One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ENCLOSURE

  Private control of resources, from land to electricity to gene lines; a world in which private interests buy up the world and sell it back to us, at mark-up.

  What do we do?

  If these are the key principles of this movement, then, what would a world based on them look like? Again, it’s possible to pull together some answers, and to lay out at least the beginnings of a strategy. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said, in these pages, that this movement has no manifesto; and that in many ways this is a good thing. It means there is no ‘one way’ for the world to go; it means that ‘one no, many yeses’ can be a basis for a set of practical principles, rather than just a slogan. I don’t plan to change my mind now, and what follows is not a watertight, prescriptive plan or, needless to say, a new Big Idea. But it is one way in which we could get where we want to go; and it’s a way based on ideas and principles that I’ve seen coming out of today’s movement.

  Globalisation creates exclusion, division and dependence. At every level it comes between people and their self-governance, people and their resources, people and their communities, people and nature, people and control of their economies, people and real human values. Change, then, has to come in two stages. The first task is to tear down those institutions, laws, ideas and systems which come between us and what we need and desire; to topple the menhirs of money that block out the sun. Only when the obstacles are gone will the second stage – building new worlds, new values, new systems, on a new paradigm – be able to properly take shape.

  Two stages, then:

  Stage One: Clearing the Ground

  Neoliberalism, corporate power, mass-marketed materialism, the unthinking pursuit of narrowly defined ‘growth’ – these are cancers eating away at people and planet alike. They are the barriers that stand between us and the world we want to see. We need to sweep away these barriers and build up strong systems, checks and balances to ensure they are not erected again. We need, in other words, to reshape politics and economics on different principles: those that favour people rather than power, measure ‘growth’ in very different ways, and value systemically what people value individually.

  This is no time for half-measures or gradual reforms. We need to clear the decks and start again. Here are just a few global proposals that would help make it happen:

  ABOLISH THE WTO, IMF AND WORLD BANK

  The whole of the post-war ‘Bretton Woods’ settlement is rotten; captured by corporate interests and making the world worse rather than better. All three institutions should be scrapped and new ones created, based on very different values. A good starting-point would be the suggestions laid out by the International Forum on Globalisation at the World Social Forum. Get rid of the Bank and the Fund, abolish the ‘structural adjustment’ principles that require countries to destroy their social services in the name of ‘efficient’ markets and replace them instead with democratic institutions under UN auspices, designed to wipe out Third World debt, limit international financial flows and ensure that the poor get their share of the world’s resources. As for the WTO: let’s replace it with an organisation whose purpose is to regulate trade strictly in the interests of environmental protection, poverty reduction and equity of access. The UK Green MEP Caroline Lucas, for example, has suggested replacing the WTO agreements with a ‘General Agreement on Sustainable Trade’, which would re-focus the global trading framework. Rather than basing development on WTO-style rules, which promote trade above all, a GAST would allow governments to promote local and national industries once more, abolish TRIPS and its like, promote sustainable farming and local economic activity, lock environmental protection into the global economic framework and generally turn the world’s economy the right way up again.

  TIE DOWN GLOBAL FINANCE

  ‘I sympathise,’ said the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1933, ‘with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be primarily national.’ Keynes was one of the founders of the World Bank and IMF, in the days when they were intended to be progressive rather than destructive institutions, and he understood only too well that when finance capital gets out of hand it eats human needs alive. Today, international banking systems and open flows of investment are holding elected governments to ransom. Elected to bring about systemic change in your country? If the markets don’t like it, they will destroy your economy in hours. This is at odds with every principle of democracy – if that word is to mean anything again, finance has to be reined in. Taxes on international financial speculation, re-regulating international banks and re-introducing exchange controls have all been suggested as methods of doing so. A new new world order should be one based on the real needs of real people in real places, not the instant gratification of traders, investors and shareholders, divorced from any responsibility for the real-world effects of their decisions.

  RE-PROGRAMME CORPORATIONS

  A corporation is a machine programmed to do two things: make profits and keep growing. Today, the machines have broken free of the boundaries set by their masters and are increasingly destroying anything that gets in the way of those goals – the environment, human rights, cultural differences, non-market values – like mad robots in a 1950s B-movie. Rafts of new regulations and voluntary commitments to ‘corporate social responsibility’ are nowhere near enough to tackle this problem. Corporations need to be re-invented; re-programmed, like those robots, with radical new rules designed to make them servants, not masters. The original model of corporate organisation in the USA can provide something of an idea for what these rules could be. Charters issued for specific purposes and up for regular renewal. Corporations forced to pay progressive taxes and remain accountable in one country. Bans on corporate involvement in politics. Directors and shareholders to have personal financial and legal liability for any crimes or misdemeanours committed by the corporation. To these, we could add other strictures: new laws requiring corporations to ‘internalise’ the costs they currently externalise on to society. For example, forcing oil companies to take financial and legal responsibility for their role in creating climate change; requiring forestry companies to add the massive cost of biodiversity loss to their balance sheets; making car firms, rather than society as a whole, pay for cleaning up air pollution, dealing with congestion and patching people up after road accidents. Local communities should have the right to decide how and if corporations operate in their area. We should impose strict controls on corporate media ownership and ban government subsidies and tax breaks to corporations. All of this, taken together, would change the world overnight.

  RE-CREATE THE UNITED NATIONS

  Strengthening and democratising the UN – not a simple or easy process, but probably a vital one – could provide a fair means by which the above measures could be achieved. Governments already agree to vast numbers of international laws, on everything from protecting labour rights to preventing climate change, which the UN, with scarce resources and an inadequate budget, is expected to administer. Usually, its efforts are undermined by the WTO, corporations, investors and governments themselves, who give the immediate demands of trade and commerce priority over more long-term goals like protecting biological diversity or preventing exploitation of the weak. So let’s strengthen the UN, fund it properly and give it what the WTO already has – the power to back up its laws and punish those who break them. Let’s bring regulation of trade and finance under UN auspices, creating a raft of new institutions like those suggested above. They, and all international agreements, should be based on a set of key principles: that all global economic activity should protect the environment, enhance equity, reduce poverty and be accountable to the people it affects, and that laws designed to protect the environmen
t, democracy and human rights should always take priority over trade. To do all of this would require a radical democratisation of the UN – granting poor countries as much say as rich ones, basing influence on population rather than wealth and refusing corporations or commercial interests any say in global decision-making.

  RE-THINK THE COMMONS

  Let’s also institutionalise a radical re-thinking of the relationship between private and public goods. Globalisation’s tendency is to privatise everything possible and turn it into a commodity; a process which adds numbers to balance sheets but denudes what life is really about. So here’s another task for that reformed UN: to define, protect and enhance the commons. Let’s ring-fence public goods and public places and ban the monopolisation of public resources by private interests. Let’s champion the civic and the public realm once again, and ensure through international law that certain institutions and goods are free from private incursion and market values for ever. Common land, as defined by communities. Public services – education, health care, public broadcasting, museums, libraries and more. Life itself, from gene lines to crop varieties. Water, space, the atmosphere – everything which provides a common good for people as a whole, should be bound in by strict rules guaranteeing public access and preventing private incursion.

  A GLOBAL CONVERSATION

  Finally, let’s set the stage for a global conversation about where the world is going and what we want from it. What is democracy and how can it be made to work? What do we mean by ‘growth’ or ‘development’? Are we happy about the direction in which the world is going? Are there universal human values, and if so, how do we turn them into actions? How can we balance local needs and global requirements? What more can be done to redistribute wealth and power on a global level, and ensure it stays that way? How are decisions made, and do we want to change it? The world is moving further and faster than at any time for centuries – possibly ever – and nobody, even those in power, seems to quite understand where. It’s time we instituted a global democratic conversation about it; a conversation in which, for once, the poor are heard as loudly as the rich and people, not special interests, make the running.

  Stage Two: Sowing the Seeds

  This, measured by the standards of the age, is an ambitious list. But it’s a minimum requirement for the kind of world this movement wants to see. It would go a long way towards clearing away the major obstacles which currently prevent people and communities defining their own relationship between themselves and the world they live in, and taking back their own sovereignty. It would open up a space in which genuine alternatives could flourish – a space in which those many yeses could come into fruition.

  Globalisation is about taking control away from people. To turn the world into a market and its people into consumers, it’s necessary to create economic and mental dependence. Ideas like those above are about moving us from dependence to sovereignty – real control by people, according to their needs. They are about hacking away the undergrowth and exposing the shoots of the new to a long-hidden burst of light.

  But they’re just a start. What happens then is up to us. Better worlds don’t just create themselves, and with the obstacles gone and illegitimate power locked down, the rest comes from below. This means that people need to act personally, at local and international levels, to make change happen: join organisations, set up our own, fight for our own communities, lobby those in power, get together with others to make things happen (the Appendix, ‘Action Stations’, includes just a few places to start). If we want a world with many worlds in it, no one can say quite what the results will be – every place will develop in its own way, within a global community of equals. Some ideas for rebirth are fairly universal, however. Real local democracy, for instance, with meaningful devolution of powers to community level, including control over resources and land-use, would return governance to the people it is supposed to belong to. A systemic bias in favour of local business and trade, communities’ rights to define economic activity in their area, political parties who actually disagreed with each other and were able to offer genuine national alternatives without being crushed by the markets – all these, and many more that we probably can’t yet imagine, could flower in a re-worked world. A thousand systems would be free to bloom.

  None of this is prescriptive. Plenty of people, within the movement as well as outside it, will undoubtedly disagree with at least some of it. Stage one and stage two will not operate in isolation; they can happen in tandem; they already are. But what is clear – as clear to me now as it was when I wrote my very first word – is that none of this – nothing – will happen at all, unless we make it happen. There will be no real change unless there is a worldwide popular movement with mass support and growing numbers able to demand it. This is already happening, but it needs to keep growing – in size and strength and reach and popularity. Power is never given up lightly, and serious change will not come about through asking politely. Demands, backed up by numbers, are the only thing that will make it happen.

  There is more to it, though, even than this – for even making demands, however forcibly and visibly you do it, is not enough. This is something people were aware of everywhere I went. None of them had any intention of sitting around politely drumming their fingers while their elected representatives came up with the goods. This is a movement that, through practice and principle, is doing for itself what others won’t do for it. It takes back space, reconnects wires, declares autonomy, creates its own alternatives without asking anyone’s permission. That is its great strength. It’s not a parade of lobbyists, it’s a massing of people who are already making change happen where they live, in their own way. And while they call for those great systemic changes that will allow their visions to become a wider reality, they go ahead at local level and create those realities themselves. As they do, they re-create their own sovereignty, become what they demand – emerge from the consumer chrysalis to become citizens once again. After that, there is no going back. It is transformation.

  Everywhere I go I have seen this: people who won’t wait, can’t wait: people creating their own worlds without asking permission. And as this movement grows and spreads, and as more people understand that democracy does not mean marking a piece of paper every five years, but defining your own community and creating your own world, this will grow. As it does, and as the numbers involved do too, there may be no choice for those at the top but to begin making changes themselves; real ones. In the meantime, though, change is already being constructed – from the bottom, not from the top. It may not be very long before the world’s governors have to confront a very uncomfortable question indeed: how many people need to opt out of your system before it stops being a system at all?

  We are at a unique moment in history. It is more fragile than it seems. What we thought was democracy is stalling, private power is becoming entrenched, old systems are failing to meet new needs. It may be that when historians look back on this moment, and this movement, they will see the beginnings of a new democratic revolution – a new stage in democracy’s journey. It may be that people will look back on today’s belief that ‘democracy’ means choosing a ruling elite from two gatherings of remote figures in suits as a historical anachronism, as hard to understand as support for slavery or absolute monarchy. It may be that today’s model of ‘democracy’ is just a staging-post on the long road towards the real thing. It may be that this movement will help us all to travel further in that direction.

  There are words of warning to be heeded, though. A fragile world could succumb, too, to the siren call of the far right, that trusted repository of easy solutions when destabilising change comes too fast. Governments could crack down, as they are beginning to do, on peaceful and legitimate dissidents, under the all-encompassing banner of ‘anti-terrorism’. Or that terrorism itself, often feeding too on the insecurities created by globalisation, could prove more powerful and long-lasting than most hope, and drown out peaceful calls
for a just transformation.

  Then there is this movement itself: it is far from complete and far from perfect. Will it unite around one call for change, adopt a manifesto, elect representatives to put its cause on the world stage? If it does, will it survive as anything new and meaningful? Will it split and split again, and will those splits matter? Will it remain democratic? Will it develop a clearer identity in the eyes of the world? Can it sustain its momentum? Can it pull more people in, and keep developing, as it has so far done so successfully? Hard questions. We don’t yet know the answers.

  But I can’t help being optimistic, and my optimism comes from the answers I find to a few simple questions. Has a movement this big ever existed before? Has such a diversity of forces, uncontrolled, decentralised, egalitarian, ever existed on a global scale? Has a movement led by the poor, the disenfranchised, the south, ever existed at all, without being hijacked by intellectual demagogues or party politicians in a way that this movement looks unlikely, because of both its principles and its organising methods, ever to do? How have we achieved so much in such a short time? Do the world’s people want to listen? Are we going in the right direction? Are we gaining in momentum? I get the right answer to every one of these questions, and every one of those answers help to answer another: can the world afford to ignore this any more?

  Above all, I have come to see that a belief in real, lasting change is the first step to bringing it about. Everywhere we turn we are told that globalisation is irreversible, that history has ended, that capitalism is triumphant, that everything about the way the world is currently set up is essential and unavoidable if we want ‘growth’, ‘progress’ and ‘development’. This sort of talk is supposed to be ‘realistic’. It’s nothing of the sort: it’s a failure of the imagination dressed up as a political opinion.