We engage at a community level less and less, and yet community, working more with, and for, others, with less focus for ourselves, could be where our futures lie.

Could be, or rather, should be?

Community… how to set up the structures to make it possible, to make it work? It exists already of course in countless ways, from pro bono roles such as magistrate and school governor, to charity work, to simple acts of kindness to neighbours. But it’s not embedded.

And do we build community within the existing system, a more mature capitalism, or do we look to national economies based, for example, on cooperatives?

In the former case, the system is still predicated on expansion. In the latter, it’s about worker engagement and it’s non-profit, and economies would exist in a vibrant steady state. Our skills and imagination would be focused less on milking profit out of products old and new, more on maximising community benefit. We’d engage in a different kind of globalization, where we seek to advantage everyone by advantaging ourselves, and spreading the word, and we’d trust other countries to reciprocate.

Steve Hilton, former adviser to David Cameron, argues powerfully for a world in which people comes first. Matthew Taylor in a RSA Journal interview asks him about the political realities – hostile press, public accountability, building coalitions of support – simply getting from A-Z when you have to get from B to Y first. On schools Hilton argues that a simple structural change will set the ball rolling – let school operators make a profit, and let alternative and progressive forms of education flourish at the grass roots. (In some ways I love this. Profit? Surely no-one should profit? But we won’t get innovation from a state-funded system.) Setting up formal arrangements whereby cooperatives supply goods and services to local hospitals would be another example, as has happened in the USA (quoted by Gar Alperovitz, also in the RSA Journal…).

And as Alperovitz also argues, if community-based structures are to succeed, we all have to work less. Co-operatives could become the norm in working life, but many activities are pro bono, charitable, running clubs or teams, simple acts of kindness. We need time, and we need energy, more than we have than when, returning home after a long day and commute, we collapse in front of the TV.

Now TV of course endlessly reinforces the status quo. But that’s another story.

Capitalism versus community, profit or cooperative enterprise? Are we suffering no more than a banker-driven crisis in the only system which really drives human achievement and human welfare? Or we have something of an entirely different order – a terminal crisis in a system which is busted?

I’ve enjoyed dipping into Russell Brand’s Revolution, not least because much of the time I’m rooting for him. But how do we get to utopia? We’ve failed throughout human history. Why should we think we can do better now? Are the internet and social media, one kind of community, the answer? Or local community activity, from running libraries to big cooperatives?

John Plender in his book Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets argues that capitalism will muddle through. It may be the worst from of economic management – save for all the other forms that have been tried down the years.

Advocacy for radical solutions beyond either capitalism or indeed state socialism is part of the answer. Likewise advocating a more caring and socially responsive capitalism, with outputs more (radically more) equitably shared between the 1% or indeed the 10% elite and the mass of working people. We need both, side by side, with all the argument and even the vituperation that goes with it.

Yes, we need both.

And crucially we need to operate within not outside the system we have. That’s where Brand and other utopians fall short. It’s also where Jeremy Corbin is so out of line. If we spurn the system – think we can, for example, renationalise and still compete – then the system will beat us, and greed not compassion will infuse itself deeper into our political system.

Be a utopian – and a realist. Follow your heart, and use your head. Vote for what you believe in (above all VOTE!), but don’t set yourself up to be a loser. There are too many out there, I first encountered them when I was FOC of an NUJ chapel back in the early 70s, and they’re still gaining new recruits – born to be outsiders, grumbling about the way the world has left them behind.