The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
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