Antiglobalization\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAntiglobalization\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/b><\/p>
Since the heavily advertised death of socialism, if there's\r\nan idea that unites much leftish economic thought today, it's\r\nthat globalization is the root of many evils. It's a strangely\r\namorphous enemy, one at odds with the usual progressive celebration\r\nof diversity, and an interesting shift for a tradition that was\r\nonce deeply cosmopolitan.
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\r\nAn excellent laboratory for studying antiglobalism was assembled\r\nin New York in November by the International Forum on Globalization, \"a\r\nproject of El Bosque.\" El Bosque is a project of Doug\r\nTompkins, cofounder of Esprit. The one delightful thing about\r\nthe conference was the attendance -- 2,000, with a pleasingly\r\nlow median age. Many more of these conferences are promised over\r\nthe next few years.
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\r\nThe opening plenary, held in Riverside Church (a project of the\r\nRockefeller family), assembled a long night's worth of speakers\r\n-- Maude Barlow (Council of Canadians), John Cavanagh (Institute\r\nfor Policy Studies), Barbara Dudley (Greenpeace), David Korten (author), Ralph\r\nNader, Carl Pope (Sierra Club), and Vandana Shiva (Third World\r\nNetwork). The MC was adman Jerry Mander, who believes that TV,\r\nwhich he hates, will soon implode of its own contradictions. Mander\r\nis on the board of El Bosque and is the program director for Tompkins'\r\nFoundation for Deep Ecology, whose funding was acknowledged, along\r\nwith that of the Goldsmith Foundation.
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\r\nKorten's book When Corporations Rule the World<\/i> embodies\r\na lot of the antiglobalist thinking common among progressive nongovernmental\r\norganizations (NGOs) and the philanthropists who fund them. The\r\nvolume, subsidized in part by Tompkins, is blurbed by Archbishop\r\nDesmond Tutu; John Cavanagh and Richard Barnet, authors of Global\r\nDreams; <\/i>catalog merchant and economic moralist Paul Hawken; Doug Tompkins; and Teddy Goldsmith,\r\neditor of The Ecologist.<\/i> The New Internationalist<\/i>\r\njust reviewed it enthusiastically.
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\r\nIn his prologue, Korten says he was born \"into a conservative,\r\nwhite upper-middle-class family\" who ran a retail business\r\nin a small Washington timber town -- and the unexamined consciousness\r\nof a small-town worthy permeates the entire book. He went to Stanford,\r\ngot an MBA and PhD; taught at the Harvard Business School, which\r\nhe left for the Ford Foundation and then the U.S. Agency for International\r\nDevelopment (AID). Korten shares these details \"to establish\r\nthe depth of [his] conservative roots\" -- a theme that recurs\r\nin his hymns to Adam Smith. While with AID, Korten had an epiphany\r\n-- AID was too big, too bureaucratic, and too centralized, stifling\r\nlocal autonomy and initiative. He left AID for the NGO world,\r\nwhere people were \"asking basic questions about the nature\r\nand process of development.\"
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\r\nKorten exhibits an American distaste of big government, without\r\nnoticing that the U.S. has one of the most decentralized state\r\nsystems on earth. This decentralization has accomplished not local\r\n\"empowerment\" (a word that deserves a long vacation)\r\nbut fragmentation, duplication, and bidding wars for corporate\r\ninvestment -- not to mention Jim Crow laws.
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\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nThe Garden\r\n\r\n<\/b>
It's common in quasi-radical thinking to imagine a Golden Age\r\nwith a better set of rulers, now displaced by vile usurpers. In\r\nthe old days, says Korten, \"rich and poor alike...shared\r\na sense of national and community interest.\" So \"the\r\nproblem is not business or the market per se but a badly corrupted\r\nglobal economic system that is gyrating far beyond human control.\r\nThe dynamics of this system have become so powerful and perverse\r\nthat it is becoming increasingly difficult for corporate managers\r\nto manage in the public interest, no matter how strong their moral\r\nvalues and commitment.\"
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\r\nWhen was this Golden Age? The 1960s, when GE was filling the Hudson\r\nwith PCBs? The 1930s, when Chase was banking with Nazis? Or the\r\n1890s, when Carnegie's Pinkertons shot strikers? Was it the 1850s,\r\nwhen British industrialists kidnapped children to work in their\r\nfactories, and when the locally owned bakeries of London worked\r\ntheir staffs up to 20 hours a day to produce bread fortified with,\r\nin the words of a contemporary, \"a certain quantity of human\r\nperspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead\r\ncockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand\r\nand other agreeable mineral ingredients\"?
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\r\nGolden Age myths belong to literature, not nonfictions, but even\r\nthere they vanish on close inspection. As Raymond Williams tells\r\nit in The Country and the City<\/i>, Leavis' 1930s culture lamented\r\nthe loss of the \"organic community\" of the turn of the\r\ncentury; just before the century's turn, Hardy wrote of the lost\r\nEngland of the 1830s; the 1830s had Cobbett writing of the paradise\r\nof the 1770s...on back to Piers Plowman. In the Golden Age mode,\r\nsays Williams, a feudal order is idealized as more \"natural\";\r\nsure enough, one of the globalization conference panelists described\r\nthe Middle Ages as a time of \"real community.\" But,\r\nfor \"the uncountable thousands who grew crops and reared\r\nbeasts only to be looted and burned and led away with tied wrists,\r\nthis economy, even at peace, was an order of exploitation of a\r\nmost thoroughgoing kind: a property in men as well as land; a\r\nreduction of most men to working animals, tied by forced tribute,\r\nforced labour, or 'bought and sold like beasts....'\"
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nAsceticism\r\n\r\n<\/b>
Antidevelopmentalists typically complain about how big business\r\nstokes the desire for things to keep the flywheel of consumption\r\nturning. Korten holds up Nike as an example of \"the distortions\r\nof an economic system that shifts reward away from those who produce\r\nreal value to those whose primary function is to create marketing\r\nillusions to convince consumers to buy products they do not need\r\nat inflated prices.\" But capitalism has always been a system\r\nthat shifts rewards away from the real producers of value. And\r\nillusion-makers are not the prime reward-getters -- senior managers\r\nand stockholders are.
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\r\nGreenish postmoderns, their elitist asceticism never far from\r\nthe surface, prefer to talk about consumption rather than the\r\nownership and organization of production. Sure Nike exploits the\r\nhell out of Indonesian workers to make big money on overpriced\r\nsneakers, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the desire\r\nto wear stylish shoes.
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\r\nIn a rant like Korten's, the list of woes barely admits any progress\r\n-- the lengthening of lives, the reduction in infant and maternal\r\nmortality, the partial liberation of women, the spread of literacy\r\n-- in the First and Third Worlds. Of course there's a chasm between\r\nwhat is and what could be, but what could be depends a lot on\r\nwhat is. It's evil that Merck will steal plants from indigenous\r\npeople and then patent them, and be protected for doing so under\r\ninternational trade law, but the plants wouldn't do much good\r\nif it weren't for some large, complex organization to develop\r\nand process them. Socialize Merck, don't dissolve it.
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nAlgebra of need\r\n\r\n<\/b>
In developing a prototype for utopia, Korten points to a group\r\nof countries that Alan Durning of the Worldwatch Institute called \"sustainers\"\r\n($700-7,500 per capita income), vs. the \"overconsumers\"\r\n($7,500+) and \"excluded\" (under $700). These correspond\r\nto what the World Bank calls, respectively, middle, high, and\r\nlow-income countries. To Korten and Durning, the middle group\r\n(which includes Indonesia, Mexico and Russia) offers the model\r\nof a sustainable life.
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\r\nThose middle-income countries have, on average, life expectancies\r\n9 years shorter than the high-income (77 vs. 68); a female illiteracy\r\nrate of 30%, compared with less than 5%; an infant mortality rate\r\nof 39 per 1,000 live births, vs. 7. They include the victims of\r\nthe structural adjustment programs that antidevelopmentalists\r\nrightly criticize; it's strange to see them as models. It's especially\r\nstrange that a Malthusian should, since the \"sustainers'\"\r\npopulation growth rate is three times that of the rich countries.
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\r\nKorten, who even mentions Malthus by name, gingerly endorses the goal\r\nof bringing the world's population down to 1-2 billion from the\r\npresent 5.7 billion, though without saying how. Malthus, at least,\r\nwas honest enough to advocate the promotion of death: \"Instead\r\nof recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary\r\nhabits.\" Korten probably isn't a partisan of mortality-promotion,\r\nbut advocating the disappearance of billions of people without\r\nsaying how invites terrible speculations.
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nBack to Smith!\r\n\r\n<\/b>
Globalization is shorthand for our evolution into a single\r\nborderless economy, with free flows of money and goods, under\r\nthe dominance of several hundred giant corporations. LBO has spent\r\na lot of time denouncing those things, but never out of a nostalgia\r\nfor a past that never was.
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\r\nThe demon of the book -- like that of many populist screeds, left\r\nand right -- is the \"corporation.\" To Korten, corporations\r\nbetray Adam Smith's ideal of competitive markets, by reaching\r\nfor monopoly and smothering \"local enterprise.\" He seems\r\nunaware of Karl\r\nPolanyi's claim that free markets impose an unbearable discipline\r\non participants, resulting in deflation in the economic realm\r\nand atomization in the social. Korten seems equally unaware of\r\neconomic history. Despite myths of free competition among small\r\nproducers, early capitalist Britain was plagued by local monopolies;\r\na town often had a single baker, a single brewer, rather than\r\nan array of vendors in benign competition. It wasn't until the\r\ndevelopment of national markets that real competitive markets\r\ndeveloped.
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\r\nEarly capitalism wasn't as local and personal as myth has it;\r\nfrom its beginning it was deeply international. In the U.S., early\r\n19th century merchants imported British industrial goods and exported\r\ncotton, acting as financiers at every stage. Their financial arrangements,\r\nin Alfred Chandler's words, were a \"long chain of credit\r\nstretching from the banks of the Mississippi to Lombard Street\"\r\nin London. Rarely did merchants know the consumers and producers\r\nthey brought together, a commerce accomplished through a \"long\r\nchain of middlemen, transporters, and financiers who moved the\r\ngoods through the economy.\" Moving a good and its payment\r\nfrom one place to another required a long chain of credits; every\r\nplayer was on the hook to someone else. When the chain was broken,\r\nthe disruption quickly spread -- one reason for the severity of\r\n19th century financial panics. For all the complaint about modern\r\ninstability, the 19th century was far more volatile, with panics\r\nleading to depressions every decade or so. This was the Smithian\r\nmarket -- anonymous, atomized, unstable.
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\r\nMarket apologists always ignore the costs of market transactions\r\n-- comparison shopping takes time, and there's always the risk\r\nthat you may get burned in any deal -- which can be reduced when\r\nthings are done within the walls of a single firm rather than\r\nthrough outside markets. While many crimes, from price-fixing\r\nto murder, aided the creation of the modern giant firm, there\r\nare great advantages to be gained from planning production on\r\na larger-than-local scale.
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nStinking money\r\n\r\n<\/b>
Along with globalization, another of Korten's usurpers is money,\r\nspecifically the landless, unreal kind that flows through fiber\r\noptic cables. Of course the reign of money is horrid, and even\r\nabsurd, but under capitalism people work and do business for money;\r\nmoney is one of our most fundamental principles of social organization.\r\nThe end of capitalist production is profit, which comes in money\r\nform, and people who accumulate capital have long shown a propensity\r\nto keep it in as liquid a form as possible.
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\r\nIt's no surprise that a system run for money would devise exotic\r\nways of multiplying it. Korten rightly decries the financial explosion,\r\nthe $1.2 trillion hurtling about the globe every day, as the volatile,\r\npointless-to-destructive force it is. But it's as difficult to\r\nseparate finance from capitalist reality as it is to separate\r\nmoney itself; finance is money evolved into more exotic forms.\r\nNor are the exotics recent inventions; futures markets go back\r\na century, options go back three, and foreign exchange gimmickry\r\ngoes back seven or more. British foreign holdings a century ago\r\nwere far larger in relative terms than anything seen today. To\r\nlament the way money can accumulate while leaving human needs\r\nunmet is to lament capitalism, not some recent mutation.
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nVisions\r\n\r\n<\/b>
At the end of his book, Korten offers a vision -- of disarmament,\r\ntolerance, gender equality, less consumption, global trust-busting,\r\ndebt writeoffs, the transformation of international financial\r\ninstitutions into democratic, cooperative institutions, voluntary\r\nexecutive salary caps, grassroots democracy, etc. He offers a\r\nvision of \"a market economy composed primarily, though not\r\nexclusively, of family enterprises, small-scale co-ops, worker-owned\r\nfirms, and neighborhood and municipal corporations.\"
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\r\nMuch of this is desirable. But it would be impossible to run a\r\ncomplex economy on this scale only; it's easy to imagine furniture\r\nbeing made this way, but not trains and computers. If Korten means\r\nto do away with trains and computers, he should tell us. Leaving\r\naside the matter of scale, any significant restructuring of the\r\nownership of production would be taken as a fight to the death\r\nby the existing owners.
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\r\nBut that's not a worry for Korten, because there will be a revolution\r\nin consciousness, which will unleash a new cooperative spirit\r\n\"of those within the system -- including those who head our\r\nmajor corporations and financial institutions -- in addition to\r\nthe efforts of citizen movements working outside it.\" There's\r\na habit in books like this to present what seems like a reasonable\r\nset of demands and think our rulers will suddenly slap their foreheads,\r\nsaying, \"Ah! We were wrong!\" There's no awareness that\r\na serious transformation of corporate behavior would require a\r\nserious political threat to private ownership; without that threat,\r\neven New Dealish reform is impossible. Instead, Korten points\r\nto \"an obvious solution: create societies that give a higher\r\nvalue to nurturing love than to making money.\" Gosh, yes,\r\nthat would be nice, but how do we get there? Some powerful people\r\ndon't find that solution so obvious.
\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nWandering localists\r\n\r\n<\/b>
Korten and the antiglobalizers are right that economic growth\r\ndoesn't necessarily make people happier, and often makes them\r\nmiserable; that institutions like the World Bank have made the\r\nrich richer while making the nonrich poorer; that conventional\r\nideas of free trade are wonderful for managers and stockholders,\r\nbut hell on workers and nature; and that a turn away from the\r\naccumulation of things and toward more humane pursuits would be\r\nhighly welcome.
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\r\nBut to turn from that to a dream of local self-sufficiency is\r\nsuffocating and reactionary. On this, Korten is outdone by some\r\nof his antiglobalizing comrades. Kirkpatrick Sale wants to smash\r\ncomputers and live like the Amish, who happily use antibiotics\r\nand sell their produce for cash while refusing to participate\r\nin industrial life. The ecofeminist Vandana Shiva views technology\r\nas a male disruption of the sacred woman-nature dyad, and advocates\r\na \"subsistence\" economic model. Shiva, it should be\r\nnoted, is more popular in the West than in India. As sociologist\r\nShasti Mitter wrote in New\r\nLeft Review<\/i> #205, the Bangladeshi women workers she's\r\nstudied in both their native country and London want jobs, training,\r\nand good wages, and do not want to return to their villages.
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\r\nShiva opened her talk at the conference by noting that one of\r\nthe \"positive externalities\" of globalization was that\r\nshe'd made so many good friends around the world. Korten's acknowledgments\r\ndescribe his book as \"the product of an international collaboration\"\r\ninvolving colleagues from around the world. If \"globalization\"\r\ncan produce such desirable things as friends and books (even bad\r\nones), perhaps it's wrong to name it as your main enemy.
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\r\nIt's ironic that people should rack up the frequent flier miles\r\nwhile touting the virtues of localism -- writing books and running\r\ninstitutes while telling the masses that they should stay home\r\nand tend to their lentils. This recalls T.S. Eliot's remark that \"on the whole\r\nit would appear to be for the best that the great majority of\r\nhuman beings should go on living in the place in which they were\r\nborn.\" At least Eliot, who was born in St. Louis but moved\r\nto London at age 26, was an avowed snob.
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\r\nIn its rejection of Marxism, much of the left no longer has a\r\nvocabulary for cosmopolitanism, and has apparently given up hope\r\nof transforming technology into something kind to people and the\r\nearth rather than to stockholders. Vast numbers of people are\r\nangrily scared of what the economy is doing to them, but foundation\r\nintellectuals, compromised by their blinkered vision and their\r\nfunders' conservatism, are no place to turn for answers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\ngo to followup article\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\nMoneybags\r\n\r\n<\/b>
Doug Tompkins, principal funder of the globalization roadshow,\r\nestablished the Foundation for Deep Ecology (FDE) in 1991. In\r\n1994, its assets were $34 million and it dispensed $2.5 million\r\nin grants. Another Tompkins foundation, El Bosque Pumalin, is\r\noriented towards his new home, Chile, though based in San Francisco;\r\nit has funding guidelines nearly identical to the FDE's. Tompkins\r\nmade his fortune co-founding Esprit with his ex-wife Susie Tompkins.\r\nHe preferred the title \"Image Director\" to his official\r\none of president and CEO.
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\r\nThe FDE defines deep ecology as \"a new movement among westerners\r\nthat rejects the prevailing anthropocentric (human centered) paradigm\r\nof technological society, in favor of a biocentric ethic and practice.\"\r\nNature exists not as a life-support system for humans, but has\r\nits own \"intrinsic value.\" Whatever this means in theory,\r\nin practice it's often quite anti-human. Tompkins' favorite theoretician,\r\nDave Foreman, is one of the founders of Earth First!, the folks who spiked trees in\r\nthe 1980s. Foreman, who dates The Fall at the development of agriculture\r\nabout 10,000 years ago, welcomed an Ethiopian famine as nature's\r\nmethod of population control; a columnist named Miss Ann Thropy wrote in EF!'s magazine during\r\nthe days when Foreman controlled it that AIDS, too, did valuable\r\nMalthusian work. Deep Ecologists, according to Kirkpatrick Sale,\r\nthink that the human population of the earth, now approaching\r\n6 billion, should be under 1 billion, with some bids in as low\r\nas 100 million.
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\r\nTompkins funds the Wildlands Project, guided by Dave Foreman,\r\nwhich aims to depopulate huge swathes of North America and return\r\nthem to wilderness -- so that \"grizzlies in Chihuahua have\r\nan unbroken connection to Grizzlies in Alaska,\" with \"pre-Columbian\r\npopulations of plants and animals.\" Unexplored is the need,\r\nsaid to be recognized privately by Project members, to reduce\r\nthe human population by two-thirds for this \"rewilding\"\r\nto work. The FDE also funds the scary Negative Population Growth and Carrying Capacity Network. According to Jeff\r\nSt. Clair of the Wild Forest Review,<\/i> the FDE has the strictest\r\nMalthusian litmus test of any enviro foundation.
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\r\nIn an act of private rewilding, Tompkins bought 670,000 acres\r\nof Chilean forest for $12 million, making him the second-biggest\r\nlandowner in Chile, and probably earning himself a giant U.S.\r\ntax break. His holdings, which divide the country in half, were\r\nassembled furtively, giving no clue of his intentions. He wants\r\nto turn the land into a park, which he will give the government,\r\nbut Chilean nationalists are outraged. There is no question that\r\nChile has been ravaged since Pinochet's coup, but some local enviros\r\nsay Tompkins has done more political harm than ecological good.
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\r\nTompkins' stated principles don't stop the FDE's portfolio from\r\nholding stocks or bonds of Allstate, which insures cars; Citicorp,\r\nand three foreign banks, which fund the globalization the conference\r\nbemoaned; Fannie Mae, which greases suburbanization; Grupo Televisa,\r\nthe Mexican TV network, a nice irony given their localist rhetoric\r\nand program director Jerry Mander's hatred of TV; HCA-Hospital\r\nCorp. of America; Telefonos de Mexico, which Wall Street viewed\r\nas a way of riding the NAFTA \"boom\"; and Wal-Mart, friend\r\nof small towns everywhere.
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\r\nThose stockholdings reflect the hypercapitalist way Tompkins first\r\nmade his money, selling stylish garb made in California and Third\r\nWorld sweatshops. In 1972, Esprit shut a factory in San Francisco's\r\nChinatown after the workers organized a union; the NLRB rebuked\r\nDoug Tompkins' \"paternalism\" for seeing the union as\r\nan expression of \"ingratitude.\" Esprit took 10 years\r\nto pay off the back wages the government ordered them to pay.
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\r\n[Addition not in print version]<\/b><\/p>\r\n\r\n
Asked to comment on this contradiction\r\nbetween the source of his wealth and its present applications,\r\nTompkins told LBO: Maybe you have me confused with somebody else.
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\r\nAnother pot of money with a sleazy pedigree\r\nbehind the Antiglobalization roadshow is the foundation started\r\nby Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, the well-born corporate raider who has\r\nnow retired to statesmanship and philanthropy. While his articles\r\ndenouncing GATT were widely circulated by anti-free-traders, his\r\ngifts to Margaret Thatcher were not. Goldsmith, the model for\r\nthe yacht-based raider in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, <\/i>had\r\na rapacious career buying companies and shaking money out of them,\r\nwith not a moment's regard for human or natural consequences.\r\nOne of his last raiderly acts was the 1990 deal in which he swapped\r\npapermaker Crown Zellerbach for friend of the earth Newmont Mining.\r\nOne of the cost-savings moves he made after taking over CZ in\r\nthe 1980s, says St. Clair, was to sack the company's environmental\r\nscientists; it was one of the few papermakers that bothered to\r\nhave any. And of course he fired up the chainsaws and went on\r\na logging spree, as always happens when financial reasoning is\r\napplied to trees.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\ngo to followup article\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\nDoug Henwood's book, A New Economy?<\/i>, forthcoming from Verso, has a chapter expanding on these arguments.
\r\n\r\nThis article appeared in Left Business Observer<\/i> #71, January 1996. It was written by Doug Henwood, editor and publisher. It retains its copyright and may not be reprinted or redistributed in any form - print, electronic, facsimile, anything - without the permission of LBO. Republished here by permission of the author.
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\r\n<\/b>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/www.panix.com\/~dhenwood\/Globalization.html","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"Is globalization really an evil in itself? Most folks in the 'antiglobaliztion' movement are uncomfortable with the 'antiglobalization' label, so there's a clear need to think critically here. Capitalism has from the first been a global and globalizing system, and claims to the contrary are just nostalgia for something that never existed. A closer look at some antiglobalist movers & shakers helps sharpen the question of what we're for & against.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2000\/10\/globali2.htm","filesize":"24.7 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2000\/10\/4075.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}