The acute crisis of the present moment, COVID-19, has revealed the deeper crisis of our age: inequality. And looking around at the current crop at the top of politics, it sure is hard to identify the leader who will pull us out.
Dominating much of the media and policy conversation worldwide is where might we find such leaders. Sometimes such discussions merely wallow in despair; at other times they rush to name a redeemer based not on any viable record, but often merely on the basis of one fine photoshoot or slogan, or just on our understandably desperate hope that ‘this is the one’. Still, in the cold light of day we can see that the saviour leaders are not there. And it’s not just because the search for great rescuers is generating deeply unsatisfactory answers; it’s because asking where to find them is the wrong question.
For my new book, How to Fight Inequality, which comes out today, I looked back at when inequality had been beaten before, and found that inequality was never beaten through the grace of saviour leaders, but was instead beaten by people power.
It’s important to emphasise that the rationale for building collective power from below does not depend on having a pessimistic assessment of the personal moral character of the world’s leaders. Indeed far too much time is lost, by first trying to work out if people in power in oppressive systems are personally irredeemably not nice – as if that is what determines whether or not we need to organise. Even with the best leaders, the fight against inequality cannot be won unless ordinary people organise and take on the power of those at the top. History shows that what matters is the imbalance of power: without fixing that, we cannot fix the injustice.
Even with the best leaders, the fight against inequality cannot be won unless ordinary people organise and take on the power of those at the top
One of the most important recent examples of significant progress in reducing inequality was in Latin America, in the period from roughly 2000 for a decade or a decade and a half. On one level, we can accurately say that inequality was reduced in Latin America because from around the year 2000 a set of governments decided to address it, and implemented some of the policy mix needed to reduce inequality. They redistributed some land from large landholders to landless people; they increased the wages of the poorest people by increasing the legal minimum, strengthening labour law enforcement, and enabling trade union representation; they increased social protection for children and the elderly; they expanded public services like health and education, paid for with progressive taxes; they organised economic policy around jobs; and they tackled discrimination.
But when we look at the deeper causes of that success in tackling inequality, we can’t start in 2000 – we need to look earlier, and we can’t start with the decisions that were made by those governments, as the more interesting question is why? Why, in a region so unequal, where for decades before, governments had pursued policies which exacerbated inequality, did the governments of the 2000s act differently? The short answer is because ordinary people built up their collective power, and it was this power which successfully pressured and enabled those governments to act. From landless workers’ movements in Brazil to indigenous people’s movements in Bolivia, organising from below was the key to securing change.
So too, when we look at what drove action to tackle inequality across much of the world in the long mid twentieth century, we can see that change did not come from a handful of famous heroes, but from many thousands and thousands of everyday ones. The progressive policies enacted from the 1930s to the 1970s in the US, for example, came from a combination of pressures from below. They came from trade unions, from black organisations, from churches and from other progressive grassroots groups together devoting their energies, in Dr King’s words, “to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.” In the Venn diagram of the movements, you’ll see people like the African-American trade union organiser Philip Randolf, who successfully pressured both the FDR and Kennedy-Johnson governments by reminding them of the power of organised people – without which we would not remember them as such reforming Presidents.
César Chávez, who organised US farm workers, put it so succinctly and so beautifully: “We don’t need perfect political systems. We need perfect participation.” Notably, the impact of the pressure from below went beyond party: during the period of strong union membership and organisation, Republican as well as Democrat administrations presided over policies on tax and labour laws that were much more egalitarian than later Republican or Democratic administrations presided over, once unions became much weaker.
We don’t need perfect political systems. We need perfect participation
People power was fundamental too to the emergence of the welfare state in Europe. The Scandinavian welfare state, for example, is sometimes portrayed as stemming from an essential Nordic character that is seen as innately egalitarian and gentle. In such a portrayal, they are equal because of their cultural character, with no lessons for the unfortunate rest of us who don’t like Abba. But such a portrayal is false.
Up until the early twentieth century, there was grinding poverty and great exploitation in Scandinavia (many Americans are descended from Scandinavians who fled starvation!). By strengthening their power through rural collectives and through unions, Scandinavia’s small farmers and workers were able to challenge the power of elites. The elites did not accept this challenge at first. Instead, they organised for troops to come out to stop workers’ protests and strikes. Norway’s government even organised a militia of strike breakers. Strikers were killed, but in the end people’s organising triumphed. What created the conditions for the compromise and concession and for the egalitarianism we see as so Scandinavian today was massive pressure from below. Not blonde hair! The Scandinavian story can be a powerful lesson for anyone who dreams of a fairer society.
Following independence, and intimately entwined with that independence, African and Asian countries also took bold action to tackle inequality. While it is often the names of great national leaders that dominate how major steps to tackle inequality are officially remembered, organising from below was key to their realisation. In Ghana, organising by cocoa workers not only led to the cocoa board protecting their incomes, but also led to the rollout of free education, first to cocoa workers and later to everyone.
Having allies on the inside often helped those working for greater equality, but that was never enough – as a group, the dominant always had to be pushed. As the father of history, the Ancient Greek writer Thucydides put it, “the quality of justice depends on the equality of power to compel”, as when power is unchecked, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Just as the victories against inequality in the past came not from saviour leaders but from organising, so too the hope we can find today comes not from above but from around us
Just as the victories against inequality in the past came not from saviour leaders but from organising, so too the hope we can find today comes not from above but from around us. Organising continuously fosters leadership, helping to catalyse the conditions for change. Mexican community organizer Paola Payró, taking me around the alleys of Guadalajara’s informal settlements, explained to me how:
“When we form a group is when we start to be able to confront inequalities. It is from forming groups that we build the confidence in our sense that it’s not OK to be left without services, that we don’t have to accept as natural to live in fear of violence. We realise that we are not crazy, that we have rights, and that we can challenge those who push us around because we are a group which have each other’s backs. We don’t learn this from courses but from doing it, from being in it. We learn it when we think with our whole bodies, when we walk together down the street and when we sit down together to develop our own agenda.”
Organising is difficult, time-consuming, and never guaranteed to work. Salvadorian farmer Mario Ramírez Cañas, describing what it has been like for the community to build their farming co-operative in the face of so much challenge from powerful landlords and officials, used this powerful image: “we are like salmon – we have had to swim upstream!” There is no quick fix: what can seem as sudden breakthroughs are in fact the result of longer term build-ups, often of much less high profile, less dramatic, less romantic work – there are moments of drudging delay, defeats, reversals, and despair.
But while organising is hard everywhere, it is not impossible anywhere. It sometimes argued, for example, that ‘technology’ renders certain jobs inevitably unorganisable. The successful organising of strikes by Uber, Lyft, and Deliveroo drivers show that to be a fiction – a fiction created to weaken workers. Alison Hirsh at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) shared what they have learnt from their support of cleaners, private security, and food delivery workers to organise: “There is no category of work, there is no app, that means that some jobs can’t be unionised. Any job can be a good union job, you just need to build the union.”
While organising is hard everywhere, it is not impossible anywhere
Successful organising to take on inequality is not only about unions, not only about grassroots movements, not only about faith-based groups; it is about all of them, and more. This is why the US Poor People’s Campaign’s Revd William Barber talks of ‘fusion coalitions’: collective power comes unity across differences.
Despite the huge hurdles faced in confronting inequality, we’ve seen glimpses worldwide of what is possible, of what progress in the fight against inequality looks like: the mobilisation of a million farmers in Uganda against taxes on agricultural inputs; the ending of VAT on bread in Zambia; the handing back of land illegally acquired in Cambodia; the resurgence of racial justice activism driven by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US; organising by trade unions, which has secured increases in minimum wages in Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa; the rising movements in response to the COVID-19 crisis worldwide, of people demanding free healthcare for all, better conditions and pay for the workers who have kept society going, and accountability for the pandemic profiteers.
The record of the past on beating inequality, and the emerging movements to confront it today, point to the basis of transformative change being not great rescuers but us, together. We need to overcome the deference that can hold us back from challenging authority; we need to unite across our differences to build power that is strong enough to force change; and we need to craft the story of the society we seek, going beyond individual policies to the deeper moral, emotional, and social frame.
This is not to say that we will beat inequality through organising; it is rather to say that this is the only way that we have in the past, and the only way that gives us a chance now. An old slogan of mobilisers goes: “the people united will never be defeated.” In fact, the people united are often defeated, but the people divided are always defeated.
As one civil rights song reminded people:
“Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on the wing
It doesn’t come down like the summer rain,
Freedom, freedom is a hard-won thing.
You’ve got to work for it, fight for it,
Day and night for it,
And every generation has to win it again.”
Now, too, we must make our own history. We are the people we’ve been waiting for.
Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality (Polity Press).
You can order How to Fight Inequality from any country by clicking here (select your country on the site).
