The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
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