“The future is not what it used to be.”

This, from the French poet Paul Valéry, who died in 1945, best sums up how I feel about the year that has passed.

Nothing bears this out as powerfully as the overwhelming horror of the climate emergency. But there is more. With defeats for the progressive side of politics in Australia and the UK, this year was stamped with assaults on the rights of workers (including those who are in unpaid work or who are residualised by the labour market and increasingly denied the right to social security), wage stagnation as a deliberate design feature, rising unemployment and precarity, a flattening of the tax system, a housing crisis, deeply worrying free trade deals, an epidemic of gendered violence, unabated systemic violence against First Nations people, a steady dismantling of the public sector, a diminution of the public sphere and the placement of strictures on democracy.

Not to mention the vicious repeal of Medevac and the prospect of a retrograde religious discrimination bill.

And now the nation is burning. And people cannot breathe. Not a metaphor. Not a good year.

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No, the future is not what it used to be. But we can reconfigure it. Christine Berry argues that the left needs to develop a long-term strategy to reassert a politics that puts working people at the forefront of policy development, citing, on the other side of politics, the Ridley plan, prepared in 1977, and executed assiduously by Thatcher:

The Ridley plan prefigures almost all of the key moments in the long neoliberal assault on public ownership, from the open war against the miners to the privatisation ‘by stealth’ [Ridley’s own words] of the NHS. It suggests that Thatcher pick her battles, provoking confrontations in ‘non-vulnerable industry, where we can win’ such as the railways and the civil service, while taking steps to create the conditions for eventual victory against the more powerful trade unions … Ridley explicitly describes this as a ‘long term strategy of fragmentation’, ‘a cautious “salami” approach’ – one thin slice at a time, but by the end the whole lot has still gone.”

Ring any bells?

The future is not set in stone. Neoliberalism has successfully dismantled much, but not all, of the social democratic project in Australia. It is up to the movement for progressive social change to dismantle neoliberalism, incrementally displacing it.

Not with a return to the past. Certainly not with a Blairite version of neoliberalism dressed up as the social liberal third way (which Thatcher referred to as her greatest achievement). But with a believable vision of social justice for the 21st century that, in the words of Seamus Heaney, makes “hope and history rhyme”.

Now is not the time to watch and weep. It is the time to stand and fight. The recent defeat of the Ensuring Integrity Bill (Round 1) teaches us that what matters most is what happens on the ground through well-organised, unflinching and unceasing, collective struggle.

Working people have been thrown into the corner. We can either end it there or come back fighting. But the corner teaches us a few lessons while we catch our collective breath:

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1. Work with what you’ve got. Not what you wish, or imagine, you have.

If we want to change the course of history, we need to build our grassroots movement. We need to start from where we are, not from somewhere else. “Organising,” as Angela Davis writes, “is not synonymous with mobilising … When organising is subordinated to mobilising, what do you do after a successful mobilisation? How can we produce a sense of belonging to communities in struggle that is not evaporated by the onslaught of our everyday routines? How do we build movements?”

Whether it’s the mass mobilisations against the inaction over the climate emergency or the union mobilisation against the Ensuring Integrity Bill and other attacks on the working class, it is the unglamorous work of organising that will make the long-term difference at the end of the day.

It is particularly up to those of us who are members of the organised collective movement to reach out to people who are not, keeping in mind that one of the key tenets of neoliberalism is to dis-organise and atomise us or, at worst, turn us against each other.

2. So join! It is the best defence against this atomisation and the best chance of changing the future instead of just raging against it. If you share the union movement’s anger against the attacks on working people and you are not yet a member, join! A strong civil society is a precondition for a strong democracy. And if a party pisses you off because you think it should be representing you, why not join it? It might piss you off even more but you will be in there adding your voice and actively shaping it. Join the community organisations or social movements that matter to you, not because they are perfect but because it is only collectively that we can achieve something good.

3. Know how to tell the story. It’s everything. We love best the stories that speak to our lives, that tell us what we feel to be true but are unable to articulate.

Elena Ferrante speaks of frantumaglia, a “jumble of fragments… an effect of the sense of loss, when we’re sure that everything that seems to us stable, lasting, an anchor for our life, will soon join that landscape of debris that we seem to see”. Our job is to turn this fragmentation into a resonant narrative.

More than developing policies that speak to our sense of being overwhelmed, it is about capturing that painful sense of dislodgment and transforming it into a nugget of credible hope.

We are usually more afraid of losing what we have than failing to gain what is not yet real for us. Politics, at its worst, is a vehicle for lies that play on these fears and offer us a false protection against them. At its best, however, when the personal is political, to cite the great feminist insight, politics is the collective means of achieving our shared hopes.

Many of us feel despised by the neoliberal status quo: people who bear the brunt of inequality, women facing the daily reality of violence, people who have nowhere to call home, unemployed workers who wage a daily battle from below the poverty line, unpaid carers, people with a disability, the aged, people seeking asylum, young people facing hyper-exploitation and wage theft, First Nations people facing continuing colonisation, and those who are losing their homes and even their lives in catastrophic bushfires fuelled by inaction on the climate emergency.

At a time when some of us are already so relegated, so devalued, we do not have the right to indulge in the luxury of despair. What we have, and have in spades, is the obligation to engage in the hard work of hope.