New Socialisms
The major problems facing the world as it gets used to the twenty-first century are global inequality, poverty, war and militarism, oppression, exploitation, and ecological sustainability. Far from solving these problems, economic and political neo-liberalism seems to be plunging us deeper into them. Diverse opposition movements have arisen over the years to combat these problems, which the groups generally consider to be the result of “globalization.” These opposition movements suffer greatly from being opposed to lots of things without necessarily putting forward realistic alternative suggestions. This impressive new book seeks to analyze and develop serious alternatives to the status quo. With contributions from a wide range of scholars, this important book will provide a uniquely varied outlook. Students and academics involved in international politics and economics as well as general readers with an interest in the anti-globalization movement will find this work incredibly useful. Robert Albritton is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. Shannon Bell is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. John R. Bell is Professor in the General Arts and Sciences Program at Seneca College, Toronto, Canada. Richard Westra is Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies at Pukyong National University, Pusan, Republic of Korea.
Innis centenary series: governance and change in the global era Series Editor: Daniel Drache Harold Innis, one of Canada’s most distinguished economists, described the Canadian experience as no one else ever has. His visionary works in economic geography, political economy, and communications theory have endured for over fifty years and have had tremendous influence on scholarship, the media, and the business community. The volumes in the Innis Centenary Series illustrate and expand Innis’s legacy. Each volume is written and edited by distinguished members of the fields Innis touched. Each addresses provocative and challenging issues that have profound implications not only for Canada but for the “new world order,” including the impact of globalization on governance, international developments, and the environment; the nature of the “market” of the future; the effect of new communications technology on economic restructuring; and the role of the individual in effecting positive social change. The complete series will provide a unique guide to many of the major challenges we face as we enter the twenty-first century. The Innis Centenary Series is supported by the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and York University. Proposals for future volumes in the series are actively encouraged and most welcome. Please address all enquiries to the editor, by email
[email protected] or by fax 1.416.736.5739. Other titles in the series include: States Against Markets Edited by Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache Political Ecology Edited by David Bell, Lessa Fawcett, Roger Keil and Peter Penz Health Reform Edited by Daniel Drache and Terry Sullivan Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City Edited by Engin F. Isin The Market or the Public Domain? Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power Edited by Daniel Drache
New Socialisms Futures beyond globalization
Edited by Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell, and Richard Westra
First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Robert Albritton et al. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-39089-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-66966-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32820–9 (Print Edition)
In memory of Teresa Brennan
Contents
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements
Introduction: towards democracy through socialisms
x xii
1
RO B E RT A L B R I T T O N A N D R I C H A R D W E S T R A
PART I
Governance and law
15
1
17
Socialism and individual freedom RO B E RT A L B R I T T O N
2
Globalization’s challenge to feminist political economy and the law: a socialist perspective
33
MARJORIE GRIFFIN COHEN
PART II
Reembedding
51
3
53
Earth democracy VA N DA N A S H I VA
4
The imperative of the social bond: after the triumph of markets DA N I E L D R A C H E
71
viii 5
Contents Adam Smith’s green vision and the future of global socialism
90
COLIN A.M. DUNCAN
6 Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism
105
JOHN R. BELL
PART III
Pleasure 7 Hedonist revisionism
123 125
K AT E S O P E R
8 Post-porn\post-anti-porn: queer socialist pornography
139
SHANNON BELL
PART IV
Development visions 9 The failure of African socialisms and their future
157 159
J O H N S . S AU L
10 The “impasse” debate and socialist development
182
RICHARD WESTRA
PART V
Political agency
199
11 Global alternatives and the meta-industrial class
201
ARIEL SALLEH
12 Postscript on the surplus population WILLIAM CORLETT
212
Contents ix PART VI
Possible worlds
229
13 Socialism beyond market and productivism
231
T H O M A S T. S E K I N E
14 From socialists to localists
245
TERESA BRENNAN
Index
260
Contributors
Robert Albritton is Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. His recent publications include: A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development; Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy; (co-editor) Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, and Globalizations; and (co-editor with J. Simoulidis) New Dialectics and Political Economy. John R. Bell is Professor in the General Arts and Sciences Program at Seneca College in Toronto. He is author of “Dialectics and Economic Theory,” in R. Albritton and T. Sekine (eds.), A Japanese Approach to Political Economy; and (with T. Sekine) “The Disintegration of Capitalism: A Phase of Ex-Capitalist Transition,” in R. Albritton, M. Itoh, R.Westra, and A. Zuege (eds.) Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, and Globalizations. Shannon Bell is Associate Professor of Political Science, York University. Recent publications include: Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body; Whore Carnival; (co-authored) Bad Attitude/s on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler Decision; Fast Feminism (2004). Teresa Brennan, prior to her tragic death on February 3, 2003, was Schmidt Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Florida Atlantic University. Some of her recent publications include: History After Lacan; Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy; Globalization and Its Terrors. Marjorie Griffin Cohen is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Recent publications include: (editor) Atlantis (Special Issue: Sexual Economics) 23(2); (co-editor) Canadian Women’s Issues, vols. I and II. William Corlett is Professor of Political Science at Bates College. Recent publications include Community Without Unity: A Politics of Derridian Extravagance; Class Action: Reading Labor,Theory and Value. Daniel Drache is Associate Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and Professor of Political Economy at York University. He has written and published extensively on globalization, social inclusion and trade blocs in
Contributors xi a comparative setting. His most recent book is entitled The Market or the Public Domain: Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power. Colin A.M. Duncan is Assistant Professor at the McGill School of the Environment. Recent publications include The Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature. Ariel Salleh is Associate Professor in Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney. Recent publications include: Ecofeminism and Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern; “In Defence of Deep Ecology,” in E. Katz, A. Light, and D. Rothenberg (eds.) Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology;“On Production and Reproduction, Identity and Non-identity,” in Organization and Environment 12; and “Social Ecology and the Man Question,” Environmental Politics 5. John S. Saul is Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto. Recent publications include Socialist Ideology and the Struggle for Southern Africa; Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s; and Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy. Thomas T. Sekine was a Professor of Economics and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto, from 1968 to 1994. He is currently teaching at the School of Commerce, Aichi-Gakuin University, Japan. His recent publications include: A Japanese Approach to Political Economy: Unoist Variations (co-edited with R. Albritton), and An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, 2 vols. Vandana Shiva founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in 1982. In 1993 she received the Right Livelihood Award (often called the “Alternative Nobel Prize”). Recent publications include The Violence of the Green Revolution, Stolen Harvest and Monocultures of the Mind. Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities, Arts and Languages at London Metropolitan University. She has been on the Editorial Committee of New Left Review, and has a longstanding association with Radical Philosophy. During the 1980s she was a Chairperson of European Nuclear Disarmament. Her more recent work includes: (with Martin Ryle) What is Nature?; To Relish the Sublime?; and Culture and SelfRealisation in Postmodern Times. Richard Westra is Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies at Pukyong National University, Pusan, Republic of Korea. His recent publications include articles in Capital & Class and Review of International Political Economy as well as the co-edited volume Value and the World Economy Today.
Acknowledgements
The editors of this volume want first of all to thank Daniel Drache for wanting to include this volume in his series on governance. Many of the contributors to this book first presented their papers at a workshop at York University in March 2002. At this workshop each presenter benefited from the feedback of two graduate student discussants. Many of the discussant presentations were so outstanding that we would have liked to include them in the book, and would have but for the constraints of the publishing business, which can only in rare instances afford to produce long books. We would, however, like to thank the discussants whose participation helped to shape this book: Jessica Cameron, Leandro Vergara-Camus, Susan Spronk, Hanadi Loubani, Pamela Leach, George Niksic, Matthew Hays, Stephanie Ross, Derek Hyrnshyn, Julie Dowsett, Gavin Fridell, Martyn Konigs, Andrew Biro, Michael Marder, Alex Latta, Sean Saraka, Chris Vance, Ellen Travis, Stefanos Kourkoulakos, Lara Karaian, Colleen Bell, Dan Irving, Rosalee Gallant, Kim Nakjung, and Sonya Scott. We would also like to thank those graduate students who helped to organize and run the workshop: Seiko Hanouchi, Lori-Ann Campbell, John Simoulidis, Joshua Dumont, Andrea Harrington, and Sabine Hikel. We would also like to thank Joshua Dumont and Marnie Lucas-Zerbe for helping out with the editing. We want to thank John Simoulidis for his wonderful index. Finally we would like to thank York’s Political Science Department, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, the Social and Political Thought Program, the School of Women’s Studies, and the Department of Sociology for helping to fund the workshop. Finally, in response to Teresa Brennan’s tragic death, we are donating all royalties from this book to “The Teresa Brennan Foundation.”
Introduction Towards democracy through socialisms Robert Albritton and Richard Westra
Reclaiming the idea of socialism The intellectual impetus for this volume has been the longstanding interest of the editors in grappling in new and creative ways with what has certainly been one of the most influential, controversial, and maligned ideas in the modern world – the idea of socialism. Inspired by “freedom, equality and fraternity,” the modern socialist tradition has been the main source of theories and practices that have spurred workers of all stripes to fight for a more just world. Yet, today, faced with the “fall of the Wall” and the unceremonious collapse of the Soviet Union, it is more commonplace to hear workers and progressive-minded people speak in terms of the “TINA factor,” that there is no alternative to current neo-liberalism and corporate globalization, with the version of social justice these offer; and that all future-directed thinking about human society and social change must necessarily unfold within the narrow bounds of what “the market” purportedly renders possible or “rational.” However, it is paramount that the TINA factor be vigorously resisted. On the one hand, it has to be acknowledged that if the former Soviet Union and its satellites were imbued with much socialist substance, then the unraveling of the social orders there and subsequent turn towards capitalism would have involved a far more drawn-out process than what literally amounted to a mere few months’ upheaval. What such societies actually represented were efforts to establish a very one-sided kind of socialism in underdeveloped countries, with weak traditions of the rule of law and democracy, under circumstances in which survival dictated the development of a large military establishment and an all-out effort to develop the heavy industry needed to support such an enterprise. In other words, the failures of the “soviet-style” experiments with social change should not be viewed as confirming the exhaustion of all possibilities for building a genuine socialist future. On the other hand, polemicists for “free” markets over soviet-style centralized planning, such as Hayek and Friedman, present extremely one-sided and simplistic characterizations of the options confronting us. They offer up false choices between the extremes of top-down centralized state planning and bottom-up free markets, state property and private property, and totalitarianism
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and freedom.Their arguments are spurious for many reasons, but with regard to their market versus planning dualism what may be emphasized here is their failure to bring out the problems associated with unfettered markets (monopoly, inelasticities, externalities, instability, market coercion, inequality of opportunity and outcomes, unemployment, environmental degradation, etc.), their failure to see that extensive planning is indispensable to today’s capitalism, and their failure to consider the diverse types and degrees of market and of planning. Similarly, if by “property” we mean rights of control over things and space, then there is no reason why there should only be essentially two types of property. Rights of control can be partial, can be shared, and can be vested in persons in numerous ways, from the single individual to global society. Indeed, rights of control can easily be multi-scalar, with control being shared from the local level to the global. And there is no reason in principle why a socialist society could not promote individual freedom much more effectively than is presently done in capitalist societies. The fact is that modern socialism is a tradition of thought and action that goes back at least to the Diggers, who fought against the enclosures of the commons in seventeenth-century England. If, as market enthusiasts such as Friedman argue, capitalism is fundamentally about profit maximization, then it follows that capital will be concerned with human beings only to the extent that their actions contribute to that goal. Thus, the caring professions that have grown up beside capital and that to some extent counteract the dehumanization generated by the hegemony of profit have almost never been initiated by capital without outside pressures. For example, some of the earliest welfare-state legislation was adopted by Bismarck in the Prussia of the late nineteenth century. He did not adopt this legislation because of a deep sympathy for the plight of working people. Instead, it was intense fear of a socialist revolution, or at least of the growing influence of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), that motivated him. It was only by co-opting part of the program of the SPD that Bismarck could forestall the coming to power of this socialist party. It is no exaggeration in our opinion to argue that nearly all of the humanizing and caring dimensions of capitalist society stem from popular resistance, popular uprisings or the threat of popular uprising, and not from any tendencies inherent in capital’s profit-oriented program for human society. We believe that it is also accurate to claim that, from the seventeenth century to the present day, at the core of this pressure from below have been socialist ideas and ideals whether or not by that name.
Rethinking socialism after the collapse of the Soviet Union In the current academic literature much of the capitalism versus socialism debate has been co-opted by economists, who have framed the debate in terms of markets versus planning. While this debate has a certain importance, it has been troubled by its being cast in terms of an overly simplified and
Introduction 3 reified dualism. In this volume we wish to break from this debate both because it tends to reduce socialism to being some sort of simple function of planning and because it turns our attention away from considering the broad range of issues associated with the root meaning of socialism as the promotion of humanity’s sociality. An initial reason, then, for the “newness” and emphasis upon the plurality of possible future socialisms in the title of this book is precisely this shift away from such overly economistic orientations. Another important reason for rethinking socialism after the collapse of the Soviet Union relates to the transformed conditions of the world economy. For example, while there exist pockets of burgeoning economic activity today, predicated upon the oft-cited new materials and new information and biotechnologies, the expansion of stock and money market activity, and the interlinking in the global economy of new regions such as China, none of this translates into a better quality of life for most human beings. Stock and money market activity has fuelled vast and widening disparities of income in even the most developed Western societies. Yes, advancements in information technology offer the prospect of viewing callers on cell-phone screens and the development of self-navigating automobiles, but that seems little solace to people living in a world with impoverished healthcare and education systems, polluted waterways and barely breathable air. Bio-technologies engineered in expensive private research programs hold out the possibility of extended human life-spans; however, leaving aside the question of their exorbitant costs, sure to be beyond the reach of average working people, how much will that life be worth living in the deteriorating social and psychological environment? In short, neo-liberalism and globalization are failing us in so many ways: instead of internationalism and peace, we see imperialism and war; instead of sustainability, we see environmental destruction; instead of distributive justice, we see obscene inequality; instead of a system more responsive to human need, we see one that neglects all needs but those of profits and the market. To be sure, the gathering anti-globalization movement constitutes a response to the foregoing. Yet, while we consider this movement to be in its early stages of development, as it develops further it will need to move from being an “anti-” movement to a “pro-” movement. And for this to happen in ways that are inclusive it is important for all sincere points of view about alternatives to be heard. It is in this spirit of inclusiveness that this book was conceived. Yet another reason for rethinking socialism, as touched upon above, is the necessity of freeing up our thinking from the “cold war” encrustations that have tended to equate socialism with Stalinism. Inextricably tied to this is the pressing issue of simply opening up debate on radical alternatives to the present system at a time when neo-liberal ideological hegemony is so complete, and the discussion of such alternatives requires that we resist the chilly winds of the so-called “war on terrorism” that perforce serves to silence such discussion. The ideological, political and military hegemony of the United States has made it a world dominant power in ways that are unprecedented. Since its economic model of corporate globalization is not seriously
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challenged, it has fought relentlessly to strike down the social democratic compromises with socialism that were forced upon Western societies after World War II, and, as a result, the world is becoming more ruthlessly oriented to short-term profit maximization as its problems can less and less be blamed on “communism.” It is in this sense that the recently formulated war on terrorism, which targets an ever-expanding enemy, raises serious concerns about a new American national chauvinism and militarism. Therefore our rethinking of socialism must make it crisply clear that the choice we face is not between a “free” world ruled by neo-liberal ideology and corporate behemoths with a “way of life” that requires an increasing military outlay to protect us from internal and external threats, and a similarly militarized Stalinist dictatorship where we are slated to become automatons in gigantic state factories. In sum, this volume begins to unpack the problems of building a non-capitalist future that is economically viable, redistributive, eco-sensitive, democratic – and the list, as we shall see, can be extended in ever more creative ways.
Socialisms In considering alternatives, it is problematic that “socialism” has been considered to be one thing. On the contrary, we should admit that we are not yet very clear about the specific directions that radical change should take. As authors, we think of ourselves as being near the beginning of a discussion rather than near the end. (Is there any end to making the world more just or more democratic?) Hence, this book does not advocate one view of what socialism ought to be; rather, it considers a variety of economic, social and political issues that need to be sorted out as we move into the future. At this point in time we believe that we need to speak of multiple socialisms – not of any one totalizing blueprint, but of many dimensions of social life. We begin to address some of these dimensions in this book, including, for example, questions of socio-economic scale, governance, internationalism, sexuality, gender, the environment, pleasure, agency, neo-colonialism, class, development and freedom. If this book seems highly diversified, that is intentional.We want to indicate a range of views rather than a unified focus.We also want to represent some perspectives that are more theoretical alongside those that are more historical or immediately practical, and not simply one or the other. At this point in time it is our contention that many voices need to be heard and many paths forward considered and debated. Despite the diversity, all voices in this volume would agree that a future desirable form of socialism would have to be more free, equal, democratic and ecologically sustainable than our current neo-liberal capitalism. There is no general agreement or discussion of exactly what mix of planning and markets would most advance these ideals, but there is agreement that unbridled markets are definitely not the direction to take. All contributors would want an end to class exploitation and to oppression based on any kind of superior/inferior
Introduction 5 relation. And all contributors would want to shift the focus of our economy away from profits and towards the meeting of human needs, starting with such basic needs as food, shelter, health and education. And all contributors believe that these needs must be met in ecologically sound ways. Finally, we all believe that strong grassroots democracy is essential to new socialisms. The contributions to this collection have been grouped under six basic themes: “Governance and law,” “Reembedding,” “Pleasure,” “Development visions,”“Political agency,” and “Possible worlds.” Governance and law If “law” usually refers to formal rules made by state or international agencies with law-making or law-altering authority, “governance” usually refers more broadly to forms of institutionalized agency that constitute policy (including law and less formal norms), often including in policy considerations the relation to those governed by the policy. In other words, governance often refers both to policies and to how subjectivities are both shaped by and respond to those policies. This tends to open up political science to a much broader and fuller conception of power, in contrast to approaches emphasizing formal lawmaking institutions. From a governance perspective, politics is no longer limited primarily to the sovereign state; instead, politics is viewed as something that criss-crosses civil society from the local level to the global. One effect associated with the use of the term “governance” has been to open up thinking about the political to include civil society organizations of all types, organizations that might be considered private rather than political in some more restrictive approaches to thinking about politics.The term “governance” may not only facilitate the appreciation of new forms of power from below, but also facilitate the investigation of de facto policy-making by such bodies as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a large number of other acronymic organizations. The book opens with a chapter by Robert Albritton entitled, “Socialism and individual freedom,” which considers the sort of governance entailed in a purely capitalist society. He argues that if we imagine such a society, the only kind of subjectivity that capital must recognize is legal subjectivity arising from property rights. In other words, the commodity form that is basic to capitalism only entails legal subjects who can own and exchange commodities. Pure capital, interested solely in producing commodities and profiting from them, has no intrinsic interest in moral or political subjectivity. The fundamental claim, then, is that while legal subjectivity has a certain importance it is only the outer shell of subjectivity, and consequently the much vaunted freedom of the market is in fact very limited and superficial. Nearly all the freedom that exists in capitalist societies has been won against either the indifference of capital or its active opposition. It follows that to the extent that a society is governed by capitalist self-regulating markets, society will manifest only a few basic rights, and in practice even
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some of those basic rights are often violated. Contrary to capitalism, socialist forms of governance have the potential to support major advances in human rights and individual freedom. Marjorie Griffin Cohen’s chapter, “Globalization’s challenge to feminist political economy and the law: a socialist perspective” (Chapter 2), proposes a new strategic orientation for socialist feminists in the light of current changes in international governance that are shaping globalization in the interests of big capital. She argues that, despite a certain dismissiveness of legal reform in the past, socialist feminists have in practice actually advanced legal reform in a number of important areas. It is important that they more fully embrace the gains to be made from legal reform not only at the state level but now in particular at an international level. New rules are rapidly evolving that will establish a new trading regime with the power largely to determine how governments must act with regard to many fundamental economic issues. In this sense the WTO and other such international organizations are effectively evolving something like a world government. Since this trading regime (system of world governance) is in its early stages of evolution, it is still possible for feminists to have an impact on its direction. Will this new trading regime serve narrow commercial interests or will it serve social needs by redistributing income on a global scale? The answer to this question will evolve in the coming years and it will be determined by our ability to resist capital’s logic, which always tends to promote short-term profit interests. Addressing socialist feminists, Cohen calls for two broad strategic directions. First, feminists should advocate the recognition of pluralism in economic systems in opposition to the homogenizing tendencies of market solutions. This is a long-term strategy given the current hegemony of neo-liberal policies. Second, feminists need to expand their focus towards creating international institutions that can regulate international corporations, making them more democratically accountable. This becomes particularly pressing given the destabilizing effects of sudden changes in international financial markets in an age of casino capitalism. Reembedding The theme “reembedding” comes from Polanyi’s famous book The Great Transformation. According to Polanyi, with capitalism the economy becomes disembedded from social life and social life is subsumed by the economy in destructive ways. For him, socialism involves a reversal in which the economy is subsumed by social life, and if this is carried out in a way that advances democracy and freedom the result will be democratic socialism. For Polanyi, reembedding would include the subsumption of economic imperatives by ecological concerns, and it is this meaning that is the theme for Part II of the book. In this part Vandana Shiva leads off with a passionate attack on a variety of tendencies associated with globalization that undermine what little security still remains for the majority of people in the world who are poor. Daniel
Introduction 7 Drache follows with strong arguments for strengthening the social bond against the eroding influences of markets. Colin A. M. Duncan rereads Adam Smith to discover the elements of an ecologically sustainable mode of development that could have created a capitalism much more amenable to the development of eco-socialism. The world has not followed Smith’s ecologically benign path of development, with the result that huge ecological damage has already been done and eco-socialism will require a much more radical altering of existing economic structures. John R. Bell closes Part II with a strongly documented essay that demonstrates that Marx and Engels were much more advanced in their ecological sensitivity than most environmentalists have given them credit for. Vandana Shiva argues in Chapter 3 that the current globalization breaks with all former relations of humans to the earth and its resources. She claims, for example, that five corporations mainly control seeds, plants, food and health globally. Furthermore, water and other resources fundamental to human existence are being commodified and privatized, setting the stage for huge profits for the owners of water as it becomes more scarce globally. The international food regime that is now in place is leading to the ruin of a large percentage of the world’s smaller and poorer farmers, and to the growth of hunger and starvation as food prices climb while the profits of small farmers decline. The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, was hijacked by pro-globalization capitalists, according to Shiva, thus turning it into a farce. Indeed, very little in the way of change that would benefit the poor came out of the Summit. Instead it is fear and violence that rule in a world that is moving dangerously in the direction of fascism. Shiva believes that an earth democracy movement will be needed to break with exclusionary and monoculturalist modes of thought and action. Inspired in part by Gandhi, this movement will promote generosity as opposed to greed, cooperation as opposed to aggressive competition, compassion as opposed to cruelty and non-violence as opposed to violence. Daniel Drache’s chapter examines the dynamic sense of the common good, or what he calls the social bond (Chapter 4). The social bond is the ethical-normative dimension of public policy that arises from the relations, institutions and practices of what we share in common. With strong public authority comes a revitalized notion of the public, the obligations, responsibilities and undertakings no longer exclusively defined by our membership in our nation-state of birth or adoption. Rather, in this global age our identities are increasingly pluralistic, multiple and diverse. More often than not they are multicultural identities, and always gendered. They are defined behind the border where our primary loyalties reside, at the border with those in the region and beyond the border as citizens of the planet. Identity politics cut across the left–right spectrum and have forced a realignment in the way politics are defined and practiced. International civil society has grown stronger and more influential locally and globally as, paradoxically, fewer people on the planet are exercising their right to vote. Multilateralism from below has given
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bold voice and not insignificant “nixing” power to those outside the formal political system to prevent the WTO and other international regulation bodies of governance from conducting their business behind closed doors. International civil society, the expression of transnational dissent, has become a new kind of agency at a time when traditional ideas about class are being rethought. Colin Duncan’s chapter (Chapter 5) is connected to Shiva’s in the sense that his interpretation of Adam Smith places Smith’s thinking about economics very close to Gandhi’s. Duncan argues that, according to Smith, approximately two-thirds of created wealth comes from the labor of humans and domestic animals, with the rest due to the growth of vegetation. Following Smith’s train of thought, manufacturing and international trade should only be developed to the extent that sustainable agriculture has been developed. By starting with maximizing the returns of a sustainable agriculture, humans would get the benefit of the “free work” of nature, and the result could ultimately be a socialism of small-scale local production of goods using local materials, assisted only marginally by fossil fuels.This alternative contrasts radically with the totally unsustainable existing globalized industrial structures based on the massive consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying environmental degradation. John Bell argues in Chapter 6 that if one reads Marx and Engels carefully and extensively it is possible to find support for nearly all of the central concerns of eco-socialists. Furthermore, their theories cannot be simply written off as advocating productivism and the conquest of nature. Not only did they continually point to the ecological damage wreaked by a system that places profit ahead of all other concerns, but they also advocated a socialism in which humans live in harmony with nature’s rhythms and need to recoup from our interventions. Their vision of the future is best described, according to Bell, as “anti-authoritarian ecocommunism,” a vision not out of line with many of the visions put forward or implied in this book. Pleasure One of the basic needs of all people is the need for pleasure; and yet this need has often been slighted in socialist discussions because of a certain asceticism in socialist traditions of thought. However, if socialist alternatives are to be attractive they must also be seen to offer enriched prospects of pleasure, whether arising from play, from sensuality or from aesthetics. Kate Soper discusses the possibilities of forms of hedonism that are not tied to an ever greater commodification of the earth’s resources (Chapter 7). Hers might be called an environmentally sensitive and egalitarian hedonism. Shannon Bell, in Chapter 8, agrees with Catharine Mackinnon’s claim that pornography shapes the way we look at women, but, unlike Mackinnon, she thinks that counterhegemonic female and homosexual agency can challenge the predominantly patriarchal pornography industry.
Introduction 9 Soper argues, contrary to what one might believe based solely on the study of the current capitalist advertising regime, that consumerist culture is actually repressive and that there is already widespread disillusionment with consumerist culture. This creates a situation where there is a crying need for all those concerned to develop an alternative hedonism based on a new political imaginary. She is critical of liberals who fail to consider the social conditioning of needs that may inhibit the development of latent needs, or needs based on wider experience, and of Marxists who are prone to tell people what their “true” needs are. In opposition to these perspectives, she contends that what is needed is the generation of new, eco-sensitive and widely accessible pleasures. A major expansion of pleasure could come from making creative autonomous work more accessible and from enriching the possibilities of pleasure in leisure time. Shannon Bell believes that, while pornography is overwhelmingly patriarchal, there is a small but significant movement of alternative “pornography” that is an open and egalitarian sharing of sexuality in ways that undermine the hegemonic stereotypes. In particular she focuses on the use of certain websites that are devoted to advancing such an alternative “pornography.” It is her hope that this egalitarian alternative hedonism might break down the highly commodified stereotypes of hegemonic pornography in favor of a postpornographic sexual sharing of bodies and pleasures. Development visions Under the theme “Development visions,” in Part IV the issue of global inequality, addressed to some extent in the first two chapters, is considered in some depth. To begin with, it should be noted that the “development” of the world’s poorer countries has been such a total failure that the word “development” has become problematic. After a life of support for left-wing movements in Africa, John S. Saul reflects upon the lessons to be learned from the failures of three specific African socialist movements, while Richard Westra offers a rethinking of Marxian political economy that can combine an understanding of capital’s general tendencies with sensitivity to time and place specific contexts. Drawing from his rich experience, in Chapter 9 Saul attempts to draw some lessons from the failure of African socialist movements and reflect on the prospects for socialism in Africa in the future. The first and most fundamental point that Saul makes is that, if anything, capitalism has worsened, rather than advanced, the prospects for development in Africa. There is absolutely no evidence that capitalism has in the past or will in the future improve the standard of living of the majority of Africans.This suggests that if Africa is to ever get out of its total peripheralization there must be a rebirth of thought and action that pose radical alternatives to the capitalist devastation of the continent that is occurring. For these new directions to be productive, Saul believes that Africans should carefully study and learn from the failures of past
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socialist movements in Africa, and to this end Saul critically analyzes the failures of socialist experiments in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. Saul argues that, contrary to the beliefs of some leftist intellectuals, underdevelopment is not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to socialist transformations. He also argues that, while external pressures against individual states moving in a socialist direction are strong, as demonstrated by the examples of Nicaragua and Chile, they too can be overcome. Saul proposes three general strategic considerations for African socialists: first is the need to build bottom-up counter-hegemonic projects; second is the need to emphasize the importance of agriculture and to support more equal exchanges between the urban and the rural; third is the need to advance democratic rights and the mobilization of popular power to ensure that economic reforms are geared to really meet the needs of the majority of people. In Chapter 10 Westra utilizes the work of the Japanese political economist Kozo Uno to reinterpret Marxian political economy, urging that Uno’s levels of analysis approach provide a fruitful alternative to economistic readings of Marx’s Capital that would try to deduce historical outcomes directly from the theory of the laws of motion of capital. In their place, Capital is considered to be a theory directed towards defining what capital is, and this leaves open the question of the extent of capital’s impact upon the world and its interaction with other social forces in particular contexts. Similarly, socialism is not to be deduced as an inevitability from capital’s logic. Instead, a theory of this logic helps us to become clear about what capitalism is and therefore about ways we may want to separate ourselves from it. Or, in other words, clarifying the ontology of capitalism can help us to think about an “ontology” for socialism. According to Westra, a socialist ontology might usefully be reduced to three basic principles: • •
•
the de-reification or decommodification of economic life; the specific decommodification of labor-power, though without the reinstatement of forms of extra-economic compulsion as existed in soviet-style societies; the reembedding of the economy in the “life-world.”
Using these three principles as a basis,Westra argues for an extensive re-theorizing of a socialist approach to development that can rethink development in connection both with globalization and the particularities of local contexts. Political agency We have to admit that under the theme “Political agency” (Part V) we would like to say more. One reason we do not is because of space limitations, but another reason is that we are still too early in the post-capitalist transition to be clear about the question of agency. One thing is clear, however.The industrial proletariat can no longer be single-mindedly focused on as the agent of change. Instead, we need to think about broad heterogeneous coalitions of
Introduction 11 those interested in advancing social justice in all its dimensions. As agents of change, the anti-globalization movement, the world social forum and the antiwar movement are still embryonic, but they do prefigure a few basic principles. One is that while an anti-capitalist movement must have grass roots at the local level it must also be thoroughly international.Another is that it must be as inclusive as possible, encouraging all those with positive dreams for a better world to speak out and act in concert with those who are like-minded.The spirit of such a movement ought to be non-sectarian and experimental, thus supporting the release of diverse forms of subjugated creativity. Finally, such a movement needs ultimately to end class exploitation at the same time as it attempts to alleviate all forms of oppression, and in these senses can be seen as a movement that is not only firmly anti-capitalist but also as pro-democratic as it is socialist. In Chapter 11 Ariel Salleh argues for considering agents of change who are not often focused on in the traditional formulations that emphasize the working class and social movements. In her view the present era is one of “biocolonialism,” in the sense that bio-technology is increasingly colonizing human reproduction and the metabolism of nature through high-tech medicine and agriculture, genetic manipulation and the commodification and patenting of life forms. Those most directly concerned with the material reproduction of life are women in the North, peasants, and indigenous people in the South. Salleh claims that these groups are now combining in opposition to globalization because their substantive involvement in reproductive labor is directly harmed by it. Salleh calls them a “meta-industrial class,” because they share a common relation to the means of production. This is characterized by handson lay knowledges of sustainable provisioning learned over centuries; a non-invasive expertise in “holding” living systems together. According to Salleh, it is because reproductive labor mediates between humanity and nature at a fundamental and unavoidable level that this particular vantage point can serve to unify ecological, feminist, postcolonial and socialist politics. William Corlett’s chapter (Chapter 12) is a meditation on the possibilities for agency of the most oppressed, Marx’s famous “surplus population”: the dispossessed, the homeless, the unemployed, the impoverished and the damned. It is Corlett’s basic claim that the “genocidal decimation” of the surplus population is the representational frame within which capital is produced by alienated labor. It is his aim to attempt to think clearly about the surplus population without reducing its members to pure victims. Instead of reducing the surplus population to “other,” Corlett wants us to understand that more privileged positions in capitalism are themselves intimately connected to the surplus population, such that any “othering” is really a kind of “self othering.” Possible worlds Many of the contributions in this volume recommend the revitalization of or creation of local community-based economics of varying sorts. Under the
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theme “Possible worlds,” in Part VI we have two chapters that argue extensively for strong forms of localism. Thomas T. Sekine argues that socialism is best conceived as a judicious mixture of the planning principle of the state, the cooperative principle of the people and the market principle of capital. Central to Sekine’s model of socialism are local communities where the production of “qualitative goods” is carried out by small cooperatives. Teresa Brennan believes that central state planning is so strongly tied to socialism that it is better to think of the alternative to capitalism as “localism” – where local and regional economies replace the current trends towards globalization. In Chapter 13 Sekine argues that since World War I we have been in transition away from capitalism. In capitalism proper, state policies were limited to peripheral matters as economic life was centrally governed by self-regulating markets. After World War I markets were far less self-regulating, requiring systematic state intervention to make them work at all. The 1929 depression forced all capitalist states to increase state intervention radically, and even so it was only World War II which brought capitalism out of depression. After World War II a new phase of transition emerged, often referred to as “Fordism” or “consumerism”; and a new phase has emerged since the 1970s that may be labeled “post-Fordism” or “casino capitalism.” During these phases of transition the political and ideological superstructure increasingly determines the base. This is true even in today’s so-called neo-liberalism, in which we face a fossil-fuel-based economy characterized by an environmental crisis that has us choking on our own economic life. And while Sekine views the present phase as transitional, it is marked by two deeply harmful vestiges of capitalism: the religious worship of the market and productivity. A desirable socialist economy would focus on producing only what is needed, freeing up our time to pursue a vast array of human values other than money and profit, and to pursue them in harmony with the environment. Polanyi argues that the three basic principles for integrating economic life are reciprocity, redistribution and exchange. The problem with capitalism is that it is one-sidedly based on exchange, whereas socialism would utilize all three as needed to advance democracy and freedom. Sekine advocates the production of qualitative services and goods, or use-values, within local communities that use local money. Quantitative goods (standardized and mass produced) would be produced in a largely robotized and planned sector of the economy, and for their purchase general money would be used. For Sekine a socialist economy would be constructed such that the local community would always have primacy over the planned mass-production sector. Like Sekine, Brennan argues for the primacy of community life in any future economic reorganization (Chapter 14), but she makes her case for this through a deep criticism of globalization. Brennan’s argument is based on a novel integration of space and time considerations into Marx’s theory of value. Capital, she argues, must continually speed up and expand spatially in order to maintain profit rates. With contemporary globalization we have reached the point where arithmetic increases of speed have geometrical
Introduction 13 impact on human health and the health of the environment. Indeed, there is an observable relation between globalization and the rise of many forms of both physical and mental illness (immune-deficiency disorders, depression, cancer, obesity, starvation, stress-related illnesses, etc.). Speed cuts more and more into the regeneration time required by nature and humans. According to Brennan, globalization is not simply about the internet; rather, among other things, it is about cheaper oil, cheap labor, reduction of corporate tax, and social service cutbacks. Globalization is also increasingly impoverishing huge numbers around the world, and it is this more than anything else that is the breeding ground for new fundamentalisms and national chauvinisms. Islamic fundamentalism breeds American national chauvinism and imperialism. One long-term goal of the anti-globalization movement, according to Brennan, is to offer ways out of these vicious circles. Instead of socialism she prefers to advocate localism, since in her view it challenges more directly the destructive spatial–temporal dynamic that is at the center of globalization, a dynamic that is ultimately anti-life because it does not allow the time that life needs to regenerate.
New socialisms It should by now be apparent that we approach the idea of socialism with new eyes, viewing classical socialist ideals such as freedom, internationalism, equality and democracy in strikingly new ways and emphasizing ideas that have often been neglected in the past by socialists, such as feminism, environmentalism, localism and pleasure. Further, it is our position that at this point in history we need to open up a broad and deep public dialogue on radical alternatives to the current neo-liberalism and corporate globalization. It is worth emphasizing once more that it is precisely for this reason that we use socialism(s) in the title – to indicate that we need to consider socialism in its most creative incarnations at this point in time, both to open our minds to alternatives and to build a non-sectarian coalition rich with dialogue and debate.Thus our inclusion of diverse perspectives is intentional. Our contributors are located in India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, the United States, the UK, and Canada. And while their perspectives differ, they all converge in dealing creatively with current issues of socialism broadly conceived. Each contributor has a long history of thought and action on the left. They all write from a standpoint of deep concern for problems that they have attempted to deal with in thought and/or action. Some essays are more theoretical and some more empirical. Some are more visionary and some deal with more immediate problems. And while there is a good deal of overlap among all fifteen articles in this collection, there are also many differences that require further debate. The post-World War II period has been transfixed and stupefied by a cold war that made creative critical thinking about either capitalism or socialism difficult. From the point of view of the United States, the “Evil Empire” of
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communism eventually unraveled, proving the permanent superiority of capitalism. Lacking a credible or powerful opposition, capitalism has adopted a neo-liberal ideology that has been used to justify a set of policies that have enriched the wealthy at the expense of the poor and that has played a primary role in drastically increasing inequality on a global scale. Globally there has been a shift of wealth from the public sector to the private sector.These two shifts of wealth have indeed been enormous. And given the current structure of the global economy and its increasingly bleak-looking future, it seems unlikely that the caring dimensions of our current society can be injected with new life. What capitalism needs to prosper, if that is still possible, is yet a further shift of funds to the wealthy and away from the public sector. And yet, if we want a more caring society we have no choice but to move away from capitalism towards some alternative, and our contention is that this should be a locally based democratic socialism. The fundamental aim of this collection of essays is to contribute to some opening, however modest, to public dialogue about some of the deeper, underlying causes of the current problems that we face and about possible alternatives that are worth attending to even if the structural transformations that they imply may seem difficult to make in the short run. All of the essays in this book are to some extent influenced by the socialist tradition of thought.To put it a little differently, all the essays in this book are critical of capitalism, and wish us to consider ways of thought and action that might move us away from the increasingly inhuman world dominated by neo-liberalism and ruthless strategies of corporate short-term profit maximization that so blunt our human potential. At the same time, we recognize that thought and action directed at radical alternatives to the current world order need a kind of rebirth, and at this stage many voices need to be heard and many paths forward need to be considered. We believe that the left has been hampered by sectarianism, stale language and loss of imagination and vision. It will take time, effort and a lot of good will to move away from these deficits.We offer this book in the spirit of such a move. What the left needs is a renewed confidence and a passionate language that will resonate with the idealism of today’s youth. It needs music, poetry and humor. It needs experiments with alternatives, even if small scale. And to be successful it will need to build international movements that are more inclusive, more democratic and stronger than ever before.We live in a world that is still capitalist, but it is capitalist in new ways, ways that call out for new responses. The socialist tradition has always offered the greatest riches of ideas and action with which to constrain capitalism and move beyond it. Perhaps now more than ever before we need to rethink socialism creatively precisely in order not to betray its legacy. Neo-liberal capitalism displays an unprecedented hegemony that must be challenged and defeated if humanity is to have a future that is not a descent into human and ecological catastrophe, but instead creates the conditions for the realization of the finest that is within us.
Part I
Governance and law
1
Socialism and individual freedom Robert Albritton
Neo-liberal ideology has indoctrinated many people into believing that socialism must necessarily destroy or radically curtail individual freedom. It is said that socialism sacrifices the individual to the collective, that it concentrates huge amounts of power in the hands of the state and that this is the greatest threat to individual freedom. Central planning is seen as a form of paternalism depriving us of choice since it must always mean the plan of a few imposed on the many. A vital private sector is the only check on state power, and our only choice is between rule by an impersonal market or rule by the arbitrary will of a few individuals. The right to private property is the basis of all individual freedom, and, since “individual freedom” is the most cherished ideal in advanced capitalist societies, socialism, it is claimed by neoliberal ideology, should be dismissed as not worthy of further consideration. At best socialism may offer certain gains in the areas of social justice and equality, but these gains will be too costly, for their cost is precisely the loss of individual freedom.1 In contrast is the belief that socialism advances individual freedom. It is the aim of this chapter to take on capitalist ideology precisely on what it considers to be its home turf. I shall argue that while pro-capitalist ideologues have focused a great deal of attention on freedom, they have almost totally ignored questions concerning the individual. By and large their theories of subjectivity are vacuous. For them, freedom is the freedom to choose, but they seldom address questions about what it takes for individuals actually to have a meaningful range of choices and be able to choose effectively. They simply assume that individuals as pre-given units know exactly what they want, know how to get what they want, and once they get it are satisfied (or at least have maximized their marginal utilities). I shall base my argument in this chapter on the assumption that Marx’s Capital is a generally successful attempt to theorize capital’s inner logic. Marx’s brilliant analysis of the commodity form will be the ground for developing a theory of legal subjectivity as the basic form that subjectivity takes from the point of view of capital. I shall argue that capitalist legal subjectivity is extended and restricted in ways convenient to capital accumulation and that nearly all of the much vaunted rights and freedoms that exist in advanced capitalist societies
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have been won against capital’s active resistance or indifference. Then, turning to consider the transition to socialism, I shall indicate some of the ways that legal subjectivity might be further extended and deepened. And, finally, I shall argue that capital fails to see beyond legal subjectivity and, hence, in any society where capitalism is dominant there is a tendency for legal subjectivity to become split off from and to absorb other dimensions of subjectivity. In the early stages of socialism legal subjectivity could become both more substantively realized and integrated with other aspects of subjectivity, thus losing its capitalistic fetishized character. In advanced forms of socialism rights discourse might tend to shrink, because rights are needed precisely in situations where they may be violated. Rights are desperately needed under capitalism precisely because they tend to be violated.The right to freedom of movement, for example, would tend to become less important in a world of open borders.
Socialism It is always possible to raise objections to proposed transitional or socialist institutions, precisely because future projections of institutions are necessarily always out of context, in the sense that we can never specify completely a future context. Those who support the status quo can always stop the conversation by raising endless questions about exactly how this or that will be organized. But the point in putting forward alternatives is not to blueprint the future; instead, it is to give some concrete indications of alternative possibilities. Since any actual institutional arrangement is relationally embedded, its details need to be worked out in a process of interconnections with subjectivities and other institutions. As a result, any radically different institutional proposal must always seem utopian.We cannot leap out of our skins; nor can we voluntaristically realize our dreams.We have dreams, but reality is always different since we have to work things out with many others who also have dreams. I believe that the struggle for socialism is a process that has already been going on for some 200 years, if not longer. To me socialism advances democracy, equality, freedom, community and justice. But these things have no final end. For example, we can always have more democratic and more just societies. The struggle for socialism may sometimes involve a step back before taking a step forward, and it already has and will in the future involve numerous radical changes and intense struggles – some more violent and some less. Looking back 100 years from now there may be one particular revolution that is seen symbolically to break most decisively with capitalism, or there may be a transitional period characterized by ongoing turbulence of all types. Whatever the case, I want to propose that socialism is not something achieved by one apocalyptic revolution, but, rather, is an ongoing process that started long ago and will continue indefinitely into the future. Having emphasized process, however, it is necessary for me to add that the most decisive steps towards socialism would be fundamental alterations in existing property regimes.
Socialism and individual freedom 19 In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels proposed ten transitional policies for the communist movement.While it is not the purpose of this chapter systematically to critique their list, it is clear that today global inequality, oppression in all its forms and the ecological crisis must be addressed in any list of transitional policies. For example, Marx and Engels called for “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (1972: 490), but today we should reshape that call to include at least the following: a massive redistribution of wealth on a global scale, the mobilization of savings and taxes to promote equality and freedom, a guaranteed annual income above a poverty line indexed to local costs of living and number of dependants, the democratic control of work and consumption, and the redesign of technologies and of knowledge production to serve the needs of the majority as they themselves help to clarify and meet those needs at a grassroots level. To get a better hearing for socialist alternatives in public discourse it is essential to argue convincingly in theory and to demonstrate in practice that democratic socialist alternatives can radically and qualitatively increase individual freedom in the long run as compared to current capitalist practices. As I see it there are two major obstacles that have prevented socialists from moving more decisively in this direction. First, the USSR, the predominant power to be labeled “socialist” during much of the twentieth century, did indeed curtail individual freedom, as did other societies that have called themselves “socialist.” In my view, any socialist experiment deserving the name should make significant qualitative improvements in human rights over capitalism. And by “human rights” here I mean both individual rights such as the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly and the right to due process, and social rights such as the right to the basic necessities or to a job that will enable one to purchase them. And, unlike Hayek and Friedman, who equate socialism with top-down central planning, I shall argue that, far from necessarily diminishing freedom, in principle socialism can greatly advance individual freedom. Second, the socialist intellectual tradition has devoted far more attention to promoting the need for equality than for individual freedom. It is my contention that if “individual freedom” is the absolutely central ideal of neoliberal capitalism that is all the more reason to take up the challenge.We should not shy away from taking on neo-liberals precisely on the grounds where they think they are strongest. I would go further and claim that individual freedom must be central in any thought and action that would advance socialism.
Freedom Vague generalities about self-determination, empowerment, liberation and emancipation are no longer enough to rally people behind the movement for socialism.Visions of alternatives that people can identify as realistic and realizable are now on the agenda, for it is this kind of vision that they can effectively organize around and fight for. I do not mean that we need detailed
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blueprints of socialism at this time. Instead, we need clear and realistic critiques of the existing capitalist order that point towards alternatives that the left can begin to flesh out and fight for. It is the argument of this chapter that, despite all the rallying around individual freedom throughout the history of capitalist ideology, in fact capitalism has promoted only shallow and limited forms of individual freedom, and even these are primarily for a minority of privileged. Indeed, many of the most important freedoms that now exist have not been promoted by capital at all, but have been won by fighting against capital. In the few instances where capital seems to have advanced individual freedom it has never done so in ways that would jeopardize long-term profits and weaken the long-term hegemony of capital, and nearly always it has been in response to outside pressures. Further, I shall argue that substantive and meaningful advances in individual freedom are difficult to make, and that, while democratic socialism opens the prospects for such advances, actually achieving them will take time, trial and error, and sustained commitment. Spontaneous uprisings of the multitudes are therefore likely to be counterproductive. It is not as if socialists have not been critical of bourgeois notions of freedom. Marx (Marx and Engels 1972: 199), for example, claimed that bourgeois freedom is little more than the freedom to buy and sell, and that the seeming freedom in the market is belied by despotism in the factory and ever deepening inequality throughout the capitalist world. In his famous 1844 Manuscripts, Marx argues passionately that alienation makes a farce out of bourgeois freedom and that the freedom to develop complex and rich human needs is stifled in capitalist societies by the overwhelming hegemony of one need, the need for money (ibid.: 90–8). Others have criticized liberal notions of freedom for being one-sidedly negative, focusing solely on non-interference and ignoring the positive social requirements needed to develop fulfilling lives. Still others point out that liberals tend to limit equality to equality before the law and do not pay enough attention to the relation between more substantive kinds of equality and freedom. With regard to rights, it is argued that liberals emphasize individual rights, and most particularly the right to private property, while ignoring social rights or the need to extend individual rights to make them more substantive for more people.The result is formalistic rights that are too often meaningless in the everyday realities of most people. All of these arguments have some substance. But my interest in this chapter is to focus on the need for a theory of subjectivity in order for freedom to become meaningful.
Individuality In introducing the three concepts in the title of this chapter – “socialism,” “individual,” and “freedom” – I have decided to focus on the concept “individual” last, because, for the purposes of this chapter, it is the most important. It is my contention that heretofore insufficient attention has been focused on
Socialism and individual freedom 21 the first term in the conception “individual freedom,” and the shift of focus that I am advocating requires that we think about subjectivity – both what kinds of beings capital needs us to be in order for it to function successfully as self-expanding value and what kinds of beings we would like to be as evidenced by our struggles against capital and by our manifest potentialities. In short, I shall argue that large gains in individual freedom in the past were achieved mainly by struggling against capital and that in the future they are only possible to the extent that we channel the formation of our subjectivities away from capitalism towards democratic socialism. It is not enough to assert, as many social thinkers have done, that we should develop subjectivities that are open to the radically different other and that are generous and caring.2 What we need is a fuller discussion of the material conditions under which moving in these directions becomes more feasible. And the starting point for this is to explore the obstacles posed by capital in its tendencies to impose or select kinds of subjectivity. Making at least some headway in clarifying “individual” would seem to be a prerequisite for thinking clearly about the sorts of freedom that are possible or desirable for such a being. No doubt this moves us into controversial and difficult philosophical and psychological territory, but in this chapter I would like to make at least some moves in this direction. I believe that the basic questions to pose are: what are we like as subjects in the capitalist world and, given the basic characteristics of our being under capitalism, what changes will advance our freedom? I recognize that these are large, controversial and abstract questions; and yet worth trying to answer, since such efforts can inform and help interrelate more concrete questions having to do with what it means to be, for example, a neo-colonial subject, female subject, a person with a disability or a homosexual subject in various concrete settings.
Marx’s Capital and freedom In the three volumes of Capital, Marx did us the huge service of sketching in capital’s deep structure or inner logic. Fundamentally, his theory demonstrates what an economy would look like were it to operate strictly in accord with capitalistically rational principles. It demonstrates in the abstract and in general how capital must deal with commodities, money, labor-power, technology, profits, credit, commerce, land, time and space in order effectively to reproduce itself and expand through a commodity-economic logic. The reason this theoretical effort is so important is that it shows us how capital would have the world if it could, and this clarity about capital is essential to the task of separating ourselves from capital. In order to get capital out of our social systems and bodily systems the first step is to know what it is. As a result of this knowledge, we may come to the conclusion that there are aspects of capital that we either cannot or would not separate from, while other aspects may clearly cripple our self-development. In this chapter the focus will be on how capital in and of itself views our subjectivities. It will be my argument
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that, strictly speaking, capital would prefer to recognize us only as legal subjects with very limited rights, and that from the point of view of capital’s inner logic the category “subject” is necessarily limited to “legal subject.” In volume I of Capital Marx (1976: 178) claims that the only form of recognition that matters to capital is ownership, and that this implies that individuals are legal subjects that represent commodities as wills residing in them. Thus, from the point of view of capital legal subjecthood arises from the ownership and exchange of commodities, and legal persons as abstract impersonal subjects of rights in things have sovereignty over those “things.”3 According to the Soviet theorist Pashukanis, “[i]f all economic life is to be built on the principle of agreement between autonomous wills, every social function, in reflecting this, assumes a legal character” (1978: 103). It follows that, from the point of view of capital, the state in its most abstract moment is simply a legal person writ large that serves the basic function of confirming property rights, the right to buy and sell, the right to contract and the right to move around in order to compete. Subjecthood for capital in its innermost identity, then, is legal subjecthood with these rights attached. Viewed simply as legal subjects, capitalists and workers are the same, and since capital would prefer not to recognize the existence of class, this view is very convenient to apologists for capitalism. As soon as we look beyond the category “legal subject” class structure emerges into our vision. Capitalists, who own the means of production, are free to buy and sell at will. Also, they are free to hire and to fire labor-power at will, since it is simply a special kind of commodity. Workers, on the other hand, must sell their labor-power in order to survive. In doing this, they have freedom of movement to make the best labor contract they can with any capitalist. Thus they always have an absolute right of exit from any job, but this is constrained by the fact that survival dictates that they quickly find another job. In a purely capitalist society legal subjects are isolated atoms that are free to buy and sell and to contract. But capitalist legal subjects are constrained by the need to maximize profits, and worker legal subjects are constrained by the need to seek the best wages and working conditions in an environment fraught with insecurity. Within capitalist ideology these constraints are played down and the structural differences between capitalists and workers are ignored. Insofar as capitalist ideologues focus mainly on the final consumption by individuals, class distinctions totally disappear. The resulting consumer sovereignty presumably ensures that all wants are maximally satisfied. Legal subjects as consumers are free to spend their money as they please, constrained only by their endowments and the prices and/or availability of the commodities that are supposed to bring satisfaction. From the foregoing exposition it follows that, strictly speaking, capital need only recognize individuals as legal subjects with property rights, including the freedom of transaction and the freedom of movement in pursuit of those transactions. A number of implications follow. First, the category “subject” is crucial for capital because commodities cannot exchange themselves. Second,
Socialism and individual freedom 23 exchangers need only recognize each other as wills residing in commodities or as legal subjects with rights over things. Third, while capital cannot exist and function without “subjects,” the legal subjects that it recognizes represent only a minimal outer shell of subjectivity. This outer shell is constituted by the things owned by the legal subjects or the objects wherein resides their will and by the mutual recognition of property rights. A fundamental contradiction that flows from this analysis is between the basic importance of subjectivity to capital and the thinness of the subjectivity that it needs to recognize.
Legal subjectivity When we think about the legal subject historically we find that in practice capital has to some extent opposed even the most basic property rights mentioned above. For example, in England, the birthplace of capitalism, married women were not considered legal subjects with property rights until late in the nineteenth century. The Settlement Acts virtually froze the movement of workers in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and subsequently the free movement of workers has been restricted in all sorts of ways both within and between nation-states. But according to capital’s own logic or rationality, free movement is an essential right of all workers. And yet, as we move into the twenty-first century freedom of movement between nation-states is becoming more and more restricted, often in highly racist ways. We have come to connect many rights to legal subjecthood, and neoliberals like to connect many of these rights to capitalism. What they don’t care to notice is that most of these rights have been won only by struggling against capital.Take freedom of assembly, for example. As capitalism developed in England a whole raft of draconian laws were passed, making it almost impossible for workers to assemble in any way.The anti-combination acts, the riot acts and the crime of treason were all used against workers trying to organize. Violators of these laws were subject to the most brutal bodily punishments. Even the great founder of liberalism and writer on toleration John Locke advocated that beggars caught with counterfeited passes should have their ears cut off (Cranston 1957: 424–5). One can only act legitimately within capitalism insofar as one is recognized as a legal subject.This applies to collectivities as well. For example, corporations became legal subjects in England in the 1840s. Until very recently their legal subjectivity totally exempted corporations from criminal prosecution and empowered them to act in almost unlimited ways. In contrast, trade unions only gradually gained a limited and constrained form of legal subject status, which subjected them to the possibilities of heavy fines and even criminal prosecutions in cases where their militancy exceeded restrictions that often undermined their ability to act effectively. I mention these examples in order to illustrate that there are diverse degrees and types of legal subject status, and that for the working class legal subject status may actually constrain action in important ways, while for the bourgeoisie it is usually empowering.
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Since subjectivities in their specificity are always constituted in concrete contexts, it may seem difficult to generalize about them, but from the point of view of capital’s logic there are only different forms and degrees of legal subjectivity. I would like to develop this rather abstract level of analysis further by offering some considerations about legal subjectivity in relation to some current structural trends of global capitalism. In particular, I shall focus on legal subject as consumer, legal subject as producer and legal subject as citizen. Consuming subjectivities Economists right across the left–right spectrum have emphasized for some time how important the American consumer is to keeping the global capitalist economy afloat. However accurate this view may be, the consumer is also important as the central figure of bourgeois economic theory ever since the marginal revolution, and, of course, as a legal subject everyone is equally a potential consumer. Since legal subjects are basically clusters of commodities with a will, their mutual recognition is limited to their accoutrement of commodities. Consumption, then, becomes absolutely fundamental to identity formation, and the more predominant legal subjecthood becomes, the more want-satisfaction is directed towards commodities.To put it a little differently, if mutual recognition is fundamental to self formation and one can only be recognized through what one possesses, then all one’s hopes and desires for recognition will be channeled towards commodities. It is not surprising that many people do find a degree of want-satisfaction in commodities since this is how many wants get constructed and directed in an age of consumerism. Usually, however, such satisfaction is short lived because, once possessed, a commodity may lose its allure, or become consumed and in the process be destroyed or turned into waste. Want then shifts to another commodity. Thus want-satisfaction becomes a repetition compulsion that is infinite and concludes only with death. The increasing invasion of advertising into every nook and cranny of life helps to channel our dreams of fulfillment towards commodities: the dream car, the dream house, the dream vacation. The basic desires for sex, for love and for mutual recognition amongst persons as rich subjectivities become totally intermeshed with the world of commodities. For the legal subject, love is the love of the commodity accoutrement of the other that symbolizes desirable traits that the in-love legal subject believes lie behind the legal subjecthood of the other. Perhaps certain shoes are dashing, cologne is dizzying, and clothes are dishy. Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in the Victorian gilded age, but today even he would be dumbfounded by the degree to which identity formation in the rich countries, beginning at a very early age, has become tied up with the consumption of commodities.This has led to an amazing externalization of the self into the commodity world. Legal subjects are themselves commodities and their success depends largely on how they are able to package themselves.The pace of life of today’s
Socialism and individual freedom 25 capitalism has reached such a pitch that we generally do not have time for mutual recognition that gets beyond the external packaging. Time spent on meaningful mutual recognition is now called “quality time,” but this kind of time is shrinking even between lovers or parents and children. In capitalism, just as quantitative value relations subsume qualitative use-value relations, so linear sequential time as money subsumes the qualitative time of mutual recognition. Indeed, it is no doubt contradictory to expect quality time really to be quality time if it is squeezed into linear sequential time. Since capital as self-expanding value literally does not care about the lives of concrete individuals, the caring professions have sprung up alongside capital. During the twentieth century, in response to pressures from below, the caring professions, with the support of the welfare state, grew to enormous proportions. But since the debt expansion of the 1970s and 1980s was in the 1990s seen as excessive, the caring professions are facing ever-deepening cuts. And this is occurring precisely at a time when the hollowing-out of the subject into little more than a consuming legal subject is becoming so prevalent that there is a growing need for caring professions. It follows that a basic contradiction of consumerist capitalism is between the hollowing-out of subjectivity and the destruction of the caring professions that are needed more than ever to deal with the casualties of this deepening identity crisis. The hollowing-out of subjectivity means, among other things, that even the much-fetishized freedom of consumer choice becomes increasingly meaningless. First, it is meaningless for the vast majority of people in the world because they are very minimally recognized even as legal subjects and because they simply lack the income to have significant consumer choice. And, second, even those who do have the means to make consumer choice meaningful have fewer inner resources to resist the continual and increasingly invasive pressures of advertising. In many cases freedom of choice comes down to wanting what someone else wants you to want, or what an externalized shell of subjectivity wants. Consumer sovereignty is in most cases a farce. Indeed, anything like real consumer sovereignty is only possible to the extent that we move towards democratic socialism. Of course,“sovereignty” is not an appropriate concept for socialism since such a concept cannot capture the sort of democratic interplay of networks from the local to the global that could be developed with socialism. Consuming subjectivity would simply be one of many dimensions to the rich subjectivity of socialism, and it could be integrated with rather than split off from other dimensions of subjectivity. Under capitalism most consumers do not see much beyond a price tag and the immediate qualitative appearances of the product. In order for consumption to be knowledgeable and political we need to know both the human and ecological conditions under which the product was produced. Effective advertising should do just this. Consumers, then, could actively reject those commodities that now try to hide their high human and ecological costs. In a democratic socialist society, of course, this would not simply be up to consumers since producers and various kinds of other groupings would continually work
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to improve the ecological and human dimensions of production and consumption. A major contradiction in consumerist capitalism is between consumption, which is mostly the arena of the rich, and, to use Marx’s phrase, “the hidden abode of production,” which is mostly the arena of the poor.Typically, not only are production and consumption separated in time and space, but also, and in part because of this, production is opaque to the consumer, who, as a result, can more easily be a guiltless consumer. Producing subjectivities Capital does not recognize individuals as producers except insofar as they are legal subjects free to contract with any employer. Thus a worker is a legal subject who sells their labor-power for a wage or salary and then becomes a consumer. That which happens between the selling of labor-power and the purchasing of commodities is in capitalist ideology a black box, better known as the production process. Ever since Marx, it has been clear that this way of looking at things makes class disappear altogether, since it appears that like everyone else in capitalist society, workers are simply buyers and sellers of commodities. In this fashion the consuming legal subject of capitalist ideology has always pushed the class subject into the background or ignored it altogether. Even today special efforts have to be made to expose the working conditions and environmental impact of particular production processes. And these efforts need to be intensified in a period when economic stagnation may cause capital to turn a blind eye on concerns over the human and environmental costs of profit-making, particularly when all countries are under intense pressure to be “hospitable” to capital. A second contradiction of global capitalism arises from an increasing desire and ability to share information about production processes around the world and the need for capital to get away with ignoring the human and environmental costs of particular forms of production and consumption. This contradiction will be deepened to the extent that producing subjects can organize themselves globally. Producing subjects or class subjects have always posed a threat to the legal subjectivity of capitalist ideology, and as a result of this they have gained an array of rights attached to legal subjectivity. However, when push comes to shove capitalist states have a way of taking away workers’ rights when it is convenient to capital. Furthermore, to an increasing proportion of the world’s work force, the real job choices are narrowly constrained, often to jobs with little security, low pay and poor working conditions. Indeed, given current levels of global unemployment and underemployment, the typical worker is desperate for any kind of job. Much work in today’s world is performed by highly vulnerable workers, who, because of their poverty, immigrant status, employment in the “informal” sector or job insecurity, are superexploited. When these workers begin to get mobilized on a global scale they will constitute an enormous force for change. The changes they will bring about could radically improve their freedom of choice in relation to work.
Socialism and individual freedom 27 In a democratic socialist world all people will be able to have a much wider and more realistic array of dreams in connection with productive activity.Toil will be reduced to a minimum and equally shared. All individuals will receive a guaranteed annual income above a poverty line relative to the local cost of living.To pay for this, all incomes and profits above a certain level will be taxed away. Democracy in every workplace will drastically improve the quality of work life. No children will be raised in material environments that drastically curtail the dreams of and possibilities for developing their creative and productive abilities. Unlike consumer subjectivities, producer subjectivities are not easily subsumed under the shell of legal subjectivity. Perhaps the most important rights accorded to workers historically have been the rights to organize unions and to strike. But these rights have always been sharply curtailed by state repressive apparatuses, so that legal subjectivity for producing subjects has been a mixed blessing. And yet, in a world when more and more workers are denied almost all standing as legal subjects even these mixed blessings are to be struggled for and expanded. It may be thought that socialism would curtail that individual freedom that is called “entrepreneurship” under capitalism, but which might be called “producer creativity” under socialism. While the exploitation of workers will certainly be curtailed, the translation of creative ideas into production could be hugely advanced under socialism as compared to capitalism. The possibility of translating creative ideas into new practices and products under capitalism tends to be limited to the wealthy. This translation under capitalism typically has the following steps. First, the legal subject, considered to be the author of the idea, pays large legal fees to patent attorneys to ensure a monopoly on the idea. Even this step requires either considerable wealth or contacts with people or banks willing to lend money. The next step is to buy all the productive inputs, including land, means of production and labor-power. This, of course, would require yet more access to wealth. To maximize profits it would be rational to locate production where the inputs could be attained at minimum cost, implying the maximum exploitation of labor-power and minimum state regulation and taxation. Having produced the commodity, it would now be necessary to create a market, which will involve further large costs, including in most cases advertising and the sort of negotiations necessary to get large retailers to carry the product. If the product turns out to have a strong demand, others will produce slightly altered imitations in hopes of skirting the patent and getting a share of the market. The original inventor must now spend further huge sums of money to fight expensive legal battles to defend her or his patent. All along the way it will be tempting to sell out to already existing corporations that can more easily raise funds. In the end, the patent will significantly slow down the rate at which society benefits from the invention, and at the same time the inventor may end up with little to show for her or his original idea. In a socialist society the aim would be for individuals to have equal access to social resources. Anyone with a creative idea to make social practices more
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democratic or more conducive to human flourishing or to make social space more beautiful or to pursue a line of research or to introduce a new technology or product would be encouraged to apply through democratic processes for the necessary resources. If the project is considered worth pursuing by the relevant democratic body, then it would receive community backing. Political subjectivities A third area of contradictions arises from the legal subject as citizen. On the one hand, legal subjects cast ballots for candidates and this is supposed to ensure democracy. On the other hand, governments at every level and in every part of the world are becoming more and more beholden to the power of big money, which is itself becoming more global. Since international political institutions that might constrain big money tend to be weak and undemocratic, this area of contradictions comes down to a crisis of democratic governance. In any democratic socialism that would be attractive to most people, the existing politics of class domination and elite rule would need to come to an end. Global citizenship implies the possibility of influencing global norms governing such things as arms production and sale, ecological concerns, food quality and distribution, health, education, human rights and workplace democracy. A further implication of global citizenship is open borders and a reasonable access to the citizenship of a country of residence.The freedom of movement of legal subjects implied by capital’s own rationality would then for the first time become a reality, but ironically only in a post-capitalist world. In today’s world of increasing restrictions on immigration we are moving further away from this very fundamental freedom. The current restrictive immigration policies and war on terrorism are fuelling new and dangerous forms of racism and militarism. The current trends are for the rich to hide in gated and armed communities, gated corporations, gated conferences, gated nation-states and gated continents. And the costs of securing these pacified gated areas is militarism and the loss of human rights that goes along with intensified surveillance and policing.
Beyond legal subjectivity While legal subjectivity may be the outer shell of subjectivity, it is extremely important now and will remain so for the foreseeable future. In contrast, a more advanced form of socialism might place less emphasis on rights because subjectivities could in principle become much more generous given that the struggle for survival might no longer be the central concern of most people. Conflict resolution in advanced socialism could shed much of our current adversarial proceedings, with their attendant bureaucracy, ritual, moralism, individualism, intimidation and prisons. Instead, various forms of mediation could take place which would focus less on individuals in adversarial proceedings and more on situations and the supports needed by both criminals and victims.
Socialism and individual freedom 29 Legal personhood is only the most outer shell of subjectivity; and yet most thinkers in the liberal tradition do not get beyond a theory of freedom suitable to legal persons. We cannot dispense with this shell because without it more substantial dimensions of freedom may be choked off; and yet it is only a first step towards individual freedom. The theory of subjectivity embedded in liberal notions of freedom seldom gets beyond thinking of persons as crustaceans hiding in their legal shells while voluntaristically groping around to maximize want-satisfaction. And yet it is this conception of individual freedom that capitalist ideologies have always celebrated. It is always assumed that legal subjects are fully mature adults who make rational choices to satisfy wants according to their rank ordering. This, of course, ignores the important formative years of infancy and childhood. After Freud we are much more aware of the early development of key psychic structures; and yet, capital as such is indifferent to use-value and therefore in principle takes no interest in such findings. The indifference of capital to the inner person has not stopped collective efforts to provide childrearing supports. Unfortunately the movement for free universal day-care picked up steam at precisely the time that high inflation rates were giving birth to neoliberal policies.Today the extreme pressures on nearly all forms of childrearing suggest the need for extensive social supports. These may take many forms relative to material and cultural needs in different parts of the world. A guaranteed annual income indexed to the number of children might be one important step in ensuring the material security of children. Of course, the implementation of such a policy would necessarily be transitional, since to finance it all incomes above a certain level (say three times the minimum) would need to be taxed away and steep inheritance taxes would gradually tax away extreme differences in wealth. To a certain extent we live in our imaginations and our dreams.We continually dream of a future for ourselves that we invest with desire. Through reality testing that gives us feedback on our efforts to realize our dreams, we modify those dreams. The more children are exposed to all sorts of creative possibility and are encouraged to experiment, the more they can achieve a better connection between their dreams and their lives. Under socialism great social resources would be directed to enriching childhood experience. Capital’s logic must pay attention to adult workers only to the extent that their labor-power is the prime input in profit-making, and to children only insofar as they are future sources of labor-power, but the elderly are simply a dead weight on the system. Despite over a century of struggle to achieve better social supports for the elderly, their treatment in this enlightened age of advanced capitalism is generally a disgrace, and is likely to worsen with the decline of the welfare state and the squeeze on pensions. Given the emphasis on the consuming legal subject in the modern world, freedom is usually thought to be the freedom to choose. In his book Subjectivity in Political Economy, David Levine claims that neoclassical economics views the individual subjectively as “a preference ordering, and objectively [as]
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an endowment of resources” (1998: 76). Both the preference ordering or hierarchy of wants and the endowments are simply given. Within democratic socialism the fairness of endowments is always open to debate. Furthermore, since Freud we are aware that subjects are decentered and characterized by deep divisions, self-deceptions, compulsions and inner conflicts. Learning to choose effectively relative to one’s dreams and desires is extremely difficult and can be most fruitfully advanced in a context of material and social supports. There is little such support for helping individuals to get clear on wants in connection with self-development within capitalism, and where it does exist it has been established in the face of capital’s indifference. Indeed, the main tendency of capitalism has been to bemuse individuals by bombarding them with advertising messages that propose ever-new status symbols. In such a situation individuals often cannot distinguish what it makes sense for them to want as opposed to wanting what someone else wants them to want. Another shortcoming of the image of the individual as a preference ordering is that some of the most important wants in life are not always easy to rank in a quantitative way. How does one rank in quantitative terms the want for recognition, for security, for love, for opportunity, for beauty or for quiet? And even if we could be so calculating, would we want always to reduce qualitativeness and meaningfulness to hierarchical quantitative calculation. Must we choose between which friend is our ninth best friend and which our tenth? Must we decide how much money a particular love relationship is worth to us? If our most fundamental want is for self-affirming recognition in all its various dimensions, does this not have more to do with the qualities of our relations with others than with want-satisfaction calculated quantitatively? Even assuming that our wants are commensurable and therefore rankable, we need to have the practical or strategic wisdom that it takes to pursue them most effectively. Suppose that we rank democratic socialism highly in our want-satisfaction hierarchy. History has taught us that, given the forces arrayed against such an outcome, the strategic questions about how best to advance such a project are highly complex and contestable. It is important to know how to avoid blind alleys or how to avoid strategies that strengthen capitalism at the expense of those which would transform it. The kind of knowledge relevant to such large strategic change is of many types, different levels of abstraction and degrees of certainty. In this case it is clear that an individual can only make headway to the extent that she or he is part of a very large collective effort. The very idea of individual want-satisfaction relative to such a project appears to be absurd. In opposition to these neo-liberal conceptions of subjectivity, Levine claims that wants cannot be reduced to a preference ordering, but instead have to do with efforts by subjects to integrate their inner psychic structures with needs for recognition and needs to find a fulfilling place for themselves in a world of other subjects and objects. He is critical of neo-liberal choice-centered theories because they “treat both objects and other persons as instruments of satisfaction, rather than opportunities for connection” (1998: 104).
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Conclusions Modern left-wing humanism is largely a reaction against subjectivity conceived in terms of the legal subject. It reacts against this homogenized shell with an equally homogeneous realized or self-determined human being. The main trend of postmodernism has been to react against the over-generalizing force of homogenized subjectivity, whether in the form of liberal legal subjecthood or of Marxist humanism, in favor of different kinds of contextually constructed subjectivities. As a reaction this is understandable. But what postmodernism often fails adequately to recognize is the enduring reifying force of capitalist commodity-economic forms that have had a strong and continuing impact on subject formation.What I have argued in this chapter is that capital’s logic in itself can only recognize legal subjectivity narrowly understood as it emerges from private property. If this is true, then many of the individual rights so celebrated by the liberal tradition have been won despite capital’s indifference or opposition. Contrary to Hayek, Friedman and many other pro-capitalist ideologues, it is my claim that individual rights and freedoms do not flow from capital’s logic, and that what does flow from such a logic is an extremely impoverished conception of legal subjectivity that in practice empowers capital while constraining all those who would resist it. The category “subject” is essential to capital, and at the same time capital is absolutely indifferent to all dimensions of subjectivity except for legal subjectivity. And what is still more ironic is that legal subjects are conceived by capital in a totally voluntaristic way as self-contained subjects of pure will. But, as Marx shows so forcefully, to the extent that capital’s commodityeconomic logic has its way subjects are reduced to being mere personifications of economic categories. In other words, capital in its pure state sees individuals as totally free legal subjects even as it, as self-expanding value, totally subsumes subjectivity to its own motion. When we look at capital historically we see that, against its indifference or active opposition, working people have extended the legal subject as subject of rights far beyond the basic property rights that capital would like to recognize. Thus the right to assemble, to speak, to vote, to strike are all important gains, even though for many people in the world today they are either formal rights that seldom affect their lives, rights in the process of being lost, or rights yet to be won. Furthermore, as I have argued, the right to free movement globally, which emerges directly from basic property rights, has generally been assumed by capital as a birthright, while working people have never been granted anything like the same global right to freedom of movement. As a result the entire world has been converted into an apartheid system of economic ghettos with the accompanying racism. Inequality has reached such proportions as to be obscene beyond words. The main message of this chapter is that capital has never been the champion of freedom, that most meaningful freedoms have been won against capital, and that capital has always blocked the most basic freedom of movement of working people. In everyday discourse we often speak of “winning
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rights” but seldom name “capital” as the social force against which these rights have been won. For the foreseeable future it will be important to expand and deepen the rights of legal subjects, but at the same time it should be noted that legal subjecthood does not get far in addressing the kinds of subjectivity most capable of expanding freedom. For that we need both to strengthen the outer shell of legal subjectivity and to go beyond it to address deeper questions about how to develop less fragmented and less crustacean-like selves. In a more advanced socialist society rights would become less important because the right to free movement across boundaries, for example, would not become something to be continually fought for when from birth people are encouraged to move freely. A global movement towards democratic socialism could open the possibility for huge advances in human freedom by expanding and deepening human rights in the immediate future, by developing subjectivities more capable of making the most of freedom in the medium future, and in the long run by affirming the interconnections of a truly rich human development on a global scale.
Notes 1 2 3
This paragraph is an amalgam of the views expressed by Milton Friedman (1962) and Friedrich Hayek (1944). Recently the emphasis has been on more open, receptive, caring and generous subjectivities, but far too little has been written about the economic conditions conducive to their realization. See C. J.Arthur’s introduction to Pashukanis’s classic (1978: 14).
Bibliography Cranston, M. (1957) John Locke:A Biography, London: Longmans. Friedman, M. (1962) Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. (1944) The Road to Serfdom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, D. (1998) Subjectivity in Political Economy: Essays on Wanting and Choosing, London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1976) Capital, vol. I, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1972) The Marx–Engels Reader, Tucker, R. (ed.), New York: Norton. Pashukanis, E. (1978) Law and Marxism:A General Theory, London: Ink Links.
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Globalization’s challenge to feminist political economy and the law A socialist perspective Marjorie Griffin Cohen
This chapter focuses on feminist political economy and the law because of the changes that are occurring in the political and legal regimes that feminists encounter through the process of globalization. New international legal institutions are being constructed that profoundly shift the power structures (and legal institutions) that women have confronted in the twentieth century. This shift in the location of legal power destabilizes the various types of feminist methods that have been constructed over the past century for confronting all aspects of patriarchal economic power: the power of the state, the pervasive and unregulated power of capital, and male privilege.This means that many of the strategies that feminists have used to improve living and working conditions for women no longer have a familiar target. Some targets that were firmly in focus – the state and the corporation – are now more nebulous and increasingly able to sidestep responsibilities and deflect the focus of law (Ciscel and Heath 2001). Socialist feminism has long been distinguished from liberal feminism for its skepticism about focusing on legal approaches for dealing with social problems and inequality. The typical analysis is to see liberal feminists’ demands as reformist, primarily related to gaining equal political and legal rights, while socialist feminists are associated more with analyses and actions based on class distinctions and changing fundamental economic relations.1 In Canada and other Western industrialized nations the distinction between socialist and liberal feminists has been a real one, with regard to both their political theory and their ultimate objectives, but the notion that socialist feminists are somehow less pragmatic than liberal feminists with regard to issues like the law does not describe the practical political experience. While the analyses and objectives of socialist and liberal feminisms were markedly different, there were frequent attempts to develop an integrative feminist approach to public policy, specifically with regard to issues of political economy and the law (Matthaei 2001). Feminists in many countries were effective in this and a great deal changed – change that was a direct result of women’s activism. Both corporate and state actions have been the target of feminists’ attempts to mitigate the effects of state and market forces on women
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(Pierson and Cohen 1995). Within the boundaries shaped by the nation-state, feminists have put heavy pressure on states to change their own practices and to design and enforce regulation to restrict the power of corporations. The main point of this chapter is to argue that the tactics and objectives of feminist action on economic issues need to be reshaped as the nature of the prevailing regulatory regime changes. While the state, corporations and male collective power can be confronted in specific ways under certain relations of ruling, the complexity of changes, such as are occurring through globalization, demands a thorough analysis of the changes in political culture and institutions. Most importantly, it requires a shift in the primary focus on the state and corporations within the state for challenging the conditioning framework under which state actions are undertaken.2 As international economic law becomes more potent in shaping the parameters for states’ actions, more action needs to be developed in relationship to this law and possible alternatives to it. Discussions of globalization often focus on whether the state is a victim of the international corporate power that is shaping international institutions to support corporate rule, or whether the state has been a willing participant in neo-liberal efforts to reconfigure state power (Weiss 1997; Panitch 1994).The debate is too large to mention all of the variations on these two positions, although this is an important issue because there are variations between states that will affect the strategies of activists within the state (Wood 1999; Hurst and Thompson 1996). In Canada, for example, the federal state has obviously been a prime mover in furthering the codification of international law (by pursuing increasing liberalization in existing international trade agreements and entering into new agreements) to place one ideological perspective in a supreme position to shape the actions of states (McBride 2001; Grinspun and Kreklewich 1994). This has been contested, modified and recontested at the national level, but there is relatively little evidence of success in changing the direction of state actions in the international economic arena (Ayres 1998). That does not mean that collective action dealing with international economic law has been ineffective: certain types of action, such as the concerted effort against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), were effective at the international level. However, the action did not force Canada to behave differently; nor has the success of these groups in the international arena changed Canada’s subsequent policy.The point is not that the state is an inappropriate target for social action, but that a new and significant arena is opening up and the strategies for dealing with it are embryonic. The force that is loosely known as “globalization” has put a distinct trajectory to the shape of international economic law. Three separate but related factors influence the construction of a self-regulating market – the major organizing principle of most international economic law.3 These three forces of globalism are:
Globalization’s challenge to feminism/the law •
•
•
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economic forces, which are characterized by the dramatic increase both in the mobility of capital and the international organization of production and distribution; political forces, which are characterized by changes in existing international institutions and the creation of new ones to expand markets and make market-oriented decisions dominant in rules-based systems; cultural forces, which relate to the hegemony of ideologies that support the spread of self-regulating markets as the primary determinants of social life.
Stressing the three elements of the globalization process is important so that globalism is not construed as an inevitable economic outcome of a stage of capitalism – one that becomes codified by law because it is part of a normal trajectory of international economic forces. Globalization is a result of powerful forces that are intentionally constructing international institutions to pursue specific economic, political and ideological objectives. In this context, international economic law is not developing as a codification of existing practices (as one often understands changes in legal regimes); rather, it is creating economic and political power through the legal entrenchment of a specific type of economic system that is then accepted as the only legitimate economic organization throughout the world. The shift in power that then occurs is the result of the institutionalization of an ideology in ways that allow no other ideologies or moderating influences to penetrate the international economic legal systems. This shift in power obviously has different implications for people within different nations. While international law is an extremely powerful force for change in small or weak nations, or in any countries not central to international decision-making, it has less impact on economic, political and cultural institutions in countries that are more closely aligned with the dominant ideology that shapes international law, countries such as the United States. This distinction between the effects of international economic law on the specific circumstances of countries is probably a good basis for understanding the differences in feminist approaches to globalization. Feminists are far from united on the negative effects of globalization, and even when its dangers are recognized there is a wide variety of strategies that seem appropriate to different groups under different circumstances (Benería et al.2000). Most feminist discourse on globalization does not deal with the legal basis of economic power in the international regime, although when the discourse focuses on this the debate on what type of action is needed is just beginning. But before entering into a discussion of where feminists now stand and what are the most fruitful avenues for action for the future, the limits on dealing with globalization within the confines of national law need to be examined.
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Feminist political economy and the state The globalization process has forced feminists in many countries to focus on the downsizing efforts of governments. In the name of improving the competitive position of national business interests in a globalized economy, many governments around the world are cutting taxes and privatizing state institutions in order to shift resources away from the public sector. As a result, services women struggled to receive are frequently threatened through deliberate decisions by governments – especially through budget initiatives that decrease funding to the public sector and through specific strategies to privatize a wide range of public services (Bashevkin 1998; Crossman and Fudge 2002; Upadhyay 2000). The focus on state governments’ activities as an arena for feminist activism can be effective in countries where governments respond to public pressure through democratic institutions. This activity has appeared even more promising as feminists have drawn attention to the gender implications of a wide range of macro-economic policies that shape government actions on social policy (Bakker 1994, 1996).The recognition that macro-economic policies are not gender neutral but, rather, provide a conditioning framework for state decisions has been an important tool for feminist action. The call for the development of gender-sensitive budget analyses, for example, offers both a strategy for highlighting the negative effects of budget decision-making for women and a rallying point for opposition to neo-liberal government policies (Budlender and Sharp 1998). But there are very serious limits to these types of actions: their success tends to be limited to maneuvering within an accepted framework shaped by overarching neo-liberal designs that are being encrypted through international law. The result is frequently a bizarre demand to show how treating women better will improve economic performance within the neo-liberal regime. This often leads to a lengthy stream of “gender audits” of government programs that ultimately have little impact on public policy. In these feminist economic analyses and strategies the focus for action is the nation-state. The underlying premise is that state power is sovereign and, given sophisticated feminist analysis and enough political pressure, might be influenced in a positive way. This is sometimes referred to as a “nationalmanagement approach to globalization” (Bergeron 2001: 991). The attempt is to highlight feminist concerns about the effects of globalization and to protect people within the nation from its negative consequences. Feminist activists generally have few illusions about the ease with which change can be brought about and most are highly skeptical about the role of the state as an ally (Cohen 1997). But despite the difficulties of effecting change when neoliberal forces gain control of governments, there has been at least a domestic arena for discussion, debate and action when the focus is on the nation-state. Legal approaches to feminist political economy have focused on two main types of actions within the nation, with varying degrees of success: those dealing with legal prohibitions and those dealing with laws that extend social welfare or enabling legislation.
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Prohibitions: these actions involve work for legislation that would eliminate economic practices that exclude or harm women.These prohibitions have been an important step towards a social recognition of inequality itself and the harm it does.The most significant of these have been prohibitions against discrimination, particularly those designed to protect women in the workplace, through tax policies and in dealings with financial institutions. Associated with changes in legislation are feminist efforts to eliminate gender bias in all forms of law (Mahoney 1999). Enabling: these actions involve work for legislation that fosters economic and social programs that enable women and others disadvantaged by a selfregulating market to participate in economic and social life on a more secure basis. Included in this are the whole panoply of publicly provided services, such as public education, healthcare and public infrastructure such as transportation and electricity systems. There have probably been no redistributive devices more significant than public education and healthcare. But also significant were the counter-cyclical programs (like unemployment insurance and social welfare programs) that kept the system, particularly in Western countries, from more disastrous failures during economic crises.
These political projects codifying progressive legal measures were important ideologically: the regulations focusing on prohibiting unfair practices are politically significant in that they imply that self-regulating markets inherently produce inequality. Similarly, the underlying philosophy supporting the co-existence of a substantial public sector within a larger capitalist society implies, either consciously or subconsciously, that the self-regulating market is too brutal to sustain a reasonable society. The counter-cyclical programs implicitly worked and were crucial because the market was prone to failure4 – or at least it was not self-regulating in a way that was tolerable to human life. Women and other minorities have had many successes with strategies to enact legal prohibitions and enabling legislation. Usually they were pursued despite the overwhelming odds, involving Amazonian efforts that resulted in a great tenacity to bend the system – ultimately in ways that were integral to the very nature of the system itself. However, recognizing the significance of legal gains should be kept in perspective: it is crucial not to exaggerate the extent to which the law has supported women – particularly with regard to economic issues.The capacity of legal discourse to challenge gendered norms and power structures to advance equity is hugely problematic, and any feminist project that focuses on the law (as a solution to a problem) certainly gets its share of criticism from other feminists and other critics on the left (Crossman and Fudge 2002; Backhouse 1999). But it is also important that feminists do not underestimate the important advances women and others have made as a result of concerted political action to control a self-regulating market, or at least reduce the effects of its pure form, within the nation-state.
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The regime of international political economy The state-oriented arena for debate and action is shifting substantially with the growth of international institutions that condition the action of nations. Some of these changes have been the subject of considerable feminist analysis – in particular those associated with structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on less-developed countries (Afshar and Dennis 1992; Elson 1995). Feminists have also focused on international trade agreements and the ways that they can compromise human rights, environmental sustainability and state actions to promote activities other than those provided by market outcomes (Williams 2001; Cohen et al. 2002; Hale 1999; Orford 1998). The particularly disturbing development of the trade agreements is that international trade law, as it is being constructed, is rapidly assuming the role of international government (Clarkson 2002; Schneiderman 2000).The deliberate and conscious attempt to make trade law a world constitution was clearly expressed by the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) first directorgeneral, Renato Ruggiero, in a 1995 statement:“We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single world economy” (Tabb 2000: 6). The kinds of accommodations between commercial and social needs that have been painfully worked out over time within nations are being replaced and superseded by international trade agreements whose only purpose is to support the very narrowest of commercial objectives.5 Governments have had very elaborate roles in capitalist economies, roles that have become increasingly circumscribed with each round of negotiations through institutions that further “liberalize” markets. This does not imply, however, that this circumscribed role for states is in some way in opposition to many individual states’ notion of how the world should be shaped. As has been pointed out repeatedly, and as is well recognized by activists who have opposed the extraordinary power of these agreements, many states, other than just the US, have been leading the way in ensuring that they are in place.6 The problem, then, is not a shaping of state actions by outside forces, but a design of these forces by states so that specific economic and social objectives become much more difficult to negotiate within states themselves.While the extent to which this has actually occurred and how much room the state has to pursue distinct strategies vary considerably with the might and power of individual states, the objective of those involved in furthering an intrusive international regime is clear – they want the state to be less responsive to democratic economic demands from within. The most intrusive of the new international institutions in shaping the economic structures of nations is the WTO. This organization rules the economic world for one main purpose – to create and expand private markets. In the creation of private markets a specific type of economic system typifies the ideal: this is a system in which state activity does not impinge on the ability of the private sector to undertake all types of economic activity, including that currently in the public sector. While this ideal is far from
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existing in reality, the objectives of the WTO are clearly spelled out in its agreements and successive rounds of negotiations are built into the agreements so that this objective can be achieved incrementally7 (Sinclair 2000; Cohen et al. 2002; Shrybman 2001). Crucial differences exist between the new international legal regimes, like the WTO and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (and their related, quasi-legal bodies the World Bank and the IMF), and those economic legal regimes that operate at the national and sub-national level. These differences relate most fundamentally to the fact that the international economic regimes established by law have the state as the exclusive subject of law.This is an important point because the international trading regimes are often characterized as “rules-based” systems, but, unlike national governments, which make rules that everyone must follow, the trade regimes focus exclusively on the ways that governments must behave. It is then up to governments to discipline their subjects to conform to the rules of the international trading regimes. The WTO is the closest instrument we have to a world constitution. Most nations are in, and those who are not want to get in because exclusion means economic marginalization, if not outright isolation (Hoekman 2002). Because the WTO has one overriding mandate – to create markets – its laws focus on the actions of states that inhibit capital mobility and investor rights (Shrybman 2001). The international economic rules-based system is not intent on regulating the actions of those who trade, but, rather, on regulating governments on both trade and a whole variety of issues involving investment rights. It codifies what actions of states (and sub-national governments) are permissible and in general focuses on removing state power over the market.8 The very intention of “liberalization” of markets is to undo the work of millions of women and men within the boundaries of nations whose specific project over centuries has been to get the law to intervene on their behalf to bring about results that were not possible with a self-regulating market.9 Whatever one thinks about the capacity of law to meet redistributive and equality needs, one thing is absolutely certain: the legal apparatus of globalization and restructuring is a mighty force that has the capacity to make the world, especially the world of women and disadvantaged minorities, even more unequal than it is now, and for many this will mean a more miserable existence. The point to stress is that even if the law does not meet the needs of disadvantaged groups it cannot be ignored. International economic law is shaping up in a peculiar way and is extending its tentacles well beyond economic structures to establish the parameters for political and social organization as well.
The feminist debate Feminists are far from agreement about the dangers of globalization: some stress the advantages of export-led growth policies on women’s employment and see a nexus between equity and growth. These analyses tend to
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focus less on the coercive nature of international law itself than on the mitigating measures that need to occur at the national level to protect women and disadvantaged minorities. But among the feminists who are most vocal about the dangers inherent in the legal aspects of the international trade agreements themselves there is considerably less unity on what to do about it. The most common cry is to say that women want to be consulted and to demand that international institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO include women in discussions and ensure that women’s issues are reflected in policy as it is created. These groups want to “be at the table.” Feminist economists who discuss the horrendous problems for women created by WTO policy, for example, call for the integration of a gender perspective into trade policy so that it can be more supportive of gendersensitive and sustainable human and social development (Williams 2001). Other groups are explicitly “anti.” They want no part of any international institutions and would like them to be abandoned. The women’s conferences associated with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forums leave no doubt about where specific groups stand and are examples of the many philosophical differences between groups. The group’s meeting in Vancouver in 1997 was called the “Second International Women’s Conference Against APEC.” In contrast, another women’s group associated with APEC and funded by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is the Women Leader’s Network (WLN), which promotes the integration of a gender perspective within APEC (Macdonald 1999). And between these two poles there are a variety of positions that want a transformation of the existing trajectory in international trade perspectives. The most developed feminist agenda for dealing with the WTO’s trade agreements is that of the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). IGTN, which was initiated in 1999, is organized into seven regions – Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, North America and the Pacific. Its demands for the WTO’s fourth Ministerial Meeting at Doha, Qatar, reflect its recognition of the power of the WTO agenda, particularly in its expanding liberalization initiatives, to compromise food security, national sovereignty and development programs within nations. Three of IGTN’s four main demands deal with the removal of whole areas from the rule of the WTO.The areas to be removed are agriculture, intellectual property rights (TRIPS), and traderelated investment measures (TRIMS). Its fourth main demand calls for a renegotiation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), mainly so that services in the public sector can remain under state control. But it also calls for the removal within the GATS of the “Movement of Natural Persons,” because of the implications of loss of skilled labor from the Global South. This is qualified by saying that removal is necessary “unless more focused attention and corrective mechanisms are defined to protect local labour markets in developing countries” (IGTN 2001: 6). It is crucial that feminists deal specifically with the existing trade agreements, as IGTN is doing. This requires a tremendous amount of work to
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understand the potential of both existing trade agreements and the plethora of new areas being negotiated. The complexity of the agreements makes this a daunting task itself, but one of the successes of the international social movements that are opposed to the trajectory of globalization is the sophistication of the analysis of the trade agreements and the ability to have this information disseminated widely. This is particularly crucial for pressuring governments against support for specific liberalizing initiatives in the successive rounds of negotiations that are occurring at the WTO. However, since the agreements themselves are platforms on which successive structures are erected, undoing what is already there is highly problematic. The inherent penalties on any nation that “opts out” of its previous commitments will prevent any nation from adhering to domestic pressure on these issues, and the specter of a wholesale rewriting of trade law seems a distant and unlikely project. The biggest danger in working within the structure of the trade agreements is that attempts at redistribution and market control will be pursued in this arena. The most obvious attempt in this direction is to have labor and environmental issues incorporated within the framework of these agreements.10 It is a dangerous strategy, primarily because it would establish the trade agreements as legitimate governance over areas that in other jurisdictions have rightly been established as separate juridical bodies, with different goals and objectives from the market-creating bodies that deal with issues like trade and investment. The argument here is that separate, distinct international institutions need to be established to regulate capital and effectively to pursue policies of redistribution on an international scale.
Devil in the details It is easy to understand why labor and environmental groups in wealthy countries have been attracted to pursuing their issues within the WTO. As the new liberalized regimes make it increasingly easy for large corporations to pursue their objectives of deregulation, the avenues for protection become narrower. The WTO appears to be the most promising forum for imposing discipline on these issues. For those who do not know the specific details of the trade agreements, it would appear logical that any regulation of trade should also regulate trade’s influence on labor and the environment. This would be logical and appropriate if the trade agreements were about trade and if they regulated the actions of corporations. But the trade agreements are not about trade as trade is normally understood: they are about guaranteeing the rights of corporations. They are enormously complex documents that do not regulate those engaged in trade (the corporations), but, rather as was noted earlier, the actions of governments that restrict the rights of international capital. As such, they are inherently incapable of regulating the actions of large international corporations. Any discipline of corporations is still left to states, and as states’ regulatory power declines (through race-to-the-bottom strategies fostered by global competition or by directives from the WTO), the will or ability to regulate weakens.
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So far the main proposals for regulation are aimed at the practices of developing countries. For example, the “core” labor rights proposed by international labor groups for inclusion in the WTO deal with child labor, slave labor, collective bargaining, prohibitions against discrimination, and equal pay (Russell 1998; Swenarchuk 2000). These are not issues that will affect most wealthy countries, since they tend to have at least minimal legislation on all of these issues. But poorer countries are often either too weak or have governments that are too corrupt to enforce these standards on the international corporations operating within their boundaries. Also, with a focus on “core labor rights” the spotlight on abuses will focus on less-developed countries and shift the debate away from the effects of trade agreements and liberalized markets on lessening legal protection elsewhere. Less-developed countries have not been supporters of labor and environmental clauses, and for good reasons. If strong social clauses are included in free trade agreements the effect on poor nations could be devastating. If poorer countries must abide by the employment and environmental standards of wealthy countries and at the same time maintain the same type of capitalist economic system that benefits wealthy, not poor countries, as is mandated by the trade and investment agreements, they will be put in impossible positions. They are essentially barred from pursuing collective-type public policies that might better meet their socio-economic needs. It must be stressed that the inclusion of social, labor, and environmental clauses holds little threat to corporations in wealthy countries. The corporations within their own national boundaries increasingly are escaping control, through the deregulation processes, and the very minimal requirements of the social clauses are easy to meet and pose no threat to business activities within wealthy nations. Aside from the differential impact these kinds of arrangements would have, setting up trade law as the template for all economic law must be avoided. The main concern is that as piecemeal attempts are made to construct an international regulatory regime through the trade agreements, these agreements will formally be constructed as the constitution for international society. Certainly international capital needs regulation by international institutions, but this has to be developed independently of trade and with international corporations, rather than nations, as the subject for law.
Strategy The question of whether it is possible to develop a strategy that would change the current trajectory is a serious question because sometimes in the history of the world the changing circumstances of the disadvantaged were so overwhelming and the power they confronted so great that no viable strategy was possible. That is, nothing these people did was going to change the outcome. The most obvious example was the power of Europeans over indigenous people in North America.The annihilation of the culture of these people and the people themselves did not occur because they chose the wrong strategies
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– they were brutally overwhelmed by superior political and economic power. In the current rush to “liberalize” markets governments themselves are now aggressively leading the assault on state powers and are excessively unreliable allies in attempts to regulate markets and protect collective interests. As the legal conditioning framework gets established on the international level the disadvantaged are faced with extremely serious problems: who, at the international level, represents women, labor, aboriginal people, racial minorities, and all the disadvantaged? And, equally significantly, how can the interests of civil society be realized in international economic law? In the face of such serious difficulties, proposals that aim for radical change in the design of international economic law appear utopian and are open to criticism as being exceedingly impractical under the prevailing circumstances. Discussions about the reinvention of globalization to “collectively define viable economic, social and political frameworks that can guarantee gender equality, sustainable livelihoods, and human rights for all” need to occur within the context of what currently exists.11 There needs to be a common vision of how an integrated global economy could be shaped, and feminists certainly need to be a part of this discussion. But there also needs to be a vision of how to deal with the immediate issue of capital control at the international level. It is crucial that feminists not pursue the path of least resistance, by supporting capital-controlling measures within the trade agreements themselves. This will divide the international feminist networks and have little effect on the enormous power of the international corporations themselves. The following will deal with only two of the many strategies that need a coherent analysis among feminists. It is important to note, however, that these strategies focus only on international institutions; feminists will obviously need to continue to pursue action at the local and national levels. Economic pluralism There is an urgent need to begin what will be a long-term project to counter the very politically successful propaganda of the right with regard to the efficiency of the self-regulating market.This could begin with analyses that show the economic inefficiencies and real human misery which follow from imposing a uniform economic system around the world. The call would be for an ability to recognize economic pluralism in international trade agreements. A tolerance for economic pluralism requires the recognition that different goals, conditions and cultures throughout the world require very different solutions to problems. One system, the Western system based on a US kind of economy and social system, will not serve the needs of all people in all circumstances. The attempt of international trade agreements to impose uniform economic and social policy worldwide creates impossible positions for people in countries that have vastly different problems and resources, in addition to different values and goals. People in various parts of the world have devised
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economic and social systems that are different from the US system because, in part, of the need to accommodate their own conditions, both geographical and cultural, that are extremely different. But countries are being forced to change many of these systems as a result of trade liberalization, and, however difficult it will be for many groups in wealthy countries, the problems arising from conformity are infinitely more serious for poor countries with very different types of social and economic organizations. In the process of demanding economic uniformity the corporate sector has taken away from less-developed countries innovative ways in which they might be able to find unique solutions to their problems. Poor countries will never be able to escape poverty if they are required to abide by the employment and environmental standards of wealthy countries while at the same time they are required to maintain a competitive, market-based economic system. The case for economic pluralism would be a natural political position for all feminists, but specifically for socialist feminists. In recent years the political activism of minority and disadvantaged groups has made more visible the different circumstances of groups of people in our society. This has led to the demand for distinct social policy to recognize these different needs. This pluralistic approach to public policy is an important starting point for an analysis that recognizes the need for pluralism in social and economic systems. As a strategy for international feminists, its overarching framework would cross the North–South divide that frequently inhibits a strong feminist voice in international issues. Any attempt to change the international rules seems an impossible task, particularly because the power of the corporate sector has been so enhanced by the changes in the trading rules so far. However, the very real likelihood of the failure of these policies to meet the needs of most of the people in the world is going to give new approaches a chance to flourish. But, this is obviously a very long-term vision because it is a strategy that is least likely to have the support of the major interests that have developed the world trading system and its laws as they now exist.This does not mean that this is a project that should be abandoned, but, rather, that it should be accompanied by visions of action that are possible under the current regime. Institutions to control capital A stronger regulatory regime to address the threats posed by liberalized financial markets has received attention, particularly in light of the vulnerability of all countries to the contagious effects of financial market failures. Financial deregulation and the consequent hyper-mobility of finance capital create problems that even those normally in favor of deregulated markets realize create a dangerous situation. But the destabilizing effect of deregulation on labor, the environment, and social systems has not yet reached the critical point to trigger serious thinking about international institutions to constrain corporate power.
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In designing new international institutions, the focus for discipline must shift from the nation to the international corporation.Virtually all of the international regulatory regimes work through the nation-state: they assume that states are responsible for the discipline of corporations. But the very rationale for capital mobility is to take advantage of the economic climate in countries that are either politically corrupt or too weak to protect their people or their environments. International institutions that disciplined corporations, rather than countries, would begin to replicate some of the work of national institutions, work that was effective when nations exerted more power over corporate behavior. Just as the WTO has been established to work internationally to expand markets, parallel institutions could be established to regulate the corporations engaged in international production. Corporations like Disney in Haiti, Shell in Nigeria and Canadian mining companies in Russia and Spain are not easily disciplined by the countries whose people and environments they exploit. These corporations understand the ways in which their operations outside wealthy Western nations offend, for example, the core labor standards which trade union groups want to see observed internationally. An international body that specifically regulated their behavior – one whose regulations were enforced with the same power that trade legislation is enforced – would obviate the need to rely on nations to control corporations which are often more powerful than the nations themselves. Related to the institutions to control capital is the need to establish, internationally, redistributive functions now in the purview of the nation-state. As long as enormous disparities exist worldwide, the corporate sector will be able to blackmail nations into submitting to their demands for a “favorable” climate for business. This redistributive function requires the ability for an international governing institution to raise money and to decide where money should go. Financing for global governance now relies primarily on taxing national governments, an approach which is not particularly fruitful for raising substantial amounts of money. Proposals to shift the burden from nation-states to the corporations that benefit from globalization include a tax on international financial transactions (the Tobin tax) in order both to discourage excessive speculation and to raise money. Another is to charge for the use of common global resources. Economic rents for resource use are common within many countries and this is a principle which could be expanded to deal with global resources which are currently “free.” Other possibilities suggested by the Commission on Global Governance are designed around market instruments for use of the international “commons,” including user fees for ocean, non-coastal fishing; parking fees for geostationary satellites; a surcharge on airline tickets for use of congested flight lanes; a charge on ocean maritime transport to control pollution; and special user fees for activities in Antarctica.12 These types of activities are taxed within national boundaries and it is reasonable that as the national boundaries are removed, international governance should be financed by the groups that benefit substantially from the globalization process.
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Conclusions Feminist political economy “has yet to move significantly from a critique to reconstruction.” (Mutari 2001: 396)
While feminist state-focused legal activity is recognizing the need to shift from the local and national to the international, the strategies for dealing with economic issues are exceedingly underdeveloped. The political strategies that we learned when dealing with national or sub-national governments are ineffective when governance is as anonymous and unresponsive as it is at the international level: the construction of an international economic legal regime has the state as its subject, something that in itself discourages participation by minorities or disadvantaged groups. Feminists have been concerned about the development of international economic law through trade agreements without the development of parallel laws that deal with labor, social, and environmental protections. But because the trade agreements have little control over the activities of international corporations the danger of insisting that the trade agreements deal with these issues is that these agreements can become established as the overarching framework for all international legislation, thereby subsuming basic social rights under the market-liberalizing objectives of those agreements. Rather, as international law gets constructed feminists should work for the separation of powers, not the integration of them under the auspices of trade. This does not mean that feminists can ignore the agreements and work only in other forums, but that the focus for the agreements should be on their details and the ways that they are being constructed.Their details, particularly as they are now being negotiated within the GATS, are extremely important in furthering the deregulation and privatization objectives of many corporate, government and quasi-governmental bodies. These objectives, particularly as they apply to social programs and any other state-centered activities, should be acutely monitored and ultimately opposed because they place at risk all of the programs that feminists and other equality-seeking groups have established within their national and sub-national governments.
Notes 1 It is common for books on feminist theory to structure an analysis on the distinction between different kinds of feminisms to deal specifically with liberal, socialist and radical feminism. See, for example, Bryson, V. (1992) Feminist Political Theory, London: Macmillan Press; Eisenstein, E. (1984) Contemporary Feminist Thought, London: Unwin; Freeman, J. (1975) The Politics of Women’s Liberation, New York: Longman; MacKinnon, C. (1989) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press; Jagger, A. (1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Brighton: Harvester; Spender, D. (1983) Feminist Theorists, London: Women’s Press; Tong, R. (1989) Feminist Thought, London: Unwin Hyman;Vickers, J., P. Rankin and C.Appelle (1993) Politics as if Women Mattered,Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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2 The argument that the actions of social movements must change with the greater integration of states is most commonly made in connection with the political changes in Europe. See, for example, Marks and McAdam (1999). 3 The exception is human rights law, which is a poor cousin to trade law – at least in terms of enforcement at the international level. 4 The concept of “market failure” is interesting because of its political associations. For neoclassical economists, it refers to the market’s failure to behave as they have theorized it should. 5 The extreme narrowness of these objectives is recognized within the WTO itself (Esty 2002). 6 Canada, in particular, has been aggressively pursuing trade liberalization policies both in the Americas and through the WTO (Clarkson 2002). 7 Texts of all WTO agreements can be found in World Trade Organization, the Legal Texts; available at http://www.wto.org/wto/. Also, see especially World Trade Organization Secretariat (1999) The GATS: Objectives, Coverage and Disciplines, Geneva:WTO. 8 Of course, this is the ultimate goal and the organization is acutely aware that it is a long way from fully achieving it. 9 Even economists who have firmly supported the development of the WTO in the past recognize the limits of neo-liberal principles for the realization of social welfare, economic development and democracy. See, especially, Stiglitz (2002). 10 This is the position of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 11 The quotation is from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) call for papers for its Ninth International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development, “Re-inventing Globalization,” Guadalajara, Mexico, October 2002. 12 See Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Bibliography Afshar, H. and C. Dennis (eds.) (1992) Women and Adjustment Policies in the Third World, London: Macmillan. Ayres, J. M. (1998) Defying Conventional Wisdom: Political Movements and Popular Contention against North American Free Trade,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Backhouse, C. (1999) Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bakker, I. (ed.) (1994) The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy, London: Zed Press. —— (ed.) (1996) Rethinking Restructuring: Gender and State Responses to Restructuring Canada,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bashevkin, S. (1998) Women on the Defensive: Living through Conservative Times, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benería, L., M. Floro, C. Grown, and M. MacDonald (2000) “Globalization and Gender,” Feminist Economics 6(3). Bergeron, S. (2001) “Political Economy, Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 26(4). Budlender, D. and R. Sharp (1998) How to do a Gender Sensitive Budget Analysis, London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Ciscel, D. H. and J. A. Heath (2001) “To Market, to Market: Imperial Capitalism’s Destruction of Social Capital and the Family,” Review of Radical Political Economics 33.
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Clarkson, S. (2002) Uncle Sam and US,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cohen, M. G. (1996) “New International Trade Agreements: Their Reactionary Role in Creating Markets and Retarding Social Welfare,” in I. Bakker (ed.) Rethinking Restructuring: Gender and State Responses to Restructuring Canada,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (1997) “From the Welfare State to Vampire Capitalism,” in P. M. Evans and G. R. Wekerle (eds.) Women and the Canadian Welfare State,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cohen, M. G., L. Ritchie, M. Swenarchuk, and L.Vosko (2002) “Globalization: Some Implications and Strategies for Women,” Canadian Woman Studies 21/2(4/1). Crossman, B. and J. Fudge (eds.) (2002) Privatization, Law and the Challenge to Feminism,Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Elson, D. (1995) “Gender Awareness in Modeling Structural Adjustment,” World Development 23(11). Esty, D. C. (2002) “The World Trade Organization’s Legitimacy Crisis,” World Trade Review 1. Grinspun, R. and R. Kreklewich (1994) “Consolidating Neoliberal Reforms: ‘Free Trade’ as a Conditioning Framework,” Studies in Political Economy 43. Hale, A. (ed.) (1999) Trade Myths and Gender Reality: Trade Liberalisation and Women’s Lives, Uppsala, Sweden: Global Publications Foundation. Hoekman, B. (2002) “Strengthening the Global Trade Architecture for Development: the Post Doha Agenda,” World Trade Review 1. Hurst, P. and G. Thompson (1996) Globalization in Question:The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance, London: Polity Press. IGTN (2001) WTO Fourth Ministerial Meeting, Policy Positions, November. McBride, S. (2001) Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. Macdonald, L. (1999) “Trade with a Female Face:Women and the New International Trade Agenda,” paper presented to the International Association of Feminist Economics annual meeting, Ottawa, June. Mahoney, K. E. (1999) “Gender and the Judiciary: Confronting Gender Bias,” in A Byrnes and K. Adams (eds.) Gender Equality and the Judiciary, London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Marks, G. and D. McAdam (1999) “On the Relationship of Political Opportunities to the Form of Collective Action: The Case of the European Union,” in D. Della Porta, H. Kriesi, and D. Rucht (eds.) Social Movements in a Globalizing World, London: Macmillan. Matthaei, J. (2001) “Healing Ourselves, Healing Our Economy: Paid Work, Unpaid Work and the Next Stage of Feminist Economic Transformation,” Review of Radical Political Economics 33. Mutari, E. (2001) “ ‘…As Broad as Our Life Experience’:Visions of Feminist Political Economy, 1972–1991,” Review of Radical Political Economics 33. Orford, A. (1998) “Contesting Globalization: A Feminist Perspective on the Future of Human Rights,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 8. Panitch, L. (1994) “Globalisation and the State,” in The Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism, London: Merlin Press. Pierson, R. and M. G. Cohen (1995) Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. II: Bold Visions, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Lorimer.
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Russell, B. (1998) Fighting for Workers’ Human Rights in the Global Economy, Geneva: International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Schneiderman, D. (2000) “Investment Rules and the New Constitutionalism,” Law and Social Inquiry 25. Shrybman, S. (2001) The World Trade Organization:A Citizen’s Guide, Ottawa: CCPA. Sinclair, S. (2000) GATS: How the WTO’s New “Services” Negotiations Threaten Democracy, Ottawa: CCPA. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents, New York: Norton. Swenarchuk, M. (2000) “The ICFTU Labour Clause Proposal: A Political-Legal Critique,” in S. McBride and J. R. Weisman (eds.) Globalization and its Discontents, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press. Tabb, W. K. (2000) “After Seattle: Understanding the Politics of Globalization,” Monthly Review 51(10). Upadhyay, U. D. (2000) “India’s New Economic Policy of 1991 and its Impact on Women’s Poverty and AIDS,” Feminist Economics 6(3). Weiss, L. (1997) “Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State,” New Left Review 255. Williams, M. (2001) “Free Trade or Fair Trade? DAWN Discussion Paper on the WTO,” unpublished paper. Wood, E. (1999) “Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation States,” Monthly Review 51(3).
Part II
Reembedding
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Earth democracy Vandana Shiva
Humanity seems to be in a freefall towards disaster.The ecological fabric of our existence is being torn apart, as the violence of corporate globalization combines with the violence of war on a planetary scale. Alternatives beyond war, nonsustainability and social and economic injustice are becoming a survival imperative. These alternatives need to combine our making peace with the planet and our making peace among people from diverse cultures. One is not possible without the other because the roots of terrorism, violence and war lie in environmental and economic exclusion and the insecurity it generates. People’s security does not lie in larger military budgets, bigger bombs and stronger police states. It lies in ecological and economic, cultural and political security. Rebuilding these multiple securities can recreate peace, justice and sustainability.
Economic globalization and ecological insecurity Climate change, species extinction and the destruction of water resources are threatening the very basis of our existence. Even as we attempt to grapple with the pollution and externalities of the first two industrial revolutions based on fossil fuels and chemicals, in the form of climate change and toxic pollution, a new threat in the form of genetic pollution (e.g. through biotechnology and genetic engineering) is being unleashed as part of a third industrial revolution. The fundamental principles of exercising caution and of holding polluters accountable have been trampled on in the stampede into the marketplace and from there into vulnerable ecosystems of potentially hazardous genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This phenomenon is part of a corporate-led globalization which is especially threatening to the economic and ecological security of the poor. While an attempt is being made to project resource conservation as anti-poor, it is the poor who pay the highest economic costs for resource privatization and destruction. Globalization, at the most fundamental level, is rewriting our relationship with the earth and her species, alienating land, water and biodiversity from local communities and transforming commons into commodities. Globalization is a break from all earlier stages of human relationships with the earth and her resources:
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It is based on enclosures of the remaining ecological commons – biodiversity, water and air – and the destruction of local economies on which people’s livelihoods and economic security depend.The commodification of water and biodiversity is ensured through new property rights built into trade agreements which are handing over people’s resources to corporate monopolies. The corporatization of food and agriculture is supposed to be guaranteed through the World Trade Organization (WTO) to be traded freely for profits – with a total indifference to the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of this commodification of life. It is based on new international regimes such as the Agreement on Agriculture and the Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank. In Orissa, one of the poorest Indian states, the World Bank and the Department for International Development, UK (DFID), are using Northern taxpayers’ money to privatize irrigation water, which now costs ten times more, thus destroying agriculture, the only livelihood of the poor. The transformation of commons and basic needs into commodities is ensured through shifts in governance, with decisions and rights moving away from communities and countries and towards global institutions, corporations and a handful of powerful states acting on the principle of “eminent domain” – the absolute sovereignty of their rule.This corporate takeover of vital resources and vital economic sectors has spawned antidemocratic formations and constellations. Instead of acting according to public trust doctrines and the principles of democratic accountability, globalization has pressured governments to usurp power from parliaments, regional and local governments, and local communities.
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For example, the Trade-Related International Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement was shaped by corporations and allows five corporations to effectively control seeds, plants, food and therefore health globally. It forces central governments to hijack the rights to biodiversity and knowledge from communities and assign them as exclusive monopolistic rights to corporations, who foresee a $1 trillion market in seeds. Centralized decision-making is being used by Monsanto to push its genetically modified (GM) crops and seeds, bypassing democratic decision-making and all concern for biosafety. The Agreement on Agriculture was shaped by global grain giants like Cargill and is premised on the removal of decision-making power from farming communities and regional governments. Governments are being forced to sacrifice their farmers and food security for export-led agriculture and the dumping of subsidized products on the markets of others, thus creating a regime of mutually assured destruction, in place of systems of food security. The General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) removes decisions and ownership over water from the local and public domain to the privatized, global domain. Future trade in water is assessed at $1 trillion by the World Bank. And, paradoxically, water privatization is carried out through water
Earth democracy 55 policies that make water the property of the state. This has already happened in the case of India. Land is privatized by using the government’s right to acquire land, often in violation of constitutional and community rights, as in the case of Bastar.This undemocratic process of privatization and deregulation has led to increased political and economic bankruptcy and corruption. It has also led to an increased concentration of power and ownership. Globalization has relocated sovereignty from people to corporations, through centralizing, militarizing states.The rights of people are being appropriated by states to carve out monopoly rights to give corporations control over our land, our water, our biodiversity and our air. States acting on the principle of eminent domain or absolute sovereignty of the state are undermining people’s sovereign rights and their role as trustees of resources according to the public trust doctrine. State sovereignty, by itself, is therefore not enough to generate countervailing forces and processes to corporate globalization. The reinvention of sovereignty has to be based on the reinvention of the state itself, because the state must be made accountable to the people. Sovereignty cannot reside only in centralized state structures; nor does it disappear automatically when the protective functions of the state with respect to its people start to wither away. A new partnership of national sovereignty needs empowered communities which assign functions to the state for their protection. Communities defending themselves always demand such duties and obligations from state structures. On the other hand, transnational corporations (TNCs) and international agencies promote the separation of community interests from state interests and the fragmentation and divisiveness of communities.
Corporate globalization and economic insecurity Both ecology and economics emerged from the same roots in the oikos – the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognized and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It provided for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was woman centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of improving human welfare, for the majority of people poverty and dispossession have increased. So-called “economic development” is leading to underdevelopment. While projecting growth, it is causing lifethreatening destruction. Far from benefiting the majority of people, it is both unsustainable and economically unjust. The dominant model of “economic development” has in fact become anti-life. It is this unsustainable model which is being globalized. Corporate globalization is creating economic insecurity worldwide as livelihoods are destroyed and basic needs are denied to millions. Contrary to free trade doctrines, the
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globalization of agriculture has allowed the dumping of subsidized, artificially cheap products, which are robbing small farmers of livelihoods, markets and incomes. Giant corporations controlling production and distribution are using subsidies to push up costs of production and push down the prices farmers receive for their product. It is this negative economics that is being globalized by the rules of the WTO and the imperatives of structural adjustment. The dominant economy is negative both in ecological terms and in financial terms when viewed from the perspective of the poor and women. It is ecologically negative in a dual sense: it is destructive of the resource base needed for our collective survival and it consumes more resources than it produces. The destruction and waste of resources are not taken into account, as an essentially unproductive unsustainable economy is pushed on the grounds of “development” and improving welfare. A typical argument used in promoting industrial agriculture like the “Green Revolution” earlier and genetic engineering in agriculture now is that only industrial agriculture and industrial breeding can increase food productivity sufficiently to feed a growing population. However, an increased number of mouths to feed implies more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. Since resources, not labor, are the limiting factor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labor productivity, which is the relevant measure.A sixtyfold decrease in food-producing capacity in the context of resource use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water and biodiversity to feed the world. An increase in labor productivity based on the displacement of farmers cannot reduce hunger. It actually decreases food entitlements by the destruction of livelihoods. A myth promoted by the one-dimensional monoculture paradigm is that biodiversity reduces yields and productivity, while monocultures increase yields and productivity. However, since yields and productivity are theoretically constructed terms, they change according to the context. Yield usually refers to production per unit area of a single crop. Planting only one crop in the entire field as a monoculture will of course increase its yield. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields of individual crops, but will have a high total output of food. The globalized negative economy of agriculture destroys biodiversity, soil and water. It also destroys rural livelihoods and creates hunger and starvation. When farmers have to spend more on production costs than they earn from selling their produce the economics is negative. Farmers are only kept afloat by subsidies. Rich countries spend $370 billion a year on such subsidies. The corporate farmers of California receive more than $500,000,000 in such subsidies. The New Farm bill (2002) increases US subsidies to agriculture by $73.5 billion, to $180 billion by 2008. This will artificially bring down prices worldwide, destroying millions of peasant livelihoods. It is not efficiency but subsidies which are lowering prices of farm commodities. It is the poor farmers and small farmers who are destroyed by the globalization of a negative economy. Thousands of Indian peasants have committed
Earth democracy 57 suicide because of the increasing costs of seeds and chemicals. Poor consumers also suffer. Starvation deaths have returned to India for the first time since independence. As 500 million Indians face starvation, 60 million tons of grain are rotting in storage because poor people cannot afford to buy food due to a fourfold increase in prices and the removal of food subsidies. Food denied to people is now being exported with subsidies. While the poor in India were paying Rs7,000 per ton for wheat and Rs11,300 per ton for rice, due to the withdrawal of subsidies exporters were getting food at the subsidized rates of Rs4,300 per ton and Rs5,650 per ton, respectively. This negative economics forces people out of production. It creates economic displacement and disposable people, people whose very right to survival is denied. A negative economy is based on pseudo-productivity and pseudo-surpluses. It is based on an illusion of growth, which hides the poverty and destitution it creates. The growth is, of course, real for the Monsantos – the seed, chemical and biotechnology industry – which has expanded markets even as farmers take their lives or sell their kidneys or their land. The growth is real for the Cargills, who buy cheap from farmers and sell processed food at high cost to consumers.The trade rules are aimed at benefiting the Monsantos and Cargills. An economics for creating scarcity and poverty is transformed into an economics for creating surpluses and growth through the magic of statistics. Food output is replaced by “high yield” categories; food security in the household and community is replaced by agricultural trade figures. Yields go up while output goes down; trade goes up while consumption by the poor goes down. Pseudo-surpluses hide starvation; superprofits hide a crisis of distribution. The economy that generates superprofits for the global corporations also generates ecological poverty for the planet and economic poverty for the poor. It is an economy that produces insecurity for all. And it is this economics of insecurity that is creating the politics and culture of insecurity. Globalization is fuelling extremism, terrorism, xenophobia and fundamentalism; and it deepens the destruction of nature, people’s rights and democracy.
The Great Betrayal: the road from WSSD to W$$D The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), organized in Johannesburg from 26 August to 4 September 2002, was supposed to have been the Earth Summit II – ten years after the Earth Summit organized in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Instead of Rio ⫹ 10, WSSD became Doha ⫹ 10. Recently the Ministerial Meeting of the WTO was organized in Doha to salvage the WTO negotiations for a new enlarged round which had failed in Seattle due to citizen protest and a walkout by smaller countries who had been marginalized and excluded in the negotiations. In one of its drafts the implementation document of WSSD mentioned Doha and the WTO fortysix times and Rio only once.The draft had been introduced undemocratically by the US and the European Union (EU), and, with minor modifications, was
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reintroduced by South Africa.There was no rebellion by governments against the surreptitious replacement of the sustainability agenda of Rio by the commercial and corporate agenda of the WTO. While the struggles of the poor in the South are related to their access and rights to natural resources – land, water and biodiversity – and hence are intrinsically environmental and ecological struggles, the WSSD was artificially presented as being about “poverty,” not about the “environment.” Globalization was then offered as the solution to poverty, and decisions that were aimed at robbing the poor of their remaining resources and hence making them poorer, such as the privatization of water, the patenting of seeds and the alienation of land, were being offered as measures for “poverty alleviation.” While the landless people and the movements against privatization marched for environmental and resource rights, globalization pundits kept repeating the mantra that the poor could not afford the “luxury” of their natural capital – they needed globalization. Globalizers pretend not to see that globalization would rob the poor of their resources, making them the property of global corporations, who would then sell water and seeds at high cost to the poor, thus pushing them deeper into poverty and threatening their very survival. During a PBS/BBC (Public Broadcasting System/British Broadcasting Corporation) debate in which I participated, industry spokespeople clearly said that imposing private property rights on natural resources was their first priority. Globalizing the non-sustainable, unethical, inequitable systems of ownership, control and use of natural resources was the main agenda at WSSD. The corporate hijacking of the Earth Summit was the overall outcome; WSSD had mutated into W$$D. But the implications go further than the hijack of one summit.These are dangerous trends for democracy.The substitution of multilateral, legally binding agreements (Type I outcomes) by so-called Type II outcomes in the form of private partnerships is a reflection of the privatization of states and the privatization of the United Nations (UN). The UN of “We the People” was transformed in Johannesburg into the UN of “We the Corporations.” It appeared to be an auction house where the earth herself was being put up for sale. For us in civil society the earth and our world are not for sale.That is why we withdrew our consent from the outcomes. When I had the opportunity to address the opening of the Civil Society forum with President Mbeki, I talked of how a global apartheid was being created by globalization after South Africa appeared to have won its domestic apartheid. President Mbeki made reference to “global apartheid” in his draft political declaration at the end of the Summit. He had intended to say: From the African continent, the Cradle of Humanity, we declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. Meeting in the great African city of Johannesburg, which bears testimony to how industrial activity can change the environment in a matter
Earth democracy 59 of decades, we recall the great social and economic divides we have seen. This is a mirror of our global existence. If we do nothing, we risk the entrenchment of a form of global apartheid. Unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor of the world may lose confidence in the democratic systems to which we are committed, seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling cymbals. The US forced South Africa to change that text and remove all reference to “global apartheid.” It thus contributed to the Summit being nothing more than “sounding brass or tinkling cymbals.” Only the governments of Norway and Ethiopia spoke up against attempts to make the Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) of Rio subservient to the trade rules of the WTO, and to dilute the proposals on corporate accountability that the Friends of the Earth campaign had successfully introduced into the text. The only other “victory” was the Women’s Alliance of Ministers and the women’s caucus preventing the removal of language relating to human rights in the context of health. In an age supposedly characterized by a clash of civilizations, the “clashing civilizations” – the US, the Holy See and the Islamic countries – were amazingly unified in seeing human rights in health as a threat to all shades and colors of patriarchy. The tragedy was that all “victories” were merely successes in preventing further regress – in terms of corporate accountability, multilateral environmental agreements and women’s health rights. Instead of governments committing themselves to conserving water and to defending and upholding the water rights of all their citizens, they were selling off water in privatization deals, even though water is not the property of the state but the commons cared for and shared by communities. The privatization of water commons is illegal and illegitimate in common property law, natural law and moral law. This is why there were protests against water privatization throughout the W$$D. That is why we withdrew our consent from the process.The police attacked one such protest on 24 August with stun bombs, injuring three people. During a television debate, a person displaced by a dam in Lesotho (a dam whose aim is to bring water to South Africa’s industry and towns) called money generated by water privatization “blood money.” The head of South Africa’s water supply replied, “I love blood money that creates wealth.” Johannesburg made it clear that the real clash of cultures is between cultures of life and cultures of death. The antipoverty movement, the justice movement, the sustainability movement and the ecology movement are actually one movement, the movement to defend the resources for sustenance and the right to sustenance as a natural right – a right that is not given by states and cannot be taken away by greedy corporations. Corrupt deals on pieces of paper cannot extinguish that natural right.
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This is why in Johannesburg the movements had the moral power, not the corporations or governments. The moral degradation of the ruling elites was also evident in the privatization of life through biotechnology and patents. Southern Africa has been made a victim of drought and famine under the joint impact of climate change and structural adjustment programs.The World Bank has forced countries to destroy and dismantle their food security systems. Severe drought and the lack of food security are creating famine conditions. More than 300,000 people face starvation. Famines caused by Western powers are now being used to market GMOs through food aid. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have refused to accept GMOs in food aid. The World Health Organization (WHO) was mobilized to force African countries to accept GM food. The US government made the force-feeding of Africans with GMOs a major issue.When Colin Powell, representing President George W. Bush, insisted on African countries importing GM food from the US in the closing plenary of the Earth Summit, he was heckled by both non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments. African farmers had come to Johannesburg with alternatives – small-scale indigenous agriculture supported by farmers’ rights to land, water and seed. The Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, organized ten years after the Rio Summit, which gave us the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Biosafety Protocol, was also reduced to a marketplace for pushing biotech on Africa. Hundreds of African farmers and government representatives condemned the US pressure to force GM-contaminated food aid. As civil society representatives from Africa stated: We, African Civil Society groups, participants to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, composed of more than 45 African countries, join hands with the Zambian and Zimbabwean governments and their people in rejecting GE [genetic engineering] contaminated food for our starving brothers and sisters: 1 We refuse to be used as the dumping ground for contaminated food, rejected by the Northern countries; and we are enraged by the emotional blackmail of vulnerable people in need, being used in this way. 2 The starvation period is anticipated to begin early in 2003; thus there is enough time to source uncontaminated food. 3 There is enough food in the rest of Africa (already offered by Tanzania and Uganda) to provide food for the drought areas. 4 Our response is to strengthen solidarity and self-reliance within Africa, in the face of this next wave of colonization, in the form of GE
Earth democracy 61 technologies, which aim to control our agricultural systems, through the manipulation of seed by corporations. 5 We will stand together in preventing our continent from being contaminated by genetically engineered crops, as a responsibility to our future generations. There was in fact not one Summit but many.There was the hijacked Summit at Sandton, the richest suburb in Johannesburg. To get to the Convention Center we had to pass a shopping mall. It was an appropriate symbol of a summit that became a market for the earth resources.There was a limp official NGO gathering at Nasrec.At St. Stithian’s School there was a celebration of the People’s Earth Summit, and in Soweto children gathered for a Children’s Earth Summit.The landless people and the small farmers had their own summits.The alternative summits were planning a people-centered, earth-centered agenda for the future. In the midst of corruption they were promoting courage and truth. In the midst of hopelessness they were creating hope. In the midst of violence they were creating non-violence. When, as civil society, we walked away from the official process on 4 September and withdrew our consent we did so in peace, in confidence and in joy. We were then brutally assaulted by the police of the apartheid era. We remembered Gandhi, who was also assaulted on another September 11th. Instead of responding to violence with violence, he shaped non-violence into the ultimate power of the weak and excluded. His satyagraha – the “force of truth” – was a different response from that to the events of 11 September 2001. His satyagraha is our inspiration. As we said in our statement issued from the People’s Earth Summit: We celebrate our common resolve to celebrate the diversity of human cultures and the integrity of our Planet Earth. We reaffirm that another world is possible and we shall make it happen. We are outraged that the World Summit on Sustainable Development, instead of being an Earth Summit, which reinforced the commitments made in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro to protect the Earth and strengthen the rights of the poor has been subverted by governments and corporations for their own ends at the expense of civil society and the Earth. We refuse to collaborate with laws and systems of governance that deny the most fundamental birthrights of people and our responsibilities within the Earth Community and to future generations. Our collective civil society statement issued on 4 September 2002, when we dissociated ourselves with deep concern from the outcomes of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, was simultaneously a declaration of our resolve and commitment.
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The decay of democracy and the rise of terrorism, fundamentalism and police states An economics of exclusion creates a political culture of exclusion. Nondemocratic economic systems that centralize control over decision-making and resources and displace people from productive employment and livelihoods create a culture of insecurity. Fundamentalist, extremist and exclusionary politics emerge to fill the void left by the collapse of a measure of economic democracy and the growth of economic security. Instead of identifying the root causes of economic insecurity in the global economy, every policy decision is translated into the politics of “we” and “they.” “We” have been unjustly treated, while “they” have gained privileges. Globalization is creating a global culture of insecurity, and insecure people can be made afraid of the “other” more easily. Destruction of resource rights and the erosion of the democratic control of natural resources, the economy and the means of production undermine cultural identity.With identity no longer coming from the positive experience of being a farmer, a craftsperson, a teacher or a nurse, or from the security of national sovereignty, culture is reduced to a negative shell where one identity is in competition with the “other” over scarce resources that define economic and political power. Positive identities mutate into negative identities: “I” am not the “other,” and annihilation and extinction of the other are necessary for my security and survival. A politics emptied of an economics of welfare becomes a negative politics of hatred and divisions on the basis of race, caste and religion. The rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France is an illustration of how the culture of insecurity created by globalization fuels xenophobia. Le Pen has a slogan of “French First” and he sees insecurity as the most severe problem, but he does not identify the erosion of French security with globalization, as José Bové does. Instead, his project is to link insecurity and immigration. It is not the removal of borders for foreign investment and foreign corporations which he sees as creating threats to French identity, culture and jobs. His exclusive focus is on immigrants. If barriers against people are not erected, according to Le Pen, France will be submerged; it will disappear. It is the WTOs and World Banks that create the Le Pens in France, the Fortuyns in the Netherlands, the Haiders in Austria, and the Narendra Modis in India.There is in fact a comfortable partnership between the supporters of globalization and the promoters of the politics of hate. By keeping people’s energies diverted from issues of basic needs and economic democracy, xenophobia, tribalism, ethnic and religious strife and nationalism help keep an unjust and inequitable economic order in place. During the worst violence since India’s independence, both GM crops and a new Patent Act were implemented. Corporations gain from globalization and its fallout in terms of social disintegration. I believe a new politics of hatred and intolerance is arising from the growing economic insecurity and the perception that the space required for
Earth democracy 63 survival is being squeezed into oblivion. Simultaneously, representative democracy is losing its base in economic democracy as decisions move out of countries and into global institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO and the boardrooms of global corporations. Politicians robbed of mandates to ensure people’s basic needs are moving to political agendas of exclusion to garner votes and stay in power. People’s economic security and democracy are both being systematically killed by the forces unleashed by globalization. Democracy emptied of economic freedom and ecological freedom becomes a potent breeding ground for fundamentalism and terrorism. Since the early 1980s I have witnessed conflicts over development and conflicts over natural resources mutate into communal conflicts, culminating in extremism and terrorism. My book The Violence of the Green Revolution was an attempt to understand the ecology of terrorism. Harvest of Rage drew similar links between the Oklahoma bombing and the US farm crisis, and how these create fertile ground for extremist fundamentalist ideologies and actions. Our international solidarities and our national sovereignties are evaporating and being replaced by the narrowest conceivable sense of who we are. Centralized economic systems also erode the democratic base of politics. In a democracy, the economic agenda is the political agenda.When the former is hijacked by the World Bank, the IMF or the WTO democracy is decimated. The only cards left in the hands of politicians eager to garner votes are those of race, religion and ethnicity, which subsequently give rise to fundamentalism. And fundamentalism effectively fills the vacuum left by a decaying democracy. Economic globalization is fuelling economic insecurity, eroding cultural diversity and identity, and assaulting the political freedoms of citizens. It is providing fertile ground for the cultivation of fundamentalism and terrorism. Instead of integrating people, corporate globalization is tearing apart communities. Globalization is creating negative economies, negative politics and negative identities. Rejuvenating, deepening and widening democracy have become a survival imperative for the human species. The reinvention of freedom in our times requires freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from denial of basic needs, freedom from non-sustainable and unethical production, and from unsustainable trade and consumption patterns. It requires a shift from negative economies, politics and culture to positive life-enhancing economies, political institutions and identities. Instead of addressing the root causes of terrorism and fundamentalism in the growth of economic insecurity and the collapse of economic democracy and ensuring people’s needs are met and their livelihoods protected, states across the world are equipping themselves with laws to shut down democracy and freedom in the name of fighting terror. Whether it is the Patriot Act in the US, the Prevention of Terrorism Act in India (POTA), or the AntiTerrorism, Crime and Society Act (ATCSA) of the UK, new laws created after 11 September 2001 are not just laws against terrorists; they are also laws
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against citizens’ democratic defense of their fundamental freedoms, which are being trampled upon by the forces of globalization. Fear and violence are currently the dominant forms of human expression. Rule through fear and violence is becoming the dominant mechanism for governance. In another period this would have been described as the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, with the totalitarianism of corporate control over markets combining with the totalitarianism of militarized states to deny people their fundamental rights and freedoms.
Earth democracy Why are we as a species destroying the very basis of our survival and existence? Why has insecurity been the result of every attempt to build security? How can we, as members of the earth community, reinvent security to ensure the survival of all species and the survival and future of diverse cultures? How do we make a shift from life-annihilating tendencies to life-preserving processes? How do we from the ruins of the dominant culture of death and destruction build cultures that sustain and celebrate life? A major source of threat to our ecological survival and growing culture of insecurity is rule and domination by abstract constructions and a denial of the real, the concrete, the life giving. This “escape” from our biological speciesbeing is historically rooted in the Cartesian/Newtonian divide between mind and matter, between objective and subjective, between primary and secondary qualities. In the reductionist mechanistic worldview, the constructed has primacy and is more real than reality itself. This domination of abstract construction over lived reality is based on division and separation – decontextualization and disembeddedness – and a blindness to the disintegration that results from an artificial separation of that which is interconnected. Atomization has become the dominant thought and practice. The false assumption of separability based on abstraction allows the emergence of lifethreatening technologies like genetic engineering and terminator seeds. It allows the dominance of corporations, mere legal fictions, over the lives of real people and citizens. It allows the destruction of real wealth in soil, water, biodiversity, good food and rich cultures, for the creation of a fictitious wealth of more than $3 trillion a day, which is nearly a hundredfold more than the real goods and services these dollars can command. Closely linked to the rule and reification of abstraction are dominant traits which threaten life in all its diversity, in its self-organization and its selfrenewal through the creation of a monoculture of the mind and the law of the excluded middle. The monoculture of the mind pushes into oblivion and extinction biological and cultural diversity, which are the very preconditions of ecological and cultural security. The law of the excluded middle becomes the basis of the legitimization of the exclusion that generates ecocide and genocide. It shuts out in-between species in nature and culture. It denies the existence of biodiversity on farms and food from forests.
Earth democracy 65 Once we break free of the mental prison of separation and exclusion and see the world in its interconnectedness and non-separability, new alternatives emerge. Despair turns to hope.Violence gives way to non-violence. Scarcity is transformed into abundance and insecurity into security. Globalization has “downsized” our humanity. It has replaced the diverse cultures of conservation and compassion with a global monoculture of consumerism. It has pitted community against community, neighbor against neighbor, faith against faith. Globalization, a paradigm based on competition and war, has created a world of many wars and multiple conflicts. We need once more to feel at home on the earth and with each other.We need a new paradigm to respond to the fragmentation caused by various forms of fundamentalism. We need a new movement which allows us to move from the dominant and pervasive culture of violence, destruction and death to a culture of non-violence, creative peace and life.That is why in India we started the Earth Democracy Movement. Earth democracy is based on creating living economies that protect life on earth and provide basic needs and economic security to all. It is based on a living democracy which is inclusive. The Earth Democracy Movement is a commitment to go beyond the triple crises of economic injustice and inequality, ecological non-sustainability, and the decay of democracy and the rise of terrorism. Earth democracy provides an alternative worldview in which humans are embedded in the earth and the family. We are connected to each other through love and compassion, not through hatred and violence. Ecological responsibility and economic justice replace greed, consumerism and competition as objectives of human life. In earth democracy, economy, politics and society move from negative systems that benefit a few in the short run to positive systems which ensure the fundamental right to life of all species and all peoples.The maintenance of life in all its diversity and integrity, rather than limitless extraction of profits through monopoly control over biodiversity, water and all vital resources, is the basis of relationships in earth democracy. Earth democracy embodies principles that enable us to transcend the polarization, divisions and exclusions that are pitting the economy against ecology, development against the environment, people against the planet and against one another in a new culture of hate. It is symbolized by Hindus visiting a Muslim shrine on their pilgrimage to Sabarimala, and by Wasiffudin Dagar, a Muslim singer, praying to Durga and Shiva, keeping the ancient Dhrupad tradition alive for a composite culture. It is symbolized by farms rejuvenating biodiversity and by species acting in mutuality to benefit one another. Earth democracy recontextualizes humans as one member of a rich, culturally diverse earth family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbkam). We are being ruled by terror, greed, fear and insecurity. As we face a double closure of spaces by corporate globalization and militarized police states, by economic fascism aided by political fascism, our challenge is to reclaim our freedoms and the freedoms of our fellow beings. Reclaiming and
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recreating the indivisible freedom of all species is the aim of the Earth Democracy Movement. The Earth Democracy Movement embodies two indivisibilities and continuums. The first is the continuum of freedom for all life on earth, and for all humans without discrimination on the basis on gender, race, religion, class and species.The second is the continuum between and indivisibility of justice, peace and sustainability – without sustainability and a just share of the earth’s bounties there is no justice, and without justice there can be no peace. Earth democracy is the democracy of all life, not just humans, and definitely not just humans privileged through class, race, gender and religion. Since other species do not vote, cannot lobby and have no purchasing power in the marketplace, earth democracy creates an obligation for humans to take their well-being into account. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama said on his sixtieth birthday,“All beings have a right to well being and happiness.We have a duty to ensure their well being.” This encourages and inspires us to accept responsibility as trustees and stewards rather than as masters, controllers and owners of the earth. Earth democracy supports diversity in nature and society in form and in function. When the intrinsic worth and value of every life form and every human is recognized, biological diversity and cultural diversity flourish. Monocultures result from exclusion and the dominance of one species, one variety, one race and one religion. Monocultures are an indication of coercion and a loss of freedom. Freedom implies diversity. Diversity signifies freedom. Earth democracy also nourishes diversity by going beyond the logic of exclusion of apartheid, of “us” and “them,” of either/or, of the law of the excluded middle. It is in the included middle that diversity and creativity flourish in nature and in culture. The law of the included middle also implies multifunctionality, the logic of “and,” of inclusion. It transcends the false polarization of wild versus cultivated, nature versus culture, or even the false clash of cultures. It allows for the forest farm and the farmed forest; it recognizes that biodiversity can be preserved and also support human needs. Through diversity replacing monoculture and multi-dimensionality replacing one-dimensional systems, the negative economics of scarcity creation can be replaced by the positive economics of mutually shared abundance, a guaranteed provision of basic needs and a guaranteed access to vital resources. Gandhi’s concept of swadeshi – of economic freedom and economic democracy – is at the core of earth democracy. Earth democracy puts responsibility and duties at the core of our relationships, with rights flowing from responsibility instead of the dominant paradigm of rights without responsibility and responsibility without rights. The separation of rights and responsibility is at the root of ecological devastation as well as gender and class inequality. Corporations that earn profits from the chemical industry or from genetic pollution resulting from GM crops do not have to bear the burden of
Earth democracy 67 that pollution. The social and ecological costs are externalized and borne by others who are excluded from decisions and from benefits. Rights to natural resources for maintaining life are natural rights. They are not given by states; nor can they be extinguished by states, the WTO or corporations, even though under globalization attempts are being made to alienate people’s rights to vital resources of land, water and biodiversity. Earth democracy shifts the constellation of power from corporations to people, and rebalances the role and functions of the state, which is increasingly taking on undemocratic forms. In the dominant constellation, non-sustainable and unjust economies are being kept in place by undemocratic governments. The erosion of economic and political democracy is giving rise to fundamentalist cultures: old divisions between “haves” and “have-nots” are mutating into new polarizations of the “lives” and “live-nots,” as millions are robbed of their very right to stay alive. The economic “apartheid” between the “lives” and “live-nots” is being translated into the genocidal tendencies of ethnic cleansing. Earth democracy is not dead; it is alive. Under globalization, democracy, even of the shallow representative kind, is dying. Governments everywhere are betraying the mandates that brought them to power.They are centralizing authority and power, both by subverting the democratic structures of constitutions and by promulgating ordinances that stifle civil liberties. The September 11th tragedy has become a convenient excuse for anti-people legislation worldwide. Politicians everywhere are turning to xenophophic and fundamentalist agendas to get votes in a period when economic agendas have been taken away from nation-states and are being set by the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and global corporations. The Earth Democracy Movement is about living rather than dead democracy. Democracy is dead when governments no longer reflect the will of the people but are reduced to anti-democratic, unaccountable instruments of corporate rule under the constellation of corporate globalization, as the Enron and Chiquita cases make so evident. Corporate globalization is centered on corporate profits. (Enron was the famous case in the US of corporate “accounting” fraud. Chiquita involved the questionable tactics of the corporate giant in manipulating decisions of the Honduran government.) The most basic right we have as a species is survival, the right to life. Survival requires guaranteed access to resources. Commons provide that guarantee. Privatization and enclosures destroy it. Localization is necessary for recovery of the commons. And earth democracy is the movement to relocate our minds, our production systems and our consumption patterns from poverty-creating global markets to the sustainability of sharing of the earth community.This shift from global markets to earth citizenship is a shift of focus from globalization to localization of power, from corporations to citizens. Privatization based on exclusive rights of corporations to vital resources like biodiversity and water is an enclosure of the commons. Reversal of this
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enclosure requires a recovery of the commons through a combination of actions at three levels: 1
2
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At the local level, the recovery of the commons needs the strengthening and assertion of local community rights and people’s sovereign and natural rights to vital resources such as water and biodiversity. At the national level, the recovery of the commons requires a recognition of local community rights and a reinvention of sovereignty, and a shift from the state functioning according to the doctrine of eminent domain to the state functioning on the public trust doctrine. At the global level, the recovery of the commons requires a movement of people to keep water and biodiversity beyond monopoly, ownership and commodification, which in turn prevents the patenting of life forms and the privatization of water.These principles need to be enshrined in international law and policy. They become the source of popular democratic pressure to reform the WTO and the World Bank, to implement a review of TRIPs in which countries of the South are calling for the exclusion of life forms from patentability and a review of structural adjustment programs which impose export-led agricultural strategies and policies of water privatization.
The citizen treaties to defend water and biodiversity as commons will have democratic power and substance to the extent that they reflect the recognition of and the strengthening of local community rights at the global level. Global commons not built from or based on local commons are an ecologically and democratically fraudulent category.The global commons is merely a recognition and reinforcement of local community rights. It is not the level at which rights are exercised or assigned. Since sovereignty based on the doctrine of eminent domain is becoming the conduit for global usurpation of people’s resources, and undermining of people’s sovereign rights, reclaiming biodiversity and water commons must go hand in hand with reclaiming sovereignty and redefining a new partnership between people and governments on the basis of the public trust doctrine.The reclamation of sovereignty embodies Gandhi’s concept of swaraj or self-rule. Beginning with people’s everyday actions, earth democracy offers a potential for changing the way governments, intergovernmental organizations and corporations operate. It creates a new paradigm for global governance while empowering local communities. It creates the possibility of strengthening ecological security while improving economic security. And on the foundations of ecological and economic security it makes societies immune to the virus of communal hatred and fear. Earth democracy offers a new way of seeing in which everything is not at war with everything else but in which we cooperate to create peace, sustainability and justice.
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Earth democracy: justice, sustainability and peace Ecological democracy: democracy of all life We are all members of the earth community. We all have the duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and all people. No humans have the right to encroach on the ecological space of other species and other people, or to treat them with cruelty and violence. The intrinsic worth of all species and peoples All species, humans and cultures have intrinsic worth. They are subjects, not objects of manipulation or ownership. No humans have the right to own other species, other people or the knowledge of other cultures through patents and other intellectual property rights. Diversity in nature and culture Defending biological and cultural diversity is a duty of all people. Diversity is an end in itself, a value, a source of richness, both material and cultural. Natural rights to sustenance All members of the earth community, including all humans, have the right to sustenance – to food and water, to safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space. These rights are natural rights, they are birthrights given by the fact of the existence of life on earth, and are best protected through community rights and commons. They are not given by states or corporations; nor can they be extinguished by state or corporate action. No state or corporation, through privatization or monopoly control, has the right to erode or undermine these natural rights or enclose the commons that sustain all. Earth economy is based on economic democracy and living economy Earth economy is based on economic democracy. Economic systems in earth democracy protect ecosystems and their integrity; they protect people’s livelihoods and provide basic needs to all. In the earth economy there are no disposable or dispensable species or people.The earth economy is a living economy. It is based on sustainable, diverse, pluralistic systems that protect nature and people and are chosen by people for the benefit of the common good. Living economies are built on local economies Conservation of the earth’s resources and the creation of sustainable and satisfying livelihoods are most caringly, creatively, efficiently and equitably
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achieved at the local level. Localization of economics is a social and ecological imperative. Only goods and services that cannot be produced locally, using local resources and local knowledge, should be produced non-locally and traded long distance. Earth democracy is based on vibrant, resilient local economies which support national and global economies. The global economy does not crush and destroy local economies. Living democracy Earth democracy is based on local living democracy, with local communities organized on the principles of inclusion, diversity and ecological and social responsibility, and thus having the highest authority on decisions relating to the environment, natural resources and the sustenance and livelihoods of people. Authority is delegated to more distant levels of governance on the principle of subsidiarity. Earth democracy is living democracy. Living knowledge Earth democracy is based on earth-centered and community-centered knowledge systems. Living knowledge is knowledge that maintains and renews living processes and contributes to the health of the planet and people. It is also living knowledge in that it is embedded in nature and society, and is not abstract, reductionist and anti-life. Living knowledge is a commons; it belongs collectively to communities that create it and keep it alive.All humans have a duty to share knowledge. No person or corporation has a right to enclose or monopolize patent or exclusively own as intellectual property living knowledge. Balancing rights with responsibility In earth democracy, rights are derived from and balanced with responsibility. Those who bear the consequences of decisions and actions are the decisionmakers. Globalizing peace, care and compassion Earth democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict. Earth democracy globalizes compassion, not greed; and peace, not war.
Bibliography Dyer, Joel (1988) Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning, Boulder, CO:Westview Press. Shiva, Vandana (1992) The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, London: Zed Books.
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The imperative of the social bond After the triumph of markets Daniel Drache
For most of the time since the early 1980s, market fundamentalism in its many formulations has relied on markets as the ultimate gold standard against which all public policies were valued and compared. Today communities and regions are looking for stronger, more effective and more transparent public authorities unencumbered by and less subservient to unaccountable market forces. It has long been argued that markets should be embedded in social institutions, arrangements and practices. The two questions now at the top of the agenda are: is globalization likely to be embedded any time soon? And how will globalization foster a just society? This chapter examines a dynamic sense of the common good, or what I call the social bond. The social bond is the ethical-normative dimension of public policy arising from the relations, institutions and practices which we share in common. If we believe that globalization can be tamed, protecting the social bond is a high priority. For many countries a “thick and sinewy” social bond operates to limit the intrusiveness of markets at the micro and also at the macro public policy level. A social bond requires institutional protection, a vibrant civil society and public values to limit the reach of markets. A proactive public authority is needed to support the social bond and the active goal of building inclusive societies. In many jurisdictions the state is no longer seen as the frontline agency to contain private interest and defend public need. It is evident that the legacy of Thatcher liberalism is still with us, as “things public” are attacked as being too expensive and bureaucratic. This loss of a vital and pragmatic confidence in the public has left a void which has yet to be filled.This chapter examines the pressures and forces pushing for the re-emergence of the public domain in its multidimensional aspects. The public good normally refers to obligations, responsibilities and undertakings that are no longer exclusively defined by membership in a nation-state of birth or adoption. Rather, in this global age our identities are increasingly pluralistic, multiple and diverse.They are defined behind the border where our primary loyalties reside, at the border with those in neighboring jurisdictions and beyond the border as citizens of the planet. Identity politics cut across the left–right spectrum and have forced realignment in the way politics are
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defined and practiced (Isin and Turner 2002). International civil society has grown stronger and more influential locally and globally, while, paradoxically, fewer people on the planet are exercising their right to vote. Multilateralism from below has given bold voice and not insignificant “nixing” power to those outside the formal political system intent on preventing the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international regulatory bodies of governance from conducting their business behind closed doors. International civil society, the expression of transnational dissent, has put governments on notice.The critical message conveyed by highly articulate civil society actors is that, in the absence of any imminent socialist renewal globally, governments must rethink many of their strategic long-term goals and practices with respect to human rights, the environment, and health and labor standards. Socialists too should not forget that social inclusion embodies many of the fundamental values and principles of Marxist humanism.
Citizenship and the emergence of the public No society can indefinitely support a laissez-faire system in which private need and individual greed triumph over public interest. The challenge is to define short- and medium-term strategies and practices to build inclusive societies and define in new and compelling ways a modern ideal of citizenship. The substantive issue will always be where to draw the boundary line between the public interest and private rent-seeking actors.This line has never been static. Historically, private property was boundless in its appetite and energy to appropriate the collective goods of every society. The modern idea of the public began, paradoxically, with the tragedy of the commons in the 17th century as the commons were enclosed and common land privatized (Marquand 1988). The family became the preserve of publicly sanctioned morals, which advanced a culture of possessive individualism, and the law was also utilized to ensure the sanctity of the contract and to enforce master–servant privileges in hiring practices and workplace organization. Since the Enlightenment every modern society has made decisions that reassert the public and the public good and establish those goods and assets which are owned in common and are not traded on the open market. The public was an initially contested and seemingly subversive idea that threatened established order and hierarchy, but it quickly developed support and policy legs, becoming much more complex and powerful as it evolved. Our idea of the public is intimately connected with the modern ideal of citizenship. Citizenship is exercised in public, so the public interest has had to be defended by democratic means, including literacy movements, an informed and free press, and the growth of public opinion independent of the state and powerful vested interests. Public opinion, born in the coffee houses of London, Paris and Berlin, had to be organized to acquire a voice and institutional presence. These two qualities gradually transformed it into a political
The social bond after the triumph of markets 73 force in cities as well as the countryside.The growth of popular penny newspapers, both sensational and informative, and later modern electronic media must be seen as part of the toolkit of democratic citizenship (Drache 1995). After the French Revolution, the idea of “rule by the people” captured the imagination of people everywhere. Citizenship in a national community would become the unique legal and political concept on which every nation-state rested. In the 18th and 19th centuries the terms “public” and “citizenship” were highly ambiguous and substantively vacant because industrial societies everywhere were neither particularly democratic nor visibly inclusive. These were pyramid societies, tiny at the apex and held together at the bottom by discipline, control, threat, consensus, socialization and the legal power vested in the dominant classes and the state. The non-state world of the public did not appear spontaneously (Taylor 1995; Walzer 1983). “Things public” required an institutional legal foundation, badly needed resources for civil society, mass democratic political parties and a democratic public administration. These features are never easy to achieve even under the best of circumstances and it would take the better part of a hundred years of protest and change to realize.
Constructing the public History instructs us that initially the public sphere had a constricted existence, one largely concerned with issues of personal security for the propertied classes. It also included public goods like roads and proper sanitation facilities in cities. Its autonomy was precarious and often in question because there was no clearly articulated public interest.The social classes that benefited most from limitations on property rights were regarded as a dangerous element. Citizenship was rudimentary and not yet a legal category with judicial clout. Certainly the masses had few rights guaranteed by law and were little more than subjects commanded and ordered about in the workplace and conscripted into the king’s armies. Towards the end of the 19th century in Europe and North America the public became identified with building a sophisticated industrial infrastructure, including schools, roads, railways, public housing, and urban reform. Keegan (1999) argues that the need for an effective fighting army required public authority to improve health and living standards for the average conscript. Diet and personal hygiene would necessitate the enforcement of public health standards in the 1880s. Still later, as the 20th century unfolded, the public became indistinguishable from social welfare policies and programs (Arthurs 2001). Redistributive programs in health and education as well as the provision of jobs and other forms of security in the labour market, expanded the notion of the public and expectations of citizenship. Social democrats and other radicals correctly insist that these formal guarantees of collective and individual rights – free speech, free press, freedom of religion, legal representation, and access to justice and due process – that the law was supposed to protect have not lived up to their promise in
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societies rent by antagonistic class cleavages. For much of its history capitalism has valued property rights over social need. Democracy co-existed uneasily with the market, and deeply entrenched property rights slowed the spread of democracy. Not surprisingly, citizenship entitlements were often regarded as formal promises with little effect when the social bond was at risk. A stronger sense of belonging needed much stronger modes of intervention that went beyond the legal category. Citizenship rights had to be protected internationally from national governments that denied citizens their rights. For many of the same reasons, human rights abuses globally required the international community to establish norms and standards in international law. Post-1945, the singular explosion in the growth of human rights legislation internationally dramatically altered beyond recognition the “quasi-organic” relationship between the citizen and the state (Etzioni 1968).
Inclusion, exclusion and the failed notion of the public Since the Enlightenment, it has been clear that this shared sense of what is “in the public domain,” as opposed to the private domain of self-interest, was not fixed for all time. It has changed as circumstances require. To determine what was in the majority’s interest involved a class of decision-making procedures that would draw lines, admitting some things while leaving others out. It has become clear, since the 1980s, that the welfare state was not as universal in its entitlements as many of its architects assumed. It had its own gender and other biases. Indeed, Europeans discovered to their shock and amazement that there were silos of exclusion inside social Europe’s many programs. Because of their gender, sexual orientation or physical disability, the disqualified and marginalized did not fit the conventional norm of an industrial wage earner with a family. They were shunted to the margins of society to live as outcasts – excluded and stigmatized.Their numbers were often significant but those in authority hardly noticed their presence, and when they did there was no imperative to remove the obstacles to inclusion. Even 20th-century democracies have seen that defining members of the national community is a tricky business. Having a well-endowed public with a full range of functioning institutions that enforce the rule of law provides no guarantee that all will be treated fairly by society. The persistent dilemma is that the rights and freedoms of minorities are often not respected in a system of majority rule. Minority rights are frequently trampled underfoot. For example, Canada voted for conscription in World War II, overruling the Quebec minority who passionately opposed it. The language rights of ethnic groups have often been ignored, repressed or crushed by intolerant majorities that demand the minorities assimilate and speak English. In many advanced societies sexual conformity to the heterosexual ideal type used to be enforced by law, and non-compliance was subject to criminal prosecution. Gay couples had a second-class status in most societies until the 1980s and the majority routinely denied them their rights.
The social bond after the triumph of markets 75 Democracy has produced and reproduced exclusion as a social fact even though political rights broadened dramatically after World War II. If the law defines community as “those whose freedom it realizes and defends together” (Taylor 1995: 266), then it is not difficult to see why popular sovereignty has failed many sub-groups, national minorities and others who have not been able to see themselves as part of the larger sovereign people. Quebecers, First Nations and Basques are but a few contemporary examples for whom popular sovereignty has failed to be inclusive. National minorities have been kept on the outside looking in, excluded on the questionable grounds of nationalism, public security, linguistic needs and social cohesion.
Building sanctuaries where the market is ring-fenced The critical issue of establishing the boundary between private interest and public purpose is intensely important, particularly at a time of global economic interdependence. Every society has need of common resources, places, spaces and services – diverse kinds of sanctuaries and protected social space maintained by the public interest, which fosters a vibrant practice of collective responsibility. The public domain should be seen as a complementary site of social life, a safe haven where the citizen moves from being a passive to an active agent to secure and protect fundamental political and economic rights. The need for a strong and resilient public domain alerts us to the fact that social goods of all kinds, from human security to sustainable environmental practices, can and do override entrenched private property rights in many instances. The imperative associated with these collective necessities furnished by the public domain is also compelling because its message is both direct and democratic – it is that the environment, labor standards, the organization of a better life and redistributive goals all need the collective “we.” Also, it speaks to the concern that the goods and services owned in common belongs to us – the people – not to them, private rent-seeking actors who put self-interest before the collective need. It has long been recognized that civil society has a strong public domain component built into it. Civil society, created by the state and by emancipatory movements from below, is defined as the complex relations between non-market and non-state actors. Putnam’s (1995) liberal definition adds a vital dimension where civil society includes the individual civic engagements of local commitment, a reaction to markets exceeding their boundaries and the need for a collective strategy to empower society and mobilize its collective resources for both basic and complex needs.
Our toolkit: what’s in the garden shed? The basic problem is that, with the Washington Consensus (see p. 76) more contested than ever, we have a shortage of ideas in our toolkit to rethink “things public.” How can we frame alternative visions to the challenge of globalization and reinforce domestic institutions?
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The principal obstacle is that there is no institutional provision at the global level for elementary social justice, the delivery of social goods globally and other non-income objectives. So far, global economic management as championed by anti-globalization activists is very far from the principal goals of generating better human services such as income security, gender equity, sustainable housing and healthcare, and a more just world (Bello 2000). All of these policy agendas would require new kinds of agency and voice both globally and locally. Globalization, as we have experienced it, is largely defined by efficiency/competition values and beliefs. It has not integrated the economic imperative of development with an explicitly ethical commitment to a plan for a socially inclusive global economy. At its best, public policy in the North and the South aims at the minimization of public bads, but this is largely a reactive process. For instance, Mexico spends approximately 4 percent of its national budget on healthcare. Brazil devotes less than 3 percent of its budget to poverty alleviation. The best researchers on poverty in Mexico estimate that over 40 percent of the population live at or below the poverty line, defined as having 50 percent of the median income. In many countries, after-market income is flat or negative for the bottom 40 percent of wage earners. Significantly, the trend line in many jurisdictions is that taxes on consumer goods and personal income have increased, while government expenditures have been cut to meet tough new zero-inflation targets. New initiatives are always needed to address the social side of development, but so far the existing macroeconomic framework of market fundamentalism puts macro-economic stabilization goals before redistributive and spending priorities. One of the best empirical sources through which to grasp the magnitude of the macro-economic imbalance between the global and local is Rodrik’s seminal study Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (1997). In it he demonstrates that there is no systematic relationship between a country’s commitment to tariff reduction and its future economic growth rates. For many countries trade liberalization has led to lower growth rates and greater income polarization. This is very much the case in many Latin American countries but it is also true for Canada and the US. Unplanned economic integration driven by market forces places enormous downward pressure on the most vulnerable in the labor market.
The troubled Washington Consensus The Washington Consensus policy package promised improved efficiency and productivity, more choice for consumers, reduction of poverty, increased accessibility to information, stronger democratic regimes, reduction in corruption and better health and education services through private initiatives, lower debt, zero fiscal deficit, more affordable public housing and a dramatic breakthrough on best-practice environmental sustainability. What Rodrik’s (2001) empirical data proves is that the gulf between the goals and
The social bond after the triumph of markets 77 the outcomes of market fundamentalism has widened. The failure to produce an adequate supply of public goods and services in Latin America has crippled growth prospects and reduced per capita incomes to 1950s levels. If the intention of Washington Consensus policies was to promote the institutional democratic reforms necessary to transform many Southern countries into successful global actors, it has failed. The effects have been very far from this primary objective. Social inclusion is never automatic; it requires a strong public authority to invest in social capital, public goods and job skills development. Government has to do much more and do it more effectively. Smaller governments and fewer taxes, in the end, only reinforce the downward cycle of social exclusion. With one half of the globe living on under $2 a day in substandard housing, with inadequate nutrition and without access to safe drinking water, social inclusion remains a distant goal and not an imminent reality (United Nations Development Program 2002). Building socially inclusive, democratic societies requires a very different notion of “things public” and the norms and practices of governance. Some community-based groups want less state and more civil society. Others want a stronger regulatory presence. Devolution and decentralization are often seen as key components of public policy reform (Garrett and Rodden 2001). But none of these agendas are complete and they often work at cross-purposes to the end goal of building accountable, democratic forms of governance that effectively reduce the intrusiveness of markets. As the old notion of a state-centered public culture is being challenged and refashioned, increased pressure on governments to do better in managing the global economy creates the possibility for new political forms at the local as well as the supra-national level. In the advanced capitalist world what passes for the public is no longer bound by the welfare state. For the developmental state of the Southern world, state bureaucracies no longer possess the high politics, the prestige or the capacity of their nation-building periods.The state in the developing world is often resource poor, weaker and more disorganized compared to what it was in the early 1990s. Public expenditures measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are at significantly lower levels despite population growth and pressures to modernize (Garrett and Nickerson 2001). An important part of “the public interest” is increasingly identified as being outside state authority and hierarchy. In practical terms, though, it is difficult to see how new forms of effective regulation will not require the strong and steady hand of state regulators. Indeed, the collapse of Enron, the criminal proceedings against Arthur Andersen, the giant US multinational business consultancy and accounting firm, and the recent landmark settlement for over $1 billion signed by 10 of Wall Street’s largest investment banks have put re-regulation on the front burner of public debate even if legislatures are slow to enact new standards.The need for a strong public authority to police corporations has opened a Pandora’s box for US elites. It could mean very little; on the other hand, it
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could lead to new ways to rebuild a modern notion of the public domain. A modern public domain includes the many goods, ideas and practices that reside and flourish in the public sphere, such as accountability, trust, reciprocity, redistribution and equity. When effectively present and properly endowed, these market-limiting social constraints have immediate distributive impacts at the local level.They do, though, require legal enforcement. The European Union (EU), for example, has given the market much smaller scope to undermine the public delivery of goods and services. It provides more non-negotiable goods and mixed goods from public housing, universal healthcare and day-care, to job retraining. No European country, including the UK, has been prepared to spend important political capital on flattening national diversity. The social democratic countries of Europe have rejected making themselves overdependent on the neo-liberal principles of privatization, deregulation and structural adjustment policies. In comparison to the Anglo-American model, the EU is certainly committed to a larger public domain as a policy priority. Supiot insists that “la culture juridique domimante continue de dresser un mur entre le privé et le public,” not in an absolute way but in a powerful one nonetheless (Supiot 2000: 13). The wide-open deregulation typical of the US is a no-go in the EU, which continues to value social policy goals and programs that enhance solidarity and equity. But social solidarity goals alone do not eliminate many sources of inequality, and the persistence of visible barriers to minorities and first-time participants entering the labor market provide evidence that social Europe has not conquered entrenched inequality trends. Certainly, since the early 1990s in the EU social exclusion has been tied to long-term joblessness, youth unemployment, poverty and racism and has been very much in the public eye. Had the EU dismantled its welfare state, social exclusion, inequality and long-term unemployment would have reached American levels. The absence of consensus for promoting narrow-gauge harmonization of public authority reflects the existence of strong social democratic values and governments that are highly skeptical of unplanned economic integration. For instance, Germany and Britain are not willing to give up their national veto on social security to aid the freedom of movement of workers. Germany and France, for constitutional reasons, cannot accept a single EU policy with respect to asylum and immigration policies. France opposes a common EU trade policy on services and intellectual property because it regards culture as a “non-tradeable commodity” and wants to safeguard it from Anglo-American attempts to treat it otherwise. France prefers its own voice in international trade negotiations and is not prepared to leave trade negotiations to Brussels. Britain, Luxembourg, Ireland and Sweden want to keep a grip on tax policy, including moves to prevent tax fraud and the updating of current tax rules. All of these divergent trends are evidence of the fact that, although the state is making a comeback, there is no one-size-fits-all template characterizing the public in the postwar period (Ferrera et al. 2000).
The social bond after the triumph of markets 79
Convergence is everywhere but in the numbers: what does the empirical evidence reveal? Certainly there is no evidence of a single emergent global state culture. Privatization, deregulation and downsizing in the development state of the South and the welfare state of the North have resulted in both anticipated and unanticipated effects.Among these are: •
•
•
There is a convergence in public policy goals and frameworks across entire regions to promote trade liberalization, new investment rights for business and fiscal stability. By contrast, policy outcomes are very different and cannot be explained by neo-liberal principles. The oneworld framework has produced a huge array of divergence in state practices and behavior with respect to fiscal, labor market, and social policy spending between jurisdictions. The growth of strongly divergent practices reflects the central importance of institutions and economic culture in affecting market behavior and multinational corporate strategies (Picciotto 2001). The delivery of traditional services such as day-care, school meals and security continues to be provided by public authority, particularly at the local and regional level. Public authority also remains responsible for the maintenance of public places and spaces, as well as for issues such as homelessness and street youth.There is a large public sphere operating in all countries. It is important to distinguish privatization from underfunding and cutbacks. Privatization leaves public authority no capacity to provide critical social services. In contrast, underfunding is more easily corrected by new budgetary spending.Within Canada the provinces have responded in very different ways to the smaller-state hypothesis. For instance, Quebec introduced publicly funded childcare, while Ontario was cutting social programs. As there is no single template the many changes are not easily categorizable (Banting et al. 1997). Downsizing the state in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has not led to a significant dismantling of state authority in the advanced group of Northern countries. Regulatory and redistributive welfare-state programs are very much in evidence in EU countries and have not been abandoned even though political elites have accepted new restrictions on state spending. High-tax, high-skill, high-wage economies remain as distinct as in the past. Scandinavian countries are big spenders and by comparison the UK is a smaller spender – a pattern that has remained relatively stable since the 1960s. Recently the gap between social Europe and market US has widened, and there is no convergence between these two models. Despite all the changes, state–market relations in social market economies are as different from the US laissez-faire model today as they were in 1992 (Weaver 2000).
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•
Within the Anglo-American model there are strong visible differences between Canada and the US with respect to health and social spending, taxation, trade union representation, redistribution and poverty. Canada remains strongly positioned at the collective end of the spectrum, while the US has become less redistributive, less social-welfare oriented and more individualist. When Clinton dismantled the US welfare state in 1996 Canada took no equivalent measure.Today there is only one welfare state and it is north of the 49th parallel. There is no equivalent array of programs to protect vulnerable Americans, and this has transformed social standards in North America. Nor did neo-liberalism produce an acrossthe-board convergence in public policy. Canada remains strongly redistributive when compared to the US despite being economically dependent on the US as its primary export and investment market. Among Southern countries there is as much divergence as convergence in macro-economic practices. Structural adjustment has produced a checkerboard effect in Latin America. Brazil has a record fiscal surplus on the primary account but disposable per capita income has been flat or negative. Mexico has recorded a strong trade performance but GDP growth is low and unemployment is dangerously high. Argentina defaulted on its $160 billion debt and continues to spiral out of control. Throughout Latin America debt levels have increased annually, while inflation has stabilized. There is a decline in social investment and a shortage of public goods in many countries. Markets have overreached and underperformed, often resulting in industry-wide failure. The volatility of market signals has been highly intrusive to national sovereignty capacity-building throughout the hemisphere. There is no single template that explains such a diverse range of responses. What no one disputes is that throughout the region poverty and marginalization have reached levels not seen since the 1950s (United Nations Development Program 2002).
•
What do all of these different evidentiary-based trend lines reveal about new state forms and practices? The most important conclusion is that the public is more complex and resistant to attack by neo-liberal reforms than is usually recognized. The public sphere has not buckled, but it is smaller and often less coherent than it once was. Second, since the end of the Cold War there is no single model of public authority, no one-size-fits-all for the North or the South. Diversity is the rule and national particularity the institutional benchmark. We need to be clearer about the first principles and normative practices that push society towards the social exclusion end of the spectrum at the expense of the social bond. Further, we need to locate indicators that speak directly to the way policy intervention affects outcomes and often becomes a permanent obstacle to inclusion. What are some of the causal connections and social determinants of public solidarity and inclusivity (Drache 2003)?
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Social inclusion: sorting out what we mean To dismantle barriers to inclusion all people must share in the benefits of society, have access to them and participate to the fullest extent possible. If inclusivity is to become a priority there has to be the political will to ensure that the process of inclusion is enhanced and the obstacles to inclusion are removed as effectively and deliberately as possible. This is a difficult task because the processes of inclusion and exclusion occur simultaneously. There will never be total inclusion, as this is to confuse inclusion with assimilation. Inclusion respects and encourages cultural diversity. Societies are constructed around deep cleavages and differences in values and there will always be tension between insiders and outsiders.The challenge is to alter the balance of forces between inclusion and exclusion in favor of inclusion.Those who are kept out of the labor market need to be brought into it. Those whose citizenship rights are not recognized need to be treated fairly. The needs of those who are young or elderly, who enjoy little security or wellbeing have to be addressed. Disability is a huge issue to be addressed in large urban cities as well as rural areas. Race and gender are other bases of exclusion. The common condition the excluded experience is the failure of society to provide all citizens access to society’s collective wealth and the ability to participate to the maximum extent possible. Is inclusion primarily an economic agenda or a democratic one? It is, of course, neither wholly one nor the other. Inclusion requires that civil society as well as government think outside the box in order to address the social effects of markets when they underperform and overshoot. Public authority must employ its arsenal of policy tools and large amounts of public resources to protect the social bond from corrosive pressures.What does this entail? (See Figure 1.) Building inclusive societies requires a multidimensional approach through which to attain specific ends that are part of an inclusion model of governance. It has three distinct aspects. Economic inclusion exists when citizens have the opportunity to participate in economic activity and governments make an effort to reduce or eliminate the structural barriers to this opportunity. These barriers include lack of access to higher education, job training or safe, affordable childcare. By removing barriers and opening access, labor-market participation is facilitated. Further, governments must ensure that basic workplace rights exist to provide for safety and fairness in economic activity. This includes the right to organize, the right to collective bargaining, to a safe workplace and a fair balance between the rights of employers and employees. In addition, it includes the existence of a distributional regime that ensures that people’s basic needs, in terms of access to healthcare, education and basic sustenance, are met without personally devastating economic consequences. These are necessary conditions for economic inclusion. Political inclusion exists when citizens feel that their voices are heard through either vibrant responsible government or other processes of participatory democracy.This does not mean that citizens will agree with every government policy or decision, but they must perceive that their viewpoint was considered
Figure 1 The challenge of building inclusive societies
The social bond after the triumph of markets 83 fairly. Moreover, adult citizens should not be excluded from these processes on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, territory or sexual orientation. Social inclusion speaks to quite a different condition. It exists when societal processes incorporate dimensions of human security such as the right to exercise choice safely and freely, irrespective of group membership or spatial location. This includes the opportunity to form networks and linkages with other citizens. For this there must be sufficient time free from market activities to participate in such activities. If inclusion is to mean anything it must reverberate in the public domain and in the allocation of public goods as well as private goods accessed through the market. It is one of the keys to building a strongly vibrant civil society where citizens are encouraged to organize, articulate their interests and satisfy their needs through cooperative endeavors. If this idea has any validity, we would expect to find a large interface between the rights and obligations that we have for each other, the adequacy of the legal processes, and the protection afforded by the state and other kinds of accountability mechanisms in markets.This is what should be called the sphere of the public domain, a place where authority and power are contested, challenged and made accountable. A strong and democratic public domain is a great facilitator of public debate and one of the constituent parts of a developing notion of the good life.Thus, the good life in any society reflects what its members believe and value, not simply what the elites tell them it is.
The interface between inclusion and things public The key to building stronger socially inclusive societies is that public authority must think strategically about its most critical policy levers. The most important from an inclusion/social bond perspective is the provision of human services. Human services represent the commitment of the state to provide a minimum of material resources to all citizens. Human services are the glue that reinforces our rights and obligations to each other. They are the connectors linking civil society to public authority (Drache 2003).They strengthen the social bond, broaden points of entry into society and remove structural obstacles to inclusion. Human services are an implicit social contract between public authority and its citizens and an ethical commitment to reducing social inequality. Increasingly, the responsibility for provision of human services does not rest solely with governments. When public authority does not do enough, or when it withdraws from primary responsibility for providing an adequate supply of collective goods, markets and civil society will try to fill the gaps. The ability of the private sector and civil society to provide collective goods has been taxed to the limit by the unwillingness of governments to maintain an adequate supply of human services and to build socially inclusive societies. To shift the balance of power towards inclusion requires that the largest number of people possible, if not everyone in society, have access to income
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security, healthcare, housing and education. However good this principle is in practice, it has always fallen short of transforming the life circumstances of those suffering urban poverty, the chronically unemployed, indigenous peoples and persons with disabilities. The fact remains that the future of the excluded, the most vulnerable and marginalized, is tied to a renewed commitment to reinvesting in human service systems for everyone. From a social inclusion perspective, government has to gauge its capacity to create a society in which even the most disadvantaged can participate fully and share in the benefits society generates to the fullest possible extent. Despite the persistent efforts of governments to combat illiteracy, provide public housing, maintain and improve population health and ensure minimum economic security, there is a very large deficit to address. A social deficit can be defined as a sharp imbalance of resources that disadvantages the most vulnerable and needy in society. Some examples are in order. Persons who lose secure jobs or fall seriously ill can experience first hand what it means to live in a society where there is a deficit of human services. In such circumstances single mothers who live in makeshift housing have no opportunity to obtain healthcare for their children or develop skills that will enable them to rise out of their impoverished condition (Sen 1999). They are excluded from the benefits of their society (Barber 2001). Social inclusion requires benchmarks to improve the basic necessities of life that are essential for full participation in social, political and economic processes. The most important areas include income security, healthcare, housing and education. For the informed public social inclusion is not a new idea, but it is used here for a specific reason. It is a powerful concept that helps to focus attention on the plight of those who are at risk of being left further behind by economic globalization’s relentless drive for efficiency and labor market demands for increasingly sophisticated knowledge and skills. Many barriers standing in the way of achieving this goal are economic, but without doubt the most challenging ones are deeper-rooted attitudinal barriers, which are fundamentally social in nature. Improving access to human services is one of the most effective ways to tear down the walls of prejudice and indifference that have appeared in recent times. It is also the case that when human services are in short supply or non-existent the undersupply of collective goods supports an environment of intolerance and collective indifference to growing exclusion in all its many forms. So far, many public authorities have been slow to grasp the importance of the need to broaden and deepen access to the informational commons, a term that has become synonymous with the skills and social capital that create economic, educational and social opportunities. Information is critical to modern society because it is not only a public good but also a public resource (Appadurai 1990). Governments have to prepare their societies for the information age, and public information and space are critical arenas that facilitate free expression and free association among citizens. Informational sites, both real and virtual, are important avenues within which individuals participate in all kinds of ways in
The social bond after the triumph of markets 85 society. They enable citizens to be informed, not only about their choices as consumers, but about everything from the personal to the political. But the information commons is failing many. Only 5 percent of the world’s population are online and almost half of that online community lives in Canada and the US. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) emphasizes that the North–South divide is exacerbated when most of the world’s population lacks access to a telephone, let alone a computer. One of the most important barriers to connectivity is cost. Purchasing computers, cell phones and pagers is financially within the reach of many in Canada and the US, but even in these fortunate societies there are many lowincome people who are not able to own or buy a computer. Outside the richest countries many new technologies are beyond the means of the vast majority of people because they are too costly. Since the early 1990s more people, particularly in Latin America, have been excluded from new social domains than have been included. Although the cost of network provision and hardware equipment continues to decrease, social inclusion in the information age depends on the degree of diffusion of information within the whole population.The challenge for public authority is to understand that there are ways in which diffusion is facilitated or impaired. Civil society organizations are essential to broaden access to the information commons. Countries, such as Canada, which have invested in making the internet available in schools, libraries and other arenas of public access, have broadened the point of entry for the least advantaged. Those who are information rich have acquired the skills, know-how and confidence to use these new technologies to better themselves. The ability to access new information technologies such as the internet is more prominent in populations that have a higher level of education and employment, and where there is government involvement in creating an information-friendly environment.To be information poor means individuals and communities are being denied access to possibly the greatest information revolution since the invention of printing. Individuals and communities who are excluded from the informational commons are generally identified with low levels of education, low levels of income and lack of employment. Moreover, those who are excluded are groups which potentially have the most to gain from access to and usage of information and communications technology, as new technology offers the potential to level inequities. Virtual public spaces created through communication by telephone, the internet or email are becoming increasingly important to social inclusion as more people are gaining access to these technologies (Deibert 1997). Inclusion is dependent on one’s ability to function comfortably and with confidence in the public arena. Public domain institutions such as libraries, schools and universities enable individuals to access information.
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From global disconnect to social reconnect Public authority continues to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money each year, but high-quality public goods in areas such as education and healthcare are in short supply. The state, with its arsenal of policy tools and large amounts of public resources, has to protect the social bond and defend the public interest (Gamble 2000). There are strong exclusionary practices that occur through ill will, intolerance and ignorance, but fear of the other is a learned response not an ingrained one. A society that wants to be inclusionary can take many practical measures to end systemic and episodic exclusion, although this will never be easy if dismantling barriers to inclusion is not a top priority. Often government and civil society fail to meet the challenge because the excluded live in such different circumstances – they have no natural affinity with each other. Without power and influence, society finds it convenient to ignore the existence and concerns of the excluded. Those who are outsiders do not want to end their lives on the margins. Their most fervent hope is to have the same formal and substantive rights as everyone else. Inclusion is never absolute and society has two choices to address the imperative of the social bond: it can let individuals cope the best that they are able; or in a self-concious way it can address the many multilayered dimensions of inclusion. Canada is not always a strongly inclusionary society but its political culture of multiculturalism and pragmatic egalitarianism provides a powerful incentive and a strong environment to build on (Stein 2001). By choice, Canada’s social democratic collectivist political culture does not support a society that “bowls alone,” Putnam’s (1995) evocative term to describe the decline in social capital and the eclipse of community in the US. Universal healthcare, the strengthening of our national culture, the provision of collective and public goods dedicated to the reduction of inequality, and the provision of human security in its many different guises are all large building blocks that sustain greater dynamics and limit the harmful effects of deregulated markets. Divergence from the “less state, less tax” American model is more pronounced than it ever has been. Poverty rates are 30 percent lower in Canada than in the US, and in social policy Canada continues to spend almost 5 percent more of its GDP on income security than its southern neighbor. All countries have equivalent collective responsibilities that bind people together and build sanctuaries against intrusive markets and arbitrary state authority. A modern concept of citizenship emphasizes the quality of participation in a political community. Richard Falk (Falk et al. 2002) reminds us that it is not law but politics and the adversity of experience that more adequately capture the experiences of individuals and groups. The goal and process of inclusion rest on developing over time a better way of organizing life on the planet. It speaks to the “politics of aspiration and desire” and of mounting a challenge to globalization from above. Inclusion wants to move the goalposts of community and to hold public authority, the market and the media accountable. It is
The social bond after the triumph of markets 87 expressive of a very different kind of dynamic in the modernist phase of state–market relations. Implicit is the imperative that political choice and dedicated action can make a difference to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.
A final word Social activists across the globe are pushing hard to decenter the political debate from market fundamentalism and to set popular politics in an inclusionary direction. Politics is back and the new norms are intrinsically and markedly public: diversity, gender equity, social justice and development.Time and social need are on their side in this global age. An active localism, the need for strong and vibrant communities regionally, and development and diversity globally matter more than ever. Inclusion, citizenship and popular sovereignty require the sanctuary of the public to limit market failure, prevent market overreach and limit the intrusiveness of private actors. New governance institutions are needed too. At the present time, political will remains in short supply and the barriers to social inclusion have created a very large policy and knowledge gap that still needs stronger, more persuasive and powerful answers.The line between private interests and public action is never fixed for all time. As states face the expectation that globalization can be managed, new social norms, goals and values are emerging that are inescapably public, collective and egalitarian. Tant mieux.
Bibliography Albert, M. (1993) Capitalism Vs. Capitalism: How America’s Obsession with Individual Achievement and Short-Term Profit Has Led It to the Brink of Collapse, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Anderson, S. (ed.) (2000) Views from the South:The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries, Oakland, Calif.: Food First Books/International Forum on Globalization. Appadurai, A. (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Mike Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage. Arthurs, H. (2001) “The Re-constitution of the Public Domain,” in Daniel Drache (ed.) The Market or the Public Domain: Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power, London: Routledge. Banting, K. G., G. Hoberg, and R. Simeon (1997) Degrees of Freedom: Canada and the United States in a Changing World, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Barber, B. R. (2001) Jihad Vs. Mcworld, New York: Ballantine Books. Bello, W. (2000) “Building an Iron Cage: Bretton Woods Institutions, the WTO, and the South,” in Sarah Anderson (ed.) Views from the South:The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries, Oakland, Calif.: International Forum on Globalization/Food First Books. Benhabib, S. (1990) “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57(1).
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Deibert, R. J. (1997) Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, New Directions in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Drache, D. (1995) Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. —— (2001) “Introduction:The Fundamentals of Our Time:Values and Goals that Are Inescapably Public,” in Daniel Drache (ed.) The Market or the Public Domain: Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power, London: Routledge. —— (2003) Economic Integration and Citizenship: Modeling Social Inclusion after the Quebec Summit, Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage. Etzioni, A. (1968) The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes, New York: Collier Macmillan/Free Press. Falk, R. A., L. E. J. Ruiz, and R. B. J.Walker (eds.) (2002) Re-Framing the International: Law, Culture(s), Politics, New York: Routledge. Ferrera, M., A. Hemerijck, and M. Rhodes (2000) The Future of Social Europe: Recasting Work and Welfare in the New Economy: Report for the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union, Brussels: European Union (EU). Gamble,A. (2000) Politics and Fate,Themes for the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Garrett, G. and D. Nickerson (2001) Globalization, Democratization and Government Spending in Middle Income Countries, Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles. Garrett, G. and J. Rodden (2001) Globalization and Fiscal Decentralization, Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles. Gutmann, A. and C.Taylor (1994) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Innis, H. A. and D. Drache (1995) Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Isin, E. F. and B. S. Turner (2002) “Citizenship Studies: An Introduction,” in Engin F. Isin and Bryan S.Turner (eds.) Handbook of Citizenship Studies, London: Sage. Keegan, J. (1999) The First World War, New York:A. Knopf; distributed by Random House. MacMillan, M. O. (2001) Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, London: J. Murray. Marquand, D. (1988) The Unprincipled Society: New Demands and Old Politics, London: Cape. Picciotto, S. (2001) “Democratizing Globalism,” in Daniel Drache (ed.) The Market or the Public Domain: Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power, London: Routledge. Putnam, R. D. (1995) “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6(1). Rodrik, D. (1997) Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, Washington: Institute for International Economics. —— (2001) “Trading in Illusions,” Foreign Policy, March–April. Sen,A. K. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf. Stein, J. G. (2001) The Cult of Efficiency, CBC Massey Lectures, Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Supiot,A. (ed.) (2000) Servir l’Interêt général: Droit de travail et function publique, Paris: Puf. Supiot, A. and Commission of the European Communities (1999) Au-Delà l’Emploi: Transformations du travail et devenir du droit du travail en Europe: Rapport pour la Commission des Communautés européennes avec la collaboration de l’Université Carlos Iii de Madrid, Paris: Flammarion. Taylor, C. (1995) Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. United Nations Development Program (2002) Human Development Report 2002: Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World, New York: Oxford University Press.
The social bond after the triumph of markets 89 Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York: Basic Books. Weaver, K. (2000) Ending Welfare as We Know It,Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Williamson, J. (1990) “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in John Williamson (ed.) Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?,Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. World Bank (2002) World Development Indicators 2002, New York:World Bank.
5
Adam Smith’s green vision and the future of global socialism1 Colin A.M. Duncan
Political views are deeply affected by interpretations of the past. This is especially true in what is still eurocentrically called “the West,” even though most do not realize it.2 Whether people are optimists or pessimists about the future of socialism, in particular, largely depends on how much they think the past constrains humanity, which in turn is a function of how far back they look, which is of course tightly restricted by the ways history has been periodized (for them). But even though digging back into the past searching for grounds for optimism may seem pathetic, that is just what I counsel in this chapter. I am, however, very particular, not to say fanatically precise, about how far back I think we should go. It may seem fantastic, but I suggest we reconceive the socialist project by first scrolling back to the 1770s, and then taking a fresh look around. For curious technical reasons, sticking with the old socialist habit of first focusing analytic attention on England, the most modern place at the time by any reasonable definition,3 turns out to bring unexpected benefits.
Grounding optimism in an earlier modernity From a socialist point of view, there certainly were some very attractive people around in, say, 1776. Admittedly Mary Wollstonecraft was still a teenager and Jane Austen only a neonate, but Tom Paine was busy penning some of the most forthright arguments for democracy ever advanced. Ideologically varied and challenging discussions of how people could behave better towards each other in daily life were interestingly linked to seemingly more public and practical matters, on two of which I wish to focus attention here. As it happens they are nicely balanced between head and hand, because the one concerns mere talk and the other is about material practices. The one is the state of economic discourse and the other is the set of ways in which humans used the rest of nature at that time. Mostly discussed in strict isolation since then, these topics combined actually reveal much about the etiology of our current predicament. For the linkage between theory and practice was arguably at its tightest in the 1770s, certainly very much tighter than now. Talking heads normally spoke about what was really happening when ordinary people did their usual work, and
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 91 important rich people listened and pondered. Although that deeply practical quality of public attention at the time helps justify my focus on just one particular decade, I am of course painfully aware that it has long been common to smear careful consideration of the seemingly minute topics I wish to discuss under such broad-brush interpretive strokes as “the Rise of Economic Science” or “the Industrial Revolution,” or similar whitewash. Indeed, doing so is normally regarded as praiseworthy “contextualization.” I wish to argue to the explicit contrary that the decade of the 1770s is better seen as a magic moment, brightly lit by a brief, arguably unique, flash of intellectual realism about the place of humans in nature. We have been stumbling in the dark ever since. In Britain at that time conceptions of modernity were generally and importantly much more open-ended than they are now. For one thing they were not dogmatically urban. It was frankly acknowledged, even by intellectuals, at that time that rural and small-town people lived in many different ways in the many different regions of the United Kingdom, even though metropolitan attention tended to focus on the ways the households were linked (politely via the coastal trade). Turning to the micro-historical scale – that is, looking behind all the front doors and peering within – it is noteworthy that the literally domestic scale of economy, still so ubiquitous at the time, actually encouraged a degree of practical equality between the sexes only painfully regained quite recently in some corners of the globe. It was, in short, just a very different kind of modernity from today’s. The single biggest problem we have in seeing this clearly is the still unabated popular power of nineteenth-century prejudices about the eighteenth century. What was most wrong with those perceptions was their basis in sheer ignorance. Since the early 1950s, however, scholars have come to understand the eighteenth century better than any nineteenth-century person could. But this newly attained sophistication about the complexity of affairs prior to 1800 has not yet trickled down to the level of general knowledge, which is where periodizations of history normally lurk, and do their damage. It is urgent that we liberate ourselves as quickly as possible from the thralldom of bogus textbook periodizations. As an historian who at least tries to understand past periods and distant places in their own terms, I submit that the only sure way to avoid drowning in the vicious Euro-American currents of political reaction, evangelicalism, capitalism, nationalism, racism, militarism, positivism, scientism, etc., ad nauseam, that so marred what the nineteenth century bequeathed to the twentieth, is to refuse the whole package and start afresh. Let us try again to think our way through to a progressive program, just as a thought experiment, by re-examining the status quo ante, namely England in 1776. My argument is in some respects rather involved and text based, as well as highly unfashionable, so let me summarize it first in one dense paragraph. I have published elsewhere more systematic discussions of many of the key issues involved (Duncan 1996, 2000). Here I try a different rhetorical tack, something more akin to an ideological Trojan horse.
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The declension from relative to absolute anthropocentrism It is now a commonplace that the international socialist movement came to be set on a distinctive and environmentally dubious path in large part due to the influence of the German philosopher Karl Marx. Rather less well known is the fact that Marx based his analysis squarely in the work of David Ricardo, an English policy hack given to rigorous abstract reasoning in search of neat fiscal answers to problems caused by his state’s costly and protracted reactionary crusade against French influence. Making an interesting contrast, most opponents of socialism, contemporary and historical, explicitly trace(d) their intellectual antecedents much further back, namely to Adam Smith, the great Scottish humanist philosopher. In the matter of empirical evidence about trends, all three famous thinkers focused almost exclusively on the English case, but they saw different things and came to strikingly variant conclusions. Smith expected wealth to grow slowly but he expected the growth to be very steady and very fair. Marx is celebrated for his novel conviction (since amply vindicated) that the growth process would itself tend to accelerate continuously, but he simply copied Ricardo in expecting it to be crisis ridden, and not just unfair, but increasingly unfair. This chapter will argue that an underlying cause of the declension from profound optimism to deep pessimism about political economy is to be located in a sudden shift in explicit conceptions of the role of non-human nature in causing wealth.A contemporaneous shift in actual material practices, which was, however amazingly, not reflected at the level of theory, actually caused most of the later celebrated change in growth rates. Both shifts, the ideational and the practical, happened between the days of Smith and Ricardo.4 However absurd, it appears to have been mere coincidence. Applying a lesson from the twentieth century, we could perhaps allow that lines of argument were obscured by the glare of war, but I still find the attitudes of early nineteenth-century persons to their recent past astonishingly blinkered. Let us simply try listening to Smith free from the noise of later history. In passages of limpid prose long since forgotten or ignored by the reading public (but closely analyzed below; pp. 96–7), Smith attributed nearly two-thirds of direct wealth creation to the labor performed by humans and domesticated animals, but said the rest was due to the unstoppable dynamism of vegetation. Since all laborers (bovine, human, equine) depend on eating vegetation, directly or indirectly, it followed for Smith not only that natural life processes are absolutely fundamental to almost all production, but that they provided a kind of automatic governor for trade patterns. The tight metabolic linkage made it technically impossible for the owners of farmland to serve their own private interests at the expense of the rest of society. Reasoning from an extraordinary piece of sophism, Ricardo explicitly contradicted Smith on all these points,5 and Marx again simply copied Ricardo in claiming that the only source of value was human labor.6 Marx, indeed, lived late enough to see huge numbers of laborers operating machines
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 93 powered by what we now abstractly call the “energy” latent in fossil fuels, but even that spectacular thermodynamic innovation in no way made him doubt Ricardo’s fantastic critique of Smith. This great wrong turning, which took the Euro-American world from merely relative to absolute anthropocentrism, is of course only one of many senseless caesurae in modern intellectual history, but it continues to be productive of immense practical mischief. For two centuries it has caused people not merely to spurn what living nature offers free of charge, but also to acquiesce in all manner of activities actually destructive of living nature. In countless ways the myriad defects of actually existing socialist and capitalist models bespeak their alignment with Ricardo’s radical contempt for non-human life. Marx’s excessively revolutionary corrective to Ricardo’s dismal outlook derived from his focus on the many forms of injustice endemic in trade patterns (from local to global), for he was optimistic that systems of wage slavery, once exposed, would collapse as quickly as chattel slavery so recently had. It is only fair to say that opponents of socialism relish the fact that it never even occurred to Smith that basic structural injustices could be made to disappear, but it is noteworthy that Smith was certain everyone would gradually become more comfortable if wealth creation was not hampered by foolish or selfish policy. In this connection Smith was famous for recommending that long-distance trade patterns be developed only after the division of labor in manufacturing had been perfected, which in turn cannot be sensibly implemented until after sustainable agricultural techniques for producing raw materials have been refined to the greatest extent possible, region by region.7 For no very good reason this argument has recently been dismissed as eurocentric cant, but if one recalls Smith’s point about the centrality and dynamism of vegetation, then the most literal interpretation makes perfect sense. For it is only by following this sequence that people can get the maximum benefit from the work freely performed for us by non-human living nature. It is absolutely crucial to recall that in Smith’s time almost no work in the literal thermodynamic sense was performed by fossil fuels.8 There are good reasons for supposing that had Smith lived later, and (like Marx) seen fossil fuels substituting so much for muscle power, he would have recommended that they, and the mineral ores absolutely necessary for their utilization, be administered as a kind of rationed global common good. Of course the world has done just the opposite.Thanks largely to Ricardo, a cult of so-called “Free Trade” appeared, and a world order was constructed in which the geologically lucky use(d) “their” fossil fuels and metals to accumulate vast sums of capital which they employ(ed) in tormenting distant others, making vast investments in weather-independent transportation systems and then foisting unfair international trade patterns on people who did not even get to begin to try to follow Smith’s carefully argued sequence. Just imagine the kind of fair, ecologically reasonable global trade patterns that would have come about if socialists had been able to start their campaign for justice from a world ordered according to Smith’s vision of durable, mostly
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hand-produced goods made from locally grown raw materials, assisted, as needed, by the special favors that fossil fuels can grant. A beneficent socialist “league of nations” could have been conjured into being to insist on reserving world fossil fuel use for direct relief of places afflicted by crop failures and other needful tasks for which such fuels are uniquely suited. I submit that Smith would have been simply amazed at how we combine material folly with tolerance of global injustice, and at our simultaneous waste and cruelty.
The declension from ecological realism to abstract liberalism It follows from the above line of argument that an important question for socialists now is how the human species can reverse some of the massive damage done in the era since the onset of Ricardo’s influence. Can we get the world on to the pattern of green global trade flows Smith looked forward to, but this time, so to speak, try custom-building socialist institutions on that material basis, rather than on the senselessly complicated and deeply unfair industrial infrastructure we actually use today? I want simply to raise that complex issue of political construction in this novel way, since I cannot pursue it here. In the rest of this chapter I want to explain why the modern world since 1776 did not have to be anywhere near as horrible as it has been. In the course of laying out my arguments, I will suggest an alternative general periodization for human history, one that is not just plausible from some arbitrary stance, but able to account for why crucial shifts were invisible for so long, as well as practically useful for those attempting to address the world’s problems. Most past periodizations were constructed by naive optimistic liberals, people who, strange to say, actually did not believe problems could exist except as a result of explicit ill will. Some of these same people have only just begun to register embarrassment at the extent of unintended damage sustained by the planet. To be fair, it is only very recently that the destruction of the environment both accelerated sharply and became truly global. But I want to argue that economic ideology after Smith helped cause both the dangerous acceleration and the baneful globalization, as well as blindness towards their precursors. For it is a special insidious effect of economic ideology that it can make some very important things, such as large changes even, seem invisible. I also recognize that I am making a very grave as well as a very involved charge, so, first: what do I mean by “economic ideology”? Economic ideology presents with many aspects, and sometimes goes by the more general-sounding term “liberalism” (or “neo-liberalism”), but for our purpose here it can be reduced to the twin beliefs that, ceteris paribus, capital tends to do good and trade should be free in every respect.The second point is the one I will focus on most, but the first requires some comment. Like the phrase “stock exchange,” the word “capital” is an old word borrowed from the livestock sector – it used to mean heads of cattle – but its more recent, now
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 95 general, meaning is mobile but storable extra wealth not needed for social reproduction, not needed for current consumption purposes, though it has often been used to expand those (either per capita or through underwriting population growth). Capital is thus society’s pet loose cannon, if you will excuse the mixture of metaphors. Capital is what we can use to do good or to do massive harm. It is noteworthy in this connection that the wealthiest people in the eighteenth-century world spent enormous sums making gorgeous gardens and houses. Their descendants were converted to favoring “productive” investment by economic ideology, which is fairly classified as an “ideology,” not just a set of beliefs, because it functions as a substitute for thought. Allegedly practical, economic ideology actually operates in the space where frank discussions about relations with material reality ought to be taking place, and effectively forestalls them. Among ideologies that have much bearing on material aspects of existence, and by world-historical standards, economic ideology is fairly new, barely two centuries old. Its sheer novelty helped it to be more deeply anthropocentric than any previous ideology. Many previous ways of understanding have been based in relative anthropocentrism, but economic ideology induces absolute anthropocentrism – as it happens, a twin-forked variety. It is only about and for humans, not all humans, but no entities other than humans; and according to it only humans do anything, not all humans, but no entities other than humans. The absolute capacity of economic ideology for encouraging environmental damage in the name of humankind is a special effect of the general way it fosters and even requires absolute indifference to many things, starting with what we call garbage and ranging from the intra-household division of labor through ecological peculiarities of place, all the way to the condition of the planet as a whole. Economic ideology compares things only according to one uni-dimensional criterion: pure exchangeable value to humans. It is the indifference to place on which I will focus in this chapter. According to economic ideology no characteristics of anywhere matter absolutely. Nowhere matters in itself. But it then follows, as I see it, that economic ideology actually regards material reality as irrelevant. This point may seem contentious, but actually it is closer to tautologous. For it is because economic ideology ignores reality that it is able to be so effective as an ideology, as a substitute for, rather than as an example of, thought. For some good reasons economic ideology has usually been traced back to Smith, but I think it can be demonstrated that its widespread adoption circa 1800, not long after he died, actually coincided with a complete break with the ways of life common in Smith’s day, and also that given his methods it is inconceivable that he would have approved of economic ideology. Those of you with any background in intellectual history will recognize that I am here making an almost mind-numbingly extreme claim. I must insist that my point is one that only an ecological historian of English agriculture with strong realist and indeed materialist leanings could possibly have noticed (such being the perils and benefits of multidisciplinary work). What he said on some
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particular, now obscure, topics I think was much more interesting than what he is most famous for having said. I realized this very slowly as I reread him eight times from the 1980s.
Envisioning a green division of global labor So what did Smith say about human use of the environment? We have to break that question into two parts: the first concerns living bits of nature, the second concerns the non-living bits.To anticipate, he said some very strange things (at least, strange to urban ears) about living nature and revealingly little about non-living nature. His carefully qualified argument for “Free Trade” was wholly based in points about the former, and it can be said that what he expected was what we would now call a purely green global division of labor. It would have been a kind of culmination of the many millennia during which most humans came to rely on agriculture (in the broad sense of deliberately grown vegetation). I suggest we call that long and slow-starting period so abruptly eclipsed after 1800 “Vegetation Globe One.”According to Smith’s vision every place on earth would have specialized in what its peculiar ecology allowed it to grow best. In the resultant clusters of productive activity, primary and secondary, the world’s poor would have done well, certainly better than they did or do now. I think we could just manage to get the world back on to the course Smith thought it was on by imitating his now unheeded approach to studying the nature and causes of wealth. Convinced that the manufacturing of goods made from agricultural raw materials should not be undertaken until after agriculture is brought to the highest pitch, and that international trade should not be attempted until after both agriculture and manufacturing have been perfected, Smith also noted that history shows people always did it backwards. So, although very irritated by actual history, Smith took the trouble to analyze it, unlike later abstract economists. He allowed that England had done well in spite of making the standard errors. Beginner’s luck? Smith singled out landtenure practices (1970: 517–18), but our knowledge of regional farming systems now points us to ecological diversity as well. But let us leave such issues, as well as speculation about the green future he expected, and examine some seemingly merely technical passages in Smith. In Smith there are two specific arguments about living nature we must consider.The essentials are contained in the following striking passage: No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than does that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers. In agriculture, too, nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expense, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workmen.The most important operations of agriculture seem intended not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. A field overgrown
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 97 with briars and brambles may frequently produce as great a quantity of vegetables as the best cultivated vineyard or corn field. Planting and tillage frequently regulate more than they animate the active fertility of nature; and after all their labour, a great part of the work always remains to be done by her. The labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or the capital which employs them, together with its owners’ profits; but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of these powers, or in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man. It is seldom less than a fourth, and frequently more than a third of the whole produce. No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing, man does all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it. (Smith 1970: 462–3)9 In agriculture, unlike in manufacturing or commerce, domesticated animals such as cattle and vegetation work alongside humans to bring about the surplus on the farms upon which we all depend. It is fundamentally the unstoppable because inherently reproductive power of vegetable growth that is responsible for this fortunate circumstance. Between one-quarter and onethird of raw wealth was attributed by Smith to this fundamental metabolic power of living representatives of nature.To various extents humans can direct living nature, even stimulate its activity, but it is what is ordinarily happening in the air around plants and animals and deep in the soils of the land that matters. As we now know, the living entities in the soils upon which we depend cannot not work for us once we plant what we want, unless of course we poison them, but that’s a later story! Smith could not know anything about microbial metabolism, let alone about its unequaled variety and frenzy (McMenamin and McMenamin 1994), but amazingly he seems to gesture to it in the passage above. Smith further said that what lets farmland allow its landlord owners to collect rent is this, its irretrievable generosity. Rent is not at all about an exchange relationship between persons or groups of them. Such might have been true under feudalism, but Smith is writing about the modern world. The trick now is to see that not everything in modernity has always been a matter of social construction. Smith explicitly stated that the landlord owner lends the powers of nature inherent in a piece of land to the tenant user. There is absolutely no reason to doubt that he meant anything other than
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exactly what he said. We now can elaborate his point because we now know that even far north, thanks to the gulf stream where temperate England mostly lies, the microbiota in the soil are not just active but incapable of suspending their frenetic metabolic activities which collectively keep plants cycling continuously, most notably herbage. To repeat the significance to contemporary ears, Smith’s whole point is that it is the land, not its owner, that does useful work. If landlords did any work then it would have been an exchange relationship. The definition of a gentleman a few centuries ago was simply and accurately one who does no work. Read Jane Austen if you want to know how they lived.Their farms have been changed, but you can still visit many of their gardens. Of course humans labored too, both in garden and on farm. Crucially, in Smith’s day and for some time after it was up to the farming tenant to add in to the system the labor of hired workers. But it is because land itself normally produces so much that a capitalist farm operator can not only recover his capital costs and his expenditure on wages, but also realize a profit, and still hand over another considerable sum by way of rent, all from the proceeds consequent upon successful sale of the farm’s produce of course. This point about the land’s inherent powers to benefit humans endlessly is plenty interesting, but Smith made another remarkable claim about the place of agriculture as a kind of anchor for the economy as a whole.Technical facts about agriculture in his day, facts that he could have no reason to expect would ever change, made him an opponent of explicit economic policy. On this, political considerations did not enter his mind, unless you call expecting the status quo to remain a kind of politics. But recall that he wrote before the American and French Revolutions. Let us look at this second technical argument about agriculture. Since the only ingredient in agriculture that could ever be classified as off farm was labor, and the main element of cost in hiring labor was food, itself the very product of agricultural labor, it followed that no policy aimed at artificially increasing the returns to agriculture could possibly work (Smith 1893: 394).10 A policy trying to make the price of food, the product of agriculture, artificially high must be self-defeating, since the higher pay the agricultural workers must get if they are to be able to buy the more expensive food makes the cost of growing it, thus its price, really higher, not artificially higher, which is absurd of course.The exceptions prove the rule. For if much human labor on the farm is unwaged, performed perhaps by slaves, spouses, or children, if, that is to say, farm workers don’t have to buy their own food, then different considerations apply (Friedman 1979), but in England from 1600 to 1875 most marketed food was grown by waged laborers who had to buy their food.
Back when free trade made sense It is noteworthy that this long era of capitalist agriculture also coincided with the period of England’s greatest relative strength as a world power. But from an environmental point of view the key is that Smith’s highly influential anti-
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 99 policy stance, now identified as the common sense of “economics,” derives from this unique case, long gone and never generalized. What actually happened in intellectual history is that Smith’s anti-policy conclusion was generalized, but his specific and careful reasoning was very soon after derided on absurd grounds, and then simply utterly forgotten. In fact techniques of farming did eventually change in relevant ways too complex to explain here, but long before that the joint agricultural activities of humans and nature came to contribute a much smaller part to overall productive effort, eclipsed by non-living nature. Let me then reiterate the strikingly simple point that, as Smith saw it, the price of the basic food gave the whole integrated system of price-setting markets an invariant standard of value that was impervious to makers of policy ill disposed to the public. In fact the story of agriculture in his day in England was getting even better, because far from it being possible to have a bad selfish policy on agriculture damage the economy, to the contrary the normal trend was for technical improvements fostered by greedy landlords to improve the structure of almost all soils, and thus benefit all of society. For if you sustainably lower the costs of growing food, absolutely everyone benefits.This is simply because everyone eats and most commodities are made by people who have to buy what they eat. Let me now summarize the joint philosophical import of Smith’s twin arguments. Basically, Smith saw humans as technically reliant on living nature but thought the technical details of that dependence justified an extremely optimistic social outlook on the part of government. So Smith was anthropocentric but his practical motive led him to a realist analysis of how people actually use the rest of nature, and that in turn implies that his anthropocentrism was only relative. He trusted nature as a partner. People use the rest of nature, but living nature is active with us and we depend on it. Smith’s was an optimistic human-centered outlook based in profound acknowledgement of the role of nature as agent. No other economic thinker has even registered the point, far less based policy on it. With Smith liberated from nineteenth-century dogmas, for once the field is free for socialists to build constructively. So much for the living bits of nature. Now what did Smith have to say about the non-living bits, and what should we now think? Here it’s more a case of teasing out the meaning of what he did not say. In some ways it is less technically tricky, but the implications ramify further. I have first to snap us smartly back to our ways of living and talking.
The second (or true) Stone Age According to data proudly presented by the American mining industry, the average North American these days annually consumes material drawn from 40,000 pounds of mineral ore as well as enormous quanta of fossil fuel.11 Recall that about 75 percent of US electricity comes from burning coal, gas or petroleum. Most mining happens nowhere near where most people live and none of this heavy metallic and/or greasy stuff could be moved around
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without the destructive use of lots of metals and greasy fuels. But on such non-living matter removed from holes in the ground – that is, most of the key stuffs undergirding lives today – Smith had very little to say. He of course predated oil wells but noted carefully that mines for coal and metals are rarely near where many people live (Smith 1970: 342–4), and that people are always willing to pay more for wood than for coal, even when coal is near and more abundant (ibid.: 270–2). Clearly they were not using coal for anything that only coal could do.That is, coal was not even a substitute for wood, let alone a uniquely special fuel. Coal packs a much greater amount of usable heat per unit mass than even the best cured pieces of wood. But to use coal to do work you need metal apparatuses. Oil has an even better ratio of usable energy delivered per unit mass of itself, but what oil also does is to allow much less metal to be used per unit of usable power delivered. But in Smith’s day oil was not used at all and coal was not used as a source of power, but only as a heating agent useful for cooking, heating houses, and causing changes of state in materials such as glass. So much for the fuel side. What about machines in general? Smith was very interested in improved design, but strikingly unlike people today he thought a better machine was just one that was cheaper to repair (ibid.: 383). A fortiori he did not see the need for metal apparatuses in which to contain combustion used for transmissable power, or the need to use fossil fuels and metal apparatus for the fetching of the metallic ores and the fossil fuels themselves. But within a quarter-century of Smith’s death England was the world leader by a huge margin in precisely such consumption of fossil fuels and use of metals, and in the development of the new transportation systems we still utterly depend on when moving these stuffs, namely railways and ships not powered by wind. It is instructive to consider where the free trade argument, the argument for having no policy, fits into this new post-1800 world, which as a reluctant occupant I sardonically call “Stone Age Two.” Given the highly technical way Smith talked about agriculture, I am sure Smith would have been amazed at the general technical situation even half a century after his death. I am sure he would have rethought his whole system top to bottom. It is really quite unspeakable condescension to suppose otherwise. He was one of the most careful students of human affairs and a superb analytic writer. There is no ambiguity in what he said when he said it, and what he said simply does not fit the later situation. Many things need to be said about the role in economic theory since Smith, of key non-living elements of Stone Age Two. It is outstanding, first of all, that coal, oil and metal ores are available in strictly finite quantities. So far from frenetically growing like vegetation or animals fed on vegetation, rocks are not even capable of reproduction. Microbes may not have brains but at least they can reproduce.Yet Ricardo, the most influential economist to come after Smith, asseverated explicitly against him that agriculture is not distinctive for relying on the help of nature. This is supposedly because nature helps us
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 101 just as much in manufacturing, the point being proven (apparently) because in the use of steam engines to do work (common by then) humans make use of natural aids that are “inexhaustible and at every man’s disposal” (Ricardo 1970: 34). That’s actually the phrase he used. Ricardo had a reputation for having a formidable intellect. What on earth could he have meant by implying that metals and fuels are freely available everywhere? Every time I reread that profoundly incoherent passage the mixture of arrogance and ignorance still floors me. It’s like Descartes’ claim that animals cannot suffer. But I have come up with a kind of explanation (mindlessly generous perhaps). Ricardo may have been trying, however ineptly, to draw attention to there being no need to apply human labor in producing such materials as fossil fuels and metals, even though the labor of getting hold of them and moving them was still considerable (recall that in Smith’s day the cost had normally been prohibitive). So much for the non-living side in Ricardo. What about farming according to post-Smith economists? In Ricardo’s allegedly agrarian model there is no mention whatever of the metabolic activity of vegetation, let alone its unstoppable generosity. Arbitrarily and ignorantly considering agriculture production increases to be only ever due to increases in area under cultivation, which is an absurd reductive misreading of the improved farming practices of his own lifetime even, let alone those of his ancestors (Kerridge 1973), Ricardo actually went on to say that agriculture was inherently prone to diminishing returns. On every point that matters in Smith’s defense of free trade he said virtually the opposite, or else something weirder and worse. Because Ricardo only thought of farms as geometric areas, not as threedimensional chunks teeming with living nature, he convinced himself and then others that landlords were bound to gain at the expense of other members of society, and that capitalists and laborers were bound to fight over the remainder. So Ricardo married a wholly fantastic picture of infinite supplies of non-living stuffs with a wholly unjustifiable rejection of the contribution of living nature, and then drew deeply pessimistic social conclusions. What a performance! The distance from Smith is just about infinite it seems to me. Tracing the origins of free trade doctrine to Smith may reveal a guilty conscience, but economic ideology has been able to get away with this intellectual fraud only because there has been such massive public ignorance of the real material history of human interaction with the rest of nature. We are routinely told that machines do work for us, not the fuels, and nothing about microbiota in farming. But instead of slinging living mud at forkedtongued ideologues and foolish educators, let us consider the wider and deeper philosophical implications as well as some later global consequences.
Geological luck underwriting wealth and power By Ricardo’s time Euro-American anthropocentrism had suddenly become absolute. Living nature was assigned no role, and reliance on fossil fuels and
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metals had become normal in some places. Dependence on the rest of nature had in fact become more acute, and more unreasonable. But as an extra negative result some newly unpleasant trends in global inequalities also got under way. Recall that if we had stayed with Smith’s world and followed his advice things were for sure going to get better. Stone Age Two is actually nasty for many people, though very nice for some. I am not, here, going to discuss the fates of so-called “indigenous” peoples, since most of them and their cultures were and are just straight victims. To the extent that the importing of fossil fuels and metal ores from elsewhere by means of an elaborate transportation apparatus became normal for those geologically lucky enough to get off to a quick start in the use of these rocks, it became possible for even poorer people in those same nations to be granted some political rights and even a share of the greater wealth. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century some of the blessed countries were nicely cocooned in opaque spheres of financial control, basking in what I call “Finance Sphere Three.” But such comfortable circumstances would never outlast a collapse in transportation systems, because Finance Sphere Three is continuously dependent on Stone Age Two technically. The price of the basic fuel and lubricant, namely petroleum products, is not at all an invariant standard. Indeed, it is inherently subject to monopolistic control either by those fortunate enough to sit on the relevant geological formations or by others from elsewhere wealthy enough to impose their will (points resonating grimly in the early twenty-first century).What the combined techniques of Stone Age Two and Finance Sphere Three cause is an endless reshifting of economic goalposts according to patterns that have no ecological rationale, and that sometimes help poor people but often hurt them massively. Capital employed this way only ever does good by fluke.The first principle in economic ideology may have been true in 1776 but is a cruel lie today. Global trade is certainly facilitated by fossil fuels and metals, but it cannot possibly be globally fair unless the fuels and metal apparatus are administered as kinds of common good. Without the world-historically cheap transportation systems we now depend on, and which could not exist without the massive consumption of fossil fuels and metal apparatus, free trade would actually be confined to the scale Smith envisioned, which would have been more easily subject to local control. Given the way Smith talked about vegetation and its unstoppable powers, so easy for humans to harness in so many places, it would seem certain that had he lived long enough to see the nineteenth century he would have said of fossil fuels that they did much of the work that used to be done by muscle power, and lots more besides, but that because of the hideous combination of their irreproducibility and our reliance on them they must be managed as a special kind of global commons, subject to careful rationing, and never as substitutes in any contexts where living natural entities would do. Given what Smith said about vegetation, I also think it is quite impossible that he would have talked about machines in the absurd fetishistic way we do, ascribing
Adam Smith’s green vision and global socialism 103 them powers that they actually owe entirely to the fuels that power them. It is the fuels that do the magic, not the machines. This is crucial because so long as capital can purchase the fuels to thus do most of the actual thermodynamic work there is no reason to expect poor people to benefit from the prodigious capital accumulation accelerated by free trade. On the contrary, the growth of human populations made possible by the new cheapness of food and transportation simply aggravates bad employment conditions. That is why every major city in a poor country is now surrounded by expanding slums.After the advent of Stone Age Two, full employment can only be episodic or brutal, never normal and benign. Keynes’ institutional analysis explained the manifestations, but he never so much as hinted at the material environmental underpinnings of that changed world that he saw had gone so awry in the 1930s. Since Keynes died, the poor in the peripheries have begun to do very badly and the rich metropoles have depended on chronic and very expensive war preparations to kick-start their systems. Smith would have been just appalled. Free trade was a progressive doctrine in 1776 but it has not been since. Only if we returned to substantial reliance on vegetation and excluded metals and fuels from its purview could trade be automatically beneficial. It seems to be essential for socialists to start from a realist analysis of the relations between humankind and the rest of nature. Economic ideology is too unrealistic even to be a worthy foe for socialists.The irony is that Smith, the hero of neo-conservatives, alone among economic thinkers would have been able to see why.
Notes 1 2 3 4
5 6
7
Thanks, chronologically, to Roger Krohn, David Banks, James Moore, Ruth Sandwell, and Robert Shenton, who have all encouraged me, although in completely different ways. What Clifford Geertz (2000) has written about politics in many different texts over his career underscores rather neatly the Euro-centered but world-historical contrast laid out by Plumb (1969). In the context of a broader discussion I presented and discussed a dynamic definition (Duncan 1996: 26). Working to an utterly different, even incompatible, purpose, Keith Tribe (1973) actually supports my view that Smith is the special case. It is highly revealing that in his subtly conceived transhistorical survey Tribe can really make neither head nor tail of Smith, and casually renders the scale and duration of his impact inexplicable. Seeing Smith as the last careful economic thinker, not the last “pre-economic” thinker, solves the riddle, of course. In his chapter “On Rent,” Ricardo speaks of, for example, “the gifts of nature which exist in boundless quantity” (1970: 34), an utterly absurd construction from any thoroughly materialist perspective. Marx’s notes on Smith v. Ricardo, published posthumously (Marx 1963: 60–1; 1969: 161–2), are very subtle but shot through with the common bogus notion that after its advent “the standpoint of modern industry” is somehow inherently more realistic in a general sense. Smith makes very clear his ideas both about proper sequence (1970: 483–4) and about how sophistication in the use of land in a place grows (ibid.: 505–7).
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8 Let me gesture to the scale of technical change long after Smith died by pointing out that in 1800 total installed capacity of steam engines was only 35,000 horse power (Langton and Morris 1986: 74), whereas in 1858 one ship, Great Eastern, was rated at 1,600 horse power (McNeill 1982: 225). 9 See also Smith’s generalization about land’s inherent generosity usually surpassing the demands placed upon it (1970: 250), so much less gloomy a view than the supposedly more dynamic but actually less agro-ecologically sound one held by Malthus. 10 The argument is in Book IV of Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, which was omitted by Penguin from their edition. 11 The message on a poster hanging at the site in Tacoma of what was the world’s largest copper smelter.
Bibliography Duncan, C. A. M. (1996) The Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature, Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press. —— (2000) “The Centrality of Agriculture: History, Ecology and Feasible Socialism,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.) Socialist Register 2000, London: Merlin Press. Friedman, H. (1979) “Household Production and the National Economy,” Journal of Peasant Studies 7. Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kerridge, E. (1973) The Farmers of Old England, London: George Allen & Unwin. Langton, J. and R. J. Morris (1986) Atlas of Industrializing Britain, London: Methuen. McMenamin, J. and D. McMenamin (1994) Hypersea, New York: University of Columbia Press. McNeill,W. (1982) The Pursuit of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marx, K. (1963) Theories of Surplus Value, vol. I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. —— (1969) Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Plumb, J. H. (1969) The Death of the Past, London: Macmillan. Ricardo, D. (1970) Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: Dent. Smith, A. (1893) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: Routledge. —— (1970) The Wealth of Nations, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tribe, K. (1973) Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse, London: Macmillan.
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Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism John R. Bell
It can be argued that many Enlightenment thinkers conceived of the natural world as an object for manipulation and control; and they therefore advanced an instrumental, manipulative reason to realize their project of technological domination. But the predisposition to view the natural world in “objectivistic,” mechanistic, and mathematical terms necessarily entailed viewing humankind as machine- or object-like as well, and, as a result, suitable for exploitation. Any such one-sided view of so complex and far-reaching a phenomenon is bound to be an oversimplification, but let us assume there is some truth to this characterization for our purposes here. If one’s acquaintance with the ideas of Marx was limited primarily to secondary sources, as is the case with many ecological and feminist critics, Marx might be too easily categorized as a dutiful child of the Enlightenment as described above. In this chapter I advance the argument that Marx and Engels were critical not only of the capitalist and bureaucratic structures that dominated the lives of the majority of citizens and working people in modern society, but also of the domination of nature that necessarily appeared with it. It is their belief that the overcoming of the domination of both nature and the majority of humankind must be accomplished simultaneously. They do not advocate an unsustainable “productivist” socialism which privileges technocrats and bureaucrats and attempts to maintain capitalist-style growth such that citizens and workers achieve a dubious and limited empowerment at the expense of the natural world and of the aspirations for a democratic polity and workplace.
Marx and Engels on ecology and natural science Marx and Engels were quite critical of the dominant currents in the natural sciences and materialist philosophy of their day and both were acutely sensitive to environmental issues. Thus they were necessarily ambivalent with regard to the legacy of the Enlightenment. Both tended to believe that natural scientific objects could not be thoroughly comprehended in isolation from the objects to which they were necessarily and not merely contingently related in the natural world outside the laboratory, even if experimentation
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might be necessary to establish the truth of many hypotheses regarding the nature of natural objects and phenomena. Engels, in particular, was disturbed by the natural scientific fetish of carrying to extremes the habit of observing natural objects in their isolation “detached from the whole vast interconnection of things” (1969: 26–7). Engels’ predisposition to explain the self-organization of the natural world, which we did not create as a dialectical system, was doomed because of the insufficiency of natural scientific knowledge then and now, but the philosophy of internal relations which Marx and Engels shared did incline them to view the global ecosystem as an integrated whole in which incremental changes in parts of the system, such as increases in pollution levels, could eventually lead to profound alterations in regional ecosystems.This perspective required them to attempt to understand natural objects/processes in their relation to other natural and social objects/processes with which they were assumed to have necessary if not apparent connections. Moreover, I have not been alone in pointing out that the mature Marx clearly recognized that to comprehend a unique social scientific subject/object such as capitalism it was disabling to draw on a pseudo-universal scientific method derived from physics/natural science. For such a method assumes that we cannot know a social system that we ourselves have made any better than the natural world that we did not. Marx and Engels were aware that Enlightenment philosophers and scientists looked at the natural and social world differently than did their pre-modern forebears. Marx tells us, “Descartes, in defining animals as mere machines, saw with the eyes of the manufacturing period, while to the eyes of the middle ages, animals were assistants to man” (1961, I: 390). Marx suggests that if we examine a society’s technology we will learn much about the human-to-human and human-to-nature relations prevailing there. Scrutinizing societies’ technologies discloses man’s mode of dealing with nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life…the mode of formation of his social relations, and…the mental conceptions that flow from them. (Marx 1961, I: 372) it is not the articles made, but how they are made…that enable[s] us to distinguish different economic epochs. Instruments of labour…supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained…they are…indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on. (Marx 1961, I: 180) In turn, however, Marx recognizes that not merely technology but even pure “natural science is provided with an aim with its material through trade and industry” (Marx and Engels 1969, I: 28). To understand why instrumentalist and mechanistic thinking have permeated society we have only to look at the
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 107 market system of “universal competition” which has taken control of material economic life. That system has made “natural science subservient to capital…destroyed natural growth…resolved all natural relationships into money relationships…[and] completed the victory of the commercial town over the countryside” (ibid.: 61). The early Marx (1964a: 207; 1973c: 390; Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 5: 58–9) had often insisted that since humans, like all other species, need an appropriate natural niche in which to satisfy their natural needs and maintain their bodies, that niche should be recognized as part of our extended bodies and our human nature. Preserving an appropriate habitat is necessary to preserve any species including our own. Much later, in Capital, Marx affirmed that Labour is…a process in which both man and Nature participate…[man] mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants…[The labour process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction…between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence. (Marx 1961, I: 177) In the Economic Manuscript of 1861–3 (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 30: 40) and in Notes on Adolph Wagner (Marx 1975: 109, 209), written late in his life, Marx makes similar arguments. Nor does Marx look at the metabolic exchange purely from the human side. We are expected to return nutrients to nature as well. In the Grundrisse Marx regretted that English agriculture “no longer finds the natural conditions of its own production within itself, naturally arisen…these exist as an independent industry” (1973a: 527). In short, capitalist agriculture was no longer self-sustaining; thus it was necessary to import guano from Peru. In Capital Marx explains that it was the “blind desire for profit” which had exhausted the soil and made this necessary (1976: 348), and he laments the fact that the capitalist economy could,“do nothing better with the excrement produced by…[Londoners] than pollute the Thames with it at monstrous expense while…denying the soil which it has robbed of its nutrients the advantages of that manure” (Marx 1981: 195). Marx and Engels (1965a: 251; 1969: 128) were not foolish enough to believe we could ever transcend the laws of nature, though that might be an Enlightenment fantasy. We can only achieve a “knowledge of these laws” and “mak[e] them work towards definite ends” (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 25: 235–6). Marx (1961, I: 178–9; 1964b: 126–8) often celebrates our creative and productive abilities but even as he does so he acknowledges the amazing abilities of other species. Nor does he claim that we are the only tool-makers – only the most prolific. Just because Marx (1973c: 70) recognizes that only humans build self-acting mules and railways this does not mean that he, of all people, does not realize that this capacity, when exercised inappropriately, can
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do great harm to ourselves and the planet. Nor does it mean that he does not share Engels’ contempt for the “idealist exaltation of man over animals” (Marx and Engels 1965b: 122). It might be nice to think that we could evolve in nature in intimate symbiosis if we reverted to the kind of societies that prevailed before the rise of corporate agribusiness or capitalism itself. However, the sustainable agriculture that was practiced before the rise of agribusiness entailed the creation of simplified, human-created ecosystems that were already radical departures from the natural variability of nature. Hunting and gathering societies disturbed this variability least but could only support a small population living primarily in warm temperature regions. While the greatest quantities and varieties of biomass are found in climax communities such as tropical rainforests, the perennial plants that grow there are not the best sources of food for large human populations. Thus we must grow our own food if we wish to support our present numbers, and that means we cannot work in total harmony with nature. We must make nature’s processes work for us by “tricking” nature into following a path we have chosen rather than its own.True, we respect nature’s cycles when we plant in spring and harvest in autumn, but we permanently interrupt nature’s movement through successive stages to establish a climax community of perennial plants.Thus in agriculture we typically work with and against nature. Marx strikes the right balance when he says in various places (Marx and Engels 1965a: 99; Marx 1964a: 75; 1964b: 126–7; 1961, I: 171) that, as food growers and producers, we consciously confront nature, although, of course, still remaining a force of nature rather than being content to merely hunt or gather what nature offers in the manner of animals or our early ancestors. We grow things by harnessing nature’s processes so that they operate in ways which are more conducive to human survival, but we must also respect their limits, giving nature time (and often our assistance) to cleanse, restore and heal itself. While we limit diversity on cultivated land, we should not try to eradicate it with the expectation that petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, hybrid seeds and genetically engineered plants spawned by agribusiness will make it possible for us to reduce farming first to monoculture and then to something akin to hydroponics.
Marx’s ecology of capitalism In On the Jewish Question Marx (1973c: 239) showed some sympathy for the view that all living creatures should be free and the property of no one. Shortly thereafter, having converted to communism, he connected alienated labor to the alienation of man from nature and introduced a theme to which he frequently returns: capitalist industrialization, which separates the direct producers from the soil, exaggerates the distinction between town and country, with deleterious consequences for humans generally, for working people in particular, and for the natural world (Marx and Engels 1965a: 318–19). Indeed, Marx lamented the fact that workers were exposed unwill-
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 109 ingly to “universal prostitution,” “universal pollution” and material insecurity in the towns (1964b: 77), and he regretted that in that environment fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man reverts…to living in a cave…now polluted by the mephitic and pestilential breath of civilization…the worker has…a precarious right to live in it…should he fail to pay…for this mortuary…he can be evicted.A dwelling in the light,…[with] which Prometheus…transformed savages into men…air…cleanliness cease to be a need for man. Dirt, this pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage…of civilization…. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied nature becomes an element of life for him. (Marx 1964b: 169–70) Young Engels also lamented the impact of capitalism on nature and on working people: To make the earth an object of huckstering…the first condition of our existence was the last step toward making oneself an object of huckstering…an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation and the monopolization of the earth by a few, to the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life, yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth. (Marx 1964b: 210) In The German Ideology Marx and Engels (1975, vol. 8: 32–4, 64–5, 401) develop their argument that the capitalist division of labor tends to concentrate mental labor in the burgeoning towns and, by the depopulating and hollowing out of rural communities to make way for capitalist agriculture and the rearing of sheep and other livestock, increasingly isolates rural inhabitants, who are then separated from “all world intercourse, and consequently from all culture.” Thus, the ugly phrase “rural idiocy” ought to be used, if at all, to describe the material deprivation and socio-cultural isolation imposed on rural communities by the development of capitalism and not to describe some imaginary, allegedly self-imposed, transhistorical or natural condition. Indeed, Marx insists that capitalism and its forms of rent even alienate countrydwellers of all classes from the earth as well (Marx and Engels 1965a: 61–3). He observes that capitalism has so completely divorced the landed proprietor from the soil, from nature, that he has no need even to know his estates…the farmer, the industrial capitalist and the agricultural worker…are no more bound to the land they exploit than are the employer and the worker in the factories to the cotton and wool they manufacture. (Marx 1963: 159–60)
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In the Grundrisse Marx (1973a: 489) argues that it has been the norm in history that humankind maintain close links with the natural world in order to carry on the sort of healthy metabolic exchange with nature necessary for survival. Industrial capitalism’s “disembedding” (Polanyi 1957: 277) of society from nature, while it appears normal, is what is unusual and must be explained. Marx concurs with Steuart that the development of capitalist property relations in the countryside was a violent process. Indeed, It clears the land of its excess mouths, tears the children of the earth from the breast on which they were raised, and thus transforms labour on the soil itself…the direct wellspring of subsistence, into a mediated source of subsistence…purely dependent on social relations. (Marx 1973a: 276) A presupposition of the development of mature/industrial capitalism is, following Marx, “the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization – from the means of labour and the material for labour…[and the] release of the worker from the soil as his natural workshop” (ibid.: 471).The maturation of capitalism requires a process of history which dissolves the various forms in which the worker is a proprietor, or in which the proprietor works…. Dissolution of the relation to the earth-land and soil as natural condition of production to which he relates as to his own inorganic being. (Marx 1973a: 497–8) The separation of industry/manufacturing began when female members of the peasant household became involved in a putting-out system. Because merchants could not impose substantive control over direct producers, who were scattered throughout the countryside and who often independently produced their means of subsistence, a process of primitive accumulation, which included the Enclosure Acts and similar legislation, together with physical coercion, was employed to create a class of property-less workers with only their labor-power to sell, which the capitalist industrialization process might then draw on. In the same work, Marx laments the fact that capitalism has made nature “purely an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility” such that nature “ceases to be recognized as a power for itself ” (ibid.: 410). Marx regrets that nature is only viewed as an “object of consumption or as a means of production.” It is a pity that Marx did not carry these insights further, but they do suggest that Marx would have been sympathetic to the idea that we ought to leave some parts of the natural world – such as fragile wilderness ecosystems – as untouched and pristine as possible. In Capital Marx reminds us that capitalist industrialization/urbanization
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 111 disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man…it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.The capitalist transformation of the production process is at the same time the martyrdom of the producers…. All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops…by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. (Marx 1976: 637–8) Marx singles out large-scale industrial and agricultural production as being especially destructive: Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns…[provoking] an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life…. The result…is a squandering of the vitality of the soil…. Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect…the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural powers of man…the latter…the natural power of the soil…they link up…later…since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade…provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. (Marx 1981: 949–50) For Marx, capitalism is an unnatural, inverted and reified society not merely because value successfully subsumes use-value therein, but because it drives the direct producers from the soil, “disembedding” (Polanyi 1957: 272) industry from agriculture and a direct dependence on natural cycles, even though its continued survival depends on society’s ability to maintain a healthy metabolism with nature. The early Marx (1973c: 348–9) had argued that capitalism would lead to the “universal prostitution of the worker,” and the “universal pollution” of urban environments as “dead matter,” in the forms of commodities and money, triumphed over both workers and their world.The conquest of nature is thus a victory for one class and one aspect of our human nature. By viewing human beings generally as voracious consumers and as capitalistically rational in their orientation to nature throughout their history, ecologists risk immobilizing us in despair while failing to make the perfectly legitimate claim that the rehabilitation of nature and the overturning of the regime of
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disinterested labor can and must be accomplished simultaneously in a successful socialist transition. In 1876 Engels warned that nature has a way of taking revenge on humankind when we rush to embrace the cultivation and consumption of unfamiliar crops, new technologies, untested products, or the reshaping of regional ecosystems (through the adoption of monocultural agriculture, the clearing of forests, etc.) merely because the immediate advantages of these changes are so attractive or profitable that we fail to exercise due caution and humility given that there are always unforeseen effects and unintended consequences and these often outweigh the initial benefits. Engels reminds us during the course of a lengthy but interesting exposition that We by no means rule over nature like a conqueror…standing outside nature…we belong to nature, and exist in its midst,…our mastery of it consists in…that we…[unlike]all other creatures [can] learn its laws and apply them correctly. It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions…. Individual capitalists…concern themselves…with the most immediate effect of their actions…even this retreats…into the background, and the sole incentive becomes…profit. (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 25: 235–6) This interesting passage, from which I so selectively quoted, could be taken as indicative of a “greening” of the late Engels as he stepped out of Marx’s “red” shadow when the latter’s theoretical productivity declined due to ill health. Actually, the themes which Engels develops were addressed earlier by Marx. In Capital Marx had already noted that capitalism was concerned with only the most immediate effects of its operation, whereas a sustainable agriculture must be concerned with maintaining the “permanent conditions of life” for future generations (1981: 754). Yet he also acknowledged that pre-capitalist agriculture could threaten the economic and ecological viability of society when “it progresse[d] spontaneously and [was] not consciously controlled.” Indeed, it could leave deserts behind it, as it did in “Persia, Mesopotamia…and Greece” (Marx and Engels 1965b: 190). Marx was thus aware that profound historical transformations could occur not merely because of class struggle but also because a society could unwittingly destroy its productive forces and, more specifically, its topsoil and groundwater base. Marx (1978: 322) also recognized that the long production time entailed in silviculture made it especially unsuitable for capitalist management, given the short-term, market-oriented focus of capitalists. He explains that throughout history we have destroyed forests and that everything we have done for their conservation and production has been “completely insignificant in comparison.” Marx was thus perhaps even less optimistic than Engels that humankind could avoid the destruction of forests or other ecological calamities by learning more of nature’s laws.
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Marx’s communist ecology The early Marx (1973c: 348–9) described a communist utopia in which alienation not only from self and others but also from nature was simultaneously overcome. The maturing Marx never repudiated his commitment to this goal. With respect to overcoming the alienation of urban and rural dwellers from one another and the separation of humans generally from nature, The Communist Manifesto advocates “a gradual abolition of the separation between town and country, by a more, equable distribution of population over the country.” Marx hopes to achieve “a higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms developed during…their antagonistic isolation” (Marx and Engels 1969, I: 127). This will permit the restoration of a healthy metabolic cycle, including the recycling of wastes to the soil (Marx 1981: 195). Indeed, Marx tells us that “the transformation of capitalism, the abolition of wage labour, and the creation of a society of associated producers…necessitates the abolition of this alienation of human beings from the earth” (ibid.: 216). He insists that “the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture.” Rather, a sound agriculture “needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers” to maintain “the permanent conditions of life” for generations to come (ibid.: 75).The coupling of small farmers and the associated producers suggests that whatever the latter implies it does not entail the introduction of gigantic state or corporate “factory” farms which engage in monocultural agriculture under the direct or indirect control of some remote state or corporate planning apparatus. Marx (1981: 195) had advocated the return of human excrement and, where appropriate, the wastes produced by human productive activity to the soil to complete the metabolic cycle, rather than squandering them while polluting the Thames. Later, Engels makes similar arguments. Because “in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole…of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums” it would be necessary for communism to establish “as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country” such that an “intimate connection” between industry and agriculture would prevail (Marx and Engels 1969, II: 368). Indeed, Engels tells us that Abolition of the antithesis between town and country…has become a direct necessity of industrial production…of agricultural production and…of public health. The…poisoning of the air, water and land can…end…only by the fusion of town and country [which]…will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease. (Engels 1969: 351–2) Perhaps the best way to conclude this necessarily brief treatment of an important topic is with the words of Marx, who astutely warns future socialists/
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communists that the “permanent communal ownership of land as the guarantor of the chain of human generations” must be supported by an appropriate communist-environmental ethic: From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation [i.e. socialism] individual private ownership of the earth will appear just as much in bad taste as the ownership of one human being by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or all contemporary societies taken together, are not the absolute owners of the earth. They are only its occupants, its beneficiaries, and like a good paterfamilias have to leave it in improved condition to following generations. (Marx 1981: 911)
Marx against bureaucracy We have learned over the past century that state and corporate bureaucracies can be even more hostile to the environment and to democracy than the operation of capital’s logic. Marx was already a critic of state bureaucracy when he became a communist, having grown up in Prussia, where an undemocratic, authoritarian, conservative state operated virtually unchecked. According to Marx, in such a society The bureaucracy has the essence of the state…in its possession, as its private property. The bureaucracy asserts itself as the final end of the state…. The…spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved inwardly by means of the hierarchy and externally as a closed corporation…the administration…manage[s] the state in opposition to civil society…they are officially holders of the state. (Marx 1973c: 108) to becom[e] an executive civil servant…is…a…Masonic rite…a privilege. (Marx 1973c: 112) Years later Marx recalled that in such a society you could do virtually nothing without the permission of the authorities (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 11: 139). After meeting Engels and having been won over to the cause of socialism/communism, Marx adopted Engels’ view that the state typically acted as the agency through which the ruling class dominated material economic life and exerted coercion over the subordinate classes. However, he never entirely abandoned his earlier view that the state tended towards bureaucratic/professional/managerial/technocratic parasitism. Periodically, the mature Marx warned that whenever there is a balance of contending class forces, a parasitic state can emerge which “escapes the despotism of a class” (1973b, II: 236), dominating the rest of society as a law unto itself. The “Bonapartist” state, for example, is savaged as a “deadening incubus, a boa
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 115 constrictor,” “a supernaturalist abortion of society and an excrescence” (Marx 1971: 149) which “enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors” everything until society is reduced to a “helpless dependency” (ibid.: 196). The 18th Brumaire refers to the Bonapartist state’s executive power: with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its elaborately stratified and artificial state machinery, and a horde of officials…this dreadful parasitic substance which envelops the body of French society like a caul and chokes all its pores [such that] every common interest was…separated from society and counterpoised to it as a higher general interest, torn from the self-activity of the members of society and made the object of government activity…all revolutions so far had perfected this machine instead of smashing it. (Marx 1973b, II: 237) Marx did not devote even more attention to the dangers of state/bureaucratic despotism because English capitalism appeared to be leading other economies in the direction of a pure market capitalism and, consequently, of less bureaucratic regulation. The age of capitalist imperialism was still in its infancy when Marx died and, although Marx observed that monopoly and state intervention might be resurgent, he could not know that capitalism would enter a new stage in which the market would have less capacity for self-regulation and that capitalist societies would begin a slow movement away from pure capitalism without immediately collapsing as the visible hand of bureaucracy increasingly complemented the invisible hand of commodity economic logic. Marx and Engels also opposed the professionalization of political life, a form of parasitism which over the past century has come to plague representative democracies. De Tocqueville (1945: 260) had earlier said that Americans, unlike Europeans, would find it intolerable not to actively participate in democratic political life. However, Engels’ description of American politics in 1891 sounds depressingly contemporary: Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests.… But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had…in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from…servants…into the masters of society…each of the two major parties…is…controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats…or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.The Americans have been trying…to shake off this…intolerable…yoke…we see…the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be…two…gangs of political speculators…alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it
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John R. Bell by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends –…the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who dominate and plunder it. (Marx and Engels 1951: 438–9)
Perhaps the nascent corporate influence over the political process might have been implicated in Engels’ analysis of this parasitic excrescence, but the fact that it is not indicates that Engels thought that this malaise posed a threat to representative democracy even in its absence. Marx and Engels also criticized the notion that the leadership of socialist parties, unions or movements had/ought to be composed of an elite minority of educated, typically bourgeois professionals or bureaucrats organized in a rigidly hierarchical or even dictatorial fashion. Marx clearly realized that workers would never develop the skills or confidence to participate in socialist political life if authoritarian party leaders dominated internal party politics. As Marx put it, “where the worker’s life is regulated from childhood by bureaucracy and he himself believes in the authorities…he must be taught…to walk by himself ” (1973b, III: 156–7). Engels warns of the dangerous tendencies of socialist party members to treat “party officials – their own servants – with…kid-gloves…as…infallible bureaucrats” and of the leadership’s attempts to limit internal criticism and press freedom (Marx and Engels 1959, vol. 38: 35–6). For his part, Marx was never more incensed than when he discovered that Bakunin, who masqueraded as a libertarian and radical democrat, was in fact conspiring with a select group of his devotees to have himself installed as a totalitarian/authoritarian dictator. By contrast, Marx favors public argument and debate within open, democratic, broad-based, International-style proletarian organizations/parties (Marx et al. 1972: 111–12). Since 1917 the differences between Marx and Engels and the anarchists with regard to the disappearance of the state in socialism have been exaggerated and misrepresented.After all, Engels had maintained that The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous…the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.The state is not “abolished”. It withers away. (Engels 1969: 385) Marx goes even further on several occasions when he speaks of the communist revolution as a revolution against the state itself and insists that this revolution must not merely transfer the bureaucratic-military machinery from one hand to another but immediately smash it (1971: 70, 73, 150, 221, 226). Contra Engels, I do not see how the government of persons could ever be replaced by the administration of things – though the state and capital might
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 117 well treat people and a living nature as thing-like! Nor would I ever count on state institutions to wither away of their own accord. I prefer Marx’s position despite the fact that it seems to display even greater naivety than that of Engels. If we consider that Marx and Engels were speaking of the mid-19thcentury liberal state and not the contemporary state, then both can be defended. Engels is arguing that the class coercive state ought to end its independent existence as soon as society takes ownership of the means of production away from the capitalist class and places them under an appropriate form of social control, while Marx is arguing that Marxian communists, like anarchists, must not wait for this task to be completed to immediately attack the bureaucratic, parasitic institutions of the state. These positions are complementary and reflect the fact that the capitalist state in Marx’s day was both an agency of class coercion and an instrument of bureaucratic management with an innate tendency to become class autonomous and despotic. Marx (ibid.: 73–4) believed that both of these functions of the state could be made largely redundant by the institution of a more robust political and economic democracy than has been achieved in any modern society.Thus he commended the Paris Commune for its efforts to bring about the active, ongoing participation of working people generally in both the legislative and executive branches of government. Marx also endorsed universal suffrage, short revocable terms of office, and public service wage levels consistent with workers’ wages. Marx (ibid.: 33, 63, 73–4, 150–3) frequently expressed his support of the Commune’s plan to implement a type of federalism in which the level of government closest to the citizen and permitting the greatest participation held the greatest power and in which all other more centralized, regional and national representative assemblies were composed of elected, revocable delegates bound by the formal instructions of the communities they represented. These more centralized bodies were to have greatly reduced roles in the lives of citizens than we are accustomed to in contemporary society. Marx’s endorsement of the democratic, anti-authoritarian innovations of the Commune was not opportunistic. He was a radical democrat before he became a communist. For him, the revolution had to be led by a majority of workers and their allies, who would rely on a robust democracy in the movement and in society to achieve and defend communism. Marx and Engels defended all those civil liberties which would allow citizens to participate effectively in social and political life and opposed both the economic and other (e.g. educational) barriers to full participation such as the natural/property rights which humans were alleged to have enjoyed in an imaginary state of pre-social, monadic isolation.1 I believe that I have made a plausible case that Marx opposed the domination of nature and the political domination of humankind either by the economic or political institutions of capitalist societies or by the political institutions aiming to achieve and maintain socialism/communism. However, the question remains: can a socialist economy be organized in such a fashion
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as to achieve ecological sustainability, economic viability, and genuinely democratic management, or does the Marxian project come to grief or founder due to the incompatibility of these goals?
The anti-authoritarian ecocommunist workplace Many would dismiss Marx’s early vision of a communist society which has revived community ties and successfully transcended the division of labor, thus permitting workers to change occupations regularly without losing their livelihood, as a romantic pipedream (Marx and Engels 1965a: 45). Much later, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, the mature Marx reiterates that in communism “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, the antithesis between mental and physical labour, have vanished…labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want” (Marx and Engels 1969, II: 22). Nevertheless, Engels, as an experienced factory manager, realized that Marx contemplated eliminating only the extreme capitalist division of labor, if only because working people would not introduce or indefinitely retain machinery which forced them to perform deskilled, disinterested, robotized labor. (If there must be robotized labor, let robots perform it!) Engels suggests that, rather than doing away with the extreme form of the division of labor, we should educate working people in the applied sciences so that they understand the entire social production process and can move not merely from one task to another but also from one industry to another as socially or individually desired (Marx and Engels 1969, I: 923). This view is utopian with a vengeance, because it assumes that working people generally would wish to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of this type and that they would derive fulfillment, after having done so, from their ability to move from one potentially mind-numbing, monotonous task to another. Paradoxically, it is also anti-utopian in that the deskilling of labor in capitalist and corporatedominated societies has already made it possible for workers to move quickly from a routinized, low-skill task in one industry to one in another, thus allowing a speedy adjustment in supply to meet a prior change in demand. In his Conspectus of Bakunin’s State and Anarchy, the mature Marx insists that large modern factories could be run as workers’ cooperatives and that this would end “dictatorship,” “bureaucratic discipline,” “authority,” and “officialdom” (Marx et al. 1972: 151). This is supposed to allow workers simultaneously to overcome the tyranny of experts and the division of labor as the experience of self-management compensates for the drudgery of factory work. This is not credible as a universally applicable solution to the problem of alienated labor. In relatively small, community-embedded factories or workshops producing only final consumption or “qualitative” goods, as posited in Sekine’s model of socialism presented in Chapter 13, self-management would enhance the experience of work which is already creative and fulfilling. Conversely, as Engels admits, “[t]he automatic machinery of a big factory is much more despotic than…small capitalists…[subjecting workers]
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 119 to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization” (Marx and Engels 1969, II: 377). Because Engels fails to take use-values seriously, he assumes that all the use-values that a socialist society will require will be heavy and/or complex and that they must therefore be produced by rigidly hierarchical, highly mechanized, larger-scale industries. Moreover, he appears to have forgotten what he and Marx observed about the diseconomies and environmental problems that result from too great a reliance on such operations. He seems to think we cannot de-emphasize large-scale industry and some of its more notorious products (autos) together with the forms of bureaucratic and technocratic control associated with them without retreating all the way to the society of the spinning wheel. Marx puts a more positive spin on things when he tells us that every combined mode of production/labor on a large scale requires a directing authority/commanding will and supervisory labor in order to coordinate and integrate individual activities so as to secure the harmonious working of those activities. As Marx says on several occasions, a single violin player can be his own conductor but an orchestra requires an independent conductor (1976: 330; 1981: 376). More ominously, Marx tells us that with further productive force development “a superior class of workers, some of them scientifically educated must appear” in order to perform this and other functions (1961, I: 15). This could all too easily become a tyranny of technocrats. In remarkably prescient pages of the Grundrisse, however, Marx foresees a time when the factory is run by an automatic system set in motion by a self-moving automaton (1973a: 692–705). The workers’ operations having been made more and more mechanical, it eventually becomes possible for all workers to step outside the production process and act as watchmen/regulators of a selfmoving mechanism. Capitalism, and the regime of the law of value, must come to an end when the value-creating capacity of the workers’ labor capacity shrinks to such an infinitesimally tiny magnitude that it threatens to disappear; that is, when a monstrous disproportion exists between the labor time expended by workers and the mass of products produced. Once capitalism makes the labor-power of the worker and the organizational role of the capitalist redundant, a general recognition of the necessity of socialism is assumed to arise almost automatically. This is a future possibility, and a desirable one, in those sectors in which the work performed by humans cannot be other than drudgery (i.e. in much of heavy industry producing intermediate and producer goods). Although the oligopolistic, transnational corporations which are currently introducing the new information/robotic/automated technologies are bringing technological unemployment or demeaning, insecure underemployment along with them, Marx’s vision would be worth pursuing in a socialist society if it were restricted to those sectors that produce what Sekine (in Chapter 13) refers to as quantitative (mostly intermediate and producer) goods, provided that these enterprises and the technocrats who manage them are subject to strict social control so as to maintain democracy and environmental sustainability.
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In capitalist society and in our contemporary society many final-consumption/ qualitative goods are produced inappropriately as quantitative goods. This is most unfortunate. Even in those cases where CAD–CAM (computer-aided design)/automated techniques are capable of producing precision products, an ecocommunist community should not choose such techniques merely because they are labor saving. An excessive reliance on such techniques, together with the distribution of the products so produced over vast distances, can needlessly squander resources and increase the strain on the ecosystem. In socialism no creative labor should be eliminated by laborsaving techniques unless there is a labor shortage.The production of final consumption/qualitative goods by hand, tool, and new generations of light machines which serve human beings rather than reducing them to appendages of a mechanized or robotized assembly-line should be favored not merely because of the quality of the products so produced, but also because this will permit human beings greater scope to express their creativity than is permitted by lean production techniques. An emphasis on local and regional production of final-consumption/qualitative goods to satisfy local needs is likely to be far more conserving of energy, resources, and the environment and, by maintaining high levels of employment, does much to enhance economic viability and the bonds of community, whereas an overemphasis on large-scale production for the global market undermines them. Let us freely share more of our collective wisdom rather than ever-increasing quantities of goods. My criticisms of Marx and Engels aside, I do not believe either was wedded to a “productivist” vision in the manner of neoclassical economics. Marx recognized that the wants and needs of working people would continue to expand for a time in a socialist society because workers would justifiably “lay claim to an altogether different standard of life” (1976: 530). He had noticed, however, that, even in the absence of the massive corporate manipulation of consumers, the advanced capitalist division of labor caused workers to display certain pathologies of which intemperance in consumption was one. In communism both cause and effect would disappear (ibid.: 384; 1973a: 714). Marx was confident that “where not the exchange-value but the usevalue of the product predominates…no boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of production itself ” (1976: 235). Since, according to Marx, “a man who has no free time at his disposal, whose whole life…is occupied in working for the capitalists, is lower than a beast of burden” (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 6: 554), communism must aim to achieve “not the reduction of necessary labour-time in order to replace it with surplus labour, but the reduction…of…necessary labour…to a minimum…. The measure of wealth is then not…labour time, but rather disposable time” (Marx 1973a: 706) or “free time for human development” (1972, III: 257). Here, Marx suggests that “the realm of freedom” lies necessarily beyond the “realm of necessity”/material production. This is to temporarily forget or to fail fully to appreciate that a measure of real freedom can exist in the realm of necessity, as Marx argues elsewhere (1973a:
Marx’s anti-authoritarian ecocommunism 121 611–12), but it does demonstrate that Marx’s communism is not about an ever-increasing production and consumption, with its attendant toll on the natural world. I have presented Marx’s generally attractive vision of a federation of democratic ecocommunist communities but noted the threat to this vision posed by the sometimes uncritical over-reliance on the production methods and organization developed furthest by heavy industry. I hope I have shown that Marx is not yet a “dead dog” and that he tackled many of the problems socialists, ecologists, and radical democrats are struggling with today.
Note 1
Space does not permit a defense of this admittedly sweeping statement, but evidence in support of the view that Marx and Engels were staunch defenders not only of universal suffrage but also of all the civil liberties permitting citizens to participate in political life without impediment or fear of state sanctions may be found in such diverse places as On the Jewish Question, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,The Chartists, and On Britain.There is also R. N. Hunt’s (1974, 1984) wonderful study The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, which defends Marx and Engels not only as radical democrats and libertarian socialists, but also, and necessarily, as revolutionaries.
Bibliography Albritton, R. (1991) A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Albritton, R. and T. Sekine (eds.) (1995) A Japanese Approach to Political Economy, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Albritton, R., M. Itoh, R.Westra, and A. Zuege (2001) Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, and Globalizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave. de Tocqueville,Alexis (1945) Democracy in America, New York:Vintage. Duncan, C. (1996) The Centrality of Agriculture, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s. Engels, F. (1969) Anti-Duhring, London: Lawrence & Wishart. —— (1972) The Origins of Private Property, the Family, and the State, New York: International Press. Foster, J. B. (2000) Marx’s Ecology, New York: Monthly Review. Hunt, R. N. (1974) The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. I, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. —— (1984) The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. II, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Marx, K. (1956) The Holy Family, Moscow: Progress. —— (1961) Capital, 3 vols., Moscow: Progress. —— (1963) The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International Press. —— (1964a) The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, London: Lawrence & Wishart. —— (1964b) Early Writings,T. Bottomore (ed.), New York: McGraw-Hill. —— (1970) The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1971) Writings on the Paris Commune, Moscow: Progress. —— (1972) Theories of Surplus Value, 3 vols., Moscow: Progress.
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—— (1973a) Grundrisse, London: Penguin. —— (1973b) Political Writings, 3 vols., D. Fernbach (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1973c) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1975) Texts on Method,T. Carver (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1976) Capital, vol. I, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1978) Capital, vol. II, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1981) Capital, vol. III, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1951) Selected Works, Moscow: Progress. —— (1959–) Werke, Berlin: Dietz. —— (1965a) The German Ideology, London: Lawrence & Wishart. —— (1965b) Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress. —— (1969) Selected Works, 3 vols., Moscow: Progress. —— (1971) On Britain, Moscow: Progress. —— (1975–) Collected Works, Moscow: Progress. Marx, K., F. Engels, and V. Lenin (1972) Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, Moscow: Progress. Ollman, B. (1971) Alienation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation, Boston, Mass.: Beacon. Rattansi,Ali (1982) Marx and the Division of Labour, London: Macmillan. Schmidt,A. (1971) The Concept of Nature in Marx, London: New Left. Sekine,T. (1997) An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Uno, K. (1980) Principles of Political Economy, trans. T. Sekine, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.
Part III
Pleasure
7
Hedonist revisionism Kate Soper
According to a recent UN report on the impact of globalization, living standards in the world’s 49 least developed countries are now lower than they were 30 years ago. The same study estimates that 307 million people have fallen below the basic subsistence rate of $1 a day, and that this figure will increase to 420 million over the first 15 years of the new century (annual income per capita for these countries is $287 compared with $27,402 for the developed market economies).1 Another recent report informs us that disasters triggered by global warming have more than doubled since the 1970s, and have injured or made homeless some 2 billion people in the final decade of the 20th century, most of these in the more impoverished areas. There are now 25 million environmental refugees, more than double the number of political refugees, and this figure is set to rise dramatically over the coming period.2 These problems are not caused, as conventional wisdom would have it, by the failure of the least developed nations to be integrated into the world economy. On the contrary, their markets are very open – to the point where trade accounts for a higher percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) than in the developed countries. The problem lies in their unsustainable debt burden and the protectionist strategies of the rich countries, both of these causes being attributable in the final analysis to the refusal of the wealthier nations to curb their own markets or compromise on the basis of their comparative affluence. The ultimate source of this division between underand over-development is to be found in the competitive nature of the market itself, and the license – and almost irresistible encouragement – it constantly gives to the prosperous to protect and enhance their riches, and thus to continue to produce and consume in ways that further degrade the environment and render the already poor even more destitute. This division, of course, has its analogue on a smaller scale within the confines of the nationstate, where the contrasts between the aspirations and enjoyments of the privileged sectors and the miseries and despair of the least advantaged are stark reminders of the structural inequalities perpetuated as a condition of the success of capitalist societies. But even where there is sympathy with the many victims of globalization and agreement that the root of their problems lies with the capitalist mode of
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production, there is today even less confidence than previously that socialism affords any compelling solution. Increasing numbers of commentators, many of them one-time socialists themselves, but now writing from within their postmodern times and with an eye to the reasons underlying the collapse of the Soviet regime, now assure us that socialism has become discredited and no longer offers a plausible agenda.3 Some of these claims have been made in an overly glib and dismissive fashion, but they have also served to expose the weaknesses of the orthodox case that has been made for socialist solutions. Or perhaps, to put it more accurately, they have exposed the way in which the socialist conceptions of the dynamics of social change and transition, and even socialism’s understanding of the nature of “progress” itself, have come to seem increasingly out of touch in a contemporary context where all the stress falls on contingency, pluralism, and cultural difference.As Barry Smart has put it, Rather than constituting a new social space, socialism presents a rearrangement of the furniture of modernity as the solution to all social issues and problems. The complex histories of the societies of “actually existing socialism” have taught us that the institutional changes that socialism might be able to deliver will not resolve all social issues, and this hard lesson has contributed to the erosion of its grand narrative status. Given the devaluation of socialism as the imaginary, alternative, progressive form of life to a capitalist modernity (and the corollary, an extensive and intensive proliferation of postmodern political conditions, premised on pluralism, and manifest, for example, in relations of indifference between cultures, unauthentic celebrations of otherness, and either a total denial, or a relativization, of universals), the question of what ties are [in Bauman’s phrase] “still capable of holding our world together”, must be addressed. (Smart, in Crozier and Murphy 1996: 56) One can surely agree to much of this even if one dissents from any implication it might contain that something entirely other to a solidarity built around support for a socialist politics would be more likely to provide those ties or offer a better bulwark against the depredations of capitalist postmodernity. Indeed, the weakness of much of the critique of socialism’s inadequacies in the present era is the refusal to spell out what the putative alternative might be in these circumstances, or to show how any nonsocialist economic strategy could more successfully check the social and ecological abuses of the global market economy, and thus guarantee the democratization and cultural pluralism to which the postmodernists claim to be so committed. Socialism in its Stalinist version has certainly been discredited, and indeed was never defensible in the eyes of much of the Left. But socialism construed as a politics aspiring to an egalitarian and democratic order and viewing the dismantling or very extensive regulation of the
Hedonist revisionism 127 capitalist market as essential to its realization is not nearly so obviously anachronistic and could well prove a force for change in the decades to come. That said, the critics are surely right to imply that there will be very little chance of this coming about without an extensive revision to those aspects of its argument that have made socialism vulnerable to the charge of “rearranging” modernity rather than responding to the need for a genuinely counter-capitalist postmodern politics. This will require, most importantly, that socialists repent of any former disdain for the observance of democratic process and accept how crucial it is to win an electoral mandate for their political agenda. Only those on the Left who are most impervious to the realities and demands of the present situation could hope to gain wider support for any form of socialist program that views revolution rather than electoral politics as the means of social transformation. Relatedly, those arguing for socialism today must be hypersensitive to the paternalism of their claims to represent the “genuine” needs of the masses. They must acknowledge the theoretical inadequacy and totalitarian implications of some of the former socialist (especially Marxist-socialist) discourse on questions of need, consumption, and selffulfillment, and be altogether more scrupulous in their response to concerns that any form of political control over the economy is at risk of moving towards a “dictatorship over needs.” The extravagance of some of the claims that have been made in the past about what socialism can deliver also stand in need of correction. “An end to the division of labor,” “an abundance of needs,” “distribution according to need”: such slogans, heady though they may be, can no longer figure as appropriate summations of what will be achieved in any transition to socialism. All such claims need to be revised to take account of the work needs of modernity and the environmental conditions in which all future production will now take place. Work could certainly become more varied and personally rewarding when released from the time-economy imposed by the quest for profit, but this falls very far short of an end to the division of labor, a goal which would seem well-nigh impossible to achieve in advanced industrial societies, and is, in any case, not clearly desirable. The idea of an abundance of needs is also misleading if it is read as implying an indefinite expansion in the consumption of material goods. One has to accept that the only viable form of socialism in our own times is a greened or eco-socialism that has fully recognized that there can be no program for enhancing global justice that is not observant of the environmental limits to growth and the constraints these must now place on resource-hungry forms of consumption, especially in the developed world. Also to be accepted now is the contingency of any rearrangement along socialist lines. Those arguing for socialism cannot complacently presume it to be already immanent within the capitalist order; nor can they point to the existence of a readymade agent of social transformation in the proletariat. The case has to be made without invoking metaphysical guarantees of this kind and in full awareness
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that there is no dialectical meaning writ into history and bringing it to its culmination in a socialist or communist order. But it is one thing to offer these cautions against a certain, now rather dated, form of socialist rhetoric; it is another to deny the continuing power and pertinence to the contemporary situation of the socialist critique of the unregulated market economy, or to deny the existence today of any signs of a mandate building in the future for the alternative world order and the modes of living it could help to promote. These signs are not necessarily very explicit. As I have argued elsewhere (Soper 1990: 60–1), some of them are discernible only in the “negative” evidence of widespread political apathy, violence, neurosis, and self-destruction, all of these being symptoms of a deeply troubled experience even within the “freedom” and “plenty” of capitalist existence. But there are also some of a rather more direct and explicit character to be read in the now quite widespread alarms about environmental destruction and global inequalities, and in the growing recognition of the role of private consumption in generating these collective problems.The potential for this contradictory structure of need to escalate into a major “consumer crisis” for the free-market economy in the coming decades should not be underestimated even if it presents no very grave threat at present. In order to build on this potential, what is needed, I shall argue in what follows, is the elaboration of an “alternative hedonist” case for socialism. This argues, to put it in summary form, that the main agents of any radical change of political direction in the developed nations will not, or not only, be found in the traditional labor movement, but will come from a much broader transclass body of concerned producers and consumers; that the pressure for change will be fuelled in large part by moral and material dissatisfactions generated by the affluent life-style itself; and that it will discover its “utopian” summons in a post-consumerist vision of the “good life,” a vision in which enjoyment and personal fulfillment are indissolubly linked to methods of production and modes of consumption that are socially just and environmentally protective. This is obviously in many respects a profoundly unorthodox conception of the counter-capitalist political agenda – to the point, in fact, where many will want to treat it as a heresy and question its entitlement to be considered as any form of socialist politics. That does not worry me. What does concern me is that the Left remains in a position to offer a compelling and radical opposition to neo-libertarian market thinking, and this requires now, I am convinced, a preparedness to revise its political program in the light of contemporary realities: to respond to the emergence of new constituencies, differing conditions of production, and altered conceptions of progress, prosperity, and personal fulfillment. An eco-socialist politics has, of course, from the outset been associated with a critique of consumerism and a call to the more affluent communities of the First World to adopt less ecologically wasteful and globally exploitative modes of consumption. It is a critical perspective well summarized by Lucio Magri when he argued in an article in the 1980s that
Hedonist revisionism 129 Western Europe possesses now, as it did not 30 years ago, the economic, technological and cultural means to assert its own political autonomy and to help sustain another path of development for the impoverished communities of the world. But the condition of this would be reorientation of the European economies away from the quantitative multiplication of goods for consumption and export and the wastage of natural resources that goes with it, towards another style of development: one that was sober in its consumption, exported technology rather than commodities, sought a reduction in labour-time performed, gave priority to improvements in the quality of living. Such a model of development would…be based not on the expropriation of nature, but on its reconstruction and valorization. (Magri 1982: 124) My own argument for “alternative hedonism” is entirely consistent with this perspective, and differs only in its emphasis.Where Magri speaks of “sobriety” in consumption, I choose to focus on the pleasures of a more egalitarian and sustainable mode of consuming. One of the reasons for this stress on the pleasure of consuming differently is tactical: it is designed to counter the rhetoric of those who try to dismiss environmentalists as puritanical belt-tighteners bent on returning us to the miseries and reduced existence of the Middle Ages. It is to draw attention to the fact that less socially exploitative and ecologically damaging forms of consumption will not necessarily prove less sophisticated or complex than those currently enjoyed, and are focused on securing less troubled and compromised forms of sensual enjoyment rather than on reducing pleasure. But I also emphasize the hedonist aspect in the conviction that alternative consumption can both restore pleasures that have been lost to the high-speed, materially encumbered cultures of affluence and also provide for some others that we have yet to experience and maybe even to envisage. Consumerist culture is itself too puritanically inclined in its assaults upon the senses and its abstraction from the complex forms of human sensibility; and it is narrowly constraining on the hedonist imagination itself. “Alternative hedonism” is thus to be viewed not so much as an attack upon the exorbitance and luxury of contemporary consumption or as calling for a return to a “simpler” mode of existence, but more as the slogan of a new “political imaginary” – as a pointer to a program of utopian projection through which eco-socialists can seek to summon desire for a postconsumerist order centered around unprecedented forms of respect for both sensual and spiritual fulfillment. In saying this, I do not mean to dispute that a consumption that has been transformed in order to meet eco-socialist ends will include some elements of reversion to earlier methods of working (as would be the case, for example, in the return to organic agriculture, more labor-intensive methods of production, and so forth).The point, rather, is that reversions of this kind would be motivated less by sheer need and the absence of alternative means of accommodating it, and
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more by considerations of their hedonist gains and compensations.The turn to traditional or simpler methods would take place within a new context of thinking about work and leisure, need and pleasure, and thus be itself an innovation, the manifestation of an altered dialectic of production and consumption.
Theoretical considerations: against naturalism My resistance to viewing “alternative hedonism” as a return to a simpler or more “natural” mode of existence is underwritten by a “humanist” or antinaturalist understanding of human needs and humanity–nature relations. I have written on this at length elsewhere (Soper 1995) and it would be inappropriate to dwell on it in great detail here. Suffice it to say that it is an approach that takes issue with those who want to integrate the ecological and socialist projects on the basis of what might be termed a “redemptionist” view of nature. This emphasizes the ontological affinities between humans and other animals and regards the recognition of a naturalistic understanding as essential to good ecological policy. The redemptionist perspective is also critical of any anthropocentric privileging of humanity within the planetary eco-system, and tends to endorse nature as a site of intrinsic value to whose conservation we should always give priority. It is true that we share certain essential needs and ecological dependencies with other animals. It is also true that there is an onus on human beings to acknowledge and as far as possible respect the sensibilities of other living creatures with whom they share planetary space and resources. But to dwell on the intrinsic qualities of non-human nature and the equality of status and fundamental kinship between humans and other living creatures is to risk overlooking specifically human attributes and feelings (and thus the forms of suffering and oppression that are distinctive to human beings and require distinctive forms of alleviation).As Andrew Ross has noted, there is a slippery slope that runs from biocentric ethics, wherein all life forms are equal, to the diminution of our hard-won social rights and freedoms, no sooner achieved than transferred elsewhere, to agents seen as more worthy because they are “closer” to nature. (Ross, in Bender and Druckrey 1994: 337) We should be careful, too, about giving approval to an aesthetics of wildlife and wilderness that has encouraged the provision of new playgrounds for affluent eco-tourists, but only at the cost of dispossession and violence against the indigenous peoples. A socialist politics needs generally to be wary of lending itself to any normative position which tends to condemn “humanity” in the abstract as the “anthropocentric” villain responsible for all forms of ecological abuse, when so much of the blame lies with the excessive resource consumption and pollution of a relatively small, but highly privileged, percentage of the global population.
Hedonist revisionism 131 A further reason to be cautious about adopting a naturalistic approach to human needing is that this invites us to disregard precisely those differences of human nature and activity that are at once most responsible for ecological attrition and alone able to correct for it. Unlike those of other animals, the needs of human beings are dynamic and expansionary, always historically developed through what is made available by human production itself, and continuously seeking to transcend earlier forms of consumption and their structures of gratification. Looked at from this perspective, the major problem is how to reconcile the ecological – and egalitarian – need for a more cyclical (reproductive or “immanent”) use of resources with the more distinctively human – and individualist – needs for continuous cultural innovation. We need to find ways of accommodating material needs in ecologically sustainable ways while also developing non-consumerist and less socially divisive modes of gratifying amour propre (the interest in social esteem and recognition) and the distinctively human need for novelty, complexity, and personal self-expression. These tensions and the particular demands they place on any program for reconciling human fulfillment with nature conservation are not, to my mind, sufficiently acknowledged and addressed by those who put the stress on the ontological continuum between humans and other animals. What needs emphasizing, rather, is the historical dimension of human needing, its relative (even if not total) lack of fixity, and the specifically human capacity for a pre-emptive revision of consumption. Relative to other animals, we are “underdetermined” in respect of the forms of our satisfaction, pleasure, and fulfillment, and thus uniquely placed to engage in conscious rethinking about the essentials of the “good life.” Global stability will ultimately depend on the degree to which we manage to do so. This is a perspective on needs and forms of flourishing which will certainly recognize that there is much wasteful and frivolous consumption, but which also finds it difficult to think in terms of any very final distinctions between “true” and “false” needs, and is certainly at odds with the suggestion that social and ecological harmony can be achieved or restored only by pursuing what is “truly” needed and discarding what is “false.” Even if one agrees to the presumption that one can arrive at an objective knowledge of this kind about human needs and conditions of flourishing, there seems to be no guarantee that natural resources will always be available to provide for those needs which are deemed to be authentic. (Or no guarantee, that is, unless we are defining “true” needs analytically as those which nature will endlessly accommodate, in which case the argument has little substance.) Conversely, there seems little reason to suppose that wherever contemporary consumption has proved ecologically destructive or unsustainable it has been answering to an inherently “false” need. Any globally responsible adjustment to ecological scarcities will require those living in affluent societies both to restrict or altogether sacrifice some current sources of gratification and to be imaginative and undogmatic in their attitudes to
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what they can enjoy: to open themselves to the possibilities of an alternative hedonism and modes of living and fulfillment rather different from those associated with prevalent Western assumptions about flourishing. But adjustment of this kind should be viewed not so much as the eradication of “false” needs, but as the exploration of new pleasures. Take the example of transport needs. Few will dispute that human beings have a “basic” or “abstract” need for mobility, to move about from one place to another. But how fast and in what mode? Contemporary conceptions of the “good life” in affluent cultures view this, for example, as conditional upon at least the car, and increasingly in terms of access to regular flights. In other words, we think of ourselves as flourishing in respect of our need for mobility very much in terms of the availability of modes of transport of a speed and flexibility unknown to previous generations. But if these are indeed needs, or at any rate forms of consumption essential to flourishing, they are also needs/forms of flourishing that are highly problematic ecologically, and upon which nature may well not prove able to deliver even for another century, let alone indefinitely. In this sense, even as we are satisfying an abstract need for mobility with a particular set of satisfiers so essential to current well-being that they appear themselves as needed items of consumption, we need also – for ecological reasons – to be pondering on possible alternatives to these commodities, and thus on what other possible forms of satisfaction such alternatives might provide.4
Theoretical considerations: on ascribing needs This resistance to any naturalistic approach to human needs has some implications for the revisions I earlier suggested were needed to the Marxist-socialist approach to the theory of needs and consumption. Perhaps the best way of bringing out what is at issue here is to consider the terms of the orthodox Marxist response to orthodox liberal theory. Whereas for liberals the cardinal virtue of the market economy is that it responds to needs rather than dictating consumption, for Marxists its cardinal sin is that it manipulates desire rather than satisfying genuine need. Where the liberal view is underwritten by a view of needs as a sovereign possession of individuals that is to be preserved from the imposition of any deliberate policies on consumption, the Marxist views needs not as unchallengeable and quasinatural attributes of individuals but as strongly influenced by what is promoted for consumption by the market and as reflecting its disparities of income; and where the liberal regards needs as always subjectively experienced and most typically and reliably revealed in the exercise of purchasing power, the Marxist points to the vast range of needs that remain unmet precisely for lack of effective demand, and in general denies that needs can only properly be said to exist where they are consciously felt and acted upon. On the contrary, says the Marxist, if consumer aspirations and the patterns of actual consumption are the manipulated effect of the market,
Hedonist revisionism 133 then, far from seeing the exercise of purchasing power as the index of what is “truly” needed, we should view it as evidence of the “false” needs generated by a profit-driven economy. Both these approaches, I submit, are deficient. The liberal must be rejected for its counterintuitive failure to accommodate the possibility of inexperienced or latent needs: needs that can be ascribed to individuals whether or not there is purchasing power to act on them, and even in the absence of any expression or articulation of them (the abused child’s need for love, for example; the anorexic’s need for food; the depressive’s need for joyful experience). The limitation with the Marxist approach is almost the reverse, namely its over-readiness to ascribe needs even where these are consciously denied and its resistance to accepting actual professions of need and patterns of consumption as evidence of authentic needing. To be more precise, the difficulty with the Marxist approach is its tendency to overlook the important distinction between the needs that can legitimately be ascribed to individuals whether or not they ever come to be felt (many medical needs, for example, are of this order) and the more properly political type of need which can only legitimately be said to exist insofar as there is some experience and acknowledgement of it. Marxist socialists have often spoken in the past of the need of the working class for socialism, the “true” needs of the workers, and so forth, as if these needs had the same objective status as those, for example, of an unconscious patient for a blood transfusion: they are “known” to obtain whether or not they are experienced or professed. But this conflation of objective and political needing is incoherent and self-subverting. When socialist theory speaks of “true” or “real” needs, it should not, in fact, if it is to remain in a political dialogue with those it is claiming to represent, be happy to present these needs as if they were comparable to those claimed by a doctor for an anaesthetized patient. It must present them, rather, as the needs which people can only properly be said to have if/when they come to feel them to be their own, and this means there is always an implicit reliance in any such claims on experience as validating the imputation of “political” need. In this sense, the coherence of any socialist critique of the consumption generated within the market economy, and its advocacy of the more authentic need satisfaction that socialism might help to promote, is always dependent on a reference to an already existing and acknowledged, even if not fully articulated, structure of feeling. Failure, on the other hand, to acknowledge and provide such anchorage in actual experience will always expose any claimed knowledge of political needs to the charge of being undemocratic, patronizing, even authoritarian. An “alternative hedonist” argument for socialism avoids this charge precisely because it resists any wholly objective ascription of needs and rests its case on the complex and contradictory feelings already evident in consumer responses. It is to these and their implications for political agency that I now want to turn.
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Questions of agency No radical politics of the Left can survive, or even retain its theoretical coherence, unless its negative critique of the global order is linked into an analysis of the potential political agents that might carry forward its agenda. We need to talk not just about what is wrong and about what ideally we might want in its place, but about the process of political transition itself. There are, of course, extensive global networks of socialist opposition outside the First World orbit, and many left-leaning popular movements and nongovernmental organizations campaigning around the world on issues of poverty, race, feminism, and environmental conservation. But these to date have had rather little impact in terms of party politics in the affluent nations, and one has to remain gloomy about the prospects of any electoral mandate emerging in the more immediately foreseeable future for parties of red–green commitments. In this context, as I have already suggested, the only discernible beginnings of a change of heart that might ultimately lead in that more radical direction are to be found in the fears and disillusionments that have been bred by consumerist culture itself. These are of a twofold character. Some – the more altruistic or other-oriented – consist in alarm and distress over ecological attrition; in compassion for the miseries endured by the more destitute global communities; and in moral revulsion at the “system” which reproduces such grotesque disparities of wealth and well-being. It would be difficult, admittedly, to claim that these forms of altruistic concern have been either very extensively experienced or deeply felt (had they been so, their underlying egalitarian and empathetic impulse would have been acted on much sooner, and we would not now be contending with anything like such extreme forms of destitution and ecological collapse). But there are some signs that concern of this kind will in the future be reinforced by growing disaffection and anxiety within affluent society itself. Perhaps the most significant of these sources of discontent is the structuring of time itself within a capitalist culture dominated by the work ethic and the drive for continual growth and productivity. The prosperity and technological mastery that could have allowed a more leisurely pace of life and a massive reduction of time spent laboring have been harnessed to a quest for profits that has resulted in ever more intensive and often more tedious work routines. But as many now are beginning to appreciate, endless production is irrational from both an environmental and a human point of view. Much less stress would be placed on both nature and ourselves were we to cut back on the hours spent in offices and factories and spend more time in idling and not producing. Not everyone finds work, of course, and there are those who are now more or less permanently unemployed, or very vulnerable in such work as they do have to the shifting demands of a deregulated economy and increasingly “flexible” contracts. The point, rather, is that almost everyone’s life experience is determined in one way or another by the combined impact, on the one
Hedonist revisionism 135 hand, of the capitalist mission to cut jobs to the minimum and the puritan insistence, on the other, that work is the condition of pleasure, and that if you are deprived of the former you have very little entitlement to the latter. The solution here (and a successful start has already been made in France with the introduction of the 35-hour week) is that outlined by André Gorz (1985, 1989, 1999): a reduction in the amount of time spent on heteronomous (other-determined) labor required by modern mass production, and the expansion of the sphere of creative, autonomous work. Ultimately, as Gorz himself fully realizes, this would be conditional on a break with the capitalist economic and cultural dynamic. But in the boredom and weariness, the stress and lack of fulfillment that are now so prevalent in the capitalist work world, we can discern signs of a future pressure for moves which might finally enable wealth to be realized not in the profit-driven production of yet more (ecologically damaging) goods, but in the form of a life-enhancing expansion of free time. Importantly, too, from the standpoint of alternative hedonism, we should acknowledge the politicizing impact of some of the more negative effects of the work-driven consumer society on need-satisfaction itself. Many forms of pleasure and convenience consumption (car travel, air flight, disposable goods, fast foods, inorganic and genetically modified foodstuffs, etc.) have now been compromised by alarms about their safety, their ecological side-effects, their impact on health, and their anti-hedonist repercussions for the affluent life itself. Anxieties of this kind are, of course, by no means universal, and tend at present, for obvious reasons, to be largely confined to those in the middle and upper income brackets. They will also very often be experienced in conflict with other, more immediately pressing concerns over employment security. Those who are dependent for their livelihood on the less eco-friendly forms of production and consumption will not find it so easy to be enthused about any ecologically prompted fall-off in demand for these commodities.Yet despite these countervailing influences and their partial and fluctuating impact on the enthusiasm for green measures, we can still point in recent times to higher and relatively diversified levels of public support for anti-pollution legislation, more organic methods of agriculture, and curbs on road-building and airport extension. We are witnessing, we might argue, the emergence of a new, more contradictory structure of consumer needs whereby some consumers are looking to alternative, more ethical lifestyles in order to escape the unpleasurable byproducts of their own formerly less questioned sources of gratification. In addition, moreover, to the more directly experienced constraints on pleasure associated with these now compromised forms of modern consumption we might note some more insidious and less consciously acknowledged forms of deprivation. Some time ago now, Adorno drew attention to this dimension of contemporary anti-hedonism in his Minima Moralia when he described technology as
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Kate Soper making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility…. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, nor shielding the interior of the house which receives them…. What does it means for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? (Adorno 1978: 40)
Although Adorno here does not even begin to answer his question about what these developments have meant for the subject, what he does do is alert us to our failure sufficiently to consider the impact on our sensibilities of the more minor environmental changes, cultural shifts, and routine technological innovations. What he reminds us of is the rapidity of our accommodation to these: our powers, almost unconsciously, to adapt to the impact of new practices and technologies – and thus to transcend and cancel out their initially abusive and alienating features. Or so it would seem. For what Adorno is surely also suggesting is that this cancellation of alienation may also come only at the cost of reducing our responsiveness and sensual enjoyment, and doing so in a way that simultaneously deadens us to the sense of what it is we may have lost, or be in the process of losing. At any rate, one can think of many aspects of contemporary existence which seem to manifest this kind of deprivatory dialectic. City-dwellers, for example, almost never now experience total silence; they are never enveloped in full darkness nor offered a clear vision of the night sky; in their street perambulations they are constantly interrupted and halted by traffic lights and other obstacles, and assaulted by the noise and dust and stench of motorized vehicles. Commuters on both trains and underground are submitted to continuous sensory insult in the form of ticket-barrier buffeting and overcrowding. Provisions for shelter or rest are either now non-existent or entirely minimalist and very seldom designed to comfort the flesh or delight the eye. Indeed, in respect of the extremely reduced, or even non-existent, provision today of a whole range of public amenities that were previously taken for granted, it is difficult not to feel that we are expected now to tolerate far higher levels of physical abuse and discomfort than in the (relatively opulent and sensually sensitive) past.This creation of an alienating tolerance is but one of many aspects in which the advance of consumerist culture should be viewed as hedonistically regressive. In countering these forms of unpleasure and their often only halfacknowledged status what needs to be highlighted are the joys of traveling
Hedonist revisionism 137 and eating more slowly; of freedom from the car-culture depredations; of a consumption less troubled by the knowledge of its socially exploitative and ecologically destructive impact.We need visions of a future consumption built around ecologically less damaging methods of farming and commodity production, the pleasures of unpolluted air and water, the recycling of all waste, the expansion of free time, the promotion of cultural and aesthetic modes of self-realization, the decline of shopping. We need to promote the idea of green cities, based on the privileging of pedestrian rights, the expansion of public transport, the shift from road-building to the provision of multiple cycle routes with covered lanes, insulated homes for everyone, communal provisioning, and luxurious public works. In arguing for such utopian projections, I am not in any sense underestimating the difficulties of building support for a red–green politics, or suggesting that visions of eco-socialist forms of consumption can substitute for the less heady forms of economic and political analysis and the campaigning built around them.The visions I am offering here and suggesting that eco-socialists should encourage in their writings and cultural productions are only, I believe, auxiliary to these more central strands of analysis and campaigning. But, rather, as Adorno implied that he was able to discern something of the horror of the whole in the design of the door handle, so in our current perceptions and projections we can further the desire for change by pointing to the other possible structures of pleasure intimated in the specific dissatisfactions with the present.
Notes 1 2 3 4
See the report in the Guardian, 19 June 2002. The World Disasters Report 2002, published by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. This is a central theme, for example, of Anthony Giddens (1994); see also Crozier and Murphy (1996). See the reports from Tourism Concern and the Rethinking Tourism Project; see also the Guardian, 22 May 2002.
Bibliography Adorno,T. (1978) Minima Moralia, London: NLB. Bender, B. and T. Druckrey (eds.) (1994) Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, Seattle: Bay Press. Bowring, F. (2000) André Gorx and the Sartrean Legacy, London: Macmillan. Crozier, M. and P. Murphy (eds.) (1996) Left in Search of a Center, Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: the Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Gorz,A. (1985) Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, London: Pluto. —— (1989) Critique of Economic Reason, London:Verso.
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—— (1999) Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-based Society, Cambridge: Polity. Lodziak, C. and J.Tatman (1997) André Gorz:A Critical Introduction, London:Verso. Magri, L. (1982) “The Peace Movement in Europe,” New Left Review 131. Soper, K. (1990) Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism, London: Verso. —— (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell.
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Post-porn\post-anti-porn Queer socialist pornography Shannon Bell
Post-porn\post-anti-porn is a work in a new genre of feminism which I term fast feminism.1 Fast feminism is a mesh of the most fundamental operative principle of all feminisms – gender equality – with masculinist speed theory, originated by the philosopher Paul Virilio (Virilio and Lotringer 1983, 1987; Virilio 2003). Speed is the practice and ideology of post-contemporary society: everything rushes into its opposite and back again, only to recur. Where the power lies is in the motion. Motion\speed scrambles distinctions: the territories of philosophy, politics, pornography rush into one another, as do the cyber-body and psycho-body, as do what we once knew and lived as male and female. “What happens is between bodies,”2 and it is between and among bodies that gender assembles, disassembles, and reassembles.
Heterogeneous pornography as gender terrorism The problem with dominant, hegemonic, or what Georges Bataille might have termed homogeneous pornography is its strictly defined and ever so easily identifiable “appropriate” gendered behavior. What I am terming postporn\post-anti-porn is a new type of heterogeneous3 pornography, produced by alternative image producers, primarily, perhaps necessarily, queer socialist producers, and in this instance, in addition, digital or cyber producers. In cyber heterogeneous pornography the cyber-body image of the bio-body engages in actions that can be considered gender terrorist, in accordance with gender terrorist Del LaGrace Volcano’s definition of a gender terrorist as “anyone who consistently and intentionally subverts, destabilizes and challenges the binary gender system” (www.disgrace.dircon.co.uk/page1.html). These gender terrorist actions function to alter the meaning and practices of the lived psycho-bio-body. In so doing, the actions serve to redefine the sexual aspect of what Richard Westra (in Chapter 10) has identified as the third principle of a new socialist ontology: “the re-embedding of the economy in the ‘life-world’.” Gender terrorism deployed in alternative image production dislocates and sabotages the heterophallic sexual economy premised on the duality of a two-sex economy and the corresponding binary gender system, and frees the bodies and body actions from the limitations and
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restraints of heterosexual coding represented in and actively constructing homogeneous porn.
Fast feminism and post-porn\post-anti-porn How does fast feminism play out in the context of Post-Porn\Post-AntiPorn: Queer Socialist Pornography? Let me begin with Catharine MacKinnon’s astute observation that “[c]ensoring pornography has not delegitimized it” (1987: 140). MacKinnon continues: “I want to delegitimize it. What would do that is unclear to me at this time. Maybe there is a way.” Interestingly, Drucilla Cornell, in her essay “Pornography’s Temptation,” which is partially a critique of MacKinnon’s framing of pornography as a sex act, as “a form of forced sex” (MacKinnon 1987: 172) rather than as a representation of sex, sets forth a way. Cornell poses and addresses a more specific question:“How can a feminist approach to pornography that challenges rather than replicates gender stereotypes be developed?” (1995: 95–6). Cornell’s answer is “a different form of ‘representational politics’ ” (ibid.: 97). She contends: “Political action, not legal action, should be the main mode of intervention in the production of pornography” (ibid.: 96). Representational politics “describes the effort…to unleash the feminine imaginary into new representational forms that challenge the stereotypes of femininity governing the presentation of the female ‘sex’ in the mainstream heterosexual porn industry.” After all, MacKinnon is not wrong: “Pornography codes how to look at women” (1987: 173). However, and here is the problem, MacKinnon produces what I have previously analyzed as a totalizing system premised on a blind spot: “The blind spot in her theory is the possibility for female sexual agency in a sexist\racist\classist system” (Bell 1994: 83). That hegemonic pornography – that is, mainstream heterosexual pornography – does not incorporate a great deal of sexual agency for the women engaged in it is rather obvious. MacKinnon, in her talk on pornography at the University of Toronto, on April 26, 2001, argued that women’s lack of political representation in the political system coincides with the precise nature of women’s representation in pornography. What MacKinnon means is that the stereotypes of women’s sexuality and the objectified fantasies of women’s sex in pornography cause women as a group to be seen and treated as unworthy of equal citizenship, and consequently unsuitable for and incapable of equal political leadership roles at state and federal levels. When questioned about the linkage between non-hegemonic, alternative pornographic images and alternative political action, MacKinnon observed that although there were numerous efforts to construct alternative pornographic images these images never get outside of precisely that which they were erected to critique and stand on their own without the potential for recuperation. Here MacKinnon is wrong, but only recently wrong because only recently with the meshing of the dual technologies of pornography production and
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internet distribution into web pornography are there what I am identifying as nonrecuperable sexual images and fantasy stories potentially produced and distributed on a significant scale to destabilize the representations of the female sex in hegemonic or mainstream pornography.The website www.ssspread.com, I contend, deploys the dual technologies of pornography and the internet and places these within a queer cyber collective practice.This is not to minimize the cultural\sexual significance of 1980s and 1990s lesbian, sadomasochistic (SM), and transgender “sexual representations in magazines such as On Our Backs, Bad Attitude, Quim, Wicked Women, the writings of such feminist erotographers as Pat Califia, Joan Nestle, Susie Bright and Carol Queen, the films of Blush Production, and the photos of Dell LaGrace Volcano [(previously Della Grace), which] depict sex between women who privilege and engage in sex with one another” (Bell 2000: 177); it is to suggest that these were contained more within their community of origin – distributed and consumed in a lesbian context. MacKinnon and radical feminism equate sexuality, the foundation of women’s oppression, with labor, the foundation of human possibility and in alienated form the source of human oppression, according to Marx and Marxism: Both labor and sexuality are socially constructed and constructing and both are universal and historically specific. Marx theorizes both a general, universal aspect of labor as conscious, purposeful life activity and a specific historic aspect of labor as alienated labor. MacKinnon, on the other hand, has no space for non-alienated female sexuality. (Bell 1994: 82) And no possibility for female sexuality as purposeful life-activity.
Producing porn: labor as self-activity William Corlett, in Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory, and Value, stresses the necessity of labor as self-activity, that is, as life-activity and subjectivity, for political action. What Corlett means by self-activity is “the nameless properties, reserves and energy” (1998: 217) that Marx includes in his broad concept of labor before it is objectified into labor-power. It is this excess to laborpower that will facilitate a recovery of labor’s subjectivity, according to Corlett. Labor’s subjectivity and form-giving fire are channeled through and contained in its relational position vis-à-vis capital. “Labour is objectified by capital at precisely the moment it attempts to speak; the price of labour’s access to the means of subsistence is lack of access to the means of representation” (ibid.: 146). Class action, claims Corlett, must begin in “abject areas of life” (ibid.: 147), with the persons and the aspects of human life that are unmediated in the capital–labor–power relation. Corlett contends that “a third component of Marxist struggle…is valorizing those aspects of life ruled
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worthless” (ibid.: 195), those aspects of life in excess to labor-power; those aspects of the life-world that, according to Westra (Chapter 10), following Karl Polanyi, need to be understood and included as part of a widening of the economy and its reembedding in social life itself. The abject Corlett sees as including “all aspects of human survival – the struggle to connect with the means of subsistence (learning to fight, bartering through life, giving whatever one can, nursing children, taking what one needs) as part of labor’s movement” (ibid.: 177). “[T]he form-giving power of labor” (ibid.: 176) lies beneath and directs “all aspects of human survival” (ibid.: 177). Corlett states: “I detected labour’s whereabouts in bourgeois society – in prisons, lost dreams, broken spirits, daydreams, dilapidated buildings – in a devalorized state underground” (ibid.: 89). I want to add to Corlett’s cursory list of locations of labor’s whereabouts the life-activity of performative sexual praxis that one finds in the production, distribution, and perhaps consumption of heterogeneous pornography. Corlett’s category of the “abject” incorporates those who Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in Empire (2000), have termed “the new barbarians.” The new barbarian “destroy[s] with an affirmative violence and trace[s] new paths of life through [her] own material existence” (ibid.: 215). Hardt and Negri contend that “we can recognize” barbaric deployments “first and foremost in corporeal relations and configurations of gender and sexuality” (ibid.).They advise: The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 216) This is the bio-body come cyber-body which leaves behind the old female psycho-body produced by both hegemonic sexuality and the Oedipal family – the masochistic-hysteric or engendered little-girl cum mommy-woman. It is the old female psycho-body that is the stereotype of femininity and the materiality of hegemonic pornography. In situating the performative sexual praxis of making, producing, and distributing pornography as labor, there must be a distinction made between pornography that, in the words of Angela Carter, “remains in the service of the status quo” (1978: 17) and “codes how to look at women” in a way that “reinforces the prevailing system of [social\sexual] values and ideas in a given society” (ibid.: 18), and pornography that works to take apart the prevailing system of social\sexual values and ideas.The latter Carter (ibid.: 19) identifies as “moral pornography”: pornography that functions as “a critique of current relations between the sexes.” She claims that The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute
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sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His[\her] business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. (Carter 1978: 19–20) It is this idea of moral pornography that informs Cornell’s politics of representation, and it is this idea that informs my idea of nonrecuperable pornography; although I would change Carter’s “real relations of man and his kind” (ibid.: 20) to “diverse degendered relations of humankind.” A nonrecuperable politics of representation is located in what Kobena Mercer, in “Just Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fantasies of Race” (1993), terms the “perverse aesthetic.” The perverse aesthetic, according to Mercer, in addition to being sexually explicit, contains a textual ambivalence that ensures the uncertainty of any one singular meaning. I add to Mercer’s configuration of the perverse aesthetic an important third feature: this is, it is the home, the territory of “the pervert who resists Oedipalization and has invented other territorialities to operate in” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 67); it is the territory of “a body that is incapable of adapting to family life…to the regulations of a traditional sex life” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 216). In hegemonic pornography, “stick your hard cock inside her juicy pussy” pornography, a fairly singular meaning is attached to the images; this is that the bio-female is the object of desire that is going to make the bio-male come; the fact that she comes many times is a function of the bio-cock’s prowess. Cornell states that “domination is doing someone else’s language” (1995: 144). I would say that domination is laboring in someone else’s language. I contend that the hegemonic heterosexual pornography genre comes close to being an example of what Emmanuel Levinas calls a “said without a Saying” (1981: 45).4 A Saying, once said, becomes congealed in the Said. I am claiming that hegemonic homogeneous pornography is an excessively objectified Said to the extent that there is no Saying; rather, the genre absorbs the Saying.
Saying porn In order to engage in nonrecuperable pornography production, distribution, and consumption, three philosophical conditions need to be met: • • •
the saying of the work is not lost in the said; the work is produced from a new post-porn\post-anti-porn positionality; the work is an act of labor as self-activity and not labor alienated as laborpower.
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The first condition is derivative from Levinasian ethics. Levinasian ethics is an ethics of responsibility owed to the other before self, a performative “here I am” to a call from the face of the other; through the face of the other one connects to the third or potentially all others. As part of a perverse aesthetic Levinas’ biblical others – the widow, orphan, and stranger – are queered, becoming the phallic-widow mother, the post-female\post-male bastard orphan and the de-Oedipalized stranger. Crucial to theorizing nonrecuperable porn are Levinas’ concept of the saying and his positioning of holocaust art. The saying is “a foreword preceding language” (Levinas 1981: 5). When the saying moves into language it is located in the symbolic order and “subordinated to its theme” (ibid.: 6). Levinas claims that “a said is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations” (1985: 88). When a saying congeals in a said it congeals in “the linguistic system and…ontology” (Levinas 1981: 6) of domination or as a counter-discourse to the language of domination. Although the saying is necessarily betrayed in any said, Levinas can be read as making a distinction between dead saids, saids in which the saying is congealed as in a commodity form, congealed as an alienated and objectified said, and sayings that are congealed in saids that operate more like living labor and convey the saying in the praxis of witnessing: “saying is witness, whatever be the ulterior destiny into which it enters through the said in a system of words” (ibid.: 147). Levinas comes close to locating saying as witnessing in holocaust art. Art for Levinas is a fixation of the saying in the said; Levinas contends that “every artwork is in the end a statue – a stoppage of time” (1987: 8); art is congealed or frozen sayings.When Levinas speaks positively of art, it is “art made by survivors or it is art that deals with the Holocaust in some way” (Robbins 1999: 133–4); that is, it is art of the disaster whose saying witnesses the singularity of beings. This is the type of art that Levinas might see as “art that makes the ethical difference” (Levinas 1987: 133). Art that makes the ethical difference can be extended beyond art that witnesses the holocaust if the holocaust is taken as a specific manifestation of disaster. Disaster, according to Jean François Lyotard, is “Auschwitz generalized” (Caputo 1993: 28). In Auschwitz generalized Lyotard includes “everyone whose mind or body, dignity or identity has been damaged or even shattered” (ibid.: 28).Women as a group, regardless of our vast distinctiveness and power differences, have had our minds, bodies, dignity, and identities damaged in sexist/classist/racist systems of domination. This damaged identity is represented and reproduced in hegemonic pornography, and these representations and reproductions act simultaneously as production sites of damaged gender. The moral pornographer, as the moral pornographer, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) banned artist, art professor, and one of three ssspread partners, Barbara De Genevieve, says, takes “the vilified and vilifying genre of imagemaking found in hegemonic pornography and play[s] with its mark of disgrace” (email communication, February 5, 2002). The moral pornographer witnesses the sexual relations between bio-men and bio-women in the society in which
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they take place. At the levels of action and imagination the moral pornographer “deproduces” these relations and reproduces new action-images in which these sexual relations have been exposed, parodied and given a different meaning. In “The Image Cannot Be Seen,” I questioned and used images to question “[w]hat happens when hetero-gendered codes – dress, gesture, posture, and sexual activity – are reworked in a [pervert] frame? What happens when you mime the mime that heterosexuality has written on male and female bodies and you are both [bio-]females” (Bell 1997: 232) or a bio-female and a trans-boy or bio-female and trans-man, or trans-boy and trans-man? If sexual actions construct meaning between bodies, then the labor of performative sexual praxis constructs and records new meanings between sexual bodies. The second condition, producing porn work from a new positionality, builds on what sexual theoretical and political activists such as Dany Lacombe (1994), the authors in the collections Sex Exposed (McIntosh and Segal 1993) and Dirty Looks (Gibson and Gibson 1993), and Brenda Cossman et al.(1997) have identified as a politics of subversion in which sexual others, those deemed obscene and thus off/scene, come on/scene and produce images of their sexualities, or as an act of guerilla warfare deconstruct the codes of the dominant pornography genre, and in so doing upset the sexism often present in mainstream sexual imagery. (Cossman et al. 1997: 26) These are transgressive acts of representation which may or may not “stand on their own without the potential for recuperation.” MacKinnon argues that they don’t.
Levinasian perverts: owners of the female phallus I contend that images and stories are least likely to be recuperable in a language of dominance if they are produced from the position of the phallic mother queered as the phallic widow-mother, the post-female\post-male bastard orphan and the de-Oedipalized stranger. These three Levinasian perverts are part of what Hardt and Negri have termed the new barbarians deploying “the will to be against in corporeal relations [between and among bodies] and configurations of gender and sexuality” (2000: 215–16). Cornell puts forth Lacan’s argument that “at the very basis of Western culture lies the repressed, abjected figure of the ultimate object of desire, the phallic mother” (1995: 126).The phallic mother is the fantasy figure who has it all – the phallus and female genitalia, the completely whole all-powerful being who haunts our imaginary. The phallic mother, of course, has to be brought under the law of the father in the symbolic realm in order for appropriate gender identities and social roles to ensue. Cornell argues that the conflation of the bio-penis and the phallus occurs at individual fantasy level in
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viewing pornography: “The ever-erect prick we see in pornography is the imagined prick of the father who can control the terrifying figure of the Phallic Mother” and “take [her] at any moment” (ibid.: 129). Cornell contends that the so-called “bad girls” of porn stand in for the phallic mother who is disassociated from the actual mother in the Oedipalization process: “The ‘bad girl,’ the seductress, is the woman who tempts the man to pursue his desire…at risk to himself ” (ibid.: 131). Carter contends that the Sadeian woman is the phallic mother who possesses “intellectual rapacity,” “sexual omnivorousness,” is indifferent to child-bearing, “penetrates and is penetrated in turn” and “exercis[es] a Sadeian right to fuck” (1978: 111–12). While Judith Butler (1993) queers the phallus5 as a lesbian organ, and Elizabeth Grosz (1995) positions the woman with the phallus as a lesbian fetishist,6 I want to make the female phallus the perverse phallus, the prosthetic cock and phantom cock of the pervert phallic widow-mother who murdered the rule of law of the father, the post-male\post-female bastard orphan who fought against and escaped the mommy–daddy–me triangle of the nuclear family and is able performatively to enact all three triangular points at will, and the de-Oedipalized stranger to heterosexuality. It is these positions that the “hot femmes, studly butches, trannie boys and genderfuckers” of the ssspread website cyber embody; the “hot femmes, studly butches, trannie boys and genderfuckers” are the legitimate offspring of the Sadeian woman who refuses “to accept the female body as it has been forged by societal authorities” (Schutzman 1999: 103) and in so doing “exercises a Sadeian right to fuck” on her own terms. Freud discloses that woman emerges when female masculinity is repressed, when the active girl is fully Oedipalized into the feminine woman.The feminine woman is the dead said of hegemonic pornography; the so-called bad girl embodies in fantasy just enough of the phallic mother to be dangerous and thus desirable, but not enough to be terrifying and deadly; she is no phallic-widow. Hegemonic male sexual identity is not at risk; rather, it is one of remaining spaces in which heteromasculinity is reaffirmed at the man’s convenience. She can actively seduce him, fuck him, control him, talk dirty to him, all the while being available for his pleasure, which is her pleasure, and always, always adoring his cock. She doesn’t own her own phallus, for the cock she wears, if and when she wears a cock, is present to arouse the male viewer as other femmes play with it, swallow it, and take it up their orifices. These are acts of alienated gender labor. Performative sexual praxis, which I have identified as belonging to Marx’s broad understanding of labor as creative, self-affirming life-activity, is reduced to labor-power in hegemonic pornography. It is not owned by the people enacting it; this is to say, the actions of sexual praxis are not derived from an identity temporarily or permanently constructed by the persons doing the actions; nor are the sexual practices derived spontaneously from the ground up by the participants (although the actors involved on the alienated porn shoot may occasionally dialogue as a group about setting the scenes up). The sexual practices take
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place in the context of a dead said, “an eight-billion-dollar-a-year industry” (MacKinnon 1987: 198) in which sex is presented according to industrial formulae premised on variations in an overarching sexual script according to which females are endlessly fuckable, lustfully unable to control their sexuality, and “bad girls,” the repressively desublimated remnant of the phallic mother, exist under the law and pleasure principle of the father.What is implied about male sexuality is equally alienating: men are always hard, big and masterful, and able temporarily to give up control when it suits them.
Ssspread: queer socialist pornography Ssspread (Chicago\San Francisco) is a cyberspace of nonrecuperable pornographic images, stories, and interviews.The images, stories, and interviews are nonrecuperable on six fronts: 1) The nature of the images and written texts is of “hot femmes, studly butches” and they involve “lots of genderfuck” (www.ssspread.com). 2) The images and written texts are produced for a specified consumer – “the queer community.” In “About Us” the ssspread producers identify themselves as a “team of artists who have been involved with issues of sexuality and gender for many years…[who] are committed to the queer community…and want to serve a segment of the community that is under-represented in web pornography” (ibid.). 3) The labor producing the images is the labor of self-determining life-activity enacted by what the three co-producers identify as “non-professional” actors and writers. “The majority of our models have been friends and acquaintances who are interested in and support what we are doing. The use of non-professionals as talent…represents our attitude” (ibid.). 4) The content is collectively determined and produced as an interactive process between those in the images and scenarios and those shooting the images and scenarios, with feedback from those viewing the images. “[T]he scenarios we shoot are based on discussions with and the fantasies of the people we photograph…this expand[s] to include suggestions from our viewers as to the specifics of what they want to see on the site. ‘Tell us your fantasy, we’ll shoot it for you’ ” (ibid.). 5) The posted material (images and written texts), the said of the website, is a living said “interactive on as many levels as possible,” inviting viewers to “share your stories or articles” and “take a turn being the porn star”; and involving an active viewer gaze which is both laudatory and critical in the feedback forum.The web producers state: “We believe that feedback is an essential part of the web experience. Bulletin board forums and direct feedback emails permit members [sic] two-way communication” (ibid.). 6) The material is made from the positionality of the Sadeian woman: the phallic-widow mother, the post-male\post-female bastard orphan and the de-Oedipalized stranger.
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On the opening ssspread web page the viewer sees a woman in femme attire – garters and nylons, slinky burgundy dress, matching burgundy slingback pumps, on her knees having her long black hair pulled and her head shoved on to a hardwood floor by a male-encoded body in short-sleeved nerd shirt, baggy denim trousers and Doc Marten shoes. The male embodiment lifts the female embodiment’s dress and spanks her butt with the palm of his hand. The image is in motion so the viewer can watch the female head be shoved to the floor and her butt spanked again and again with the image returning to start position. There is something different about the image, something that alerts the viewer to what Freud (1919: 252) calls the uncanny. The image is familiar, yet unfamiliar, strange; the motion makes it somewhat frightening, seeing a woman’s head pushed to the ground even in play has a gruesome quality, bringing to thought the familiar dead said of gender violence; there is an aspect of looking on with anxious pleasure, a desire to occupy both positionalities in the image simultaneously; to insert your gaze in the meaning constructed in the motion between these bodies. There is a secret in the image – we know that this is not a heterosexual couple enacting domination and subordination. This visual image is able to portray the uncanny – perhaps it’s the clothing, perhaps the denim pants are too baggy, the male body too heavy, the spanking hand too fleshy. The caption under the image reads: “The prime porn site for hot femmes, studly butches, and lots of genderfuck.” However, without the caption we know the image is not “normal.” A warning accompanies the opening web page: “This site contains sexually explicit adult pornographic material for dykes, lesbians, and transgendered individuals. Visitors must be over the age of 21 to enter, if you are under the age of 21 or you are offended by sexually explicit dyke, lesbian, or transgendered material, please exit.” The viewer, once logged in for a very small monthly member’s fee of $9.95, has four options: Image Galleries, Story Lounge, Articles and Interviews, and the Forum. Image Galleries Each of the current twenty-eight Image Gallery pages has four different photo scenarios (for a current total of 112 individual porn shoots); each individual photo scenario has between seventy-five and ninety thumbnail photos. I will examine three scenarios: 1–900-Trans-Man (gallery page 12), Dick and Jane (gallery page 14), and Sailor’s Hitch (gallery page 16); the first two have viewer feedback in the Forum. In 1–900-Trans-Man (www.ssspread.cpm/members/gallery/gallery12.html) we see an African-American tattooed femme ordering what turns out to be a trans-man and a grrl\boy by phone; photo 3 discloses the femme, a transman, and a queer boy negotiating the ensuing scenes; in photo 4 the femme removing the condom previously in her cleavage informs man and boy that they will be playing safe; bondage is introduced in photo 8 when the boy is
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placed in ankle and wrist cuffs, photos 12–28 have the trans-man topping and servicing the boy, who morphs into a girl in photo 18. By photo 20 it is obvious who the scene has been for and who has been directing the scene – that is, the femme dominatrix (dom) and her female assistant dom; photos 30–37 make clear that the trans-man and his boy\grrl sidekick are acting according to the pleasure of the female dom; photo 43 shows the grrl\boy worshiping at the shoe sole of the assistant dom; photos 46 and 47 are of the number one dom, the phallic widow or Sadeian woman, femme-handling the trans-man; and in photo 50 she is femme-handling the grrl\boy, who in photo 52 is pushed by the dom to perform oral sex on the trans-man; from photos 55 through 64 the trans-man, grrl\boy, and assistant dom focus on the pleasure of the prima dominatrix, with the trans-man and grrl\boy jointly servicing the dom orally and with a hand\fist job. The final photo, photo 65, is a cuddle scene in which the trans-man, grrl\boy and dom gaze respectfully and adoringly into each other’s eyes; it is a shot of three faces recognizing each other and in this joint recognition recognizing the third (the viewers’ gaze). The dom occupies the position of the Sadeian woman, the phallicwidow, who sexually rebirths the trans-man and boy\grrl as bastard orphans of the mommy–daddy–me triangle and heterosexual desire. In the Forum a viewer’s comment reads: “Group sex scenes are hot, and this one especially! I love seeing people with different body types, sizes, shapes, colors…the diversity of the bodies represented in ssspread is greatly appreciated when most porn features a really narrow view of what attractive is.…My only problem, and that’s the title…it says ‘transman’ when…I think there may be a third person in the shoot who either ID’s [identifies] as male or genderqueer or gender fluid” (www.spread.com/cgi-spread/wwwthreads.p1). Dick and Jane (www.ssspread.cpm/members/gallery/gallery14.html) is a solo photo shoot of Dick morphing into Jane, the object of his desire, and then back again into Dick. Photos 1 and 2 show Dick smelling and fantasizing over a fetish item, a negligee top of Jane’s; in the first fifteen photos Dick removes his male signifiers, culminating in him playing with his hard black cock in photo 15; in the next series of fifteen photos Dick removes his cock and proceeds to fuck himself with his condom-protected cock; Dick is becoming, body-morphing, into Jane in photo 28; by photo 30 he is an embodied she wearing the fetish object of Jane’s attire, a black spaghetti-strap sheer lingerie top; in photo series 31–45 Jane plays with her nipples, then enacts androgynized femme poses that feature her female sex organ, complete with a masturbation sequence that has Jane riding a black silk scarf between her pussy lips in photos 40–45; in photos 45–75 Jane finger-fucks and again uses a dildo on herself; photos 63–65 show Jane face down on a hardwood floor in somewhat classical positions of female submission; in photo 75 Jane looks the viewer straight in the eye; changing her femme attire to a black lace tank top, Jane seductively begins to redress, to redesign Dick; the lace t-top and Jane body-actions are transported in photos 76–90 into Dick, who reemerges as a man with a difference in photos 88–90. Dick and Jane is the
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creative life-activity of enacting a genderfuck on one body which morphs male\female and back to male again, but male with a difference. Dick\Jane is simultaneously a post-male\post-female bastard orphan stranger to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. An anonymous comment in the Forum exclaims: “sexy cute handsome pretty cock sweet fuzzy totally genderfucked” (www.spread.com/cgi-spread/wwwthreads.p1). Sailor’s Hitch (www.ssspread.cpm/members/gallery/gallery16.html) begins with a sailor late at night cruising the streets to get laid; he meets a blackhaired femme diva, who originally asserts her dominance by blowing smoke in the guy’s face.They head off together to her place; the first sexual action is the femme pinning the sailor’s head against the wall; a sailor, conventionally considered rough trade, is being roughed up by a petite femme, who by photo 13 we learn from the background equipment is a practicing dominatrix who has taken the sailor to her dungeon. In photo 18 the sailor’s hard cock is foregrounded; however, by photo 21 it is the sailor who is on his knees worshiping, and by photos 22–28 sucking the femme-dom’s cock, which she pulls out from beneath her sheer polka-dot dress; the scene begins to shift to SM domination in photo 29 as the femme pins the sailor’s arms above his head on the leather SM work\play table; this is followed by a bathroom series in which the dom washes the sailor’s mouth out with soap, dons a black lace negligee and pins him on the floor with her foot, then engages in nipple torture before she leads him back to the dungeon (photos 31–45) to be placed in quite severe and expert rope bondage (photos 47–60) using slip knots – a sailor’s trade; the sailor tied face down has his pussy probed by the femme-dom’s latex-gloved fingers until he is ready to be penetrated by her femme-cock (photos 61–74); after being fucked, the sailor is released from bondage and sent on his way in the world with only his cap as a shield (photos 76–90). The sailor, an icon of working-class masculinity, in Sailor’s Hitch is a stranger to heteromasculinity; the femme-dom occupies the dual positions of bastard orphan to femininity (she has her cock serviced) and phallic-widow mother, who disciplines a male icon redesigned on a biofemale body, turning the sailor’s cyber-embodied male\female flesh body into her object of amusement to be discharged according to her will. Story Lounge The Story Lounge currently houses twenty-five stories; I will examine two: My Mother’s Body and Eat at Eddies. In My Mother’s Body, Barbara DeGenevieve, the artist member of the ssspread collective, narrates an SM scene enacted in her art studio. The encounter is fueled by DeGenevieve’s childhood voyeuristic love of her mother’s body: Your breasts are beautiful, like my mother’s. It’s odd when I think about the ease with which she dressed and undressed in front of me. I was fascinated
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by her breasts. They were large and very dense with nipples in perpetual erection. I watched in awe as she put her bra straps over her shoulders, bent over and shook all of that pink flesh into the white cotton cones of her 36C Maidenform. (Bend Over and shake for me, www.spread.com/members/stories/archives/001215.html) I never thought of [my mother’s body] as sexual until I started telling you about it. When I was a kid, I compulsively drew breasts and high heeled shoes, usually without attachment to a body. (ibid.) The protagonist, De Genevieve, is an active agent of desire: My lust embarrasses me and I’m comforted by your blindness to my lechery. I want to work your body into the same frenzy I feel in mine. My cunt is throbbing. I stick two fingers into my wet and swollen hole and bring them up under your nose. (ibid.) De Genevieve clips her captive’s pubic hair with a fetishized object of her mother’s, her mother’s old sewing scissors. What is fascinating about the story is that the mother remains the phallic mother, a strong desirable figure capable of daughter seduction; for De Genevieve, her mother was never desexualized and placed under the sign and law of the father. When she was a child, De Genevieve discloses, “[m]y mother never closed the door all the way when she undressed for bed at 9:30 every night. Shake your breasts for me” (ibid.). De Genevieve transports her sexual desire for her mother forward and enacts adult desire from her lineage as the daughter of a Sadeian woman cum Sadeian woman herself, who actively desires her mother in fantasy and her sexual partner in material reality, using one realm to fuel the other. Eat At Eddies, by Josh Gallagher, is a quick humorous degradation fantasy by a butch for an older butch server (mid-30s, graying flattop, bulge in tuxedo pants) in her femme’s favorite restaurant. The fantasy takes place while the femme girlfriend discusses how much fun marriage would be. Josh drifts: I’m licking up and down the shaft of the server’s dick and swallowing it so far in my throat I’m gagging…. She’s fucking my asshole rhythmically, ritually. I’m trying to squirm but my hands are bound, my legs are bound, and her hands are holding me still. She’s telling me that I am not a person…I’m simply a piece of property to be fucked, beat, pissed on, cut, sliced, diced, used and abused. (www.spread.com/members/stories/archives/020305.html)
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When the fantasizing butch’s girlfriend reprimands him for calling the server “sir” the butch doesn’t protest, but she\he wants to yell to her girlfriend: Would it kill you to visit a barbershop every once in a while? Would it be so bad to own a suit and tie, or to quit waxing the hair on your lip and let your moustache grow? Is it too much to ask for my girlfriend to be a butch? (ibid.) This short story plays with the queer-gender semi-illicit butch-on-butch desire for the same. It is the narration of a post-male\post-female bastard orphan to both heterosexuality and the gender codes inside queer butch\femme relations: the narrator maintains a solid butch gender identity while manifesting a fluid gender object of desire, simultaneously desiring her femme girlfriend and the butch server. Articles and Interviews Currently there are six entries in this ssspread section. I will examine two interviews: one with Susan Stryker, a male-to-female (MTF) leader in the transgender community, and the other with me, a leader in the feminist ejaculation community. What both interviews have in common is a conscious redesigning of the female body. Stryker discloses: “At some point I realized, ‘I’m not going to grow to be a woman unless I do something about it!’ ” (www.ssspread.com/members/articles/index.html). Stryker discusses her past, when embodiment was male, her participation in the San Francisco leather community as a “gender queer,” how SM is “a really powerful way of acknowledging…embodiment,” especially for people who are “elsewhere than [their] body because your body isn’t where you’re at home” (ibid.). Stryker states:“Bottoming really pulled me into my flesh. It was confirmation. The more embodied I felt pre-surgically, the more sure I was that being on this path toward bodily transformation was being on the right path for me” (ibid.). She talks about how her object of desire was female regardless of her male and then female embodiment. Stryker closes the interview by discussing the phantom cock of some of her lesbian lovers: Sometimes with some partners I can really feel their cock as much as they can feel it themselves….It’s [sic] ghostly presence is better than its fleshly presence. And it feels queerer, and feels woman-centered, womanidentified….I don’t want a man with a cock between my legs but I love having my woman lovers between my legs pounding into me with their fantasy of fucking me with her cock. (ibid.)
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Bell describes the technology of female ejaculation in Sadeian detail using the interview space as a teaching tool; suggesting tools and techniques, such as “sleep with a Kegelcisor inside to build up pussy muscles, push out when you feel the burning sensation in the urethral sponge area on the top wall of your vagina” (www.ssspread.com/members/articles/index.html). She discloses how the capacity for female ejaculation was socially designed out of the female body during the eighteenth century, only to be submerged in male pornography in the nineteenth century and codified as a psychological and medical problem until well into the latter part of the twentieth century, when it was rediscovered and redesigned by the lesbian and transgendered communities. In making the ejaculation images I was engaged in labor as self-activity. My particular position in producing pornography is as a Sadeian woman: for me, this means I occupy the position of desiring subject and freeze the object of desire (me) outside the realm of desire; there is never a gap, a space left in which the viewer is invited to “stick his\her hard cock inside my pussy” (ibid.). I do this in three ways: • • •
I publish images with interview teaching text. I use codes of dominance, in this case leather driving gloves and high-top dominatrix boots. I own and occupy my own body anatomy – first it is occupied by a gold Kegelcisor, then a speculum used to display the internal female erection as similar and different to the external male erection.
I produce an ejaculation shot with the speculum inside, bringing the inside of female sex organ to outside view, physically and visually redesigning female sexual anatomy, and I produce a retread, a redoing, of the artist Louise Bourgeois’s arch of hysteria, which I encode in the interview as the arch of orgasm and place female ejaculation inside the redefined hysteric image as a comment on Freud’s linkage of female body fluids with hysteria. Ssspread images, stories, and interviews demonstrate that it is possible to produce nonrecuperable pornography and that this production falls necessarily in the territory of the pervert; it is the labor as self-activity of those “incapable of adapting to family life…to the regulations of a traditional sex life” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 216). This pornographic work (production and distribution) is done in the queer community from the positionality of the phallic-widow mother, the post-male\post-female bastard orphan, and the deOedipalized stranger, those who are outside, who don’t belong to, are incapable of belonging to heterosexuality; it is produced by and for the queer community, and its content is collectively determined by those involved in making the images and writing the texts and those actively viewing these images and texts; it can be seen as a new genre of heterogeneous pornography – in this case queer socialist pornography.
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Notes 1
2 3
See Bell’s “The Fast Feminist and Fast Feminism” (Bell 2004: ch. 1) for a more extensive construction of fast feminism. In a nutshell, fast feminism is writing and doing feminism, fast; positioning after the annihilation of femininist\non-feminist distinctions, the obliteration of intradisciplinary foundations; feminism minus the rehashed exposition of its theoretical grounding from radical feminism to postmodern feminism to queer feminism to cyberfeminism, to post-feminism, to third-wave feminism; taking feminism, the way bell hooks (2000: 1) defines it – “feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression…[. It] does not imply that men are the enemy…it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult” –and doing it. The power in fast feminism is to leave the locations of feminism, write and do feminism in the gait (speed and risk), morph what is needed, what appeals, what thrills to whatever is the present project or event at hand. Stelarc, interview with the leading artist\philosopher and public intellectual of new technology and cyborgology, February 9, 2002,Victoria, British Columbia. Bataille claims that the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure…. This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value.…Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of homogeneity. (Bataille 2001: 127)
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Levinas positions his philosophy in the inverse: “the saying without the said” (1981: 45). By “saying” he means that “which signifies prior to essence, prior to identification” (ibid.). “The act of saying” is “the supreme passivity of exposure to another, which is responsibility for the free initiatives of the other” (ibid.: 47). Butler presents the lesbian phallus as resignifying both masculine and feminine, in which both identifications are disavowed: When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculine figure of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled. And insofar as it operates at the site of anatomy, the phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus.This opens up anatomy – and sexual difference itself – as a site of proliferative resignifications. (Butler 1993: 89)
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Grosz reads the woman with a “masculinity complex” as a lesbian fetishist. “The lesbian subject takes a substitute phallus in the form of another woman. She makes a fetish of the woman and in the process depreciates Freud’s penis-envy hypothesis by changing the signification of the phallus from penis to clitoris….The woman with the masculinity complex, or the lesbian fetishist[,]” (Grosz 1995: 153) “like the fetishist,…disavows women’s castration, but this castration is her own, not that of the phallic mother” (Fernbach 2002: 61).
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Bibliography Bataille, G. (2001) “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” The Bataille Reader, ed. F. Botting and S.Wilson, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bell, S. (1994) Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. —— (1997) “On ne peut pas voir l’Image” [The Image Cannot Be Seen], in B. Cossman, S. Bell, L. Gotell, and B. Ross, Bad Attitude/s on Trial, Toronto, Buffalo, N.Y., and London: University of Toronto Press. —— (2000) “Feminist Erotica,” in Lorraine Code (ed.) Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, London and New York: Routledge. —— (2002) “Liquid Fire: Female Ejaculation and Fast Feminism,” in L. Johnson (ed.) Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. —— (2004) Fast Feminism, New York:Autonomedia. Butler, J. (1993) “The Lesbian Phallus,” Bodies That Matter, New York and London: Routledge. Caputo, J. (1993) Against Ethics, Bloomington and Indiana, IN: Indiana University Press. Carter, A. (1978) The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, New York: Pantheon Books. Corlett, W. (1998) Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory, and Value, Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press. Cornell, D. (1995) The Imaginary Domain, New York and London: Routledge. Cossman, B., S. Bell, L. Gotell, and B. Ross (1997) Bad Attitude/s on Trial, Toronto, Buffalo, N.Y., and London: University of Toronto Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fernbach, A. (2002) Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human, New York: Rutgers University Press. Freud, S. (1919) “The ‘Uncanny’,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. —— (1993) “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks,” Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. P. Reiff, London: Collier Publishing Company. Gibson, P. and R. Gibson (eds.) (1993) Dirty Looks, London: British Film Institute. Grosz, E. (1995) “Lesbian Fetishism?,” Space, Time and Perversion, New York and London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. hooks, b. (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Lacombe, D. (1994) Blue Politics, Toronto, Buffalo, N.Y., and London: University of Toronto Press. Levinas, E. (1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. —— (1985) Ethics and Infinity, trans. R. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. —— (1987) Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. McIntosh, M. and L. Segal (eds.) (1993) Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, London:Virago Press.
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MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. —— (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. —— (1993) Only Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mercer, K. (1993) “Just Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fantasies of Race,” in M. McIntosh and L. Segal (eds.) Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, London:Virago Press. Robbins, J. (1999) Altered Readings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schutzman, M. (1999) The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria and Advertising, Hanover, N.H.: University of New England Press. Virilio, P. (2003) Unknown Quantity, New York:Thames & Hudson. Virilio, P. and S. Lotringer (1983) Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti, New York: Semiotext(e). —— (1987) Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti, New York: Semiotext(e).
Part IV
Development visions
9
The failure of African socialisms and their future1 John S. Saul
The current situation in Africa is a bleak one. As Colin Leys and I concluded in a recent survey of Sub-Saharan Africa’s position within global capitalism, the result is relegation to the margins of the global economy, with no visible prospect of continental development along capitalist lines…. Global capital, in its constant search for new investment opportunities, finds them less and less in Africa. Which does not mean that nothing is happening, let alone that no alternative is possible. It simply means that Africa’s development, and the dynamics of global capitalism, are no longer convergent, if they ever were. (Leys and Saul 2001: 21–2) In such a context it seems likely that, whatever else may come to be asserted politically on the continent, some revival of socialist discourse and socialist aspiration will also, almost inevitably, have to occur. This said, however, we also remain challenged by an old conundrum. As Roger Murray observed many years ago (surveying the wreckage of failed quasi-socialist hopes in Nkrumah’s Ghana): “The starting-point for a lucid understanding of contemporary counter-revolutionary dynamics is a recognition that the historically necessary [socialism] should not be confounded with the historically possible” (1967: 39). Now Africans will again have to face the challenge epitomized in this formulation – and we will debate in this chapter the extent of the truth it may still contain. But Africans will also have to face this challenge in the additional light of the experience of the socialist endeavor that has actually occurred since those first heady days of independence that witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s ascent to a key role on the African left. For, unfortunately, this period has seen the failure (or is it the defeat?) of all of the various attempts to build socialism that have, from time to time, flared up across the continent. The fact that capitalism as a socio-economic system has itself done nothing more to transform in positive ways the lot of the vast majority of Africans can offer only cold comfort to socialists in Africa in light of this failure.True, such socialists will learn something useful to their purposes from the current
160 John S. Saul bankruptcy of capitalism in Africa, but they will have to explore carefully the record of these failed socialisms as well. What is to be learned from such a study? And just what is it possible for Africans to reclaim for present purposes and in a changed context from the devastation of socialist-inspired hopes and efforts both on their own continent and further afield? These questions, too, will be explored in the present chapter, both in general terms and by thumbnail sketches of three of the experiences in Africa which seem to many to have offered most in the way of socialist experimentation and/or aspiration: Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa.The fact that all three are countries in which the present author has lived and worked for extended periods may also make it efficacious to deal principally with these three countries here.
Socialism(s) in Africa Continental perspectives In the immediate postcolonial period the language of socialism was attractive to nationalist elites and emergent intellectuals in Africa as a means of further distancing themselves from the colonial powers (and the “imperialist system”) from which they had now won their independence. Often this reflected the sincere belief that a socialist system promised a more just and humane society than any other likely alternative.2 It could also seem, in light of the apparent strength and rising ascendancy of the Soviet and Chinese models, to offer an effective growth strategy and a convincing rationale for the kind of “developmental state” thought necessary on the left (but even, at the time, on the right) to realize socio-economic transformation. In many of its earliest expressions the goal of socialism in Africa intersected with the ideological discourse of “African socialism.”3 This term came to summarize a claim – now much discredited – that there is a “socialism” distinctive to Africa, one that springs, quite spontaneously, from egalitarian cultural predispositions and communal social practices antedating the European penetration of Africa.These predispositions and practices were said to have survived the impact of colonialism and to provide the basis for giving a promisingly collectivist tilt to the policies of postcolonial governments. Sometimes these notions reflected the cultural-nationalist preoccupations of certain members of the first generation of successful African nationalists, less eager to advance a deeply critical analysis of their own societies than to develop an indigenous alternative to left-wing discourses (Marxism, for example) they considered too eurocentric or too potentially divisive. Leopold Senghor of Senegal best exemplified such a tendency, perhaps – although it should also be noted that this perspective was, from the very earliest days of African independence, viewed with suspicion by other putatively socialist leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekou Touré of Guinea. These leaders employed a rather more universalistic, if still hazily defined,“progressive” discourse in outlining their own (ultimately unrealized) left-populist and “anti-imperialist” goals.
The failure of African socialisms 161 More often, the rhetoric of African socialism was adopted quite cynically by opportunist elites, on the rise everywhere in Africa, to give a veneer of progressiveness and apparent concern for popular aspirations to their otherwise self-interested and increasingly capitalist policies. By means of this ideological rationale these elites sought to mask the workings of new class structures and continuing imperial linkages that a more rigorous socialist discourse might more readily have revealed to popular scrutiny. A particularly notorious example of this manipulative use of the concept was the Kenyan government’s “Sessional Paper #10” on “African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya” (1965), which, substantively, had almost nothing to do with any recognizably socialist intention. It was not long before the Kenyan leadership itself began to rationalize its policies in much more straightforwardly capitalist terms. And certain other much-touted variants on African socialist themes – the “humanism” of Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, for example – also proved to have little or no genuine socialist content. As noted above, we will further focus our discussion in this chapter on case studies of three countries of particular importance both to evaluating the experience of socialism in Africa and to seeking to draw out the most apposite lessons from that experience. First, Tanzania: the most sincere and well-developed of all variants of “African socialism” – and the African experiment perhaps most often discussed and debated in the late 1960s and early 1970s – was that driven by the philosophy and practice of Ujamaa (“familyhood”) as generated by Julius Nyerere in that country. Second, Mozambique: in the late 1970s and, briefly, into the 1980s a Marxist socialist current had grounded itself more prominently than ever against the pull of “African socialism”; this was a current that grew, in particular, out of the experience of the liberation struggles of southern Africa and one that found its most advanced expression in the practices of the Frelimo movement and its subsequent government in Mozambique. And, finally, South Africa: in the late 1980s and early 1990s many eyes were focused there and upon the principal liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC was linked both to the South African Communist Party and to a highly mobilized and radicalized network of mass organizations on the ground (including the country’s vibrant trade union movement), and seemed to many to promise, in a relatively economically well-developed setting, a much clearer socialist possibility than elsewhere. Given the limitations of a single chapter, our three brief case studies will have to suffice in providing the primary empirical basis for the argument here. Nonetheless, it is the full breadth of this continental experience that I will draw on when presenting, in the second part of this chapter, a preliminary summary of the problems and preoccupations that students of socialisms (past and future) in Africa – as well as would-be practitioners there – should keep uppermost in their minds.
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Tanzania4 Julius Nyerere and his Tanzania African National Union (TANU) colleagues in Tanzania mounted in the late 1960s and early 1970s what was probably the most sincere and well developed of all variants of “African socialism.” Suspicious, in part on religious grounds, of Marxism and “class struggle,” Nyerere nonetheless evinced, through his Ujamaa approach, a high moral tone, a certain scepticism as to the bona fides of Western economic interests and strategies, and a genuine concern for the fate of the mass of the population in his impoverished country. Nyerere first exemplified his position in a seminal essay, “Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism”: “Socialism…is an attitude of mind.… We in Africa have no need of being ‘converted’ to socialism…[it is] rooted in our own past – in the traditional society which produced us” (1967c: 162, 170). At the same time, Nyerere sought to balance this (rather romantic) perspective against his own deepening awareness of the profound contradictions inherent in modern African society, producing a series of widely quoted analyses of rural questions, education, leadership, and democracy. Few were the African leaders, for example, who could utter a statement like the following to the mass of his fellow countrymen: Mwalimu [i.e. Nyerere] warned that the people should not allow their freedom to be pawned as most of the leaders were purchasable. He warned further that in running the affairs of the nation the people should not look on their leaders as “saints or prophets.”The President stated that the attainment of freedom in many cases resulted merely in the change of colours, white to black faces without ending exploitation and injustices, and above all without the betterment of the life of the masses. He said that while struggling for freedom the objective was clear but it was another thing when you have to remove your own people from the position of exploiters. (Nyerere 1967b) He wrote equally bitingly about the kind of class polarization that was being produced both by class penetration of the countryside and by the elitist logic of postcolonial education systems. He also spoke eloquently about the economic choices open to his people: The pragmatist in Africa…will find that the choice is between foreign private ownership on the one hand, and local collective ownership on the other. For I do not think that there is a free state in Africa where there is sufficient local capital, or a sufficient number of local entrepreneurs, for locally based capitalism to dominate the economy. Private investment in Africa means overwhelming foreign private investment. A capitalist economy means a foreign-dominated economy. These are the facts of the
The failure of African socialisms 163 African situation.The only way in which national control of the economy can be achieved is through the economic institutions of socialism. (Nyerere 1968a: 264) In consequence of these perspectives, Nyerere moved his party, TANU, to adopt policies that sought to curb elite aggrandizement and encourage equality, to make foreign investment serve positive social ends, and to facilitate a new pattern of collective life for rural-dwellers, about whose materially backward existence he seemed to care deeply. However, even though Nyerere was to sustain his eloquent critique of capitalist-induced global inequalities until his death in 1999, in Tanzania itself his project was not successful, either economically or in terms of realizing socialist ideals.Yet in spite of this failure, so sophisticated an economist as Manfred Bienefeld has been able to draw positive lessons from the economic policies of Nyerere’s Tanzania: The Arusha Declaration, with its nationalization of the commanding heights of industry and finance, its granting of greater priority to agriculture, its leadership code and restriction of TANU membership to those who supported its new strategy, did not automatically increase the resources of the country nor the incomes of its people. What it did do was to give the Tanzanian state greater control over the investible surplus being produced in the country. It also further reduced private capital’s direct influence within the Party and its indirect influence through its command over resources. As a result, it achieved greater freedom for determining a wide range of economic, social and political policies, including the country’s foreign policy. The primary objective of the new strategy was to permit…a more domestic needs-oriented and a more socially responsive utilization of investible resources. (Bienefeld 1982: 300) Of course, one can quarrel, from the left, with various aspects of Nyerere’s actual “socialist” practice within the frame of these economic objectives – while also noting the decline in the terms of trade and the rise in oil prices and interest rates that marked the hostile global circumstances within which Tanzania lost its footing. Interestingly, on the negative side, it is the high costs to socialist intentions of Nyerere’s undemocratic propensities (not least vis-àvis the rural sector, where forced villagization became the final stage of his experiment in rural communalism) that Bienefeld himself rightly tends to emphasize.There is a certain irony here since Nyerere’s model of a democratic one-party state has sometimes been praised as offering precisely the kind of institutionalization of a judicious dialectic between leadership and mass action that could overcome divisive tendencies (ethnic and other challenges to a nascent national consciousness) while keeping leaders honest. And, indeed, there is something to be said for the view that this system (especially when its approach to intra-party elections is assessed in tandem with other initiatives of
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the time like the Leadership Code, which sought to control the potential corruption of leaders) successfully overrode a certain amount of intra-elite political opportunism and the negative mobilization of ethnic politics that has often scarred politics elsewhere in Africa. But it is also easy to underestimate the formidable costs that accompanied the kind of “guided democracy by philosopher king” (in this case, by “Mwalimu” – “the Teacher” – as Nyerere was called), costs to be measured principally in terms of the authoritarian manner in which progressive popular mobilization to the left of TANU’s policies and practices was crushed. Mozambique5 There had always coexisted in postcolonial Africa a more Marxist socialist current. This sensibility had surfaced at the edges of Nkrumah’s own project, for example, and also contributed to the leftward inflection of radical populism in a country like Algeria, where an interesting form of collectivism and auto-determination was briefly attempted in the rural areas. But it was to resurface most prominently in the rejection of Nyerere’s ideas by a later generation of socialists, many of them linked to the liberation movements and post-liberation governments of southern Africa. Mozambique’s Frelimo movement (and subsequent party of government), led first by Eduardo Mondlane and then, after his assassination in exile by the Portuguese, by Samora Machel, housed probably the most serious of these critics. Deeply suspicious of Western capitalist dictates and anxious to address the needs of its impoverished population, Frelimo found in Marxism an alternative to the vague nostrums of “African socialism” and a possible guide to realization of the collectivist aspirations that had developed in the course of the movement’s armed struggle against the Portuguese. Once in power (now under the presidency of Machel) this Marxist sensibility led to a heightened role for the state in the economy and an attempted practice of egalitarianism in class, gender, and racial terms. Unfortunately the experience of Mozambique exemplifies above all else the pitiless circumstances under which socialist endeavor has most often been launched in Africa: the legacy of a backward colonialism that locked into place a particularly dependent economy (dependent not least on its apartheid neighbor, South Africa) and, thanks in part to the backwardness of Portugal itself, a systematically undertrained and marginalized indigenous population. Moreover, the hostility of the external environment was intensified by the fact that independent Mozambique – as well as the socialist project of its victorious liberation movement, Frelimo – came on to the historical stage at the very epicentre of the ongoing thirty years’ war for southern African liberation. Choosing, once in power, to support liberation struggles in neighboring territories, Frelimo found itself a target of Rhodesian and South African counterrevolutionary wars of destabilization, with these wars in turn eventually being sanctioned by the Reagan White House as part of its policy of a
The failure of African socialisms 165 rollback of left-leaning states. A debate continues in the literature as to the precise weight of these situating factors in dictating the failure/defeat of Mozambican socialism: I have myself argued that the external variable was a crucial one, the intensity of escalating destabilization depriving Frelimo of any space within which to learn from its mistakes and correct certain of the negative features of its socialist practice. Still, the fact remains that once in power (after 1975) Frelimo failed to avoid the authoritarian and vanguardist practices, the stiff intolerance towards cultural diversity, and the economic strategies, top down and technocratic, that had come to characterize the “Marxist-Leninist” brand of Marxism elsewhere. Indeed it could be argued that Frelimo’s domestic policies – exemplifying clearly the difficulties of dealing with certain key challenges to socialists in underdeveloped settings that we will have to return to below (pp. 173–8) – stand as virtual archetypes of what not to do in Africa when seeking to build anything that might be thought of as socialism.6 While the new government was prepared to be quite pragmatic in certain respects (for example as regards its inherited linkages with South Africa), the various crises of the transition encouraged the ambitious leaders of Frelimo to embrace too many tasks at once. Moreover, with the limited room for maneuver available for progressives in power in the then polarized world of the Cold War, the party’s development agenda came to be distorted by the impact of assistance from the Eastern Bloc, upon which it became overly, if almost inevitably, quite reliant. The movement was drawn away from the peasant roots of its liberation struggle towards a model that, by fetishizing (with Eastern European encouragement) the twin themes of modern technology and “proletarianization,” forced the pace and scale of change precipitously.This was true in terms both of inappropriate industrial strategies and, in the rural areas, of highly mechanized state farms and (against the evidence of experience elsewhere in Africa) ambitious plans for the rapid villagization (“aldeias communais”) of rural-dwellers. As I will argue more generally below (pp. 175–6), the Mozambique case thus exemplified a situation in which the possibility of defining an economic strategy that effectively linked a more apposite program of industrialization to the expansion of peasant-based production was lost. Moreover, the failure to do so (and the severe reproduction crisis which its alternative policies produced for the peasantry) was to be a key material factor in placing in jeopardy Frelimo’s parallel hopes of mobilizing popular energies and transforming consciousness. For in the political realm there were already negative tendencies at work. The authoritarianism of prevailing “socialist” practices elsewhere reinforced the pull of the movement’s own experience of military hierarchy and of the autocratic methods conventionally associated with African nationalism, leading to the “vanguard party” model of politics that was officially embraced at Frelimo’s Third Congress in 1978.The simultaneous adoption of a particularly inflexible official version of “Marxism-Leninism” had a further deadening effect on the kind of creativity (both vis-à-vis the peasantry during the liberation struggle and as further exemplified in the transition period by
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the encouragement of grassroots “dynamizing groups” in urban areas) that the movement had previously evidenced. Such developments substantially contradicted any real drive towards popular empowerment, tending to turn the organizations of workers, women, and the like into mere transmission belts for the Frelimo party. It is true that the kind of “left developmental dictatorship” now created by Frelimo witnessed successes in certain important spheres (health and education, for example), and advances in the principles (if not always the practice) of such projects as that of women’s emancipation were impressive. Moreover, the regime took seriously the challenges to its emancipatory vision posed by the structures of institutionalized religion, by “tradition” and patriarchy, and by ethnic and regional sentiment. But the high-handed manner (at once moralizing and “modernizing”) in which it approached such matters often betrayed an arrogance and a weakness in methods of political work that would render it more vulnerable to destructive oppositional activity than need otherwise have been the case. At the same time, I would repeat my judgment that the central finding of Minter’s study of Mozambique (and Angola) stands: that without external orchestration Mozambique’s own internal contradictions would not have given rise to war (Minter 1994). Once launched, however, the war did serve to magnify Frelimo’s errors and to narrow its chances of learning from them. Indeed, such was the war’s destructive impact on Mozambique’s social fabric that what began as an external imposition slowly but surely took on some of the characteristics of a civil war. Given the nature of its own violent and authoritarian practices, Renamo, the South African-backed opposition movement, could not easily pose as a champion of democracy (except in some ultra-right circles in the West). Nonetheless, it had some success, over time, in fastening on to various grievances that sprang from the weaknesses in Frelimo’s own project, with Renamo seeking endlessly to fan the resentments of disgruntled peasants, disaffected regionalists, and ambitious “traditionalists” (for example displaced chiefs). Meanwhile, under pressure both from the war and from the international financial institutions (IFIs) that now circled around Mozambique like vultures, the Frelimo state itself buckled, its original sense of high purpose and undoubted integrity having been progressively eroded. Thus, by the time open elections did finally occur in the 1990s as part of the peace process, Renamo had gained sufficient popular resonance to give Frelimo a close run – albeit on a terrain of political competition reduced to the lowest kind of opportunistic calculation of regional, ethnic, and sectional advantage, and without any residue of socialist discourse and debate whatsoever. Indeed, by the 1990s such trends had witnessed a full-scale surrender by Frelimo and the Mozambican state to the globalizing logic of neo-liberalism.7 South Africa South Africa’s claim to our attention is based less on what was attempted there by the forces of liberation from apartheid’s quasi-colonial grip than by what the situation had seemed to promise. If there was ever a dog that did not
The failure of African socialisms 167 bark in the night for latter-day Sherlocks to reflect upon, it is the absence of a post-apartheid socialist vocation on the part of both South African liberation movement leadership and, perhaps more importantly, that country’s apparently well-developed and assertive working class. As with the Mozambican case, hot debate continues as to the reasons for this outcome as it has emerged in South Africa. Some will see the ANC leadership’s embrace of a starkly neo-liberal policy (“Just call me a Thatcherite,” said then South African vice-president Thabo Mbeki in announcing the government’s programmatic move to the right in 1996) as reflecting the fact that, in the 1990s, “There Is No Alternative” on a world stage set by the untrammeled hegemony of global capitalism. Others will be more inclined to see in the apparent apostasy of the ANC a confirmation of the petty-bourgeois ambitions that are said always to have characterized that movement’s leadership. As for the working classes, broadly defined, in that country it may simply be too early to tell whether they have been definitively sidelined by the rightward turn of the chief spokespersons for the anti-apartheid/national liberation thrust that seemed to many to also house such strong anti-capitalist potential. For, whatever the best explanation of the outcome that has occurred in South Africa, the fact remains that many socialists both on the continent and beyond had come to look for a vindication of their hopes in precisely that anti-apartheid struggle. Recall the statement of Magdoff and Sweezy: [South Africa’s] system of racial segregation and repression is a veritable paradigm of capitalist super-exploitation. It has a white monopoly capitalist ruling class and an advanced black proletariat. It is so far the only country with a well developed, modern capitalist structure which is not only “objectively” ripe for revolution but has actually entered a stage of overt and seemingly irreversible revolutionary struggle. (Magdoff and Sweezy 1986: 5) Given the ANC’s links to a highly mobilized and radicalized network of mass organizations on the ground – including, by the end of the 1980s, the country’s large and vibrant trade union movement – there seemed some good reasons for such optimism. Here – in a setting far more “developed” than elsewhere in Africa – was promise both of an ongoing and cumulative democratization of the transition and of an emergent set of economic policies with transformative promise. To take the latter point first, many of the ANC’s pre-liberation formulations emphasized the need to impose a strong measure of social control upon the workings of the market and over a capitalist economy that was very much more developed in South Africa than elsewhere on the continent. Much was heard of the prospects for nationalizations and of economic strategies designed to facilitate “growth through redistribution.” Linked implicitly to a radical notion of “structural reform” that had as a goal the progressive closing in on the prerogatives of capital by movement and state, such strategies would
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have sought to press capital to slowly but surely gear an increasingly high proportion of its productive energies to meeting popular needs.Yet the difficulties of confronting the post-Cold War global economic power structure in these terms were soon apparent. And this, in combination with the increasingly self-interested ambitions of at least some amongst the ANC leadership, soon produced a markedly neo-liberal post-apartheid development project, one premised on “global competitiveness,” the centrality of foreign investment, and the rule of the market.8 Moreover, the reluctance to place popular needs at the center of economic strategy was linked to the narrowness of the ANC’s agenda in the sphere of democratic empowerment more generally. One should not distract attention from, nor deny credit to, the ANC’s considerable accomplishment in easing South Africa’s shift away from apartheid authoritarianism. But the negotiation process that saw this result was also rendered more palatable to established power both by the extreme nature of the compromise with neo-liberal economics just noted and by the limitations on mass democratic empowerment facilitated by the ANC. These latter limitations were defined by the demobilization attendant upon the establishment of liberal democratic (as distinct from popular democratic) norms and institutions and by the firming up of a dominant-party system (the comparison with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico is sometimes mentioned) rather than anything more overtly authoritarian. Increasingly, unions are merely bullied into line (despite some ongoing resistance on their part) and the stirrings of progressive organizations in civil society merely “managed” by the ANC, rather than being embraced as part of some shared struggle to constrain capital. It begins to appear that South Africans may eventually have to invent a new politics grounded in the wide range of popular grievances and organizational initiatives present on the ground in South Africa, in order to reactivate more transformative aspirations in that country.9
What is to be learned? Framing defeat Students of Marx will understand why Africa can be thought to provide a particularly extreme case of the challenge that haunts all Third World socialisms. This challenge is defined by the absence of what have been conventionally thought to be the “objective conditions” necessary for building socialism.There are two variables here, the first being the lack of the prior development of the productive forces and of the advanced measure of accumulation that would, at least in theory, have made the appropriation and rational use of capital by the collective laborer a potentially smooth operation. The conditions of underdevelopment under which a necessary measure of planned accumulation must now be carried out by the new “socialist state” are generally defined, in a situation of “economic backwardness,” by shortfalls
The failure of African socialisms 169 of many of the societal skills and much of the training and education necessary to guide a state-centric process of development. Even more importantly, it is feared that the “accumulation” that still needs to be accomplished must involve forms of surplus extraction from the populace by the state which, while essential to such accumulation, are difficult to achieve democratically. Moreover, this latter point reinforces a second crucial dimension of Marx’s overall argument regarding the socialist project, his notion that a principal enabling condition for socialist possibility was the creation by capitalism of its own gravediggers in the persons of the industrial working class. Self-conscious and self-organized workers – and not some party substituting itself for them – would democratically drive the revolution forward.Whatever we may think of such a premise in light of how little has been realized of the revolutionary promise of working classes in the advanced capitalist countries, the fact that socialist revolutions have occurred in what, at best, have been semi-industrialized, and more often than not primarily rural, settings has raised questions about the social base for sustaining the democratic thrust necessary to keeping popular needs and egalitarian principles on the agenda. For Gavin Kitching, himself a student of Africa in his formative years, democracy is indeed the central issue and, in his Rethinking Socialism, he makes the negative case regarding Third World socialisms quite starkly: I believe that a necessary but not sufficient condition of the creation of socialism is a materially prosperous society. And I believe that socialism is impossible to construct in materially poor and deprived societies. Or rather, I believe that [and here he quotes Paul Baran] “socialism in backward and underdeveloped countries has a powerful tendency to become a backward and underdeveloped socialism.” (Kitching 1983: 2–3) Kitching acknowledges that there are some countries that can lay a certain minimal claim to the label “socialist” since they will have “abolished private property in the means of production, distribution and exchange.” But, since they cannot be democratic, their “socialism” will inevitably be a “poor and stunted thing.” Cannot be democratic? Here’s Kitching again: I hold these countries are not socialist democracies because (a) many of them are poor and poverty has certain social and cultural consequences which mean that there is little or no effective popular support for democratic forms, and (b) they build socialist economic institutions primarily in order to commence or speed up the process of industrialization and economic growth…. Since certain elites in these countries have an interest in this process succeeding and believe that its success is in the interests of the long-term welfare of their people, they will not allow this popular will open or effective expression. (Kitching 1983: 2–3)
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Strong stuff, this. Moreover, for Kitching (1982) the only left alternative (under conditions of underdevelopment) to this kind of bastard socialism is a version of peasant-centric populism (note that he places Nyerere’s efforts firmly under this category), albeit one he suggests to be equally doomed to failure. But are the conditions of underdevelopment really so hostile to mounting a socialist project? There is, some have argued, a certain promise to be found in the “weakest link” theory of capitalism’s global reach, a theory that suggests the system’s peculiar vulnerability to challenge precisely under the conditions that exist on its periphery and semi-periphery. Moreover, this is an argument reinforced by the fact that “socialist revolutions” have, in any case, generally occurred in such settings. And Post and Wright, in their valuable Socialism and Underdevelopment, set out a related perspective: The working out of capitalism in parts of the periphery prepares not only the minority working class but peasants and other working people, women, youth and minorities for a socialist solution, even though the political manifestation of this may not initially take the form of a socialist movement. In the case of those who are not wage labourers capitalism has still so permeated the social relations which determine their existences, even though it may not have followed the western European pattern of “freeing” their labour power, that to be liberated from it is their only salvation….The objective need for socialism of these elements can be no less than that of the worker imprisoned in the factory and disciplined by the whip of unemployment…. Finding another path has thus become a desperate necessity if the alternative of continuing, if not increasing, barbarism is to be escaped. (Post and Wright 1989: 151–2) Not that such “disparate forces” (as Post and Wright term them) can be expected to spontaneously produce revolutionary outcomes. A measure of leadership to “combine” (their term) and guide such forces – by contributing in the spheres of organizational innovation and ideological probity – seems necessary. Post and Wright give their argument a rather grating edge when they turn to Africa, stating that international capital is now reproducing a new sub-category of country…places, above all in Africa, so poor that they have almost fallen off the edge of the US State Department’s map of the world, places where the physical well-being of the people has been reduced below the level at which the mobilizing force of ideas can be expected to have much impact[!]. (Post and Wright 1989: 178)
The failure of African socialisms 171 But it is also the case, more generally, that as they move beyond discussing the Third World’s potential for facilitating the “combination of disparate forces” in potentially anti-capitalist movements and turn to a consideration of the practice of socialists once in power they begin to sound more like Kitching. For they underscore, as “an innate economic tendency,” the severe conflicts that must arise in arbitrating the distribution of scarce resources when planning for accumulation is done under conditions of underdevelopment. And they assert, for the political sphere under these same circumstances, “the innate political tendency to the assertion of state control, eradicating all autonomous elements in civil society” (Post and Wright 1989). These are both challenges that we have seen in our case studies to be real enough, and we will return to them below when we seek to explore, in light of the African experience, the ways in which the apparently negative imperatives of both accumulation and authoritarianism might have been countered. What bears noting here, however, is the way these “imperatives,” in both the economic and political spheres, are said to arise for socialists precisely because of the special circumstances of underdevelopment. Finally, it is worth noting a final question mark that hovers over the project of any “Third World socialism” and one that is particularly challenging for all those who would seek to conceive and to forge socialist futures under the circumstances of African underdevelopment. Those who have questioned the feasibility of such socialisms have always not merely noted the internal contradictions inherent in seeking to build them under forbidding objective conditions, but also emphasized, quite correctly, the vulnerability of all such attempts to external pressure. Thus even so committed a socialist as Ralph Miliband could feel compelled to state that virtually all “governments in the ‘third world’ have accepted the hegemonic role of the West and adapted their economic and social policies to it. The price for not doing so is beyond their capacity and their will” (1994: 190–1). For Miliband, then, this vulnerability is principally defined by the pressure of global capitalism and Western states, quick to intervene in order to disrupt, or even to overthrow (when possible), socialist regimes in power. In Africa, in an age of intensified globalization, direct pressures (the physical assault on Mozambique by a Reagan-backed, apartheid South Africa, for example) have been complemented by the intrusive role of IFIs using the lever of Africa’s debt crisis to impose “structural adjustment” packages of one kind or another on most countries on the continent. It is these pressures, complementing physical assault, that helped produce a “recolonization” of aspirant-socialist Mozambique and it is the apparent prison of an overbearing global capitalist economy that has provided the ANC, once in power in South Africa, with the (semi-plausible) excuse that “There Is No Alternative” to its own dramatic capitulation to neo-liberalism. It is also this situation that wrenched from a defeated Nyerere in Tanzania a particularly expressive cry of pain regarding the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF):
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Other kinds of costs have had to be borne in Africa as a consequence of its vulnerability to external pressures. The Cold War context in which many African socialisms to date have tried their wings meant the possibility of some succor from the so-called “socialist countries.” In the case of the imperatives of armed struggle (a sometime seedbed of socialist awakening, as mentioned), assistance from the Eastern Bloc was often essential. This bears noting, but so too does the fact that such assistance often carried a heavy cost of its own: as seen in Mozambique, the apparent haloing of a mode of “socialist” discourse imported from the bad old days of official “Marxism-Leninism.” As will be obvious, therefore, the removal of this model from the field is a mixed blessing for African socialists. For whatever the long-term contribution of the passing of the Soviet Bloc and the discrediting of its bankrupt legacy (both in theory and in practice) to the freeing up of space for the renewal of radicalism in Africa, it is equally true that the East’s demise has left Africa more vulnerable than ever to the dictates of global capitalism. The demise of “socialism,” the ever rawer ascendance of “global capitalism” – such developments focus the mind. There is, of course, a long tradition on the left of seeing revolutions in “the center” as being necessary to facilitate any real advance on the periphery. But even if we decline to fall back too comfortably on such formulations and their potentially eurocentric subtexts, the vulnerabilities of small, poor countries (small, in Africa, often in numbers, but, with the partial exception of South Africa, also small in terms of economic weight and substance) are legion. It is no accident that Kwame Nkrumah in his radical heyday stated categorically that “Africa must unite,” and socialists in Africa will, as time goes by, have to think more effectively in terms of region and continent as terrains for struggle and for economic action. Moreover, the present worldwide context – of neo-liberal market mania and monolithic capitalist globalization – is at least as hostile (if in novel ways) to progressive aspirations in Africa as was the old Cold War world. How much, one is led to ask, are African radicals dependent on dramatic changes at the global level to facilitate their own efforts? Indeed, Colin Leys (1996) argues that there exist quite severe limitations upon what any African state might hope to achieve in the absence of radical changes being realized at the global level itself. Not that African assertions cannot be part of some larger
The failure of African socialisms 173 global struggle, but, even for those who consider that the national framework still offers some room for maneuver on the continent, a lot of thought will have to be given to the question of the scale (nation, region, continent, worldwide) at which their various radical assertions are to be pitched and the kind of alliances against global capitalism that it would be wise to enter into. Three challenges We must not forget this discussion of the complexities produced by the general framing conditions of “underdevelopment/development,” for all efforts to mount socialist challenges under such conditions. But we must also seek, even if somewhat artificially, to keep such complexities at arm’s length if we are to undertake a second task germane to this chapter: an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of concrete socialist practices and programs that have been attempted both in spite of and because of these very conditions. Following Post and Wright, we can identify three different arenas of relevant practice, briefly elaborating on each in turn here.The first arena concerns the theory and practice of socialist movement-building as geared to the actual taking of power in the first instance. The other two areas are those germane to the practices of socialist-intentioned regimes once power has been taken. As noted, these latter are identified as referring to economic strategies (the issue of “state socialist accumulation” is the way Post and Wright signpost this theme) on the one hand and to political strategies (“the politics of state socialist societies”) on the other. Needless to say, in discussing the causes of the failure of socialist aspirations in Africa it is extremely difficult to distinguish those causes that spring from the forbidding circumstances that prevail from those causes to be identified in the actual weaknesses of socialist practice on the continent. Still, socialists in Africa have attempted (been forced to attempt) socialisms under prevailing circumstances, however difficult, and there are indeed lessons to be learned, in and of themselves, from such attempts. Let us take first the question of how socialist projects have been launched in Africa and how they might come to be launched again. It bears emphasizing that in most cases to date they have been produced as part of the apparent unfolding logic of specific nationalist and national liberation movements, borne to the fore by anti-colonial energies and then carried further by the nationalist leadership itself as it has turned to the left. The fact that socialist aspirations have emerged in a very real sense from above (as in Tanzania and Mozambique) has created problems, which, if not preordaining authoritarianism (however quasi-benevolent), at least have facilitated it. The importance of the issue of establishing a positive interaction between leadership and mass action has been well illustrated in these cases. But it is also demonstrated, from a rather different angle, by the South African case, where in fact much more of the energy for socialist transformation seemed to spring from below, from the mobilized set of social/class actors that drove the antiapartheid struggle on the ground. The fact that the ANC was able to wrap
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itself in the mantle of anti-apartheid and national liberation rectitude in such a way as to preempt a deepening of the process of transformation in that country is therefore instructive. For it is worth underscoring that, however much the socialist impulse in Africa heretofore has been cast within the framework of simultaneous, even preeminently, nationalist aspirations, the nationalist movement in African history is now drawing to a close. Efforts to build freshly radical socialist movements geared to the seizure of power in contemporary Africa will increasingly have to stand firmly and self-consciously on their own two feet in this respect. This is quite likely to prove a considerable blessing. Note, for example, the terms in which Patrick Bond several years ago hailed the initial emergence of a new opposition politics in Zimbabwe, one rooted in the assertions of civil society (including those of a strong trade union movement), as heralding a new phase of progressive activity on the continent: “What is crucial,” he wrote, “is that the opposition’s political orientation is potentially both post-nationalist and post-neoliberal, perhaps for the first time in African history” (Bond 1999). Subsequent developments in Zimbabwe have not borne out the promise thus perceived by Bond. But Bond’s emphasis on both the novelty of the movement in Africa and the potential role of a range of new, more actively assertive actors in (urban) civil society to the next round of struggles in Africa is an important one (even if the urban tilt of his formulation may also suggest the need simultaneously to define more overtly, as writers as diverse as Amilcar Cabral and Mahmood Mamdani have urged, the kind of positive links that such a movement must seek to establish with rural actors, similarly inclined).10 I have sought elsewhere to contribute to a discussion of the kind of grouping of Africa’s “disparate forces” of contemporary dissent that could yet drive forward a new phase of struggle for popular power and socialism there.11 Suffice to summarize here that the situation is very far from being a static one, with various promising instances of resistance, particularly at the local level, beginning to cut against the simultaneous pull towards further continental decay. Such instances help define what Célestin Monga (1996) has termed the “collective insubordination” of Africa, as directed not only against parasitic governments but also IFI-induced austerity. This “renaissance” of “popular resistance from below” (in Fantu Cheru’s phrase [2000: 124]) is wide-ranging: from IMF riots, through the more structured activities of an impressive array of actors (itemized as “lawyers, students, copper miners, organizations of rural women, urban workers and the unemployed, journalists, clergymen and others” by Riley and Parfitt [1994: 167]) that have shaken numerous African governments in recent years, to the local manifestations of “street-level democracy” in various “political settings at the margins of global power” that Jonathan Barker (1999: 13) has identified in his recent writings. True, African experience has taught Cheru and others that there are no shortcuts, via nationalist organizations, liberation movements, or vanguard parties (the chimeras of an earlier movement of African
The failure of African socialisms 175 struggles), to building a bottom-up hegemonic project: “Instead of focusing on a unifying conception of society and transformation, we must look for a workable sense of cohesion to emerge out of seemingly irreconcilable modes of resistance waged from below” (Cheru 2000: 119). Others, of course, have placed greater emphasis on the urgency of bringing immediate organizational and ideological focus to such diverse resistances, emphasizing both the need to build, democratically, “nation-wide movements and/or parties capable of exercising state power, and making it felt in supra-national institutions” (Leys 1997: 23) and the importance of developing potentially counter-hegemonic discourses – including the revival of a socialist imaginary – in doing so. Graham Harrison (2001) and others have highlighted related emanations of resistance across the continent – in Nigeria, for example – that may yet manifest greater potential along these lines.12 Needless to say, it remains to be seen what will prove “historically possible” in this regard. Meanwhile, it also behoves us to look more directly at the lessons that any new movement successful in achieving power along such lines might expect to learn from prior continental experience when it makes its own attempt at (socialist) transformation. Recall, then, our suggestion that the actions undertaken, once in power, by movements and leaders identified as being socialist can themselves be investigated on two principal fronts, the economic and the political. In doing this we are imagining that Africa can still provide one plausible framing context for some kind of genuinely socialist endeavor and that a movement reflecting social forces that are increasingly self-conscious about the need to undertake such socialist endeavor can in fact emerge to center-stage there.What, on this basis, are the lessons thrown up by previous socialist practice in Africa? First, it hardly needs emphasizing that the challenges arising in the economic sphere are legion.13 Still, one may wonder whether either the imperatives of “accumulation” and “planning” or the dangers said to be inherent in these imperatives need be quite so implacable as we have seen observers like Kitching, Post and Wright to argue. Isn’t this to accept, however regretfully and/or resignedly, the necessary logic of a roughly Stalinist model of “socialist” practice as being the most appropriate (and/or inevitable) under conditions of extreme scarcity. This model, put into practice in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, did indeed witness a developmental “solution” based on extreme centralization; an emphasis upon “primitive socialist accumulation” at the expense of the peasantry and in the one-sided interests of heavy industry; and the granting of priority to state farms in the rural sector. But in fact there does exist a possible alternative to this model of “primitive socialist accumulation” – one that shifts the emphasis towards facilitating more equal urban–rural exchanges as key to driving the economy forward.The accumulation process could then be advanced precisely by finding outlets for industrial production in meeting the growing requirements, the needs, of the mass of the population, including the rural population. The key to “expanded reproduction” – “expanded socialist reproduction”14 – would then lie in the
176 John S. Saul exchanges suggested above, with food and raw materials moving to the cities and consumer goods and producer goods (including such modest items as scythes, ploughs, hoes, axes, and so on) moving to the countryside. As Thomas, Luttrell and others have argued,15 accumulation – collective saving geared to investment – could then be seen as being drawn essentially, if not exclusively, from an expanding economic pool, rather than merely being squeezed from the population. And wouldn’t such a developmental ethos also be more open to acknowledging the claims of environmental sensitivity, human scale and collective consumption than many of the all too heroically modernist socialist schemata of the past? Any such strategy would also be premised on taking the peasants seriously. This is something that Stalinoid Marxism has had grave difficulties in doing everywhere, and yet it is no less necessary to do so on a continent where even non-Marxist socialists in power (Nyerere) have tended to fall back on their own versions of forced collectivization as a plausible solution to their rural development problems. Taking the peasantry seriously might still involve reaffirming the virtues of the cooperativization of the peasantry, albeit a cooperativization won democratically rather than one forced upon rural-dwellers in the name of “more proletarian” forms of production. It might also be one that found more room for allowing market mechanisms to structure some of the exchanges between urban and rural, worker and peasant, sketched in the previous paragraph, thereby also protecting the state from being overwhelmed by the requirements of micro-management. Of course, the precise role to be assigned to the market in the process of socialist construction – with all its inherent dangers (such as class formation) – on this and other fronts opens up an additional range of difficult questions. But we need not go as far as Alex Nove and others have done in the direction of “market socialism” in order to recognize that the question must remain open – and open as well (even as the new socialist economy becomes more promisingly auto-centric) concerning just what kinds of “necessary” entanglements with the global marketplace are possible (and/or unavoidable) before their costs begin to outweigh the benefits. As we have seen in the cases of Tanzania and Mozambique and also in the debate about alternative economic strategies in South Africa (where the late, lamented “growth through distribution” model might have produced a promising variant on the theme of “expanded socialist reproduction”) that was cut short by the ANC leadership, the track record of African socialist practice to date underscores just how crucial it is that new economic thinking begins to occur along some such lines. This is essential to strengthen the economic prospects of any novel socialist effort (national, regional, or continental) that seeks to counter the malignant grip of capitalism on Africa. But it is also the case that any such rethinking has potentially positive political ramifications. For (recalling Kitching’s dour formulations quoted earlier) just how much more likely would be a democratization of the “socialist” development process if it were twinned with an
The failure of African socialisms 177 economic strategy that placed the real needs of the people at the center of policy-making? But of course the democratic deficit – the denial by socialist leadership once in office of mass democratic empowerment that has stalked twentieth-century socialist practice, not least in Africa – has not merely been an offshoot of presumed economic imperatives; it has had other roots as well. We know that on this second front of socialist practice there has been a veritable witch’s brew of negative ingredients which have gone into producing such outcomes in “socialist Africa”: the intellectual arrogance of newly ascendant elites; the cumulative precedents of nationalist movement practices elsewhere on the continent (even when these precedents had been established by leaderships in pursuit of much less benign ends than the socialists themselves); the inherited hierarchies deemed necessary to movements and liberation forces previously engaged in intense struggles, sometimes armed, against colonial masters; the “progressive” vanguardist discourses learned from overseas parties in the “successful” Marxist-Leninist tradition. Indeed, in the specific African cases studied earlier, the pattern of smothering (however often “with the best of intentions”) the kinds of mass political activism that could have helped sustain the democratic and socialist charge was repeated over and over again. Was this inevitable? Not necessarily. There were, after all, in each of the countries under consideration real expressions of popular energies that had actively to be disabled in order for self-appointed vanguards to consolidate themselves. True, the alternative of advocating mere spontaneity is not a sufficient answer here. A complicated interaction between leadership and mass action is required to sustain socialist endeavor. Fortunately, one may anticipate that such a democratic outcome will be insisted upon when new movements for transformation emerge, as they must, primarily from below rather than from above. Do such aspirations sound merely utopian? Their achievement in practice will be something new for socialists certainly – although the experience of the PT (Workers’ Party) in Brazil may give some example of what such a future might look like. Moreover, experience does suggest that ensuring the political space necessary to facilitate the kind of self-organization from below that can alone drive popular democracy and meaningful socialist struggle requires the following necessary (although decidedly not sufficient) conditions: institutionalized guarantees of open debate, freedom of political and social organization (including independent trade unions, women’s organizations, peasant associations, as well as opposition political parties), and unfettered ventilation by the media of any and all issues. Socialists have conventionally been suspicious of such apparently “liberal” preoccupations. But don’t calls for such institutional guarantees actually reflect a much clearer acknowledgment than in the past of just what is necessary – in Africa and elsewhere – to give democratic forms the potential to be real and meaningful (that is, to release revolutionary energies and to advance class and other popular struggles) for those who need them most?
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Conclusion What, then, are we to make of the record of socialism in Africa? And where does consideration of that record bring us? There can be little doubt that, given the global and continental defeat/failure of regimes and movements that presented themselves as socialist, and faced with the hegemony of neoliberal orthodoxy worldwide, the language of socialism had, by century’s end, lost a great deal of its credibility on the continent. Indeed, writing some years earlier of socialism in Africa, Colin Leys could only conclude, somewhat elegiacally, that The accomplishments of African socialism are not, on the whole, to be measured in terms of growth rates.They are primarily social and political, above all in having posed the question of the form in which development is to occur, in having made it comprehensible to ordinary people that they do have collective historical choices, which they may try to exercise if they will. The achievement of the Tanzanians and the Ghanaians [and, we may wish to add, the Mozambicans] in this respect is epochal. One can also say that the accomplishments of actually existing African socialism lie partly in its failures; to paraphrase Marx, what succumbed in these failures was not African socialism but the “persons, illusions, conceptions, projects,” from which the idea of socialism in Africa was not free, from which it could be freed only by a series of defeats. (Leys 1996: 131) At the same time there are those in Africa and outside (Leys among them) who argue that any such setback need prove only temporary. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, global capitalism shows no more sign of producing socio-economic transformation in Africa than it has heretofore, and the costs of ongoing socio-economic crisis for the continent are mounting. In this context, the claims of the social over the workings of the unalloyed marketplace, and of the “left developmental state” over those of capital, may yet reassert themselves, in Africa as elsewhere, as crucial dimensions of emerging popular democratic demands in Africa. If so, the analytical categories and political practices linked to socialist critique and practice – albeit much freer, if some of the lessons we have highlighted here are learned, of the authoritarian propensities and of the narrow economic thinking that often characterized such initiatives in the past – will ultimately have to be revived in Africa.
Notes 1
This chapter was first presented in draft to the workshop on “Beyond Market and Plan:Toward New Socialisms,” held at York University, Canada, March 23–4, 2002, and there I profited in particular from the formal commentaries on the draft presented at the workshop by Pamela Leach and George Niksic, and also from subsequent observations on the text by Colin Leys.
The failure of African socialisms 179 2 For this introductory survey I draw on my brief overview article “Socialism in Postcolonial Africa,” in Kevin Shillington (ed.) Encyclopedia of African History, London: Fitzroy & Dearborn, forthcoming. 3 For a more sympathetic account of “African socialism,” see the relevant chapters of Young (2001). 4 There is a vast literature on Tanzania’s socialist experiment, to which I also contributed at the time: see, for example, Cliffe and Saul (1972–3); and Saul (1973). More recently I have returned to such themes in two articles which I have drawn on in writing the present section (Saul 2002a, 2002b). 5 Once again, there has been a strong literature on Mozambican themes, my own contributions to which inform the present section; see, for example, Saul (1985, 1993). 6 Note, however, that the most important “mistake” Frelimo made during this period was its fateful decision to commit itself to the continuing struggle to liberate the rest of southern Africa, for which noble decision, a clear by-product of its overall level of revolutionary commitment, it was to pay dearly. 7 See Plank (1993). 8 On this and other points relevant to this section see, inter alia, Marais (1998), now in a second edition; Bond (2000); and Saul (2001). 9 See the section “Starting from Scratch?” in Saul (2001: 33ff.). 10 See Cabral (1969) and Mamdani (1996), who argues vividly that in rural Africa, where most Africans live, the “subject” (as distinct from “citizen”) status of ordinary rural-dwellers is not easily transcended. 11 See Saul (2002c) conference paper. 12 See also Zeilig (2002). 13 I draw for these paragraphs on, inter alia, my essay in the collection by R. R. Fagen, C. D. Deere, and J. L. Coraggio (Saul 1986). 14 I have further spelled out this proposed economic model with reference to the Mozambican experience in Saul (1985: ch. 2). 15 See Thomas (1974) and Luttrell (1986).
Bibliography Barker, J. (1999) Street-Level Democracy: Political Settings at the Margins of Global Power, Toronto and West Hartford: Between the Lines/Kumarian Press. Bienefeld, M. (1982) “Tanzania: Model or Anti-Model,” in M. Godfrey and M. Bienefeld (eds.) The Struggle for Development: National Strategies in an International Context, Chichester, UK: John Wiley. Bond, P. (1999) “Post-nationalist Politics for Zimbabwe?,” Red Pepper,April. —— (2000) Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, London: Pluto Press. Cabral,A. (1969) Revolution in Guinea:An African People’s Struggle, London: Stage 1. Cheru, F. (1989) The Silent Revolution in Africa: Debt, Development and Democracy, London: Zed Books. —— (2000) “The Local Dimensions of Global Reform,” in J. N. Pieterse (ed.) Global Futures: Shaping Globalization, London: Zed Books. Cliffe, L. and J. S. Saul (eds.) (1972–3) Socialism in Tanzania: Politics and Policies, 2 vols., Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Harrison, G. (2001) “Bringing Political Struggle Back in: African Politics, Power and Resistance,” Review of African Political Economy 89, September. Kitching, G. (1982) Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective, London: Methuen.
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—— (1983) Rethinking Socialism, London and New York: Methuen. Leys, C. (1996) The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Bloomington, IN, and London: Indiana University Press. —— (1997) “Colin Leys Replies,” Southern African Report 12(4). Leys, C. and J. S. Saul (2001) “Sub-Saharan Africa within Global Capitalism,” in J. S. Saul (ed.) Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. Luttrell, W. (1986) Post-Capitalist Industrialization: Planning Economic Independence in Tanzania, New York: Praeger. Magdoff, H. and P. Sweezy (1986) “The Stakes in South Africa,” Monthly Review 37(6). Mamdani, M. (1996) Citizen and Subject, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Marais, H. (1998) South Africa: Limits to Change:The Political Economy of Transformation, London, New York, and Cape Town: Zed Books/University of Cape Town Press. Miliband, R. (1994) Socialism for a Sceptical Age, London:Verso. Minter, W. (1994) Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique, London: Zed Books. Mondlane, E. (1983) The Struggle for Mozambique, second edition, London: Zed Books. Monga, C. (1996) The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Murray, R. (1967) “Second Thoughts on Ghana,” New Left Review 42. Nyerere, J. K. (1967a) Standard, Dar-es-Salaam, speech, July 8. —— (1967b) as summarized in the Nationalist, Dar-es-Salaam, September 5. —— (1967c) “Ujamaa:The Basis of African Socialism” in Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1968) “Economic Nationalism,” speech of February 28, 1967, in J. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, London: Oxford University Press Plank, D. (1993) “Aid, Debt and the End of Sovereignty: Mozambique and Its Donors,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31(3). Post, K. and P. Wright (1989) Socialism and Underdevelopment, London and New York: Routledge. Riley, S. P. and T. W. Parfitt (1994) “Economic Adjustment and Democratization in Africa,” in J. Walton and D. Seddon (eds.) Free Markets and Food Riots, Oxford: Blackwell. Saul, J. S. (1973) “Tanzania: African Socialism in One Country,” in G. Arrighi and J. S. Saul (eds.) Essays on the Political Economy of Africa, New York: Monthly Review Press. —— (ed.) (1985) A Difficult Road:The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique, New York: Monthly Review Press. —— (1986) “The Role of Ideology in the Transition to Socialism,” in R. R. Fagen, C. D. Deere, and J. L. Coraggio (eds.) Transition and Development: Problems of Third World Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. —— (1993) “Rethinking the Frelimo State,” in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds.) The Socialist Register 1993: Real Problems, False Solutions, London: Merlin Press. —— (2001) “Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement,” Monthly Review 52(8). —— (2002a) “Poverty Alleviation and the Revolutionary-Socialist Imperative: Learning from Nyerere’s Tanzania,” International Journal 62(2).
The failure of African socialisms 181 —— (2002b) “Julius Nyerere:The Theory and Practice of (Un)Democratic Socialism in Africa,” in D. A. McDonald and E. N. Sahle (eds.) The Legacies of Julius Nyerere: Influences On Development Discourse and Practice,Trenton, N.J.:Africa World Press. —— (2002c) “Rot, Reform and the Revival of Resistance in Postcolonial Africa,” paper presented to the Workshop on “The Political Economy of Africa Revisited,” Johns Hopkins University, April 22–3, 2002. Thomas, C. (1974) Dependence and Transformation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Young, R. (2001) Postcolonialism:An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Zeilig, L. (ed.) (2002) Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, Gretton, UK: New Clarion Press.
10 The “impasse” debate and socialist development Richard Westra
Today, with regard to the so-called “less developed” societies of the world, we hear terms bandied about such as “sustainable development,” “human development,” “just development,” “popular development,” “post-development,” “anti-development,”1 but rarely, if ever, do we find that seemingly nasty Sword – “socialist development” – applied. Why this is the case, in my view, is at bottom bound up with widespread and longstanding misconceptions among proponents of socialism of what constitutes socialism and socialist development. It is precisely the persistence of such misconceptions that, despite the best intentions of socialists, has empowered opponents of socialism of all stripes to too readily dismiss socialism as a viable and progressive form of society for the less developed world (and, for that matter, for the so-called “developed” world). Within the academic literature on the development of less developed societies the progressive discrediting of socialism has taken place as part of an ongoing debate over the existence of an “impasse” in theories of development animated by Marxism.2 The intention of this chapter therefore is, first, to briefly summarize the impasse debate and, second, to expose the roots of the core misconceptions of the socialist project that marked that debate. Finally, this chapter will suggest how an alternative view of what constitutes socialism and socialist development can provide renewed hope for the building of redistributive, eco-sensitive socialist societies across the less developed world. Thus emphasis will be placed upon questions of the most fundamental theorizing of socialism and upon the broad policy implications for socialist development that flow from a creative Japanese approach to Marxism.
An impasse in development theory and the impasse of capitalism Development studies as a discrete field of social science research emerged in the post-war period as the dominant capitalist states were divesting themselves of direct control of their colonial networks. The formative approach to the field, and that which arguably shaped its subsequent development (Randall and Theobald 1998), was “modernization theory.” In the broadest sense, all
The impasse in development theory 183 variants of modernization theory conceived of development in the former colonies as a unilinear process that commenced in an original state of “tradition” or “backwardness” and culminated with the attainment of so-called “modernization,” in which former colonies would come to be characterized by patterns of economic growth, political institutions, and social attitudes similar to those of the dominant capitalist states. Now, on the one hand, work in the Marxist tradition offered effective critiques of modernization theory as ahistorical, dismissive of the economic impact of centuries of colonization, blind to the social forces and class interests that animate processes of social transformation, and so on. But, on the other hand, as we shall see, it was beset by serious theoretical difficulties as it attempted to formulate its own development theory with respect to both capitalism and ultimately socialism. The problems Marxism faced stemmed from the fact that it never adequately resolved issues pertaining to its conceptual architecture that inclined it towards teleological interpretations of human history. These issues, as I have consistently argued (Westra 1999, 2001, 2002), revolve around the view that historical materialism constitutes the overarching centerpiece of Marxism and that Marx’s economic study in Capital exists as a sub-theory of historical materialism purportedly confirming the prognosis of the latter; that capitalist development tends towards and institutionally prefigures socialism.3 My argument, to be developed below, is that there are important futuredirected transformatory policy implications linked to the critical rethinking of such a received approach to the cognitive sequencing in Marx’s theoretical work. In the development field, then, Marxism was first confronted with the fact that, though exposed to capitalism and a world economy dominated by capitalist states, capitalist development in less developed societies, dubbed en masse the “third world,” bore little resemblance to the so-called “normal” experience of capitalism in the developed capitalist states. Responses to this, reproduced here in highly caricatured form,4 were: •
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that the modalities of the confrontation of the capitalist system with the third world rocked capitalism there off its normal course, rendering it “dependent” or “extroverted,” and fostered “underdevelopment” rather than development; that, again, the mode of “articulation” of capitalism (and a world economy dominated by the capitalist mode of production) and the economies of third world societies unfolded in a peculiar fashion so as to effect a “conservation-dissolution” of pre-capitalist modes of production there, interrupting the process of epochal change captured by historical materialism; that, contrariwise, there was in fact little to worry about for – though belated – impelled by imperialism normal capitalist development was actually occurring in the third world as exemplified by the economic development of the East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs).
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Despite obvious differences in these Marxist perspectives, what proponents of the alleged impasse claimed (Booth 1985) is that each shared the same commitment to “necessity,” in that the particular historical outcome, whether underdevelopment or development (or some mix), necessarily flowed from the historical unfolding of capital, or could be “read off ” the capitalist mode of production, or stemmed from the “needs” of developed capitalism and a capitalist world system. As well, impasse critics argued that Marxism was burdened by a commitment to “meta-theory,” in that, notwithstanding differences in geographical locale, the historical sequencing of development or the levels of aggregation being considered, Marxism sought to explain the varied processes of development (or underdevelopment) through a single overarching theoretical structure. In short, it was concluded “that there is a basic problem with marxist theory as an input to development sociology that transcends the particular forms in which it has been manifested” (ibid.: 773). To be sure, Marxists within the development field did protest the foregoing as unfairly tarnishing a diverse tradition with the same brush (Corbridge 1990; Kiely 1995). But, in the end, development studies has witnessed a retreat from development theory in any strong sense, and a certain consensus has emerged that emphasis should be placed upon “diversity in development” and “heterogeneity of the real world of development” (Booth 1994: 3), a tack that has fed increasing interest in “postmodern” or “postcolonial” criticisms of development.5 Such thinking was further supported by the increasingly widespread acceptance of the fact that, since at least the mid-1980s, anything remotely approaching a homogenous third world no longer existed.6 The second problem confronting Marxism, and that of paramount concern in this chapter, was that of theorizing socialist development in less developed societies given the view attributed to Marx that socialism was the culmination of a process of historical development and was institutionally prefigured in the development of capitalism. Under conditions where capitalism had not developed to any significant degree, issues that were of particular concern were those of the development of the productive forces, in the sense both of their technological advancement as the basis for generalized abundance and of their “socialization” so as to render them amenable to economic planning. There were also questions concerning the working class – its proportionate size, role, and influence, and formation of its classconsciousness – in the development process. To again caricature here a series of complex arguments,7 Marxists maintained: •
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that the existence of a socialist world system meant that the “highest social order” had already been reached, therefore every society did not have to follow the evolutionary path through capitalism, but rather could simulate the development of those aspects of capitalism purportedly required by socialism; that in situations where socialist revolutions occurred in less developed societies the “transition” to socialism – involving management of the
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facets of economic development that capitalist development would “normally” have undertaken, the fostering of working-class consciousness and solidarity with other social classes, and the ensuring of the socialist pedigree of the whole process – could occur under the auspices of Marxist-Leninist political parties imbued with proletarian classconsciousness; that where no socialist revolution was on the immediate agenda, Marxists could support strategies of “national liberation” in less developed societies and forge alliances with social classes deemed progressive from the point of view of indigenous “national” capitalist development.
This latter point saw Marxists embroiled in debates over so-called import substitution industrialization, dependent development, the role of the state in development, and so on. However – and this is where the impasse in development theory can be said to interface with an impasse in the development of capitalism, as has been pointed out (Leys 1996a, 1996b) – the international environment in which development studies germinated was one where, on the one hand, developed capitalist states were themselves undertaking projects of “national” development entailing Keynesian economic programming, redistributive social entitlement policies, and so on; and, on the other hand, such policy initiatives were supported by the international institutional edifice of the Bretton Woods monetary system, which had supported the necessary international economic stability. The argument, then, is that with the demise of Bretton Woods unleashing a torrent of speculative capital movements and prompting waves of neo-liberal deregulation, all attempts to maintain a national regime of development of whatever persuasion, whether in the less developed world or in the developed one, for that matter, are doomed to miscarry.This sort of prognosis is quite damning for Marxist theory given its teleological residues whereby socialist development was expected to build on the socializing tendencies of capital, rendering it amenable to centralized economic planning.
Unoist Marxism and the anatomy of material existence The problem with the impasse debate as a whole, however, is that Marx’s work or “Marxist theory,” at least that component of it which occupied Marx’s attention throughout the better part of his life, was not directly concerned with the development of human society across the sweep of human history, or with the historical development of capitalism per se, and should never have been enlisted in the development field in the way it was in the first place. Let me unpack this statement: When Marx reproached the “Utopian Socialists” for drawing up “blueprints” of post-capitalist societies prior to attaining in-depth knowledge of capitalism, what he was adverting to involved one of the most profound insights in the social sciences. As has been emphasized by the Japanese Uno approach to Marxism8 Marx was struck by
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the “ontological peculiarity” of capitalism: that in organizing human material life through integrated systems of self-regulating markets, capital tended to “objectify” or “reify” social relations of production, converting them into quantitative relations between “things.” Now, while such objectification would wreak havoc over the centuries with people, the human life-world, and nature, it also provided a unique window of opportunity for producing knowledge about the world we live in – knowledge that could be used to consciously change the world for the better. First, in objectifying or reifying socio-material relationships, capital left what may be conceptualized as objective “footprints” that a theorist like Marx could rely upon to assist them in unraveling and exposing capital’s deep structure or “inner logic.” The purpose of Marx’s Capital, as Unoists emphasize in their completion and recasting of the work as the theory of a purely capitalist society (Sekine 1997), was not a confirmation of socialism as the telos of human history, or a charting of the future course of capitalist development. Rather, Capital was to constitute an exposition of how it is possible in the first place for something like capitalism – a fully “marketized” society or commodity economy, where material life is reproduced for the abstract purpose of augmenting value – to exist at all. This goal is accomplished with the highest degree of precision when capital’s tendencies to objectify or reify socio-material existence are consummated in theory; where it is assumed that capital has created a world in its ideal image, a bourgeois utopia, if you will, divested of all non-economic non-capitalist encumbrances. In other words, Capital, or the theory of a purely capitalist society, is intended to tell us what capital – the constant across the ebbs and flows of capitalist history – is. Second, it is precisely capitals’ reification of socio-material relationships, or, to use Polanyi’s popular term, the “dis-embedding” of the economic from other social practices, and the wielding of them by capital for its abstract purpose of value augmentation, that constitutes the very condition of possibility for the development of economic theory. Economics, therefore, arises as a field of study only in the age of capital. However, whereas bourgeois economics which animates modernization theory interprets this fact to mean that capitalism is the “natural” mode of organizing human material reproduction, Marxian economics views capitalism as an historically constituted transitory human society. At the core of the Marxist research agenda, then, is the understanding that the capitalist commodity economy and human material life per se, that integral part of the human life-world without which human life and society would be inconceivable, are not the same thing. And it is in this sense that Marxian economics, in tracing the objective, abstract inner workings of capital to demonstrate how capital is able to reproduce the economic life of a human society, simultaneously sheds light on what Uno dubbed “the general norms of economic life” (1980: xix), or what is referred to here as the study of the anatomy of human material existence. This, then, is the answer to the question of the cognitive sequence in Marx’s work; that it is through the prism of the study of capitalism that the study of material life in
The impasse in development theory 187 other historical societies – the research program of historical materialism – derives its validity. Marxian economics, therefore, is not a meta-theory as its concern is with but one subset of human social relations studied under historically delimited conditions. Its power emanates from the way it informs other research domains within Marxism (including that of historical materialism), not from its subsumption of every region of Marxist research under a single overarching epistemological or methodological umbrella. Marxian economics is not teleological because its primary mission is to apprehend the peculiar material anatomy of capital. Questions of the historical trajectory or historical development of capitalism, according to the Uno approach, involve study at different “levels of analysis,”9 requiring theory to take account of the impacts of noneconomic, non-capitalist social practices. Therefore the Uno approach to Marxian economics precludes from the outset any form of theorizing that sets out in any way directly to extrapolate or “read off ” historical outcomes from capital as attempted by Marxists in the development field. Third, and this brings us to the revolutionary crux of Marxism, as the objective theorizing of capital in Capital’s recasting as the theory of a purely capitalist society provides insights into the material anatomy of past human societies, so it offers the most fundamental knowledge necessary for the construction of a genuine and viable socialist society. But the theory does not do this in the conventionally understood sense. That is, the contribution of Marxian economics to the building of socialism has little to do with tracking the historical developments of capitalism that confirm or point to a socialist historical outcome. Rather, on the one hand, in providing the most incisive knowledge of what capital is, the value of the theory resides in what it teaches us about the specific ways capital has polluted and corrupted the human lifeworld and ravaged the natural environment; and what precisely has to be undone in our material existence to rid us of the reificatory structures and residues of the commodity economy. In this regard, the foisting on less developed societies of the paradigm of so-called “developmental socialism” (Durand 1990) – socialism that in practice entailed the development of modalities of capitalist production organization – could not but produce the most unpalatable social outcomes; partly because developing societies were getting varying doses of – just that – capitalism, and in the case of China (or the Soviet Union), for example, a monopolistic and Taylorist variant of capitalism, but also because this was coupled with the most odious authoritarian modes of social control, something that was inevitable given the perceived task of “controlling” or “channeling” capitalist development to develop socialism. But similarly unpalatable, and operating with the same premise, is the so-called TINA position foisted on the world: that there is no alternative. This view – that, given the current neo-liberal economy enveloping the globe, socialist initiatives must wait on capitalist development again becoming conducive to the development of socialism – perpetually condemns socialism to some indiscernible
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future, and in my view further opens the door to the emergence of modern forms of “barbarism,” that which Marx himself believed might supplant socialism as the post-capitalist alternative.10 Thus, on the other hand, besides its crucial contribution to exposing what capital is – knowledge to be utilized in guiding our endeavors at purging the life-world and its material reproductive anatomy of capital and its residues – the theory of a purely capitalist society also makes a vital contribution to the elaboration of what I have dubbed “an ontology of socialism” (Westra 2001, 2002); that is, a set of principles of a socialist economy that will exist as targets to be met in varying ways, according to local conditions, by all attempts to construct genuine socialist societies.And it is to this that we shall now turn.
The ontology of socialism and socialism in the less developed world Building upon my argument that a primary purpose of Marx’s Capital recast as the theory of a purely capitalist society was to furnish the clearest understanding of capital to be utilized in the dismantling of the reified structures of the commodity economy, and recalling the discussion of the theory of a purely capitalist society as the window through which it was possible to study the anatomy of material existence of other human societies, it makes sense that if socialism is to constitute an historical advancement over capitalism (and pre-capitalist societies) in terms of the betterment it offers for the reproduction of human material existence, then creative thinking about socialism should begin with the theory of a purely capitalist society as a benchmark for conceptualizing socialism as the “antithesis” or “institutional opposite” of capitalism. This is the procedure I have adopted to produce the three fundamental ontological principles of a genuine socialism which follow. Marxian economics demonstrates that, as Marx himself put it, capitalism is an “upside-down” society, for, in reifying human material life, capital effectively transfers the responsibility for managing material reproduction to an “extra-human” power – the integrated systems of self-regulating markets of the commodity economy – that manages it for the abstract purpose of augmenting value. Thus, the first principle of an ontology of socialism that springs from this is that socialism necessarily constitutes a non-reified economy in which the responsibility for organizing material life is vested in human beings themselves and that material reproduction is managed for concrete human purposes. What this ontological principle implies is that, contrary to past socialist reasoning, the question of scale in socialism must be reconsidered in order to foster a new relationship between quantitative and qualitative economic considerations. Let me explain: It is only through the economic governance of the law of value11 that capital is able to meet the social demand for basic goods with the society-wide, impersonal, arm’s-length transactions characteristic of its network of self-regulating markets. The notion of an economy tending towards a “general equilibrium” refers precisely to the commodity economic
The impasse in development theory 189 force of the law of value in producing an “optimal” allocation of social labor to achieve the foregoing end. But, as noted above, human material reproduction, as such, necessarily unfolds as a byproduct of the abstract chrematistic of value augmentation. The challenge of the socialist project is to find a replacement for the capitalist mode of socio-material communication in which quantitative “calculation”, namely equilibrium prices, guide the allocation of social resources. As history has displayed, the soviet-style centrally planned economy proved woefully inadequate at meeting the concrete human needs required of a genuine socialism and even exacerbates many of the ills of capitalist abstract calculation such as destruction of the life-world. But, conversely, transformatory projects based solely on isolated self-sufficient communities would be unable to furnish many categories of goods that those with the cosmopolitan experience of capitalism have come to expect (even those with the most reasonable expectations), and also would not have the capacity to address many of the social and environmental scars left by capitalism, or the gargantuan worldeconomic asymmetries. The key to the question resides in the creative rethinking of possibilities for socio-material communication that would allow for the emergence of varying combinations of quantitative and qualitative economic decision-making involving material reproductive communities of varying sizes connected through the differing forms of economic relationships; specifically those directed towards redistribution of social wealth and satisfaction of concrete human use-value needs (Sekine, in Chapter 13, offers a model of one such future socio-economic configuration). Next, capitalism has been upheld as the embodiment of individual freedom because of the way impersonal markets dissolved direct interpersonal material relations of domination and subordination that characterized pre-capitalist societies. However, what Marxian economic theory establishes is that capitalism exists as a very peculiar class society where, through the commodification of labor power, the direct producers have their freedom suspended through the material economic coercion they are subject to as workers. Hence, the second principle of the ontology of socialism that flows from the theory of a purely capitalist society is that socialism requires the decommodification of labor power, but without the reinstatement of extra-economic compulsion. The importance of this latter point cannot be minimized as demonstrated in the agonizing experience of soviet-style socialism, where, though labor power was decommodified, it was subjected to forms of extra-economic coercion over which capitalism already represented an historical advance. But, with both economic and extra-economic compulsions to work excluded, what remains for a genuine socialism that will constitute an historical advance in the material reproductive existence of human beings is for all work to become self-motivated. However, for all work to become self-motivated, or, as Marx himself put it, to become “life’s prime want,” again demands that socialists concern themselves with questions of economic scale that facilitate the deployment of alternate modalities of quantitative and qualitative
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economic decision-making. That is, overcoming alienation demands a rethinking of the connection between production and consumption: first, in the sense of its engendering an interest on the part of the direct producers towards the product outcomes of the production process; and, second, in the sense of its eliminating indifference on the part of workers as consumers, for the modalities and wherewithal of work in production. It is difficult to envision how such could be managed without recourse to a linking together of forms of self-managing communities as a constituent part of the new armature of socialist governance. Finally, as demonstrated in Marxian economic theory, capital’s modus operandi involves the triumph of value over use-value and the production of use-values, the material basis of all human life, to suit its abstract need to augment value. In concrete terms this has meant, among other things: the ongoing production of commodities that threaten to annihilate human life itself; the production of such that continue the destruction of nature; the frustrating of use-value potentials, particularly those such as renewable energy sources, eco-sensitive mass transit systems and transformed community infrastructures; the distorting and exaggerating of our use-value desires; and so on. Thus, the third principle of an ontology of socialism that devolves from this is the re-entrenchment of the use-value dimension of material life and re-embedding of the economy in the life-world. This is, in fact, the linchpin of the socialist edifice given that socialism as I have defined it hinges upon the de-reifying of material existence and the vesting of the responsibility for material reproduction in human beings themselves. These, in turn, necessarily entail the decommodification of labor power and cultivation of self-motivation for even the most arduous forms of work; both necessitating the reconnection of production and consumption through the reconfiguring of productive communities with significantly reduced scale.That is, as we proceed in purging the life-world of the vestiges of capital great care must be taken not to unwittingly reproduce its abstract impersonal modus operandi in similarly impersonal, bureaucratic collectivisms, each with inherent tendencies towards the neglect of concrete use-value needs. So what does the foregoing suggest for socialist development in less developed societies? First, it must be admitted that there exists virtually no option for the advancement of social betterment in less developed societies other than to embark upon projects of socialist construction according to the ontological principles of socialism set out above.Today the less developed societies of the world find themselves trapped in a twilight zone: they are saddled, on the one hand, with massive and virtually non-repayable debts to the powerful capitalist financial institutions of developed states and bound, on the other, to submit to ruthless neo-liberal “openings” of their economies to often subsidized goods of the similarly indomitable developed countries’ corporations as conditions for simply maintaining further “creditworthiness”; with such serving only to perpetuate the hijacking of their economies according to the abstract goal of “modernization.” In fact, in relation to the latter point, as part
The impasse in development theory 191 of the ominously named “structural adjustment” programs the less developed world is subjected to a systematic destruction of its material reproductive ability to meet the social demand for basic goods as its economies are oriented to the zero-sum game of “production for export.”12 Currently there is no “really existing” example of a less developed society success story predicated upon participation in the world economy as such, particularly, as recent analysis demonstrates (Burkett and Hart-Landsberg 1998; Cumings 1999), in the wake of the economic crisis in East Asia. Therefore the building of socialism as discussed above (pp. 188–90) – involving efforts towards de-reification through reductions in economic scale that operationalize the new combinations of quantitative and qualitative economic decision-making, with the further qualification that communities attempt to insulate and protect themselves from the ravages of current global markets – would seem to be a matter for human survival itself across the less developed world.And there exist numerous initiatives – including the development of local currencies, local exchange/ barter systems, local credit and banking structures, and so on13 – that progressive social actors could implement in the here and now to begin structuring a de-reified economic life in less developed societies. Second, and this devolves from the principle of re-embedding the economy in the life-world and nature, and therefore relates to the fundamental material reproductive viability of socialist societies, all socialist development in socialist communities must be predicated upon the cultivation of local agriculture and the utilization of all fertile community land to satisfy local needs as far as possible. As has been well documented (Mittelman 2000; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999), central to the process of what is conventionally dubbed “globalization” is the tendency of even the world’s poorest countries to import vast quantities of staples from developed states while at the same time devoting productive land to the production of luxury products primarily for consumption in those same developed countries (that is, it is the land in less developed societies that is increasingly being co-opted to serve the more affluent in the developed world). In this sense I am supportive of aspects of the agenda dubbed “the subsistence perspective” (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999) which also seeks to sever the connections between local agricultural production and world market demand and re-embed it in local community life. As Colin Duncan (1999) points out, such local agriculture in the less developed world would have an immediate impact on curtailing hunger and on unemployment; not to mention its cleansing effects for local environments. And a similar strategy could be applied to the utilization of local natural materials and minerals; the latter then being deployed in the building of rudimentary infrastructure, housing, and so on.14 An obvious question that arises here is: given the impoverished conditions of much of the less developed world and the fact that societies there are enmeshed in relations of dependence upon developed states for a host of usevalue needs, ranging from heavy material infrastructure products to technologies of automation and transportation and even vital medical
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supplies, would the sort of withdrawal from the world economy advocated here as a socialist strategy not condemn such societies to perpetual “Luddism”? In response, it may be initially noted that, in theory at least, the building of genuine viable redistributive, democratic, eco-sensitive socialist societies does not have to wait on the capitalist development of the “productive forces” because, as I have argued, those productive forces come tainted with the material reproductive modalities of the commodity economy. But, while not all labor-displacing technology and production organization adopted as “best practice” in developed capitalist states will contribute to genuine socialist socio-material betterment, for socialism to fulfill its ultimate potential in the less developed world it will have to have socialist partners among some of the now developed capitalist states. And within the less developed world itself there exists tremendous variation in levels of development. It is precisely here, then, that the sort of creative operationalizing of varying forms of qualitative and quantitative socio-material communication will prove its utility. Socialism will necessarily require the cultivation of economic relationships, not only between self-governing material reproductive communities of varying degrees of scale, but among groups of less developed and current developed societies with the establishment of a socialist commonwealth (though whether the nation-state in something resembling its present configuration plays a central role will be determined in practice). Related to the foregoing is the issue of national v. local as the site for social transformation. While this chapter is not concerned with the politics of resistance to capital or the fashioning of transformatory coalitions, radical social actors should be careful to distinguish between strategies for attaining political power and commencing the process of transforming capital and other relations of oppression, and those of constructing viable, enduring, genuinely socialist economic structures and institutions.There is certainly a good case to be made for concentrating political attacks upon capital at the level of the nation-state – the site of the emergence of capitalism – but, predicated upon an understanding of the ontological principles of socialism, it is solely through meeting the social demand for as many categories of basic goods as possible at the level of selfsufficient socialist communities that a de-reifying of material life, which engenders forms of socialist motivation and the re-embedding of material existence in use-values and the human life-world, will be ensured. Further, it is not clear how extending democracy is possible without creative thinking about constructing a new balance between representative and direct expressions of democracy, which is necessarily bound up with the reconfiguring of material reproductive life advocated here. This is particularly the case for the less developed world, where nascent aspirations for democracy have been ruthlessly frustrated by neo-colonial and imperialist forces, as well as various local politically and culturally mediated strategies of social disempowerment. One final point: As touched upon above, the impasse debate concluded that, as meta-theory, Marxism was akin to modernization theory in supporting a development policy that ignored the multidimensional conditions
The impasse in development theory 193 of development, and marginalized and suppressed less developed societies, peoples, ideas, cultures, and so on. Under the influence of postmodernism and post-colonialist theory, then, the notion of the “local” has recently been deployed in development debates as a sort of truncheon to be wielded against “meta-narratives” of development such as socialism and in defense of “local narratives” and local “resistances” (though the content of these latter tend to remain vague in the literature).15 What I have argued in this chapter, however, is that the Japanese Uno approach to Marxism is not a meta-theory of the sort postmodernists rant against. Its levels of analysis approach is attuned to the fact that in capitalist history the logic of capital is compromised in significant ways by non-economic and non-capitalist practices and that modern history has been shaped by social forces – gender, race, and so on – other than capital. However, it should also be understood that neither do the policy prescriptions for socialist development of the Marxism advocated here amount to a meta-narrative of development; one that involves making an arbitrary a priori distinction between the local and “national” or, for that matter, among those and the global or regional. On the one hand, the ontology of socialism constitutes a set of basic principles of socialist material reproductive anatomy – derived from social theory – that, while offering solid guidelines or parameters for genuine socialist construction, do allow for the full range of human creativity as it confronts the full range of local conditions. On the other hand, it is predicated upon the theorizing of capital, the study of its world-historic stages of development and varied historical impacts on the world, the theorizing of what constitutes a genuine socialism in its most fundamental incarnation, and the historical materialist analysis of the material anatomy of pre-capitalist society, that clear decisions can be made on what features of material reproductive practices from either the developed capitalist societies or the less developed societies themselves can be imported benignly into the new socialist communities.
Conclusion There is no need here to summarize all the points made in this chapter; however, several salient ones certainly merit revisiting. The chapter commenced with a review of the impasse debate in development studies because the debate furnished an instructive vista from which to examine an important new perspective on the theorizing of capital, socialism, and development per se. My position on the debate is that, while development studies animated by conventional Marxism certainly offered trenchant criticisms of modernization theory as well as valuable insights into the quandary of capitalist development in less developed societies, it did, as impasse proponents claim, produce overly rigid and deterministic frameworks which proved an impediment to the deepening and broadening of knowledge of the world we live in. However, such is not a problem endemic to Marxism per se, despite the conclusions that were drawn to the contrary in that debate. Rather, it is a reflection of a predominant tradition in Marxist theory that failed properly to
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grasp the cognitive sequence in Marx’s work and thus left the most powerful aspect of his research agenda undeveloped.Where this had the most unpropitious impact upon Marxism was in its theorizing of socialism. Given the concern of much of Marxist theory with the trajectory of history and the tendencies pointing towards a socialist historical outcome, particularly tendencies in the development of capitalism that supposedly institutionally prefigured socialism, the substantive view of what constituted socialism that emerged – and that which animated previous historical attempts at socialist construction – was a conception of socialism shaped in far too great a degree by the historical development, and modalities of material reproduction, of capitalism. Therefore, with the current neo-liberal transformations of capitalism stripping away those aspects of capitalism that Marxists had counted on as the foundation of future socialist construction and governance, it is hardly surprising that the field of Marxist studies would fall into disarray and the TINA hypothesis be grudgingly accepted even by erstwhile foes of capitalism. Deriving from the Japanese Uno approach to Marxism introduced in this chapter, however, is a research agenda that suggests that the potential for Marxist analysis of the global economy, as well as that of the very uneven and disparate ways capital has impacted upon the world and interacted with other social forces, is far from being at an impasse. And, of even greater importance, the Uno approach generates a substantively new and creative way of thinking about the construction of a genuine and viable socialism. The ontology of socialism I have outlined is particularly relevant for socialist endeavors in the less developed world. The past orientation of Marxism had saddled socialist development there with the task of constructing modalities of a capitalist economy as a centrally managed national project of development, and, as such, often exacerbated the authoritarian propensities and studied insensitivity towards varied conditions of people’s livelihood and culture that was the trademark of its modernization-theory-inspired competition. What this chapter confirms is that a project of genuine socialism, one which addresses the most pressing needs of the less developed world today – fruitful employment of people, the satisfaction of social demand for basic goods, ecological integrity, individual empowerment, and so on – can be viably embarked upon in the here and now without recourse to capitalism or the imbibing of its material reproductive modalities (including those of Keynesian vintage).
Notes 1 2 3
See, for example, Pieterse (2000) for a current survey of theoretical trends in the development literature. The opening salvo was fired in Booth (1985), followed by Sklair (1988) and Corbridge (1990), among others, to be surveyed again in Booth (1994). It is important to be clear that the foregoing is not an attempt to set up a “straw Marx” in the tradition of so much of the “postmodernist” critique of Marxism. Rather, the intention is to spotlight a critical theoretical problem that characterizes otherwise divergent Marxist perspectives, the implications of which resonate through – with unfortunate consequences – to strategies of socialist construction.
The impasse in development theory 195 4 Brewer (1991) provides an overview of this literature. 5 See, for example, Escobar (1995) and the quite critical take on this question of Dirlik (1997). 6 See, for example, Harris (1986). 7 Excellent reviews of the salient issues can be found in Thomas (1978) and Griffin and Gurley (1985). 8 The core monographs of the Uno approach available in English are Uno (1980), Sekine (1997), and Albritton (1991). 9 Levels of analysis in Marxist theory entail the view that the political economic study of capitalism as a whole requires that the movement in thought from the theorizing of a purely capitalist society to the study of capitalist history be mediated by a stage theory of capitalist development; the latter focusing on the production structures and non-economic support systems congealing around the characteristic use-values marking capital in its world-historic stages of development. See, in particular,Albritton (1991). 10 On the relation between the demise of capitalism and the potential emergence of forms of barbarism, see Westra (2003). 11 There is no substitute for a careful reading of Sekine (1997) to obtain an understanding of the central role of the law of value in the economic governance of capital. Succinct summaries of this issue developed in different contexts may be found in Westra (1999, 2003). 12 On structural adjustment, less developed society debt, and the neo-liberal mantra of production for export, see Dasgupta (1998), Rowbotham (2000), and Grabel (2000). 13 There is a burgeoning literature here. On questions of local currency and barter systems, see, for example, Meeker-Lowry (1996), Rotstein and Duncan (1991), and Shorthose (2000). On credit and banking in socialist society, Itoh and Lapavitsas (1999: ch. 11) succinctly summarize the salient issues. 14 In a classic work,Thomas (1974) examines ways in which local resources might be immediately utilized in less developed society transition initiatives. 15 See, for example, the critical discussion in Dirlik (1997).
Bibliography Albritton, R. (1991) A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development, London: Macmillan. Booth, D. (1985) “Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse,” World Development 13(7). —— (1994) “Rethinking Social Development: An Overview,” in D. Booth (ed.) Rethinking Social Development:Theory, Research & Practice, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical. Brewer, A. (1991) Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, second edition, London: Routledge. Burkett, P. and M. Hart-Landsberg (1998) “East Asia and the Crisis of Development Theory,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 28(4). Corbridge, S. (1990) “Post-Marxism and Development Studies: Beyond the Impasse,” World Development 18(5). Cumings, B. (1999) “The Asian Crisis, Democracy, and the End of ‘Late’ Development,” in T. J. Pempel (ed.) The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Dasgupta, B. (1998) Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development, London: Zed Books.
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Dirlik, A. (1997) The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO:Westview Press. Duncan, C. (1999) “The Centrality of Agriculture: History, Ecology and Feasible Socialism,” in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds.) Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias. Socialist Register 2000, Suffolk: Merlin Press. Durand, C. (1990) “The Exhaustion of Developmental Socialism: Lessons from China,” Monthly Review 42(7). Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Grabel, I. (2000) “The Political Economy of ‘Policy Credibility’: The New-classical Macroeconomics and the Remaking of Emerging Economies,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 24. Griffin, K. and J. Gurley (1985) “Radical Analyses of Imperialism, The Third World, and the Transition to Socialism:A Survey Article,” Journal of Economic Literature 23. Harris, N. (1986) The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Itoh, M. and C. Lapavitsas (1999) Political Economy of Money and Finance, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kiely, R. (1995) Sociology and Development:The Impasse and Beyond, London: UCL Press. Leys, C. (1996a) The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —— (1996b) “The Crisis in ‘Development Theory’,” New Political Economy 1(1). Meeker-Lowry, S. (1996) “Community Money:The Potential of Local Currency,” in J. Mander and E. Goldsmith (eds.) The Case Against the Global Economy:And for a Turn Toward the Local, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Mies, M. and V. Bennholdt-Thomsen (1999) The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy, London: Zed Books. Mittelman, J. H. (2000) The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pieterse, J. N. (2000) “Trends in Development Theory,” in R. Palan (ed.) Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, London: Routledge. Randall, V. and R. Theobald (1998) Political Change and Underdevelopment, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rotstein, A. and C. Duncan (1991) “For a Second Economy,” in D. Drache and M. S. Gertler (eds.) The New Era of Global Competition: State Policy and Market Power, Kingston: McGill–Queen’s Press. Rowbotham, M. (2000) Goodbye America! Globalisation, Debt and the Dollar Empire, Oxfordshire: Jon Carpenter Publishing. Sekine,T. (1997) An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, 2 vols., London: Macmillan Press. Shorthose, J. (2000) “Micro-Experiments in Alternatives,” Capital & Class 72. Sklair, L. (1988) “Transcending the Impasse: Metatheory, Theory, and Empirical Research in the Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment,” World Development 16(6). Thomas, C.Y. (1974) Dependence and Transformation, London: Monthly Review Press. —— (1978) “ ‘The Non-Capitalist Path’ as Theory and Practice of Decolonization and Socialist Transformation,” Latin American Perspectives 17(2). Uno, K. (1980) Principles of Political Economy: Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, Brighton: Harvester Press.
The impasse in development theory 197 Westra, R. (1999) “A Japanese Contribution to the Critique of Rational Choice Marxism,” Social Theory and Practice 25(3). —— (2001) “Phases of Capitalism and Post-Capitalist Social Change,” in R. Albritton, M. Itoh, R. Westra, and A. Zuege (eds.) Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave. —— (2002) “Marxian Economic Theory and an Ontology of Socialism: A Japanese Intervention,” Capital & Class 78. —— (2003) “Globalization: The Retreat of Capital to the ‘Interstices’ of the World?,” in R. Westra and A. Zuege (eds.) Value and the World Economy Today: Production Finance and Globalization, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Part V
Political agency
11 Global alternatives and the meta-industrial class Ariel Salleh
A glance at emerging forms of resistance in the current era of globalization and ecological crisis suggests that the appropriate “agents of history” may now be “meta-industrial workers,” rather than the industrial proletariat. In exploring this thesis, I will not spend time on exegesis, sifting through definitions of class or revisiting old debates in socialist feminism or left anthropology. For, as Bertell Ollman (1992: 48) has pointed out, even Marx did not define class, but varied his usage of the term according to the context of his discussion. So, in daring to speak of “a meta-industrial class,” I take courage from this pragmatic attitude. Even so, I do adopt a rule of thumb on class as a material relationship, and often a self-conscious joining together, of people who share a similar place in systems of production (or reproduction). This chapter destabilizes reified notions of class which have prioritized productive labor and marginalized socially and ecologically reproductive activities. Most analyses of capitalism have tended to treat workers as waged white men, whereas reproductive labor is deemed the province of the unwaged – women domestics and carers, peasant farmers, and indigenous hunter-gatherers. However, the latter meta-industrial groupings, nominally outside of the economic system, actually constitute the majority of workers in 21st-century global capitalism. The case for recognizing meta-industrial workers as “a class,” and even as “agents of history” in the current conjuncture, rests on at least six interlocking assumptions: 1
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Dominant discourses from religion to economics are culturally hierarchical, and devalue meta-industrial workers by ideologically positioning reproductive labor at the lowly interface of humanity with nature. Meta-industrials reproduce necessary biological infrastructure for all economic systems, but under capitalist globalization this labor is undertaken at ever increasing cost to that material base and to the reproduction of their own lives. A phenomenological analysis of meta-industrial practices, whether household, farming, or hunter-gathering, highlights their ecologically benign quality as forms of human provisioning which sustain metabolic linkages in nature.
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Ariel Salleh This hands-on reproductive labor interaction with habitat creates lay knowledges of an economic and ecological kind. It represents a thoroughly reality-tested and “embodied materialism.” Observation of anti-globalization movements and forums indicates that despite cultural differences, reproductive labor groupings have a common material stake in challenging capitalist notions of development. A shared meta-industrial class perspective can provide a basis for unifying socialist, feminist, postcolonial, and ecological concerns. This politics is synergistic, addressing class, race, and gender injustices, as well as species and habitat, simultaneously.
Lay knowledges and political thought The human relation to “nature” has become a focus of social thought in recent decades, with a new “eco-politics” given over to it. Eco-Marxists, social ecologists, and deep ecologists each offer unique narratives, but debates about the humanity–nature problematic still provoke public confusion and intellectual hostility. Meanwhile, an insurgent global opposition to neo-liberalism and its ecological crisis receives little help from academic theory. Sociologist Peter Dickens (1995: 1) suggests that the difficulties educated people have in thinking about the humanity–nature connection result from the modernist industrial division of labor and its inevitable knowledge fragmentation. Like ecofeminist subsistence theorists – Maria Mies (Mies and Shiva 1993), Vandana Shiva (1989), and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999) – Dickens argues that the marginalization of lay and tacit forms of knowledge under industrialization means that people lose a sense of their own organic nature. Environmental abuse is one effect of this disembedding. Materialist ecofeminists and Dickens both see the capitalist division of labor alienating individuals and pulverizing social relations. Following SohnRethel (1978), Dickens observes that the abstract professional knowledges informing modern labor processes become fetishized – information technology, genetic engineering, public policy, and even environmental economics are contemporary instances of this. Under capitalism, this “expertise” is traded as a commodity, dislocated from its material ground in social and ecological relations, and often inaccurate (Dickens 1995: 142–3). The ecofeminists Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies arrive at their theory from hands-on womanist and ecological praxis. But they too recommend taking a “view from below”: to demystify the delusions created by those “on top” that their life and lifestyle are not only the best possible ones but also the image of the future for everybody on this planet…[In fact] the so-called good life is possible only for a minority and…[enjoyed] at the expense of others: of nature, of other peoples, of women and children. (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999: 3)
Theorizing the meta-industrial class 203 Ecofeminists focus on complex synergistic interactions between economics, sexuality, race, and environmental habitat; and their critique of the eurocentric scientific hegemony privileges embodied knowing. Certainly, Marxist analyses of nature’s commodification can deal with the humanity–nature metabolism, but in ecofeminism there is a shift of interest from production towards reproduction – of economic relations, of cultural practices, and of biological processes. The Marxist theory of labor by which humans negotiate their social relation with nature is suggestive, but not sufficiently articulate on the functions of reproductive labor.This has led to absurd sociological claims like Habermas’ (1989) surmise that ecology and feminism belong to civil society and are therefore not class-based movements.Younger Marxists like Sean Sayer (1992) do see production and reproduction, gender, and class as mutually determining. But this level of theoretical awareness is unusual among Marxists, and combining it with an ecological perspective, as ecofeminists do, is even less common. During the 1970s socialist feminists engaged in what became known as “the domestic labor debate,” trying to explain the precise character of reproductive labor as an essential component of a capitalist system based on surplus value. But their efforts were inconclusive and were largely ignored by subsequent generations (Sargent 1981). Moreover, these earlier feminist analyses still tended to reason in terms of industrial growth and redistribution of the social product. Since that time, environmental crisis and postcolonial struggles have broadened the emancipatory agenda, so that the concern for equality needs to be integrated with cultural diversity and with sustainability. In this new historical context, the subsistence perspective in ecofeminism emerged, interrogating the very foundations of Marxist materialism and its supposedly transhistorical concepts of history, nature, and labor. Ecofeminists asked whether there might not be deeper causal structures, general processes, and particular contingencies formative of old gender-innocent Marxist understandings. Ecofeminists address reproduction as materially and logically prior to production, and the implications of this destabilize taken-for-granted concepts of class and contradiction (Mies 1986; Salleh 1997).
Reproductive labor under globalization The claim that once self-sufficient meta-industrial labors are increasingly indispensable to the infrastructure of global capitalism was established long ago by International Labor Organization statistics (ILO 1980). This phenomenon has been revisited in Hilkka Pietila’s (1984) analysis of domestic productivity as the free economy, Marilyn Waring’s (1988) gender critique of the UN System of National Accounts, and Silvia Federici’s (1999) deconstruction of the “New International Division of Labor.” All these ecofeminist scholars demonstrate how women’s reproductive labor is systematically eliminated from the capitalist equation. Meanwhile, Shiva et al. (1997) have shown how prior to colonization small farmers and hunter-gathering communities
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were able to manage subsistence economies and protect major global reserves of biodiversity at the same time. Yet today the consumerist North, whose footprint spans 80 percent of global resources, hypocritically blames these “impoverished” groupings for the global environmental crisis. Sophisticated meta-industrial resourcing techniques are invisible to the eurocentric eyes which frame World Bank “development” programs.Typically, the Financing for Development Summit, which met in Monterey, Mexico, in 2002, was more about free markets and investment opportunities than about development. Diplomatic rounds such as this, and the foundational Uruguay meetings, have simply enhanced the appropriation of local reproductive resources by transnational corporations. The latest of these neo-liberal moves to restructure global agriculture and trade is the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Harbinson proposal, soon to be promoted by governments and challenged by people at Cancun, Mexico (Via Campesina 2003). The shared stakes of culturally diverse meta-industrial workers are made very clear in an International Women’s Day email posting from the Peoples’ Caravan. Here, the Malaysia-based Pesticide Action Network (2002) reports research into the impacts of neo-liberal trade regimes on food security in Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan. Peasant women are found to suffer most under newly introduced agricultural schemes, because these are cash based, requiring machines, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. Moreover, with national tariff protections abandoned, these vulnerable Asian states are overwhelmed with cheap imported food.The same thing has happened in Mexico, a country once self-sufficient in grains and now 95 percent reliant on imports. But destroying local subsistence economies results in farmer bankruptcy, landless refugee populations, and prostitution. Rural men leave villages for cities to supplement family incomes with factory work, but lone women farmers are rarely extended credit. Many must put in 10-hour days at cash cropping under the competitive free market, their soils and their bodies damaged by exposure to imported pesticides. Reading between the lines of the UN Human Development Report (UNDP 2001), global economic pressure on farmers to develop marginal lands for export crops deprives indigenous foragers of their habitat, in turn. And it leads to a general scarcity of firewood, fodder, and clean drinking water. Private investment in capital works like dams, brokered as development aid by Export Credit Agencies, may leave thousands homeless and close to starvation. Other indigenes and smallholders are coerced from their land by transnational mining ventures and oil extraction, often backed up by military violence. Displaced populations arrive in urban centers, only to find welfare, health, and education services decimated by International Monetary Fund conditionalities for structural adjustment. Increasingly, access to drinking water supplies is privatized and put beyond reach of the poor. But the heavy social costs of global free markets are easily matched by environmental damage. With subsidies for the affluent North and deregulated trade regimes for the South, the intensified global movement of products means more accidental oil spills affecting the
Theorizing the meta-industrial class 205 livelihood of fisher folk; more transfer of disease organisms in foods shipped across continents; and more greenhouse-induced climate disturbances, leading to floods. While mothers worldwide are concerned about loss of food quality, transnational corporations impose genetically engineered crop seed on farmers and urge governments to deregulate standards. The public health and ecological risks of genetically modified (GM) products are unknown. But GM seed stocks also pose an economic burden to farmers, as many are sterile and must be purchased annually from their monopoly source. Beyond agribusiness, communities in the South continue traditional practices of seed-saving, sharing and cultivating medicinal plants. But the non-elected, non-transparent WTO facilitates the biopiracy of indigenously developed foods and medicines. This international theft has been legalized by the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights mechanism of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In the face of this outrage, an alliance of tropical nations in South America, Africa, and Asia is pressing governments to register local plant and animal resources and secure indigenous intellectual property rights against invasive corporate patenting. The protective clauses of the Convention on Biological Diversity have been subject to prolonged dispute between nations and the document remains unsigned by the USA. The debate on genetically engineered organisms is now focused on the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol 2000. This adheres to a “precautionary principle” but is threatened with dilution by the standards monitor Codex Alimentarius, whose members include powerful business representatives. And bio-colonization does not end here. At the turn of the millennium, people of the isolated Pacific island of Tonga found themselves struggling to hold on to their own blood tissue, as their government considered a pharmaceutical company deal to patent this “natural resource” in exchange for a hospital and research center. Technico-legal arguments about lack of informed consent by patients or absence of risk assessment surely miss the point. A Tonga National Council of Churches Centre statement (2001) on bioethics emphasizes the reproductive labor values of reciprocity and respect for all life forms. And it reiterates the right of indigenous peoples to preserve their traditional knowledge and protect their lands and their bodies from biocolonial exploitation by scientific, business, and governmental partnerships. But neither are the urban-dwellers immune to the effects of free trade. Across the world these show up as unemployment, stressed family relations, alcoholism, diabetes, and cancer. Housewives, campesinos, and indigenous peoples increasingly reject global capitalism and its culture of individualistic consumerism. In response to the WTO imperative known euphemistically as the Agreement on Agriculture, grassroots campaigners are calling for a new right to “food sovereignty.”These voices include the international ecofeminist network Diverse Women for Diversity, Via Campesina, the Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions, the Community Forest Network, Assembly of Moon River Watershed, Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et des
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Producteurs (ROPPA) West Africa, and the Association de Mujeres Rurales e Indigenas from Chile. The key point is that productivist mega-economies externalize social and ecological costs. Self-reliant subsistence economies anticipate and pre-empt them by intelligence and adaptability.
Working between “humanity” and “nature” The practical skills and holistic understanding of meta-industrial workers should be taken seriously by those seeking political alternatives to global capitalism. The hands-on lay knowledge of women domestic providers, small farmers, and hunter-gatherers can be characterized as an “embodied materialism” (Salleh 1997). This usage deepens the classic Marxist meaning of materialism, for it involves an ecologically embodied knowing. Ecofeminist thought inspired by this learned sensibility traces the socially constructed and deformed linkages between men and women and nature. Historically, these terms have been essentialized and valorized hierarchically, male-dominated societies using female bodies as a “natural” resource for reproductive ends. That material practice was rationalized by ideologically positioning women somewhere between humans and nature in the “Godgiven” order of things. As if in parallel to gender subordination, the bodies of colonized peoples have been resourced also for their sexuality, their slave labor, and their DNA. These masculinist practices point to a fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism: a node of crisis not yet included in the conversations of political economy. An embodied materialist analysis grounded in reproductive labor is strong political medicine for those infected with the intellectual alienations and confusions of the industrial division of labor. For while productive labor is historically contingent, reproductive labor is universal, necessary, integral, attuned to general causal processes within the ecosystem. Among Australian indigenous peoples this humanity–nature (body–land) partnership is conveyed by the word “country.” The notion of a meta-industrial class defies given sociological constructs of gender, class, and race. Both women and men from all societies will undertake reproductive labor – economic, cultural, biological – at some stage in their lives. This ecofeminist thesis is not therefore a sociobiological argument that “women are closer to nature” or “better than men” – or a celebration of “the essential feminine,” as superficial readers of ecofeminism sometimes assume. Rather, it is based on an intimate empirical observation – a phenomenological reading – of how people go about meeting their needs. The texts that follow represent three kinds of reproductive labor – subsistence farming, housework, and parenting. In considering these exemplars the reader should bear Marx’s early anthropology in mind. As Dickens puts it, “[h]uman beings …make something new of themselves as a result of humanizing nature. They realize new powers with which they were born but which they did not know they had” (1995: 104).
Theorizing the meta-industrial class 207 A classic statement of material agency in scientific complexity occurs in Vandana Shiva’s study of Indian women subsistence farmers: It is in managing the integrity of ecological cycles in forestry and agriculture that women’s [re-]productivity has been most developed and evolved. Women transfer fertility from the forests to the field and to animals. They transfer animal waste as fertilizer for crops and crop byproducts to animals as fodder. This partnership between women’s work and nature’s work ensures the sustainability of sustenance. (Shiva 1989: 45) The German ecology activist Ulla Terlinden spells out the tacit systems epistemology behind domestic reproduction carried out by urban housewives: Housework requires of women [or men] a broad range of knowledge and ability. The nature of the work itself determines its organization. The work at hand must be dealt within its entirety….The worker must possess a high degree of personal synthesis, initiative, intuition and flexibility. (Terlinden 1984: 320) Contrast this total engagement with the fragmented industrial division of labor and the numb inconsequential mindset that it gives rise to. In discussing parental skills, the American philosopher Sara Ruddick introduces a notion of “holding” labor, which again embodies the principles of good ecological reasoning: To hold means to minimize risk and to reconcile differences rather than to sharply accentuate them. Holding is a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety. It is the attitude elicited by world protection, world-preservation, world repair. (Ruddick 1989: 75) Paradoxically, while minimizing risk, “holding” is the ultimate expression of adaptability. As against the positivist separation of fact and value, space and time, which marks science as usual, interconnectedness is common sense in this embodied materialism. Barbara Adam (1998) offers yet another analysis of engagement with nature in terms of interlocking cycles of human and ecological time. She describes how people’s sensitivity to nature’s implicate timings is colonized by the clock of capitalist production and its administering state. But when the material substrate of life is processed by manufacture and put up for a price, the socially contrived focus on “things” misses the myriad of exchanges and reverberations that hold matter together. Citizen consumers are disempowered by the one-dimensional economic landscape and are only able to grasp “what is,”
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in contrast to “what can be.” In other words, appearance subsumes essence – the unrealized potential of nature. Each of these ecofeminists describes non-violent and non-alienating ways of objectifying human energies in labor. An embodied materialism highlights the relational logic of this labor form and knowledges that have been marginalized, censored, and repressed by the vanities of modernity. As noted already, meta-industrial labor as a process of human partnership with nature is not necessarily gender specific. Ecological holding is found in both genders among indigenous peoples. By custom, Australian Aboriginal workers practice a kind of holding, nurturing sustainability as they move through country (Rose 1996).The hunter-gathering mode of production is reproductive labor, in that it does not take more than it needs. In this most efficient of all subsistence economies, the seasonal walk through country is made in the knowledge that with careful harvesting each habitat will replenish and provide again on the return. The argument being made here is not about romancing “the noble savage”; its focus is entirely practical. Self-managed Aboriginal economies generate lay knowledges that are not only environmentally benign, but creatively social. Besides subsistence, they foster learning, participation, innovation, ritual, identity, and belonging. Indigenous peoples are known to achieve a high quality of life with only three hours’ work a day. On the other hand, as Manfred Max-Neef (1991) reminds us, the engineered satisfiers of modern industrial societies – like bureaucracies or cars – cost much time and energy, often sabotaging the very convenience they were designed for. Reproductive labor is a metabolic bridging of human and natural “cycles.” But productive labor is “linear” and pursues a single goal, whether in agribusiness, mining, manufacture, or “controlled” laboratory science. This instrumental rationality collides with complex patterns of material exchange, leaving disorder in nature, and human poverty as collateral to it.
The meta-industrial class To reiterate: in principle, holding labors transcend differences of class, race, gender, and age, though in practice, under the modernist division of labor, they have become the province of low-status groups like women domestic caregivers, subsistence farmers, and indigenes. Each of these workers occupies an unspoken space in the industrial division of labor and in Marxism, its theoretical mirror.This is a remarkable omission and an especially salient one in today’s ecological crisis. In the rural hinterlands of the South and in the domestic hinterlands of the North, meta-industrial provisioning models simple ways of adapting nature to meet human needs, without ecologically damaging industrial forces of production or socially oppressive capitalist relations of production.As the exemplars drawn from Shiva,Terlinden, and Ruddick reveal, this way of working literally embodies the precautionary principle. Ecofeminist activists apply this logic beyond home and neighborhood to
Theorizing the meta-industrial class 209 politics at large. Another commitment of materialist ecofeminists like Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, myself, and others is to validate existing “moral economies” as they start to resist the depravities of neo-liberalism at an international level. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and 10 years later at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the “other” experience of housewives worldwide, poor farmers, and indigenes was treated as cultural not economic, and located outside the mainstream white middle-class masculine government and UN agency dialogue. The World Economic Forum (WEF) held by global capitalist leaders at Davos and elsewhere continues this subterfuge. But WEF discourse is now dual-powered by a World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre and Hyderabad. Additionally, the losers of capitalist globalization are initiating a plethora of interim conferences, direct actions, and websites challenging the WTO. In this context, women and men of the Seattle People’s Caucus convened by the Indigenous Environmental Network USA/Canada, Seventh Generation Fund USA, and many more nongovernmental organizations wrote: we believe that it is also us who can offer viable alternatives to the dominant economic growth, export-oriented development model. Our sustainable lifestyles and cultures, traditional knowledge, cosmologies, spirituality, values of collectivity, reciprocity, respect and reverence for Mother Earth, are crucial in the search for a transformed society where justice, equity, and sustainability will prevail. (Seattle People’s Caucus 1999) Dominant discourses from religion to economics have positioned women, peasants, and indigenes in/with nature and treated their bodies as a resource. But this bifurcated existence, the experience of living between humanity and nature, makes for dialectical thinkers well equipped for moving beyond the political double binds that mark the era of bio-colonialism. On one side, stands the allure of sovereign nationhood and “catch-up” development, as defined in the hollow international codes of neo-liberalism. On the other, is material belonging and identity, grounded in a sense of place, and the integrity of “holding” materially reproductive ecosystems together for future generations. A manifesto from a gathering organized by the Tebtebba Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education in Manila (Tebtebba Foundation 2001) bespeaks the political sophistication of people who must negotiate dialectically, both their own cultural meanings and the dominant worldview: “When we seek redress for the grave injustices that still confront us, we utilize agencies of international and domestic law but continue to reclaim and revalidate our indigenous ways…. At the same time, this conference seeks support from non-indigenous partners.” From a position of ethical strength, meta-industrials keep the door open for conversations with the North.
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It is my contention that the basis for an alternative 21st-century socialist vision exists already across the earth in the myriad of meta-industrial practices that remain uncaptured by market and plan. Ecofeminists call this guiding utopia an earth democracy – because it is inclusive of all life forms. This approach reverses the classic Marxist prioritization of production over reproduction, and more, it aims to render modes of production (as we have known them) obsolete altogether! In fact, many people in the North are already setting up bioregional economies, communal farms, local exchange and trading systems or LETS schemes, and eco-villages, and designing their lives around the principles of diversity and reciprocity. Progressive thinkers, even Marxists, now admit that the current global crisis is exacerbated by the abstract, disembodied, and inaccurate knowledge base of white masculine middle-class decision-makers – in business and government alike. But too few progressive thinkers are clear about how to build positive human links with nature.This is where they can learn from “the view from below.” The site at which reproductive labor and its lay knowledges physically mediate humanity and nature is the best vantage point for framing an ecologically literate class politics. Here, ecopolitical strategies for ecology, feminism, postcolonial, and socialist movements find common ground. Given the new insurgency of meta-industrial voices, their global majority status, their pivotal role in capital accumulation, and their unique models of sustainable provisioning, this class may well be the most appropriate “agents of history” at this time. The claim for their being “a class” is surely an overdetermined one. But their solidarity is vulnerable to being undermined by capitalist-identified and/or productivist elements in the anti-globalization movement – old-style socialists, liberal pro-development feminists, and assimilationist indigenous elites. In this conjuncture, once-radical political positions become reactionary by failing to grasp their own parasitic dependency on a worldwide system of non-renewable accumulation. For prudential reasons, then, as much as socialjustice and ecological ones, it is crucial to encourage a deeper awareness of the shared interests of meta-industrial labor groupings. My chapter is offered as just this kind of reinforcement to a class in its own right.
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Theorizing the meta-industrial class 211 Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1981) Capital, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Max-Neef, M. (1991) Human Scale Development, New York:Apex. Mies, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation, London: Zed Books. Mies, M. and V. Bennholdt-Thomsen (1999) The Subsistence Perspective, London: Zed Books. Mies, M. and V. Shiva (1993) Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Ollman, B. (1992) Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge. Peasant Meeting (2001) “End Global Hunger! WTO out of Agriculture!,” Bangkok, August 26–27, 2001; forwarded by the Peoples’ Caravan,
[email protected], August 28. Pesticide Action Network (2002) “Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) Harms Small Farmers”; forwarded by the Peoples’ Caravan,
[email protected], March 7. Pietila, H. (1984) “Women as an Alternative Culture Here and Now,” Development 4. Rose, D. B. (1996) Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra:Australian Heritage Commission. Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking:Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon. Salleh, A. (1997) Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, London: Zed Books; New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sargent, L. (ed.) (1981) Women and Revolution, Boston, MA: South End Press. Sayer, S. (1992) The New Social Economy: Reworking the Division of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell. Seattle People’s Caucus (1999) “Indigenous Peoples Seattle Declaration on the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization,” Seattle, November 30–December 3; forwarded by Tebtebba Foundation
[email protected], December 8. Shiva,V. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books. Shiva,V. et al. (1997) The Enclosure and Recovery of the Commons, New Delhi: Research Foundation for Science,Technology and Ecology. Sohn-Rethel,A. (1978) Intellectual and Manual Labour, London: Macmillan. Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples’ International Centre for Policy Research and Education) (2001) “Manila Declaration of the International Conference on Conflict Resolution, Peace Building, Sustainable Development and Indigenous Peoples,” Manila, December 6–8, 2000; forwarded by Diverse Women for Diversity
[email protected], January 30. Terlinden, U. (1984) “Women in the Ecology Movement,” in E. Altbach (ed.) German Feminism,Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. Tonga National Council of Churches Centre (2001) Statement of Bio-Ethics Consultation, Nuku’alofa, March 12–14. UNDP (2001) Human Development Report, New York: United Nations. Via Campesina (2003) “April 17, International Day of Farmers’ Struggle,”
[email protected],April 18. Waring, M. (1988) Counting for Nothing, Sydney:Allen & Unwin.
12 Postscript on the surplus population1 William Corlett
How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs? (Alexie 1994: 152)
Donella Meadows remains silent on class struggle, of course, when she seeks “the solution for homelessness” in “attention, engagement, the willingness to focus on homeless people not as statistics but as individuals who need to be welcomed back as full members of the human race” (1991: 29). Nevertheless her humanitarian impulse resonates with many of us engaged in low-income organizing against capital’s hegemony. But merely to call for including, aiding, respecting, or empowering the dispossessed may serve more to reinscribe than counter the mentality of “government” as policy, “population” as a target, and “political economy” as rationality.2 To engage in the struggle for emancipation by pursuing a strategy for radical inclusion one must open up the question of representation by paying as much attention to questions of framing as to the problems articulated within their purview. My approach to the surplus population seeks to rethink its position in anti-capitalist struggle by raising the possibility that the genocidal decimation of this part of our humanity provides the frame within which commodified labor-power produces capital.3 Perhaps it makes more sense to approach the surplus population as an hors d’oeuvre, outside the main work of political economy, a foreclosure of life without which capitalist expropriation could never be (over)determined. I begin with Marx’s depiction of the surplus population in Capital I, attempting to illustrate it with the work of William Bunge, a political geographer who maps out the intricate relationships between those who overconsume and the others who pay us tribute.Then, drawing from the insights of feminist theory, I face the problem of taking the plight of a surplus population seriously without reducing the people involved to victims.This discussion leans heavily on the work of Sharon Marcus, whose approach to rape as a scripted maneuver addresses rather directly the twin problems of representation and victimolatry. I next consider Gibson-Graham’s reliance on Marcus as they4 blur a rather crucial distinction between a Derridian “constitutive outside” and
Postscript on the surplus population 213 Althusserian “overdetermination.” Attempting to distinguish these terms more sharply allows me to ask how the ruined status of the surplus population renders absent–present binaries intelligible. I am trying to suggest that occupying privileged subject positions in a capitalist mode of production is intimately related to the generation of a surplus population; there is a human relationship, which is not an intersubjective relationship. Indeed, those rendered abject may serve to frame the more visible power struggle between commodified labor and capital.The welcome wagon approach of Donella Meadows and so many others is flawed: the dispossessed cannot accept the invitation which their haunting “presence” renders redundant. In Derrida’s formulation, “Il est d’abord à la bord.”5
Reading Marx in the spirit of labor’s exile York University’s William Bunge (1972) offers a most illuminating way of representing urban spaces as a concatenation of three cities, each of which can be mapped, with exchange relations between them.Those in the “city of superfluity” (I shall call these people gorgers) dominate the others, send all things toxic, sick, and dying to the “city of the dead” (I’ll call them the damned) and establish the “city of need” in between (they will join us as the toilers) to protect itself against the obvious repercussions of such a bald power play. The gorgers maintain their inflated lifestyle by exploiting the toilers and collecting a “death tax” in the form of subsidies on food, shelter, and transportation from the damned. Bunge developed his typology by mapping rat-bite incidents and other atrocities in Detroit over thirty years ago; but the categories remain useful as we approach Marx’s depiction of the people rendered abject. Who hasn’t at some point spent time reading about the “industrial reserve army” in Capital I? Some readers display a healthy sense of the dangers of reducing the “surplus population” to the “industrial reserve army”; such a reduction eliminates, for example, the lumpenproletariat. But even fewer readers continue down the line to consider pauperism, the “dead weight” of those damned by capital and not meant to survive. Marx opens section 3 of chapter 25 of Capital I by pointing out that “a surplus population of workers…becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.”6 He describes the process of creating “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements” (1976: 784). Marx presents this mass of human material as “the background against which the law of demand and supply of labour does its work” (ibid.: 792).7 We must ascertain in what sense this “army” enables capital’s masquerade. Does the dead weight of those exiled to poverty join with other factors – economic and noneconomic – to (over)determine capital’s hegemony? Or must the torment of these people be rendered unrepresentable, non-present, to frame capitalist subject–object relations? The answer seems to depend in part upon which part of the surplus population one is talking about.
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Marx explains in the subsequent section, section 4, that “the relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms” (ibid.: 794); all workers slip in and out of the reserve army depending upon whether they can find someone to exploit them. He attempts to identify three omnipresent forms: “the floating, the latent, and the stagnant” (ibid.). Examples of the floating surplus population include workers who are “sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again” from factories, workshops, ironworks, mines (ibid.). Examples of the latent surplus population take us to the countryside: As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture…the demand for a rural working population falls…. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat…. But the constant movement toward the towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population. Marx 1976: 795–6) We’re already sinking because the agricultural laborer “always stands with one foot in the swamp of pauperism” (ibid.), and the next stop is the stagnant form of the surplus population.This third category “forms a part of the active labor army but with extremely irregular employment”; “Hence it offers capital,” Marx tells us, “an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labourpower” (ibid.: 796). But this level of poverty is only the beginning of the forgotten story. Marx distinguishes the various categories of the surplus population, each of which flows in and out of the active labor pool, whether floating on top, lingering in a rural area nearby waiting for the call, or wallowing in poverty and agreeing to work for the longest hours and the lowest wages because wage work is so infrequent. Then he arrives at “the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population” (ibid.: 797), pauperism, the hospital of the active labor force, the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Setting aside immediately “the vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat” (ibid.), Marx turns his attention to three categories of this “social stratum.” The first two categories help to make sense of the hospital metaphor. First, we encounter those who are “able to work” – perhaps having recovered from an injury – and who may or may not find a way back into the active army of toilers. Second, we face the “orphans and pauper children”; Marx regards these youngsters as “candidates for the industrial reserve army” and in some cases the “army of active workers” (ibid.). In both of these cases the “lowest sediment” can be caught up in the commingling of labor-power and capital, if only to sink back down again. But the third category is far less likely ever to have much to do with the army of active workers, or even their hospital. Here we find the “dead weight” of the industrial reserve army, whom Marx presents as
Postscript on the surplus population 215 the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. (Marx 1976: 797) The production of pauperism is included, for Marx, in that of the relative surplus population. There is never any doubt that desperate living conditions and early deaths are a necessary condition for capitalist production. But capital rarely pays these costs; poverty “forms part of the faux frais [incidental expenses] of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie” (ibid.). He ends this discussion with the reminder that “accumulation of wealth…is…accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation…[for] the class that produces its own product as capital” (ibid.: 799).8 Rather than view the relative surplus population as the victim of capital, Marx sees these people as the producers of their oppression, riveted to capital in ways that are sometimes difficult to sort out. Capital cannot put its house in order without accruing the incidental expense of disposing of the “refuse,” the damned.9 I want to be careful here to distinguish approaching the place of the refuse as a part of the mappable world, as it appears in Bunge’s formulation, from regarding the lives of the homeless, unemployed, sick, and tired people as the parergon, intimately related to and yet unrepresented in the labor–capital struggle.The question of framing needs to be incorporated into any discussion concerning how the surplus population can be expected to fight back.
Rape and exploitation as scripted maneuvers It helps, of course, to begin by rejecting the “victimolatry” of considering thrown-away people and devalued aspects of everyone’s life as “casualties.”10 In another context, Anna Yeatman (1995) points out that this can lead to a “politics of ressentiment”; in our case, this would presume that the world’s impoverished bear no responsibility for their plight and stand in need of rescue by those more familiar with power as coercion. Emphasizing “power as capacity” requires a different (if not only Foucauldian) approach to power, one in which resistance is part and parcel of the power matrix, and democratic forms of coercion are not ruled out. I am trying here to figure out the most promising way to connect the abject regions of the surplus population with business as usual.11 And so I join others in drawing inspiration from the work of Sharon Marcus when I compare the capital–labor couple with the rapist–victim
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couple and seek alternative scripting; but I part company with her when my approach turns in the direction of contrasting these couples. After glimpsing a few of the highlights of Marcus’s essay, I move to Gibson-Graham’s analysis of globalization, in which capital plays the part of the rapist. Here I show how they blur the distinction between the “constitutive outside” and that “overdetermination” which has helped define the impressive work of Resnick and Wolff (1987) and others recycling Althusserian structuralism to such good effect. My approach focuses on precisely this “constitutive outside,” which I read in the direction of the “uninhabitable” and “unintelligible” zones, which must be exiled or “foreclosed” to make the condensation of structural effects possible (Butler 1993: 22). Entire regions of the surplus population have come to embody this constitutive outside. Sharon Marcus has inspired many activists because of the forthright way she counters the tendency of the oppressed to participate in their own victimization. Marcus works against thinking about rape as “terrifyingly unnameable and unrepresentable, a reality that lies beyond our grasp and which we can only experience as grasping and encircling us”; such thinking, she argues, places rape beyond the pale of human agency: In its efforts to convey the horror and iniquity of rape, such a view often concurs with masculinist culture in its designation of rape as a fate worse than, or tantamount to, death; the apocalyptic tone which it adopts and the metaphysical status which it assigns to rape impl[y] that rape can only be feared or legally repaired, not fought. (Marcus 1992: 387) Marcus’s project seeks to eliminate any approach to rape and rape prevention that renders the possibility of fighting back “unnameable and unrepresentable.”12 After reinterpreting the available script, she gets on with the business of eliminating it altogether. I want to show how she presents the idea of scripting and then make some preliminary observations concerning her argument. According to Marcus, “we only come to exist through our emergence into a preexistent language, into a social set of meanings which scripts us but does not exhaustively determine our selves” (ibid.: 391). She is concerned in this essay with power relations, how subjects are positioned in relation to each other. She sees the script “as a framework, a grid of comprehensibility which we feel impelled to use as a way of organizing and interpreting events and actions” (ibid.). Within this framework, Marcus defines rape as a scripted performance so as to “enable a gap between script and actress which can allow us to rewrite the script” (ibid.: 392). Even though we must ultimately “eradicate this social script,” says Marcus, it is possible immediately to “interfere with it by realizing that men elaborate masculine power in relation to imagined feminine powerlessness” (ibid.). Stressing the interdependence of both parties, Marcus argues that because rape victims are “solicited to help create” such masculine power they “can act to destroy it” (ibid.).
Postscript on the surplus population 217 When engaged in the immediate task of “interfering” with the script, Marcus does not contest the subject position of the men involved; instead she contests our inflated sense of the power of masculinity. Accordingly, she cites the “gentlemen’s agreement” (ibid.: 396) often displayed in intra-racial man–man violence with the twisted power relations between the rapist and the woman he is assaulting. In the former case, “one man can expect to receive from another any violence which he metes out to him”; in the latter, the rapist “anticipates and seeks its target’s subjection as a subject of fear, defenselessness, and acquiescence to injury” (ibid.). Although both are capable of fear, men and women receive different stage directions in the dominant script: masculine fear is directed in ways that resonate with the principle of “fight or flight,” whereas “feminine fear inspires the familiar sensation of ‘freezing’ – involuntary immobility and silence” (ibid.: 394). Marcus would immediately redirect the actors, restoring what Yeatman (1995) calls “power as capacity,” including the capacity for violence, to the dominated subject, working in the direction of equalizing the struggle between them. Moving this emancipatory project to the next step of eradicating the script altogether requires eliminating elements which reduce woman to genitalia, such as images of “violated inner space” (ibid.: 399). Resisting these images requires us to abandon the view of rape as a theft.As Marcus explains, The rape script strives to put women in the place of objects; property metaphors of rape similarly see female sexuality as a circumscribable thing.The theft metaphor makes rape mirror a simplified model of castration: a single sexual organ identifies the self, that organ is conceived of as an object that can be taken or lost, and such a loss dissolves the self.These castration and theft metaphors reify rape as an irrevocable appropriation of female sexuality. (Marcus 1992: 398) Marcus wants to “revise the idea of female sexuality as…property”;13 “The horror of rape is not that it steals something from us but that it makes us into things to be taken” (ibid.: 399). Marcus argues that by setting aside images of the tremulous female body or the female self as an immobilized cavity, we can begin to imagine the female body as subject to change, as a potential object of fear and agent of violence. Conversely, we do not have to imagine the penis as an indestructible weapon which cannot help but rape. (Marcus 1992: 400) Then, as if to signal an alternative script, she closes with a story by a woman who fought a rapist successfully in self-defense: “I couldn’t let go. I was just determined I was going to yank it out of its socket. And then he lost his erection…pushed me away and grabbed his coat and ran” (ibid.). Marcus closes
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with a reminder that self-defense “offers no final solution”; but she is unwilling “to wait for men to decide not to rape” (ibid.). Although it is useful and possibly subversive to approach capital’s hegemony as scripted, in order to deflate the significance of capital in our collective imaginary any analogy with rape must be careful not to overlook three important points: capital, the product of labor-power, is not a person; disembodied capital does steal something, including labor’s subject position; and this theft means that some people are exiled to the dead zone Marcus seeks to expunge from her rape script. How capital’s survivors are connected and disconnected with each other lies at the heart of my chapter. J. K. Gibson-Graham’s rape analogy risks overlooking, I think, the significance of the third point. I want first to locate the rape analogy in their wider project. The script that holds their greatest interest is not the familiar one between capital and labor; instead they are working with a script which places capitalism in the superior position and renders non-capitalist and other social ventures as victims who participate in their victimization. J. K. Gibson-Graham are committed to the idea that “in the hierarchical relation of capitalism to noncapitalism lies (entrapped) the possibility of theorizing economic difference, or supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms” (1996: 11). Working in the direction of a “plurality of economic and other forms,” they employ the language of a “constitutive outside” to show that capitalism is made possible by the elements, not all of which are economic, that it regards as other. They discuss the “radical emptiness” of capitalism in the following way: For capitalism to exist in difference – as a set of concrete specificities, or a category in self-contradiction – it becomes necessary to think the radical emptiness of every capitalist instance. Thus a capitalist site (a firm, industry, or economy) or a capitalist practice (exploitation of wage labour, distribution of surplus value) cannot appear as the concrete embodiment of an abstract capitalist essence. It has no invariant “inside” but is constituted by its continually changing and contradictory “outsides.”…In the terms that Althusser appropriated from psychoanalysis…a capitalist site or practice is “overdetermined”; entirely (rather than residually) constituted by all other practices, processes, events. The practice of social theory…involves exploring these constitutive relations. (Gibson-Graham 1996: 15–16) To appreciate what is about to happen, I must emphasize their connection between the “constitutive outside” and overdetermination. By connecting the “constitutive outside” with “overdetermination,” Gibson-Graham invoke the psychoanalytic term “condensation” in a way that presupposes capital’s identity.Their project becomes one of destabilizing capital’s fragile identity.14 This helps to explain how Gibson-Graham can
Postscript on the surplus population 219 acknowledge that capital is not a person – indeed, they view it as a presence made possible by the absence of the other – and still allow capital to play the role of the rapist. Capitalism is like a person in the sense that it has an identity. In Freud’s process of condensation, “a compression of two or more ideas occurs, so that a composite name is formed” (Grosz 1990: 87). Capitalism is one such name.15 Indeed, overdetermination is the starting place of this project: As a theoretical starting place or ontological presumption, overdetermination involves an understanding of identities as continually and differentially constituted rather than pre-existing their contexts or having an invariant core…we believe that it is…important for leftists to decenter and destabilize “capitalism.” (Gibson-Graham 1996: 16, n. 33) Gibson-Graham want, then, to extend the play of difference to structural effects that range from non-capitalist economics to non-economic social forms. Viewing capital as a scripted maneuver is, for them, a useful context within which to engage in this identity play of absence and presence. Reading globalization as if it were analogous to sexualized violence allows Gibson-Graham to make three key maneuvers, two of which are related to Marcus’s double task of changing the script from within by reassigning the status of the victim – fighting back – and then moving on to eliminate the language of the domination altogether. The first allows them to expose the overblown importance of capital, which has eclipsed all other economic forms:“Like the man of the rape script, the MNC [multinational corporation] is positioned in the standard globalization script as inherently strong and powerful (by virtue of its size and presumed lack of allegiance to any particular nation or labour force)” (ibid.: 127). The second allows them to suggest an alternative script: “Globalization, it seems, has…allowed capital to seep if not spurt from the productive system, but the implications of this unboundedness, this fluidity, for the identity of capitalism remain unexplored” (ibid.: 137). This is as far as Marcus could take us because, although the identities of the subjects are negotiable in the scripting and rescripting of rape scenarios, neither has the “hollow center” one associates with Moneybags. And so the third maneuver becomes decisive. Gibson-Graham move beyond the Marcusinspired analogy – between the rapist and the MNC, and the reductive image of woman as vagina and capital as erection – to draw on queer theory to help in the radical project of “rethinking capitalist morphology in order to liberate economic development from the hegemonic grasp of capitalist identity” (ibid.: 139). Here we find these innovative writers writing almost as easily of “labour flows” as “capital flows” (ibid.: 142). Using the new metaphor of capitalist globalization as one “infection” among many and raising the possibility of zones of “immunity,” they open up new spaces (ibid.: 142–243). This is how they talk about infection, for example:
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In other words, once the starting place of condensation/overdetermination was announced, capital’s identity became intact; subject to destabilizing to be sure, but intact all the same. Before going on to consider the implications of this starting place for the problem of domination, please recall William Bunge’s way of mapping urban places.The toilers live in a buffer zone between the gorgers and the damned. Gibson-Graham would liberate us from reducing the toiler–gorger tension to labor–capital; and yet in all of the complexity of “labor flows” and “capital flows,” “capitalist formations” and “non-capitalist formations,” capital manages to retain its subject position, as if it were an imperial power accommodating protest and resistance as a condition of its rule. This (over)extension of credit to capital’s subjectivity can be detected later in their book, when GibsonGraham raise the specter of Derrida’s blackboard. In response to Fukuyama’s end of history, Derrida (1994) lists ten conditions, two of which are most relevant to the surplus population: homelessness and unemployment. After listing them he calls for a two-part strategy: the first involves trying to bridge the gap between the sorry state we are in and any kind of imaginable resolution; and the second requires putting into question again the very concept of the ideals presumed in the first.Without doing both at the same time there will be no repoliticization; without radical “repoliticization” there will be no “emancipation” (ibid.: 75). Because they are looking for a radical displacement of capital’s identity, Gibson-Graham read Derrida’s presence at the blackboard as a haunting acceptance of an unnecessarily unitary portrayal of what he calls “capitalist imperialism” and an inability to deal with the real world. Although they do not pursue the suggestion formally, they wonder aloud: “In one who has untiringly taken on the task of destabilizing western metaphysics and philosophy, the tiredness evident in the blackboard chapter seems particularly uncharacteristic” (Gibson-Graham 1996: 250, fn. 17). But Derrida’s text is haunted by the “dead weight” of Bunge’s city of death, the looming monstrosity of lives denied access to the means of representation. Perhaps one cannot even conceptualize as an ideal the magnitude of capital’s carnage, let alone attempt to catch up with what we are now calling “unemployment” and “homelessness.” If people were to turn to GibsonGraham for help in coming to terms with those living in abject poverty, they would be likely to realize that these authors start, as we have seen, with what they take to be its fixed subjectivity, one ripe for destabilizing, and they never look back. Here is the exclusionary move: “If categories like subjectivity and
Postscript on the surplus population 221 society can undergo a radical rethinking, producing a crisis of individual and social identity where a presumed fixity previously existed, can’t we give capitalism an identity crisis” (ibid.: 260)? By choosing overdetermination as a starting place, Gibson-Graham grant capital the identity they would place in crisis and in doing so relieve themselves of the need to rethink the unimaginable violence required to clear the ground for the absent–present play of condensation. They have no reason to speak about the most dire circumstances in the surplus population and therefore risk sharing capital’s evasion and denial. In other words, what Gibson-Graham call the “constitutive outside” may itself be constituted by exiling the damned outside the walls of William Bunge’s “city of need” and “city of superfluity.” Derrida’s parergonal logic allows us to pursue the possibility of death-tax-paying people whose presence is undeniable and nevertheless impossible.
An irredentist turn toward Marx’s surplus population The most crucial aspect of any irredentist struggle lies in resisting a popular tendency to accept the foreign occupation, to “move on” with our lives, to let bygones be bygones. In the case of capital’s occupation of the West, one should attempt to refuse its subject position in addition to attempting to continue a subject–subject struggle, especially wherever the latter strengthens the enunciative stance of labor while weakening capital’s inflated “ego.” Beating one’s head against a brick wall can exhaust labor’s resources unnecessarily, except for when one finds an opening from which to gain a tactical advantage. Such strengthening of the dominated person’s subject position makes such good sense in the rape scenario depicted by Marcus because she objects to the inflated presence, not the right to existence, of the subject position of the rapist. She even distinguishes the subject–subject violence of a bar fight between similarly situated men, on one hand, from the absence–presence domination of a victim–rapist relation, on the other.The point of her plea for rescripting is to equalize the intersubjective struggle, ascribing vulnerability, penetrability, fluidity, and absence of control to the leaky bodies one often calls “men.” Marcus’s example takes us into the complexity of subject positioning, and works to restore women as subjects of fear and even violent retaliation, as they explore what Yeatman calls “the full range of agentic capacities” (1995: 154). Generations have passed and capital’s masquerade is widely disseminated and, at least among most gorgers, almost totally normalized. Labor speaks in multiple – sometimes multicultural – voices, but only if it acknowledges capital’s presence. Queer subjects emerge to complexify capital’s vulnerabilities; feminist subjects emerge to give capital a run for its money; ethnic subjects seek to ferret out its despicable racism, its racial project, the sacraments of whiteness. Each time it seems able to accommodate – never without a struggle but eventually finding markets for most of the new subjects. It is
222 William Corlett tempting to forget that capital, in all of its varieties and complexities, has stolen the identity of its producer, labor.The very idea of irredentism – taking back our alienated lives – begins to feel foreign even to the most neglected workers, who, while still proud, still strong, remain incarcerated, drugged, hobbled, forced out of the picture. Gibson-Graham’s work with the play of absence–presence offers special insight into how one might restore the surplus population, and other neglected economies, to a place which is always already within capital’s hegemonic fortress. Their deployment of overdetermination to describe the condensation of multiple effects that makes an otherwise hollow capital possible allows them to argue that capital appears larger than life only because it has devalued non-capitalist economies all around it. The excitement of the resultant economics of difference resonates with Resnick and Wolff ’s work (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1984), in which the household is not seen as a place for the regeneration of exploitable labor, but an economic alternative. We can identify, for example, communist households within a capitalist mode of production, and many other innovative programs, some of which infiltrate capital to the point of undermining profit maximization. Gibson-Graham turn to the Marcus essay because capital’s arrogance does resemble the patriarchal “sex right.” Capital’s masquerade is so complete, at least among the gorgers, that it is bound to mimic the patriarchal character of the labor it (mis)represents. These are, however, only the habits of an enemy occupying our lives. But Derrida’s work opens the possibility that what Gibson-Graham call the “constitutive outside” isn’t really as far out as it could be, and thus risks reinscribing the exclusion of the damned.16 We need to consider the framework within which their overdetermination, this condensation of multiple structural effects (including the last instance which never comes), plays itself out. Gayatri Spivak distinguishes gender and race-based differentiation by relying on a suggestive distinction between excluded subjects who are “argued into that dismissal” by a “Master Subject” and those whose possibility is “foreclosed as a casual rhetorical gesture” (1999: 30). The woman in Marcus’s rewritten script, who takes control of her capacity for violence, stands in a different position from that of the most abject victims of capitalism, who stand outside the work of political economy. The “lowest sediment of the surplus population” has more in common with Spivak’s “raw man”: “structurally and crucially…the nature/culture-differentiated parasubject remains outside the work, para[a-]ergonal, to use Derrida’s word” (ibid.: 34).This brings us back to the hors d’oeuvres. Lost in the effort to revalorize the alternative economies in the absence–presence relation of capitalism and non-capitalism is the “constitutive outside,” which Judith Butler describes like this: To this understanding of power as a constrained and reiterative production it is crucial to add that power also works through the foreclosure of
Postscript on the surplus population 223 effects, the production of an “outside,” a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility that bounds the domain of intelligible effects. (Butler 1993: 22) One must foreclose the non-presence of the supplement in the name of framing the absence–presence polarities that govern Marcus’s rape scenario as appropriated by Gibson-Graham to describe capital’s domination of other economic subjects.17 Retrieving this sense of the play of difference depending upon, and necessarily excluding, an unlivable outside allows us to see how Gibson-Graham’s compelling analogy risks eclipsing the most horrific aspects of labor’s stolen subjectivity.
Facing up to the surplus population Sharon Marcus is certainly right to avoid the death metaphor when rewriting the rape script. But death is not a metaphor for many sentenced to the surplus population and one simply cannot become immobilized – either by guilt or ignorance – if the struggle for emancipation is to be continued. But trying to organize against capital amidst people in crisis brings one up sharply against Spivak’s distinction between subjects who can speak and parasubjects who inhabit the aporia of the master texts.Viewing the distinction between foreclosure and condensation heuristically, condensation seems most useful in the analysis of the multiple overlapping dreams of a new socialism; but foreclosure helps to explain the nightmare of being poor in the twenty-first century.The concept of overdetermination helps to explain capital’s hollow center as the effect of relations between gorgers and toilers; but only the “constitutive outside” can help us begin to comprehend capital’s necessary exile of the damned (whose “rapport sans rapport” can easily be missed). Disregarding the aporia allows us to concentrate on the main work of Marxist critique; but those people humanitarian activists would have us welcome in are already and necessarily all around us. Building upon Marx’s discussion in Capital I, one can imagine that within the hospital wards of the army of active workers some patients are released to join the ranks of the (un)employed or to eke out a life of subsistence outside the circulation of money and commodities. But others have no hope of recovery and require the support and attention of hospital workers. These “incidental expenses” are passed on by capital to those who pay the taxes for minimal “cradle to grave” protection in some polities, and even less in the more vicious states. But any hospital has volunteers, some motivated by faith, others by outrage. In addition to taxes, then, both gorgers and toilers give money and time to such “hospital” efforts as the Salvation Army, Oxfam, or Save the Children to ease the troubled souls of those perceived to be the most abject. Here in the hospice section of the general hospital of the army of active workers marked for death we find the lowest level of the lowest order of the relative surplus population, the damned.
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In the hospice we might expect to find hospital workers – often academically trained, with homes in the cities of superfluity and need – attempting to come to terms with the people marked for death by the slide from subsistence to abject poverty. With living spaces uninhabitable and protests unintelligible, the people marked for death are not even absent. They are beyond the Althusserian “last instance” and locked outside the Foucauldian “network of power and resistance.” They are the “nothing” which is “outside of the text,” the “not-anything” that makes it possible to say the “everything has become discourse.”When we first enter the wards where people are sent to die, privileged volunteers may be surprised to find that the “mutual support and defense” one sometimes associates with community are an everyday practice. Those rendered “abject” in capital’s theft of labor’s identity are often more interested in helping fellow survivors immediately than in working for what we might call “progressive social change.” The progressive mantra – reduce, reuse, recycle – is a necessary way of life here, where it often loses its individualistic implications.18 Describing the surplus population as a “constitutive outside” risks disrespecting those whose abject positions are denied access to the means of representation, forced outside of the main work of political economy. Associating some people with the refuse produced by capitalist economics appears to deny these fellow human beings agency. But such a conclusion presupposes the classed subjectivity of the entire surplus population. Because subject positions in discursive fields are not the same as the people who embody them and because the agency of the subject varies both quantitatively (that is, from dead to emerging to full) and qualitatively (for example from sex to ethnicity to gender to class based), many combinations and complexities are possible. I raise the possibility that classed subjectivity is denied to some discarded people in the surplus population, whose class-based agency is thereby defunct. Glossing over the complexities of subjectivity and agency by extending these positions and capacities to everyone helps gorgers and toilers avoid acknowledging our complicity in the “faux frais” of capital’s senseless accumulation. Even if we were to acknowledge the denial of an enunciative stance for many in the surplus population, the question of representation can itself appear to be delimiting. Why should a person who lives in the street and mixes it up with local authorities to bring food to the people in the park even want to be inside the picture? Sean Saraka (2002), for example, extends a Deleuzean critique of representation in the direction of unleashing practical acts steeped in revolutionary desire. His work issues a necessary cautionary note to any theorist hawking revolutionary distinctions. But surely this sophisticated work soft-pedals the significance of framing – the scene of writing – thereby restricting representation to the main work within its bounds. Once again, limiting the means of representation to officially sanctioned points of access glosses over the complicity of all wasteful consumers in the non-presence of the surplus population.
Postscript on the surplus population 225 Sharpening the distinction between overdetermination and its constitutive outside allows us to keep both foreclosure and condensation available, if only as heuristics. This may prove to be an important part of facing up to the surplus population. J. K. Gibson-Graham’s analysis resembles William Bunge’s when it extends an economic role to spaces neglected by capital. But regarding the surplus population as the outer limit of economic rationality encourages a shift in perspective from the circulation of money and commodities to the waste and destruction accompanying these flows. Always flushing, floating, disposing, clearing out, storing, sequestering worlds of waste products actively forecloses the possibility of relating to them, even as we produce them. Approaching the surplus population – our ultimate waste site – as if it were the framework in which money and commodities are exchanged allows us to see that framing as part of the structure of domination. To actively seek out the possibility that the gorgers’ most familiar forms of life necessarily foreclose the class-based agency of a large percentage of the world’s population may require at least as much “high-income disorganizing” as low-income organizing. Perhaps a good place to begin is with the rapport available now, for example, in the bars, reading groups, language classes, solidarity clubs, gun shows, and the faith movement, many of which include people living on the edge. Networking where possible may help us unlearn what we need to when networking becomes impossible. But human emancipation requires us to act on our complicity, as we struggle to make sense of the “rapport sans rapport” that the world’s dispossessed people share with those of us squandering the social surplus.
Notes 1 2
3 4 5
The author is grateful to Shannon Bell, Ethan Miller, Sean Saraka, Carole Anne Taylor, and Chris Vance for incisive critical comments and solid support. Foucault (1991: 102) alerts one to the danger of making the surplus population yet another target for government policy. Less noticeable perhaps is the twin problem of welcoming a new member to the anti-capitalist struggle without lifting the foreclosure of their class position. My interest in framing, especially Derrida’s notion of “rapport sans rapport,” owes a debt to Spivak (1999: 35) and the inspired use she makes of Derrida (1987, 1981). J. K. Gibson-Graham are two people, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Derrida writes: A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [Il est d’abord à la bord]. (Derrida 1987: 54)
6 7
Marx continues: “It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost” (1976: 784). According to Marx,
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For a compelling distinction between a background and a frame, see Derrida (1987: 61). 8 Consider the complete quotation: The law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital. (Marx 1976: 799) 9 Here I am reminded of Charles Mills’ essay, “Black Trash” (2001), in which he reads the white privilege in Hobbes’ body politic to conclude that the racially marked “other” becomes the product of the excretory system. 10 Elizabeth Spelman (1995) discusses the complexities of “victimolatry,” and mentions Martha Minow’s concern to avoid trivializing the victimization without reinscribing the status of victim. 11 The question of framing evokes the supplement, trace, associated with Derridian non-presence at the scene of writing. I discuss Derrida’s distinction between nonpresence and the presence–absence binary in Corlett (1989: 158–9). 12 This is, of course, precisely my problem; but I cannot bring the “terrifyingly unnameable and unrepresentable” surplus population into the capital–labor script because of its necessary exclusion. This is why I am pursuing a parergonal logic. For an earlier attempt in a related context, see Corlett (1998: 56–7). 13 Carole Pateman (1988) expresses a similar reservation about property metaphors, including ownership of labor-power. 14 Connecting the “constitutive outside” to “overdetermination,” Freud’s concept of condensation, presupposes the formation of the unconscious. This is how Elizabeth Grosz describes the overdetermination-cum-condensation process that Althusser and his followers find so suggestive: The unconscious has only limited techniques at its disposal to gain even a partial pleasure through distortion and disguise. Freud cites the two primary techniques of disguise as condensation and displacement.With condensation, a compression of two or more ideas occurs, so that a composite figure, image or name, drawing on and leaving out features of both, is formed. In this way, a single image in a dream is able to represent many different wishes or thoughts through compression of common features and elimination of (relevant) differences. (Grosz 1990: 87)
Postscript on the surplus population 227 15 This explains their reluctance to define “capitalism”; that would be essentializing capital’s identity. Though their provisional definition (Gibson-Graham 1996: 3, n. 4) does rely upon a capital–labor tension. 16 Early Derrida argues that What is supplementary is in reality différance, the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay. Différance is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the active work of difference. Of course this is inconceivable if one begins on the basis of consciousness, that is, presence, or on the basis of its simple contrary, absence or nonconsciousness. (Derrida 1978: 88) 17 Elizabeth Grosz knits “foreclosure” into the way she uses the word “deconstruction”: Deconstruction involves a very careful, patient reading of the text, inhabiting it from a point of view sympathetic to the text’s concerns and its logic; and at the same time, reading it from a point of view of what is left out, foreclosed, or unarticulated by it but is necessary for its functioning. (Grosz 1990: 90) Butler shows, for example, how the heterosexual subject is formed by foreclosing same-sex objects, a formation which results in the melancholy associated with being unable to grieve for these lost objects. Is the surplus population the “lost object” of the gorgers? This possibility lies in our foreclosure of the theft and carnage which surround the worlds we can acknowledge. 18 Whenever gorgers notice this solidarity among the damned, they rush to add it to the death taxes by encouraging them to set up their own relief programs – for example informal translation services, furniture banks for fire victims. This allows the gorgers to cut the taxes they and the toilers would otherwise pay for more established programs in the buffer zone city of need. Hospice volunteers need to be on the lookout for this tendency on the part of the gorgers to increase the death taxes while lowering their own.
Bibliography Alexie, S. (1994) The Lone Ranger and Tonto: Fistfight in Heaven, New York: HarperCollins. Bell, S. (1994) Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bunge, W. (1972) “Detroit Humanly Viewed: The American Urban Present,” in Ronald Abler, Donald Janelle, Allen Philbrick, and John Sommer (eds.) Human Geography in a Shrinking World, North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, New York: Routledge. Corlett,W. (1989) Community Without Unity, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. –– (1998) Class Action, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Derrida, J. (1978) Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. –– (1981) “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11. –– (1987) The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –– (1994) Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge.
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Foucault, M. (1991) The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fraad, H., S. Resnick, and R.Wolff (1994) Bringing It All Back Home, London: Pluto. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Oxford: Blackwell. Gray, C. (1994) Toward a Nonviolent Economics, self-published: 888 Almaden, Eugene, Oregon USA 97402. Grosz, E. (1990) Jacques Lacan:A Feminist Introduction, New York: Routledge. Marcus, S. (1992) “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds.) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge. Marx, K. (1976) Capital, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin. Meadows, D. (1991) Global Citizen,Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Mills, C. (2001) “Black Trash,” in L.Westra and B. Lawson (eds.) Faces of Environmental Racism, second edition, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Resnick, S. and R. Wolff (1987) Knowledge and Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saraka, S. (2002) “General Economy,Value and the Concept: Towards an Aneconomic Marxism” (unpublished manuscript), available from
[email protected]. Shiva,V. (2000) Stolen Harvest, Boston, MA: South End Press. Spelman, E. (1995) “The Heady Political Life of Compassion,” in M. Shanley and U. Narayan (eds.) Reconstructing Political Theory, University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Spivak, G. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yeatman, A. (1995) “Feminism and Power,” in M. Shanley and U. Narayan (eds.) Reconstructing Political Theory, University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Young, I. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Part VI
Possible worlds
13 Socialism beyond market and productivism Thomas T. Sekine
Elsewhere, I have claimed that capitalism in its classical form (or capitalism proper) ended its life with the First World War, and that all efforts to restore the old order failed, thus beginning a process of ex-capitalist transition, which might be characterized alternatively as a process of the disintegration of capitalism (Bell and Sekine 2001: 37–55). This process, as I argued, differs from capitalism proper in that it lacks a self-perpetuating structure of its own, and is thus unable to constitute an historical society.1 Here I would like to begin by recapitulating the same view, which I inherit from Kozo Uno (1897–1977). According to Uno (1974), the world-historic development of capitalism (proper) underwent the three stages of mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism. His explanation is roughly as follows.
Three stages of capitalism In the first stage of mercantilism, which represents the emerging phase of capitalism, merchant capital typically2 organizes domestic industries in rural districts – often through a putting-out system – to produce goods such as wool.The usevalue space (that is, the context in which the real economic life of society occurs) at this technological level is still rather primitive for the logic of capital to work its way through, so that the mercantilist policies of the state have to be mobilized to break the ground and to build a minimum infrastructure for the capitalist home market to develop. In the second stage of liberalism, which represents the middle phase of capitalism, it is goods like cotton yarn and fabric, produced in modern mechanized factories that constitute the typical commodity in the usevalue space. In this stage industrial capital can seek to accumulate autonomously, no longer being directly dependent on the power of the state, since the capitalist market has increasingly become self-regulated. Old mercantilist regulations are thus dismantled and the regime of free competition among a multitude of small firms establishes itself, enabling the capitalist principle of the market to work on its own, largely unobstructed by factitious impediments. But at a higher stage of technological evolution another type of use-value space comes into being, in which goods like steel replace cotton-related ones as the typical commodity. Thus, in the third developmental stage of imperialism, which represents the
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declining phase of capitalism, commodity production shifts its core from light to heavy industries. Since the production of steel-like products requires a massive investment of fixed capital, monopolistic firms evolve to suppress free, atomistic competition. Under these circumstances finance capital, which dominates industrial capital, becomes the leading form of accumulation, calling into being a set of imperialist economic policies with a view to facilitating its operation without at the same time unduly straining society. In all these cases the economic function of the bourgeois state is limited to ensuring that by means of its policies the accumulation of (merchant, industrial, and finance) capital proceed most effectively – that is, that all “externalities” to the working of the capitalist market be as much as possible “internalized” so as to conform to the logic of capital.3 It is important to notice that these three developmental stages are distinguished by the types of use-value spaces characteristic of the emerging, the middle, and the declining phases of capitalism.These stages do occur in chronological order, but they are not conceived of as “ideally” representing the succeeding epochs of world history. They are, rather, meant to show how the same logic of capital might manifest itself differently in the three typical use-value spaces, characterizing as they do the world-developmental stages of capitalism. It is Uno’s view that the rich empirical reality of actual capitalism in history cannot be interpreted directly in the light of the logic of capital, but only as mediated by the appropriate stage-theoretic determinations. What is both interesting and important, however, is that this pattern of mediation between theory and history by means of the stage ceases to apply after the First World War. Indeed, Uno writes rather enigmatically as follows: The development of capitalism after the First World War constitutes directly the object of empirical-historical analysis, as a study of the world economy in which capitalism co-exists with socialism, since it cannot be viewed as representing the evolution of another world-historic stage of capitalist development (“soreni-yotte shihonshugi-no sekaishiteki hatten no dankaironteki kitei wo ataerareu-mono to shite deha naku, shakaishugi ni tairitsusuru shihonshugi toshite, iikaereba, sekai-keizairon toshite-no genjou-bunseki no taishou wo nasu-mono to shinakereba naranai”). (Uno 1974: 248) This may be interpreted to mean that a process of disintegration of capitalism had begun with the war of 1914, so that the evolution of the world economy thereafter cannot be adequately explained by reference to the logic of capital as mediated by the characteristics of a particular stage of development of capitalism, other factors interfering with the logic of capital in some major way. If that is the case the world economy today must be in transition from capitalism to socialism, to use this latter term broadly to mean an historical society that is to follow capitalism. Indeed, it is, in my terminology, in the process of ex-capitalist transition.
Socialism beyond market and productivism 233
Three phases of ex-capitalist transition I have also suggested (Bell and Sekine 2001: 37–55) that this transitional process, in its turn, undergoes three distinct phases in fairly rapid succession: 1 2
3
The interwar period of great transformation, during which the bourgeois state was replaced by a welfare state; The period of Fordism/consumerism, which achieved a high level of economic activity based on mass production and mass consumption in the 1950s and 1960s; The period of post-Fordism and casino capital (or globalization), which we are currently living through.
During the inter-war period, as all attempts at restoring the pre-First World War economic order failed, the bourgeois state was challenged by the collectivisms of the right and the left.This was due to the fact that the rift between the working of the self-regulating market and the protection of society, to borrow a phrase from Polanyi (1944, 1968), could no longer be bridged by traditional economic policies of the bourgeois state. To appease class struggles and achieve industrial peace, the bourgeois state had to yield and transform itself (by way of the New Deal and whatnot) into a welfare state, which, by directly involving the state power in the management of the national economy, sought both to constrain and to preserve the capitalist market. The welfare state, in other words, aimed at social democracy (with a Keynesian bent) rather than capitalism pure and simple.This trend was confirmed and reinforced after the Second World War, especially in the context of the Cold War. Fortunately for capitalism, the petroleum-based technology then made newly available bolstered the Fordist mode of production and the high consumption of the masses at the same time, which together generated the unprecedented economic prosperity under so-called Pax Americana. Not only could oil, unlike coal, run internal combustion engines, but it also, unlike coal, replaced many natural raw materials with synthetic ones, thus causing, on the one hand, power revolutions in both production and transportation and, on the other hand, the “disembedding” (again in the language of Polanyi [1944, 1968]) of industry from agriculture to the limit. Petro-technology, however, possessed two distinct characteristics: it was radically labor saving and, at the same time, environmentally unfriendly. In the age of Fordism it was the second of these properties that predominated. This was due to the fact that people who had lived through the privation and shortages of the 1930s and 1940s craved material amenities, insuring demand for virtually any newly produced good.Thus production could expand more rapidly than the labor-output ratio fell. This ensured the high level of employment and economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s, while laying the material foundation of the welfare state and social democracy. But the “stagflation” that followed the oil and environmental crises in the 1970s put an end to these happy days of Fordism/consumerism and ushered in the present phase of post-Fordism and globalization.
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In order to sell to largely satiated and more discriminating consumers, unsophisticated Fordism, in the style of “slash-and-burn farming,” had proved inadequate.Thus a series of innovations based on “high technology” involving microelectronics, new carbon materials, genetics, etc., had to be introduced, with a view to rendering post-Fordist production more sophisticated and knowledge intensive. But that meant also that even in manufacturing, nonproductive service labor occupied a dominant position and the demand for traditional productive labor, the kind that is employed on the shop floor, shifted out of developed countries towards the “emerging economies.” The so-called industrially advanced nations, thus increasingly “hollowed out,” had to seek economic reorganization by placing greater emphasis on software (information) than on hardware (products). In the 1980s, after the control of inflation, the United States gradually renounced the hope of restoring the competitiveness of its traditional manufacturing industries and shifted its focus to financial intermediation and the information technology (IT) industry, and, as this trend became established in the 1990s, underwent a sustained economic boom which was to falter only at the threshold of the century. The “IT industry,”4 however, is quite unlike other ordinary industries in that there is no clear-cut product called IT. It is a blanket term to cover a wide range of industries to which information and communications technology is more vigorously applied. But the very fact that the American economy must be led by an “industry” of that sort suggests that the age of industrial production (or manufacturing) has reached its limits and is now in its twilight. Economic hegemony will no longer be assured by a superior capacity to “produce” advanced goods, but rather by a superior capacity to gather, store, process, and transmit key information. Indeed, the production of material wealth no longer consumes a major part of human energy in any advanced society. Increasingly more of its human resources are devoted to the provision of services and the creation of intellectual properties. Now that for the first time in history human society is liberated from the burden of productive labor, capitalism is quickly outliving its usefulness. For capitalism can be regarded as the last production-oriented society, such that its material base, constituting society’s substructure, determined its ideological superstructure. Now is the time that, on the contrary, the ideological superstructure might determine the economic base of society. Yet the present society has inherited many undesirable vestiges of capitalism, of which the most harmful are its productivist ideology and its adoration of the market. For it is because of these that the world economy today is caught in a stalemate. Under the present market-based regime, much touted as symbolizing the triumph of capitalism over communism, we try to produce more things than we need to consume and we seek more economic growth even when society does not really want to grow, causing much unhappiness in the process along with environmental crises. In other words, we continue to be enslaved to an antiquated (productivist) economics and still think in terms of free (if not atomistic) competition, which is supposed to guarantee an optimal allocation
Socialism beyond market and productivism 235 of productive resources. Since Adam Smith we have been taught to believe that the demand for material wealth is unbounded and that a sound economy is the one that enables us to produce (good and not-so-good things) most efficiently with an optimal use of scarce resources. Today the most important economic consideration is, on the contrary, to produce no more than that which is really needed, and to enable us to pursue non-material and human values in harmony with the natural environment. It is in this context that the question of socialism should arise today, since we think of it as society that is to follow capitalism. Clearly, the socialist society that we seek cannot be one that is compulsively addicted to the production of useless objects and is destructive of the environment. It has to rescue us from all the economic evils that we have inherited from capitalism and to enable us to lead a happier and more fulfilling life in it.
Three integrating principles of economic life Socialism was originally conceived as an antithesis to capitalism in the nineteenth century. At that time, however, relatively little was as yet known of capitalism itself either theoretically or historically, so that conceptions of socialism formulated then, in reflection of the limited knowledge of capitalism, remained rather insufficient, if not outright misguided, at least from today’s point of view.Yet many of these conceptions have survived to this day virtually unchanged, thus demonstrating the extraordinary staying power of conventional wisdom. For example, a disproportionate emphasis has been placed on the central planning of economic activities by the state, with a belief that such planning can avoid the anarchic instability of the market and is therefore superior to capitalism in the production and distribution of material wealth. In this case, the proponents of socialist planning in effect regard “production” no less technocratically than the capitalists, viewing it merely as a technical transformation of a series of inputs X into a series of (net) outputs Y, just as “exchange” is a market transformation of a basket of goods B into another basket C. Behind this mechanistic conception of production lies the formula X = (I ⫺ A)⫺1Y, where A is a matrix of known technical coefficients which suggests that, once the vector of final demands (Y) is given, that of economic activities (X) will be technically determined. This is a typical example of the theory of socialism within the capitalist frame of reference. Beside the fact that this type of socialism has been discredited since the fall of the Soviet Union, it clearly solves none of the problems that we face today in the dying days of capitalism. As stated above, the planning principle of the state had to be adopted, if partially, in the process of ex-capitalist transition too, to supplement the capitalist principle of the market due to the fact that the management of the use-value space exceeded the range of traditional policy weapons of the bourgeois state. When the economic life of society depends on heavy and
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large-scale use-values – such as automobiles, airplanes, power stations, and systems of bullet trains – the market principle of capital alone does not adequately meet society’s needs, so that intervention of the state in all sorts of economic activity cannot be avoided. The fact that private firms themselves become oligopolistic corporations and often resort to game-theoretic strategies, rather than acting as pure price-takers, adds to a collusion of big business and the state. Unlike the soviet system, however, the welfare state did not suppress the capitalist market, but merely constrained and supplemented it. This proved to be wise inasmuch as the welfare state did achieve far more economic success than the soviet state. The reason was that for the management of many small use-values that surround our daily lives the planning principle is far too unwieldy an instrument to apply. It presupposes a technocratic (and bureaucratic) determination of Y from the above. One can easily plan how much electricity will have to be supplied and at what cost in the next few years, but to estimate adequately the population’s need for shoes and gloves in the near future defies the most sophisticated computer program. From his extensive studies in economic history and anthropology, Karl Polanyi (1944, 1968) concludes that there have been three methods of integrating an economy, namely exchange, redistribution, and reciprocity. In my terminology these correspond, respectively, to the market principle of capital, the planning principle of the state and the cooperative principle of people. All these integration principles have specific virtues and have specific areas of economic activity where they prove to be the most effective. Capitalism sought to integrate the economy almost exclusively on the market principle of capital. But in reality the more traditional cooperative principle was never completely eliminated and survived vigorously, especially in country life. In public utilities and finance some planning was always resorted to. Under the soviet regime it was the planning principle of the state that played the leading role, but other principles too operated, either openly or covertly, to supplement it in actual economic life. It was the insufficient operation of these other principles that, in effect, doomed the regime.What is to be guarded against, then, is an ideological addiction to just one of the three principles of economic integration to the exclusion of the others. In my view, the key to a successful socialism lies in a judicious mixture of all the three principles.
The cooperative principle of people This outlook immediately brings to mind, however, the fact that the third principle of economic integration, reciprocity, has so far been almost completely neglected by the economists, even if it has always attracted the anthropologists’ interest. This parallels the other fact that in the loud controversy over socialism versus capitalism the anarchists’ voice has always been drowned out and has remained hardly audible, even though the anarchists and the socialists were close siblings to start with.They rallied together against the tyranny of capital, as it was about to establish its hegemony. But the anarchists
Socialism beyond market and productivism 237 rejected the idea of empowering the state in order to control the capitalist market, and, rather, looked for the activation of the natural impulse of people to prefer mutual aid, reciprocity, cooperation, and sharing in order to integrate the economy at a human-to-human level. This understandably alienated the socialists, who were determined to seize the power of the state and to use it to their advantage. Furthermore, the accelerated development of modern society and its increasing urbanization worked against the anarchists’ village mentality, as the socialists and the capitalists grew more and more convinced that “small, if beautiful, was irrelevant.” Despite these circumstances the anarchists’ view of society could not be wholly suppressed. For no society would have survived had it been organized exclusively in terms of the anonymity of the market and the technocracy of the state which the working of the two abstractgeneral principles of economic integration would promote. In the living world of flesh-and-blood human beings the concrete-specific principle of reciprocity could in no case be dispensed with. The issue, then, is how one might bring the cooperative principle of people to bear upon postmodern society. Indeed, as the process of ex-capitalist transition nears its end, we have already begun to observe a vigorous reawakening of the cooperative principle of people. For example, the increasing adoption of local money, invented by Michael Linton, in many local exchange and trading systems (LETS) demonstrates the democratic will of people to fight back against the capitalist market and the state.5 When the generalpurpose money issued by the state is usurped by large corporations and international speculators and fails to function as people’s means of exchange, the natural reaction on the part of the local community is to issue its own special-purpose money with limited circulation and limited functions. Local money is in effect a voucher or an exchange ticket, which circulates only within a group based on mutual trust. A local community, or a village, forms such a group most naturally. But any other mutual help association – be it a university, a hospital, a trade union, a cooperative, or a club of some kind – sharing a common destiny and held together with a strong sense of solidarity can also use vouchers or tickets within the group, which enable closer communication and exchange of goods and services among its members. Here I am talking about an exchange of use-values and services, not of valueobjects or capitalistically produced commodities. Classical and neoclassical economics have deliberately obfuscated the distinction between these two types of “exchange,” while even Polanyi was not quite categorical as to where exchange ends and reciprocity begins.6 But capitalistically produced commodities are traded in impersonal (anonymous) markets as value-objects; they are “exchanged” in the process of accumulating abstract-general (mercantile) wealth.7 In contrast, use-values are useful objects for human life in community; they are concrete-material wealth to be partaken of by all members of the community. Here, exchange in effect means the sharing of products.Thus the two types of “exchange” have different meanings and purposes, and must not be confused. One of the striking features of
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contemporary societies is that they are increasingly service oriented, but since services cannot really be impersonal or anonymous the “exchange” of services is closer to the exchange of use-values than to that of commodities as valueobjects (using the term “commodities” strictly in the Marxian sense and not in the loose neoclassical fashion). Recently the idea of “work sharing” has become topical in many countries.8 When firms “shed” labor, hoping to become globally more competitive, jobs tend to become scarce. In order to maintain the previous level of employment, it is said, work must be shared. But this only means that the profit-making business sector engaged either in commodity production or in offering production-related services (such as commerce, storage, banking, insurance, etc.) can no longer be depended upon for society to achieve full employment. In the meantime, outside the business sector – that is, in the non-profit-seeking sector, be it education, healthcare, garbage disposal, the police force, or other public services, or in many homes with infants and the aged – there is a drastic shortage of trained helpers. But these are the areas in which very few have access to stable and well-paid jobs, while many others are engaged as volunteers or as temporary hands and hold precarious positions. This shows that in the post-Fordist society a crying need exists already for many non-production-related service workers, whom the existing system based on market and planning is poorly equipped to employ. The local money I have just mentioned is a way partially to address the problem. But a more radical reform in the labor market and mode of employment will be necessary for a satisfactory solution. In the meantime, the increasing participation of women in the workforce today in many developed countries leads me to propose a system of pair-wise employment for married couples. According to this system, the community guarantees the employment of both the husband and the wife for half a day, so that together they can earn enough for the family’s living. For instance, if the husband works in the morning the wife does so in the afternoon, or the other way round. They will then be both breadwinners and household workers on an equal basis.9 The community should encourage firms operating within its boundary to adopt such a system by means of various incentives. But eventually the community itself should become the largest employer of this kind. For that to be possible the community must be endowed with a stable source of income, and it is this condition that is lacking in present societies, which pay little attention to the cooperative principle of people.
A three-sector utopia The above discussion hints at the need to design a new society in which the economy is integrated primarily by the cooperative principle of people. Hence, at the risk of some “utopianism” I wish to outline an economy in three sectors (Sekine 2000a: 214–19; 2000b: 1–21):
Socialism beyond market and productivism 239 • • •
sector I, which consists of local communities; sector II, which is made up of cities; sector III, which is formed by large firms.10
Of these by far the most important is the first sector, made up of local communities of “human scale,” in which the day-to-day economic life of the majority of the population is supposed to take place. By a “local community” is meant here a group of people who live together in a given geographical location and who produce use-values (useful objects) in principle for themselves. Some of these products may be sold to others, but the purchasers are in the main nonanonymous members of the communities directly or indirectly known to one another. Therefore they have reason to feel themselves responsible for all the effects, positive or negative, which may derive from the production and consumption of these products. In other words, they take pride in consumer satisfaction and they will refrain from offering things that might harm them and their neighbors in production and consumption.They only produce what I call qualitative goods, which they make with care and pride.These are mostly final-consumption goods for use inside the community and not for sale in an anonymous, universal market, though a certain proportion of them may be regularly exported to neighboring cities and communities. It is difficult to determine the right size for such a community in general terms, but the population of 100,000–150,000 individuals (or 20,000–30,000 families) may not be too far off the mark. For a community of that size will not need an elaborate bureaucracy to administer it, and can provide a suitable environment for a direct or participatory democracy to flourish, especially if the community makes use of recent progress in information and communications technology. While the communities concentrate on the production of qualitative goods, the quantitative goods will, in contrast, be produced by large enterprises belonging to the third sector and operating outside the local communities. These are products that are “standardized” and mass producible, consisting, for the most part, of intermediate-producer goods, though not excluding some finalconsumption goods. They are mostly produced with highly labor-saving methods in automated and robotized factories. It is not necessary to establish a rigid rule in distinguishing between the qualitative and quantitative goods. Most final-consumption goods are produced in several stages, where earlier stages are usually viewed as preparatory and later ones finishing. Each community can decide, taking into consideration all the pertinent community-specific factors, at which point it wants to begin the in-community production of qualitative goods. As far as labor is concerned, all productive and unproductive labor necessary for the production of the qualitative goods must be found inside the local communities, whereas productive and unproductive labor needed for the production of quantitative goods by large firms in the third sector should come from the second sector, consisting of cities in which the employees of large firms
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reside. But labor that the residents of the cities provide is not limited to this kind alone. Many advanced-level professionals, administrators, and technicians whose labor is relatively more “knowledge intensive” tend to live in cities (for example university professors and students, research doctors, specialized lawyers, artists with national or international fame, etc.), while general-level service workers are more likely to live in communities (school teachers, general practitioners, ordinary lawyers, and local administrators and officials, etc.). Again there need be no rigid or hierarchical distinctions between those who choose to live in cities and those who would rather stay in communities. In order to ensure that local communities constitute the core of this economy and retain unquestioned primacy, I would dictate that they must be deemed to own severally all the land that belongs to the society, such that all large enterprises and cities must, without exception, arrange to lease the land that they use from some communities and pay them annual rent. Thus all communities will have guaranteed rent incomes in addition to earning revenues by selling qualitative goods to cities. But the purpose of investing the communities with landed property is not limited to securing them the purchasing power of intermediate goods and advanced labor services from other sectors. Leases on land must be renewed at regular intervals, so that every time new terms are negotiated the communities can exert control over the use of their land. Thus if a large factory utilizes an industrial technique that harms the environment, or if a city fails to manage its garbage disposal properly and pollutes the vicinity, the lessor community can exert pressure on the lessee to discontinue the undesirable practices on pain of revocation of some existing privileges. The transition to this kind of economy, it seems to me, can be easy and gradual, involving no violent revolution, provided that there exists a strong enough political will. If a local community is formed by the free will of the residents and satisfies a set of previously agreed conditions, the existing state can declare it a special zone and protect it from outside commercial interventions, while investing it with certain landed (and financial) properties. The existing large corporations can also be relatively easily converted into providers of quantitative goods to the communities. In each industry large firms will have to compete among themselves to obtain contracts from communities and other large firms in much the same way as they have so far been doing. Since they cannot directly sell to individuals, however, there will no longer be the repugnant consumer exploitation and the irresponsible marketing of hazardous commodities. It will no longer be the capitalist producers who dictate our lives, but, quite to the contrary, it will be we, humans, living happily in local communities and in cities that shape our own destiny.
General money and local money Two sorts of money will be used in the economy described above. They are local money, which circulates only within the community, and general money,
Socialism beyond market and productivism 241 which is used for transactions between sectors and in cities. They will be exchanged one for one (dollar for dollar) when deemed necessary or appropriate, so that some rules must be agreed upon in each community as to when such exchange may or may not be made. In establishing and revising these rules all members of the community will be consulted through a direct and participatory democratic process. Thus in some communities more general money may be used by their members than in others, but it is unlikely that in any one community the circulation of general money becomes so universal as to make the existence of local money insignificant. For that would mean that the community itself is disintegrating for lack of strong enough solidarity and mutual trust. In any case, the producers of qualitative goods and providers of in-community services will normally be paid in local money, not in general money.Yet there will always remain demand for general money as well in the community. For it will be needed when the members of the community purchase quantitative goods (either directly from large firms or through distributors in cities) or advanced services provided by city residents, and even in some cases qualitative goods and services from other communities. Therefore in-community firms and individuals may wish to be paid for their products or services partly in local money and partly in general money. The business of the large enterprises in the third sector, on the other hand, will still be carried out exclusively in terms of general money and the profitmaximizing principle. These firms will sell quantitative goods to firms in communities engaged in the production of qualitative goods, either directly or through specialized distributors in cities. In both cases they will be paid in general money, not in local monies.As already pointed out, the large enterprises in each industry will have to compete among themselves for more general money, more or less as they have always been doing. For they have to try to best fit the needs of their customers, failing which they will eventually be forced out of business.Thus, apart from the fact that they can no longer sell their products directly to consumers, the operation of these enterprises will not differ much from what they do today. They may even retain their present corporate form, except that their shareholders will not primarily be wealthy individuals, but non-profit organizations in cities and in communities, be it pension funds, humanitarian and cultural institutions, artists’ and musicians’ clubs, or sporting groups.The shareholders can also be local communities and cities themselves. This, I believe, is good from the point of view of “corporate governance,” which is much talked about now in Japan, and will soon be talked about more in the United States following the fall of Enron and WorldCom. Under normal circumstances these shareholders will remain dormant and will not interfere with the day-to-day management of such enterprise. But once the profit-maximizing behavior of a firm clashes with public interests, the shareholders, representing the good sense of society (and not the individual thirst for money), can dictate their will to restrain or control it.11 Furthermore, the cities and communities as well as non-profit organizations within them will be endowed with “funds,” in the same way as the Ford
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Foundation and rotary clubs are, which will enable them to hire a large number of non-production-related service workers.12 They can also put into practice the system of pair-wise employment for couples which I proposed above (p. 238).
Conclusion Thus, I have presented the outlines of a socialist economy that I conceive as the process of ex-capitalist transition nears its end. Rather than going back to the nineteenth-century conceptions of class struggle and revolution, I have taken off immediately from the realities and practices that seem to me to constitute the unnecessary stranglehold of the present post-Fordist society. For socialism, in the sense of an historical society that evolves beyond capitalism, to be meaningful, it must address the defects and inadequacies of the economic life that we currently experience. Yet, interestingly, this discussion takes us back to the most fundamental question that socialist thinkers have always harkened back to: the question of private versus collective property. In the market economy the principle of private property prevails, such that public-sector activities must be financed with taxes collected from enterprises in the private sector (and individuals). This means that the public sector can be activated only when the private sector is already active (as during the Fordist period). On the other hand, the near-complete suppression of private property by the soviet-type system had the sad record of merely promoting bureaucratic inefficiency until it led to a strangulation of human society. We must therefore approach the question of property with care and discretion. In the above-sketched economy I first endow only local communities with landed property, while the communities, cities, and non-profit organizations of all kinds operating in them are endowed with shares of large enterprises. These endowments are neither private nor state properties, but collective properties in between. I am not the only one who would like to see in society rich collectivities (such as local communities, cities, humanitarian and cultural organizations, educational and health institutions, artistic and athletic associations) rather than rich families or individuals.There is no need to completely suppress private property, but it should be kept within limits and should not become overbearing. On the other hand, the richer the collectivities of human scale, the richer will be life in society, not only materially but also spiritually. Now that human society is increasingly liberated from the burden of productive labor and need devote only part of its energy to the production of material wealth, we can finally dispense with the asinine adoration of the rich as the incarnation of the highest human achievement.
Notes 1
An historical society possesses a self-perpetuating structure, in the sense that it can perpetuate itself within a certain range of technological development. In other words, it is a society for which a stable set of production relations can be defined as reflecting a particular level of productive powers.
Socialism beyond market and productivism 243 2 A stage is characterized by its typical manifestations. For example, when we say that the mercantilist stage of capitalist development is typified by the wool industry of Britain as organized by merchant capital, we do not deny the fact that in the same historical period many things other than wool were also being produced using perhaps some different techniques. But in conceptualizing the developmental stage of capitalism we simply abstract from these historical details and pretend that all use-values were produced more or less as in the British wool industry of that period. 3 This part contains my interpretations. Uno himself does not use such terms as “externalities” and their “internalization” by the bourgeois state. These are the terms that I have borrowed from neoclassical welfare economics. 4 On the treatment of the IT industry, see the report issued by the US Department of Commerce in 1998 entitled Emerging Digital Economy, especially Appendix 1: “Information Technology Industries, of Growing Importance to the Economy and Jobs,” where the category of “IT industries” is defined to include: hardware, from semiconductors to computers; software and services, containing computer programming, processing, data preparation, and maintenance and repair services, as well as prepackaged software; communications equipment; and communications services. The most recent report of the Department on the same subject was issued in February 2002 under the title Digital Economy 2002. 5 Some important writings in Japanese on the subject of local money include those by Maruyama (1995: 221–52; 2001: 199–216) and Nishibe (2000a: 89–162; 2000b: 81–101; 2000c: 326–42). 6 This ambivalence or lack of clear distinction seems to survive in recent, and in many respects excellent, studies by William T. Waller Jr. (1987, 1988, 1989; Waller and Jennings 1991), as well as by Weiner (1992). I am indebted to Professor Marjorie G. Cohen for these references. 7 In neoclassical economics “commodities” mean “goods and services.” But in the dialectic of capital, in contrast, “commodities” are value-objects, i.e. objects produced at the real cost of society’s labor-power and for sale in impersonal markets indifferently to use-values. See Sekine (1997). 8 Alarmed by the presence of over 3.5 million unemployed, the Japanese government and business community are of late seeking enlightenment from the celebrated Dutch experience. 9 The participation of women in the workforce increased suddenly in Japan after the passage of the baby-boomers’ generation through the job market. That is to say, as male workers belonging to the population bulge moved upward to higher-level positions, the vacated lower-level positions could not all be filled with male workers alone, which created unanticipated opportunities for many young women willing to join the workforce, with the result that the traditional division of labor between the two sexes (men work outside homes, where women stay) has been put into question. Achieving a balance between work and household chores, for both men and women, has thus become a fairly concrete policy issue. 10 I have proposed a model of this kind in several places, most recently in Sekine (2000a, 2000b). 11 Here I have been much inspired by the last chapter of Schumacher (1974). 12 The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867) in Japan lasted so long because at its inception the shogun established his claim to a disproportionate share in real sources of the national wealth. The Meiji revolutionaries had learned this lesson when they went to great lengths to endow the pre-war Imperial Household with an equally disproportionate share in the national wealth. The Tokugawa shogun and the pre-1945 Japanese emperor were the largest landlords of the nation by far.
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Bibliography Bell, J. and T. Sekine (2001) “The Disintegration of Capitalism: A Phase of Ex-Capitalist Transition,” in R. Albritton, M. Itoh, R. Westra, and A. Zuege (eds.) Phases of Capitalist Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Maruyama, M. (1995 ) “Economy as Circular Motion and Local Currency,”Junkan no Keizaigaku,Tokyo: Gakuyoh Shoboh. —— (2001) “Local Money – Towards an Economy Embedded in Natural Cycles,” Japanese Society for Studies in Entropy (Junkangata Shakai wo Tou), Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten. Nishibe, M. (2000a) “Local Currency: LETS Transcending Money and Credit,” in Kohjin Karatani (ed.) Kanouna-Komyunizumu (Possible Communism), Tokyo: Ohtashuppan. —— (2000b) “Possibilities of LETS: Counter-Media against Globalization,” Speak, Talk and Think 63. —— (2000c) “Globalization and Local Currency,” Associé IV. Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation, Boston, MA: Beacon. —— (1968) Primitive,Archaic and Modern Economies, Boston, MA: Beacon. Schumacher, E. F. (1974) Small is Beautiful, London:Abacus. Sekine,T. (1997) Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, Basingstoke: Palgrave. —— (2000a) “La Vie économique d’une société et les valeurs humaines,” Human Coexistence and Sustainable Development, Proceedings of the World Congress, Montreal: Black Rose. —— (2000b) “L’Economie au sens large conçue par Karl Polanyi et Yoshiro Tamonoi,” Shogaku Kenkyuu 43(I), Nagoya:Aichi Gakuin Daigaku. Uno, K. (1974) Types of Economic Policies under Capitalism (Keizaiseisaku-Ron), Collected Works of Kozo Uno, vol. 7,Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten. US Department of Commerce (1998) Emerging Digital Economy,Washington, DC. —— (2002) Digital Economy 2002,Washington, DC. Waller, W. T., Jr. (1987) “Transfer Program Structure and Effectiveness,” Journal of Economic Issues XXI (2). —— (1988) “Creating Legitimacy, Reciprocity and Transfer Programs,” Journal of Economic Issues XXII(4). —— (1989) “The Impossibility of Fiscal Policy,” Journal of Economic Issues XXIII (4). Waller, W. T., Jr., and A. Jennings (1991) “A Feminist Institutional Reconsideration of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of Economic Issues XXV(2). Weiner, A. B. (1992) Inalienable Possessions, the Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
14 From socialists to localists1 Teresa Brennan
Terrorism does not need to bring the consequences of globalization back home. They are already here. In what follows I will argue that physical illness in the West increases as global profit grows, and that there is a strong case for believing that mental illness grows as well. I will also argue that there is a relationship between globalization (which in this book means economic globalization) and the destruction of the climate by pollution.There is also an observable relation between globalization and the rise of environmental, immune-deficient, stress-induced, and depressive disease. We are dealing with a causal chain in which globalization increases profit because it speeds up production and distribution; as production and distribution speed up, so do fossil fuel emissions, whose quantitative increase far outweighs the positive changes in emissions control. Hence more pollution and climate damage; hence environmental illness. Of course profits were made by speeding up production and distribution before globalization, just as environmental sickness preceded the growth in trade that has marked the period since the early 1970s. But globalization makes it worse. As defined here, globalization is the continuation and logical outcome of a process of extension, a process which begins with the division between household and workplace, grows through specialization in production, then through colonialism, concentrations in land use, through urbanization and suburbanization, and through other forms of spatial reach. Against the use of globalization, it has been argued that the concept of imperialism, with its focus on the value creation of labor and the value appropriation by capital, is more to the point: it sheds logic on the different loci of exploitation (labour, dominated countries) and accumulation (capital, imperial firms and states). (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001)2 The reason I use the term globalization in preference to the term imperialism is that globalization encapsulates the spatio-temporal logic which imperialism, as a theory of capital accumulation and/or underconsumption, either ignores or substitutes for an understanding of value extracted at the point of production.3
246 Teresa Brennan While the economic theory that follows is anchored in a theory of value, it is also a theory of how expansion is the unavoidable accompaniment of speeding up the extraction of profit in production. Speeding up production necessarily means going further afield for markets and raw materials. By globalization, then, I mean an economic dynamic whereby the increasing speed of production entails expansion as a matter of course, while expansion necessitates more rapid production and distribution to sustain itself. Traversing greater distances at increasing speeds means consuming more oil and generating more fossil fuels. Even if some businesses produce without pollution, they cannot avoid the demands of the more rapid distribution instigated by their global competition. The more global distribution becomes, the more fossil fuels are used for transportation, even if a particular production process is free of them. The fact that more fossil fuels are needed to maintain and extend the global economy is flagged by fears of oil shortages. Before the Gulf War, the US president had already declared his intention of drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness and off the Florida coast. In addition, the control of oil pipelines is at issue in the war against terrorism. In this, present struggles for hegemony in Central Asia repeat a pattern that has been ongoing for a century.The “Great Game” of the latter part of the free trade belle époque of the later nineteenth century was about moving the chess pieces (as the sometime viceroy to India Curzon put it) around the Central Asian board. The “New Great Game,” as Ahmed Rashid (2000: 145–6) termed it, is over transportation and access to oil from the Caspian and nations surrounding it. The Taliban in Afghanistan was allied with and supported extremist organizations, but it also broke its promise, given to the US in return for aid, to support an oil pipeline proposal originally mooted by a multinational consortium evaluating construction of a Central Asia gas (CentGas) pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan. (This is known as the Unocal project, although Unocal has since withdrawn.4) Part of this pipeline would have crossed western Afghanistan. Bombing Afghanistan in 2002 accomplished the aim of installing a government which has already signified full backing for the pipeline proposal. Whatever its other outcomes, the war on terrorism is fostering oil acquisition, which in turn feeds speedier production and more rapid transportation, and greater fossil fuel emissions. Fossil fuel emissions are not the only consequence of speed. Speeding up production, and global production in particular, contributes to other forms of chemical pollution, leading in turn to rapidly increasing levels of cancer, allergies, and immune disorders. The “green-washing”5 directed by corporations and governments towards the growing majority concerned with increasing ill health denies any connection between health and economic globalization. Indeed, there are arguments that “natural capitalism” and “green” investment portfolios can solve the present environmental crisis – with a little goodwill thrown in. They can certainly help, and the argument which follows should not be taken as an argument against the implementation of less-polluting technologies in any context. If the first priority of meeting the Kyoto protocols (a
From socialists to localists 247 set of international agreements committing signatories to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions) is assisted – and it is – by technologies which reduce emissions without changing the basic system of production, only the perverse would argue against their introduction. Nonetheless the idea that these technologies will stop environmental degradation of themselves neglects the real barrier to their implementation. In any system of extension, from centralization to globalization, profit is made by speeding up the rate of extraction of natural, especially biological, resources (such as trees, plants, fish, animals, and so forth), as well as the “productivity” of human labor, and thus taking more from nature than one returns. The idea that there is any necessary connection between globalization, the destruction of the climate, and mental and physical ill health is denied not only by monetarist-influenced policy; the same is true for the new center-left embodied in the US Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and a growing number of erstwhile social democratic organizations. The center-left makes more concerned environmental noises but, like the new right, it believes in globalization. This combination of the right noise and the wrong direction is what Blair made known as the “third way” (Callinicos 2001).The “third way” has also been mooted as a putative solution by US democrats. It supports globalization while nominally supporting the environment. But one cannot have it both ways. To support globalization and free trade is to foster climate destruction (and hence eventually the destruction of most species). Not only this, but as the links are followed through it is plain that that global capitalism attacks all the conditions of life: from climate through to air, food, and water. Any war, from Iraq through to Afghanistan, increases those attacks by increasing fossil fuel and other toxic emissions, and diverts attention away from the damage done to long-term survival by the global war economy. The fact is that globalization is about securing more oil to keep profits going at the expense of the young and unborn. In addition, globalization is about cheap labor markets and forcing down wages and salaries. It is about reductions in corporate tax, increases in taxes for the employed, and cuts in social services. Most of all it is about using up the earth’s resources at increasing speed and at a massive environmental price. The myth is that globalization is about cell phones and little teeny microchips, rather than the heavy-duty transport of natural and biological resources (Gray 1999). This is not true. Computers have drastically increased the use of coal (Anon. 1999), and in this they are typical telecommunications products, relying on electricity, which in turn relies on fossil fuels. Aside from that, by 1990 over one-quarter of goods traded were natural “ ‘primary products’ such as timber, fish and copper” (French 1993: 160). Nearly three-quarters of goods traded are manufactured products. Of these, machinery and transport constitute 35 percent of all goods traded, while chemicals, iron and steel, and other semi-manufactures constitute 17 percent, and clothing and textiles 6 percent (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1992). Manufactured goods are made from biological and natural resources,
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which means they also draw on natural reserves.6 “With the important exceptions of minerals and petrochemical products, virtually all the raw materials used in industry are of biological origin, coming from the agricultural and forestry sectors” (Brown 1993: 13). The goods that now move more rapidly around the globe include everything from croissants to refrigerators: electrical goods made in Japan and the US go to Egypt and Nigeria; Nigeria in turn exports its trees. Or it did. Exports have now fallen drastically in response to over-logging.7 Even the most cursory survey of the increased global traffic in commodities shows that globalization is about far more than clean, new information technologies. Any move to expand the territories covered by trade agreements or conquer the ones that are non-compliant results in more rapid exhaustion of natural resources, and more transportation of heavy goods and services, as well as the less noxious ones.8 Contemporary celebrants of globalization have claimed in addition that free trade ensures adequate commerce between the “brain” countries and the “body” countries, as one book styles them (Rosecrance 1999).9 The “brain” countries, of course, are the rich ones, and their riches are due to their brains. But these rich “brains” have their own bodies, bodies which are made daily weaker by their polluted environments. Meantime, the underfed and underused brains of the “body” countries are denied the time and income with which they might pursue an education. They sell – cheap – the natural resources and physical labor which might pay for that education were it not supporting the first world “brains.” They are not in a position to seek an education. Not only this, but the labor market for unskilled and semi-skilled labor is far more extensive than the demand for skilled and educated labor. Unskilled and semi-skilled labor is used in the production of the goods and services which meet basic human needs. These goods, in turn, constitute the bulk of the world’s domestic and global trade, trade which helps human “brains” to be embodied, fed, clothed, housed, and serviced. Free trade not only increases the traffic in natural resources, thereby depleting the global environment. It not only accelerates the fossil fuel consumption needed to transport those resources. It also accelerates the traffic of human beings, who also use up fuel making their way to centralized workplaces. As we noted, historically centralization is the first stage of the same dynamic that brings globalization into being. The more centralized production is, the bigger the company has to be in order to compete, and the more mergers and acquisitions take place. Jobs become fewer, and you have to go further to get them. Both the new right and the third way promote centralization and globalization at the same time as they cut back on spending for human needs, from basic education to welfare and healthcare. They cut back just as everyone gets sicker and more depressed, and now more paranoid for fear of more attacks. The same global process which accelerates pollution also results in increasing inequality in income and access to healthcare. It results in cuts in social provision, otherwise known as the welfare state, throughout member
From socialists to localists 249 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as increasing poverty in the South. The reason most of this chapter pertains to the Western world, to those who have ostensibly benefited from global capitalism to date, is twofold. First, many in the North are unaware of how negative the impact of globalization on their lives and health is and has been. They are even more oblivious now that the focus is on terrorism. Second, the South or third world, like the second world or former Eastern Bloc, is daily made an empty promise: the promise is that they, too, if they follow the global path, will be rich and prosperous. The promise is false, not only because the North’s prosperity, in large part, is made at the expense of the South; it is also false because life, for more and more of the North’s inhabitants, is increasingly insecure, unhealthy, ill educated, and impoverished. As there are already excellent accounts of the effects of globalization on the South, especially in the work of Martin Khor,10 it seemed of more use to the South to expose a false promise for what it is. In addition, with the threat of terrorist attacks reiterated daily in the US, and general fears concerning them gathering in Britain and France, the West at home forgets what it was suffering before it was distracted. It was distracted, of course, by a threat which now justifies a war on third world countries, a war whose interests cannot be separated from US and Northern oil interests, interests which are advantaged by this war even if they did not of themselves cause it. In health terms, all those in the West (Europe, the US), like those of the South or third world, are negatively affected by centralization and globalization, no matter how much money they make.Yet this fact is downplayed or disowned, as popular and political thought proclaim that the globalizing path is the only path. Capitalism is not only right, we are told, but natural. Naturally, capitalism will go global wherever it can, exercising its right to produce as much wealth as possible. It is true that capitalism as a system strives to go global. But capitalism is not the only form of market economy. There are some markets which do not incline towards globalization.The existence of these markets is not advertised in a world where globalization is ruthlessly promoted and any alternative economic vision suppressed. Islam’s spectacular recruitment rates are partially affected by its opposition to Western capitalism. But the alternative vision offered by Islam-identified opponents of globalization is compromised by its attitude to women. Like the new right, social democracy now fosters rather than challenges the way globalization uses up biological and other natural resources; how it breaks up communities, increases poverty, especially women’s poverty, and how it has devastating environmental consequences, leading to an increase in chronic ill health in the North and death in the South.These social democrats justify the damage generated by multinational corporations and global investment by the promise of the “trickle-down” effect. Eventually, they say, globalization will lead to wealth within the poorer countries and more wealth in the richer ones. But even a weak arithmetician can gauge that this is highly unlikely, when globalization has produced massive job losses in the first world,
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and when most of the new wealth produced by the South’s labor and natural resources is removed to the first world. Terrorism aside, there are various responses to globalization and its consequences. Traditional conservatives stress the importance of community; the remaining actual social democrats emphasize the need for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Members of both groups speak for environmental protection and unified environmental standards in all countries. This is the condition of human health, although human health, as such, has yet to generate its own political movement. But, as they stand, the extant responses to globalization are not integrated, and their protagonists are frequently bitterly opposed. The opposition is further fragmented still by the onset of terrorist attacks on a large scale. An integrated response requires a new economic vision, a real third way between capitalism and socialism. The trouble is that if one accepts the Democrat and “New Labour” third way, the search is over before it has really begun. In the words of New Labour’s leading intellectual Anthony Giddens, the “third way” assumes that “there is no alternative to capitalism” (1998: 24) – other, presumably, than that offered by some versions of Islam. Whatever the disasters of socialism, whatever its rigidity and lack of innovation, it did at least provide an alternative vision to Islam-identified fundamentalism and to capitalism: a second way. But the costs of the second way were so great that the first way had to seem better, even if its consequences are proving worse in health terms and as bad politically. As John Gray (1998: 21) notes, the “open” or democratic society is endangered by capitalism as well as socialism. Free trade and capital’s needs can be better served by autocratic regimes, as they have been and are in East Asia and Latin America. They are also served by war, when this secures access to regions which otherwise resist the blandishments of global capital. In the North there is no real challenge to the present course of capitalism.The new right monetarists insist that free trade is the natural way to go. Deploying a different vocabulary, social “third way” democrats agree. To be against globalization is to be somehow provincial and definitely behind the times. It is also to be in a dubious position in the war on terrorism. “War Slows Down Globalization Crowd,” headlined the International Herald Tribune (Vinocur 2001: 1), noting that patriotism and a desire not to be identified with terrorism had affected the energy and mobilization of a movement hitherto stronger in the US than elsewhere. The anti-globalization movement now seeks to articulate a challenge to globalization which is also an alternative to the terrorist response to it. In articulating that challenge, certain spatio-temporal facts should be salient. Capital needs rapid, unimpeded access to all global spaces, and this it secures either through trade agreements or through war. The social costs of healthcare, welfare, and pensions give people time to grow up, be well, and grow old with relative stability. But they are unattractive costs, so social democracy takes them away, just as the new right did – and does. Human time is sacrificed to spatial expansion. History is here repeating itself. In the second half of the
From socialists to localists 251 nineteenth century the British state followed up the enactment of draconian Poor Laws with an extensive liberalization of free trade. As Gray (1998: 9) argues, we find the same double move (in which human time is traded for corporate space) present today: the implementation of treaties extending the sphere of free trade coincides with serious cuts in social provision.What Gray did not note then, but now surely will, is that the free trade policies of this era are leading to war, just as the trade expansion of the belle époque fed directly into the causes of the First World War conducted amongst European states. The double move sacrificing time for regeneration to spatial expansion is also revealed in increasing environmental illness on the one hand and reduced healthcare on the other. The first is due to the way profit and pollution alike are increased by speedy expansion through space.The second, reduced healthcare, is one instance of the general reduction in time and money for human needs. But it is the most interesting, and telling, instance; interesting because it shows how the species in its Western variant, and increasingly so elsewhere, seems bent on the destruction of its individual members at home and that of whole countries abroad. The paradox of the present situation is that the production of greater (unevenly distributed) wealth has adverse health effects for most, even including those who benefit from the wealth.This is not to say that the rich are without privilege in the flight to filtered water and organic foods; nor is it to say that all are equally at risk from air pollution (they are not).11 The point, rather, is that in the long run there may be a contradiction between an individual’s right to live well and that same individual’s right to live at all.12 Constituting a physical danger to oneself, let alone others, is intrinsic to the legal definition of insanity, when the body is at risk from the mind. And if the well-off mind knows, however unconsciously, that it is endangering the body, this would only increase its anxiety, depression, and, for that matter, paranoia. It knows it is under attack from somewhere, it knows life is at stake, but it looks for the source of its fears anywhere but in its own conduct. That said, globalization favors (although it reduces the numbers of) the well off. The present cuts in social provision for human needs are exacerbated by cuts in corporate taxation. Soros notes that “the ability of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens has been severely impaired by the ability of capital to escape taxation and onerous employment conditions by moving elsewhere” (1998: 112). The burden of taxation has shifted from capital to citizens (ibid.). The over-taxed middle classes are invited to castigate anything other than corporations, welfare recipients first among them. But in some countries cuts in corporate taxes have reduced revenues from 18 to 30 percent. Like the working classes, the middle classes are already feeling the globalizing pinch in other ways; either it impacts on them directly or their smaller businesses are negatively affected by it. Or they are sick. It is these middle-class taxpayers to whom new right and now center-left governments appeal with their talk of “no rights without responsibilities.” No rights – except for multinational corporations, which neither stand their share of social costs nor are much affected by shortages of minimally educated, often chronically ill, labor.
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A multinational corporation can, after all, pay less tax somewhere else, and get labor and raw materials there as well. It does not have to wait for them to re-grow (in the case of many natural raw materials) or simply grow up (in the case of people). Nor does it have to wait for them to rest and repair themselves. Waiting takes time. Crossing the globe to get labor and raw materials cuts that time. If it saves money there is even less reason to wait. Reversing the course of globalization, as I said at the outset, means focusing on how globalizing capital substitutes speed and space for time. A real third way has to counter the substitution of space for time, but it can only do this if it grapples with how this substitution is the key to global capital’s profit. This failure to challenge the dynamics underpinning capitalism is due to the failure to understand how it is making life over in favor of death, both at the level of everyday life and by business as usual. In turn, this failure is partially tied to the victory of “perfect competition economics” – and its various mainstream offshoots – over classical political economy: the theories of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and others. Mainstream economics regards the realities of natural time, the environment, and healthcare as “externalities.” There are attempts to recuperate these externalities; those invested in the idea of natural capitalism want nature to count as a cost in production (Hawken et al. 1999: 7). But these attempts at recuperating nature as economically intrinsic seem ignorant of the history of classical political economy, which begins with nature. Together with capital’s most trenchant critic, Karl Marx, this natural premise has been neglected by economists, although this is changing. Marx’s present readership is less likely to lie with capital’s critics than with its proponents, who find his diagnosis useful. My argument here is that Marx’s diagnosis is even more useful if its fundamental premises are reworked, and that this reworking will take us to the core of the spatio-temporal dynamics of capital. Marx’s economic theory is commonly known as the labor theory of value. As its name implies, this theory sees labor as the source of exchange-value and profit.What is deeply radical about this theory, the thing which takes it to the underlying dynamics of how profit is made, is the notion that money and technology of themselves are not the source of wealth. Money, strictly speaking, is nothing. The value money has must be determined by something other than itself. For Marx, of course, this something was labor (Brennan 2000).13 In my reworking of it, the labor theory of value becomes a theory of time, space, and speed. Time and space only become salient, however, because nature is treated in the same way Marx treated labor. For Marx, profit is realized through the disjunction between what labor adds in production and the cost of labor’s reproduction. Reproduction, in classical political economy, involves both the reproduction of the next generation and the daily repair of human beings, estimated in terms of food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education: the sum of human needs. The reproduction costs of labor – at the daily or generational level – can be estimated.These costs determine wages. I am proposing that the reproduction costs of nature could be calculated in the same way. This would mean that the cost of nature, like labor, is what nature needs to reproduce.
From socialists to localists 253 In my theory, time and speed matter because of an ongoing tension between the speed of production and the way that the reproduction of natural resources, including labor-power, cannot keep pace with that speed. In the case of other natural resources apart from labor-power, this tension may be resolved by going further afield. Rather than waiting for the natural sources and resources at issue to regenerate on the local scale one finds them somewhere else, “over there.” Trade, investment, and manufacturing agreements extend the global reach of capitalists who have exhausted local resources. But this procedure does not work easily for the reproduction of national laborpower, precisely because this reproduction takes time. This means that the cost of reproducing and educating labor at home becomes a drag on the speed with which profit could be made. So do the costs of healthcare, welfare, and pensions.When Soros (1998) and Gray (1998) note that the taxation of corporations is now insufficient to subsidize welfare states, they are of course right. However, there is a deeper cause: the substitution of speed and space for time. Modern politicians are not ignorant of this. “After each crisis, it is clear that capital flows have to be connected with direct production, that is, trade flows,” said President Cardoso of Brazil. France’s premier Jospin reached similar conclusions: “The speed of trade lags behind capital flows, but this does not mean we should speed up trade.”14 But Jospin and Cardoso overlooked what “speed” does at a third level: the reproduction of people and natural resources.The gap between trade and finance is disastrous, but there is something worse: this is the gap between the speed at which natural resources and human beings are used up and the time they need to regenerate. This gap contributes to ill health not only through the pollution it generates. Rifkin (1987; Rifkin and Howard 1980) has argued that the distance between natural biorhythms and the accelerated timelines of modern life affects human health by increasing stress and entropy. If it is correct to say that human reproduction is out of time with the central speedy dynamic of capital, then we can predict that there will be more cuts in social provision, from pensions and welfare to healthcare and education; we can predict too that there will be a constant push for new resources and new markets, whether these are won through war or through more multilateral agreements. In either case pollution will proceed apace. In this all too likely event, ill health will increase as production and distribution accelerate across space, just at the point where healthcare is reduced. A real alternative to global capitalism would have to address the realities of time and space very differently, so differently that it cannot be called socialism. Localism is a better term, because local economies go to the heart of the spatio-temporal profit imperative and overturn it. More accurately, they do so when they limit the distance from which profits can be extracted, and allow for the natural reproduction time of things and people. Limiting distance and allowing for time entails slowing down the speed of both production and consumption. It also guarantees the preservation of the environment, as well as the well-being of those within it. I am, of course, not the
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first to advocate local and regional limitations.The idea that production needs to return to the local is the theme of (amongst other works) Mander and Goldsmith’s The Case against the Global Economy, and of Lang and Hines’s New Protectionism. It is also advocated by many action groups opposed to globalization, from Friends of the Earth to Greenpeace. Proponents of a locally based economy are evident from the rise of industrialization.15 Of these, it is perhaps Gandhi (1959) who focuses most directly on speed – and the elimination of barriers based on distance – as the heart of the problem. The problem is that Gandhi had no plan for getting from A to B, from where we are now to where we might be. In the work of Schumacher, who is Gandhi’s principal economic successor, there is an attempt at tracing paths beyond engrossment, but these do not have a structural basis in existing conditions, something they can grow out of, something that already exists. Here, proponents of localism turn too frequently to taxation (although there are exceptions) and redefining the role of international organizations.16 Such proposals are found in the work of Lang and Hines, for instance. But they are also found in localism’s more sympathetic and best opponents, the supporters of “natural capitalism.” Shortly, I will outline a structural solution which takes us beyond the system as it stands. But my first point is that taxation is not the solution. This year’s tax reforms are next year’s election fodder, easily thrown over, and a constant source of resentment amongst the small business class as well as the multinational corporations. As a rule, the taxation of business works to unite the interests of local or regional businesses with those of global corporations, although, as we shall see here, their interests are fundamentally opposed. But taxation forces them into sympathy with one another. It makes them feel their interests are one and the same. There are also fundamental oppositions amongst the very wealthy, who, whenever the word tax is mentioned, fall into alliances which are less natural than they appear to be. Here, too, basic oppositions are obscured by the failure to grapple with the dynamics underlying the extraction of profit. While Gandhi did not grapple with these dynamics in depth, he was aware that time and speeds were at their heart, so much so that there is a concordance between Marx and Gandhi. More accurately, there is an agreement between Gandhi and the conclusions I reach on the basis of reworking Marx. Why take this route to reach Gandhi’s conclusions? First, because in India, amongst other third world countries, Marxists continue to believe in centralization as a solution, and hence oppose the followers of Gandhi, who they would do well to work with; and, second, for the simple reason that reaching Gandhi through Marx is a route which identifies trends and enables predictions about the turns global capital must take next. Reworking the labor theory of value enables us to identify a genuine third way between socialism and capitalism, a third way which opposes globalization and redistributes wealth, but also draws on market principles without sacrificing women and children. Under certain circumstances, local and regionally based production can accomplish this. Where natural resources and human beings are
From socialists to localists 255 concerned, local production puts a limit on the rate at which natural resources are consumed, precisely because one cannot exhaust one’s own supplies and go elsewhere. None of this means that international trade should cease; or travel, or the education that comes with understanding cultural difference first hand. Nor does it mean technological innovations will cease; nor, for that matter, the market. The market, as we noted at the outset, is not the same thing as capitalism (Braudel 1992). The principal form of market economy that predated capitalism, and might succeed it, had a different relation to space and time. It depended on the regeneration of natural resources close to home. Because of this dependence it could not exhaust those resources entirely. It had to wait. This different relation to time is why a market anchored in local and regional production is opposed to, rather than an extension of, global capitalization in general. An oft-repeated Marxist mistake is to assume that all local or “petty commodity production” merely paves the way for big business. But, historically, local and regional production for local and regional markets is antagonistic to capitalism, for the same reason that unchecked capital necessarily turns into globalism. The reason is this: if space and the acquisition of goods and services through space take the place of time, production speeds up, as we have seen. As we will see, the faster production is, the more shortterm profit it makes (and the sicker we and the world become).This is not the case with a business which is constrained by time, and which has to wait for its raw materials to regenerate. But if the two come into competition, the interests of a business which has to wait are opposed to the interests of a business which can discount waiting-time by going elsewhere. The point at which the earlier form of market gives way to capital is the point at which some businesses begin substituting speed and space for time (Brennan 2003). Obviously, to do this they have to find substitute resources beyond their immediate sphere of operations. But in addition, their holdings have to be sufficient to carry the preliminary costs of expansion. Finding a real third way means reversing this procedure. It means substituting time for space; that is to say, allowing for the reproduction time of biological resources and limiting their acquisition across space. Necessarily, this will slow down the pace of production, although this reversal will increase real wealth in the long term. I argue that the structural basis for a real third way lies in the fact that while businesses governed by speed cannot afford to wait for nature to replenish, or pause to take a less polluting path, especially when they are at war, those enterprises which are governed by the time of natural reproduction can do so. The line between natural time and artificial acceleration through space identifies which enterprises work for, and which oppose, a process that pollutes and exploits. It shows which contribute to illness. It also shows how environmental interests are allied with those of social justice, and social justice here means giving back to human beings the time and means they need to replenish themselves. This is human reproduction time (in both the daily and
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generational sense) or time for human needs. As we noted earlier, the sacrifice of this time, like the sacrifice of the time nature needs to replenish, is the other side of speedy acquisition through space. By this argument, then, human and environmental needs are aligned through their common spatio-temporal exploitation and can only be realigned with what does them good when space no longer overrides time for reproduction (Brennan 2000). There are many books on rethinking approaches to the environment. There are manuals – the self-help market is replete with them – on avoiding environmental hazards to health.There are also numerous books which try to rethink the issue of class and poverty. Aside from the health manuals, which are generally individually focused, many of these books are critical of the new hegemony of globalizing thought. But they do not synthesize critiques of health, environmental exploitation, and poverty into a coherent theory and an alternative for practice (Unger and West 1998). That said, theories of space and time are in the air, as are many of the things I advocate. Activist groups have long perceived localization as the solution: “Practice always marches ahead of theory.” What is novel about my account is that it shows why environmental degradation and ill health are the inevitable consequences of global profit based on increasing speed.This account also carries the task of synthesis further. Synthesis is necessary, as the short-term needs of people are often pitted against environmental interests, especially now.The short-term interests of the South and countries which are not overdeveloped are pitted against their own environmental needs. Hence the controversy over the Brazilian rainforests in Brazil itself: they are a value-producing industry in a poor country. Of course, the South has to stand the cost of the North’s profits in other ways. In addition to recurring financial crises, there is the process described by Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers. When he was vice-president of the World Bank, in 1991, Summers argued that the South should be the dumping ground for the North’s toxic waste because pollution-induced illness would not matter so much where people die young: “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”17 When his memorandum became public in February 1992, Jose Lutzenburger, Brazil’s then secretary of the environment, wrote to Summers: “your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane…. A concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”18 To talk vaguely of “preserving the environment” while abetting globalization is to foster the very insanity at issue. Not signing the Kyoto protocols, not pausing to safeguard the climate and environment, is just as insane as terrorism. Destroying the conditions under which Homo sapiens can reproduce is more so. A species that attacks the conditions of its own survival is not sane, however much it tries to defer its reckoning with the conditions of its own survival by shifting the burden of ill health on to others. But the point is that that reckoning can no longer be deferred. All the conditions of human life are
From socialists to localists 257 being undermined in the advanced countries here and now.The conditions of human life are otherwise known as human needs, or, in Marx’s terms, the conditions of human (daily and generational) reproduction. Definitions of human needs are contested, but it is generally agreed that human needs are distinct from wants, and that they can be listed as food, water, air, and a livable temperature or shelter. To this minimum list, I want to add the capacity to enjoy life, since without this capacity the organism becomes depressed, and depression also lowers immune function and thus the chances of physical survival (Sen and Nussbaum 1993). It is these needs that spatial expansion in the service of capitalization has to ignore, the very conditions of life that paying for labor-power at its value is meant to ensure, but which cannot be ensured when capital is unwilling and unable to wait.
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This article is an edited version of the first chapter of my Globalization and Its Terrors (Brennan 2003). My thanks to Kirk Besmer for his assistance. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer’s Globalization Unmasked (2001) offers one of the most thorough nuts-and-bolts accounts of the many issues that accompany globalization and its alternatives – with special focus on Latin America – including transitional strategies back to local and regional economic control. Other examples of current globalization theory include Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000), which addresses how global capital is transforming labor and civil society through flexible, decentered power networks that the authors call “Empire.” Of more interest for managing to combine empirical tracking with theoretical concern is Paul Hirst (1997). André Gunder Frank and other Latin American thinkers delineated the dependence of the center on the periphery as a trade phenomenon, and their influence in this and other respects is evident throughout this book. See Cardoso and Faletto (1969), Frank (1966, 1969), and Laclau (1977). Unocal suspended its participation in the CentGas consortium in August 1998 and formally withdrew from that consortium in December 1998. Statement on Afghanistan and the Taliban, www.unocal.com. “Green-washing” of course means “whitewashing”: presenting a green image at odds with the reality. “Green-washing” means covering over environmental damage with expressions of environmental concern. “Green-washing” is analyzed by Karliner (1997). Manufacture has increased in the South, but primary products tend to dominate. “More than 98 percent of the total exports of Bolivia, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria fall into this category, for instance, compared with 24 percent of U.S. exports and only 2 percent of Japan’s” (French 1993: 161). Between 1990 and 1998 world merchandise exports have increased a total of 6.5 percent annually. In particular, agricultural products have increased by 4 percent annually, mining products 5.5 percent, and manufactures 7.0 percent. The total value of world merchandise exports (agricultural, mining, and manufactures) is $5,270 billion in 1998 (WTO 1999). Like other African countries, including the Ivory Coast and Ghana, Nigeria has now become a net importer of timber (French 1993: 161). “Of the 33 remaining Third World exporters of forest products, only 10 are projected to still be in the position by the end of this decade [the year 2000]” (Brown 1993: 15). The world export of commercial services (transportation, travel, other) amounted to $1,320 billion in total in 1998. Their annual growth between 1990 and 1998
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was 7 percent annually. In particular, transportation’s annual growth was 4 percent (WTO 1999: table II.5). For 2000 it is still too early to make a detailed review of world merchandise trade by product group.The WTO 2000 Annual Report nevertheless anticipates an enormous growth in oil transportation: “Partial information indicates that rebounding oil prices have led to an increase of world fuel exports in excess of 20%” (WTO 2000: 9). For something more nuanced, see Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s (2000: 290–4) descriptions of immaterial and material labor. Martin Khor’s Third World Network and its website (www.twnside.or.sg) address many of the issues addressed in this chapter from the perspective of the South. Vandana Shiva’s work is also invaluable. For other concrete accounts of the impact of globalization on the South, see Anderson (2000). Even if all are affected by air pollution they are not affected equally. Class position is a key variable. In a kind of absolute and relative value of health, we might say that while some might escape for some time from the bio-ravages of pollution, none can be protected entirely or forever. Marx was constrained by a worldview in which man, the towering subject, stood alone against a world of objects. Nature was an object for Marx. Labor was a subject. In his account, only a subjective factor such as labor was capable of adding value. Yet Marx stressed again and again that the reason labor could add value – where technology and money could not – was because labor was living, a living energy. But labor is not the only thing that lives. Nature also lives, although Marx overlooked this when he consigned nature, like technology, to the realm of objects and reified things. Then French prime minister Jospin’s and Brazilian prime minister Cardoso’s addresses to the “Third Way” conference, Florence, Italy, November 1999. They include William Blake, Peter Kropotkin,William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Gustav Landau, and, more recently, Gandhi. More recently still, they include Lewis Mumford and, famously, E. F. Schumacher. Giddens can be also described this way: he wants the United Nations to take new incentives to regulate the global economy, and of course he too wants tax reforms. I mention Giddens in this context because the fact that he takes the same path to solutions as critics of the third way points to how much they have in common. The difference between them lies in the targets and degrees of taxation, and the role ascribed to international fiduciary bodies. It does not lie in any structural challenge. Lawrence H. Summers, Memorandum on GEP, December 12, 1991. Jose Lutzenburger, Letter to Lawrence Summers, in “Mr. Summers Supreme NeoLiberal,”
[email protected].
Bibliography Anderson, Sarah (ed.) (2000) Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the World Trade Organization on Third World Countries, Oakland, CA: Food First Books. Anonymous (1999) “Dig More Coal – The PCs Are Coming,” Forbes, May 31. Braudel, F. (1992) The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 2 vols., trans. Sian Reynolds, Berkeley: University of California Press. Brennan, T. (2000) Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy, New York and London: Routledge. —— (2003) Globalization and Its Terrors, London and New York: Routledge. Brown, L. R. (1993) “A New Era Unfolds,” State of the World:World Watch Report, New York:W.W. Norton.
From socialists to localists 259 Callinicos, A. (2001) Against The Third Way: An Anti-capitalist Critique, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cardoso, F. and E. Faletto (1969) Dependency and Development in Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Frank,A. G. (1966) “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18(4). —— (1969) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Modern Reader. French, H. F. (1993) “Reconciling Trade and the Environment,” State of the World:World Watch Report, New York:W.W. Norton. Gandhi, M. K. (1959) Economic and Industrial Life and Relations, 3 vols., ed.V. B. Kher, Ahmedabad, Delhi: Navajivan Publishing House. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1992) International Trade 1990–1, vol. 2, Geneva: GATT. Giddens,A. (1998) The Third Way, Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn, New York: New Press. —— (1999) “Review of False Dawn,” New York Times Book Review, June. Hawken, P., A. Lovins, and L. H. Lovins (1999) Natural Capitalism, London and New York: Little, Brown. Hirst, P. (1997) From Statism to Pluralism: Democracy, Civil Society and Global Politics, Bristol, PA: UCL Press. Karliner, J. (1997) The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization, San Franciso: Sierra Club Books. Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London: New Left Books. Lang,T. and C. Hines (1993) The New Protectionism, New York: New Press. Mander, J. and E. Goldsmith (2001) The Case Against the Global Economy, London: Earthscan. Negri,A. and M. Hardt (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Petras, J. and H. Veltmeyer (2001) Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century, New York: Zed Books. Rashid, A. (2000) Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven:Yale University Press. Rifkin, J. (1987) Time Wars: the Primary Conflict in Human History, New York: Henry Holt. Rifkin, J. and T. Howard (1980) Entropy, New York:Viking Press. Rosecrance, R. (1999) The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century, New York: Basic Books. Sen, A. and M. C. Nussbaum (eds.) (1993) The Quality of Life (Studies in Development Economics), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soros, G. (1998) The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, New York: Public Affairs. Unger, U. and C.West (1998) The Future of American Progessivism, Boston: Beacon. Vinocur, J. (2001) “War Transforms the Anti-Globalization Crowd,” International Herald Tribune, November 2. WTO (1999) Annual Report; available at http://docsonline.wto.org/gen—home.asp. —— (2000) Annual Report; available at http://docsonline.wto.org/gen—home.asp.
Index
‘abject’ 141–2, 213, 215, 222–5 Adam, B. 207 Adorno,T. 135–7; Minima Moralia 135–6 aesthetics: perverse 143–4 Afghanistan 247;Taliban 246 Africa 60; anti-capitalist movements 10–11; capitalism 9–10; development 9–10; socialism 9–10; see also African socialisms African liberation movements:ANC 161, 166–8; Frelimo 161, 164–6, 179 (6); TANU 162–4 African socialisms 159–78;Algeria 164; authoritarianism 163–8, 173; capitalist policies 161; democracy 163–4, 167–8, 176–8; democratic socialism 169–78; elites 161, 177; gender equality 166; Mozambique 160–1, 164–6, 171–2, 179 (5), 179 (14); nationalism 160, 165, 167, 173–4; neo-liberalism 166, 171–2, 178; planning 168–76; SAPs 171–2; South Africa 160–1, 166–8; Soviet Bloc 172; Tanzania 160–4, 171–2, 179 (4); underdevelopment 168–76; vulnerability to global capitalism 171–8; see also African liberation movements;ANC;TANU agency:‘abject’ 141–2; class 141–2; counter-hegemonic 5–6, 8–9, 64–70, 75–6, 81–7, 128–7; international civil society 8, 75–87; meta-industrial class 201–10; oppression 11; political change 10–11; sexual 140–1, 216–18; subjectivity 5–6, 212–25; surplus population 216–25 Agreement on Agriculture 54, 205 agriculture 93–103, 203–5; agribusiness 108, 204–5; capitalism 7–8, 96–9,
108–15; England 95–9; impact of globalization on 55–68; manufacture 96–7; monoculture 56–7, 113; socialism 8, 10, 165; sustainable 7–8, 93, 108, 112–13; see also free trade Algeria 164 alienation 11, 20, 190; labor 108–9, 118; man from nature 108–9; overcoming 221–5; self and others 108–9, 113; sexuality 139–53 ‘alternative hedonism’ 8–9; socialism 128–37 Althusser, L. 212–13, 216, 226 (14) anarchism 236–7 ANC (African National Congress) 161; anti-apartheid struggle 166–8, 173–4; neo-liberalism 167–8, 171 anthropocentrism 92–6, 99, 101–2, 130 anti-capitalist movements 10–11 apartheid 166–8, 173–4 APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) 40 Arthur Andersen 77 Arthur, C. J. 32 (3) Bakhunin, N. 116 banks 77; see also World Bank Barker, J. 174 basic needs 81–7; see also human needs Bataille, G. 139 Bennholdt-Thomsen,V. 202 Bell, S.:‘On ne peut pas voir l’Image’ [The Image Cannot Be Seen] 145 Bienefeld, M. 163 biocolonialism 11, 54, 60–1, 205, 209 biodiversity 54–7, 66–8, 96, 108, 203–4; bioethics 205 Blair,T. 247 Bond, P. 174
Index 261 Bové, J. 62 Brazil 76, 80;Workers’ Party (PT) 177 Bretton Woods 185 Britain 78, 90–2, 95, 98–102, 249–5 Bunge,W. 221–3, 215, 220, 225 Butler, J. 146, 222–3, 227 (17) Canada 76; international trade agreements 34, 47 (6); social democracy 80, 86 capital: alienated labor 11; class 22; commodity-economic logic 21, 31; controls 43, 45; hegemony 212, 218, 222; history 232; indifference to human self-development 21–32; inner logic 5, 17, 21, 23–4, 186–9, 193, 195 (11), 231–2; labor power 189, 212–25, 218, 220; legal subjectivity 17–32; mobility 44; property reification 185–6; rights 22–3; self-expanding value 21, 25, 31; unique ontology 186–8; use-value space 231–3; wealth 94–5; see also commodification capitalism:Africa 9–10, 159–78; agriculture 96–9, 108–15; alternatives to 206–10, 253–7;Anglo-American model 78–80, 86; anti-capitalist movements 10–11, 171–3, 212–25; basic rights 5–6, 17–19, 22–31; consumerist age 24–6; contradictions of 25–8; democratic accountability 6, 36–8, 250; development 7, 12–13, 110; disembeddedness of economy 6, 186, 202, 233; disintegration of 231–5; division of labor 93, 109, 118, 120; ecological damage 6–10, 12–13, 94, 102–3, 108–9, 111–12, 125–6, 190; England 23–4; externalization of costs 206, 215, 223; freedom 5–6, 17–22, 31, 189; historical development 183–5, 187, 194; human resistance to 2, 5–6, 10, 13, 17–18, 21–3; ideology 24–6, 29, 234–5; industrial reserve army 213–15; law 6, 23–8; law of value 117; legal subjectivity 17–32; levels of analysis 24, 30, 187, 193, 195 (9); nature 96–103, 105–14, 117; private property 17, 22–8; profit maximization 2, 12, 27, 29; public sector 36–7; purely capitalist society 5, 24, 30–1, 115, 186–9; relation to pre-capitalist society 183; rent 97–8, 109; separation
of industry from agriculture 110–11, 175–6; Settlement Acts (17th C-18th C) 23; social democracy 233; spatialtemporal dynamic 12–13, 245–57; stages of development 193, 231–3, 243 (2); state 22, 26, 38, 232–3; surplus population 212–25; time 207; unique subject-object 106; versus socialism 2–14, 17–18, 21, 27, 125–6; 187–8, 234–7, 250; see also democracy; globalization; governance; neoliberalism Cargill 54, 57 Carter,A. 142–3, 146 central planning see socialism, planning Cheru, F. 174–5 Chiquita 67 citizen: legal subject 28; global 28, 67–8, 71 citizenship 71–87 civil society: governance 5, 42–6, 75–87; international 7–8, 42–6, 60–1, 67–8, 72–87; public sphere 75–6; socialism 173–8 class 23, 26;‘constitutive outside’ 212–13; domination 28, 73, 114–18; industrial proletariat 10–11, 127–8, 201; Marxist view of 203, 208; meta-industrial 11, 201–10;‘overdetermination’ 212–13; struggle 212–16, 218, 220, 233; surplus population 212–25 Commission on Global Governance 45 commodification: agriculture 204; labor power 110, 189, 212–15, 218; life forms 11; natural resources (nature) 7–8, 53–68, 203 commodity (-form): legal subjects 5, 22–3; theory of legal subjectivity 17–32; typical 231; versus use-values 237–8, 243 (7) commodity exchange: legal subjectivity 22–8; consumer sovereignty 22–6, 132–3 common good see social bond commons: enclosures of 53–70, 110; information 84–5; tragedy of 72 communism: agriculture 113; household 222; policies 19 consumerism 24–6; culture 134–6; ecosocialist critique of 128–30, 134–7; post-consumerism 128–37, 233–4, 204–5 consumption 24–6; energy 99–100, 233, 246–57; human and ecological costs
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of 26, 125, 128, 130–2, 135–7, 247–57; natural resources 247–57; production 26, 135; satisfaction 24–5, 29; sustainable 128–37; see also ‘alternative hedonism’ Convention on Biological Diversity 205 Corlett,W.: Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory, and Value 141–2 Cornell, D. 140, 143, 145–6 corporations: legal regulation of 33–46 Cossman, B. 145 crises: distribution 57; financial 256; market failures 44, 47 (4); see also ecology, crises cultural diversity 64–70; monoculture 56–7, 66–7 Dalai Lama 66 De Tocqueville,A. 115 democracy 53–5, 58–70; capitalism 6–8, 28, 250; economic 62–8, 117; representative 63–4, 73; rule of law 74; social democracy 3–4, 233; social inclusion 71–87; socialism 114–21, 163–4, 169–78, 192, 239–42; see also citizen; citizenship; democratic socialism; Earth Democracy Movement; globalization; governance; socialism democratic socialism 4–6, 11–14, 18–32, 169–78, 192; equality 27–8; exploitation 27; guaranteed annual income 27, 29; individual freedom 27–8, 31–2; rights 18–21, 28; taxation 27, 29; workplace democracy 27 development:Africa 162–78; capitalism 7, 110, 183; ecologically destructive 53–68, 94, 107–8, 111–12; ecologically sustainable 7–8, 11, 38–41, 118–21, 131–3, 176–7; exportled growth 39–40; inequality 9–10, 76; Marxist theory of 182–94; modernization theory 182–6, 192–4; productive forces 168–9; socialism 162–78, 182–94; underdevelopment 9–10, 55–7, 125, 162–78, 183–4 DFID (Department of International Development, UK) 54 Dickens, P. 202, 206 division of labor 93, 109, 118, 120, 206–8; alienation 202 domination 220–1; class 114–18; gender 144, 206; language 144, 219; nature
105, 111–12, 117; structure of 223–5; technological 105 Duncan, C. 191 Dyer, J.: Harvest of Rage 70 Earth Democracy Movement 7, 64–70, 210; principles 69–70 Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro 1992) 57–8, 209 ecology: capitalism 6–8, 94, 96–9, 102–3, 105–21, 201–10, 245–57; commodification 7–8, 53–68; crises 201–2, 210, 246, 256–7; human needs 107–8; insecurity 53–68; socialism 4–5, 7–8, 12, 117–21, 182; subsistence 53–68, 203–4, 207–8; sustainability 12, 38–41, 76–8; see also development; globalization economy: disembeddedness 6, 64–5, 110–11, 186, 202, 233; insecurity 53, 60–70; life-world 186, 189–90; reembedding 6–8, 71, 142, 190–2; subsistence 53–68, 203–4, 207–8, 223 eco-feminism: critique of Marxism 203–4; materialist 201–10 eco-socialism (eco-communism) 7–8, 105–21, 127–37; civil liberties 117; consumerism 128–30; ecological ethics 113–14; post-consumerism 128, 137; unity of agriculture and industry 113 enclosures: of the commons 53–68 Engels, F. 7–8; capitalism and nature 109, 112; communist agriculture 113; critique of the state 114; ecology 105–21; and Marx, K., The Manifesto of the Communist Party 19; philosophy of internal relations 106; scientific method 105–8; socialist state 116–17 Enlightenment philosophy 105–7 Enron 67, 77, 241 equality 17, 19–20, 27–8; gender 36–41; see also globalization; inequality Ethiopia 59 EU (European Union) 57–8, 78–9 exchange see commodity exchange exploitation 27 Falk, R. 86 Federici, S. 203 feminism: economic pluralism 6, 43–4; fast 139–53; law 6, 33–46; liberal 33; materialist 201–10; political economy
Index 263 6; pornography 139–53; see also ecofeminism; socialist feminism food: security 60–1, 203–5; aid 60–1; see also GMOs fordism: post-fordism 12, 233–4, 242 fossil fuels 93, 99–103; common global good 93, 102; consumption 233, 246–57; machinery 100–3 Foucault, M. 225 (2) France 78, 249 free trade 94, 98–100, 205; inequality 93, 102–3, 125; nature’s powers 103 freedom: consumer 25, 29–30; individual 2, 17–22; market (bourgeois) 17, 25; neo-liberal 20, 29–31; political 63–4; socialism 2, 5, 17, 27–32, 120–1 Freud, S. 29–30, 148, 153, 219, 226 (14) Friedman, M. 1–2, 19, 31, 32 (1) Friends of the Earth 59 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 205 GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) 40, 54 gender 74; embodied materialism 206–10; equality 139–40, 166; female phallus 145–7; inequality 36–41, 53–68; macroeconomic policy 36–41; Marxism 203; oppression 141; political economy 33–46; pornography 139–53; public policy 33–41; violence 148 Germany 78; SPD (Social Democratic Party) 2 Ghandi, M. 7–8, 61, 66, 68, 254 Gibson-Graham, J. K. 212–13, 216, 218–25, 227 (15) Giddens,A. 250, 258 (16) globalization, 6–8, 10, 53–68; agriculture 191, 204; alternatives to 68–70, 75–8, 206–10, 249; anti-globalization movement 3, 13, 41, 58–70, 76, 172–4, 202–10; capital controls 43, 45; capital mobility 23, 31, 44; capitalism 6–8, 10, 12, 33–46; corporate governance 6, 13, 33–46, 57–68; externalization of costs 206; free trade 247; fundamentalism 57, 62–8; global apartheid 58–9; human rights 43; IMF 5; impoverishment 13, 53–68, 248–9; insecurity 53–68; international trade laws 34–5, 38–46, 53–68, 248, 250–1; Islam 249–50; labor mobility 23, 31,
44; MAI 34; oil 247–57; physical disease 245–57; public policy 71–87; regulation 44–6, 76–8; resistance to 35, 201; social and ecological impact 53–68, 125–6, 245–57; spatialtemporal dynamic 12; state 53–68, 71–87; terrorism 245–6; unemployment 249–50; unsustainable 55–7, 76;WTO 5, 7–8, 38–42, 45, 54; see also capitalism; development; inequality; neo-liberalism GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) 53, 60, 62, 66–7; food aid to African countries 60 Gorz,A. 135 governance 5–6, 27–46, 53–68; democratic accountability 77–87; institutions (policy-making) 5, 40–1, 63–4, 68, 71–87; international 6, 33–46; financing 45; power 5, 42–3, 72–3; public interest 72; reform 34, 41–6, 77–87; regulation of corporations 6, 35–46, 77–8; rentseeking actors 72, 75; socialist 5–6, 18–21, 27–32, 175–8; theory of a purely capitalist society 5, 17–18, 22–32; see also Commission on Global Governance; democracy; IMF;WTO Gray, J. 250, 253 Grosz, E. 146, 226 (14), 227 (17) Gunder Frank,A. 257 (3) Habermas, J. 203 Hardt, M. and Negri,A.: Empire 142, 145 Harrison, G. 175 Hayek, F. von 1–2, 19, 31, 32 (1) hedonism see ‘alternative hedonism’ historical materialism 183, 186–7, 193 human flourishing 128, 131–2, 135, 137 human needs 55–7, 64–5, 107–8, 130–3, 248, 255–7; relation to nature 90–103, 106–21; resource rights 62–70 human rights 17–19; see also rights humanism 31, 72 humanity 11; surplus population 11, 212–25 Hunt, R. N. 121 (1) identity 7, 62–8, 71; capital 218–25; crisis of 25, 220–1; formation 21, 24; gender 144–7; meta-industrial 209 see also agency; subjectivity identity politics 7, 71–2
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ideology: economic 94, 98–9, 101; neoliberal 14, 17, 35, 43; pro-capitalist 1–2, 17 IGTN (International Gender and Trade Network) 40–1 ILO (International Labor Organization) 203 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 5, 40, 63, 67 171–2, 174; SAPs 38, 204 imperialism 245–6 individual: freedom 5–6, 12, 17–32; legal subject 21–32; liberal conception of 17, 20, 25, 29–30; rights 22–3, 73; see also subjectivity inequality: development 9–10, 53–68, 77; free trade 93, 102–3, 125; gender 36–41, 53–68; global 31, 55–7, 77, 128, 248–9; social 83; structural 125; see also capitalism; development; globalization international trade (economic) law: economic pluralism 43–4; feminist critique of 33–46; gender 33–46; protecting private markets 38–41; social and ecological impact of 38–41; social clauses 41–2; see also globalization; IMF;WTO Iraq 247 Japan 241, 243 (12) justice: distributive 39, 41, 81; injustice 93–4, 102; social 17, 76, 255–6; see also democratic socialism; Earth Democracy Movement; eco-feminism Kaunda, K. 161 Keegan, J. 73 Kenya 160 Keynes, J. M. 103 Khor, M. 249, 258 (10) Kitching, G.: Rethinking Socialism 169–70 knowledge 202–3, 207–10 labor: alienated 11, 108–9; creativity 119, 135; de-skilling in capitalism 118; division of, in manufacturing 93, 109, 118; fossil fuels 101; green division of 96; heteronomous 134–5; land 97–8; market 248; mobility 23, 31, 44; nonalienated 207–8; pair-wise employment 238, 242; pornography 141–53; productive 201, 234, 239–40; reproductive 11, 201–10, 252–3; self-
activity 141–2, 153, 189–90; theory of value 252–5; unproductive 234 labor power: subjectivity 22–3, 39; reproduction of 253, 257 Lacan, J. 145 Lang,T., and Hines, C.: New Protectionism 254 Latin America 76, 80 law 5, 20; equity 39; feminist political economy 6, 33–46; institutional power, international trade (economic) 33–46; national 35–41 Le Pen, J.-M. 62 legal subject: bourgeois economic theory 24, 26, 29–31; corporations 23; property rights 22–32; state 39–41; theory of 17–32; trade unions 23; working class 23, 26 legislation: anti-terrorist 63–4 less developed countries: agriculture 191; capitalist development 193; debt 190–1; SAPs 38; see also development; North–South LETS (local exchange trading systems) 237–41 Levinas, E. 143–4; ethics 144–5; perverts 145–7, 153 Levine, D.: Subjectivity in Political Economy 29–30 Leys, C. 159, 172, 178 liberation: of human society from productive labor 234; radically inclusive 212–25 Linton, M. 237 localism 11–13, 35, 46, 67–8, 191–2; ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism 253–7 Luttrell,T. 176 Lyotard, J. F. 144 Machel, S. 164 Mackinnon, C. 8–9, 140–1, 145 Magdoff, H. 167 Magri, L. 128–9 manufacture: agriculture 96–7, 110–11, 175–6 Marcus, S. 212–13, 215–19, 221–3 marginalization 84–7; lay knowledge 202–3, 207–8 market 1–2, 12, 17; critique of 128; erosion of social bonds 7, 71–87; exclusion 38–41, 53–68, 76–87; failures 44, 47 (40), 80;
Index 265 fundamentalism 71, 76–8, 87; gender inequality 36–7; liberalizing 38–9, 41–6; planning 4, 17; self-regulating 5–6, 34, 37–9, 43; socialism 176 market versus planning 1–3, 12, 17 Marx, K. 92–3; agriculture 111; alienation 108–9, 113, 141; antiauthoritarianism 114–20; automation 119; Capital 10, 17, 21–3, 107, 110, 112; communism 118; Conspectus of Bakhunin’s State and Anarchy 118; Critique of the Gotha Programme 118; critique of the state 114–18; ecological ethics 113–14; ecology 105–21; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 20; 18th Brumaire 108; freedom, 21–3, 120–1; The German Ideology 109; Grundrisse 107, 110, 119; labor 141; The Manifesto of the Communist Party 19, 113; nature 109–11; On the Jewish Question 108; Paris Commune 117; philosophy of internal relations 106; relation to Ricardo 92–3; revolution 116; scientific method 105–8; socialism 169; socialist democracy 116–21; theory of value 12–13; wealth 120 Marxism: Leninism 165–6 Max-Neef, M. 208 Mbeki,T. 58–9 Meadows, D. 212–13 MEAs (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) 59 Mercer, K.,‘Just Looking for Trouble’ 143 Mexico 76, 80, 204 Mies, M. 202 Miliband, R. 171 Minter,W. 166 MNCs (Multinational Corporations) 54–5, 66–7, 77–9 modernity 90–1, 97; socialism 127 Mondlane, E. 164 Monga, C. 174 Monsanto 54, 57 Mozambique 160–1, 164–6, 171–2, 179 (5), 179 (14) multilateralism 7–8, 58–9, 72 Murray, R. 159 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 39 nation-state see state
nature 11; agriculture 96–9; fossil fuels 93, 99–103; human relation to 90–103, 106–21, 130–3; instrumentalism 105–7; objectified 105; wealth 92–3, 96–8 needs: consumer 135, critique of naturalist view of 130–3; liberal theory of 132–3; socialist theory of 132–3 neo-liberalism 12, 19, 47 (9); globalization 3–4, 6, 13, 33–46, 79–80, 166, 171–2, 178; ideology 14, 17, 43, 94, 128; state power 34–41; view of subjectivity 22–31 ‘new barbarians’ 142, 145, 153 Nkrumah, K. 159–60, 164, 172 North–South 76, 80, 85 Norway 59 Nove,A. 176 Nyerere, J. 161–4, 171–2 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 79 Pashukanis, E. 22, 32 (3) patriarchy 59, 166; economic power 33–46; pornography 8–9 periodization: capitalism 193, 231–3, 243 (2); history 90–1; Financial Sphere Three 102–3; Stone Age Two 99–103; Vegetation Globe One 96–8 Polanyi, K. 6, 142 political economy: feminist 6, 33–46; law 17–32; Marxist 9–10 political strategies 10, 19, 42–6, 64–70, 72–87; see also democratic socialism; socialism pornography: cyber 140–1; counterhegemonic heterogeneous 139–40, 142–53; hegemonic homogeneous 139–40, 142–4; moral pornographer 142–5; nonrecuperable 143–7, 153; patriarchy 8–9; post-porn 9; queer socialist 139–53; www.ssspread.com 141, 147–53 Portugal 164 Post, K. and Wright, P. 173; Socialism and Underdevelopment 170 postcolonial:Africa 160–78 poverty 13, 53–61, 76 practice: hegemonic sexual 142–3;‘new barbarians’ 142, 145; queer sexual 141–53
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privatization: water rights 54–5, 79 production 12; qualitative versus quantitative goods 12, 239–41 property: commons 53–68; labor power 22; private 17, 22–3, 31, 53–68, 72–6, 79; regimes 18; rights 22–3, 117; social 54, 59, 62–70 proletariat: revolutionary subject 127–8 public policy 5, 7, 42–3, 71–87; feminism 33–46; harmonization 78; public interest 71–2, 75–87; social welfare 75–87 public sphere 72–87 Putnam, R. D. 75, 86 race 81 Reagan, R. 164–5 revolutionary subject: proletariat 127–8; trans-class 128 Rhodesia 164 Ricardo, D. 92–4; agriculture 101–2; fossil fuels 101–2; free trade 93; nature 100–2, 103 (5) rights: basic 5–7, 17, 19, 23, 31–2; corporate 23, 41, 54–61, 67–8; democratic 43, 59, 72–5; formal 20–3, 86; free movement 23, 31; gender 33; language 74–5; legal subjectivity 26–9; limited 22; minority 74–5, 81–7; property 22–3, 31, 54–61, 72–4; resource 54, 59, 62–70; substantive 86 Rodrick, D. 76–7; Has Globalization Gone Too Far? 76 Ross,A. 130 Ruggiero, R. 38 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) 38, 54, 80, 171–2; see also IMF;World Bank Saul, J. 159 security 53; economic 53, 60–70, 73, 81–7; ecological 53, 60–70 Sekine,T.: model of socialism 118–19 Senghor, L. 160 September 11 61, 63–4, 67 sexual economy: heterophallic, critique of 139, 141–7 sexuality: Oedipal family 142, 145–6, 153; Sadian woman 151, 153 Shiva,V.: The Violence of the Green Revolution 63 Smith,A. 7–8; agriculture 95–103; anthropocentrism 99; ecology 96–8,
103 (7); free trade 96, 98–9; wealth 92–3, 96–7 social bond 7, 71–87; public good 72–3, 76–7, 83, 86–7 social democracy 2, 73–4, 78, 86; postwar compromise 3–4 social inclusion 71–87 social justice17, 76, 87; see also Earth Democracy Movement; ecofeminism; social bond; socialism social life: economy 6–8 socialism(s) 90–3;Africa 9–10, 159–78; authoritarianism 163–6; centralization 63; class exploitation 4–5, 27; collapse of actually existing 1–4, 9–10, 19, 126, 162–73; counterhegemonic practice 173–8; democracy 4–8, 10, 12–14, 114–21, 126–7, 163–4, 169–78; development 9–10; dimensions 4–5, 18–21, 173–8; ecologically sustainable 117–21, 128–37; ecology 105–21, 130–7; equality 27–8; expanded reproduction 175–6; freedom 120–1; governance 5–6, 18–21, 27–32; human needs 120, 127, 130–3; humanism 31, 72, 130; institutions 94; market 176; naturalism 130–3; necessity of 119, 159; objective conditions 168–73, 175–8; oppression 4–5; planning 3–4, 17, 19, 113, 168–76; production 120; productivist 105, 120; property 18; revolution 18, 127; rights 18–21; soviet style 160–1; state 17; taxation 27, 29; transition to 127–37; underdevelopment 162–78; use-value dimension of 118–19; versus capitalism 2–4, 9–10, 12, 17–18, 21, 27, 160; vulnerability to global capitalism 3, 171–8; welfare state 2; work 127; see also democratic socialism; eco-socialism; Marx, K.; socialist feminism; Stalinism socialist economics 11–12; cooperative principle 12; market principle 12; ontology 10; planning principle 12; see also democratic socialism; Marx, K. socialist experiments:Africa 9–10; 162–78; Soviet Union 1–4, 126 socialist feminism: international governance 6, 33–46; legal reform 6, 42–6 socialist politics/strategy 11–12, 126–37, 159–60, 168–78 South Africa 57–9, 160–1, 164, 166–8,
Index 267 171; apartheid 166–7; liberal democracy 168; neo-liberalism 167–8, 171 speed theory 139 Stalinism 3–4, 126, 176 state: bureaucracy 114–18; capitalist 22, 26–7; decline of social policy 36–7, 46, 71, 79; international economic regimes 33–46; international trade agreements 33–46; liberal 117; power 33, 73; privatization 53–68; socialist 116–17; sovereignty 36, 53–5, 80 subject: citizen 28; consumer 24–6; formation 21, 31–2, 136; left-wing humanism 31; legal 21–32; liberal conception of 17, 20, 25, 29–30, 132–3; postmodernism 31; producer 26–7 subjectivity 17–18; agency 5–6; capital’s logic 5, 17–18, 22–32, 141; consumer sovereignty 22–6; desire 152–3; labor 141–2; legal 17–32; socialism 25–32; theory of 19–32; want satisfaction 24–5, 29–30; will 22–3 surplus population 11 swadeshi (economic freedom and democracy) 66–70 swaraj (self-rule) 67–8 Sweden 78 Sweezy, P. 167 TANU (Tanzania African National Union) 162–4 Tanzania 160–4, 171–2, 179 (4) technology: economic development 106 Third World socialisms 169–71; vulnerability to global capitalism 171–8 TNCs see MNCs Tobin tax 45 trade: ecologically sustainable 93–4; free 94, 96, 98–100; fair 102; inequality 92,
102–3, 125; liberalization 38–46, 76, 78; policy 34–5, 38–46, 53–68; see also free trade; international trade (economic) law TRIMS (Trade-Related Investment Measures) 40 TRIPS (Trade-Related International Property Rights) 40, 54, 68 UNESCO (United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization) 85 United States 13–14, 43, 57–60, 76, 86, 115–16;Anglo-American model of capitalism 78–80, 86; hegemony 3–4, 35 Uno, K. 10 Veblen,T. 24 Virilio, P. 139 Volcano, D. L. 139 Washington Consensus 75–78 water: privatization 54, 59; rights 59 wealth 92–8, 120; nature 92–3, 86–7 welfare-state 2, 29, 74, 77; countercyclical programs 36–7; public sphere 73; redistribution 79; United States 80 Westra, R. 139, 142 WHO (World Health Organization) 60 World Bank 40, 54, 60, 62–3, 67–8; SAPs 38, 54 World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg 2002) 7, 57–61; alternative summits 60–1 WTO 5, 7–8, 38–42, 45, 47 (5), 47 (9), 56–64, 67–8, 72; Seattle citizens’ protest 57 www.spread.com 141, 147–53 Zimbabwe 174
