Ben Phillips - How to Fight Inequality

Ben Phillips has helped bring global attention to the inequality crisis. How to Fight Inequality is an ideal guide for anyone who wants to help. He brings to the book lessons and stories from a lifetime deeply enmeshed in activism and organizing, finding hope not in famous leaders but in everyday people, and setting out how each of us can get engaged in building a more equal society.

Naila Kabeer

Ben Phillips is a stalwart campaigner for a fairer world. How to Fight Inequality is a handy primer to help people to build power together.

John Githongo

We now know just how harmful inequality is to us all. But can anything be done about it? Ben Phillips smart new book is packed with powerful stories of change won from the ground up, helps guide us in what we can do by organizing together, and demonstrates that a more equal future is ours to make.

Kate Pickett

Inequality defines our present but it is not our fate. In Ben Phillips crisp guide, he shows from past victories and todays vibrant new movements a way we can win. His first-hand stories of extraordinary, ordinary people winning change illustrate how, together, we have the power to beat inequality.

Kumi Naidoo

Most of us know how severe and how dangerous inequality has become. The debates have been won, but the problem keeps getting worse. Now we must win the fight. And there can be no spectators: it is up to you and me to make change happen. As US President Lyndon Johnson once told Martin Luther King: I know what I have to do but you have to make me do it. Ben Phillips short, sharp, powerful book provides a rousing call for action, and draws on the hard lessons of history to create an essential how-to guide to what works and what doesnt, in the epoch-defying struggle of our new gilded age.

Nicholas Shaxson

Ben Phillips has combined the roles of NGO director, political advisor, civil society activist, and writer. He has lived and worked in four continents and fourteen cities.

He began his development work at the grassroots, as a teacher and ANC activist living in Mamelodi township, South Africa, in 1994, just after the end of apartheid.

He has led programmes and campaigns teams in Oxfam, ActionAid, Save the Children, the Childrens Society, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and the Global Campaign for Education. He has addressed the United Nations and been appointed to the Civil Society Advisory Committee of the United Nations Development Programme.

He co-founded the Fight Inequality Alliance, the growing movement for a more equal world, that brings major NGOs together with social movements, rights activists, environmentalists, womens groups, faith groups and trade unions, to campaign together for action on economic and social inequality.

He advises the UN and governments from across the world on how inequality can be beaten.

He has been the Hewlett Fellow of Public Policy at the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, the Resident Fellow on inequality at the Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Center, and the guest lecturer on global inequality for the Cambridge University series and book Capitalism on the Edge.

He has written for the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Internationalist and Reuters, among others, and appeared regularly on TV, including on CNN, Al Jazeera and the BBC.

He tweets at @benphillips76.

To all those who won the fight against inequality
before, and who will win it again: extraordinary,
ordinary, people.

Ben Phillips

polity

Copyright Ben Phillips 2020

The right of Ben Phillips to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing

Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4308-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4309-0 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Phillips, Ben (Civil society activist), author.

Title: How to fight inequality : (and why that fight needs you) / Ben Phillips.

Description: Medford : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A DIY-guide to tackling inequality for activists everywhere-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020010435 (print) | LCCN 2020010436 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509543083 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509543090 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509543106 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Equality. | Income distribution. | Elite (Social sciences)--History-- 21st century. | Social policy.

Classification: LCC HM821 .P485 2020 (print) | LCC HM821 (ebook) | DDC 361.2/5--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010435

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010436

Typeset in 11 on 14pt Sabon

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Though this book is a personal reflection and all mistakes are my own, I do not feel that I own this book alone. Writing it has depended most of all on amazing grassroots organizers sharing their stories, hosting me in their communities, and teaching me what they have learnt from the messiness of getting involved. Some are featured in the stories in this book I hope that those stories help to share their wisdom. A huge thank you, also, to those organizers and activists whose stories are not in this book but who have inspired it through their lived example.

I started sharing some of these stories in talks and then in articles because people told me that hearing about other peoples struggles, setbacks and successes in the fight against inequality helped them to make a difference. I had not originally envisaged creating a book.

Then, when I arrived at a retreat with other writers, I was starstruck to find that one of my fellow residents was my favourite novelist, Kiran Desai. So when she insisted that there was a book there that needed to be written, helped me envisage what it could be, and insisted that I would be able to produce it if I persisted, I couldnt not write it.

The Bellagio Center and then the Kellogg Institute generously provided the physical space (and skilfully enabled the head space) to write. George Owers and Julia Davies at Polity Press modelled the tough love vital in editors.