AGE OF CONSENT EPUB ED EB

George Monbiot

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780007150434
• eBook ISBN: 9780007379545
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A manifesto for a new world order.

Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot sets out now with this book to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals – political, democratic, economic, environmental – that might affect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.

'The Age of Consent' is provocative, brave, even utopian. But, with most of the 20th century's Big Ideas dead in the gutter, it's time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War II.

CHAPTER 1
The Mutation

In his novel Atomised, Michel Houellebecq writes of the ‘metaphysical mutations’ which have changed the way the world’s people think.

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it moves inexorably towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, ethical considerations and social structures. No human agency can halt its progress – nothing, but another metaphysical mutation.¹

These events are, as Houellebecq points out, rare in history. The emergence and diffusion of Christianity and Islam was one; the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science another. I believe we may be on the verge of a new one.

Throughout history, human beings have been the loyalists of an exclusive community. They have always known, as if by instinct, who lies within and who lies without. Those who exist beyond the border are less human than those who exist within. Remorselessly, the unit of identity has grown, from the family to the pack, to the clan, the tribe, the nation. In every case the struggle between the smaller groups has been resolved only to begin a common struggle against another new federation.

Our loyalties have made us easy to manipulate. In the First World War, a few dozen aristocrats sent eight million men to die in the name of nationhood. The interests of the opposing armies were identical. Their soldiers would have been better served by overthrowing their generals and destroying the class which had started the war than by fighting each other, but their national identity overrode their class interest. The new mutation will force us to abandon nationhood, just as, in earlier epochs, we abandoned the barony and the clan. It will compel us to recognize the irrationality of the loyalties which set us apart. For the first time in history, we will see ourselves as a species.

Just as the consolidation of the Roman Empire created the necessary conditions for the propagation of Christianity, this mutation will be assisted by the forces which have cause to fear it. Corporate and financial globalization, designed and executed by a minority seeking to enhance its wealth and power, is compelling the people it oppresses to acknowledge their commonality. Globalization is establishing a single, planetary class interest, as the same forces and the same institutions threaten the welfare of the people of all nations. It is ripping down the cultural and linguistic barriers which have divided us. By breaking the social bonds which sustained local communities, it destroys our geographical loyalties. Already, it has forced states to begin to relinquish nationhood, by building economic units – trading blocs – at the level of the continent or hemisphere.

Simultaneously, it has placed within our hands the weapons we require to overthrow the people who have engineered it and assert our common interest. By crushing the grand ideologies which divided the world, it has evacuated the political space in which a new, global politics can grow. By forcing governments to operate in the interests of capital, it has manufactured the disenchantment upon which all new politics must feed. Through the issue of endless debt, it has handed to the poor, if they but knew it, effective control of the world’s financial systems. By expanding its own empire through new communication and transport networks, it has granted the world’s people the means by which they can gather and coordinate their attack.

The global dictatorship of vested interests has created the means of its own destruction. But it has done more than that; it has begun to force a transformation of the scale on which we think, obliging us to recognize the planetary issues which bear on our parochial concerns. It impels us, moreover, to act upon that recognition. It has granted us the power to change the course of history.

Globalization has established the preconditions but this mutation cannot happen by itself. It needs to be catalysed, much as the early Christians catalysed the monotheistic mutation, or the heretical scientists the Enlightenment. It requires the active engagement of a network of insurrectionists who are prepared to risk their lives to change the world. That network already exists. It forms part of the biggest global movement in history, whose members, most of whom inhabit the poor world, can now be counted in the tens of millions. The people of this sub-formation are perhaps not wholly aware of the project in which they are participating. They must seize this moment and become the catalyst for the new mutation. Like many catalysts, they risk destruction in the reaction, but if they do not strike, the opportunity created by their opponents will be lost.

The movement’s defining debate is just beginning. Led by activists in the poor nations, most of its members have come to see that opposition to the existing world order is insufficient, and that its proposed alternatives will be effective only if they are global in scale. In searching for solutions to the problems it has long contested, it has raised its eyes from the national sphere, in which there is democracy but no choice, to the global sphere, in which there is choice but no democracy. It has correctly perceived that the world will not change until we seize control of global politics.

The quest for global solutions is difficult and divisive. Some members of this movement are deeply suspicious of all institutional power at the global level, fearing that it could never be held to account by the world’s people. Others are concerned that a single set of universal prescriptions would threaten the diversity of dissent. A smaller faction has argued that all political programmes are oppressive: our task should not be to replace one form of power with another, but to replace all power with a magical essence called ‘anti-power’.^*

But most of the members of this movement are coming to recognize that if we propose solutions which can be effected only at the local or the national level, we remove ourselves from any meaningful role in solving precisely those problems which most concern us. Issues such as climate change, international debt, nuclear proliferation, war, peace and the balance of trade between nations can be addressed only globally or internationally. Without global measures and global institutions, it is impossible to see how we might distribute wealth from rich nations to poor ones, tax the mobile rich and their even more mobile money, control the shipment of toxic waste, sustain the ban on landmines, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, broker peace between nations or prevent powerful states from forcing weaker ones to trade on their terms. If we were to work only at the local level, we would leave these, the most critical of issues, for other people to tackle.

Global governance will take place whether we participate in it or not. Indeed, it must take place if the issues which concern us are not to be resolved by the brute force of the powerful. That the international institutions have been designed or captured by the dictatorship of vested interests is not an argument against the existence of international institutions, but a reason for overthrowing them and replacing them with our own. It is an argument for a global political system which holds power to account.

In the absence of an effective global politics, moreover, local solutions will always be undermined by communities of interest which do not share our vision. We might, for example, manage to persuade the people of the street in which we live to give up their cars in the hope of preventing climate change, but unless everyone, in all communities, either shares our politics or is bound by the same rules, we simply open new road space into which the neighbouring communities can expand. We might declare our neighbourhood nuclear-free, but unless we are simultaneously working, at the international level, for the abandonment of nuclear weapons, we can do nothing to prevent ourselves and everyone else from being threatened by people who are not as nice as we are. We would deprive ourselves, in other words, of the power of restraint.

By first rebuilding the global politics, we establish the political space in which our local alternatives can flourish. If, by contrast, we were to leave the governance of the necessary global institutions to others, then those institutions will pick off our local, even our national, solutions one by one. There is little point in devising an alternative economic policy for your nation, as Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, now president of Brazil, once advocated, if the International Monetary Fund and the financial speculators have not first been overthrown. There is little point in fighting to protect a coral reef from local pollution, if nothing has been done to prevent climate change from destroying the conditions it requires for its survival.

While it is easy to unite a movement in opposition, it is just as easy to divide one in proposition. This movement, in which Marxists, anarchists, statists, liberals, libertarians, greens, conservatives, revolutionaries, reactionaries, animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims have found a home, has buried its differences to fight its common enemies. Those differences will re-emerge as it seeks to coalesce around a common set of solutions. We have, so far, avoided this conflict by permitting ourselves to believe that we can pursue, simultaneously, hundreds of global proposals without dispersing our power. We have allowed ourselves to imagine that we can confront the consolidated power of our opponents with a jumble of contradictory ideas. While there is plainly a conflict between the coherence of the movement and the coherence of its proposals, and while the pursuit of a cogent political programme will alienate some of its participants, it is surely also true that once we have begun to present a mortal threat to the existing world order, we will attract supporters in far greater numbers even than those we have drawn so far.

The notion that power can be dissolved and replaced by something called ‘anti-power’ has some currency among anarchists in the rich world, but it is recognized as fabulous nonsense by most campaigners in the poor world, where the realities of power are keenly felt. Just because we do not flex our muscles does not mean that other people will not flex theirs. Power emerges wherever conflicting interests with unequal access to resources – whether material, political or psychological – clash. Within homogeneous groups of well-meaning people, especially those whose interests have not been plainly represented, it can be suppressed. But as any anarchist who has lived in a communal house knows, power relations begin to develop as soon as one member clearly delineates a need at variance with those of the others. The potential conflict is quelled only when one of the antagonists either buckles to the dominant will or leaves the community. Power, in other words, however subtly expressed, either forces the weaker person down or forces him out. Power is as intrinsic to human society as greed or fear: a world without power is a world without people. The question is not how we rid the world of power, but how the weak first reclaim that power and then hold it to account.

We must harness the power of globalization, and, pursuing its inexorable development, overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own. In doing so, we will, whether or not this is the intended outcome, bring forward the era in which humankind ceases to be bound by the irrational loyalties of nationhood.^*

While we have hesitated to explain what we want, we have not been so shy in defining our complaints. The problem is simply formulated: there is, at the global level, no effective restraint of the ability of the rich and powerful to control the lives of the poor and weak. The United Nations, for example, which is meant to deliver peace, human rights and international justice, is controlled by the five principal victors of the Second World War: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France and China. These nations exercise the power of veto not only over the business of the UN Security Council, but also over substantial change within the entire organization.³ This means that no constitutional measure which helps the weak will be adopted unless it also helps the strong.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are supposed to assist impoverished nations to build and defend their economies, are run on the principle of one dollar, one vote. To pass a substantial resolution or to amend the way they operate requires an eighty-five per cent majority. ⁴ The United States alone, which possesses more than fifteen per cent of the stock in both organizations,⁵ can block a resolution supported by every other member state. This means, in practice, that these two bodies will pursue only those policies in the developing world which are of benefit to the economy of the United States and the interests of its financial speculators, even when these conflict directly with the needs of the poor.

The World Trade Organization appears, at first sight, to be more democratic: every member nation has one vote. In reality, its principal decisions have been made during the ‘Green Room’ negotiations, which are convened and controlled by the European Union, the United States, Canada and Japan.⁶ Developing nations can enter these talks only at their behest, and even then they are threatened if they offend the interests of the major powers. The result is that, despite their promises to the contrary, the nations and corporations of the rich world have been able to devise ever more elaborate trade protections, while the nations of the poor world have been forced to open their economies.

If you consider this distribution of power acceptable, that is your choice, but please do not call yourself a democrat. If you consider yourself a democrat, you must surely acknowledge the need for radical change.

Partly as a result of this dictatorship of vested interests, partly through corruption and misrule, and the inequality and destructiveness of an economic system which depends for its survival on the issue of endless debt, the prosperity perpetually promised by the rich world to the poor perpetually fails to materialize. Almost half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day; one fifth on less than one. Despite a global surplus of food, 840 million people are officially classified as malnourished,⁸ as they lack the money required to buy it.

One hundred million children are denied primary education.⁹ One third of the people of the poor world die of preventable conditions such as infectious disease, complications in giving birth and malnutrition.¹⁰ The same proportion has insufficient access to fresh water,¹¹ as a result of underinvestment, pollution and over-abstraction by commercial farms. Much of the farming in the poor world has been diverted from producing food for local people to feeding the livestock required to supply richer people with meat.^* As a result of nutrient depletion, our continued survival depends upon increasing applications of fertilizer. The world’s reserves of phosphate, without which most of the crops requiring artificial fertilizer cannot be grown, are likely to be exhausted before the end of the century.¹³

Climate change caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases is further reducing the earth’s capacity to feed itself, through the expansion of drought zones, rising sea levels and the shrinkage of glacier-fed rivers. Partly because of the influence of the oil industry, the rich world’s governments have refused to agree to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels sufficient to arrest it.

The institutions founded ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PROLOGUE Some Repulsive Proposals
• CHAPTER 1 The Mutation
• CHAPTER 2 The Least-Worst System An Equivocal Case for Democracy
• CHAPTER 3 A Global Democratic Revolution The Case Against Hopeless Realism
• CHAPTER 4 We the Peoples Building a World Parliament
• CHAPTER 5 Something Snaps An International Clearing Union
• CHAPTER 6 The Levelling A Fair Trade Organization
• CHAPTER 7 The Contingency of Power
• References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the same author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher