Unravelling + reMAKING

The future is an exciting prospect. We’re at a point in history where things cannot go on as they are: socially, environmentally, politically, we’re at a dead end. Strangely this frees us up to remake our world and our country in new ways that are at the very limits of what we imagined might be possible even five years ago. We have an incredible opportunity and the responsibility to do this wild imagination-to-action well.

To move from where we are to where we want to be is going to involve some unravelling. Much and all as we’d like a blank canvas to invent a new social system that effectively manages climate change and inequality, the reality is that we’re going to have to rebuild from where we are. This is going to mean acknowledging that in order to reMAKE, we’re going to have to unmake. We can’t reMAKE a jumper into a cardigan or a stuffed toy koala without first unravelling the jumper.

What I want to write about here is the importance of unravelling and reMAKING and how these two things are at the core of Australia reMADE.

Australia reMADE as a collaboration has always been built on the assumption that to create the Australia of our dreams, collectively we must be vision-led, systems savvy, power focussed and people powered. 

To be both vision-led and systems savvy/power focussed is challenging. On the one hand we want to lead with possibility, to seed and reinforce the understanding that there is an alternative and to provide pathways for creating practical policies and solutions. We know (because the research tells us) that we need to talk more about what it is that we want, and less about what it is that we don’t want.

At the same time, being systems savvy and power focussed necessarily requires delving into the murky waters of injustice. We’re going to need to talk about power imbalance, oppression, extraction and social and environmental destruction. And none of these things are inspiring or vision focussed, yet as we come to better understand the workings of the system, we can become energised and more in control of how we respond.

The challenge of where we are

The unprecedented fire season of the summer of 2019/2020 clearly highlights the need for both unravelling and reMAKING on a large scale. After months of work in 2019,  the events of early 2020 brought to the public eye the incredible value of our public services as the fire fighters and public broadcasters worked to keep individuals and communities safe. We saw huge outpourings of care for both people and animals as donations of time, services and money were shared across the country in what were both symbolic and practical gestures of solidarity. We saw people speak up about climate change and public wellbeing, and more and more people understanding that now, of all times, is the time and place for action.

And the arrival of covid-19 has only strengthened the need for, and value of, public goods and services.

Within the response to the current drought, fire and covid, we’ve also seen the beginnings of a world waiting to be born, both in terms of the potential for the devastating and unequal impacts of climate change and contagious viruses; and in terms of the potential for becoming a country that truly values and cares about public services, local communities, all residents and the natural and cultural history of the country.

As reMAKERS we can see the potential here, the tendrils and the pleas for a new way of being together. And yet we continuously find ourselves up against existing structures and systems that make it difficult for us to establish ways of doing things that support people and nature to the extent we have laid out in the Australia reMADE vision. And it’s not only the obvious structures (like strong privately-owned media pushing climate denialism), it’s also the structures of the neoliberal playbook that mean seemingly random acts by politicians, the media and the extractive industry, are often part of a bigger shared agenda. 

So how does the process of unravelling and reMAKING help us?

What do we mean by unravelling and what does it show us?

The process of unravelling is about working backwards to see if we can reveal the structures that create our current context. It is about becoming systems savvy.

It would be a mistake to assume the bushfire crisis was simply a symptom of the climate crisis. It was that and more. It is also a symptom of a much more complex system of wealth and power concentration that favours market forces and privilege over people and planet – with the forces of finance capital and fossil fuel extraction key drivers and beneficiaries. A system largely called neoliberalism.

There is always nervousness about making the problem look bigger – particularly when tackling climate change is already pretty big! But the failure to acknowledge the power structures, systems, institutions and culture that have created climate change without understanding that these same forces are driving inequality and injustice, hollowing out democracies and undermining public cohesion misses the opportunity to tackle underlying causes not only manifestations.

As an example of the power of unravelling to reveal the workings of how we got to where we are,  Jeff Sparrow’s article on the rise of the motor vehicle is a good start. Sparrow challenges the assumption that car culture was inevitable and instead highlights just how intentional the dominance of the motor vehicle is.

Writing about the US context, Sparrow states that prior to the 1920s streets were places for people, children, pedestrians and public life. Car manufacturers were convinced that the market had become saturated on the strength of public sentiment against cars and their killing of people and peace. In order to turn the narrative around and make more money selling cars, the automobile industry invented the notion of the jaywalker (the original term was actually ‘jay driver’ to describe hoons who swerved all over the street). Via an extensive public relations campaign of advertising, lobbying and public display (including clowns running across roads and causing chaos), pedestrians were made out to be the crazy irresponsible ones and the blame was successfully shifted from drivers to pedestrians. This was a campaign that continued for decades (a reminder of the need for long-term planning as well as yet another sign that the private motor vehicle didn’t take over the world without significant help and intervention!).

Motor vehicles continue to be the single leading cause of death for Americans aged between 4 and 34. And yet this narrative has stuck.

Of course as Sparrow points out, the collapse of the public transport system was also a target for new narratives as the motorcar industry pointed out that corporations who controlled the (often corrupt) public transit systems were also controlling individuals, while the private motor vehicle enabled personal autonomy and control. And yet, as Catherine Lutz and Ann Lutz Fernandez argue (as cited by Sparrow), “A car culture is a society built around private modes of transportation, but with massive public investment in the infrastructure that allows those private uses.”

It’s a complex and fascinating story that I obviously don’t do justice to here. It is also not a stand alone example (the plastics industry has a similar story, as does the privatisation of services, and many other examples - we’ll explore them in another piece).

The unravelling process not only shows systems at work, it also helps to show linkages between manifestations and root causes. This is essential knowledge for building solidarity across our different siloed issues. Yet unravelling without a sense of what we’re going to make can leave me feeling flat. Everytime we unravel we need to have a basketful of new patterns for reMAKING to help us focus our work and inspire creative action.

What do we mean by remaking and what does it show us?

The process of reMAKING is about starting from where we are and then talking, writing, and building into being the pathways for getting us where we want to be.

So while part of our task is to better understand human-made systems and their origins (the seemingly invisible structures and narratives that got us here and hold us where we are), equally important is determining where we want to go. And more importantly, what path will we choose to get there? The  9 pillars of Australia reMADE are a pretty obvious destination for me. I want us to create a country with a First People’s Heart, a thriving natural environment, a democracy and economy for the people. I want to be heading for a country where we have gender equality, where we’re proud of our contribution to the world and how we treat other people, a country where difference lives side by side. I want to highlight and understand the places where these things already exist, and build on our success (not just focus on our failings). 

Stepping down from high level vision and putting on a more detailed lens, I want this country powered by renewable energy; I want some form of universal services/care guarantee; I want the maintenance of our remaining old growth forests and the regeneration of new areas of wilderness; I want a thriving democracy with mechanisms for enabling and requiring community participation and purpose, alongside  processes for holding power accountable.

One of the challenges we face is an uncertainty about how to achieve this vision and these goals. It is hard to imagine new solutions and new pathways (if it was easy, we’d be there by now!) but essential that we tell stories of success and offer new models for what could be (we’ve got  a separate blog on this). Recent examples of exciting reMAKING include: the strong push for de-privatisation in Europe and the success of this movement in shifting what is politically possible; the citizens jury process around abortion law in Ireland; the closure of coal mines in Germany; and the recreation of worker run factories.

If we dig, all of these attempts at reMAKING are imperfect, primarily because they are emerging from an imperfect present. While we don’t want the perfect to get in the way of the good, we do want to make sure that anything we do is as good as it possible can be, and is done in a way that brings into being and normalises, the world that we want. For example while we want 100% renewables, rather than doing it in a way that replicates existing concentrations of power and wealth, let’s build it in a way that supports flourishing communities and a strong democracy.

The reMAKING element is challenging because we don’t have the benefit of hindsight and the future we are charting is full of uncertainty. And yet that shouldn’t stop us. More important than having an exact path mapped, we need to be willing to think about, and engage with possibility. What if we train ourselves to shout out joyful big yeses to ideas, to put these ideas into the public domain in the first place, and see this as an act of strength? We need to be imaginative and we need to understand when an idea takes us forward, or when it accidentally entrenches the status quo, or limits our ability to achieve multiple aims.

reMAKING effectively is going to require us to do two things. First, unite and organise behind a shared vision and set of values (we obviously think the Australia reMADE vision is a good place to start!). We know from developing the 9 pillars that these ambitions are held across a wide range of Austalians from all walks of life. This is an opportunity to not only begin to colour in the contours of a way forward, but to also bring people together across divides. And second, we’re going to have to not only propose new ways of doing things, but find a way to dance forward as a collective rather than millions of tiny voices on individual issues. To do this is going to require a coherent framework for unravelling and reMAKING.

A coherent framework for unravelling and remaking 

There are squillions of academics and thinkers doing good work in many of these areas.

Think tanks, like most civil society actors, tend to silo issues in ways that accidentally obscure the underlying common drivers. For example, papers might be written about the pharmaceutical industry, childcare or pill testing at festivals. As readers we know, or at least suspect, that ultimately these things are related; but they still read as a grab bag of pet projects or fundable topics and don’t get us any closer to a cohesive and effective story or program for transformation. In part this siloed response to thinking through issues is a symptom of the issues themselves – it tends to be easier to get funding the more specific a project is.

The 9 pillars of Australia reMADE provide the beginnings of a coherent framework for unravelling and reMAKING. By constantly referring back to the pillars we can ensure that any work we do takes a holistic view and we can develop further questions for helping us to ensure we’re foregrounding long term transformation. But we need to go further than the pillars and force ourselves to ask questions that help us to act in deeply transformative ways.

As we unravel, we need to ask questions like: 

• but why? 

• Who benefits? 

• How did it get to be this way and what was there before? 

• Who led the change? Who funded the change? 

And in turn, as we reMAKE, we need to challenge ourselves to go even further than what we think is currently possible. We’ve developed some criteria to help think this through:

• Enduring — does it embed lasting change?

• Scalable — does the scale of the solution match the scale or the problem, or does it have potential to be scalable?

• Values aligned — does it strengthen values of community, cooperation, nature and love?

• Multiplier effect — does it create consequential changes or assist with future victories?

• Addresses key drivers of transformation — does it address the source not just the manifestations of the problem?

• Delivers across silos — does it address multiple pillars of the Australia reMADE vision?

These questions provide an initial (if daunting!) starting point for framing the work that we do and the way that we develop and implement solutions and a more comprehensive discussion of criteria and drivers of transformation can be found in the document The Recovery Begins Now.

Our first job then is to refine this framework and build on it as we unravel and reMAKE to ensure that it becomes easy to address systemic issues; so we can  create the kind of change that will seem, like the motor vehicle, inevitable.

As we reMAKE this new world we unravel the old; not only because it must be dismantled to make way for the new, but because our ability to understand the way the old is put together is critical to our ability to move beyond it. Unravelling shows us that where we are today was not inevitable. What logically follows is that where we go tomorrow is also as yet undetermined. Where we go tomorrow will be about who wins the story for who we are and what we can do. It will be about being prepared for shock doctrine style tactics (we’ll write more on this later), seeing them for what they are, understanding the role they’ve played in our history, and responding with courage and insight.

And as we unravel the old world, we must reMAKE the new. We must build it, tell stories about it, talk it into being, walk it into being, act it into being. And this will be easier, much easier, if we have some patterns and inspiration to follow.

At times this work feels like such a luxury, to take the time and space to think, to read interesting ideas and help turn them into action. When we have coal to keep in the ground, people to find homes for and fires burning, this process of unravelling and reMAKING can seem distant from the action needed for the problem. And yet it is essential work that needs to be done to feed, inspire and shape the way we deal with current emergencies so that our work sticks in the long term. It took more than 30 years (and untold millions of dollars in think tanks, lobbying, etc) for the neoliberal project to come to fruition. We don’t have that kind of time, but our planning needs to be as strategic and as thoughtful.

Aiming for the root of the problem, is both harder and easier than hacking away at the branches. Harder because it's less visible and obvious; easier because once we've identified what we're trying to do, we can actually shift many things at once in a far more fundamental, lasting way. Together, we're learning how to "speak systems", not just treat symptoms. 

I hope that the reMAKING and unravelling we do in 2020 helps to shift not just the work that we do collectively, but the way that we do it. As always, this is a shared endeavour, one in which we all have different parts to play. We welcome feedback, input, suggestions and enthusiasm understanding and building a country where people and nature can thrive.

Millie Rooney