Learning to Need Each Other

The family argument

There is something that, once you see it, is hard to unsee: every major political argument of the last two centuries has been a disagreement about who should run the machine. Almost nobody in mainstream politics argues about the machine itself.

Free-market capitalism says the market should allocate resources and rewards. Social democracy says the state should redistribute the proceeds. Socialism says the workers should own the means of production. Communism says private property itself is the problem. Each disagrees, often violently, about management. But none questions what the machine is actually doing: the accelerating conversion of living systems into industrial throughput, measured by aggregate output.

The Cold War, looked at this way, was not a conflict between two visions of human civilisation; rather, it was a competition between management structures for the industrial project. The Soviet Union and the West both dammed rivers, strip-mined mountains, poisoned watersheds, and measured success by tonnes of steel and kilowatt-hours. Both treated the living world as raw material and human labour as a production input. The only real arguments were about ownership and the best management system.

Which means that even the most radical position on the conventional spectrum, communism’s prescription to abolish private property, conserves the industrial project, the extractive relationship with the living world, and the assumption that human welfare is measured in material output. It just changes the nameplate on the boss’ door.

The problem now is that the material basis of the machine is in structural decline: cheap fossil energy, extractable minerals, stable climate, functioning ecosystems. The entire political spectrum is arguing over the management of something that is dying, and no existing Western ideological tradition can generate a real response, because each is committed to most of the components of the dying system. For those of us in the professional classes, this blindness is mostly supplied in the form of liberalism.

Liberalism under industrialism is wilful blindness

Left and right are both conservative now, in the deep sense: each trying to preserve its preferred features of the socioeconomic order. But liberalism's conservatism may be the more dangerous, because it wears the costume of progress.

The liberal narrative goes like this: through the emancipation of the individual, through the subordination of superstition to reason, through the pursuit of rational progress and efficiency, we built something good. Democratic institutions, human rights frameworks, rising living standards, expanding education, improving health. Now these gains are under threat. The task is to defend them.

But the gains were never separable from the dysfunction, and they still aren't. Democratic institutions run on colonial and neo-colonial oppression. The fruits of wealth are only producible at the current price, and through the current means of supply, by insupportable levels of suffering and inequality. Rising living standards are purchased with a one-time fossil fuel endowment treated as income. The multilateral order manages competing imperial interests in resource peripheries. Expanding education creates the credentials that reproduce class hierarchy, and calls it meritocracy. Improving health outcomes depend on an industrial food and pharmaceutical system that externalises costs onto ecosystems and the future.

The dysfunction is not a flaw in the machine that is fixable by judicious technocratic intervention. It is the very mechanism by which the machine produces its gains.

If the gains and the harms are structurally inseparable, then "defend the gains" is indefensible because it cannot stand apart from “perpetuate the harms”. Liberalism would be left with nothing to say. So instead it maintains a selective blindness: good outcomes are the system's essence, bad outcomes are aberrations fixable by better policy. Climate change becomes a market failure, not a direct product of industrial civilisation. Inequality becomes a distortion, not a constitutive feature of the credentialing apparatus. Colonial extraction becomes a past moral failing, soon to be corrected, rather than the ongoing engine of Western prosperity.

Anyone who has experienced the dysfunction rather than the gains sees through this instantly. If your community's experience of the system is slavery, redlining, mass incarceration, and wealth stripping, the claim that the dysfunction is separable from the achievement is absurd on its face. Baldwin wrote in A Letter to My Nephew that "it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." The professional classes, of every background, were not so much offered a version of that
“innocence” as born into it: material comfort and social status in exchange for accepting a teleological narrative and not looking too closely at what the machine costs. What the professional class is now discovering, through systems theory and resource depletion models, and now through the bitter experience of the post-2020 order, excluded communities have always been able to see by looking out the window.

So, who maintains this selective blindness, and how? We do.

The class that can't see

There is a class whose function, whether its members recognise it or not, is to maintain both the machine and the liberal narrative that legitimates it. Barbara and John Ehrenreich called it the professional-managerial class. More recently, Musa al-Gharbi has called its members symbolic capitalists, after Bourdieu: professionals who deal in symbols, rhetoric, data, and abstraction, whose structural role, beneath our self-image as public servants or experts or creatives, is the reproduction of the culture and class relations that keep the whole thing running.

If you’re reading this post, it’s quite likely that you are a member of this class.

We don't just operate the machine; we produce the story about the machine, deciding what counts as a problem, who bears responsibility, and what solutions are thinkable. And the story we tell systematically excludes ourselves.

Take fossil fuels. The accepted framing is that (1) fossil fuel companies are villains, (2) consumers need help to change behaviour, and policy (carbon pricing, regulation, transition subsidies) is the answer for how to punish the villains and help the consumers. Absent from this frame is our own role: designing the systems that require fossil fuel throughput, building the supply chains, writing the legal frameworks, producing the financial instruments, and flying to conferences to deplore the results. Blaming Exxon is, whether we mean it to be or not, class self-protection. Responsibility goes upwards to the ownership class and downwards to consumers, while the operational class in the middle stays invisible.

This isn't ignorance, and it isn't cynicism. It's something more structural: an inability to see the interested nature of your own categories. We misrecognise our reproductive function as public service, our symbolic power as neutral expertise, the boundaries of our politics as the boundaries of reason. We are not in traffic; we are traffic. This méconnaissance doesn't just prevent us from seeing our own role; it prevents us from seeing where the knowledge we actually need is already held.

The people who already know

The knowledge needed for a transition away from the industrial machine does not need to be invented. It already exists, and has done for a long time.

Mutual aid, community resilience, informal economics, local food sovereignty, skill sharing, commons governance: all of it has a deep, continuous, lived tradition in communities that were excluded from the machine's benefits. Black American mutual aid runs from slavery through Reconstruction, through the church networks of the Great Migration, through Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm, through the Black Panther survival programmes, through the community networks that appeared during COVID. Indigenous land management sustained complex societies for tens of millennia. Poor communities of every description have been surviving institutional failure since long before the intellectual elites started theorising about climate collapse.

I don't want to romanticise deprivation. Poverty is not wisdom, and not every informal economy works. But the relational practices and practical knowledge developed under conditions of exclusion are far better adapted to the conditions now emerging than anything that symbolic capitalist training produces.

The professional classes struggle to access this knowledge because our epistemic hierarchy runs one way: expertise flows down, from doctors to patients, teachers to students, policy analysts to the public. The possibility that the useful knowledge runs in the other direction, that a grandmother who has maintained a garden, organised neighbourhood care, and held a multigenerational household together on an inadequate income possesses more relevant transition knowledge than a corporate strategist or perhaps even a transition designer, is not an easy idea to swallow. We can romanticise such knowledge from a comfortable distance, study it as anthropology, fund it as philanthropy, cite it in policy papers. What we find almost impossible is to receive it as expertise on equal terms, because doing so would invert the prestige hierarchy on which our class identity depends.

The double bind

Gregory Bateson described a double bind as a situation in which contradictory demands operate at different logical levels, and the subject cannot withdraw from the field. This describes the professional class's situation precisely. The system is failing and we can see it, so we must change. But our formation and dependencies prevent genuine transformation, so we cannot change. And obligations, mortgage, children, healthcare, hold us in place, so we cannot leave the field either.

The liberal and the prepper are both failed responses to this bind. The liberal projects the current way of being through the disruption by defending failing institutions. The prepper projects it by stockpiling resources — competitive individualism with the grid down. Neither undergoes the transformation that the situation actually demands.

The prepper is worth considering more closely, because the failure is instructive. Resources matter in a crisis, but what determines whether a community survives is relational density: knowing your neighbours, distributed and complementary skills, practised cooperation, networks of trust. The prepper with six months of freeze-dried food who doesn't know his neighbours is less resilient than the poor community with nothing stored but deep mutual knowledge, because the food runs out, the generator breaks, and then you're alone with your stuff — which is just stuff.

What the liberal and the prepper share is a horror of needing other people. The liberal defends their individualist identity and manages their horror through institutional mediation; the prepper achieves the same through self-sufficiency. But needing other people, materially, with no escape, is the condition that actually produces mutual aid. And it is very difficult to build this mutuality while your income can substitute for every relationship within a mile of your house.

Practice, not planning

Bateson also observed that double binds become transformative, rather than merely pathological, when you can name them and sit in them consciously. Not because naming resolves anything, but because it gives permission to stop trying to think your way out and start acting your way through.

The path out is not a plan. Our instinct is to produce a transition roadmap with milestones, but that instinct is itself the trap. The required transformation is in ways of being, and ways of being emerge from practice, not plans.

The practices themselves are ordinary. Make things with your hands, not as hobby but as relocation of competence from the abstract to the embodied. Need your neighbours for real things, not as volunteering (which preserves the helper-helped hierarchy) but as actual mutual reliance. Let people see you be incompetent, and learn from people whose knowledge comes from doing rather than credentials. Make economic decisions that deepen local ties at the cost of efficiency: buy from the local person though the corporation is cheaper, because the relationship matters more than the cost optimisation. Each of these practices does two things at once: it shifts your material conditions, and it begins to close the distance between you and the communities that already hold the knowledge you need — bringing you into encounter with them, not as anthropological subjects, but as neighbours.

None of this looks dramatic. You're still going to work, still paying the bills, still inside the machine. But the centre of gravity shifts. The skills that feel real move from CV to hands, the relationships that matter move from professional network to neighbourhood, and slowly, unevenly, the distance between where you are and where you need to be gets shorter.

I don’t think we can arrive at a truly relational economy while our salaries can substitute for every human connection around us. The goal is not purity but proximity: close enough that when the conditions change, by our choice or the system's, the relational infrastructure is there and the crossing distance is short. It's only by care for the people and places nearest to us (care as being and as doing) that we'll find the motivation to change at our own cost. And it's only through genuine need, not performed solidarity, not charitable giving, but actual dependence on each other, that we can begin to understand what comes after the machine.