The global civil society movement
Dec 2009
We should begin with a stark admission that for a couple of generations now, most people have acquiesced in the systematic destruction of the life systems upon which human well-being and planetary flourishing depends. There are layers of responsibility, of course. The poor and the powerless are blameless, and it is right and proper to point to the explosion of grassroots activism the world over. There is movement on the ground and, indeed, evidence of an emergence of an electronic grassroots. So, maybe, the seeds of a future fight-back have been sown. But there have been far too many amongst the people whom JK Galbraith called the ‘contented classes’ who have acquiesced as corporate power, financial irresponsibility and the organised looting of natural resources and socially produced wealth have bankrupted the global economy and destroyed the planet’s ecology.
There are honourable exceptions. And there’s more of them than official politics and the media would care to admit. The arguments of the critics are not merely silenced, they are deliberately misrepresented so as to be misunderstood. Yet, as the years go by, the radicals’ case is looking increasingly unanswerable.
The first misrepresentation is to call critics the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ on the basis of their opposition to the World Trade Organisation. Not so. It was a particular kind of globalisation that was in the sights of the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement. So I shall call the radicals ‘the global civil society movement’. In their sights was the iniquitous, repressive globalisation of the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is a body set up to define globalisation in terms of free trade, liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. This is the very economics that has brought the global economy to the abyss and which represents a particular form of globalisation, not globalisation as such. For the best part of a decade, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement was denigrated as backward, incoherent, clueless, and so was largely ignored. This allowed a very skewed version of globalisation to be put in the place of the promise of a global civil society. That global civil society represented a genuine globalisation, utterly distinct in every respect from the anarchy of the rich and powerful sought by the free traders. This ‘liberal’ globalisation was premised upon a highly volatile financial system built on unsustainable levels of debt. In what Paul Krugman describes as "one of the worst economic slumps in world history", Asia suffered financial collapse and millions of people in countries such as Indonesia fell below the poverty line. Instead of the global civil society, we got globalisation as the "liberal world order", and this benefited only a small proportion of the global population.
Another target of the global civil society movement (which is what I shall call the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ so as to express their true position) was corporate power and the way that it manipulated globalisation to its own ends of private profit. In flat contradiction of the principle of popular sovereignty, nation states were subject to corporate capture, with governments having neither the capacity nor the will to call them to public account. The result was a hollowing out of the public sphere and a further retreat of democracy.
Finally, the global civil society movement was a protest against the capital system and the way that it is destroying the environment and consuming finite resources at an ever increasing speed.
Caricatured, ridiculed, vilified, ignored – that should tell you something, you should always trust the political nostrils of the ruling class – the agenda of the global civil society movement has been entirely vindicated. The reward for going along with the globalisation agenda of the ‘liberal world order’ has been bankrupted states and economies, destroyed communities, displaced people and a despoiled planet. Well, people can’t say that they weren’t warned.
If someone points out that the roof is falling in on your head, you don’t question their building credentials for making such a diagnosis, you check whether there is some truth in their warning. If they further point out that the foundations of your house are sinking, you listen. Surely. But no. The cogent critique of globalisation and the way that it would undermine democracy, destroy the planet, ruin economies and bring down states went largely ignored. And so it all came to pass.
It’s not that the warnings fell on deaf ears, mind. Rather, the ears of the people were rather too full of the siren voices of ‘liberal’ globalisation to be able to hear the warnings clearly and heed their message. Our old friend TINA – there is no alternative – made her usual appearance as globalisation was presented as an inexorable force which proceeded with relentless historical inevitability. Having witnessed all these false determinisms come and go throughout the twentieth century, one would have thought people would have been immune by now to political leaders and elites of all kinds dressing up their particular politics in the shabby clothes of historical inevitability. But no, Tony Blair was allowed to declare that "these forces of change driving the future don't stop at national boundaries. Don't respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal." And from where do these forces come? Choosing, thinking, acting individuals as moral and creative change agents perhaps? The creation of the future is the task of human beings, not ‘vast impersonal forces’.
But Blair stands in no need of kiddie level philosophy. Like all tyrants who plead necessity, he had his own agenda, and he determined to insulate it from political controversy criticism and challenge. In presenting globalisation as an uncontrollable phenomenon, he took it out of the realm of political deliberation and thus denied citizens a voice and a choice. This is revealing. As the global civil society movement pointed out, globalisation in the form of the liberal world order was designed to subvert democracy. And that’s exactly what the architects of globalisation proceeded to do. This was an agenda about promoting the primacy of economics over politics. Globalisation in these terms has capital’s systemic economic determinism in its marrow. So we get the business interests promoting globalisation with a triumphalism that has lost all connection with the facts. In his book Just Capital, Adair Turner asserts that globalisation was making more people richer than ever before, "with better food ... longer lives" and "the freedom of personal mobility to move to new places". Of course, poverty remains the principal spur to mobility. It is also worth pointing out that the numbers of environmental refugees is now approaching the number of refugees from war, quite some achievement given the number of conflicts going on the world. Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, supposedly on the left of centre in politics, offered a collection, On the Edge, which urged global regulation to address the threat of financial instability, but nevertheless insisted that "the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it... it is a source of global enrichment".
Note the line ‘the absence of alternatives’. There are alternatives, it’s just that the likes of Giddens and Hutton are not prepared to entertain them. They carry on with the naïve belief that the system that is crashing around our ears is reformable. It is now plain where this complacency has ended.
As the global civil society movement argued from the first, the ‘liberal world order’ was neither liberal – it was forced through by governments in league with corporate elites – nor ordered – it was an anarchy of the rich and the powerful. The opponents of the liberal world order cited the revealing phrase "zones of sacrifice" for those whose environments and communities who were destroyed in this process of enrichment. Isaiah Berlin, a critic of marxist determinism and the whole idea of ‘laws of history’, coined the phrase ‘prophets with armies at their back’ to damn all those would-be tyrants citing historical necessity in order to impose their agenda upon the people, fanatics who are quite prepared to sacrifice the lives and happiness of millions to impose their system, regardless of what real individuals want or say.
Surely, the time must come when the human race finally learns to identify the false necessity behind such claims of inevitability. Surely, we all know Popper’s case against ‘moral futurism’ by now. The most eloquent articulation of this principle of individual responsibility over against the amorality of the historical process comes from Leszek Kolakowski:
No one is relieved of either positive or negative responsibility on the grounds that his actions formed only a fraction of a given historical process. A soldier is morally responsible for a crime committed on the orders of his superior; an individual is all the more responsible for acts performed—supposedly or in fact—on the orders of an anonymous history. If a thousand people are standing on a river bank and a drowning man calls for help, it is almost certain that one of the spectators will leap in to save him. This quasi-statistical certainty concerns a thousand people, but it does not eliminate the need for a moral evaluation of the specific person, that one in a thousand, who does jump into the river. Experience can assure us that one such man will be found in the crowd; and this certitude is analogous to those rare historical predictions that occasionally come true. But to be that precise person who, out of a thousand potential rescuers, carries out the prediction, which was based on large numbers, one must perform "by oneself," as it were, an action subject to moral judgment. By analogy, if there exists a social system which requires criminals for certain tasks, one can be sure it will always find them. But it does not follow that every individual criminal is absolved of responsibility, because in order to designate oneself for the role of such a tool of the system one must be a scoundrel "by oneself," one must voluntarily perform a specific act which is subject to moral judgment.
Thus we profess the doctrine of total responsibility of the individual for his deeds and of the amorality of the historical process. In the latter we avail ourselves of Hegel; in the former of Descartes. It was he who formulated the famous principle, whose consequences are not always visible at first glance, "There is not a soul so weak that it cannot, with good guidance, gain an absolute mastery over its passions." This means that we cannot explain away any of our actions on the grounds of emotion, passion, or the moral impotence to act differently, and that we have no right to transfer the responsibility for our conscious acts to any factor which determines our behavior; because in every instance we have the power to choose freely.
This assumption—which, as I have mentioned, can be accepted without contradicting the deterministic interpretation of the world—must also be extended to all the justifications we find for ourselves in historical necessities and historical determinism. Neither our personal, supposedly invincible emotions ("I could not resist the desire"), nor anyone's command ("I was a soldier"), nor conformity with the customs of one's environment ("everybody did it"), nor theoretically deduced exigencies of the demiurge of history ("I judged I was acting for the sake of progress") —none of these four most typical and popular rationalizations has any validity. This is not to say that these four types of determination do not actually occur in life, but merely to state that none of them releases us from individual responsibility, because none of them destroys the freedom of individual choice. Individual action remains in the absolute power of the individual. We walk the main roads of our life on our own: ‘Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself. . . .’ (Whitman)
Leszek Kolakowski Marxism and Beyond 1969: 161/2
We have no more reason to accept the inevitability of globalisation and the liberal world order than we had to accept the inevitability of Communism. We do not need to recognise the inevitability of anything in politics. I affirm the radical indeterminacy of the future in acknowledging the creating and knowledgeable moral agency of human beings. We should be cautious of all those who deny that agency. If something is historically inevitable, why are such people so keen and so active in its promotion?
But what we can say with certainty is that once the liberal world order was put firmly in place, financial crisis, debt, corruption of democracy and climate crisis became as inevitable as night following day.
The truth behind globalisation that Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand knew in 1999, Greece and Iceland have now come to know. And these are the first of many states to feel the pinch and/or fall. Savage public spending cuts was the medicine that the International Monetary Fund used to dispense to ailing countries in the developing world. It was about as much use as a course of leeches, but the rich certainly enjoyed the firesale that resulted, with assets expropriated at knock-down prices. As a result of our failure to press governments to curb the rapacious drive of corporations, driven by the capital system’s endless growth imperative to exploit natural resources, the global economy has crashed and the ecology of the planet has been vandalised, plundered and polluted. All over the world, an ecological catastrophe of one form or another is on the horizon. The acidification of the world's oceans is accelerating to an alarming extent, threatening all marine life. The world's soils were millions of years in the making, but a third of them are depleting faster than we can regenerate them. Australia is an incendiary cocktail of water scarcity, salination and soil erosion. Fires may well be a natural part of the Australian landscape, but this terrain has the potential for fires of unprecedented intensity. Alarmist? There’s plenty to be alarmed about.
Looking back on the critique offered by the global civil society movement, it is difficult not to be depressed at how slow and how little the human race learns. ‘Globalisation’ as the liberalisation of economic relations has been a decade of hubris that, all too predictably, has led to tragedy. And that is what is truly depressing – the fact that, despite all our technological sophistication and communication, we still have to go all the way back to ancient Greek for an appropriate term – hubris.
It seems that the common use of hubris in English to suggest pride or over-confidence is based on a misunderstanding of ancient texts. The term refers more accurately to intentionally dishonouring behaviour, and was a powerful term of moral condemnation in ancient Greece. It fits either way.
That said, we are in dire need of a recovery of our pride as citizens capable of standing up and dealing with the issue of climate change, ensuring proper and effective regulation of finance and the economy in general, reclaiming democracy against the entrenched power of corporations, and, most ambitious of all, putting some backbone into our political representatives. It used to be a joke in my history classes that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. It ought by now be abundantly clear that the liberal world order is anything but liberal, anything but global in the sense of universal, and anything but an order in the sense of harmony and balance – it is an anarchy of the rich and the powerful, coercive, partial and unstable. So don’t be surprised if the global economy and ecology is destroyed if you fail to act as citizens and moral agents, fail to assume responsibility for all that happens in the historical process and reign these forces of despoliation in. There really is no excuse now. The promises of globalisation may have seduced many a decade ago, but now we can see the reality - militarization and war, irresponsible financial power as a form of gambling that turned the economy into a global casino, the corporate capture of the state and the subversion of democracy, the rapacious plunder of the environment. The fallout - in terms of lost employment, income, services – has barely begun. Looking back to compare and contrast the false prospectus we were sold on globalisation with the critical worlds of the global civil society movement should wake us up to the fact that we are living in an anarchy of the rich and powerful which is destroying the life support systems on which human and planetary flourishing depends. It should now be well-nigh impossible for anyone to be able to argue for ‘progress’ in the form of historical inevitability, least of all for anyone to offer economic liberalism as the vehicle of that progress. From a longer perspective of history, we can now clearly see that these ‘prophets with armies at their backs’ are a breed endemic to the capital system, with its overriding concern to absorb all people and resources into ‘the machine’ for churning out surplus value. That’s how the system began, with the enclosures and the slave trade and the colonies. And the prophets of material progress are still at it, all the world over, still enclosing the global commons.
Additional, from 2014
Laying the Foundations of a World Citizens Movement
How can civil society organizations (CSOs) build a broad movement that draws in, represents and mobilises the citizenry, and how can they effect fundamental, systemic transformation, rather than trading in incremental change?
https://nickrobson.net.ky/2014/11/28/laying-the-foundations-of-a-world-citizens-movement/