be civil and get on, but find each evening together ends up in a hissing fight. And behind all the conflict lies hope or blame about what a leader can actually do for a party or a country– each equally superstitious, even mystical. The would-be assassins of Brown remind me of a passage in the Golden Bough about the itch to sacrifice kings and gods to bring back fertility and serenity to the land: “a dying god should be chosen to take upon himself and carry away the sins and sorrows of the people”.

The plotters are neither united in their grievances or their alternatives. Hanging over them seems to be the redemptive promise of spilt political blood. Of course, we might ask whether the resignation (or ritual sacrifice) of the Commons Speaker has raised the stock of parliament? But that’s far too reasonable a question. That is like asking the last Mayan priests why just one more blood libation will stop the jungle closing around their cities. And really, despite years of engagement with politics, I can give no better explanation of what is hoped for by the plotters than that – a semi-magical catharsis. And then a new king to replenish the joint stock of political mojo.

Well last night, the dagger halted in its arc – Brown was spared.  But if you read the columnists today discontent rumbles on, or is delayed to the autumn.  Meanwhile the Conservative’s spend most of their public utterances mocking the Labour party’s troubles. At the heart of today’s politics is introspection, ringed by derision. We can and must do better.

William Higham will be teaching The School of Life’s Politics course starting Monday 15 June. For more information or to book a place click here.

Photo by Nils Jorgensen

 

Alice Rawsthorn on Good Design

Ahead of her secular sermon for The School of Life on Sunday June 28, International design critic Alice Rawsthorn, puts out a call to arms for young designers.

 

The numbers seem nutty. There are 6.5 billion people on this planet, 90% of who can’t afford basic products and services. Half of them, nearly 3 billion people, don’t have regular access to food, shelter or clean water. Yet whenever we read, or talk, about design, it’s invariably about something that’s intended to be sold to one of the privileged minority – the richest 10%.

 

The £1 million chaise longue. The super-smart phone. The fast car. The beautifully bound book. The elegant typeface. The cute digital device.  Museums, books, magazines, and blogs are stuffed with them. Tens of thousands of designers devote their working lives to producing more.

 

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. No one forces billionaires to pay £1 million for chaises longues at gunpoint, and I can’t pretend to feel the least bit guilty about loving beautiful books. But when you look at the bigger picture, doesn’t it seem odd that so much time, energy, talent and resource should be devoted to creating luxuries for relatively few people, when so many more people are in desperate need of designers’ skills and ingenuity?

 

More and more designers, mostly young ones, are addressing that need by designing everything from emergency housing, water purification devices, cheap forms of transport, educational resources, to new business initiatives for “the other 90%”. They are also tackling the problems of mature economies like our’s by working in collaboration with other disciplines such as anthropology, economics, ethnography, psychology and the social sciences to develop new solutions to acute social problems in areas like crime, education, healthcare, housing, joblessness and ageing.

 

At the same time, the combination of the economic recession and environmental crisis is prompting designers to re-assess the value of their conventional projects. Many of the values that underpinned design in the 20^th century are now redundant. Technology is no longer seen as a panacea. New things aren’t necessarily better than old ones. Big isn’t always best. Why buy something when you can borrow it for a time, before passing it on? Then there is the realisation that most designers’ work will end up rotting – or worse, failing to rot – in landfill sites? And that the design phenomenon of this year, iPhone apps, was dreamt up by amateur designers, not professionals.

 

If you look back historically, design has always flourished in periods of change. It is an agent of change that can help us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to interpret shifts in science, technology, culture and the economy into things that can help to make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. This is a time of unprecedented change, when those shifts are accelerating as are the extremes of speed and scale that confront us daily, while the social and political systems that once ran our lives are collapsing.

 

All of this creates extraordinary opportunities for designers, if they embrace a new approach to design – one that is more fluid, responsive, collaborative and inclusive. They will have to win over an increasingly demanding and knowledgeable public. They will have to design intangible formulae, as well as things, and then devolve responsibility for how them. Designers will also have to accept responsibility for ensuring that their work can be disposed of as responsibly as it should have been sourced, manufactured, sold and shipped. And they must focus on the needs of the under-privileged 90%. If they succeed, we will have a new definition of “good design” – one that has less to do with chairs, and more with the aspects of design that really matter.

 

To book tickets for Alice Rawsthorn's sermon on June 28th, click here.

 

Sophie Howarth on the agitational influence of Augusto Boal

The Brazilian theatre director, educator and politician Augusto Boal died earlier this month. He was a huge inspiration to me and his influence can be felt in many of our courses here at The School of Life.

I had the fortune to be part of a workshop around The Art of Legislation Boal led at the GLA in London in 1998. Later I learned about his ideas from Adrian Jackson, who translated Boal’s work into English and adopts his unique brand of playful agitation though his own work as artistic director of Cardboard Citizens. Earlier this year, I made a personal resolution to try and attend another of Boal’s workshops wherever in the world that might take me, as I yearned for more of the confidence to make useful trouble he inspired. Sadly that opportunity has now passed.

Boal was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of everyday theatre used in radical education and increasingly in drama therapy. The name is a variation on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the now infamous 1968 education manifesto by philosopher Paolo Friere.  Friere is without doubt one of the great visionaries of revolutionary social education, but his books are as earnest as they are urgent. Boal, by contrast, made the very serious project of tacking social injustice seem full of humour, joy and hope. Games were in his blood and at the heart of his methodology.

Boal believed everyone could make theatre, and that it was a unique way for each of us to identify strategies for personal and social change. In his Invisible Theatre actors would, seeminly spontaneously, put on a prepared scene in a public place - a restaurant or crowded square - that would quickly engage the surrounding public. In Forum Theatre, a play about a social problem turned out to be the beginning of a negotiation; audience members were encouraged to suggest different modes of resolution for the play and even to climb onstage to help enact them. It all makes Brecht look tame.

The impact Boal made on the everyday lives of many previously disenfranchised Brazilians did not endear him to the military regime of the 1960s and 1970s, and his life was an eventful one involving imprisonment and exile.  But after the fall of Brazil’s dictatorship, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro and used his innovative theatrical approach to engage overlooked communities as a city councillor. He started over a dozen theatere companies and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.

 

 

Maurice Glasman on why Orwell got it wrong

It is sixty years since George Orwell published 1984. Maurice Glasman asks whether it has really been as prophetic as it’s cracked up to be.

George Orwell’s 1984 has failed to stand the test of time.  Twenty five years after its projected moment of realisation, the type of totalitarian repression he envisaged may help us grasp the condition of a Chinese Communist Party functionary who has fallen out of favour but does not give us the conceptual resources to capture the type of threats to liberty and integrity that confront us in Britain today. 

 

As a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition, Orwell was concerned with threats to the type of society Britain was becoming.  ‘Big Brother’ is a scary concept but it is not at the heart of what is at stake here today.  The booing of Andy Burnham at the Hillsborough Memorial at Anfield yesterday expresses a rage and contempt that people feel towards politics and politicians that is nowhere captured in 1984.  The threats to society that people fear, such as environmental degradation, market failure, immigration or Islamic contestation do not feature. 

 

It is true that millions of people live a life of atomised powerlessness when confronting forces that are definitively beyond their control.  The force which confronts them, however, is not a Single Party Prison State based upon constant domestic surveillance, common activities and Supreme Leader devotions all co-ordinated through a central government of such integrated omnipotence and knowledge of each citizen’s secret fears that resistance of even the most personal type is met by the slavering jaws of wild black dogs that attack you in the night. 

 

The force is something very different.

 

There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can.  The police are held to account by a citizen’s army of mobile phone cameramen who document every moment.  The State cannot hit its targets for teenage pregnancies or literacy, political participation or tests for cervical cancer.  Even the might of the Great Hegemon’s Army is made to jump around Afghanistan by a bunch of enraged peasants with Kalshnikoffs.  Blowing away three teenage pirates is heralded as a great success in a whole array of global wars.  Meanwhile the State finds itself subordinate to the demands of finance even to the extent of using its own resources to keep them in their position of dominance. 

 

The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding.  The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit.  Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job.  The obtrusiveness of line management and the risks associated with not being a team player are forged most furiously when making money is at stake. 

 

The type of closed society that Orwell envisages is also inconceivable in a society characterised by internet access, satellite television and immigration.  The black dogs that attack you in the night are far more likely to belong to people traffickers or drug dealers than the secret police.  Orwell’s failure to envisage the power of the market, the incompetence and subordination of the state and the increasing insignificance of political parties in people’s lives deserves some reflection. 

 

Orwell’s conceptual imagination was shaped and formed by the dreams and nightmares of the Left.  From Wigan Pier to Catalonia, from Animal Farm to 1984 the concern is the same. If the problem for Conservatism has always been that of how to stop the market undermining the family, the locality and integrity of inherited institutions, then the problem for socialism has always been that of how to stop the State nationalising society and then making it redundant.  Orwell envisages an entirely monopolistic state,  a supreme leader leading a single party through the repressive apparatus of a dominant State with collective coercive power over all its citizens.  Any form of Hard Left politics that had this type of political arrangement as a vision of the good is now only of any consequence in public-sector teaching Unions. 

 

Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness and he was right in 1948 to observe that Statist socialism was the biggest show in town.  Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten. 

 

Maurice Glasman will be discussing the failure of such a dream for the Left and for our society as a whole with Phillip Blond in Red Tory vs Blue Labour, a debate organised by The School of  Life next Wednesday 22^nd of April at Conway Hall, London WC1. Find out more here.

 

Maurice Glasman will also  be teaching the next Politics course at The School of Life starting Thursday evening 30 April. Find out more here.

Red Tory vs Blue Labour

A battle is being fought for the centre ground of British politics. Ideological divisions between the two main parties seem to be melting faster than the financial system or the polar ice caps. The School of Life is adding to the heat, by hosting the most vital debate of the day: Red Tory vs Blue Labour.

With both Thatcherism and New Labour in disgrace, the ideological cross dressing of the last thirty years has changed and intensified. Cameron’s Conservatives increasingly identify themselves with the National Health Service, educational opportunity and stronger local government. Labour meanwhile remains in thrall to the City of London, while strengthening its policy on Law and Order and presenting itself as the most effective defender of Britishness and the British State.

Speaking for the Red Tories is Phillip Blond, director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos. He will argue that only a revived Conservative tradition drawing inspiration from Burke, Disraeli, Chesterton and Belloc can challenge inequality, restore a sense of home and place and provide real security for people in times of crisis. Blond's brand of Red Toryism decisively rejects markets pretending to be free when in fact they are private sector monopolies, and far from insisting on a powerful state, argues for power to be restored to local communities.

Waving the flag for Blue Labour is Maurice Glasman, Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme at London Metropolitan University and faculty member of The School of Life. Glasman will argue for a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. The debate will be chaired by Professor John Gray, Britain's foremost political philosopher whose widely influential books include Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. Find out what is really at stake in how the two great political traditions of Britain make sense of the role of finance in civil society. And discover the battleground over which the next general election is sure to be fought.

The debate takes place on Wednesday April 22 at 7pm at Conway Hall, WC1. Tickets cost £10. To book call 0207 833 1010 or e-mail [email protected]

What We Learned From Bernard Crick

"Politics is ethics done in public", argued Bernard Crick who died on 19 December 2008. The statement sums up why he had such a profound influence on all of us who struggle with how to lead good lives both in private and in public.

Theorist, activist, academic and public intellectual, Crick was a key advisor to both Neil Kinnock and David Blunkett, and is perhaps best known as the major biographer of George Orwell, and more controversially as devisor of the recent Britishness test for immigrants to the UK.

In his landmark book In Defence of Politics (1962), Crick described politics as a messy, complex and imperfect process. But he believed this is exactly why we must value it. The frustrations of compromise and the need for constant adaptability are precisely what make politics the only tested alternative to government by coercion. He urged against the temptation to reduce politics to ideology, democracy, or nationalism, encouraging all of us who want to engage in political action to learn to live with, indeed to value contingency. 

Crick’s ideas are integral to The School of Life’s politics course. Find out more here.

Read an obituary of Bernard Crick in The Independent here.

Morgan Phillips on being immaterially green

Being green implies that you care about the future of the planet, that you enjoy the great outdoors and so on. It is generally defined somewhere along these lines: I recycle therefore I am green, I buy low energy light-bulbs therefore I am greener, I use reusable instead of plastic bags therefore I am greener still! It seems that the greener you are the better, unless of course you are too green at which point you liable to be labelled a killjoy or a hippy. By too green I mean that you are someone who has started to question conspicuous consumption, the material wealth equals happiness myth and have begun to opt out of mainstream consumer culture.

But how green is green enough? Can we really fly off on skiing holidays in the winter then exotic beach holidays in the summer and still call ourselves green because we get a box of organic veg delivered once a week? Can we still aspire to own and then flaunt the latest luxury cars, houses, clothes, electronics, holidays, jewellery and so on and consider ourselves green because we bring them home in a ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ and recycle the packaging? Surely not. The materialist and often infantilising values underpinning and reinforced by consumer culture are at the root of most, if not all, environmental, social, personal and one could now argue even economic problems.

To become green, and not just conspicuously green for the sake of one’s image, one needs to let go of these consumerist values. This is not a simple thing to do. It involves a lot of soul searching, a fair bit of scepticism and a lot of resolve. I know, I’ve been there, done it and recognised that I shouldn’t buy the t-shirt. The greenest people out there are the ones who don’t make a song or dance about it, but whose lifestyles just make them naturally ‘green’. These people often display materially simple but intrinsically rich lives. They have found real ways to meet their basic needs for non-material things like love, respect, friendship, intellectual stimulation, entertainment and play, they are not seduced by goods and services that merely promise to deliver these things and they are not conspicuously green. If you are less materialistic, less concerned with creating your identity through the goods and services you buy, you will naturally be more environmentally friendly (you will create less waste and use less fuel). You will also, probably, be happier because you will not be so reliant or guided by external stimulation and praise. Being green means doing all the green things like reducing, reusing and recycling, but it also means having a mindset that lessens your propensity to display your greenness!

Here’s a prescription for three books which might help you shake off the common assumption that a high income is always necessary for happiness, and encourage you to become less conscipuously green. 
Tim Kasser The High Price of Materialism
Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders
John Naish Enough
Andrew Simms (ed) Do Good Lives Need to Cost The Earth?

All these books can be found on The School of Life's new shelf "For Those Who Strive To Be Greener".

Morgan Phillips is The School of Life's expert on Green Living.

Richard Reynolds on his stuggle to fill the world with flowers

I began guerrilla gardening four years ago. These strikes were solo nocturnal missions. My aim was to make myself a garden from the miserable and neglected flowerbeds abandoned by Southwark Council's horticultural contractors. In parallel, little did I know, but thousands of others were doing the same, taking land that was not theirs and cultivating it, for flowers and food, alone and in groups, in cities and in country lanes. 

A lot has happened since I began guerrilla gardening and it's all because I blogged about it. So here I am blogging some more to tell you about The School of Life's wonderful Guerrilla Gardening gift box (seen here), which contains all you need for a night out transforming some orphaned land into a little garden.

It also contains a copy of my recent book, ON GUERRILLA GARDENING, which BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time picked as one of their Top 5 gardening books for Christmas: "I'd go as far as to say it's one of the most unusual gardening books of 2008, well written, well researched, very inspiring". Unfortunately praise for guerrilla gardening is not universal and the fight continues on the doorstep... my local council (Southwark) have just pressed the big red nuclear button and declared war on my oldest guerrilla garden. The bombshell arrived in the form of an invoice to me and my 89 neighbours for gardening they have not been doing. Last year they refunded their fraudulent charge for three years of 'grounds maintenance' after admitting the work had been done by guerrilla gardeners. But now they have reinstated the charge without explanation. Read more about this farcical saga at www.guerrillagardening.org.

Richard takes participants on The School of Life’s PLAY course out for a beginners’ guerrilla gardening lesson. Book now for the course starting on 2 February.

He is also leading an Urban Gardening Holiday for The School of Life in collaboration with Emma Townshend in April 2009. Find out more or book a place HERE.

To order The Guerrilla Gardening Christmas Gift Box for £35 plus post and packaging, click HERE.

Maurice Glasman on the secret of Obama's success

Of all the astonishing things that happened on Tuesday night perhaps the most remarkable and least remarked upon was the fact that someone who trained and worked as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago had become Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. 

Why does that matter?

Community Organising was developed in Chicago by a man called Saul Alinsky in the 1940’s.  It was based on a few basic principles of political action.  The first was that politics was about moving from the world as it is to the world as it should be.  Alinsky taught that we can only act effectively if we understand that the world is a place constituted by power and domination.  In the Chicago of Al Capone and Mayor Daley’s Democratic Machine Alinsky came to the conclusion that only organised people could beat organised crime.  He created neighbourhood alliances that built up relationships, generated actions and gained power in the Back of Yards area among poor Catholics and in Woodlawns among black churches.  Community Organising was born.

In the Politics Course at The School of Life we look at different approaches to politics that can make us more powerful, more capable of resisting and forming change, building relationships with others and engaging in common action.  We look at Aristotle, we look at Machiavelli and we look at Alinsky.  From Aristotle we learn that politics is the capacity to act together with others in pursuit of a common good, from Machiavelli that it is the art of ‘Acting in Time’.  We look at issues that cause us pain and how we can work with others to change them.  That’s democratic politics and that’s the tradition of political engagement that Obama was schooled in.  Saul Alinsky taught a basic set of rules of engagement in politics that Obama would have learnt from his training in Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.  Let’s look at how they worked for him.  The first rule of community organising is:

1.  Always work inside the experience of your people.  Through the use of facebook and other internet fora, through the use of music and video as forms of mobilisation and communication as well as the reactivation of churches and local meetings, Obama worked outside the experience of mainstream politics but within the experience of the coalition of first time white voters, African Americans of all kinds and local Democratic activists.  No-one could see them, no-one reported on them, no-one could control them and yet they were there, they were mobilised, they won the Primaries against a very well organised Clinton campaign and they understood what was going on.  The extra turnout, the unprecedented voter registration, the level of energy and engagement that was generated came out of working within the experience of his people which is linked to Alinsky’s second rule

2.  Wherever possible go outside the experience of your opponents.  By using the internet and popular culture, by working within the organisation and cadences of the Black Church, by organising meetings which the media were not invited to and were unaware of, Obama’s campaign confused and frightened both Hilary Clinton and John McCain who both began to panic and enforced another of Alinsky’s teachings which is:

3.  Power is not only what you have but what your opponent thinks you have.  By working within the experience of their own people and outside those of their opponents the stature of Obama began to grow, his strategists were seen as Machiavellian geniuses, the internet networks as mobilising millions and ‘Obama Girl’ was the pop sensation of the year.  Obama, far from appearing as an inexperienced one term Senator with no record of having run anything, ever, looked like the President Elect and Hilary Clinton was reduced to drinking whisky shots in red neck bars while complaining about the price of petrol while McCain, with forty years experience started describing himself as a maverick.  This also led to McCain picking as his running mate someone who was clearly unprepared for the job and which led to a vindication of Alinsky’s fourth rule:

4.  Ridicule is our most potent weapon.  The selection of Palin and the increasing desperation to depict Obama as a Marxist while George Bush was busy nationalising the banks meant that Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live could focus exclusively on the ridiculousness of the Republican campaign.  By trying to make the electorate afraid and angry of a softly spoken Lawyer from Harvard the Republicans opened themselves up for a degree of ridicule from which they never recovered.  The fact that they were opened up in this way flowed from the fifth rule of effective campaigning which is:

5.  Keep the Pressure On.  Obama’s campaign clearly identified ‘change’ as a fundamental idea and the thing they defined themselves against was George Bush and his economic and foreign policy legacy.  Obama opposed the war in Iraq and it gave substance to the point.  This put tremendous pressure of McCain to define what he was for, or against.  Obama’s biggest weakness was his lack of experience.  By keeping the pressure on McCain to define the change that he was about Obama forced a fundamental incoherence to emerge.  If McCain distanced himself too much from Bush he looked disloyal and dishonest while if he portrayed himself as the experienced continuity candidate there was no change at all.  By surrendering the centre ground to Obama he lost the campaign by making himself look erratic and impulsive, as the Palin pick revealed.  A principled Senator began to look like a grubby opportunist with no strategic vision for his campaign or the country.  And as Obama knew from his Community Organising training:

6.  The Price of a successful attack in a constructive alternative.  Yes we can.  Obama claimed to represent a new constructive politics that overcame division and political bickering.  When the decisive moment came, when the Banks of America lost their liquidity and went into liquidation and the chicken licken bankers assured us that unless George Bush transferred $700,000,000,000 into their current accounts, immediately, the sky would fall down on everyone’s head, John McCain went missing for forty eight hours.  Then he said he would suspend his campaign, then he said he wouldn’t, then he said he would not debate with Obama, then he said he would.  He said that the fundamentals of the American economy were sound, then he said they weren’t.  Obama, in contrast, supported the bail out while adding a moratorium on home repossessions and a cap on bankers’ bonuses for a year.  He attacked the Bush record and had a constructive alternative.  It looked like ‘change you could believe in’.  This flowed from the seventh rule of Community organising which is that in any campaign you have to :

7.  Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it.  The target was not John McCain but George Bush.  He was the face of what Obama opposed and then he polarised.  Obama asked whose side are you on, my side or Bush’s side?  He made America choose and he made his opponent choose and poor McCain had to show loyalty to his bitterest enemy, George Bush, he had to choose Palin, he had to laude Joe the Plumber who had no qualifications as a plumber.  By polarising against the most unpopular President in recent history in the middle of a financial meltdown Obama squeezed McCain out of the mainstream and made sense of Alinsky’s final rule which is:

8.  The Action Is In The Reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.  Community organisers are taught the difference between activity, which we all do all the time and which makes no difference to anything, and action, which engages others and provokes a reaction.  By all the actions listed above Obama forced McCain to run against himself.  Obama was freed to glide on stage at enormous rallies to the strains of Signed, Sealed Delivered I’m Yours and let his ‘people’ know that confronted by those who say it couldn’t be done they could answer ‘Yes we can’.  The most liberal Republican in the Senate ran on nationalism and anti-communism, tried to demonise community organisers as Marxists, picked a running mate he disagreed with and vacated the centre ground while swinging wildly between strategies that opposed each other.  McCain had been ‘properly goaded’ indeed. 

The result is that the new Commander in Chief is schooled and versed in the tactics of urban guerrilla politics, of how to turn a disaggregated rabble into an organised community, of how to organise the defeated and win, how to increase your power through your action, how to generate new relationships through political victory. 

The Bush Administration had exposed the limits of two very big ideas that had dominated politics for the previous thirty years.  The first is the beneficial effects of free markets and the necessity of financial deregulation as a foundation of prosperity and liberty.  The lack of oversight of the banking sector, their huge power and wealth led to excessive greed and creative accounting that strained the credibility of even their partners in deception.  The huge inequalities this generated in the real world meant that the poor could not afford to pay their mortgages or other debts.  The primacy of the formal economy crashed revealing the needs of people in the real economy for food, shelter and clothes.  The State stepped in to meet the need.  For the first time in a generation Politics was more important, more powerful than economics.  Events asserted the primacy of political community to the markets, as Aristotle might have said, or ‘Yes we can’ as Obama summarised the thought. 

The second big idea was the supremacy of arms, the idea that a superiority of force could lead to a substantive defeat for the enemies of America and a reordering of the world.  That has also been defeated.  Without an effective politics of mobilisation and engagement military action alone can only generate sectarian hate and increased violence, create the conditions of dictatorship.  Democratic politics is more vital to imperial success than military supremacy.  Its not so much hearts and mind as body and soul. 

The combination of the principles of Community Organisation that guided Obama’s strategy of electoral success and American military strength would indicate that those who oppose the renewal of American hegemony had a very bad day indeed last Tuesday. 

Chicago looks like the capital of the world in more ways than one. 

Maurice Glasman is Director of The Faith and Citizenship Programme at London Metropolitan University.  He is also on the faculty of The School of Life where he teaches the Politics course.