Читать книгу The Age of Consent - George Monbiot - Страница 8

Almost everyone who contests the way the world is run is at least vaguely aware of the problem of the migration of power to a realm in which there is no democratic control. Much of the effort of the democrats within the global justice movement has been devoted to addressing it. These people belong to two camps. The first consists of those who have sought to re-democratize politics by withdrawing them from the sphere (the global and international) in which there is no democracy and returning them to the sphere (the national and local) in which we appear to retain some political control. They see globalization as the problem, and believe that the re-invigoration of domestic democracy depends on its containment or reversal. The second consists of those who seek, by one means or another, to democratize globalization.

The most widespread and visible manifestation of the first approach is the strategy known as ‘localization’. A book of this title has been published by the trade theorist Colin Hines.²⁴ His proposals, or something like them, have been adopted as policy by several national green parties. Hines points out that globalization forces workers in different countries into destructive competition, prevents nation states and citizens from controlling their own economies and helps the rich to become richer, while further impoverishing the poor. The trend of globalization, he suggests, should be ‘reversed’ by ‘discriminating in favour of the local’ by means of protectionist barriers. Imports should gradually be reduced, until every country produces ‘as much of their food, goods and services as they can’. New trade rules must be introduced, forbidding states to ‘pass laws…that diminish local control of industry and services’, and a new investment treaty would ensure that countries are ‘prohibited from treating foreign investors as favourably as domestic investors’.²⁵ All states would be forced by international law to introduce the same labour standards.

While some of the measures he proposes are, individually, arguable, his objectives are both contradictory and unjust. There is an argument for permitting the poorest nations to protect their economies against certain imports, in order to incubate their own industries. This, as Chapter 6 will show, was how almost all the countries which are rich today first developed. There is no argument founded on justice for permitting the rich nations to do so. If all nations were to protect their economies, the wealth of the rich ones might be diminished, but the poverty of the poor ones would not. We would, if we followed his prescriptions, lock the poor world into destitution. Trade is, at present, an ineffective means of transferring wealth between nations, but it has massive distributive potential; indeed, far more potential than an increased flow of aid, which reinforces the paternalism of the rich and the dependency of the poor, and which tends to be directed, anyway, towards those nations considered by the West to be of ‘strategic importance’.

Colin Hines is in good company, however, because, though it pains me to say so, the approach of many of the most prominent members of the global justice movement in the rich world has been characterized by a staggering inconsistency. I once listened to a speaker demand, like Hines, a cessation of most forms of international trade, on the grounds of economic justice, and then, in answering a question from the audience, condemn the economic sanctions on Iraq. If we can accept – as almost everyone in the global justice movement appears to – that preventing trade with Iraq, or, for that matter, imposing a trade embargo on Cuba, impoverishes and in many cases threatens the lives of the people of those nations, we must also accept that a global cessation of most kinds of trade would have the same effect, but on a greater scale.

Many of the localizers have demanded measures which are the mirror image of those promoted by the market fundamentalists. While the fundamentalists insist that trade is the answer to everything, the localizers insist that trade is the answer to nothing. While the fundamentalists maintain that no economy should be protected, the localizers maintain that all economies should be protected. They have rightly condemned the fundamentalists’ ‘onesize-fits-all’ approach, only to check it with a policy of equal coarseness.

But perhaps the most evident conflict within Colin Hines’s prescriptions is that his formula for economic localization relies entirely upon enhanced political globalization. Nowhere in his book does he appear to address this point, or even to acknowledge it. His model requires draconian controls on the freedom of nation states to set their own economic policies, enforced by such global institutions as an Alternative Investment Code, a General Agreement for Sustainable Trade and, rather wonderfully, a ‘World Localization Organization’. These would coordinate global controls on capital flows, taxes on financial speculation, global competition and exchange rate rules and debt forgiveness for the poorer nations. He offers no clues as to how this new kind of globalization might come about, how it might be rendered democratically accountable or how enhanced political cooperation could be sustained while nations cut their economic ties. All these new global measures, needless to say, are to be accompanied by the ‘maximum devolution of political power’ and the surrender of ‘control of the local economy to the locality’.²⁶

There is another means of reclaiming power from globalization greatly favoured by theorists within this movement, and that is to bypass governments and the usual political processes, and seek to shape global futures directly, by changing the decisions which govern the daily pattern of our lives. In his beautifully written book The Post-Corporate World,²⁷ the development economist David Korten acknowledges the need for political campaigning and global measures to redistribute power and wealth, but he seeks to contest the power of transnational corporations principally by changing the behaviour of those who work for them, buy their products and own their stock. Through ‘mindful living’ we can free ourselves ‘from the imposed order of coercive institutions that constrain life’s creative power…To be truly free we must learn to practice a mindful self-restraint in the use of our freedom.’ His prescriptions could be summarized as ‘consumer democracy’, ‘shareholder democracy’ and ‘voluntary simplicity’.

Consumer democracy means, in Korten’s words, that, ‘in good market fashion, you are voting with your dollars’. By ‘starving the capitalist economy’, you can ‘nurture the mindful market’.²⁸ By using your money carefully, in other words, you can help to create a world in which other people are not exploited and the environment is not destroyed.

None but the market fundamentalists would deny that there is a moral imperative to spend our money carefully. If we believe that slavery is wrong, we should be careful not to help those businesses which depend on slavery to survive. If we wish to protect the Amazon rainforest, we should withhold from buying mahogany, whose extraction, in some parts of the Amazon, has activated other forms of destruction. But mindful consumption is a weak and diffuse means of changing the world, and it has been greatly overemphasized by those (though David Korten is not among them) who wish to avoid the necessary political conflicts.

The first and most obvious problem with consumer democracy is that some people have more votes than others. Those with the most votes – that is to say, with the most money – are the least likely to wish to change an economic system which has served them well. If we reject the one-dollar, one-vote arrangement which determines the way the World Bank and IMF are run, on the grounds that this is a grossly unjust means of resolving political issues, we should surely also reject a formula for changing the world which relies on the goodwill of those with the most dollars to spend. It should be obvious that the decisions made, in this weighted voting system, by the people with the most money will not, in aggregate, be decisions made in the interests of those with the least.

Those who do seek to make ethical purchasing decisions will often discover, moreover, that the signal they are trying to send becomes lost in the general market noise. I might reject one brand of biscuits and buy another, on the grounds that the second one was less wastefully packaged, but unless I go to the trouble of explaining that decision to the biscuit manufacturer I chose not to patronize, the company will have no means of discovering why I made it, or even that I made a decision at all. Even if I do, my choice is likely to be ineffective unless it is coordinated with the choices of hundreds (or, depending on the size of the company, thousands) of other consumers. But consumer boycotts are notoriously hard to sustain. Shoppers are, more often than not, tired, distracted and drowning in information and conflicting claims. Campaigning organizations report that a maximum of one or two commercial boycotts per nation per year is likely to be effective; beyond that, customer power becomes too diffuse. For the majority of products, therefore, the consumer’s power of restraint is limited.

This problem is compounded by the fact that nearly everything we buy has already been bought at least once by the time it reaches us. Take, for example, the market for copper. I object to the way the indigenous people of West Papua, in Indonesia, have been treated by the operators of the massive copper mine at Tembagapura. Many hundreds of people have been forcibly evicted from their lands; Indonesian soldiers protecting the operation have tortured and murdered hundreds more; and the ‘tailings’ from the mine have damaged the fisheries which provided a critical source of protein for thousands of others. I would like that mine either to cease operating altogether or to operate only with the consent of local people. But I buy none of the copper I use directly. Most of it has been brought into my house by plumbers and electricians, or in the form of components – largely invisible to me – of electrical equipment. I have purchased it, in other words, as part of a package of goods and services, for which I have paid a single price. My leverage over the copper market then depends on the transmission of my will through a number of intermediaries. If I am prepared to embarrass myself, I might be able to persuade the electrician to go back to his company and ask it to question its suppliers, who in turn might be persuaded to approach the manufacturers who in turn might be persuaded to petition the mining company to discover whether or not the copper he is about to use in my house was produced with the consent of local people and without damaging the environment.

Even if this request is somehow transmitted all the way there and all the way back, and the electrician has not walked away from the job in disgust, all I am likely to receive is an unverifiable assurance that of course it was mined sustainably. I will be left feeling like a busybody and a supplicant, which is hardly a politically empowering position to be in. And I will be no nearer than I was before to closing down the mine at Tembagapura or altering the way it operates.

Of course, there are several organizations, such as the Soil Association and the Forest Stewardship Council, whose purpose is to bypass the purchasing chain, and determine directly, on our behalf, whether or not certain products (food and timber in these cases) are as eco-friendly as they claim to be, enabling the consumer to make an informed choice simply by checking the label. But important as these bodies are, their impact is limited by the constraint afflicting all consumer democrats: namely that they possess no negative power. I can congratulate myself for not buying cocoa produced by slaves, but my purchases of fairly traded chocolate do not help me to bring the slave trade to an end, because they don’t prevent other people from buying chocolate whose production relies on slavery. This is not to say that voluntary fair trade is pointless – it has distributed wealth to impoverished people – simply that, while it encourages good practice, it does not discourage bad practice.

If we wish to prevent exploitation, it surely makes more sense to start at the other end of the purchasing chain, the end at which the exploitation takes place. If local people want to close the mine at Tembagapura, then let us campaign to help them to close it, so that we no longer have to fret about whether or not the copper we are buying is produced there. This is the means by which, for example, Western corporations were forced out of Burma, mahogany logging was brought to an end in Brazil and the biotechnology giant Monsanto was, temporarily, fettered. Consumer democracy is much less effective at reaching the source of the problem than plain democracy. An overreliance on consumer democracy disperses our power. It permits us to feel we are making a difference when we are doing no such thing. It individualizes our political action when it should be consolidated.

There is rather more to be said for ‘shareholder democracy’, for while it suffers from most of the drawbacks of consumer democracy, it automatically collectivizes the power of the mindful purchasers, for every year the company’s annual general meeting draws these people together, where they can coordinate their concerns. Campaigners buying the shares of companies whose practices they deplore have been devastatingly effective on such occasions, but only when their protests at these meetings are part of a wider campaign designed to damage the company’s reputation.

‘Voluntary simplicity’ is defined by David Korten as ‘spending less time working for money, leading lives less cluttered by stuff, and spending more time living’.²⁹ These are worthy aims (though they can be pursued only by the rich), but it is not clear that they translate into political change.

Korten celebrates the lives of people who have withdrawn their labour from destructive corporations, found less stressful employment and now spend more of their time engaged in the business of living. Many of these people, he suggests, will use this extra time to campaign for a better world. It is certainly true to say that it is hard to be an effective campaigner if paid employment consumes most of your time and energy. It is also true that there is an urgent need for all wealthy consumers to reduce their impact on the planet. But Korten, like many others, has exaggerated the transformative impact of this proposal.

In political terms, the aggregate effect of voluntary simplicity is merely an acceleration of the employment cycle. Instead of waiting until they are sixty or sixty-five before retiring from corporate life, more people are doing so in early middle age. They are not bringing the system to its knees by this means; they are simply making way for younger, keener, more aggressive workers. Far from threatening corporate power, this could enhance it, as younger workers are often easier to manipulate and less aware of the impact of their activities. The withdrawal of our labour from the corporations will hurt them as a sector only if everyone does it, all at once, by means of a worldwide, indefinite general strike. Again we run into the problem here that those who would be most inclined to strike are those with the least investment in corporate life.

Nor does it follow that, once people have left corporate employment, they will use their time to fight the forces which have supplied them with the savings or the pensions required to sustain their ‘simplified’ lives. Indeed, the two professed aims of voluntary simplicity – seeking an easier, less cluttered life and devoting more time to political campaigning – are starkly contradictory. If we are to exert any meaningful impact on the way the world is run, we need to engage in voluntary complexity.

‘Consumer democracy’ and ‘voluntary simplicity’ are easy and painless for their practitioners. We should, as I have suggested, be deeply suspicious of easy and painless solutions, for this suggests that such strategies are unopposed. A serious attempt to change the world will be difficult and dangerous. What appears to be a solution, in other words, may in fact be a withdrawal. Voluntary simplicity looks more like the monastery than the barricade. Delightful as it may be for those who practise it, quiet contemplation does not rattle the cages of power.

If an attempt to replace the global economy with a local economy locks the poor world into poverty, while fudging the issue of political power, and if consumer democracy and voluntary simplicity avoid power rather than confronting it, then our attempts to re-democratize the world by withdrawing from globalization appear to be doomed. This leaves us, as most of the movement now recognizes, with just one remaining option: we must democratize globalization. But even here we encounter another great division, this time between the reformists and the revolutionaries. While the revolutionaries wish to sweep away the existing global and international institutions, reformists such as the financier and author of the manifesto On Globalization,³⁰ George Soros, prefer to work within them.

Soros proposes certain measures, such as using Special Drawing Rights (the financial reserves issued by the IMF) to fund aid for poorer nations, changing the way the IMF intervenes in the economies of the poor world and giving the directors of the World Bank independence from the governments which appointed them. These are, as far as they go, progressive measures. But this, Soros insists, is the limit of what we can expect to achieve. ‘It would be unrealistic’, he argues, ‘to advocate a wholesale change in the prevailing structure of the international financial system…the United States is not going to abdicate its position…I do not see any point in proposing more radical solutions when the authorities are not ready to consider even the moderate ones outlined here.’³¹ Like many other people, George Soros regards the revolutionary alternatives as hopelessly unrealistic.

If we are to confine our proposals to what ‘the authorities are ready to consider’ then it seems to me that we may as well give up and leave the authorities to run the world unmolested. Even the modest reforms of the IMF and World Bank that George Soros proposes are blocked by the very constitutions with which he wishes to tinker. The United States has, as we have seen, a veto over any constitutional changes within these organizations. It has, at present, no incentive to drop this veto, and Soros offers no proposals to change the incentive. As a result, these bodies are constitutionally unreformable.

Another way of looking at the problem is this. Let us assume that through discovering some new incentives (and, as this book shows, there are one or two we could drum up) with which we might alter the behaviour of the United States, we can muster sufficient political pressure to persuade that nation to suspend its veto and permit the constitution of the World Bank and the IMF to be changed. We would then have forced the world’s only superpower to have volunteered to surrender its hegemonic status. If that is possible, anything is. And if anything is possible, why on earth should we settle for the kind of reforms which Soros admits are ‘puny when compared with the magnitude of the problems they are supposed to resolve’?³² Why not embrace those proposals which give us what we want, rather than just what we imagine ‘the authorities are ready to consider’?

George Soros’s ‘realistic’ measures turn out to be either hopelessly unrealistic or hopelessly unambitious. Certainly, as he acknowledges, they provide no realistic means of solving the world’s problems, even if they were implemented. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe such proposals as ‘hopelessly realistic’. They are hopeless in two respects: the first is that they are a useless means of achieving change, the second is that they reflect an absence of hope.

Just as importantly, compromised solutions will not command popular enthusiasm. Who wants to fight, perhaps in extremis lay down her life, for solutions which are ‘puny when compared with the magnitude of the problems they are supposed to resolve’? We know that the reform of illegitimate institutions is likely only to enhance their credibility, and thus the scope of their illegitimate powers. No solution of any value to the oppressed will surface unless vast numbers of people demand it, not just once, but consistently, and they will not, of course, demand it if they perceive that it is hopeless.

Had those people who campaigned for national democratization in the nineteenth century in Europe approached their task with the same hopeless realism as the reformists campaigning for global democratization today, they would have argued that, as the authorities were not ready to consider granting the universal franchise, they should settle for a ‘realistic’ option instead, and their descendants might today have been left with a situation in which all those earning, say, $50,000 a year or possessing twenty acres of land were permitted to vote, but those with less remained disenfranchised.

Every revolution could have been – indeed almost certainly was – described as ‘unrealistic’ just a few years before it happened. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, female enfranchisement, the rise of communism, the fall of communism, the aspirations of decolonization movements all over the world were mocked by those reformists who believed that the best we could hope for was to tinker with existing institutions and beg some small remission from the dominant powers. Had you announced, in 1985, that within five years men and women with sledge-hammers would be knocking down the Berlin Wall, the world would have laughed in your face. All of these movements, like our global democratic revolution, depended for their success on mass mobilization and political will. Without these components, they were impossible. With them, they were unstoppable.

What is realistic is what happens. The moment we make it happen, it becomes realistic. As the other possibilities fall away, a global democratic revolution is, in both senses, the only realistic option we have. It is the only strategy which could deliver us from the global dictatorship of vested interests. It is the only strategy that is likely to succeed. We have responded to the Age of Coercion with an Age of Dissent. This is the beginning, not the end, of our battle. It is time to invoke the Age of Consent.