The following article appeared in Left Business Observer #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.
Antiglobalization
Since the heavily advertised death of socialism, if there's an idea that
unites much leftish economic thought today, it's that globalization is the
root of many evils. It's a strangely amorphous enemy, one at odds with the
usual progressive celebration of diversity, and an interesting shift for a
tradition that was once deeply cosmopolitan.
An excellent laboratory for studying antiglobalism was assembled in New York
in November by the International Forum on Globalization, "a project of El
Bosque." El Bosque is a project of Doug Tompkins, cofounder of Esprit. The
one delightful thing about the conference was the attendance -- 2,000, with
a pleasingly low median age. Many more of these conferences are promised
over the next few years.
The opening plenary, held in Riverside Church (a project of the Rockefeller
family), assembled a long night's worth of speakers -- Maude Barlow (Council
of Canadians), John Cavanagh (Institute for Policy Studies), Barbara Dudley
(Greenpeace), David Korten (author), Ralph Nader, Carl Pope (Sierra Club),
and Vandana Shiva (Third World Network). The MC was adman Jerry Mander, who
believes that TV, which he hates, will soon implode of its own
contradictions. Mander is on the board of El Bosque and is the program
director for Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology, whose funding was
acknowledged, along with that of the Goldsmith Foundation.
Korten's book When Corporations Rule the World embodies a lot of the
antiglobalist thinking common among progressive nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) and the philanthropists who fund them. The volume,
subsidized in part by Tompkins, is blurbed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; John
Cavanagh and Richard Barnet, authors of Global Dreams; catalog merchant and
economic moralist Paul Hawken; Doug Tompkins; and Teddy Goldsmith, editor of
The Ecologist. The New Internationalist just reviewed it enthusiastically.
In his prologue, Korten says he was born "into a conservative, white
upper-middle-class family" who ran a retail business in a small Washington
timber town -- and the unexamined consciousness of a small-town worthy
permeates the entire book. He went to Stanford, got an MBA and PhD; taught
at the Harvard Business School, which he left for the Ford Foundation and
then the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). Korten shares
these details "to establish the depth of [his] conservative roots" -- a
theme that recurs in his hymns to Adam Smith. While with AID, Korten had an
epiphany -- AID was too big, too bureaucratic, and too centralized, stifling
local autonomy and initiative. He left AID for the NGO world, where people
were "asking basic questions about the nature and process of development."
Korten exhibits an American distaste of big government, without noticing
that the U.S. has one of the most decentralized state systems on earth. This
decentralization has accomplished not local "empowerment" (a word that
deserves a long vacation) but fragmentation, duplication, and bidding wars
for corporate investment -- not to mention Jim Crow laws.
The Garden
It's common in quasi-radical thinking to imagine a Golden Age with a better
set of rulers, now displaced by vile usurpers. In the old days, says Korten,
"rich and poor alike...shared a sense of national and community interest."
So "the problem is not business or the market per se but a badly corrupted
global economic system that is gyrating far beyond human control. The
dynamics of this system have become so powerful and perverse that it is
becoming increasingly difficult for corporate managers to manage in the
public interest, no matter how strong their moral values and commitment."
When was this Golden Age? The 1960s, when GE was filling the Hudson with
PCBs? The 1930s, when Chase was banking with Nazis? Or the 1890s, when
Carnegie's Pinkertons shot strikers? Was it the 1850s, when British
industrialists kidnapped children to work in their factories, and when the
locally owned bakeries of London worked their staffs up to 20 hours a day to
produce bread fortified with, in the words of a contemporary, "a certain
quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses,
cobwebs, dead cockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand
and other agreeable mineral ingredients"?
Golden Age myths belong to literature, not nonfictions, but even there they
vanish on close inspection. As Raymond Williams tells it in The Country and
the City, Leavis' 1930s culture lamented the loss of the "organic community"
of the turn of the century; just before the century's turn, Hardy wrote of
the lost England of the 1830s; the 1830s had Cobbett writing of the paradise
of the 1770s...on back to Piers Plowman. In the Golden Age mode, says
Williams, a feudal order is idealized as more "natural"; sure enough, one of
the globalization conference panelists described the Middle Ages as a time
of "real community." But, for "the uncountable thousands who grew crops and
reared beasts only to be looted and burned and led away with tied wrists,
this economy, even at peace, was an order of exploitation of a most
thoroughgoing kind: a property in men as well as land; a reduction of most
men to working animals, tied by forced tribute, forced labour, or 'bought
and sold like beasts....'"
Asceticism
Antidevelopmentalists typically complain about how big business stokes the
desire for things to keep the flywheel of consumption turning. Korten holds
up Nike as an example of "the distortions of an economic system that shifts
reward away from those who produce real value to those whose primary
function is to create marketing illusions to convince consumers to buy
products they do not need at inflated prices." But capitalism has always
been a system that shifts rewards away from the real producers of value. And
illusion-makers are not the prime reward-getters -- senior managers and
stockholders are.
Greenish postmoderns, their elitist asceticism never far from the surface,
prefer to talk about consumption rather than the ownership and organization
of production. Sure Nike exploits the hell out of Indonesian workers to make
big money on overpriced sneakers, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong
with the desire to wear stylish shoes.
In a rant like Korten's, the list of woes barely admits any progress -- the
lengthening of lives, the reduction in infant and maternal mortality, the
partial liberation of women, the spread of literacy -- in the First and
Third Worlds. Of course there's a chasm between what is and what could be,
but what could be depends a lot on what is. It's evil that Merck will steal
plants from indigenous people and then patent them, and be protected for
doing so under international trade law, but the plants wouldn't do much good
if it weren't for some large, complex organization to develop and process
them. Socialize Merck, don't dissolve it.
Algebra of need
In developing a prototype for utopia, Korten points to a group of countries
that Alan Durning of the Worldwatch Institute called "sustainers"
($700-7,500 per capita income), vs. the "overconsumers" ($7,500+) and
"excluded" (under $700). These correspond to what the World Bank calls,
respectively, middle, high, and low-income countries. To Korten and Durning,
the middle group (which includes Indonesia, Mexico and Russia) offers the
model of a sustainable life.
Those middle-income countries have, on average, life expectancies 9 years
shorter than the high-income (77 vs. 68); a female illiteracy rate of 30%,
compared with less than 5%; an infant mortality rate of 39 per 1,000 live
births, vs. 7. They include the victims of the structural adjustment
programs that antidevelopmentalists rightly criticize; it's strange to see
them as models. It's especially strange that a Malthusian should, since the
"sustainers'" population growth rate is three times that of the rich
countries.
Korten, who even mentions Malthus by name, gingerly endorses the goal of
bringing the world's population down to 1-2 billion from the present 5.7
billion, though without saying how. Malthus, at least, was honest enough to
advocate the promotion of death: "Instead of recommending cleanliness to the
poor, we should encourage contrary habits." Korten probably isn't a partisan
of mortality-promotion, but advocating the disappearance of billions of
people without saying how invites terrible speculations.
Back to Smith!
Globalization is shorthand for our evolution into a single borderless
economy, with free flows of money and goods, under the dominance of several
hundred giant corporations. LBO has spent a lot of time denouncing those
things, but never out of a nostalgia for a past that never was.
The demon of the book -- like that of many populist screeds, left and right
-- is the "corporation." To Korten, corporations betray Adam Smith's ideal
of competitive markets, by reaching for monopoly and smothering "local
enterprise." He seems unaware of Karl Polanyi's claim that free markets
impose an unbearable discipline on participants, resulting in deflation in
the economic realm and atomization in the social. Korten seems equally
unaware of economic history. Despite myths of free competition among small
producers, early capitalist Britain was plagued by local monopolies; a town
often had a single baker, a single brewer, rather than an array of vendors
in benign competition. It wasn't until the development of national markets
that real competitive markets developed.
Early capitalism wasn't as local and personal as myth has it; from its
beginning it was deeply international. In the U.S., early 19th century
merchants imported British industrial goods and exported cotton, acting as
financiers at every stage. Their financial arrangements, in Alfred
Chandler's words, were a "long chain of credit stretching from the banks of
the Mississippi to Lombard Street" in London. Rarely did merchants know the
consumers and producers they brought together, a commerce accomplished
through a "long chain of middlemen, transporters, and financiers who moved
the goods through the economy." Moving a good and its payment from one place
to another required a long chain of credits; every player was on the hook to
someone else. When the chain was broken, the disruption quickly spread --
one reason for the severity of 19th century financial panics. For all the
complaint about modern instability, the 19th century was far more volatile,
with panics leading to depressions every decade or so. This was the Smithian
market -- anonymous, atomized, unstable.
Market apologists always ignore the costs of market transactions --
comparison shopping takes time, and there's always the risk that you may get
burned in any deal -- which can be reduced when things are done within the
walls of a single firm rather than through outside markets. While many
crimes, from price-fixing to murder, aided the creation of the modern giant
firm, there are great advantages to be gained from planning production on a
larger-than-local scale.
Stinking money
Along with globalization, another of Korten's usurpers is money,
specifically the landless, unreal kind that flows through fiber optic
cables. Of course the reign of money is horrid, and even absurd, but under
capitalism people work and do business for money; money is one of our most
fundamental principles of social organization. The end of capitalist
production is profit, which comes in money form, and people who accumulate
capital have long shown a propensity to keep it in as liquid a form as
possible.
It's no surprise that a system run for money would devise exotic ways of
multiplying it. Korten rightly decries the financial explosion, the $1.2
trillion hurtling about the globe every day, as the volatile,
pointless-to-destructive force it is. But it's as difficult to separate
finance from capitalist reality as it is to separate money itself; finance
is money evolved into more exotic forms. Nor are the exotics recent
inventions; futures markets go back a century, options go back three, and
foreign exchange gimmickry goes back seven or more. British foreign holdings
a century ago were far larger in relative terms than anything seen today. To
lament the way money can accumulate while leaving human needs unmet is to
lament capitalism, not some recent mutation.
Visions
At the end of his book, Korten offers a vision -- of disarmament, tolerance,
gender equality, less consumption, global trust-busting, debt writeoffs, the
transformation of international financial institutions into democratic,
cooperative institutions, voluntary executive salary caps, grassroots
democracy, etc. He offers a vision of "a market economy composed primarily,
though not exclusively, of family enterprises, small-scale co-ops,
worker-owned firms, and neighborhood and municipal corporations."
Much of this is desirable. But it would be impossible to run a complex
economy on this scale only; it's easy to imagine furniture being made this
way, but not trains and computers. If Korten means to do away with trains
and computers, he should tell us. Leaving aside the matter of scale, any
significant restructuring of the ownership of production would be taken as a
fight to the death by the existing owners.
But that's not a worry for Korten, because there will be a revolution in
consciousness, which will unleash a new cooperative spirit "of those within
the system -- including those who head our major corporations and financial
institutions -- in addition to the efforts of citizen movements working
outside it." There's a habit in books like this to present what seems like a
reasonable set of demands and think our rulers will suddenly slap their
foreheads, saying, "Ah! We were wrong!" There's no awareness that a serious
transformation of corporate behavior would require a serious political
threat to private ownership; without that threat, even New Dealish reform is
impossible. Instead, Korten points to "an obvious solution: create societies
that give a higher value to nurturing love than to making money." Gosh, yes,
that would be nice, but how do we get there? Some powerful people don't find
that solution so obvious.
Wandering localists
Korten and the antiglobalizers are right that economic growth doesn't
necessarily make people happier, and often makes them miserable; that
institutions like the World Bank have made the rich richer while making the
nonrich poorer; that conventional ideas of free trade are wonderful for
managers and stockholders, but hell on workers and nature; and that a turn
away from the accumulation of things and toward more humane pursuits would
be highly welcome.
But to turn from that to a dream of local self-sufficiency is suffocating
and reactionary. On this, Korten is outdone by some of his antiglobalizing
comrades. Kirkpatrick Sale wants to smash computers and live like the Amish,
who happily use antibiotics and sell their produce for cash while refusing
to participate in industrial life. The ecofeminist Vandana Shiva views
technology as a male disruption of the sacred woman-nature dyad, and
advocates a "subsistence" economic model. Shiva, it should be noted, is more
popular in the West than in India. As sociologist Shasti Mitter wrote in New
Left Review #205, the Bangladeshi women workers she's studied in both their
native country and London want jobs, training, and good wages, and do not
want to return to their villages.
Shiva opened her talk at the conference by noting that one of the "positive
externalities" of globalization was that she'd made so many good friends
around the world. Korten's acknowledgments describe his book as "the product
of an international collaboration" involving colleagues from around the
world. If "globalization" can produce such desirable things as friends and
books (even bad ones), perhaps it's wrong to name it as your main enemy.
It's ironic that people should rack up the frequent flier miles while
touting the virtues of localism -- writing books and running institutes
while telling the masses that they should stay home and tend to their
lentils. This recalls T.S. Eliot's remark that "on the whole it would appear
to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on
living in the place in which they were born." At least Eliot, who was born
in St. Louis but moved to London at age 26, was an avowed snob.
In its rejection of Marxism, much of the left no longer has a vocabulary for
cosmopolitanism, and has apparently given up hope of transforming technology
into something kind to people and the earth rather than to stockholders.
Vast numbers of people are angrily scared of what the economy is doing to
them, but foundation intellectuals, compromised by their blinkered vision
and their funders' conservatism, are no place to turn for answers.
go to followup article
Moneybags
Doug Tompkins, principal funder of the globalization roadshow, established
the Foundation for Deep Ecology (FDE) in 1991. In 1994, its assets were $34
million and it dispensed $2.5 million in grants. Another Tompkins
foundation, El Bosque Pumalin, is oriented towards his new home, Chile,
though based in San Francisco; it has funding guidelines nearly identical to
the FDE's. Tompkins made his fortune co-founding Esprit with his ex-wife
Susie Tompkins. He preferred the title "Image Director" to his official one
of president and CEO.
The FDE defines deep ecology as "a new movement among westerners that
rejects the prevailing anthropocentric (human centered) paradigm of
technological society, in favor of a biocentric ethic and practice." Nature
exists not as a life-support system for humans, but has its own "intrinsic
value." Whatever this means in theory, in practice it's often quite
anti-human. Tompkins' favorite theoretician, Dave Foreman, is one of the
founders of Earth First!, the folks who spiked trees in the 1980s. Foreman,
who dates The Fall at the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago,
welcomed an Ethiopian famine as nature's method of population control; a
columnist named Miss Ann Thropy wrote in EF!'s magazine during the days when
Foreman controlled it that AIDS, too, did valuable Malthusian work. Deep
Ecologists, according to Kirkpatrick Sale, think that the human population
of the earth, now approaching 6 billion, should be under 1 billion, with
some bids in as low as 100 million.
Tompkins funds the Wildlands Project, guided by Dave Foreman, which aims to
depopulate huge swathes of North America and return them to wilderness -- so
that "grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to Grizzlies in
Alaska," with "pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals." Unexplored
is the need, said to be recognized privately by Project members, to reduce
the human population by two-thirds for this "rewilding" to work. The FDE
also funds the scary Negative Population Growth and Carrying Capacity
Network. According to Jeff St. Clair of the Wild Forest Review, the FDE has
the strictest Malthusian litmus test of any enviro foundation.
In an act of private rewilding, Tompkins bought 670,000 acres of Chilean
forest for $12 million, making him the second-biggest landowner in Chile,
and probably earning himself a giant U.S. tax break. His holdings, which
divide the country in half, were assembled furtively, giving no clue of his
intentions. He wants to turn the land into a park, which he will give the
government, but Chilean nationalists are outraged. There is no question that
Chile has been ravaged since Pinochet's coup, but some local enviros say
Tompkins has done more political harm than ecological good.
Tompkins' stated principles don't stop the FDE's portfolio from holding
stocks or bonds of Allstate, which insures cars; Citicorp, and three foreign
banks, which fund the globalization the conference bemoaned; Fannie Mae,
which greases suburbanization; Grupo Televisa, the Mexican TV network, a
nice irony given their localist rhetoric and program director Jerry Mander's
hatred of TV; HCA-Hospital Corp. of America; Telefonos de Mexico, which Wall
Street viewed as a way of riding the NAFTA "boom"; and Wal-Mart, friend of
small towns everywhere.
Those stockholdings reflect the hypercapitalist way Tompkins first made his
money, selling stylish garb made in California and Third World sweatshops.
In 1972, Esprit shut a factory in San Francisco's Chinatown after the
workers organized a union; the NLRB rebuked Doug Tompkins' "paternalism" for
seeing the union as an expression of "ingratitude." Esprit took 10 years to
pay off the back wages the government ordered them to pay.
[Addition not in print version]
Asked to comment on this contradiction between the source of his wealth and
its present applications, Tompkins told LBO: Maybe you have me confused with
somebody else.
Another pot of money with a sleazy pedigree behind the Antiglobalization
roadshow is the foundation started by Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, the well-born
corporate raider who has now retired to statesmanship and philanthropy.
While his articles denouncing GATT were widely circulated by
anti-free-traders, his gifts to Margaret Thatcher were not. Goldsmith, the
model for the yacht-based raider in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, had a
rapacious career buying companies and shaking money out of them, with not a
moment's regard for human or natural consequences. One of his last raiderly
acts was the 1990 deal in which he swapped papermaker Crown Zellerbach for
friend of the earth Newmont Mining. One of the cost-savings moves he made
after taking over CZ in the 1980s, says St. Clair, was to sack the company's
environmental scientists; it was one of the few papermakers that bothered to
have any. And of course he fired up the chainsaws and went on a logging
spree, as always happens when financial reasoning is applied to trees.
==============
Any comment DCK?
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