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A Green
Perspective on the MAI:
Beyond Globalization: The Struggle to Redefine
Wealth
 Brian
Milani 1998
Globalization is not simply increasing exploitation, inequality
and injustice, but it is suppressing great and growing potentials
for human development. Until the opposition to globalization puts equal
emphasis on these positive potentials, it is doomed to failure. The alternative
to globalism is not the old industrial Welfare State, but something completely
new…more participatory, egalitarian, ecological, self-regulatory, and grounded
in a radically different, more qualitative, notion of wealth.
The juggernaut of globalization is
steam-rolling on, now in the form of a proposed international agreement
on direct investment—the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (or MAI),
sometimes referred to here in Canada as Son of NAFTA. The current initiative
is being organized under the auspices of the OECD, containing the 29 richest
nations, but its intended targets include the poorest nations of the Third
World. It is not specifically a free trade agreement, but a kind of constitution
to give foreign multinational corporations expanded rights within domestic
economies. These rights drastically limit the power of national, regional
and local governments to shape their own economies. These corporate rights
are so transparent and incredible that the deal has been hatched in secrecy
and subject to a hasty timetable for ratification.
Fortunately word of the agreement—along with draft copies—leaked out last
Spring, and a spirited and rapidly growing opposition to it has emerged
throughout the world. This opposition is doing an admirable job, in the
face of mass media indifference, of educating social activists and the
larger community to the agreement’s implications. The MAI not only accelerates
capitalism’s long tradition of degrading the social fabric in traditional
societies, but it also destroys social, political and economic gains resulting
from many decades of social struggle in even the most developed nations.
Environmental destruction is both a means and a result of this new level
of industrial organization.
This essay is not, however, about specific provisions of the MAI, but about
its role in suppressing real human development, and how the MAI opposition
can be more successful by working to create space for these positive potentials.
Despite the incisiveness of many of the critiques of the MAI, the resistance’s
focus has been overwhelmingly oppositional and defensive. Its preoccupation
has been on preserving what we have now, and for this reason, it has been
unduly evasive of what the real alternative to the MAI, or NAFTA, or globalization
is. The alternative is NOT the postwar Welfare state which ran into crisis
beginning in the seventies. And yet many on the left would have us believe
this is the case. The gains made in previous eras cannot be preserved as
simple holding actions. They can only be built upon and extended, in a
new context.
Globalization and Crisis
Our strategy should start from a recognition that
globalization is not simply the conspiracy of an Evil Empire. It is also
a response to crisis—structural crisis in the industrial system which has
been growing more serious throughout this century. It manifested in the
final collapse of the classical market system in the Great Depression.
It was mitigated and redirected by the postwar corporate Waste Economy,
based in arms production and suburban sprawl. And, as that temporary solution
has come undone, the crisis is being channeled today into globalization
and Casino economics.
This longterm systemic crisis has been precipitated by growing human
development potentials which were spawned by industrialization
but which are basically incompatible with industrial capitalist (or industrial
state socialist) relationships. The greater these potentials become, the
more alienated and decadent the system’s responses must be simply in order
to maintain itself.
Long ago Marx highlighted the inevitable conflict between developing forces
of production and capitalism’s old social relations. Later, with the Great
Depression, some Marxists called attention to the way the very productiveness
of industrial capitalism had begun to threaten its existence, through a
structural crisis of overproduction. Because productivity increased faster
than workers’ wages, the growing abundance of material goods created a
serious problem of effective demand for the economy. Workers
would never have enough income to purchase these goods without a major
redistribution of income, and this might undermine class rule. The traditional
Marxist perspective was that class rule was based in (relative) scarcity—the
control of scarce resources by a minority— and that abundance undercuts
class society. People aren’t so easily compelled to do exploitative or
unethical work when their basic needs are already taken care of. The Great
Depression was seen, therefore, not to be just another bottom to the business
cycle, but a fundamental historical crisis in the system.
Too many critics have assumed that this crisis was solved by capitalism,
through a presumed redistribution of income by Keynesianism and the New
Deal. (Fordism was the name given to this new stage of capitalism, which
was based in mass production, but had to be more concerned with consumption
and organization outside direct production and the labour market.) But
the Fordist Welfare State did not really redistribute relative shares of
wealth so much as implement new forms of regulation which kept the economic
pie continually growing. These new arrangements were all premised on growing
levels of waste which would allow growth to take place without challenging
industrial power relationships.
It was not the New Deal or Keynesianism which ended the Depression. It
was World War II; and after the war, a return to depression in North America
was prevented only by the waste created by Cold War militarism and the
privatized Consumer economy. The popular image of postwar industrialism,
particularly in environmental circles, is one of affluence and extravagance.
But in fact, while the living standards for most North Americans did increase
over a 30 year period, real abundance was a distant dream. The suburban
infrastructure—of atomized plots with houses, cars, and consumer durables—maximized
the consumption of virtually every material, creating lots of effective
demand. But people were still chained to routine labour, debt and the economic
grind. Waste served to artificially maintain scarcity. And
over the long term, the deferred social and environmental costs of this
wasteful economic development would begin to wipe out even those minimal
social and economic gains.
Much of the left continues to believe that there is no real profitability
crisis or fiscal crisis in western capitalism today. All of the current
austerity measures, debt and downsizing, they believe, are simply the result
of a conspiracy of corporations to impose their power. While it is true
that corporations and their political representatives have made the most
of their growing mobility and technological power, there is a crisis. And
it is serious enough to preclude the kind of economic growth which would
allow the comforts once enjoyed by sectors of the working class in the
developed world.
While the postwar Fordist economy “externalized” its social and environmental
costs, these costs were bound to come due. But they have been expressed
in a variety of forms, including medical costs, and the costs of environmental
cleanup, of infrastructure, of crime, of addiction, and ultimately the
costs of structural unemployment. These costs, along with the saturation
of consumer durable markets, were major factors in the inflation, stagnation
and state fiscal crisis which hit capitalism in the seventies.
Today these problems are aggravated by industrialism’s perverted use of
new technology and its attempt to avoid real economic problems by creating
a new ethereal world of money- making from nothing, the Casino Economy.
Capitalism has always been based on a monetary notion of wealth; but in
the new financial economy any semblance of trickle-down of real social
use-value has completely evaporated. New technologies have allowed waste
production to take on new forms which no longer require propping up material
consumption within the (rich nations’) working classes.
The solution to this crisis is not a return to the Fordist Welfare State.
The only way the gains of the past can be maintained and extended is by
the implementing of new forms of efficiency which are appropriate to our
productive potentials. This is where both ecology and community development
come in; they are key aspects of economic redesign to harness potentials
for efficiency and real wealth creation. Industrial capitalism cannot,
of course, accede to this kind of reform because it would not only destroy
corporate rule but the essential characteristics of industrialism as a
system.
Notwithstanding all the manipulating, globalization is not primarily a
conspiracy, but a systemic response of industrialism to reinforce its key
features which are threatened by real efficiency and other aspects of qualitative
wealth. Here I will focus on one: the separation of production and consumption.
Extending this separation is a strategic means of reinforcing archaic notions
of quantitative wealth which are fast driving down the planet and
community.
Quantitative wealth is based in production-for-production’s sake—which
is an essential aspect of capitalism and the market system. Consumption
has always been ignored. In fact, even before industrialization, the masses
had always to “defer” consumption to make social investment possible. To
prioritize consumption would be to put social need first. For capitalism,
this would put use-value ahead of exchange-value, something the system
cannot do. And yet, for the last 60 years, new productive forces based
in culture and human development have created pressures to put consumption,
or human self-production, in command—and to integrate production and consumption
in elegant ways. Avoiding and suppressing this integration has created
new crises.
New potentials for qualitative wealth production bring with them a new
importance of spatial organization. Just as an ecological economy
uses spatial integration to achieve elegant forms of super-efficiency,
so also the industrial waste economy has used spatial fragmentation—like
suburbanization and globalization—to reinforce archaic power relationships.
Globalization is the constant striving of industrial society to overcome
both the potentials created by cultural production, and the problems created
by the Fordist separation of production and consumption, by extending these
very alienated relationships further afield.
Consumption and Planning
The Great Depression should
have been the last gasp of the production-centred economy. Consumption,
which in the early industrial economy had been left to take care of itself,
could no longer be ignored. Consumption would have to be planned, or at
least consciously considered. One reason for this was the crisis of overproduction
or “effective demand”. Within capitalism, the rise of the advertising industry,
Keynesian monetary policy and the Welfare State, were all responses to
this need to plan consumption.
This was a tricky adaptation for capitalism, since by definition capitalism
works through the dominance of exchange- value (or pure quantitative, monetary
wealth) over use-value. The system is driven by the quest for monetary
accumulation; and real benefit for people or communities is strictly a
by-product, side- effect, or spin-off of the quest for money. Putting use-value
or end- use in command completely overturns the means/ends relationship
which defines capitalism.
Fortunately for capitalism, waste production provided a means whereby the
dominance of production over consumption could be maintained, even while
consuming astronomical levels of material resources. The chaotic auto/suburb
infrastructure allowed a form of planned non-planning to
create demand, keep the economy growing quantitatively, and create new
sectors of cog-labour. Victories by organized labour and other progressive
movements resulted in social safety nets and other Welfare State provisions.
But the labour movement collaborated in the establishment of the waste
economy, which meant that social need would still only be satisfied as
a by-product or trickle-down from capital accumulation. And those gains
would still be very unevenly distributed within the working class.
Production-for-production’s sake implies not just a division between production
and consumption, but also a separation between politics, economics and
culture. Early industrialization rampaged on like a runaway locomotive,
with its markets largely insulated from political interference and public
accountability. As unjust and brutal as this process was, there was a some
logic to this absence of political control, since markets could work at
this material level, and since the state did not yet have the managerial
skills and information to substitute for markets.
The new importance of consumption required more state planning in the economy,
and a generally greater integration of politics and economics. The Fordist
waste economy was a means by which some degree of planning and integration
could take place, but it was concentrated high up in the organizational
hierarchy. Waste would allow production-for-production’s sake to continue,
insulate capitalist markets from grassroots input, and for the average
citizen, keep politics and economics well separated.
Quality and the Industrialization
of Culture
Capitalism’s crisis
of overproduction was, however, much more than a crisis of market mechanisms.
The new human powers emerging were not simply a question of possible material
abundance. Not only was the economy now producing for increasingly non-material
needs, but the key sources of productivity were also less and less material.
Economic development was fast moving into the realm of quality,
which would change not only basic relationships between production &
consumption, and politics & economics, but also the relationship between
the production of people and the production of things.
The classical industrial system was powered by the sheer volume of resources,
energy and cog-labour put into production. By the twenties, however, the
role of human intelligence became ever more strategic to productivity,
making possible in fact the release of cog-labour and resources from direct
production. Industrialization was moving into new areas. A new importance
of information, science, service, education, white-collar work, art, communications
and entertainment all express the industrialization of culture
which has so characterized this century.
Today, in the alienated world of globalistic clichés, we hear endlessly
about “post-industrialism”, the “information revolution”, etc. Most of
this relates to computer and communications hardware. But this is super-industrialism
not post-industrialism. Behind the information revolution is an even more
fundamental process at work: the new relationship of culture to economics.
This new role for culture has extremely radical implications for economic
development, and for the very definition of wealth. It means that material
development, or quantitative development, and production- for-production’s
sake, are no longer progressive or sustainable means of growth. Quantitative
development, and the market’s invisible hand, produced for standardized
primary needs, and was powered by standardized inputs of cog-labour and
resources. Qualitative development, on the other hand, can displace drudge-
labour and resources from direct production, and work to meet human needs
with much more subtlety. But this requires dethroning abstract exchange
value from its dominant role, and putting use-value and end-use in command.
The rise of culture signifies a new importance of the “human factor”—previously
just a cog in the machine—to economic development. It also implies that
the fastest way to develop materially is to focus on the non-material,
i.e. by developing human creativity. This is just the other side of the
new importance of consumption, which is, after all, just human self-production.
Put another way, this century’s economic development has been characterized
by growing potentials for both non-material production and non-material
consumption.
Placing human development first is a radical reversal of ends and means
which, as Lewis Mumford argued, has existed from the beginnings of civilization,
or class society. In class society, the majority of people were largely
human cogs in a social Megamachine. With industrialism, this social relationship
also became a technical one—with an explosion of routine labour.
Capitalism, of course, has had to suppress these potentials, even while
selectively and narrowly using them. Capitalism, which is by definition
a system of quantitative development, has only been able to survive by
defining consumption in extremely material ways—which has not only been
environmentally destructive, but has cultivated the lowest, most external
and materialistic levels of human personality. Possibilities for creative
work have been limited to narrow sectors of the work force, and even most
of that work has been directed toward empty and anti-social ends. Corporate
rhetoric about “quality-based production” is a joke in an economic milieu
dominated by short-term profit, speculation, and empty forms of money.
Suppressed potentials for qualitative development have, however, produced
a popular reaction: new, more culturally- defined social movements, which
have questioned not simply the distribution of industrial wealth, but its
very nature—the “what” and the “why” of production. Cutting-edge elements
of the feminist, environmental, human potential, peace, human rights, and
First Peoples movements have increasingly pointed toward alternative ways
of living and producing, in essence promoting a more qualitative notion
of wealth, work and development.
Globalizing Waste
Underlying the propaganda about the inevitability
of globalization, is the presumption that technological imperatives of
efficiency are driving it. Unfortunately, many people on the left buy this,
although they argue that the human cost of efficiency is simply too much.
We should however be challenging the conventional wisdom about efficiency,
as well as that about wealth.
The fact is that capitalism, in its super-industrial form, has become an
extremely uneconomic, inefficient and irrational system. Monetary wealth
has become completely disconnected from real or qualitative wealth, to
the point where economic growth now tends to actually destroy real
wealth. We are well beyond a point where we can talk, as much of the left
still does, of sharing or redistributing wealth. It must be completely
redefined.
One can hardly imagine a more ludicrously wasteful system than the corporate
global economy. The average food molecule travels 1500 miles before reaching
the consumer plate (Roberts & Brandum, 1995). The average North American
consumes 20 tons of material each year (Wann, 1996). R.H. Ayres (1993)
estimates that only 6 per cent of minerals and renewable materials extracted
each year are embodied in durable goods; the other 94 per cent is waste!
Some environmental economists have suggested that simply achieving sustainability
(i.e. survivability), would require the reduction of resource throughput
in the developed countries by a factor of 10 (Von Weizsacker,
Lovins and Lovins, 1997).
Buckminster Fuller (1969) emphasized that the information revolution gives
us the opportunity of “doing more with less”. But in fact, information
has not been effectively used to displace materials and energy from production.
More commonly it has been used to displace or de-skill labour. In the industrial
economy, the relationship between labour and materials is perverse. In
the developed world, labour is relatively expensive and resources cheap.
Industrial “productivity” is considered almost exclusively in terms of
its potential to displace labour, even as the economic costs of unemployment
are skyrocketing and global population is exploding. “Resource-productivity”
is almost a non-factor because the real costs of materials and energy are
not reflected in their market prices. An ecological economy would, of course,
be supremely labour-intensive, because it would be oriented to displacing
capital and resources from production through the application of human
intelligence.
Former World Bank economist Herman Daly (1996) has emphasized the logical
direction for sensible economic development: there should be growing
restrictions on the movement of goods, and decreasing restrictions
on the flow of information. Long distance transportation and distribution
is wasteful and costly; it is possible only because of subsidies to cheap
energy and fossil fuels. Freer movement of information could save lots
of wasteful duplication, along with much energy and material. And yet globalization
is going in precisely the opposite direction: towards decreasing
restrictions on goods (through free trade), and greater restrictions (through
intellectual property rights, etc.) on information.
The current super-industrial global economy is so wasteful and irrational,
simply eliminating subsidies to brown industry and fossil fuels would go
far in undercutting globalization. Leveling the playing field for various
forms of eco-production could cripple many large corporations and industries
which have such a destructive political and social impact on the world.
Countering Globalization:
The Strategy of Design
Green economist
Paul Hawken (1993) emphasizes that our fundamental social, economic and
ecological problems are not crises of management, but of design.
The primary strategies to counter the MAI thus far proposed by the left
are typically management strategies, which do not deal with the roots of
the crisis. The environment has been of concern only because of the MAI’s
subversion of existing environmental protection.
These are not unimportant concerns, but if we shift our attention to the
appropriate alternatives to corporate globalism and the Casino Economy,
ecology is ever more important—both in establishing new forms of economic
efficiency, and in providing an economic base for new levels of participatory
democracy and community development.
Buckminster Fuller was certainly correct to emphasize that the essence
of the information revolution is “doing more with less”. From this standpoint,
we can appreciate the ludicrousness of considering corporate globalism
“post-industrial” in any way. Resource-use is intensifying rather than
diminishing.
John T. Lyle (1994) describes the character of a potential truly post-industrial
economy as intrinsically ecological. He argues that whereas industrialism
replaced the landscape (agricultural and natural systems)
with machinery; a post-industrial economy would replace machinery with
the landscape. In other words, our present knowledge of natural
systems can enable us to design settlements, infrastructure and production
systems which fit within, or benignly mimic, natural processes—like sailboats
in the wind.
Much of this knowledge is far from new. We have much to relearn from indigenous
cultures and traditional societies. But science and management are also
spawning more organic methods and perspectives in response to increasing
complexity. The patterns of organization for ecological efficiency are
precisely the reverse of those of globalization. Ecological self-reliance
and diversity are in sharp contrast to globalism’s emphasis on export monocultures
and dependence on external markets.
Scale is extremely important in harnessing optimal levels of eco-efficiency
and community development. It is not simply that “small is beautiful”,
but that we must find the appropriate scale for everything
we do. In most cases, this is smaller, and is certainly more integrated.
As a general rule, economies which are based in natural systems will increasingly
see their boundaries take on the boundaries of their primary eco-systems.
That is, they tend to become “bioregional”.
Any intelligent regional development plan must look, sector by sector,
at the most efficient way of organizing everything. Whether we look at
energy, manufacturing, the food system or any other sector, it is difficult
to deny that local and regional systems are the best. Making optimal use
of local resources and conditions is important. As is eliminating transportation
costs. But eco- development also puts great emphasis on designs which do
more than one thing at a time. The most obvious example is mixed residential/commercial
land use which eliminates the need for commuting. But ecological infill
also features rooftop gardens which purify water, windbreaks which grow
food, composters which heat buildings, walls which clean air, and playgrounds
which provide industrial feedstocks, among other things. And this in communities
which, for all their productivity, are unequaled for their beauty, and
their communitarian and spiritual character.
Multiple-use requires, more than anything, proximity and diversity—precisely
what the current global monoculture eliminates. There is no reason why
all urban communities cannot be self- reliant, or nearly so, in food, energy
and basic goods. Cities are concentrations of vast resources of organic
and inorganic materials. Most of it is considered waste. If products and
processes were properly designed, almost all of it could be used—at a fraction
of the cost of extraction industry.
To the modern mind, such notions seem idyllic and simplistic, but in fact
eco-development is far more information- intensive and skill-based than
the corporate high-tech global economy. A big reason why the advanced eco-economy
must be so locally-focused and people-intensive is because only local self-
management can possibly harness the complex productivity of any particular
area. Eco-development demands a high “eyes to acres” ratio, and those eyes
must be skilled, attentive and caring (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 1996).
It should be clear from this that—in contrast to concerns for environmental
protection, which can often be used to distract from questions of social
justice and democracy—truly ecological economic forms require increased
participation, and provide an economic base for greater levels of democracy.
And because of the central role of human creativity in resource-efficiency,
the fastest results can be attained by making human and community development
the top priority.
Green Industry and Resource-Productivity
Pragmatists will
no doubt still raise the question of manufacturing and heavy industry.
Surely we are not talking about reverting to craft production. Actually,
craft production can and should have a much larger role in economies based
in qualitative wealth. But some advanced trends in mainstream manufacturing
also point toward organic principles of organization, including bioregionalism.
To really maximize efficiency, manufacturing must be considered with resource-provision.
An ecological system would eliminate as much extraction industry as possible,
and turn resource life-cycles into nearly closed loops. Extraction industry
is, along with the chemical industry, the greatest source of destruction
and pollution, one of the great exploiters of the global commons and the
Third World, and the most capital-intensive, least job-intensive sectors
of the economy. Extraction industry can survive only because we do not
insist on closing the loops of production and consumption, and forcing
producers to pay the real costs of waste production.
This could be done by product stewardship legislation which forces producers
to take responsibility for those resources over their whole life-cycle.
Those products must be either compostable or reusable/recyclable (Braungart,
1994). Such radical changes in liability force manufacturers to design
for dismantling and reuse, and this creates an economy based more on operational
leasing than outright ownership.
Recycling is of course greatly preferred by large corporations over reuse
mainly because it doesn’t entail radical new forms of liability, which
would be enforced by product stewardship. Recycling is much more energy
intensive, creates McJobs of low skill, and can reinforce giant loops of
production and consumption.
Reutilization industry is something different. It encompasses a spectrum
from remanufacturing and technological upgrading to repair and simple reuse.
The closer to pure reuse of whole items, the more ecological, the less
energy-intensive, the more skilled, and the closer this manufacturing comes
to service work. Reuse also demands proximity and very tight production/consumption
loops (Stahel, 1994). Lots of reuse-based manufacturing, along with product-stewardship
liability, is what we want to transform the global economy into a community-based
one.
Another important focus of eco-industry must be benign materials. We must
make materials and products safer to produce, to use and eventually to
compost. The petrochemical industry is the biggest polluter of all (every
Superfund site in the US is petrochemical-related). Interestingly, the
same biological revolution, which in the past of couple decades has given
us nightmares of imperialistic science in genetic engineering and biotechnology,
has also created new opportunities to inexpensively create benign materials,
including biochemicals, from plant based materials. While these feedstocks
may not be as mobile as oil, this is actually a virtue, since this emerging
Carbohydrate Economy is conducive to developing diversified human-scale
regional economies.
A final development of note in green industry is what’s called “industrial
ecology”. It attempts to design production systems modeled on ecosystem
principles. It has mainly been applied in the design of industrial parks,
where firms are selected to use each other’s waste-heat and by-products,
so that there is almost no waste. There is no reason why the same principles
cannot be applied to whole regions and industries. In the “Third Italy”,
what are called “flexible manufacturing networks” (FMNs) have emerged to
allow small companies to cooperate in such a way as to accomplish what
would otherwise require a large corporation. The Italian FMNs have distinguished
themselves in being able to compete for global markets, but principles
of industrial ecology could be applied to FMNs to provide eco-production
for regional economies in closed loops.
By and large, advanced technologies no longer require giant mass markets,
but can produce economically in short runs for regional markets. Because
a new emphasis on resource-productivity and quality of work life would
make the “economy of labour time” much less totalitarian, a combination
of craft and industrial ecology would promise a much greater quality of
life.
Clearly, there will always remain appropriately world-scale industries
and markets. Green development does not eliminate external trade. What
is does, however, is begin to base trade on questions of ecology, cooperation
and justice rather than on criteria of power and money. Self-reliance does
not mean absolute self- sufficiency. But we do need trade and communication
which is based on the independence and relative autonomy of the participants.
Money, End-Use
and the New Wealth
Within the environmental movement, a debate
rages as to whether it is sufficient, in creating an ecological economy,
to force markets to reflect the real costs of products and processes. There
can be no doubt that forcing “prices to tell the ecological truth” (as
von Weizsacker says) is one of the most important starting points for undermining
globalization and creating ecological economies. It is a crucial means
of beginning to reverse the labour/materials relationship in industrialism,
and turning the economy’s focus onto resource-productivity.
But, as suggested earlier in this essay, money—the ultimate quantitative
measure—is itself a fetter on qualitative non-material development so long
as it remains the end-goal of economic activity. Real qualitative development
cannot be a side-effect or a trickle-down.
This is because qualitative development begins with end-use
or use-value. That is, it starts with social and ecological need. In the
same way that soft-energy proponents have insisted that energy- system
design must begin with the intended results (hot showers,
cold beer) and not energy supply (power plants, fossil fuels),
so also the whole economy must start with social need and work backwards.
To create the most efficient economy possible, this means reversing the
exchange-value/use-value relationship which is at the heart of capitalism.
Money may have an important role, but it must increasingly be relegated
to a means of exchange and not the end. I have written in
more detail elsewhere about how this can be done: particularly through
the use of community currencies (particularly pure credit-money systems)
and appropriate (generally local/regional) scaling of economic activity.
It is also important to appreciate that money has never, and can never,
express the whole of society’s wealth. In fact, capitalist markets and
the power of money have always depended on the subordination of important
human-centred work, particularly that done by women in and around the home.
For years, many feminists have advocated reintegrating production and consumption,
public and private life, in ways which would generalize the nurturing aspects
of domestic work to the entire economy. More recently, environmentalists
have also called for the reintegration of consumption and production, home
and (paid) workplace, because they recognize the central importance of
home-based production (food growing, energy retrofit, preventive health
care, etc.) to overall eco-efficiency. Monetizing all this activity would
be inadequate to support this work, even if it were possible. New means
of remuneration which transcend the wage-relation are necessary. This could
be in community currencies like LETS, in universal basic income programmes,
and especially in workers’ direct creation of qualitative wealth.
In an economy oriented to end-use and social need, one cannot underestimate
the importance of gradually lessening the importance of monetary wages
to people’s standard of living. The Welfare State did this to a much smaller
degree, in providing services, financed through taxes, which helped provide
for a worker’s or community’s quality of life. (Unfortunately the Fordist
state was also a means of shifting exploitation outside the labour
market and workplace, via taxes and planned inflation). An ecological economy
which institutionalizes qualitative wealth, however, could move toward
more completely de-alienating labour, by allowing people to produce much
more directly for their own community’s need and enjoyment. This could
free people from the isolating and largely coercive power of wage remuneration—an
opportunity which an export-oriented economy can not offer a worker.
The reversal of the labour/materials relationship (where labour is relatively
more expensive than resources) depends upon implementing such new qualitative
forms of direct remuneration. If remuneration is simply in wages, and community
quality of life is not raised substantially, such a reversal just means
lower incomes for people. Qualitative wealth depends on individual creativity
and innovation; but it is an intrinsically social phenomenon which must
be linked to community enrichment.
Putting money back in its proper place requires the development of indicators
and measures of qualitative wealth. They can help in both forcing market
prices to “tell the truth”, and in devising indices which might be completely
autonomous of monetary calculation. Farmer/philosopher Wes Jackson has
argued that accounting is one of the most crucial disciplines we must develop
to create a new society.
Various forms of ecological accounting are biophysical measures which serve
as raw material for devising eco-indicators of a place’s ecological health.
Life cycle analysis is a means of ecological accounting, as is “ecological
footprint” analysis which helps us understand how much of non- human Nature
is required to support our communities, our consumption patterns, and our
modes of production.
Indicators of a place’s social health can also be improvised from
quantifiable information about the community. Both social and ecological
indicators, which should be designed to be easily comprehended by everyone,
are means by which people can participate in community planning. The planning
process should ideally work to build incentives for real qualitative improvement
into everyday economic activities. Social and ecological accounting, expressed
through the value and needs of a community, should eventually displace
money as the primary means of conveying economic value. Money should be
simply a means of exchanging goods and services which are largely reflective
of the social and environmental values expressed in the indicators.
Eco-Regulation and the MAI
While it is essential
to defend our social safety net and existing environmental protections
until they can be improved, it is nevertheless important for activists
to recognize that old forms of bureaucratic regulation are inadequate,
and they would be much less necessary in an ecological community-based
economy. As Commoner (1990) has emphasized in his writings on environmental
regulation, these regulations have tried simply to limit the damage caused
by industrial growth with “end of pipe” solutions. Alternatively, they
have intervened in the details of relatively destructive processes, rather
than changing the rules of the game to deal with fundamental motivations
and to target overall goals. The same applies to social and economic regulation:
the roots of the problems have not been attacked.
The focus of progressive strategy should be to establish new rules-of-the-game—which
completely reshape the dominant incentives of economic behavior. With all
due respects to Jane Jacobs, the nature of the state should not be a ‘guardian’
against selfish commercial interests. It should be to establish rules of
the game which reward people’s regenerative instincts, so that ethical
action can be fully integrated into everyday commerce. The state should
not be a policeman, but a coordinator.
The current political-economic context is one of major transition. The
dominant struggles are more than ever about the establishment of
new rules—a fact that is appreciated much more by corporate elites
than by most of the opposition to globalization. The MAI is about establishing
a “new constitution for a global economy”, as the Director General of the
World Trade Organization (WTO) puts it. The MAI is not primarily a trade
agreement, but a proper constitution which establishes the rights of foreign
corporations within economies to monetary profit-taking, whatever destruction
is involved. It preempts almost all the regulatory measures described above
which can help establish regenerative development and qualitative wealth.
The MAI is all about new rules—rules which are the antithesis of those
which must be established if we are to survive as a species. Richard Grossman
(1993) of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy in Massachusetts,
has been justifiably critical of the opposition to the MAI in not taking
on larger questions of these rules. He has pioneered organizational and
educational work on corporate charters, and urged that the MAI battle raise
larger questions of corporate privileges under law.
But the popular movements must actually go much farther and raise questions
of appropriate economic design, real efficiency and qualitative wealth.
Our New Rules must define and support these goals. This tack, which might
seem utopian to some, is actually much more powerful, since we need not
wait for state action to begin creation of the alternatives we advocate.
In every sector of the economy, this work has already begun: renewable
energy, ecological agriculture, industrial ecology, co-housing, eco- infill,
bioregional planning, first people’s self-determination, green municipalism,
community currencies, and more. Our New Rules would support these efforts,
but these efforts lend power to our work to establish these rules and to
oppose globalization.
The main tendency within the opposition thus far has been to invoke our
rights not to be stomped into the dirt by corporate rule. The recommendations
made, for example, by Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow (1997) in their otherwise
insightful book on the MAI, lack any power because they appeal to almost
no one. The tepid reformist controls they recommend fly in the face of
powerful globalizing tendencies, and, as largely bureaucratic measures,
they also fail to point to any visionary horizons which can excite the
grassroots. Serious oppositional work is necessary, but today no purely
oppositional work will, in the long run, be successful if it is not enriched
by a real vision of the future. A vision of the future, not
the past. This vision should complement grassroots alternatives
which need not wait for support from state economic policy.
Regeneration vs. the MAI
A green economic
perspective (as opposed to a narrow environmental one) is not about sustainability,
survivability or minimizing destruction—it is about positive regeneration,
of our communities and our planet’s ecosystems. Sustainability—that neutral
gray area where we are neither helping nor hurting Nature too much—is a
delusion. We must either heal, or we will destroy. This applies as much
to our communities as to our bioregions.
The starting point for opposition to the MAI and globalization is a recognition
that the conflict is not between local and global, nation and corporation,
or public and private. It is between fundamentally different notions of
wealth. It is a disagreement over the relationship of ends and means. Real
wealth today can never be achieved as a trickle-down from above.
With that in mind, we can understand that the main concerns that both we
and large corporations have are all about rules, but that we are talking
about very different games.
Here are some suggestions about anti-MAI strategy, which can accompany
basic information about the MAI’s destructive character:
We should be discouraging most external trade
and direct investment, and freeing up the flow of information.
Clarke and Barlow claim that,
because of the rapid growth of foreign direct investment, there is some
need for regulations concerning it. This is certainly true, but they fail
to mention that the regulations we need, in order to achieve real efficiency,
should discourage such investment, and discourage external trade. We need
to be encouraging greater regional self-reliance, and much tighter loops
of production and consumption. By the same token, there is no shortage
of investment money in our communities. What we need are appropriate institutions
to put it to work. Our savings and earnings should be invested in progressive
financial institutions, like credit unions, and they should be investing
in regenerative enterprises which can help fulfill Community Development
Plans devised by local people.
External trade incentives and disincentives
should be based on eco-indicators and real social need.
Full-cost accounting and life-cycle
analysis can provide guidelines for trade policy. Taxes can provide a means
for encouraging appropriate trade and discouraging inappropriate trade.
Trade which facilitates regenerative development in the Third World, for
example, should be especially prioritized.
Ending subsidies to brown industry, and particularly
cheap energy, must be a prerequisite for any and all external trade.
As Wayne Roberts has said,
the global economy couldn’t last a day without state support for dirty
energy and fossil fuels. He argues that attacking the un-ecological economic
props of globalization may be more effective than simply opposing trade
and legal agreements. Struggles connected to the Kyoto Climate Change accords,
and to the MAI, are simply different aspects of the same battle. These
struggles should be better coordinated through a focus on community-based
alternatives.
Ecological Tax Reform is necessary to reverse
the perverted labour/materials relationship which encourages unemployment
and resource waste.
ETR would not increase the
total amount of taxes, but besides making the system more equitable, it
would change the philosophy of taxation to build in appropriate incentives
for the things we want to encourage. It would change the focus of taxation
from “goods” to “bads”. That is, we would tax what we don’t want: pollution,
resource intensity (especially extraction industry), suburban sprawl, financial
speculation, inappropriate external trade, etc. Profits, work and income
per se would not taxed, but net worth would, in what many people
today would call a (quantitative) “wealth tax”.
Regenerative Financial Systems must be developed
for every region and community.
The creation of qualitative
wealth and community development depends on reversing the financialization
of economic life. The Casino Economy is an even more retrograde successor
to the Keynesian Paper Economy. In the postwar Paper Economy, gradual inflation
and money creation was used to re- redistribute income back to corporations
to offset the new postwar bargaining power of unions. Money creation also
helped provide demand for waste production.
The implementation of floating exchange rates
(in the 70s), coupled with new information technologies (in the 80s), helped
create an even more empty financialization based in “megabyte money”. Speculating
and “transacting” have replaced true investing; and the current system
is no longer concerned with levels of working class consumption. The financial
economy is now estimated to be 30-50 times larger than the material economy,
and the financial system therefore is the main influence on state economic
policy (Kurtzman, 1993).
Controls on foreign investment, as proposed
by Clarke and Barlow, do not deal with any of these fundamental problems.
They may have a role, however, as one tool in a larger strategy to create
alternative financial systems. Education about the MAI’s impact on investment
must be coupled with initiatives to build more substantial community-based
financial systems which are geared exclusively to regenerative development.
Community currencies, credit unions, Earth Banks, revolving loan funds,
social collateral funds, pension funds, labour investment funds, etc. must
work in concert to support regional development plans. It must be made
clear to everyone that they have a responsibility to put their earnings,
savings and investments into community development. Increasing
the scope of community currencies, particularly pure credit-money systems
like LETS, is particularly important in undercutting the power of monetary
accumulation (and the coercive power of money scarcity for the average
person) and putting economic focus on use-value and real wealth creation.
Community, Bioregional and Green City Development
Plans must be drawn up.
Participatory planning is
essential to creating regenerative wealth. Such plans are not engineering
blueprints, but general visions which provide direction for the creation
of appropriate incentives like ecological tax reform, product stewardship
systems and the like. Such plans would also provide guidelines for the
lending and investment policies of credit unions and other elements of
the community financial network. (Conscious lending by community financial
institutions would be one of the main forms of economic self-regulation
in a green economy).
Such plans would cover everything—from the
creation of secondary materials industry to ecological infill to the food
system to health care to community social services.
The initiation of grassroots participatory
planning would go far to solve current problems connected with the so-called
devolution of federal powers to the provinces and municipalities. Devolution
of power is not a bad thing; but the current process is more accurately
described as a dissolution of powers, part of a trend toward
deregulation and austerity. Progressive regional plans would make more
effectual our insistence that any decentralization of federal regulation
would be opposed until it resulted in a raising of standards
in all areas concerned.
These suggestions are only
a few examples of how we can be expanding the effectiveness of our oppositional
work by highlighting alternative visions. Unfortunately the left is way
behind other social movements in appreciating what these visions and potentials
are. Developing an oppositional strategy based on positive
vision is a way of connecting with other groups and movements which could
help move on this vision while undercutting globalization.
A community/alternative-based strategy also helps avoid burn-out which
is a common problem with oppositional activity. Even when we haven’t government
support, building alternatives can provide a sense of accomplishment and
make real gains.
There is certainly great urgency to defeating agreements like the MAI.
But if we miss this opportunity to raise consciousness about the alternatives
to globalization, any victory we achieve over this agreement will be temporary.
Globalization is a juggernaut which can only be stopped by creating our
own—a fully conscious movement to create real regenerative wealth.
There is a truly alternative way of doing everything: housing, health
care, providing energy, and making things. We must open our eyes to the
fact that, the old Fordist Welfare State was not utopia, and that even
our achievements within it can now only be preserved by raising the ante.
The current struggles over trade and investment are about rules of the
game. We really must think more carefully about what game we want to play.
 |
Brian Milani
Toronto
February 1998 |
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Note: The issues
dealt with in this essay will be the topic of a course this summer at the
Transformative Learning Centre at OISE/UT in Toronto: Economic Crisis
and Sustainable Community Development. For more information,
click
here, or
write bmilani@web.ca or
pboin@oise.utoronto.ca
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