The Age of Consent
A Maifesto For A New World Order
George Monbiot

I Angharad

Fy nghariad

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE Some Repulsive Proposals

CHAPTER 1 The Mutation

CHAPTER 2 The Least-Worst System An Equivocal Case for Democracy

CHAPTER 3 A Global Democratic Revolution The Case Against Hopeless Realism

CHAPTER 4 We the Peoples Building a World Parliament

CHAPTER 5 Something Snaps An International Clearing Union

CHAPTER 6 The Levelling A Fair Trade Organization

CHAPTER 7 The Contingency of Power

References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE Some Repulsive Proposals

Everything has been globalized except our consent. Democracy alone has been confined to the nation state. It stands at the national border, suitcase in hand, without a passport.

A handful of men in the richest nations use the global powers they have assumed to tell the rest of the world how to live. This book is an attempt to describe a world run on the principle by which those powerful men claim to govern: the principle of democracy. It is an attempt to replace our Age of Coercion with an Age of Consent.

I present in this manifesto a series of repulsive proposals, which will horrify all right-thinking people. Many of them, at first sight or in conception, horrified me. I have sought to discover the means of introducing a new world order, in which the world’s institutions are run by and for their people. Their discovery has obliged me first to re-examine the issues with which I have, for some years, been struggling. This process has forced me to recognize that some of the positions I have taken in the past have been wrong. It has brought me to see that the vast and messy coalition to which I belong, which is now widely known as the ‘Global Justice Movement’,* has misdiagnosed some aspects of the disease and, as a result, offered the wrong prescriptions.

In searching for the necessary conditions for an Age of Consent, I have not sought to be original. Where effective solutions have already been devised, I have adopted them, though in most cases I have felt the need to revise and develop the argument. Some of the policies I have chosen have a heritage of three thousand years. But where all the existing proposals appear to me to be inadequate, I have had to contrive new approaches. My principal innovation, I believe, has been to discover some of their synergistic effects and to start to devise what I hope is a coherent, self-reinforcing system, each of whose elements – political and economic – defends and enhances the others.

I have sought to suggest nothing that cannot be achieved with our own resources, starting from our current circumstances. Too many of the schemes some members of this movement have put forward appear to be designed for implementation by the people of another time or another planet. This is not to suggest that any of the transformations I propose will be easy. Any change worth fighting for will be hard to achieve; indeed if the struggle in which you are engaged is not difficult, you may be confident that it is not worthwhile, for you can be assured by that measure that those from whom you need to wrest power are not threatened by your efforts. We will know that our approach is working only when it is violently opposed.

Nor do I presume to suggest anything resembling a final or definitive world order. On the contrary, I hope that other people will refine, transform, and, if necessary, overthrow my proposals in favour of better ones. I have attempted to design a system which permits, indeed encourages, its own improvement, and mobilizes the collective genius unleashed whenever freely thinking people discuss an issue without constraint. And these proposals are, of course, a means to an end. If they fail to deliver global justice, they must be torn down and trampled, like so many failed proposals before them.

I will not explain them here, as this will encourage some readers to imagine that they have understood them and have no need to read on. I think it is fair to say that they and their implications cannot be understood in essence unless they are also understood in detail. The four principal projects are these: a democratically elected world parliament; a democratised United Nations General assembly, which captures the powers now vested in the Security Council; an International Clearing Union, which automatically discharges trade deficits and prevents the accumulation of debt; a Fair Trade Organization, which restrains the rich while emancipating the poor.

I have, I hope, made no proposal that depends for its success on the goodwill of the world’s most powerful governments and institutions. Power is never surrendered voluntarily; if we want it, we must seize it. Because, for obvious reasons, the existing powers can be expected to resist such changes, they must be either bypassed or forced to comply. I believe, as the subsequent chapters will show, that I have discovered some cruel and unusual methods of destroying their resistance.

I ask just one thing of you – that you do not reject these proposals until you have better ones with which to replace them. It has been too easy for both our movement and its critics to dismiss the prescriptions they find disagreeable without proposing workable measures of their own, thereby preventing the possibility of radical change. If you believe that slogans are a substitute for policies, or that if we all just love each other more, there’ll be a transformation of consciousness and no one will ever oppress other people again, then I am wasting your time, and so are you.

CHAPTER 1 The Mutation

In his novel Atomised, Michel Houellebecq writes of the ‘metaphysical mutations’ which have changed the way the world’s people think.

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it moves inexorably towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, ethical considerations and social structures. No human agency can halt its progress – nothing, but another metaphysical mutation.¹

These events are, as Houellebecq points out, rare in history. The emergence and diffusion of Christianity and Islam was one; the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science another. I believe we may be on the verge of a new one.

Throughout history, human beings have been the loyalists of an exclusive community. They have always known, as if by instinct, who lies within and who lies without. Those who exist beyond the border are less human than those who exist within. Remorselessly, the unit of identity has grown, from the family to the pack, to the clan, the tribe, the nation. In every case the struggle between the smaller groups has been resolved only to begin a common struggle against another new federation.

Our loyalties have made us easy to manipulate. In the First World War, a few dozen aristocrats sent eight million men to die in the name of nationhood. The interests of the opposing armies were identical. Their soldiers would have been better served by overthrowing their generals and destroying the class which had started the war than by fighting each other, but their national identity overrode their class interest. The new mutation will force us to abandon nationhood, just as, in earlier epochs, we abandoned the barony and the clan. It will compel us to recognize the irrationality of the loyalties which set us apart. For the first time in history, we will see ourselves as a species.

Just as the consolidation of the Roman Empire created the necessary conditions for the propagation of Christianity, this mutation will be assisted by the forces which have cause to fear it. Corporate and financial globalization, designed and executed by a minority seeking to enhance its wealth and power, is compelling the people it oppresses to acknowledge their commonality. Globalization is establishing a single, planetary class interest, as the same forces and the same institutions threaten the welfare of the people of all nations. It is ripping down the cultural and linguistic barriers which have divided us. By breaking the social bonds which sustained local communities, it destroys our geographical loyalties. Already, it has forced states to begin to relinquish nationhood, by building economic units – trading blocs – at the level of the continent or hemisphere.

Simultaneously, it has placed within our hands the weapons we require to overthrow the people who have engineered it and assert our common interest. By crushing the grand ideologies which divided the world, it has evacuated the political space in which a new, global politics can grow. By forcing governments to operate in the interests of capital, it has manufactured the disenchantment upon which all new politics must feed. Through the issue of endless debt, it has handed to the poor, if they but knew it, effective control of the world’s financial systems. By expanding its own empire through new communication and transport networks, it has granted the world’s people the means by which they can gather and coordinate their attack.

The global dictatorship of vested interests has created the means of its own destruction. But it has done more than that; it has begun to force a transformation of the scale on which we think, obliging us to recognize the planetary issues which bear on our parochial concerns. It impels us, moreover, to act upon that recognition. It has granted us the power to change the course of history.

Globalization has established the preconditions but this mutation cannot happen by itself. It needs to be catalysed, much as the early Christians catalysed the monotheistic mutation, or the heretical scientists the Enlightenment. It requires the active engagement of a network of insurrectionists who are prepared to risk their lives to change the world. That network already exists. It forms part of the biggest global movement in history, whose members, most of whom inhabit the poor world, can now be counted in the tens of millions. The people of this sub-formation are perhaps not wholly aware of the project in which they are participating. They must seize this moment and become the catalyst for the new mutation. Like many catalysts, they risk destruction in the reaction, but if they do not strike, the opportunity created by their opponents will be lost.

The movement’s defining debate is just beginning. Led by activists in the poor nations, most of its members have come to see that opposition to the existing world order is insufficient, and that its proposed alternatives will be effective only if they are global in scale. In searching for solutions to the problems it has long contested, it has raised its eyes from the national sphere, in which there is democracy but no choice, to the global sphere, in which there is choice but no democracy. It has correctly perceived that the world will not change until we seize control of global politics.

The quest for global solutions is difficult and divisive. Some members of this movement are deeply suspicious of all institutional power at the global level, fearing that it could never be held to account by the world’s people. Others are concerned that a single set of universal prescriptions would threaten the diversity of dissent. A smaller faction has argued that all political programmes are oppressive: our task should not be to replace one form of power with another, but to replace all power with a magical essence called ‘anti-power’.*

But most of the members of this movement are coming to recognize that if we propose solutions which can be effected only at the local or the national level, we remove ourselves from any meaningful role in solving precisely those problems which most concern us. Issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade between nations can be addressed only globally or internationally. Without global measures and global institutions, it is impossible to see how we might distribute wealth from rich nations to poor ones, tax the mobile rich and their even more mobile money, control the shipment of toxic waste, sustain the ban on landmines, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, broker peace between nations or prevent powerful states from forcing weaker ones to trade on their terms. If we were to work only at the local level, we would leave these, the most critical of issues, for other people to tackle.

Global governance will take place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place if the issues which concern us are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. That the international institutions have been designed or captured by the dictatorship of vested interests is not an argument against the existence of international institutions, but a reason for overthrowing them and replacing them with our own. It is an argument for a global political system which holds power to account.

In the absence of an effective global politics, moreover, local solutions will always be undermined by communities of interest which do not share our vision. We might, for example, manage to persuade the people of the street in which we live to give up their cars in the hope of preventing climate change, but unless everyone, in all communities, either shares our politics or is bound by the same rules, we simply open new road space into which the neighbouring communities can expand. We might declare our neighbourhood nuclear-free, but unless we are simultaneously working, at the international level, for the abandonment of nuclear weapons, we can do nothing to prevent ourselves and everyone else from being threatened by people who are not as nice as we are. We would deprive ourselves, in other words, of the power of restraint.

By first rebuilding the global politics, we establish the political space in which our local alternatives can flourish. If, by contrast, we were to leave the governance of the necessary global institutions to others, then those institutions will pick off our local, even our national, solutions one by one. There is little point in devising an alternative economic policy for your nation, as Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, now president of Brazil, once advocated, if the International Monetary Fund and the financial speculators have not first been overthrown. There is little point in fighting to protect a coral reef from local pollution, if nothing has been done to prevent climate change from destroying the conditions it requires for its survival.

While it is easy to unite a movement in opposition, it is just as easy to divide one in proposition. This movement, in which Marxists, anarchists, statists, liberals, libertarians, greens, conservatives, revolutionaries, reactionaries, animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims have found a home, has buried its differences to fight its common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge as it seeks to coalesce around a common set of solutions. We have, so far, avoided this conflict by permitting ourselves to believe that we can pursue, simultaneously, hundreds of global proposals without dispersing our power. We have allowed ourselves to imagine that we can confront the consolidated power of our opponents with a jumble of contradictory ideas. While there is plainly a conflict between the coherence of the movement and the coherence of its proposals, and while the pursuit of a cogent political programme will alienate some of its participants, it is surely also true that once we have begun to present a mortal threat to the existing world order, we will attract supporters in far greater numbers even than those we have drawn so far.

The notion that power can be dissolved and replaced by something called ‘anti-power’ has some currency among anarchists in the rich world, but it is recognized as fabulous nonsense by most campaigners in the poor world, where the realities of power are keenly felt. Just because we do not flex our muscles does not mean that other people will not flex theirs. Power emerges wherever conflicting interests with unequal access to resources – whether material, political or psychological – clash. Within homogeneous groups of well-meaning people, especially those whose interests have not been plainly represented, it can be suppressed. But as any anarchist who has lived in a communal house knows, power relations begin to develop as soon as one member clearly delineates a need at variance with those of the others. The potential conflict is quelled only when one of the antagonists either buckles to the dominant will or leaves the community. Power, in other words, however subtly expressed, either forces the weaker person down or forces him out. Power is as intrinsic to human society as greed or fear: a world without power is a world without people. The question is not how we rid the world of power, but how the weak first reclaim that power and then hold it to account.

We must harness the power of globalization, and, pursuing its inexorable development, overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own. In doing so, we will, whether or not this is the intended outcome, bring forward the era in which humankind ceases to be bound by the irrational loyalties of nationhood.*

While we have hesitated to explain what we want, we have not been so shy in defining our complaints. The problem is simply formulated: there is, at the global level, no effective restraint of the ability of the rich and powerful to control the lives of the poor and weak. The United Nations, for example, which is meant to deliver peace, human rights and international justice, is controlled by the five principal victors of the Second World War: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France and China. These nations exercise the power of veto not only over the business of the UN Security Council, but also over substantial change within the entire organization.³ This means that no constitutional measure which helps the weak will be adopted unless it also helps the strong.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are supposed to assist impoverished nations to build and defend their economies, are run on the principle of one dollar, one vote. To pass a substantial resolution or to amend the way they operate requires an eighty-five per cent majority. ⁴ The United States alone, which possesses more than fifteen per cent of the stock in both organizations,⁵ can block a resolution supported by every other member state. This means, in practice, that these two bodies will pursue only those policies in the developing world which are of benefit to the economy of the United States and the interests of its financial speculators, even when these conflict directly with the needs of the poor.

The World Trade Organization appears, at first sight, to be more democratic: every member nation has one vote. In reality, its principal decisions have been made during the ‘Green Room’ negotiations, which are convened and controlled by the European Union, the United States, Canada and Japan.⁶ Developing nations can enter these talks only at their behest, and even then they are threatened if they offend the interests of the major powers. The result is that, despite their promises to the contrary, the nations and corporations of the rich world have been able to devise ever more elaborate trade protections, while the nations of the poor world have been forced to open their economies.

If you consider this distribution of power acceptable, that is your choice, but please do not call yourself a democrat. If you consider yourself a democrat, you must surely acknowledge the need for radical change.

Partly as a result of this dictatorship of vested interests, partly through corruption and misrule, and the inequality and destructiveness of an economic system which depends for its survival on the issue of endless debt, the prosperity perpetually promised by the rich world to the poor perpetually fails to materialize. Almost half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day; one fifth on less than one. Despite a global surplus of food, 840 million people are officially classified as malnourished,⁸ as they lack the money required to buy it.

One hundred million children are denied primary education.⁹ One third of the people of the poor world die of preventable conditions such as infectious disease, complications in giving birth and malnutrition.¹⁰ The same proportion has insufficient access to fresh water,¹¹ as a result of underinvestment, pollution and over-abstraction by commercial farms. Much of the farming in the poor world has been diverted from producing food for local people to feeding the livestock required to supply richer people with meat.* As a result of nutrient depletion, our continued survival depends upon increasing applications of fertilizer. The world’s reserves of phosphate, without which most of the crops requiring artificial fertilizer cannot be grown, are likely to be exhausted before the end of the century.¹³

Climate change caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases is further reducing the earth’s capacity to feed itself, through the expansion of drought zones, rising sea levels and the shrinkage of glacier-fed rivers. Partly because of the influence of the oil industry, the rich world’s governments have refused to agree to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels sufficient to arrest it.

The institutions founded ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ have failed. Since the end of World War Two, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.

The world order designed by the rich and powerful has, unsurprisingly, been kind to them. The ten richest people on earth possessed in 2002 a combined wealth of $266 billion.¹⁴ This is five times the annual flow of aid from rich nations to poor ones, and roughly sufficient to pay for all the United Nations’ millennium health goals (such as halting and reversing the spread of AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases, reducing infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal deaths in childbirth by three-quarters) between now and 2015.*

It would, of course, be wrong to blame only the states, corporations and institutions of the rich world for these injustices. There are plenty of brutal and repressive governments in the poor world – those of North Korea, Burma, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Sudan, Algeria, Zimbabwe and Colombia for example – which have impoverished and threatened their people and destroyed their natural resources. But just as population growth is often incorrectly named as the leading cause of the world’s environmental problems, for the obvious reason that it is the only environmental impact for which the poor can be blamed and the rich excused,† so the corruption and oppression of some of the governments of the poor world have been incorrectly identified as leading causes of its impoverishment. Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, is a brutal autocrat who has cheated his country of democracy, murdered political opponents and starved the people of regions controlled by the opposition. But the damage he has done to Africans is minor by comparison to that inflicted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose ‘structural adjustment programmes’ have been among the foremost impediments to the continent’s development over the past twenty years.

Indeed, many of the countries we chastise for incompetent economic management are effectively controlled by the IMF. They are trapped by this body in a cycle of underinvestment. Because they do not possess good schools, hospitals and transport networks, their economic position continues to deteriorate, which in turn leaves them without the means of generating the money to supply these services. Yet they are prevented by the International Monetary Fund from increasing public spending, and forced instead to use their money to repay their debts. These are, as most financial analysts now concede, unpayable: despite a net transfer of natural wealth from the poor world to the rich world over the past 500 years, the poor are now deemed to owe the rich $2.5 trillion.¹⁷ The IMF, working closely with the US Treasury and the commercial banks, uses the leverage provided by these debts to force the poor nations to remove their defences against the most predatory activities of financial speculators and foreign corporations. As Chapters 5 and 6 will show, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the extent to which nations have done as the international institutions have instructed and their economic welfare.

The effective control of many of the poor nations’ economies by the IMF and the speculators, moreover, has dampened public faith in democracy: people know that there is little point in changing the government if you can’t change its policies. The rich world, with a few exceptions, gets the poor world governments it deserves.

All these problems have been blamed on ‘globalization’, a term which has become so loose as to be almost meaningless; I have heard it used to describe everything from global terrorism to world music. But most people tend to refer to a number of simultaneous and connected processes. One is the removal of controls on the movement of capital, permitting investors and speculators to shift their assets into and out of economies as they please. Another is the removal of trade barriers, and the ‘harmonization’ of the rules which different nations imposed on the companies trading within their borders. A third, which both arose from and contributed to these other processes, is the growth of multinational corporations and their displacement of local and national businesses. There is no question that these processes have contributed to the power of capital and the corresponding loss of citizens’ ability to shape their own lives. There is no question too that some of these processes have generated international debt, inequality and environmental destruction and precipitated the collapse of several previously healthy economies.

But, like many others, I have in the past lazily used ‘globalization’ as shorthand for the problems we contest, and ‘internationalism’ as shorthand for the way in which we need to contest them. Over the course of generations, both terms have acquired their own currency among dissident movements. While globalization has come to mean capital’s escape from national controls, internationalism has come to mean unified action by citizens whose class interests transcend national borders. But perhaps it is time we rescued these terms from their friends. In some respects the world is suffering from a deficit of globalization, and a surfeit of internationalism.

Internationalism, if it means anything, surely implies interaction between nations. Globalization denotes interaction beyond nations, unmediated by the state. The powers of the United Nations General Assembly, for example, are delegated by nation states, so the only citizens’ concerns it considers are those the nation states – however repressive, unaccountable or unrepresentative they may be – are prepared to discuss. The nation state acts as a barrier between us and the body charged with resolving many of the problems affecting us. The UN’s problem is that global politics have been captured by nation states; that globalization, in other words, has been forced to give way to internationalism.

The World Trade Organization deals with an issue which is more obviously international in character – the rules governing trade between nations – and so its international structure is arguably more appropriate than that of the UN. But that issue is affected by forces, such as the circulation of capital and the strategies of transnational corporations, which are plainly global in character. Internationalism alone appears to be an inadequate mechanism, if one were sought, for restraining the destructive power of these forces. The global citizen, whose class interests extend beyond the state (and are seldom represented by the state), is left without influence over the way the global economy develops.

Globalization is not the problem. The problem is in fact the release from globalization which both economic agents and nation states have been able to negotiate. They have been able to operate so freely because the people of the world have no global means of restraining them. Our task is surely not to overthrow globalization, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution.

CHAPTER 2 The Least-Worst System An Equivocal Case for Democracy

I might appear to have begun with a presumption: that a democratic world order is better than any other kind. This was not the approach with which I started my research; I sought (perhaps not always successfully) to begin without preconceptions. I was forced to adopt this as my basic political model only after examining the alternatives, the two ideologies which, within the global justice movement, compete directly or indirectly with the package of political positions most people recognize as ‘democracy’ – Marxism and anarchism.*

It is the common conceit of contemporary communists that their prescriptions have not failed; they have simply never been tried. Whenever it has been practised on a continental scale, the emancipation of the workers has been frustrated by tyrants, who corrupted Marx’s ideology for their own ends. For some years, I believed this myself. But nothing is more persuasive of the hazards of Marx’s political programme than The Communist Manifesto.¹⁸ It seems to me that this treatise contains, in theoretical form, all the oppressions which were later visited on the people of communist nations. The problem with its political prescriptions is not that they have been corrupted, but that they have been rigidly applied. Stalin’s politics and Mao’s were far more Marxist than, for example, those of the compromised – and therefore more benign – governments of Cuba or the Indian state of Kerala.

The Manifesto’s great innovation and great failure was the staggeringly simplistic theory into which it sought to force society. Dialectical materialism reduced humanity’s complex social and political relations to a simple conflict between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’; that is to say the owners of property and the workers, by which Marx and Engels meant the industrial labourers employed by large capitalist concerns. Any class which did not conform to this dialectic was either, like the peasants, shopkeepers, artisans and aristocrats, destined to ‘decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry’, or, like the unemployed, was to be regarded as ‘social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society’,¹⁹ with no legitimate existence in a post-revolutionary world.

Unfortunately for those living under communist regimes, society did not function as Marx suggested. The peasants, aristocrats, artisans and shopkeepers did not disappear of their own accord: they, like everyone else who did not fit conveniently into the industrial proletariat, had to be eliminated, as they interfered with the theoretical system Marx had imposed on society. Marx, who described them as ‘reactionaries’ trying ‘to roll back the wheel of history’, might have approved of their extermination. The ‘social scum’ of the lumpenproletariat, which came to include indigenous people, had to be disposed of just as hastily, in case they became, as Marx warned, ‘the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’. As the theory so woefully failed to fit society, society had to be remodelled to fit the theory. And Marx provided the perfect excuse for ruthless extermination. By personalizing oppression as ‘the bourgeoisie’ he introduced the justification for numberless atrocities. The simplicity, of both the theory and the objective, is attractive and enticing. Even today, it is hard to read The Communist Manifesto without wanting to go out and shoot a member of the bourgeoisie, in the hope of obtaining freedom from oppression.

Moreover, Marx’s industrial proletariat, modelled on the factory workers of Lancashire, upon whom he relied to foment revolution, turned out to be rather less inclined to revolt than the peasants, or, for that matter, the petty bourgeois, artisans, factory owners, aristocrats and educated middle classes from whom he drew almost all his early disciples. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Marx effectively re-invokes, in the form of bourgeois communist ideologues such as himself, the guardian-philosophers of Plato’s dictatorship. Rather than trust the faceless proletariat to make its own decisions, he appoints these guardians to ‘represent and take care of the future’ of that class.

His prescriptions, in other words, flatly fail to address the critical political question, namely ‘who guards the guards?’ Democratic systems contain, in theory at least, certain safeguards, principally in the form of elections, designed to ensure that those who exercise power over society do so in its best interests. The government is supposed to entertain a healthy fear of its people, for the people are supposed to be permitted to dismiss their government. The Communist Manifesto offers no such defences. As the ancient Greeks discovered, guardian-philosophers tend rapidly to shed both the responsibilities of guardianship and the disinterested virtues of philosophy.

Moreover, by abolishing private property and centralizing ‘all instruments of production in the hands of the State’,²⁰ Marx granted communist governments a possibly unprecedented power over human life. Officials could decide what – indeed whether – people ate, where they lived, how they worked, even what they wore. Marx himself, in other words, devised the perfect preconditions for totalitarian dictatorship. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’²¹ transforms itself, with instant effect, into the dictatorship of the bureaucrat.

This problem is compounded by the Utopian myth at the heart of the Manifesto’s philosophy: that with the triumph of the proletariat, all conflict will come to an end, and everyone shall pursue, through ‘the free development of each’, ‘the free development of all’. But history does not come to an end; dialectical materialism has no ultimate synthesis. New struggles do, and must, emerge as needs change, interests diverge and new forms of oppression manifest themselves, and a system which takes no account of this is a system doomed to sclerotic corruption. Indeed, Stalin and Mao recognized this, through their perpetual discovery of the new enemies required to sustain the dynamic of power.

Marx helped the industrial working class to recognize and act upon its power. His analysis remains an indispensable means of understanding both history and economics. But his political programme, as formulated in the Manifesto, was a dead end. It stands at odds with everything we in the global justice movement claim to value: human freedom, accountability, diversity. Any attempt to systematize people by means of a simple, let alone binary, code will founder, with disastrous consequences both for those forced to conform to the Marxist ideal, and for those judged by the all-powerful state to offend it.

At first sight, anarchism appears more compatible with the ideals of a global justice movement. It is the political idea I find most attractive, and to which, almost instinctively – however much I have now come to reject it intellectually – I keep returning. For the first few years in which I had a system of political beliefs, I considered myself an anarchist. Anarchism’s purpose, of course, is to reclaim human freedom from the oppressive power of distant authority. Every atrocity committed by the state is a standing advertisement for self-government. Over the past one hundred years, as everyone knows, states have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of combatants and civilians in wars concocted principally for the purpose of expanding the wealth and power of the dominant elite. They have sought to destroy entire ethnic or religious groups: Jews, Roma, Tartars, Kurds, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, East Timorese, Maya, Mapuches and many more. They have engineered famines, destroyed ecosystems, killed political opponents and curtailed the most basic human freedoms.

Those who have succeeded in capturing the wealth and power of the state have enriched themselves enormously at public expense: both King Leopold of Belgium and his indigenous successor Mobutu Sese Seko used the Congo as his personal treasury, effectively enslaving an entire nation for the purpose of filling his own pockets. The men and women who have governed all the recent superpowers – Britain, the USSR and the United States – have sought to enhance their power and secure domestic support without redistributing wealth, by seizing control of other nations and looting their economies. When anarchists assert that the state is a mechanism for violently depriving humankind of its freedom, we are forced to agree that it has repeatedly been used for this purpose. Anarchism, as a result, presents the most consistent – and within the global justice movement the most popular – challenge to the world order this manifesto invokes, in which governance plays a major role.

But the history of the past century, or even, for that matter, the past decade, is hardly an advertisement for statelessness either. When the government of Sierra Leone lost control of its territory, the lives of its people were ripped apart by men who are commonly described as ‘rebels’, but who possessed no policy or purpose other than to loot people’s homes and monopolize the diamond trade. They evolved the elegant habit of hacking off the hands of the civilians they visited, not because this advanced any political or economic programme, but simply because no one was preventing them from doing so. Only when foreign states reasserted governance in Sierra Leone were the bandits defeated and relieved of their weapons.

When the state effectively collapsed in the former Soviet Union, losing its capacity to regulate and tax its citizens, the power vacuum was filled immediately, not by autonomous collectives of happy householders, but by the Mafia, which carved its empires out of other people’s lives. The assets of the former state were seized not by the mass of its citizens, but by a few dozen kleptocrats. Anyone who sought to resist them was shot.

For most of the past decade, the eastern Congo has been effectively stateless, and the people who in earlier eras endured the depredations of King Leopold and President Mobutu, have been repeatedly attacked by six marauding armies and scores of unaffiliated militias, squabbling over their resources. Two million people have died as a result of this ‘civil war’.

Anarchists would be quick to insist both that there is a difference between the stateless chaos of places like the eastern Congo and true anarchism (in which freely associating communities can seek mutual advantage through cooperation) and that many of the recent atrocities in stateless places were caused either by the collapse of the state or by the aggression of neighbouring states. We will turn to the first point in a moment, but it should surely be obvious that the second argument causes more problems for the anarchist position than it solves. Unless anarchism suddenly and simultaneously swept away all the world’s states and then, by equally mysterious means, prevented new states from emerging, it is hard to see how the people of anarchist communities could survive when thrust into conflict or competition with a neighbouring state, which – by definition – would possess the wherewithal to raise an army. It is just as difficult to see how they could defend themselves from the robber barons arising within their own territories, who would perceive this collapse not as an opportunity to embrace their fellow humans in the spirit of love and reconciliation, but as an opportunity to embrace their undefended resources.

It is impossible to read any history, ancient or modern, without acquiring the unhappy intelligence that Homo sapiens is a species with an extraordinary capacity for violence and destruction, and that this capacity has been exercised in most epochs in all regions of the world. Those who wish to exert power over other people or to seize their resources appear to use violence as either a first or a last resort, unless this tendency is checked by some other force, principally the fear of punishment by people with greater means of violence at their disposal. Any political system which seeks to enhance human welfare must provide the means of containing and preventing the aggression with which some people would greet others.

The state claims to do so by asserting a monopoly of violence. By attesting that only the servants of the state are permitted to use violence against other people, and then only according to the rules the state lays down, it pretends to offer protection to its citizens both from external aggression and from people with violent tendencies within its own borders. In theory a democratic state is prevented, by accountability to its people, from the arbitrary use of that violent power against its own citizens. The notional safeguards against its use of violence towards the people of other nations are less clear-cut: indeed, this is among the global democratic deficits which this manifesto seeks to address.

In mature democracies, arbitrary violence by the state against its own people is fairly limited: the police sometimes beat up protesters and members of ethnic minorities and extort confessions from suspects by violent means, while the security services occasionally assassinate troublesome citizens. The anarchists would argue, with justice, that the relatively low frequency and low intensity of state violence in democratic nations reflects the fact that most citizens, most of the time, obey the state, whether they agree with its prescriptions or not. If people were more inclined to behave as they wished – in other words, if they were more free – they would be subject to a corresponding increase in state violence.

Nor will democratic states always succeed in protecting their own people from the violence of others. There is no shortage of recent examples of popular governments being deposed by external aggression. There are also plenty of instances of state authorities turning a blind eye while a faction with which they sympathize assaults a faction towards which they are antagonistic. Recent attacks on Muslims in India have been passively witnessed, and occasionally abetted, by police and soldiers. In Britain, as I know to my cost, the police often refuse to intervene when protesters are beaten up by private security guards.

But this system (with the significant caveat that it does not, as yet, prevent the state from attacking the people of other nations) does, at least, function in theory. It could be argued that both the state’s own arbitrary violence and its toleration of the violence of certain favoured citizens are the results of the failure of its people to hold the authorities sufficiently to account. It is possible to see how, in a mature democratic state, effective campaigning by the victims of violence or their supporters could be turned into such a public embarrassment and electoral liability that the government is forced to desist. Indeed, on many occasions, precisely this has happened. There can, or so we should be inclined to hope, never be another Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, or another sinking of a Rainbow Warrior by the French security services. Such restraint as democratic states display arises only from fear of losing public support, and therefore losing power.

No state but the dominant superpower can guarantee to defend its citizens from external aggression,* but the state does appear to be rather more capable of doing so – when it is responsive to the will of its people – than unaffiliated autonomous communities. Indeed, one of the reasons why both the Roman Empire and, 2000 years later, the British Empire, expanded so swiftly is that many of the tribes they attacked were either aggregated only loosely into states, or were not aggregated at all. Had there been no state of Nicaragua, the proxy warriors financed by the US could have overrun that region immediately, seizing the land and its resources from its people. The Sandinista government was far weaker than the United States, but, through ingenious organization, it succeeded in resisting the greater power for several years, during which it mustered the support both of other nations and of many people within the US. The eventual settlement was almost certainly less oppressive than it would have been, had the proxy warriors not encountered a regular army and the resistance and public relations coordinated by the state.

It is not clear, by contrast, that anarchism works even in theory. The problem with the model is that, for the reasons outlined above, it has either to be applied universally, or applied only in those regions which are so poor in resources that no one else would want to live there. In other words, if states continue to exist, they will seize from relatively defenceless peoples the assets which would be to their advantage. Anarchist communities which possess valuable resources can sometimes survive for short periods in accessible places, or for longer periods in remote and impassable regions. Their establishment has often been associated with emancipation and, within the community, redistribution. But these communities are always likely to be vulnerable to attack by those federations of people – which we call states – big enough to command armies and rich enough to deploy advanced military technology.

But let us suppose, as many anarchists do, that this system can, somehow, displace all states, simultaneously, worldwide. What we then discover is that this very universalism destroys the freedoms the anarchists wish to defend. Anarchists, like most people who support particular political systems, see those systems as responding to people rather like themselves. Most anarchists associate with oppressed communities, and envisage anarchism as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, then this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest.

This is why, though both sides would furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors, but by eliminating the state (as some, but by no means all the market fundamentalists wish to do), both simply remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This, of course, is the point of market fundamentalism. But it is also the inevitable result of anarchism. If you have difficulty envisaging this, simply picture an autonomous community of impoverished black people living next to an autonomous community of well-armed white racists. For the majority of humankind to be free, we must restrain the freedom of those who would oppress us.

So the anarchists would have us make another extraordinary leap of faith. Having caused the state magically to evaporate everywhere, they also insist, without providing a convincing explanation of how this might happen in the absence of the state, that we can eliminate those disparities of wealth and power between communities which would permit one group of people to oppress another. But even that would prove inadequate. Even if every community had equal access to resources, there is nothing in the anarchist system to prevent one group from seeking to acquire more resources by invading another. Indeed, precisely this happens, almost continuously, among the nomadic tribes of that part of Africa where the borders of Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya meet. These are classic anarchist communities, with centuries of organizational experience, and far more sophisticated means of managing their resources and resolving disputes than the intentional communes of the West. They are forced into cooperation within the tribe by the erratic ecology of the lands they inhabit and their consequent inability to sustain the accumulation of wealth. They have been, by and large, abandoned by central government.

Their loyalty to other members of the tribe is unimpeachable, but whenever the livestock belonging to another tribe come within range and are insufficiently defended, those men with sufficient arms will attempt to steal them. These forays, especially since the arrival of modern weapons, can be exceedingly bloody. When I was working with the Turkana of north-western Kenya, my visit to a cattle camp was delayed by illness. By the time I arrived, all that remained of its people were their skulls and the remains of their clothes, scattered across the savannah after their bodies had been eaten by hyaenas. Warriors from another tribe had arrived in the night, surrounded the camp, and inoculated it with bullets. Ninety-six of its ninety-eight people were killed.²²

The anarchists may respond that the brotherhood of man has, in this case, been corrupted by modern weaponry. There is no question that automatic weapons have accelerated conflict, but long before they first experienced the electrifying sensation of holding the stock of a gun, the people of these anarchist communities murdered their enemies when they perceived that they were favoured by the balance of power. Indeed another anarchist tribe, the Maasai, armed only with spears and knives, seized almost all the grazing lands of what is now central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania within a century of emerging from the region the Turkana now inhabit. So the anarchists, as well as disposing of states, greed, wealth and power, would also need to disinvent all weapons which could be used to harm another person: not just bombs and automatic rifles, but also, as the massacres in Rwanda show, any bit of metal, stone or wood which can be sharpened on one side or knocked into a point. Theirs may be the perfect political system for another planet, inhabited by life-forms whose responses to scarcity and competition are the very opposite of ours. Regrettably, it is not a system destined to enhance the lives of those who live here.

The absence of government, then, is unworkable and ultimately intolerable. Communist government appears to depend on the extermination of entire categories of human being, while vesting power in the hands of unaccountable dictators. The dictatorship of vested interests, which is what passes for governance at the global level today, is oppressive and unjust. Unless some other system, which all political philosophers have so far overlooked, emerges, we are forced to conclude that all we have left is democracy.

Democracy is unattainable unless it is brokered by institutions, mandated by the people and made accountable to them, whose primary purpose is to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to prevent people of all stations from resolving their differences by means of violence. The collective noun for such institutions is government. So democratic government, of one kind or another, appears to be the least-worst system we can envisage. It is the unhappy lot of humankind that an attempt to develop a least-worst system emerges as the highest ideal for which we can strive. But if democracy is the only system which could deliver the Age of Consent we seek, we immediately meet a paradox. The reason why democratic governance is more likely to deliver justice than anarchism is that it possesses the capacity for coercion: the rich and powerful can be restrained, by the coercive measures of the state, from oppressing the rest of us.

This is not the only sense in which democracy compromises consent. In long-established democracies, no living person has volunteered her consent to the system under which she lives, for it pre-dates her. In some of the newer democracies, the majority of those of voting age alive today may well have supported the political system’s formation, but those who are coming of age, and will also be forced to submit to the system, have not been consulted. Succeeding generations are likely to inherit the structures approved by their parents, whether or not they wish to be bound by them themselves. Of course, we can vote for reform and seek to persuade our representatives to change the constitution, but even in the most responsive of democratic systems, citizens are unlikely to be permitted to vote to dissolve the state, not least because so many powerful people have an interest in sustaining it. As Marx noted, ‘Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own making.’²³

A further problem is that, even if we do change the system, and a large majority approves of that change, there will always be people who do not. Yet they, just as much as everyone else, must surrender their consent and submit to the will of the majority. This is a distressing property of the democratic order: that it does not permit those who wish to remove themselves from the system to do so. But it appears to be a necessary one, if we are to prevent the powerful from escaping the legal restraints which defend us, however inadequately, from exploitation. This does not mean that we cannot break the rules with which we disagree. Indeed from time to time, many of us in the global justice movement violate the laws against criminal damage, obstruction or breach of the peace for political purposes, and believe we are morally justified in doing so. But the sustenance of the democratic state requires that we should expect it to seek to prevent us from doing so. We can, of course, use civil disobedience to try to change the law when, as it so often does, it discriminates in favour of the powerful. But without a body of law and the assumption of equality before it, the weak are without institutional defence.

In another sense, however, democracy is more consensual than any other political system, in that it is the only one which, in principle at least, consistently provides us with opportunities for dissent. It permits us to express our disapproval of policies and ideologies which offend us, to vote against them, and to overthrow them without bloodshed. No other system offers this. Orthodox Marxist regimes are viciously intolerant of dissenters. Anarchist systems appear to offer great scope for dissent within a community, as well as the opportunity to leave that community and join another one, but because they do not protect us from persecution, the only means of dissenting from the violence of others is through greater violence of our own. If we happen to possess the less effective weapons or belong to the smaller community, that dissent will be pointless. The dictatorship of vested interests offers opportunities for dissent only to those who represent the vested interests.

This is not to say that democracy is without substantial and systemic dangers. The most obvious of these is the tyranny of the majority. There have been plenty of states run by democratically elected governments which have, with majority consent, persecuted their minorities. The theoretical defences against this danger – such as weighted voting and special consultation rights – are flimsy and introduce problems of their own, such as complexity (rendering the political system less comprehensible and therefore less accountable) and definition (the laws designed to defend oppressed peoples can be exploited by oppressive minorities). But in this respect democracy appears to work rather better in practice than it does in theory. In most democratic countries, despite the recent advance of the far right, public acceptance of ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, children born out of wedlock and other oppressed groups appears to have increased with time. The same could not be said, for example, of the Muslim theocracies. Democracies whose people have access to communications technology appear to be self-improving in this respect, because they provide the political space in which minorities can explain themselves to the majority.

Another obvious danger is the crude and clumsy nature of the decision-making process. In representative systems, elections tend to be won or lost on just one or two issues, yet almost every party standing for election has dozens of policies. By choosing one potential government over another, we are forced to select an entire package, parts of which may be disagreeable to us. Representative systems permit a small degree of modification. If a political position turns out to be so offensive to the general will that it can threaten the survival of the government, it is likely to be dropped. But this is an insufficient safeguard, as most policies, though they may be particularly hurtful to a few people, or mildly hurtful to most people, are unlikely to generate sufficient opposition to threaten the entire government, especially if they are so complex that few will bother to discover what all their implications may be. This can be ameliorated a little by introducing an element of participatory democracy into a representative system, though this, as Chapter 4 shows, has its own limitations.

The third major problem with democracy is that a system capable of restraining the oppressor will also be capable of restraining the oppressed. If we are to prevent the rich and powerful from wrecking our lives, we require a government big enough to sit on them; but a government big enough to sit on them will also be big enough to sit on us. Conversely, if the system is sufficiently responsive to the will of the oppressed, it may also be responsive to the will of the oppressor. This, of course, is the great conflict at the heart of all democratic systems, and the one with which many of those in the movement have been rightly concerned. While states, over the past few years, have become ever more willing to regulate their citizens, they have become ever less willing to regulate the corporations. This is one of the problems this book seeks to address.

But while democracy has evident defects, it also possesses two great attributes. The first is that it is the only political system which contains the potential for its own improvement. We can overthrow our representatives without having to kill them. To a lesser extent, we can affect their behaviour while they remain in office. Democracy can be understood as a self-refining experiment in collective action.

The second is that democracy has the potential to be politically engaging. The more politically active citizens become, the more they are able to affect the way the state is run. The more success they encounter in changing the state, the more likely they are to remain politically active. Unhappily, this process appears to have gone into reverse in many democratic countries. As the competing parties offer ever less political choice (partly as a result of the constraints introduced by the migration of power to the global sphere), citizens are alienated from government, which leads, in turn, to a further withdrawal of the government from the people. A system which should be politically centripetal has instead become centrifugal.

The argument for democracy at the national level then seems to be – if not exactly robust – more compelling than the argument for any other system, or, for that matter, the absence of a system. But if we can – as most people do – agree that democracy is the best way to run a nation, it is hard to think of any reason why it should not be the best way to run the world. Indeed, it is surely demonstrable that many of the most pressing global and international problems arise from an absence of global and international democracy. The way in which states engage with each other is much closer to the anarchist model than the democratic one. The US government, like that of other superpowers before it, has seized the domestic mandate provided by its people (the ‘autonomous community’) to assert an international authority to rule the world. It expands its dominion – just like any powerful and well-armed community in the anarchist model – by means of violence and expropriation, in those parts of the world which do not form an alliance with it against lesser powers, succumb meekly to its demands, or successfully resist it with violence of their own. The democratic restraints within a state, in other words, do not prevent it from attacking weaker ones.

There are also, as this manifesto has argued, certain issues which affect humanity as a whole, and yet whose resolution is brokered by nation states. This introduces a number of problems. The first is that it permits powerful governments dominated by special interests to impose their will on the rest of the world. In some cases those governments are led by their domestic concerns to perceive a circumstance which is generally disastrous for humanity to be to their advantage. An administration which owes its election to the funds provided by oil companies, for example, will encourage the increasing use of fossil fuel.

The second problem with this brokerage of global issues by nation states is that even if all governments had an equal voice, our ability to affect their decisions is muted. Except in wartime, global and international issues seldom feature among the priorities of a domestic electorate. As national governments, we elect them, quite rightly, to tackle national issues. Without a separate process for determining what our response to a global issue may be, even a government with the best intentions has no effective means of assessing and representing the national will. This problem is commonly described as ‘photocopy democracy’. A democratic decision is taken, to elect a particular government. That government then mandates an agency, such as a government department, to set certain policies. That agency then delegates people to represent those policies at the international level. With each ‘copy’, democracy becomes greyer and harder to decipher. This can be partly addressed through referenda, but the government still acts as a filter between us and the mediation of global policy. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that other governments would have polled their citizens. Governments which have consulted their people can be outvoted by governments which have not.

A third problem is that brokerage by nation states diminishes the sense that we are all in this together. It encourages us to treat a problem affecting everyone on earth as a matter of national self-interest, and reduces our appreciation of our common humanity. Just as importantly, the lack of democracy at the global level leads to a lack of choice at the national level. National governments can seek to act as if they were free to respond to the will of their people, but they will be relentlessly dragged back to the set of policies imposed (by means I will explain in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) by those who possess global and international power. Without a global transformation, national transformations are impossible.

CHAPTER 3 A Global Democratic Revolution The Case Against Hopeless Realism

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.

CHAPTER 4 We the Peoples Building a World Parliament

Our global revolution requires no tumbrils, no guillotines, no unmarked graves; no revanchist running dogs need be put against the wall. We have within our hands already the means to a peaceful, democratic transformation. These means arise inexorably from an analysis of how the world is run, and why the existing world order fails. Each of the following three chapters examines one aspect of global governance, shows why the current system is not working, considers the possible alternatives, chooses those which seem to work best and then explains how we – the dissidents of the rich world and the citizens of the poor world – can, using only those resources available to us, replace the system which works for the powerful with one which works for the weak. The first of these tasks is perhaps the most pressing: altering the mediation of war and peace and the relations between nation states, and seeking to replace a world order built on coercion with one which emerges from below, built upon democracy.

The United Nations was conceived in 1941 by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, as an alliance against the Axis powers. As the Second World War progressed, its scope and membership expanded, until, in June 1945, fifty nations signed a declaration of principles – the United Nations Charter – whose purpose was to promote peace, human rights and international law, to encourage social progress, higher living standards and to prevent another World War.³³ The UN, in other words, was founded with the best of intentions. But these, like the motives surrounding every aspect of the postwar settlement, were mixed with some rather less elevated concerns. No one gives power away, and those nations which constructed the UN were careful to ensure that it reinforced rather than diminished their global pre-eminence.

This concern is reflected in the constitution of the supreme international body, which is charged with the prevention of war, the United Nations Security Council. If one nation is threatening or attacking another, the council may use whatever measures are necessary to force it to desist: it can order a ceasefire, for example; levy economic sanctions; send in peacekeepers; or, at the last resort, authorize the armed forces of the UN’s member states to take military action against the aggressor. At the international level it asserts (though with little success) what the state asserts at the national level: a monopoly of violence.

The Security Council mimics the notional constraints of the democratic state. By this means it claims to sustain a world order founded on right rather than might. The problem with the postwar settlement is that those with the might decide what is right.

There are fifteen members of the council, of which ten have temporary seats (held for two years and then passed to another state) and five have permanent seats. Each of the five permanent members has the power of veto: no decision can be taken by the Security Council unless all five have approved it. Unsurprisingly, the five permanent members are the three powers which founded the United Nations – the United States, United Kingdom and Russia – and their principal wartime allies, China and France.* They granted themselves the ability to determine, for as long as the UN continues to exist, who is the aggressor and who the aggressed.

The power of veto was introduced partly in order to prevent those states in possession of nuclear weapons from attacking each other: had the other member states, for example, collectively decided that the Soviet Union was threatening one of its neighbours, and then sought to restrain it through military action, the USSR may have responded by offering to meet that force with greater force, provoking another world war. Indeed, during the Cold War the Soviet Union used its veto repeatedly, precisely in order to prevent the other states from restricting its attempts to expand its imperial domain. But, while the veto may have functioned as a safety valve, preserving a global peace at the expense of the weaker states being threatened or attacked by one of the permanent members, it has also proved to be an instant recipe for the abuse of power and the impediment of justice.

The problem with the way the Security Council has been established is that those who possess power cannot be held to account by those who do not. The key democratic question – who guards the guards? – has been left unanswered. The Security Council is, by definition, tyrannical. Those who defend the way the world is run point out that veto powers have rarely been used since the end of the Cold War* and that the veto can, in theory, be deployed (as France and Russia tried to deploy it in 2003) to protect states from unauthorized attacks by other members; but the truth is that the threat of the veto informs every decision the Security Council does or does not make. Other member states know perfectly well, for example, that there is no point in preparing a resolution which the United States will reject. The US, and to a lesser extent the other permanent members, assert their will without even having to ask.

As other nations cannot hold them to account, the permanent members (or, more precisely, the two permanent members which have, since the UN’s formation, wielded real power) can blithely defy every principle the United Nations was established to defend. Since 1945, the United States has launched over 200 armed operations,³⁵ most of which were intended not to promote world peace but to further its own political or economic interests. The Soviet Union repeatedly used its veto to prevent other member states from interfering with its sponsorship of violent insurrection, and occasional direct invasion. The five permanent members also happen to be the world’s five biggest arms dealers, indirectly responsible for exacer-bating many of the conflicts the Security Council is supposed to prevent. The five nations which possess the exclusive power to decide how threats should be handled are the five nations which present the gravest threat to the rest of the world.

The problem is compounded – and this is not commonly understood – by the fact that the powers of the Security Council are not confined to the administration of peace. The UN Charter also grants the five permanent members vetoes over constitutional reform of the United Nations.* Even if every other member of the General Assembly votes to change the way the institution works, their decision can be overruled by a single permanent member. Any one of the five can also block the appointment of the UN Secretary-General,† the election of judges to the International Court of Justice, and the admission of a new member to the United Nations.³⁶

Those who benefit from this system argue that it simply reflects the realities of power: if the five permanent members were not using their vetoes to force other states to do as they bid, they would find some other means. This is undoubtedly true; but the problem with the way the council is established is that, rather than moderating the realities of power, it compounds them. It offers an immediate and painless means for a permanent member to prevent the rest of the world from pursuing peace or justice, whenever it suits its interests to do so. These special powers have rendered the UN General Assembly, in which every member state has an equal vote, all but irrelevant. The 186 member states which do not occupy permanent seats on the Security Council can huff and puff about how the world should be run, in the certain knowledge that real power lies elsewhere.

But even if the Security Council were to be disbanded tomorrow, and the supreme powers it possessed vested instead in the Assembly, the United Nations would still be far from democratic. Many of the member states are not themselves democracies, and have a weak claim to represent the interests of their people. Even those governments which have come to power by means of election seldom canvass the opinion of their citizens before deciding how to cast their vote in international assemblies. There is, partly as a result, little sense of public ownership of the General Assembly or the decisions it makes. At public meetings, I have often asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they know the name of their country’s ambassador to the United Nations. Seldom, even at gatherings of the most politically active people, do more than two or three per cent claim to know; on one occasion an audience of 600 mostly well-read, middle-class people (it was a literary festival) failed to produce a single respondent. In turn, many of the ambassadors, who are appointed, not elected, appear to be rather more conscious of the concerns of their nations’ security services than those of the citizens whose part they are supposed to take.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.