The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
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.*
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