Dec 2002 /Jan 2003
Don't
Let The Lights Go Out
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Madison's
Ghost on the Intoxicated Presidency … and its Corporate Support Group
Thom Hartman
The
Global Justice Movement
Starhawk
Frozen
Past and Dancing Present: Our Personal Response to Change
David la Chapelle
The
Consequences of Denial
John Darling
Cashing
in On Cool: How Corporations Exploit Kids and How We Can Stop It
Roar Ramesh Bjonnes
The
Blue Gold Rush
Kayla M. Starr
Feng
Shui: Smoke and Mirrors
Sugeet
Jin
Shin Jyutsu: An Artless Art, Applied With Effortless Effort
Robert Nelson
Foods
that Help Diabetics
Rebecca Wood
A
Healing Principle for Helpers
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP
Ayurveda
Winter Support
Myrica Morningstar
Circumcision
is a Human Rights Issue
Pamela Jorrick
The
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
The
Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
The Global Justice Movement
By Starhawk
What does the global justice movement want? What is our vision, our picture of an ideal society and economy? When we say “Another world is possible,” what kind of a world are we talking about?
The global justice
movement is diverse. It ranges from union leaders who want to secure a fair
share of this economy for their members to old-line Marxists, to anarchists,
to indigenous communities struggling to preserve their traditional lands and
cultures. No one picture of the world can describe all the different viewpoints.
No one vision may actually serve this tremendous diversity. And how could
it? How could the aspirations of an urban office worker in Chicago be the
same that of a Mayan farmer in Chiapas? Why should we think that one form
of economy or social organization should serve all?
Nevertheless, there are certain commonalities, deep principles and operatives,
that I believe are shared across the broad range of the movement. Here are
nine points that attempt to define that common ground. Some branches of the
movement might feel these principles don’t go far enough; they envision
a society transformed in more far-reaching ways. I am not trying to describe
an ultimate ideal here, but articulate what I see as the points of minimum
agreement in the broader global justice movement.
1. We must protect the viability of the life-sustaining systems of the planet, which are everywhere under attack. The current global corporate capitalist system is unsustainable. It is based on a premise of unending growth, in a world of finite resources. It produces enormous quantities of wastes, pollutants, and toxins, and depends on the common resources of air, water, and land to absorb them, thereby externalizing its true costs onto those who suffer from its impacts.
A system of sustainable abundance would mean that the true social and ecological costs of each product are accounted for rather than being externalized. Our first priority would be to end pollution at its source, not just to mitigate or clean it up. We would immediately begin a shift to the development and use of renewable resources and clean, renewable energy sources. We would protect biodiversity, habitat, and the diversity of ecosystems. We would ban potentially disastrous experiments such as the introduction of genetically engineered organisms. We would drastically reduce carbon emissions and attempt to forestall global warming. We would ban nuclear weapons. These ideas may seem impractical or Utopian, but in fact the technology already exists or is in development to do most of them. In their book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken discuss many examples of companies who have put these principles into practice and found them actually profitable even under the current system.
2. A realm of the sacred exists, of things too precious to be commodified, and must be respected. “Sacred” may mean places that have special meaning to indigenous cultures or local communities, ecosystems such as old-growth forests so irreplaceable and beautiful that to exploit them is a desecration, aspects of culture and the human heritage that are vitally important to a society, and the basic life resources such as water that we all need to survive. This principle implies that there should be a limit to commerce, however it is organized, that Jesus had a point when he chased the moneylenders out of the temple, that a social and cultural space must be reserved outside the marketplace, however the market is organized.
3. Communities must control their own resources and destinies. Both natural and human resources are best preserved and allocated by the communities where they are found. Outside ownership and exploitation do not lead to shared abundance. Communities can only be secure when they have control over their own food, water, energy sources, and other life support systems. Outside institutions such as the IMF and global trade agreements should not be allowed to dictate policies that override the democratic decisions made by communities.
Certainly not all communities are enlightened, and local communities are capable of exploiting their own resources in destructive ways. But communities also have a vested interest in the long-term health of their environment and the sustainability of their resources. Complex negotiations between the needs and rights of individuals, communities, and the larger society will always be necessary under any system that recognizes all levels of rights. If this principle were followed as part of a whole system defined by all these nine points, excesses would be kept in check.
4. The rights and heritages of indigenous communities must be acknowledged and respected. Indigenous communities are nations with a right to sovereignty over their lands and the right to protect their cultures and traditions. International agreements among “nations” must include a voice for indigenous people; they must be on an equal footing with other nations.
5. Enterprises must be rooted in communities and be responsible to communities and to future generations. The purpose of business, however it is organized and administered, is to serve the community. Businesses and enterprises need a specific community that they are account-able to; they need to be rooted in a place and must not be infinitely free to chase around the globe seeking the lowest labor prices and the most lax safety standards. Accountability extends to future gener-ations: enterprises cannot liquidate their assets, clearcut their standing old growth, mine their soil, or exhaust their resources to satisfy a short-term need for profits. Businesses are responsible parts of a whole economic ecology that needs to last into the long-term future.
6. Opportunity and support for human beings to meet their needs and fulfill their dreams and aspirations should be open to all. All forms of discrimination, all false privileges based on gender, race, class, age, ability, place of origin, sexual orientation, etc. should be abolished. This principle leads directly to a world of greater abun-dance, for we would no longer stifle the creativity and innovation of much of the human race.
7. Labor deserves just compensation, security, and dignity. People who labor deserve to be paid enough to live with dignity, to enjoy safe working conditions, to have maximum control over their work lives, to be treated with respect, to enjoy job security, and to have security in case of illness or injury. Child labor, slave labor, and prison labor as well as pay standards below a living wage are unacceptable.
8. The human community has a collective responsibility to assure the basic means of life, growth, and development for all its members. As a community, we bear a responsibility for each other. At times, disease, injury, emotional breakdown, or sheer bad luck may plague us all. We need to help each other bear our burdens and weather the rough passages in life, and to do so graciously not as charity but as an aspect of our human solidarity, in ways that respect and empower those in need. A strong public health system is part of our basic security. Public support for education determines the level of awareness of those citizens who will one day enact laws and elect representatives. A community is an organism—we must support its overall health and functioning if any part is to function well.
9. Democracy means people having a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions. In a representative democracy, we have some voice in choosing who will make decisions for us. In a direct democracy, we have a voice in the actual decisions themselves. Of course, on the scale of a nation as large as the United States, a purely direct democracy would be impractical. But this principle implies that we attempt to organize on scales in which people can have a voice in many of the decisions that impact their lives, and that we extend the principle of democracy to some nontraditional areas. Most businesses are currently organized on a top-down decision-making model. Democratic enterprises would encourage input from all levels and would favor self-management, worker ownership, and community input.
Differing Economic Visions
While I think the global justice movement does have areas of broad agreement as described above, the devil is in the details. We would undoubtedly have much dis-agreement on how best to implement them, on what an ideal system might look like.
Some, such as the Lovinses, Hawken, and David Korten, favor a democratic or “mindful” market economy, relieved of the worst abuses of the current system, counting the true costs of what it produces. They maintain that the rewards for sustainability will be inherent in the system once we remove the supports for the current destructive practices. Hawken talks about a Restorative Economy, which would not only prevent further ecological abuses but encourage further earth-healing.
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s Participatory Economics identifies four qualities of a beneficent economic system: equity, solidarity, diversity, and partici-patory self-management. Albert and Hahnel picture a world in which labor is fairly rewarded and fairly distributed, where work is divided into balanced job complexes that combine the sorts of tasks by which people are traditionally empowered and the tasks by which they are not. Decisions are made not by the market but by democratic councils that determine needs and capacities, and people are rewarded for effort and sacrifice, not necessarily for talent or skill.
Gen Vaughn’s Gift Economy is perhaps the most truly radical. A feminist, she sees communication as gift-giving and exchange as an alienated form of communication. She reminds us that the gift of life nurturing mothers—and fathers—give to children is perhaps the basic economy of life. An economy modeled on the nurturing values that women have embodied might pose the ultimate challenge to patriarchal capitalism.
Bioregionalists favor local sustainability. Anarchists speak of networks of self-managed communities. And, of course, every type of Socialist preaches every variation on state support and control of some areas of production and private control of others.
Any of these systems could be adapted to the nine principles listed above. Again, in a diverse world we may need a spectrum of systems to fully fit each unique set of circumstances. And anyone who has ever tried to work collectively or to help run a cooperative enterprise knows that much experimentation will be needed to develop the skills and processes needed for a new form of social organization. Our visionary political efforts might best be directed not toward putting in place some preconceived system but toward creating the conditions in which that experimentation can begin.
Drawing on the nine principles above, if we were to seek a commonly agreed-upon definition for what an economy should do, we might be able to agree on the following:
The job of the
economy is to produce security and abundance for all, equably, efficiently,
and sustainably, in a way that furthers human freedom and mutual solidarity,
that strengthens our bond to place, and that protects the interests of future
generations.
Security means that people can look forward to maintaining a reasonable standard
of comfort, health, and beauty in their lives, and do not have to fear for
their families’ survival.
Abundance means we value pleasure and beauty as well as survival. Abundance
is more than survival; it means bread and roses, enough resources to allow
us to indulge our creativity and curiosity, time for play as well as for work.
Equably does not mean that all people are rewarded exactly equally, but that
all are fairly rewarded, that some forms of work are not overvalued while
others are undervalued, that vast gaps in income and opportunity do not exist.
Efficiency, the watchword of the global power mongers, takes on a new meaning:
the use of the least amount of nonrenewable energy and resources possible
to do the job.
Sustainably means that our enterprises can continue on indefinitely because
they are based on renewable energy and resources and the waste products they
produce can become resources as well.
Solidarity means that we support each other through the vicissitudes of life
and that no one has to bear the brunt of misfortune alone.
A name for this economic system might be Restorative Economic Democracy. Restorative,
because its task is to heal the wounds and excesses left from our current
system, to restore habitat, diversity, abundance, and hope. And democracy,
to imply participation in decision-making at every level.
Generating Abundance
Any model we create must be based on real abundance, on the productivity of the natural and human resources involved. No one is eager to trade in this system for a life of privation and grim sacrifice under the control of the Commissars. But how do we generate abundance?
I’m not an economist, which may be an advantage. Hazel Henderson claims that economics is a form of brain damage. I am a gardener, and I attempt to garden in line with ecological principles, some of which are articulated in a system called “permaculture,” developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, that lays out some ground rules for applied ecological design. It may be that gardening and ecology have more to teach us about abundance than the current dysfunctional economic theories.
There are five basic ways to generate abundance:
• New inputs of energy. In a sustainable system, the energy we use would be renewable, ultimately deriving from that free gift of solar energy that every day arrives on the planet. The sun drives the wind and the tides, sustains plant growth, and ultimately provides nearly all the energy in use on the planet. Oil and coal are the stored solar inputs of the past and are not renewable in any human time scale, so their use should be extremely costly.
• New inputs of materials and labor. Again, in a sustainable system renewable and nontoxic materials would be favored; nonrenewables would become extremely expensive. Our current system replaces human labor and energy with oil-based energy; a sustainable system might reverse that trend and find empowering and productive ways to use the renewable resource of human labor.
• Recycling. Abundance in natural systems does not depend on how much of a substance comes into the system, but on how many times it is used before it passes out. Human economies also thrive when every dollar that enters a local economy is cycled through many, many times before it leaves. Abundance can be created not necessarily by generating more cash but by finding ways to recirculate the money and the value it represents.
In nature, waste is food. Every by-product of a process becomes the source of some other process. Decay breeds fertility. We could design our production processes so that every part of a product either can be reused or reprocessed or can decay naturally into fertilizer.
• Creativity and innovation. Creativity is perhaps our only unlimited resource. Creativity thrives in conditions of freedom, dignity, hope, and respect. Societies that oppress whole groups of people, that limit the opportunities of women or people of color or the poor, cut off their potential human resources and ultimately impoverish themselves.
In nature, the edge where two systems meet is often the most creative place. The tide pools, where the ocean meets the land, teem with life and diversity. Of course, each system must be large and intact enough to function well. A forest that is so cut up it becomes all edge cannot provide viable habitat for many creatures.
In human society, the edge where different cultures, social systems, and worldviews meet is often an extremely creative edge. The cultural edge where African and European musical traditions meet, to take one example, generated jazz, blues, soul, rock & roll, rap, hip hop. Cultural hegemony, the superceding of indigenous cultures and local traditions with one global McDonald’s/shopping mall/superstore, destroys edge and diversity and undermines our potential for the creative innovations that could increase real abundance.
• Efficiency. Efficiency really means doing more with less, as Buckminster Fuller said. If we can accomplish the same ends using less resources, we have freed them up to produce more abundance. Permaculturalists talk of “stacking functions”—making sure that every clement of a system serves more than one function. So I might plant comfrey under my apple tree to keep the grass down, draw up nutrients from the soil, provide mulch, and give me a valuable healing herb. So, too, in an economic system, each element should fulfill more than one need. The city of Arcata, California, for example, treats its sewage by running it through designed wetlands, which not only process the sewage but also provide habitat for birds and animals as well as an area for local recreation and a tourist destination.
The old economic model is based on the image of the frontier: there is always somewhere new to go, there are always new sources of materials and energy to explore and exploit. But we have now come close to the end of those resources. The model of endless expansion is leading us to the cannibalization of the very systems that support life on earth.
But possibilities of expanded abundance still exist, even when we acknowledge the limitations on finding new sources of resources and materials in a finite and well-exploited world. A restorative economic democracy generates abundance by shifting to the use of the resources that renew themselves, such as the sun’s energy, and by improving our efficiency, through conservation and better use of what we have. Recycling and recirculation of inputs are another source of abundance. And finally, human creativity and ingenuity are an unlimited resource when we provide the conditions in which they can flourish.
Security And Stability
Human beings also long for security, for the assurance that they can look forward to a benign future. No one-wants to spend their old age penniless and homeless or see their children go hungry or lack opportunities. Responsible adults are assumed to base their economic and career decisions on their concern for security rather than on their wilder dreams and desires. Our current economic system does not meet that need. Jobs are no longer secure; the cost of living rises faster than wages. Real estate speculation drives up the price of homes and land, and the economically marginal are made homeless. A restorative economic democracy should meet our need for security.
In an ecosystem, security or long-term stability comes from the following:
• Diversity. Diversity gives a system resilience. A forest composed of many different kinds of trees will resist a pest better than a tree plantation of genetically identical cloned Douglas fir. Of course, diversity has limits: a mango won’t grow in a Canadian maple grove. But a secure economy needs diversity. It cannot be based on only one source. Third World countries are often forced to depend on one major export; as a result, when world prices fall or a bad year reduces the harvest, they are devastated.
• Redundancy. Permaculturalists design more than one element to meet every need. So, if food is a need, we have more than one source in the garden. If the tomatoes fail, we can still eat squash. In an economy, we also need more than one source to provide income.
• Balance. The limiting factor in any system is that which is in shortest supply. A stable system remains within its limits. I plant my garden according to the small amount of water I know will be available in August, not according to how much I have on hand in the spring at the end of the winter rains. A stable system lives off the extra energy provided by the sun; it doesn’t deplete its essential resources. It limits its growth and expansion to what can be fueled by that free solar energy. A stable system does not use more resources than it has.
• Change. “Stable” does not mean “static.” Real stability is dynamic: it responds to changes in circumstance and returns to equilibrium. A truly stable system is open to change and provides ways in which changes can be integrated.
So a restorative economic democracy is not one huge monolithic structure, but a mosaic of interlocking systems that foster diversity, edge, and exchange.
Our problems are not insurmountable—solutions already exist to most of our major ecological problems. Now we need the political will and power to put those solutions into place in a just and equable way.
To make those changes, we need a change in our way of thinking. We need to learn to see patterns, to think in terms of flows and connections rather than isolated objects, to plan for and design the connections rather than focus on the things they connect. This sounds simple but it is actually quite difficult to practice even on the scale of a garden, let alone the world. But we need to do it. It is the direction of our cultural evolution, and it will give us the perspective we need to see not only where we want to go, but how to get there.
And so the revolution unfolds. We don’t have to wait for it, we can be it, live it now. Another world is possible, and necessary, and here. We are its co-creators, its dreamers, its defenders, its midwives, guiding it to light, bringing it to birth.
Excerpted with permission from Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, New Society Publishers, 2002;Paperback, ISBN: 0-86571-456-8; $17.95.
Starhawk is a global justice activist whose previous books include The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Twelve Wild Swans. Readers are invited to visit Srathawk’s website, www.starhawk.org, and to subscribe to her list at http://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/starhawk.
