Labour Matters
I live in Toronto, and it has its problems, most of its own making. One of the interesting things about it is that there are quite a few smart and enterprising people who have a good sense of what ought to be done to improve the residents’ lives as well as support local small (and probably not-so-small) businesses. But broadcasting the ideas is strangely difficult. It’s one thing to circulate ideas and develop consensus (more or less) among the circulators, but it’s another to move beyond what has turned out to just one of many concentric rings of social discourse. (Digression: Which is why the OWS is so interesting, it ruptures the laminar but isolating circulation of information. Nothing else has done that, recently.) Anyway, the Webzine London Matters does something that I should hope Toronto would, or for that matter any city. It publishes, up front, a positive message of how to fix things awry. Critique–the fun part, of course–surrounds the message. This arrangement alerts the reader that Labour is not only about negative critique with no positive suggestions for how to make things better, but in a way, the opposite. Labour has a specific agenda, and it is and was ready to go, but it is the party in power (nationally, locally) in the UK and London that negates its implementation.
But say that Toronto had something similar–and for all I know, it does, and I’m simply ignorant of it–the message I’d like to see would be one focused on jobs, green energy, urban planning (as in, public transportation and better traffic management, as well as building: the usual). The idea is not just to inform and to open a venue for residents to publish their views (edited, I suppose), but also to rupture the isolation of the circles. Naturally, I’m pessimistic that would really occur–living in the always already is always less stressful than living in interesting times, when anything can happen, even to you.
newspeak 