Poliics

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

John Dewy

Politics has become something that is reviled rather than revered by ordinary people partly because of its confusion with “party politics” and partly the corruption of the political party process itself. Politics is the expression of a collective social conscience through the democratic process and can easily operate independently of the party process. What stops people from even getting to that point is that they also suffer from a crisis of agency, depoliticisation and demoralisation, mostly because they are overburdened by the struggle to survive the day to day, and all to often in isolation.

Democracy is a conversation, with the idea of bringing people together, not orders dictated from above. So the problem as we see it is. How we start the conversation to reconnect people or communities with their politics. How do we reconnect through the historical, successes, failures and experiences of others and learning from them. Until those institutions that controls economics, communications and the means of production are in the hands of the public, politics will forever remain “the shadow cast on society by big business,”

Politics is trivia

The first thing Noam Chomsky reminds us is politics is trivia. There are no special qualifications in understanding political ideas. The same mind that can memorise football fixtures and pop songs can be easily adapted to understand the needs of society. After all that's what politics is. It is a conversation with like minded and not so like minded people to discuss ideas, problems and possible solutions and maybe try to come up with some agreements or collective action. 

It is party politicians who make this seem difficult. And the difficult seem easy.