The whole point is to bloody well change things!

I’ve been an activist in one guise or another since the late 1970s. That’s a lot of decades of opposing the system and trying to bring about change that are now under my belt. There have been a number of times where I’ve taken a few steps back to ask if it’s worth it, and whether quitting would be a better option for maintaining my sanity. There have been a few times where I’ve come very close to calling it a day. Instead, what I have done, particularly as I get older, is pace things and take a few weeks out here and there to recharge my batteries before returning to the fray.

Quitting activism altogether is a luxury that I cannot afford. In an increasingly dysfunctional and dystopian world, what the powers that be do in order to hang onto their wealth and power directly and adversely impacts my life. Quitting would be an act of surrender and a signal to the bastards that they can do what they like. This is why, unless my health dictates otherwise, I intend to stay active for whatever time I have left on this mortal coil. To put it another way, I have skin in the game. So do my family, my friends and the community I live in. Ultimately, all of outside the elite have skin in the game.

What I increasingly do is look at my activism and ask what, if anything, it’s achieving. Reassessing my analysis and position on crucial issues, and using the results of that process to change what I do, is a crucial part of how I operate. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve found myself moving more towards looking at what can be done in the here and now to foster the kind of change that will bring about a more sane, just and truly sustainable world. In other words, I’m becoming ever more interested in solutions and finding a route through all of the crap, one that will take us to a better world.

Which is why over the last fifteen years, I’ve become more interested in and involved with supporting grassroots projects that make a difference in the here and now. This has ranged from supporting community clean ups, through becoming involved in a resident run park and currently, being involved in a community food growing initiative where I now live in Keynsham. All of these projects, each in their own way, have made immediate visible differences. That’s all well and good but more importantly, they’ve empowered the people involved in them to start thinking about how responsibility for where they live can be brought down to the grassroots, where everyone is accountable to each other, rather than relying on politicians and bureaucrats to resolve their problems. Also, it’s about building a sense of community solidarity at the base that’s strong enough to resist being rent asunder by the divide and rule merchants doing the bidding of the powers that be.

The world we live in is becoming ever more dystopian. As I’ve written before – Bombarded from all sides but fighting back 3.2.25 – it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed by it all and simply give in. Not least because it’s hard work trying to figure out all of the dynamics and power plays at work that are wreaking massive and adverse changes to our lives. I follow a number of commentators and activists here on Substack who devote a lot of time and energy in trying to understand just what the f**k is going on, and communicate it to us mere mortals in the hope that it will make it crystal clear what has to change so we can live in a better world. I myself have made some attempts at this kind of analysis, with admittedly mixed results. I’ll hold my hands up and admit that there are people out there who can do this thing a lot better than I can even dream of doing myself. Which is why these days, I prefer to focus my efforts on what can be done in the here and now to bring about change. While we need to understand what is being done to us, it has to be done in the context of understanding that ultimately, the point is to bloody well change things!

This is why I over the last fifteen years, I’ve run blogs such as Alternative Estuary when I was living back in Essex, and currently now I’m in Keynsham, At the grassroots. The aim of these blogs has been to promote and support grassroots projects. All of this has been done from a recognition that real change has to come from the grassroots where we live. Real change can only come about by bringing power down to the communities where we live and then forming transparent and accountable federations of those communities to scale things up. Any so called ‘radical’ change that comes from the top down is not radical in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s window dressing and ultimately, a distraction while the elites carry on concentrating more power and wealth to themselves, increasingly screwing the rest of us in the process.

What worries me is that while a growing number of people are understandably becoming fed up with liberal democracy that’s not delivering what they want, they’re being seduced by the siren voices of the autocrats who are promising to ‘fix things’. A point I made in the previous post on this blog: There are NO heroes in politics – saying it with memes 16.2.25. The two most obvious example of this are the re-election of Trump in the USA and the rise of Reform here in the UK. When you scratch the surface, it becomes all too obvious that behind the scenes, there are some evil tech bros, using patsies such as Trump and Farage, who want to amass ever more power and wealth while throwing an increasing number of us under the bus for not being ‘productive’ enough. A point I made in this post at the start of the year: Fun and games to come in 2025? 6.1.25. These con merchants are not offering anything radical – they’re simply patsies for people with malevolent intentions.

All of this is why grassroots organising is vital. It’s about bringing power down to the level of the community. It’s about empowering people to assume more collective responsibility for where they live. It’s about offering a glimpse of a much better world where we work co-operatively together. It’s about building community solidarity, the importance of which I explained in this piece: A visit to the archives - Rebuilding solidarity at the grassroots… 13.2.25. It’s about challenging the existing power structures which offer us nothing. It’s about building the support infrastructure that will get us through the turmoil of change to a better world.

The problem is that the tech bros and the patsy politicians and shady networks who are doing their bidding are accelerating their efforts to push us all into a malevolent digital control matrix. That acceleration leaves less time than is preferable to build and enhance the parallel systems we need to get through the turmoil of change as the powers that be become increasingly desperate to hang onto their power and wealth. Building and enhancing parallel systems of support and mutual aid will be the lifeline we need to get us through what’s coming. They’ll also be the building blocks of the sane, just and truly sustainable world that we want and deserve.

To re-iterate, this is why I run the At the grassroots blog alongside this one. This is also why I now have an At the grassroots section here on this Stirrings from below blog. This is why I post up articles from At the grassroots on here, even though in terms of views, they don’t perform as well as my other posts. I do this in order to highlight the increasing urgency of building and enhancing community level projects that have the potential to develop into the parallel systems we need. The systems we’ll need to free us from the yoke of the evil banksters and authoritarian tech bros who want to amass more wealth and power to themselves, regardless of the cost to the vast majority of humanity and the planet we depend upon for our lives. This is why I’ve said many times before, At the grassroots is not a fluffy project. It’s whole point is to bloody well change things!