This issue of powerlessness, I would say, is the defining political emotion of our age, and the far right is beating us in the response. Why? There are two ways that you can respond to powerlessness. Different sides of the political spectrum take these different responses, respectively. There’s despair: “I’m powerless to change things. The world is the way it is. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

This is the main issue threatening democracy today. It’s not just inequality. It’s inequality in the context of the decline in collective power and the rise of individualism. This can again be traced back to neoliberalism—something ordinarily associated with changes in economic policy.

There was a profound and deep project at the heart of the neoliberal movement, and it comes through in the quote from Margaret Thatcher who says, “there’s no such thing as society.” This wasn’t an observation of the society that she found in the 1970s in Britain. That was a statement of intent.

One of the most important parts of the neoliberal revolution was breaking up the collective institutions that gave people that sense of community, power, and solidarity in an economy that was weighted against them. That allowed people to shift the balance of power within society, make politicians pay attention to them, and create those changes within the state in their favour.

Today, we are so busy competing with each other that we have forgotten how to work together to change the rules. That is why we all feel so powerless. This represents a real challenge because it’s a shift away from how society looked when the left first emerged; workers coming together to form the first unions and fight for their right to organize and fight for democracy itself. They faced, objectively, far greater challenges than we do today, but they had a sense of their own ability to work together and change things. That’s what we lost in the 1980s.

That’s why I think today the job of the left has to be to help us to rebuild those forms of collective power.

And our slogan, I think, has to change. It has to look something along the lines of “organize,” because nobody is coming to save us.