CCPA Monitor, January-February 2017
A couple of centuries ago (not long, in Earth time), a host of public interest regulations that had kept the fledgling English capitalist economy operating within the carrying capacity of the social and natural environment were repealed – largely due to the lobbying power of the emergent capitalists. The social movement that arose to protest and resist the devastation this unregulated transformation unleashed, Luddism (or the Luddites), came to be so demonized that at least one edition of Webster’s Dictionary defined it as “a misguided attempt to stop progress.”
This historical note nicely reviews what people in today’s social movements are up against – including at the level of naming reality, directing public policy and shaping public perception. It also reminds us that what we’re “for” is not utopia, but a renewal of a vision of humans living in right relations with each other and the planet, a vision that has served countless societies for millennia without bringing the Earth to the point of crisis it is facing today.
Three recent books approach the current crisis – financial, environmental, democratic – from the same public interest perspective. Not all are optimistic. In Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, July 2016), Ian Angus suggests corporate conglomeration, militarization and the acceleration associated with “fossil capitalism” all but guarantee we will be engulfed before we can adequately address the climate change challenge.
Joyce Nelson’s new book on big finance, Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism (Watershed Sentinel Books, October 2016), locates a citizen lawsuit to restore the original public interest mandate of the Bank of Canada within the larger context of conglomeration and acceleration in that sector. With adroit interpretive skill, she links recent bank-related developments to a blizzard of “free trade” deals that weaken public interest regulation in a host of areas, like education and public infrastructure, but which also seek to prevent demo cratic governments from expanding public governance of finance.
The third book reviewed here, A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony (ARP Books, June 2016), edited by William Carroll and Kanchan Sark er, personalizes the financial and climate crises as being part of the an ongoing colonization and integration of people into the fast, competitive, individualist consumer society that global market capitalism has produced. This important anthology then lays out a range of hopeful, helpful responses to the seemingly ineluctable status quo based on what people are doing in the here and now.
Facing the Anthropocene speaks from the fecund, fairly recent convergence of the social justice and environmental movements. By extending a socialist perspective into an ecosocialist one, Angus makes it easier to see that what has been done to human communities has also been done to nature as a living community, with similar destabilizing effects. He lays out the breakdown in nature’s carrying capacity in much the same way that sociologists have described how deepening poverty and polarizing inequality have destroyed the social carrying capacity of many cities and even regions.
Historically, the carbon and nitrogen cycles helped the earth absorb fluctuations in global temperatures. But these restorative systems are breaking down under the combined assaults of human-caused carbon emissions, particulate pollution, ocean acidification, excessive nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, fresh water depletion, deforestation and the rogue effects of plastic wrapping and various nanomaterials.
The term Anthropocene, Angus ex plains, was coined some decades ago to mark the point where human systems started to overwhelm earth’s self-regulating systems, ending the relatively peaceful Holocene era and bringing the world to the tipping point of Earth-systems collapse. The key system on the human side, he argues, has been fossil capitalism, the first phase of which was coal-based, followed by oil. Today, there is more money in oil and gas than in any other industry.
The term Anthropocene was coined some decades ago to mark the point where human systems started to overwhelm earth’s self-regulating systems.
As one thread in a well-woven tapestry of analysis, Angus points out the close link between fossil fuel and the military and also big government. Winston Churchill, former British prime minister, was the first global leader to see the strategic importance of oil, especially cheap oil from the Middle East, and the advantage of controlling it at the source.
Not only are the world’s armies (with the US military at the top) the largest users of petroleum in the world, cheap fuel has also made possible the great acceleration of the market-capital economy following the Second World War. Carbon fuelled the transportation systems that allow more transactions to be turned over faster over farther reaches of the globe, and the whole system depends on this. For capitalism, as an “ism” or ideology, is all about making as much money as fast as possible. Hence the crisis.
Corporate conglomerization, with the concentration of power it makes possible, adds another dimension to the situation, as it both concentrates and rigidifies vested interest in maintaining the status quo. From a post-war surge of mergers and acquisitions, notably in the petrochemical business and those enabled by government defence contracts during the war and the Marshall Plan after it, conglomerates spread through the corporate sector, engulfing the media, communications and financial industries, while maintaining close links to the state.
Nelson has been tracking the interconnections between money, information and government for decades, as well as the key personalities and institutions (including think-tanks and foundations) involved. Her newest book, Beyond Banksters, examines the effects of speed-of-light financial investment and information systems now driving the global economy. Anything slowing or impeding this “high frequency” movement of money from one part of the world to the next, or from one investment “instrument” into another, is, as Nelson points out, targeted for elimination in “next generation” trade deals.
Public interest regulation and some types of demo cratic governance are anathema to “free” finance because competitive advantage is increasingly concentrated in this immaterial factor, not just in cheap energy, labour or other material resources. The success of global capitalism lies in its ability to turn almost any activity and any social institution into an investment opportunity. This financialization of everyday life is pushing corporate capitalism into whole new frontiers, bringing its colonizing effects with it.
As with the other acceleration-boosting developments, this expansion of finance began shortly after the Second World War with the direction to governments from the Bank for International Settlements to borrow privately at market interest rates rather than publicly from national banks. Still, the paradigm-shifting changes only occurred under the neoliberal deregulation drive of the 1990s.
The repeal of the US Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton administration collapsed the barrier between commercial and investment banks, opening the way to the high risk realm of derivatives trading. At the same time, the World Trade Organization (WTO) revised its financial services rules to force all signatory states to dismantle their versions of Glass-Steagall, unleashing a torrent of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) around the world.
When the overextended mortgage and loans bubble collapsed in 2007-08 it caused the instant impoverishment of millions of people around the world and, incidentally, the further enrichment of a few who, rich in financial intelligence, had sold these lucrative investments and left the relatively less informed and less wealthy holding the bag. (A 2016 Oxfam report revealed that 62 billionaires now own as much wealth as half the world’s population. At the same time, between 2010 and 2015, some $500 billion shifted from the lower end of the income scale to the highest, with the wealth of the poor set dropping by 41%.) Ten million Americans alone suffered home foreclosures.
The rise of public-private partnerships and flat-out privatization of public infrastructure has also been part of this agenda, greatly extending the scope of corporate money making and reducing the scope of public interest regulation. These are important developments in their own right, with the troubling questions they raise – like how corporate interests seem to acquire these assets at a fraction of what it cost taxpayers to build them, or why, for example, the Ontario government would sell off shares in Hydro One when the utility generates hundreds of millions of dollars in profit a year for the province and its people. Equally disquieting is the loss of public knowledge about and involvement in managing these institutions.
Still, the more troubling aspect arising from Nelson’s analysis is how the expansion and acceleration of financialization has concentrated corporate power and intelligence, and shapes public perception of what’s normal. It makes the shift from public interest governance to corporate management across a widening range of public institutions and infrastructure systems seem like the normal thing to do, the new reality. And this in turn helps to neutralize public concern over the moves to permanently disable public interest governance through contemporary “free trade” agreements.
Public interest regulation and some types of democratic governance are anathema to “free” finance because competitive advantage is increasingly concentrated in this immaterial factor.
One of the book’s strengths is the depth of knowledge and insight that Nelson marshals to describe the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Canada–EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the lesser-known Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). While lowering trade barriers are part of these deals, their larger impact will likely be to tie the hands of government by, for example, preventing a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, permanently legalizing trade in financially risky (even suspect) products, and challenging the legitimacy of public banks along with the public interest mandate of Crown corporations.
Foreign financial services companies will gain new rights in both CETA and the (possibly defunct) TPP to sue governments for taking measures that get in the way of their expansion plans. In 2015, a record 70 such investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases were filed under a number of global investment protection treaties. As of January 2015, there had been 37 known ISDS claims against Canada under NAFTA, with $172 million in settled awards and some $2.6 billion in pending claims. Though this right to sue does not exist in TISA, Nelson quotes a Global Justice Now report that describes that international deal as “a massive, super-privatization deal covering everything from finance to education.”
Such is the power of naming reality and managing public perception – the result of canny connections among key people, think-tanks and receptive governments – that regulation is now a dirty word. For many, government has come to imply “interference,” not the guiding force of public interest priorities. Worse, the information inequalities and polarization that have accompanied the deepening inequalities of our time are creating additional barriers to asserting the public interest in the public’s own voice.
According to an exposé quoted by Nelson, during Occupy Wall Street the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and New York police came together with key Wall Street firms in the Domestic Security Alliance Council to conduct surveillance on the protesters in Zuccotti Park, with the FBI labelling participants a “terrorist threat.” More recently, Canadi an security legislation, including Bill C-51, designates certain transportation routes, including energy pipelines, “critical infrastructure,” giving legal heft to Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr’s menacing recent statements about using the defence and police forces to make sure “people will be kept safe” from opponents to the Kinder Morgan and Energy East pipeline projects.
The scene is being set, in Canada as elsewhere, for a future in which citizens raising public awareness about what Angus describes as an overextended global production, consumption, transportation, information and investment system are labelled not just Luddites but “threats to security.” The We who would resist this are therefore in a struggle to think for ourselves, to articulate and sustain action toward an alternative to the catastrophic status quo, and to do this from within what Habermas calls the capitalist “life world” that is continuously reproducing this status quo with us as its contributing agents.
Carroll and Sarker are determinedly hopeful in A World to Win, even as they acknowledge, as Carroll does in an introductory chapter, that we are habituated inhabitants of this individualized, commercialized short-attention-span world that we are trying to change.
Carroll draws on great thinkers and theories, and uses words like “hegemony” and “colonization” (plus counter-hegemony and decolonization) to name the challenge facing would-be change-makers in the social and environmental movements. He gently warns against short-term, feel-good, pragmatic reforms while acknowledging that the cultural politics of personal, grounded, local and pragmatic action that makes a difference in the here and now is an essential first step in claiming agency and building capacity to take on the larger, longer-term changes that are needed.
The book is an excellent study guide to the many threads of alter native building that are currently at work. David McNally’s chapter, “Neo liberalism and its Discontents,” combines salient statistics on today’s economic divide – e.g., 44% of Ontarians living between Toronto and Hamilton are “precariously” employed in temporary or contract jobs – with reports from the protest zones of elaborate self-governing social infrastructure, such as the medical stations, food centres and child care set up in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during Egypt’s 2011 uprising.
The rise of public-private partnerships and flat-out privatization of public infrastructure has also been part of this agenda, greatly extending the scope of corporate money making and reducing the scope of public interest regulation.
Laurie Adkins chapter on political ecology and counter-hegemo ny takes the analysis to the more systemic level that Carroll argues is essential for sustaining genuine change. Her definition of political ecology is helpful, introducing a “way of thinking” about the world that highlights the “mutually constitutive relationship between human societies and nature.” This thinking offers a bridge for solidarity-building between people of settler descent and Indigenous people on their journey to reclaim their traditions, their naming of reality and with it their connection to the land. It’s not only a way of living the new scientific understanding that “everything is connected,” but of acknowledging the consequences of actions on habitat and inhabitants, of having agency within that web of interconnected life. As such, it restores the legitimacy of democratic self-governance in all aspects of public life, including economics, as was the case before the rise of market capitalism.
Many chapters demonstrate the feminist mantra that “the personal is political,” often in combination with les sons from the LGBTQ, disability and student politics of more recent decades. As Warren Magnusson writes, “we need to foreground the political if we are to make sense of the world in which we live.” This means refusing the neoliberal position that favours “markets” over politics as society’s key public decision-maker, with its hidden assumption that “markets” aren’t political.
The chapter on fossil fuel divestment, by James Rowe, Jessica Dempsey and Peter Gibbs, illustrates the new hybrid expression of personal politics, as this movement seeks to erode the oil industry’s “social licence” to operate, and undermine public consent (and complacency) for the status quo by daring to name reality as its members see it. I think of 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben’s clear moral statement, “If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage.” Moreover, the authors argue that the divestment movement is also a “threshold” to the deeper issues and agenda, such as seeing climate change as a justice issue, as Naomi Klein argued in This Changes Everything, and, related to this, re-democratizing capital investment so that it can be once again accountable to the sustainability needs of the social and natural environments.
The theme of capacity building – everything from re claiming agency and the power of naming, to scaling-up co-operative, collaborative organization and information sharing networks – runs throughout the book, making it particularly timely after the recent US election. One chapter, on direct action, explores the efficacy of “solidarity networks” to support otherwise isolated temporary workers against exploitative bosses. Self-organized participative initiatives like the Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol), the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and union “flying squads” serve as “real-life training” in thinking strategically and working with others. Besides building individual self-confidence, these groups cultivate “collective capacities” as well.
Michael Bueckert’s chapter, “Solidarity with Whom?,” takes up the tough question of scaling-up and weaving initial issueaction into a larger and longer-term program of change. Instead of the either/or of horizontal local organizing versus vertical larger-scale objectives, Bueckert suggests a disciplined dialectic. He endorses the “prefigurative” practices of local, direct action out of which new forms of subjectivity emerge.
But he suggests that some generalization can occur and the skills of personal agency can be enhanced through intentional learning in other areas that allow for responsible vertical organization. In other words, rotational leadership and other practices can be employed that develop solidarity among different interests, and allow them to build. The alternative, he says, is wishful idealism and “the tyranny of structurelessness.”
This ability to scale-up and sustain actions over the long term is essential to the challenges contemporary social/ political/ environmental movements face today. The task is no less than reasserting the primacy of the public interest and the commons where so many governments and mainstream political parties have abandoned it.
Nelson mentions some of the initiatives to “municipality” water systems, as the evidence now makes it clear that privatization has yielded increased costs, not efficiencies, leaving ideology exposed as the real driving force behind the policy. She also showcases the lawsuit launched in 2011 by an elderly William Krehm, co-found er of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), to require the Bank of Canada to resume its constitutional duties under the Bank of Canada Act to make interest free loans to the federal, plus provincial and possibly even municipal governments for such things as public infrastructure projects and health care. Few Canadians today seem aware that public financing (not private bank loans) built the Trans-Canada Highway and St. Lawrence Seaway, and funded social programs like old-age pensions and post-secondary education.
Subjects like banking and the public debt tend to be black-box items to most people, and it’s probably in the interests of a controlling few to keep it that way. But it’s important that civil society take on these larger issues, because the social landscape in which we live has been so financialized. The COMER lawsuit would have a better chance of success if it were taken up by a broad coalition of social movement players.
The information on political ecology in A World to Win and ecosocialism in Facing the Anthropocene provide helpful theoretical guidance to the larger agenda of revitalizing public interest governance. With their emphasis on self-governance, direct democracy and accountable interrelationships, these books also seem to draw on long-standing legacies associated both with self-governing commons and Aboriginal traditions regulating, for example, the buffalo hunt on the Prairies and the harvesting of red cedar bark and wapato roots on the Pacifi c Northwest.
Unfortunately, Angus didn’t have space to go beyond a few broad generalizations about what “we must” do in his book. Perhaps in a follow-up he might unpack the unique intellectual and even spiritual gift that an ecological perspective has to offer, vested as it is inside the web of lived and living interrelationships of shared habitats. An Earth-based vision can help reverse the remote-control perspective of contemporary globalization and its foundational information and financial systems – as though the view from an orbiting satellite is all that matters.
Our Comment
There is an unprecedented need for all those struggling to deal with the many aspects of the world crisis, to “connect the dots’ ‘ – define a shared vision and mobilize to realize that vision. That vision will derive from shared values and principles they emanate. On this foundation, we must share information and ideas and, joining forces, build the cooperative effort essential to meaningful change.
And this is happening!
Heather Menzies’ review essay is a space-shuttle trip through the multiple dimensions of neoliberalism and its consequences.
As she highlights the outstanding achievements of neoliberal politics and exposes the tactics behind them, she clarifies the challenges faced by those “who love this planet,” the responses mounted so far, and those that must emerge as the result of our growing awareness and involvement.
Neoliberalism has delivered its intended rewards. They just aren’t those rewards that society was led to anticipate!
It can hardly be argued (though some do), that the “driving force” behind policies like deregulation and privatization was an ideology that sprang from a genuine concern for the common good!
Through debt and “free trade” it has emasculated nation states on a global scale, enlisting the compliance of governments through guile, temptation, or force.
It has sacrificed society’s real economy to the unbridled pursuit of private profit. It facilitated a startling shift from the use of money to produce goods and services that society needs, to the use of money to make more money.
“The globalisation of production has been swamped by the global trade, in financial derivatives. At the peak of the boom, derivative trading was ten times global GDP, with most transactions having no direct relationship to traded goods. By the end of the twentieth century, currency trading was 95 percent speculative as against 5 percent for actual goods and services (Rowbotham 2000: 181).
Even then, much of the movement of goods was within transnational companies. Currency trading continues to be big business, estimated at over $5 trillion per day” (Debt or Democracy, Mary Mellor, page 161).
Financialization! All bought and paid for through the privatization of the money supply.
Other contributing factors elucidated, whet our motivation for further study and validate the opinion that “the task is no less than reasserting the primacy of the public interest and the commons where so many governments and mainstream political parties have abandoned it”:
- media;
- militarization;
- the growing power of human systems that have come to overwhelm earth’s self regulating systems;
- corporate conglomeration through mergers and acquisition, and its attendant concentrated power;
- technology that sharpens the feeding frenzy and “accelerates the high-risk potential of the money system”;
- the lack of public knowledge;
- the power to frame policies and laws through political and economic control;
- the diabolical incrimination of dissenters;
- destabilization through foreign investment…
The three books she reviews – up-to-date resources on the “current crisis – financial, environmental, democratic from the same public interest perspective” – present an impressive source of information, ideas and examples that, from her review, promise to contribute much, to both the short-term and long-term perspectives needed both to act now and to strengthen our “building capacity” to take on the larger long-term changes that are needed.
The scope and the rich detail in the essay ought to inspire our motivation!
A realistic appraisal and an encouraging incentive to take up the challenges and “from the same public-interest perspective,” make whatever contributions one can to appropriate responses!
Our thanks to Heather Menzies and to the Canadian Centre for Public Policy, for theirs.
Élan
