Leaving the Green Party was a step on a longer journey, I believe. I have spent more energy getting angry at a Party than getting angry at Power, which has resulted only in waste. My vision of a society worth fighting for is broader than the Green Party’s, I believe. Climate Change and the rights of the poor are central to that, but the power structures that be are not limited to the national – they are international. They have decimated cultures (despite hybridity) in the name of modernisation, progress and development.

The world I want to fight for is one that listens to the poor and marginalised – even if I am neither, and not close to listening. The world I fight for sees wealth through love and stability not materiality – it sees a place where everyone has access to good food, shelter, and health care. This world doesn’t need the advances in technology and endless consumerism. It is about community and the space for open discussion rather than lies, secrets and order. The end to private property, especially privatisation as the determining factor all organising.

I sound like a hippie? Perhaps. But I am well aware my dream is exactly that – a dream, a utopia. Yet we need to believe in something in order to gain the changes we want. To challenge Marx, Capital is only in control because we give it value. We give our markets value because we cannot imagine living without them and the luxuries they provide us – the internet, a fancy phone, hot showers, large stylish homes – even nuclear weapons and guns. It terrifies us to ever have to leave that behind. Perhaps we don’t have to, but I don’t really see it as important either way.

Ma ny of us have come to embody the price of capitalism and complexity – we have faced the darkest times, the harshest times, and we have only become angry or disillusioned. Our battles have not been in war, but in language, behaviour and action. So many now live on the fringes of society, kicked in the dust by the people who should have given them the most support…

But these are all over used rhetorical phrases. The mire of power is one that is just as complex as our lives have been – filled with confusion, but also with small gains. The only way we can win this, I believe, is by supporting each other. We need to build stable platforms of social organising that is fed by the end of individualism. We need to be more than mere units holding together a structure, but recognise we are the fiber of the structure itself. When one fails, we all fall. That is not to ignore intersectionality – for it is clear that this form of order will force us to recognise these and work to correct/bring justice to them.

I am aware that these ideas are ideological, and that to make them real would be almost impossible. But I believe that they can be. And I want to work towards making that happen. I cannot do it alone. But if we are to make it successful we need to end creating boundaries around ourselves.