Wafer thin MINT theory

Ever since I first heard the idea of grouping together a number of countries under the heading BRIC I began to wonder what on earth was going on and what these countries might have in common. The first and admittedly shallow question I asked myself was whether countries with the initial letter I were being included in these groupings simply to make the acronym work. The disgraceful dismissal of the Mediterranean economies as PIGS is a case in point. Ireland's economy was certainly in trouble as a result of a housing boom but otherwise had no place in this group. Could its usefulness in having an initial 'I' actually have exacerbated speculative attack against its national debt?

In recent days, and largely because he has a new series on Radio 4, the man who invented the acronym BRIC, Jim O'Neill, has emerged from the shadows to claim his laurels. It is remarkable in economics how often a person can be remembered for simply one phrase or concept, no matter how shallow, so long as it supports a move that benefits the global economic elite. Jim O'Neill it transpires is a Goldman Sachs man, part of the international club that bankrupted the global economy: so why on earth is he being allowed to frame the future direction of that economy on prime-time national radio funded by myself and other British citizens?

But let's return to my initial question about whether the idea of the BRICs has any theoretical merit. The four countries involved have wildly different cultural backgrounds, motivations, and religious orientations. India and China being by far the most populous countries on earth are clearly very influential, but their economic trajectories have been utterly different in recent years. Brazil sits in the US's backyard, which has Left an indelible mark on its political economy, while Russia has emerged during the past 20 years from several generations of communism into a form of oligopolistic capitalism.

On considering this question more deeply it becomes obvious that I am crediting the idea with much greater sophistication than it deserves or claims. The answer to my question 'What do all these countries have in common?' is a simple one: they have natural and human resources that can be exploited to generate value for the global elites. They represent the most likely site for the expropriation of value. Hence the term BRIC implicitly demonstrates how globalisation works and the mindset of those who are driving it.

Which brings us to Jim O'Neill's new radio series and his exciting new acronym MINT. (Incidentally his Wikipedia entry tells us that he previously included Korea in this list but has substituted Nigeria either for theoretical reasons or simply to make a more attractive word.) The four countries whose initial letters are combined to create the word MINT--Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey--again appear to have little in common other than natural resources and willing governments.

I accidentally caught five minutes of the programme on Mexico and was shocked by the shallow application of crude theory, such as O'Neill's dismissal of the thousand-year-old market in Mexico City as inefficient. His level of analysis was frankly embarrassing and I questioned who could have allowed him onto the BBC. But of course the program is not commissioned for its insight but rather as an advert to those who are seeking new territories for their investment. For this reason perhaps countries whose initial letter is a vowel might think urgently about changing their names.

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Inside the World Trade System: Technical

The lengthy hiatus in posts is the result of my spending two weeks aboard a cargo ship without an Internet connection. The lack of connection was an interesting experience in itself, but seeing the global trading system from the inside was even more remarkable.

Before boarding the 170m vessel that would bring us back to Europe from Brazil I had seen the extraordinary documentary 'The Box that Changed the Britain' so knew something of what to expect from the vast logistical complexity and technological sophistication of the global trading system. But seeing the huge machines lift 40-tonne containers as though they were match-boxes was truly impressive.

The first thing we learned was metaphorical rather than technological. I cannot remember now many times I have been told that things cannot be changed because it would be like 'trying to turn around a supertanker'. Well, from the vantage-point of a ship of similar size I can tell you that it can be turned around in little more than its own length, as we were when leaving our berth in Natal. Somehow this proof that the metaphor is nonsense cheered me immensely, undermining another ideological block to the rapid structural changes we need to make to the global economy.

The largest port we visited was Rotterdam, which is actually three ports in one with another one under construction and a third on the drawing-board for 2020. Altogether these ports span 50km of land, much of it reclaimed from the sea, it is only the fourth largest port in the world. Our ship, the MV Homere was 'small' at just 170m long. We saw ships three times the size, capable of carrying 12,000 TEU and there are plans to build ships nearly twice this size. Physically this is overwhelming but the energy it takes to construct and maintain such facilities is horrifying.

The reason for my cargo-ship passage was to hitch a ride on a voyage that was already committed and so reduce my carbon impact. Although this may have worked at a personal level it was reduced to absurdity by the flights taken by the 23 crew members who made my journey possible. The shipping company that employs them flies them home after each 42-day contract from wherever they are to wherever their home is. Since our crew had more Filipino crew than Romanians (the two countries that make up the majority of the world's fleets) this meant at least 15 return flights to Asia to enable my air-free passage plus a slightly smaller number of European flights.

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Where are you from, originally?

The extraordinary spectacle of the most powerful man in the world having to justify his parentage is one of the clearest signs to date that the US is having a collective nervous breakdown. The invention of the concept of birtherism is a tribute both to our American cousins' impressive inventiveness with language and their abysmal record of public education. Obama's reaction is tribute to the resilience of US humour.

Both the neurotic hounding of a man whose colour was always and will always be an issue for a large majority of his fellow citizens, and the creeping of the public debate in this country towards problematising immigration, draw attention to the hypocrisy over issues of birth, nationality and belonging in our 'globalising' world.

So how important is it to know where you come from? In Wales, where I lived for 12 years and still work, it is very important indeed. In its Welsh form 'O ble rwyt ti'n dod yn wreiddiol?' it is one of the first questions you are taught when learning Welsh. Knowing where somebody comes from, and perhaps identifying their family, helps to connect you. It is not a rude or nosey question, but one that seeks relationship. It is this need for connection with place that has been denigrated and marginalised by the globalised economy. The consequent dislocation is the real source of the rise in politics based on identification, whether based on race or nationality.

From the standpoint of economic theory, free movement of labour is taken as an assumption of the market model. Unless labour can move to the market where it will receive the best returns to its skills, efficiency will not be achieved. This is but one of many examples where the market model bears not relationship to the real world, where immigration is strictly controlled.

The struggle between the deterritorialisation that results from globalisation and our identification with place has been a hallmark of the past decades. The birtherism farce is one piece of evidence of this tension; the rising votes for nationalist parties in some of Europe's most enlightened countries a more disturbing one.

Rather than encouraging the destabilising and environmentally destructive advance of a globalised economy, we should instead be working towards a system of self-reliant local economies within a bioregional framework. Within such a structure the ability of the local, and especially the local land, to evoke powerful responses could make it an appealing substitute to the our unsatisfying consumer culture, rather than a threat to social harmony.
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Ideas Merchant Facing Institutional Challenge

This has been a week of mysterious coincidences. On Wednesday I made a presentation about co-operatives to a delegation from the Technical University of Chongqing who were visiting my own institution. This troubled me on many levels. It indicated the limitation of the globalised approach to HE: I simply could not identify a ground on which to make my approach to these people. I had utterly insufficient knowledge of their cultural and social understandings.

I was not a party to the reason for their visit and so was left to assume that we were hoping they would send us thousands of students and help keep us solvent in the competitive-global-knowledge-economy. Aside from my concern about the carbon impact of this strategy, I did not become an academic in order to train Chinese businessmen to be more effective capitalist managers. I sold them the idea of co-operatives as a means of negotiating over the value of labour production. I believe that they left unconvinced, and I cannot be sure whether I made them more or less likely to make a formal link with our university.

Given this experience at the sharp-end of the academic barrow, the violent debates over the shifting of the costs of higher education away from the public purse and onto individual students were gratifying. The general conclusion appears to be that this level of our national education has moved fully into the market. This will, according to David Willetts, improve the quality of teaching. Education is a product like a potato or a sports car. If others offer better or cheaper education (potatoes/cars) I will be forced to become a better teacher.

Although Willetts is fondly known as 'two brains' he appears to have practical experience of only one side of the teaching relationship. I think this shows in his approach to policy. My experience tells me that the awareness that your time is being bought by your students undermines the trust and respect that a teaching relationship requires. Far from seeking out more time with their professors, my experience suggests that students believe they have bought the degree when they arrive; turning up and being troubled with new ideas or, worse still, expected to actively engage with theoretical concepts is an affront to their consumer rights.

Much as Darian Leader so cogently argues for psychotherapy, education cannot be turned into a product. An education that is bought and sold will always be a poor education. Watching your students check their mobiles during a lecture, and wondering whether they are calculating if you have earned the £26.49 they paid for you since you entered the room, is a dispiriting experience that saps the confidence and encourages the sort of teaching that appears to be offering value for money: voluminous handouts and regurgitated facts.

Perhaps most important of all, real education is not always an enjoyable experience. Genuine education is emancipatory and revolutionary, which may be a reason why Conservatives distrust it. The good educator challenges the student's world-view and this cannot always be a comfortable experience. You know you are teaching successfully when you see a furrow begin to appear on the youthful skin of your students' foreheads. This connotes the performance of 'thinking', an activity that has been increasingly rare in universities since the advent of the market.
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Don't Mention the Trade War

Have you ever noticed how your German friends can't pronounce the name of their own country correctly? No doubt grown tired of us correcting their pronunciation, according to Martin Wolf in the FT they have no made an alliance with China and actually become Chermany . I wish this were a joke, or some sort of economic chimera, because the reality of Germany and China turning inwards and offering only stern words to the rest of the world about our budget deficits is a very worrying development.

It is extraordinary how many politicians fail to understand that, in a globalised and interconnected world, running a surplus is just as destructive as running a deficit. It is only when national economies are in balance that all can thrive; large-scale imbalances lead to tension between countries and suffering and strife within them. This is not news: it was Keynes's understanding at the Bretton Woods conference, which is why he proposed a global trading system within which those with a surplus, as well as those with a deficit, were fined by a global regulatory body. At that time it was the US, flourishing as the purveyor of arms to the world, that resisted; now it is Chermany, which is vaunting its economic strength and ignoring the political consequences.

Martin Wolf draws attention to the problem of 'chronically weak aggregate demand'. This is the most frightening code-word that an economist can find: it means people aren't buying enough stuff. From the point of view of a capitalist economy that spells disaster. The shark has stopped moving through the water and will soon expire. The other code-word of note in his piece is 'protectionism', contrary to expectations one of the most threatening words in the economist's lexicon because it means less trade. In capitalist economics, without growth the economy will fail and the best way to achieve growth is to sell stuff to other countries.

The facile posture adopted by Dave and the Boy George at the G20 is almost as laughable as their suggestion of 40% cuts. We are, apparently, to grow our way out of the recession by exporting more. Leaving aside the understanding of readers of this blog that the planetary limit makes any further growth impossible I have two simple questions for the dining-club boys: what are we supposed to export (the demand for financial services having declined rather rapidly over the past two years), and who on earth is supposed to be buying? Tweet

The Tripartite Hegemony

It is clear that the problems facing the world economy have their origin in the financial system and that the curbs on bank powers proposed by Obama, significant as they are in a country where financial interests are so powerful, are insufficient and misdirected. What we need is not a behaviour management programme but a democratised system that serves the interests of all the world's people. Since the problems of the post-war period have resulted from too much US power - especially in global finance - it is unlikely that a solution is going to emerge from the President of the United States.

This is made heart-warmingly clear in a lucid and congent book that I have been enjoying recently: Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO by Richard Peet. Like others I have been waffling on about the need for a new Bretton Woods without feeling entirely confident about the workings of the system that has proved itself to be so wrong. Professor Peet has been spending his time cutting through the verbiage and obfuscation of the financiers and has now presented his understanding in this excellent book.

From the travails of the 1930s that led to the conviction that politicians must take control of finance, through the weary Bretton Woods negotiations and the even wearier surrender by the war-ravaged European to US domination, Peet maps out the path we trod to arrive at a system where capital is supreme as never before - in spite of its clearly demonstrated incompetence and destructiveness. For those with a taste for abstract concepts like securitization and who thirst to fully understand the workings of a special drawing right, I can promise that you too will be satisfied by the thorough research and clarity of writing. Peet has no interest in demonstrating how smart he has been to work all of this out: his intention is to help us all to follow his lead so that our proposals for change will be better informed and more powerful as a result.

As with many books that arise from the left, this one is weak on prescriptions. But perhaps that itself is appropriate. We are clear about the need for the reclaiming of power over capital for the world's citizens, and the need for a new international negotiation to establish a world economic framework based on the twin principles of sustainability and equity. Beyond this we surely need the humility to listen to those of the world's people who are not responsible for the spectacular mess the smart guys in the west have gotten us into. Tweet

Just Use It!

As the recession deepens, businesses will fold. They will no longer be needing the resources over which they have exerted control in an era when money determined what happened in the economy. We need to shift towards an economy that responds more to energy - and the energy of local people rather than fossil fuel energy.

The recession will offer many opportunities. As car-sales operations fold, forecourts and salesrooms will be unused; the failure of shops will make lots of premises available on the streets of our towns and cities; paddock-owners will have no use for their fields without the profits earned by businesspeople being spent on children's riding lessons. There are opportunities here for using these resources to rebuild the local economy. But how will we deal with the money issue?

Money is the one resources that will be less plentiful - but that offers no problem once you step outside the capitalist economic paradigm. Within a capitalist economy you can't do anything unless you have money; in a sustainable economy money is merely a means to facilitate transactions. Other resources should be not left idle and useful economic activity should not be prevented just because of a historical anomaly.

Several years ago, when I still lived in Aberystwyth, a jaunty anarchist named Bob Maycock led a group that 'liberated' a local defunct night-club and turned it into the People's Palace. For six months we did as we pleased there - and did not need to pay anybody for the privilege. After that, the long arm of the law ensured that, as before the people's arrival, the premises were boarded up and left useless once more.

This clearly identified the law as on the side of the owners and of property. If not, it would permit the use of unused resources by those with genuine need - whether for homes or premises to reskill themselves and provide their own food and clothing. This was not always the case: under Roman Law if land had been left idle for a certain number of years, landless peasants were permitted to make use of it. A similar law applies in Brazil today. In Europe we pay farmers to leave their land idle.

During Argentina's disastrous economic collapse in 2001, empty factories were 'reclaimed' by their workers. They could not tolerate the illogicality of productive resources sitting around, while people were unemployed, and others wanted to buy the goods the factories had produced. This setting right the inefficiencies caused by an economy where money dominated has been documented by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. It should provide inspiration for the next steps we will take to use our own recession to the advantage of local communities. Tweet

Refuge from the Global Economy

Yesterday I was listening to Victor Jara's beautiful songs, which made the tedium of an unavoidable car journey a pleasure. For those who don't know, Victor Jara was a Chilean folk-singer and national hero during the left-wing movement that led to the election of the world's first Communist President, Salvador Allende, in 1970. (The novelist Isabel Allende is his niece.)

This was a time of hope, which was captured by Jara along with his love ballads (try this example of his most famous song, which combines both themes). But the hope was short-lived. The forces of fascism, defending global capital against a viable, democratic and just alternative, moved in for the kill. The Chilean coup - the reason I remember September 11th, for that was the day it happened in 1973 - was sudden, violent and bloody. And supported by US corporations including ITT. (See Aled's new blog for some reflections on how '9/11' is being used to enhance their global power, including by reducing our legal rights.)

Along with thousands of other 'enemies of the state', Victor Jara was arrested and violently murdered. Another of those arrested was somebody I later came across in Oxford. His name was Jaime Baez - hence his Latin American friends always called him Joan. He had been put in jail because he was the only person in his village to own a typewriter - an obvious indication that he was a dangerous revolutionary.

These thoughts come back to me now this Labour government is creating laws to allow arbitrary detention without legal justification, which was the origin of the horrors of the Latin American guerras sucias, while simultaneously making life harder for the refugees that this sort of illegality creates.

After knowing Jaime I worked at the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford - an organisation that attempted to provide some kind of advocacy for their growing numbers. The common factor amongst the refugees I met was sadness - a deep sadness and nostalgia which nothing could shift. They played with other people's children and joined family parties with a longing which they could not hide.

The refugees' choice had not been between wealth here or poverty in Afghanistan, or Uganda, or wherever their lives still belonged. Their choice had been between life here or death there. To treat them with anything less than the utmost compassion and care is a gross violation of humanity. Tweet

Gambling while others starve

Whatever explanation you've heard for why food prices are rising it probably isn't the real one. Now that the housing market is staggering to a standstill it appears that those who have been using to making easy money from speculating in a fundamental human need for shelter have now moved on to playing the same sordid game with our even more basic need for food.

Testimony recently given to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee came from a former Wall Street investor who decided to blow the whistle. Here is a brief extract:

You have asked the question 'Are Institutional Investors contributing to food and energy price inflation?' And my unequivocal answer is 'Yes'. In this testimony I will explain that Institutional Investors are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today. Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to price determination in the commodities markets; I am here to expose a fast-growing yet virtually unnoticed factor, and one that presents a problem that can be expediently corrected through legislative policy action.

The news of famine in Ethiopia, again, more than 20 years after Bob Geldof blasphemed to no purpose on national TV is, again, being blamed on bad governance or the weather. The usual distractions offered us to avoid the obvious conclusion that 'It's the exploitative, capitalist, post-coloniast, globalised economy - stupid!'.

And what about the row over crop-based biofuels? Competition for land is a significant and growing concern for anybody interested in green economics. But can we be sure that what is being knowingly explained in terms of the competition within free markets isn't actually a commodity price bubble being manipulated by those who will profit from it? Tweet

Mending our Global Relationships

I was inspired by listening to Doreen Massey last week - especially by her approach to positive globalisation and her ability to make space and distance seem exciting rather than threatening.

One of her key themes was restitution. She raised the troubling issue of people's seeming need to apologise for things they had nothing to do with. An example is the apology by the contemporary citizens of Liverpool for the slave trade. Interesting, isn't it, how this phrase is so rarely used now - usually substituted for 'slavery'. Of course we wouldn't want to think of all trade as slavery would we?

But back to my theme of pointless apologies, I am left wondering what it is we think we are achieving by this. Is it any more than wearing a badge of postmodern right-on-ness, much as we used to wear lapel badges and as many still do where a rainbow of ribbons? How does it help that they tell us they know that breast cancer is a horrible disease?

But to action. Doreen drew my attention to an interesting piece of research from Medact which discusses the perverse subsidy that poor countries make to rich countries when health-care workers who have been trained at the public expense become the sorts of economic migrants we are happy to accept. Medact have designed a plan for genuine restitution: a reverse transfer to balance the subsidy.

This is similar to schemes proposed under the Contraction and Convergence framework for emissions trading and technology transfer. To balance the negative effects of our fossil greed, and the unfair share of the global climate commons we in the richer countries consume, the plan is that we should share sustainable technologies and expertise, as well as paying cash.

According to a letter to the BMJ from Robin Stott, vice-chair of Medact, 'Evidence from Mozambique suggests that this money will help trigger the latent entrepreneurial skills of the recipients. Given the likely market value of a tonne of carbon dioxide, it will more than provide the $110 dollars/person/year that the UN millennium project believes necessary to reach the millennium development goals in Africa.'


Doreen also mentioned a project to create a map of the Niger Delta-- in London, in other words raising awareness of the exploitation of people in this oil-rich African country that is necessary to feed our oil addiction. And also bringing this home to the City of London, which provides the finance for most of the world's trade-based enterprises.

Her final example was of the link being forged between Caracas, Venezuela and London--another form of local-to-local exchange and perhaps 'a form of alternative globalisation' cooked up by two ageing Marxists: Hugo Chavez and Ken Livingstone. Caracas is sending us cheap diesel, which fuels London's public transport and allows concessionary fares for the poor. Our contribution is more intangible-- sharing 'the capital's expertise in policing, tourism, transport, housing and waste disposal'--but it is a gesture in the right direction.


I wonder how long it took the Liberal Democrats in London to regret their comment that 'It makes us feel like a Third World country'! Tweet

The Final Frontier

I had the great pleasure last night of listening to Doreen Massey give a public lecture. She is an inspiring example of a public intellectual, an engaged academic, who is both analysing and changing the world. She took as her theme 'the politics of place'. The lecture was highbrow stuff of the kind I often struggle with and in my attempt to convey some of what I learned I am no doubt about to commit mental GBH, but surely that is better than holding back for fear of misrepresentation.

What I like about Doreen's work is her clear statement that the 'end of geography', propagated as what she might call an 'imaginary' by the proponents of this late and most corrupt phase of capitalism is an illusion and should be nailed as such. We are as much indicted in a process of international exploitation as we were in the days when we sent our best and brightest to administer the colonies and half the known world was coloured pink on our schoolroom maps.


Her question - to herself and others - is how we can live a positive response to the globalised world we find ourselves in. She made me question my own easy notion about the local and its safety. How easy it is to sit in Stroud and wrack my conscience in choosing between French organic apples and fair-trade Kenyan mangoes. Within our Transition Town process we have a theme called 'learning from the South' and a commitment to community-to-community trade between ourselves and the poor countries. This is the path towards the solidarity economy that is the 'alternative globalisation'.

But Doreen is right that our involvement in the lives of those in far-distant places goes beyond buying their crops and using their time to provide cheap holidays in warmer climes. London is the capital of the financial system that facilitates the global trade system. This makes our responsibility for challenging that system and its consequences especially acute.

I feel sure that building a strong local alternative economy is part of the answer, but it is not enough. However, the alternative on offer last night - and this was a point made by several questioners - is to be left in a dithering limbo of indecision. Ultimately, any consumption more complex than self-provisioning becomes uncomfortable. Any food we didn't produce ourselves becomes difficult to stomach. Tweet

Food: A Matter of Life and Death

After a week of argumentation about the rights and wrongs of the £1.99 chicken I finally entered the fray - indirectly, as it happens, when a very personable journalist from The Sunday Times asked me what I thought about it. My quotation is phrased in terms of knickers rather than chickens, but that appears to be my lot. He did call Market, Schmarket 'brilliantly provocative' which is going to keep me smiling for weeks. Until I saw that written down I hadn't realised how precisely it sums up what I was hoping to achieve.

Enough of me and my ego - let's get back to chickens. As it happens I got to know some local chickens fairly well over Christmas and I can tell you that looking after them is a deeply responsible business. You just worry all the time about foxes and badgers. It is considerably worse than caring for children, who could easily see off small furry mammals whereas in the henhouse they can cause the avian equivalent of Apocalipto.

I also didn't benefit from the eggs, since I found the warmth and taste of them just too alive somehow to really be food. This pins me down as not only a townie but also a child of the sixties. Yes, I know food is part of the mysterious web of life but I prefer its life to have been removed sufficiently distantly before it arrives on my plate. And this is to say nothing of blood-spots which, since the hens enjoyed the company of a cock, could potentially have turned into chicks at any moment.

I had a similar experience while trying to eat a sea bass a former partner had proudly served up after catching it himself during a manly angling trip. It wasn't the strange muddy flavour, nor the fact that it had turned up in some rather dirty newspaper. It was the fact that I could still taste life in the fish that made me want to heave.

Perhaps I should conclude that my fate is to become a vegetarian. There certainly is something rather Buddhist about all these experiences. Yet I don't think - and my herbalist is with me here! - I'm quite ready for that yet. I tend to agree rather with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's approach of forcing meat eaters to encounter the reality of the death that fills their nightly plates. I have an oustanding offer of killing my own chicken on our community farm and am thinking long and hard about it.

Life is what food is about. There is something seriously wrong with anybody who prefers dead food to living food. Since I've been eating organic I have struggled to find the word to describe the non-organic food that I, my partner, and even my daughter in school just can't stomach any more. It's just dead isn't it? Tweet

Beware the Blandishments of the Tescopolist

Capitalism is threatened by climate change and it is responding. I offer as evidence Tesco's endowment at Manchester University of a Sustainable Consumption Institute. You will have heard arguments recently that New Zealand lamb or Kenyan cut flowers are actually more sustainable than locally grown alternatives. It is in order to produce data to support claims such as this that the Institute is being funded. Its existence proves not only that our higher education system has now become the prostitute of globalised capitalism, as Thatcher long ago intended, but also that capitalism is adapting to the strictures climate change brings.

Tesco is getting extremely good value for money. They are investing a mere £5million in return for which they will divert the energies of a sizeable group of leading UK researchers to justifying their own corporate ends. They are also using this to repair their tarnished media reputation, including by claiming magnanimity in sharing the research findings with others. So you should think yourself lucky that you will be able to use Tesco's figures to justify the globalised economy without having to pay them for the privilege.

But can capitalism ever make itself sustainable? As an economic system it relies on the extraction of the surplus value of workers and the planet to pay for all the various parasites who do no work but live from ownership and investments. As such it is a system that meets the needs of the majority in an inefficient way, because the needs of the greedy minority must be satieted. As Gandhi put this so eloquently, 'the earth has enough to satisfy every man's need but not to satisfy the greed of some'. The very nature of this unfair system of distribution puts pressure on the planet as well as on those who sell their labour.

In the globalised capitalist system most work is done in the countries of the Global South, translated from de jure into de facto colonies, their resources and their labour power still stolen by the rich West, but these days through the less unsightly mechanisms of trade treaties and financial organisations, and with armies reserved for extreme situations only.

Globalisation represents the ultimate victory of the notion of 'economies of scale' that economists love so much. Now the scale is that of the planet as a whole, with corporate barons organising who shall produce what where and fixing the prices. Failing to respect Nature's scale has led to the huge imbalances of wealth and well-being we see around us, as well as creating climate change through the unncessary production of transport-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Finally, the way capitalism creates money, through debt-based bank money, requires the constant expansion of the economy without regard to natural limits. I have blogged about this elsewhere: it is really the most fundamental explanation of the link between capitalism as an economic system and planetary destruction.

I have been in this game for a while now so I have become fairly experienced at spotting a corporate scam. Hence I was intrigued by the arguments about the distribution system of globalisation being more sustainable, not to mention more supportive of our brothers and sisters in the South. I was also depressed to notice how many good people I interact with were swallowing this line.

Sadly my own resources for investigating the assumptions on which the justification for buying New Zealand apples in the UK in September are limited. And I don't suppose Terry Leahy will be offering me money to explore my proposed alternative of bioregional distribution systems any time soon.

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Call for the Abolition of Wage Slavery

The conventional mindset loves to make clear distinctions, to paint the world in terms of black and white, to establish absolute dates when eras or cultures began and ended. As though the Neolithic, whatever 'new stone age' might mean, ended 5,347 years ago, in the middle of June, around teatime. Of course such chronological control does facilitate the celebration of historical landmarks, such as the era of slavery which is being greeted with much high-blown and self-righteous joy today.

The world does not in reality divide itself neatly between good and evil. Nor did slavery end in 1807. Even the formal historians point out that it was only the state-sanctioned market in human flesh that was abolished at that time. Slaves continued to be owned in the British Empire. But more than this, the consequences of the enclosure movement and the rapid development of an industrial system of production created what the man with the beard justly called 'wage slaves'.

As we come to face difficult decisions about a truly post-industrial age, not one where we simply export our dirty work overseas, we can reckon that the industrial age has lasted about 200 years. The era of the ending of slavery coincided with the invention of machines that could turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy. Climate change has put an end to that stage of capitalist development so where do we go next?

My suggestion is that we start asking important questions about ownership. It is because those who control the economic system we are forced to live with demand an unfair and excessive share of resources that the pressure on the planet arises. Self-providing communities will have to learn to share resources and work fairly if we are to live in balance with nature and in harmony with each other.

I think this helps us to understand how the globalised trade system is inherently linked to the solution to climate change, as the Contraction and Convergence model links the two at a policy level. Because of the pressure to extract profits and rents for the wealthy, capitalism has been marked by schemes to avoid the natural limits of ecological and social reality. Fossils fuels and human flesh have both enabled the ungrounded and unbridled greed of the spoilt child that typifies capitalism.

To switch attention to wage slavery is not to belittle the suffering of the slaves of our own era. The suffering and exploitation of forced prostitutes and forced labourers in factories and fields persists in every country. We have used our organised political power to ensure for ourselves one step up the ladder so that our exploitation is restrained and decent. But while we work in a firm we do not own we can never be truly free. And while we leave the structure of the economic system unchallenged we can be sure that the morally offensive exploitation of people and the planet will continue.

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Globalisation comes home to roost

Poor old Bernard Matthews. Not so bootiful as he used to be. First Jamie Oliver decimates his profits by exposing his turkey twizzlers as deep-fried guts and gizzards and now his loathsome farming practices are coming home to roost--oh go on! Forgive me a few bad puns. We gave up eating all so-called food proceeding from the Bernard Matthews empire a few years ago when, as I opened a packet claiming to be filled with Bernard Matthews wafer-thin turkey ham slices, my son asked 'who farted?'

I had difficulty following events this morning as the news bulletins jumped about between Hungary and Turkey. I was feeling hungry myself and blame the shortage of blood sugar in the brain for my lack of lucidity, but I really did begin to wonder whether Bernard also has a production facility in Turkey. Well in this era of globalisation where nobody knows where anything is and companies count for more than countries you can hardly blame me for the confusion.

This is only one of my many struggles with the food distribution system globalisation has bequeathed us. Following the appalling episode of foot-and-mouth it was clear that transporting animals around the world just to kill and eat them is not only cruel but also dangerous to public health. It has always amazed me that friends and family find it more shocking that I know the source of my meat by name than that they cannot even tell me which country theirs was produced in. Dulcie has been slaughtered recently and should be turning up in sausages soon.

The shame around the factory production and slaughter of sentient creatures is made evident by the use of the euphemism 'cull' when what is meant is kill. Not to mention the curious public outcry about the deaths of the innocents from the latest factory-farming disease and the pseudo-ritualistic pyres, when these animals were created in factories only because they were going to be killed to be eaten. Where is the moral difference between killing and cremating them en masse, and killing and roasting them in our individual ovens?

This is to say nothing of the wasteful production of unnecessary carbon dioxide our food distribution system brings with it. For an excellent critique of that you can read Caroline Lucas and Colin Hines's most recent report. Caroline's adage on the transport of biscuits from Germany to the UK and back again is the best indictment of the global food system. Watching the lorries moving past each other on a European motorway she asked 'Why don't they just swap recipes'?

Like the guy who enjoyed shaving so much he bought the company, such strong identification between an individual and a brand, the corporate cult of personality, brings its own dangers. Bernard was never as bootiful as he thought, and now his face and the festering turkeys he is still selling as safe to eat are forever melded, leaving a most unpleasant taste. Tweet

You are what you make, not what you buy

A famous critique of the nature of work within a market system is to be found in the writings of Karl Marx. One of his central concerns was the social and psychological effect on the individual of life within the market. As expressed by Terry Eagleton, Marx’s view was that ‘Under market conditions, individuals confront each other as abstract, interchangeable entities; working people become commodities, selling their labour power to the highest bidder; and the capitalist does not care what he produces as long as he makes a profit.’ So there is nothing original in the critique of the anti-globalisation protestors, although they may not recognise the source of their complaint.

Marx reserved a special place for work in his analysis: he considered it to be the central expression of what he referred to as our ‘species-being’. It is because what we do as a species is to work that the mutation of work into its capitalist form is so socially and psychologically damaging. It is this process which Marx refers to as ‘alienation’, meaning that the items which people produce with their work are appropriated by the minority of people who own the means of production, i.e. the employers or in today’s terms the global corporations. Marx related this sense of alienation to our estrangement from nature. His conclusion was that the process of work and the creation of products that are bought and sold by others, destroys the individual sense of self and radically undermines her or his identity.

This loss of identity has been massively extended by the globalisation of the international economy. Think of the work of Adam Bede, the eponymous carpenter-hero of a novel by George Eliot. His work links him directly to the other members of his community. He makes an intricate kitchen cabinet for the employer of the woman he loves, in the hope that this will catch his beloved’s eye and win her heart. How distant this portrayal of identity and relationship in work is from the life of the person who tends the machine that turns the thing, that makes the pin, that joins the leg to the bed, that they sell on the industrial estate. S/he has no idea where the item will be sold or used, never mind by whom. And similarly, when we shop we have little idea where or by whom the items we buy were made. We lose our sense of connection and the producer loses her sense of identity.

In response to this loss of identity, and particularly for those who are too poor to adopt brand-based consumer identities, we see a rise in identity groups based on gender and ethnic identities. This unfortunate response to globalisation has long been predicted and yet appears to surprise and horrify the Establishment when it expresses itself in terms of large numbers of votes for politicians who base their appeal on the offer of an identity. In spite of radicals and environmentalists warnings of the imminent depletion of natural resources or the collapse of the financial system, it seems that the most dire threat to globalised capitalism is actually posed by the loss of identity created by the meaningless and exploitative systems of both production and consumption that it feeds off. Tweet