Lynne Davis argues that only solidarity can break its grip.
On my worldly adventures – perhaps born more of curiosity than any grand trends – I am meeting more and more people who are ‘waking up’ to the sense that the institutions shaping their lives are not serving them. The world feels intense. Leaders appear to condone genocide in real time. Wages, battered by inflation, refuse to catch up. The wealthy elite are not only more affluent but more potent than ever. For many, there’s a creeping dread that the system is broken. The sense of fracture is overwhelming, and it’s time for alternatives.
A younger, more naive me had always believed that when this time came, folk would flock around the kinds of projects and ideas I’ve spent my life developing – cooperatives, land trusts, social enterprises and commons. Or at least to demand a strengthened welfare state and redistributive taxation. But no. Although these ideas haven’t been given a real shot in decades, they are dismissed as the stale language of the establishment. Instead, the alternatives that are drawing people in are crystal healing, breathwork retreats, alternate timelines and the thunderous promises of right-wing populism.
The Lure of Shiny Salvation
Life would be boring without paradox. I remember feeling so much hope when communities rallied in the COVID era. Fast collapse yielded patient community work. However, when faced with slower polycrises of inequality, ecological collapse and democratic fragility, the slow, patient work of building institutions together is seemingly unappealing. Instead, the trend is towards shiny promises of quick salvation, like the abundant marketplace of wellness capitalism that will unlock your inner goddess for thousands of pounds.
Meanwhile, the language of shared prosperity—whether through progressive taxation, a revitalised welfare state, or forms of collective ownership—has lost its cultural force. It no longer feels like an alternative. Partly, this is because such ideas, once radical, have been absorbed into the mainstream. And when radical ideas become mainstream, they are often blunted, bureaucratised, and hollowed out. What once sounded like fairness became tarred as red tape, “nanny state,” or “big government.”
The intellectual left spent years sharpening brilliant critiques, writing detailed manifestos, and publishing elegant blueprints for an obvious and rational path forward. But hearts and imaginations are seeking inspiration elsewhere.
Losing Workers, Losing Ground
Life would also be boring without irony. The intellectual left designed a path and lost its way. Workers – the very constituency whose lives were meant to be transformed – have jumped ship. That doesn’t mean the desire for shared prosperity has disappeared. It lives on, inchoate, in the hunger for community, security and dignity. But it is now channelled through other frames: fear, nationalism and nostalgia.
Fear is a powerful organising force. And right now, fear is winning
Fear is a powerful organising force. And right now, fear is winning. Fear of migrants. Fear of decline. Fear of being left behind. It’s testosterone-fuelled politics, rallying people to fight back against imagined enemies. By contrast, appeals to solidarity and love sound weak, even naive, in such a climate.
The truth is, it doesn’t feel like the UK is making progress. There is no rising tide to lift all boats. It feels as though the tide is going out, and that is fundamentally scary. Scary times call for strong, masculine leadership and strengthened spirituality.
Imagine economies filled with love
Part of why it feels so scary is that it feels isolated. The quiet tragedy of individualism is that it made people forget the communities and ecologies that we might once have fought for. It taught people to expect little from each other, and even less from government. It made individual hustle the only form of dignity on offer. Many people have never experienced the forms of solidarity – union halls, local cooperatives, community centres – that once gave working people a collective stake. If you’ve never experienced it, it is hard to imagine it. And if you cannot imagine it, it is almost impossible to fight for it.
The quiet tragedy of individualism is that it made people forget the communities and ecologies that we might once have fought for.
The workers’ movements of the 20th century were not built on fear alone. They gave people something tangible to fight for: unions, wages, and the dignity of labour. The fight wasn’t abstract. It was about the shape of daily life. The task, then, is to imagine how daily life might fill us with joy and love, and then create the institutions that can deliver it. Movements for shared prosperity must rekindle the emotional core of their vision. They must not only show the injustice of inequality but also the beauty of what can be built together.
Movements for shared prosperity must rekindle the emotional core of their vision.
Love requires patience. It requires being able to sit with the unknown. It requires being able to hold oneself with tenderness and compassion, so that these can be offered. It requires being comfortable with mystery, allowing mystery, and nurturing it so that you can be surprised by the other, giving the other space to grow. Love means gathering together, belonging, joy and the strength of the collective. Love puts care, reciprocity and shared wealth at the centre of our values. With love, new commons of community and ecology can be created—renewable energy cooperatives, community-owned housing, regenerative land trusts, and citizen assemblies shaping local budgets—served by connected infrastructures that will benefit everyone. Love can build the world. Love is the opposite of hate, fear and control.
Creating a Gravitational Pull to a New Commons
Fear captures attention. Love builds gravity. This is not soft politics. It is the hardest work there is: to make solidarity feel more compelling than fear, to make collective life seem more meaningful than individual hustle, to build communities in which people could feel part of something larger than themselves, to love in the face of fear.
Shared prosperity is still the prize. And while fear is loud, love can be magnetic.
In times like these, when everyone doing this work is burned out, tired, and having their funding cut, we need to re-imagine and re-enchant collective action as liberation. In times like these, when the overcurrent of media and undercurrent of opinion want to make us believe that fear and hate are winning, we can remind each other that another world is not only possible but already being built by more people than we can possibly imagine, in fragments that are just about to reach a critical mass.
Because community, dignity and solidarity are worth striving for. Shared prosperity is still the prize. And while fear is loud, love can be magnetic.
