The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
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