- by Eileen Whitehead
- The Guardian
- Issue #2180
The clear message from this book is that our system of government is failing us. The crises we’re currently facing are being caused by our system of government, which is clearly not up to the job. They’re creating the crises we’re facing and, under the influence of the fossil fuel industry, are unable to find a solution. “The demands of activists, our school kids, First Nations people, scientists and doctors – in fact the great mass of humanity – are being ignored and deliberately shut out, while anti-democratic and anti-ecological structures are put in place for the maintenance of their power”.
The continual crises this system of capitalism has created – worsening extreme weather events, pandemics, and food and water shortages – are all the result of disconnection and domination. What we need to realise is this system was invented only some 250 years ago and can be changed yet again. Unless we change the present system of production, we shall become extinct. We need to organise the world in a different way by turning around ecological collapse, and generating the resilience needed to survive and thrive. This will need more networks of support, more social cohesion and co-operation but the capitalist system, in place for two centuries, has obliterated man’s basic nature of living for the betterment of the community.
In his book, Living Democracy, Hollo optimistically believes a transformation, though difficult, is possible if we “pull together and work co-operatively and creatively for the common good.” Adding that although “it’s the end of the world as we know it. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”
After living under capitalism for so long we seem to have forgotten that “we’re part of the natural world” and the importance of ecology as the total system of interactions between lifeforms and habitats, and that a network of relations between beings is an entity in its own right. Hollo emphasises the importance of interdependence, diversity and impermanence. In ecological terms, Interdependence means everything connects and supports everything else; Diversity means coexistence at a group level, working “constructively and creatively towards consensus.” Impermanence is the natural state of the world where change is reality.
Hollo says that in seeking to control the world, humans have brought us to its present toxic state – what Marx called a “metabolic rift.” In Hollo’s account “in the battle between capitalism, communism and fascism, capitalism came out on top because it bolted itself onto liberal democracy” which “allowed it to successfully cloak its coercive nature in the garb of a cultural idea of freedom.”
I loved Hollo’s dark humour. At the end of the book when summing up possible actions, he talks of weeding the ground and removing invasive species that make it hard for the ecosystem to flourish, “like political donations, advertising, violent policing and extreme wealth. We’ll have to build one of those predator-proof fences, with anti-corruption bodies and truth and reconciliation commissions.” Finally, “How we live influences how we believe we can live, which influences how we live. So let’s do it. Let’s live democracy.”
