Institutional Racism

The indifference of the Metropolitan Police to the murder of Stephen Lawrence rightly led to private soul-searching and public examination of procedures, and we have to hope that our country and particularly our police service is better as a result. But there is a more insidious form of racism that goes unquestioned and causes the death of far more people. This is the racism of an economic system that values the lives of the poor differently from the lives of the rich.

According to a recent blog post, such an attitude was subscribed to back in 1991 by Larry Summers, tipped to become the boss of the World Bank, and therefore one of the most powerful people in the global economy. According to the totally undemocratic procedures by which the global financial institutions are run, the Europeans choose the head of the IMF while the head of the World Bank is a position virtually in the gift of the US President, and the rumour is that he is thinking of giving the job to Summers.

US blogger Doug Henwood cites a memo issuing from Summers's office back in 1991, when he was the Bank's Chief Economist. The memo explains why Africa is seriously under-polluted and argues for the Bank to encourage highly polluting industries to move to Africa because this would be so much more efficient. The efficiency arises from the fact that paying compensation for the deaths of Africans is so much less costly than paying for the deaths of US citizens.

The author of the memo writes that 'I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.' The argument is that should there be a claim for damages, the costs would be based on the economic value of the people who died, that is to say their potential lifetime earnings. Since Africans earn so little their deaths would cost polluting companies relatively little.

In spite of the morally outrageous nature of this reasoning, and the blatant racism that lies behind it, this sort of costing of human lives is fairly routine amongst neoclassical economists. A seminal paper in the field cites that value of human lives, based on earnings potential, as ranging between nearly $10m. if you are Canadian to a mere $0.8m. if you are South Korean. The African countries favoured for pollution dumping by Summers and his ilk do not have enough money to invest to be part of these studies.

The estimates vary widely, suggesting that the methods as well as the morality lying behind these sorts of studies is grossly unreliable. Yet it is on this sort of basis that decisions are made about the siting of factories and the disposal of the noxious effluent of Western lifestyles. Those debating the future of capitalism should take note: the challenge to values needs to run much deeper than merely questioning relative wage differentials in the wealthy economies of the West.
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Clegg Stuck on the Capitalist Fence*

As we seek to find an alternative to the discredited corporate capitalist model of enterprise it is vital that we understand clearly the range of options on offer, which is why Nick Clegg's confusing statement about the John Lewis economy is particularly unhelpful.

John Lewis is a company without shareholders, whose value is vested in a Trust and can only be shared between the company's employees. This is quite distinct from a standard corporation which allows its employees to buy some of its shares while its management is free to inflate profits by risky endeavours or extract value in bonuses. While John Lewis employees receive a share of the profits they generate, employees of share ownership schemes might find, like the employees of Enron, that they lose not only the value they created but also their jobs and their pensions.

Understandably, those who currently profit from others' work via their share ownership are nervous about the suggestions that workers might keep all the value of their work themselves. The response to Nick Clegg's speech from the Financial Times includes the expression of these views from the side of capital, skilfully woven in with the completely distinct anxieties expressed by Charlie Mayfield, chair of the John Lewis partnership.

Unsurpsrisingly, most of the discussion entirely avoids considering the option of a full-scale co-operative business, where risks and rewards are shared between those who work in the business, who are also its owners. The suggestion that workers might own and control their workplaces is part of the real alternative that may not be articulated. Whether we look to the Basque Mondragon Group or our own Suma Wholefoods co-operative we see a model that is stable, sustainable and just: a model that could form the basis for a national economy we could all buy into.

*An edited version of this letter was published in today's Guardian.
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Will the World End in 2012?

The millenarian prophecies of doom that have rumbled on since 2000 are coming to a head this year, with the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world receiving serious news coverage. Often these reports run alongside statistical analysis of the state of the global economy and appear to have much the same level of credibility. Both encapsulate the feeling of powerless of the modern citizen and the give the lie to the notion of ourselves as rational economic men.

Apparently it was the Slovenian social critic Slavoj Zizek who questioned why we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. If we want a better economic system then we must have the courage to do this and must spread the word to our friends that 2012 is the end of one corrupt and destructive economic system, not the end of the world itself. And we must propose our alternative with confidence and grace. We are not speaking about revolution but revulsion against an economy that is destroying our mother the earth and blighting the lives of humans and other species.

There are three central aspects of capitalism which I think we can all decide to end in this year. First we have the way the system creates money and uses it to concentrate power in the hands of the few. The creation of money as debt in the private sector ensures the engorgement of the 1% at the expense of the 99% while simultaneously creating a pressure for economic growth that is causing the ecological crisis. We can share this message as well as taking steps to use our own money differently: switching our bank accounts to the Co-operative Bank or the Nationwide, making sure our mortgages are with mutual providers (the old building societies) and if we have any accumulated money investing it in local eco-projects rather than depositing it to gain interest from the corrupt system we are seeking to change.

Secondly, we can reconsider how we work and how the dominant economic system shares the rewards of work unfairly and also removes our autonomy and our self-respect in work. This is where I began as an economist, challenging the Seven Myths About Work which persuade us to give our creativity to the system that is destroying our happiness. We need to counter the lie that says that all wealth is generated in the private sector with the public sector parasitic upon it and to encourage the growth of co-operative enterprise, where work and rewards are shared fairly and the business is democratically controlled. It is perhaps no coincidence that the UN has declared 2012 the Year of Co-operation.

Finally, we need to undermine capitalism at the level of culture and ideas. My book Market, Schmarket described how capitalism operates through a system of mantras that encourage us to behave like selfish individualists. Every time we do something for nothing, or buy something that is more expensive because we value its maker, or give away something we could sell, we are undermining the hold of the mean-spirited culture of capitalism on our lives and in the world.

So, 2012 offers tremendous hope to the world and all its peoples. If we believe that the world will end then it will, but if we believe that the world will change fundamentally and positively, then this also becomes possible. It is profoundly untrue that the alternative is not clearly articulated: a green vision of economic and social life has been developed over the past 30 years and is ready to be tried. 2012 is the year when we need to make this humane, balanced and joyful expression of human possibility the path to our future.
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A Politics for the Earth

Today is the day that Vince Cable launches the next salvo in the battle between capital and labour. This is the battle that has been central to our politics for the past 200 years or so, since the industrial revolution finally broke people's ability to create a livelihood by use of their own labour and on their own land. Interestingly, this is the word, a very green word, used by the TUC in their assessment of how the labour side is doing in this battle.

The TUC report shows that labour has been losing for several decades with headlines such as: 'The wages of middle income Britain grew by an average of just 56 per cent between 1978 and 2008, despite GDP increasing by 108 per cent over the same period, and for workers in some skilled trades incomes actually fell in real terms.' This is clear evidence that the consequence of globalisation and the neoliberal revolution in economic organisation has been the extraction of an increasing share of value by the interests of capital, and at the direct expense of labour.

The report frames the discussion against the background of a dichtomy between a welfare model of the economy and a model of finance capitalism. It argues that the consequence of a move towards a reliance on finance resulted in no extra jobs to replace those lost due to the movement of manufacturing overseas: 'Finance and banking created almost no net jobs in the 15 years to 2007, despite the industry’s greatly expanded share of the nation’s output and profits.'

In its proposals the report offers the beginnings of a revival of vision on the left, a vision which includes demanding that politicians pay more attention to equality and investment in manufacturing, reopen the question of the selfish and destructive design of the corporate business model, and of course the inevitable demand for more union involvement in economic policy-making. The report also provides the sort of information about who is gaining from the neoliberal model - the wealthy and the professionals - that has been so lacking in the debate about economic policy in recent years.

The most killing statistics of all are those that show that the economy has not thrived under this neoliberal model. Growth has been slower and recessions deeper. Even on its own terms the capitalist economy has utterly failed, and the most extreme version of it, with all the social costs attached, has failed most extremely.

The weakness of the report is that, in spite of using the word livelihood, the word is used in the predictable narrow sense that a 'labour' movement seems incapable of transcending. Hence the emphasis is still on the fight between owners and earners, while the object of that fight, the source of all true value which is the earth itself, is still left outside the debate.
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Anti-Bank Holiday to Remember

Climate camp was a delight. The whole event has been planned and executed with what I hardly dare call military precision, perhaps most of the all the 'swoosh' to the chosen site on Blackheath common, which was completely unexpected by local residents. Apart from the absence of uniforms, hierarchy, and meals-ready-to-eat, of course. Instead we had communally cooked organic veggie fare, available on time and for a nominal (and voluntary) charge. The level of organisation was immensely impressive.

Campers are encouraged to join 'neighbourhoods' which, with the exception of the Thames Valley (an in-joke at the expense of our friends in navy blue) are based around regions of the country. So we had our dinner in Wales and our lunch the following day in the Thames Valley. When our massive saucepan was empty, news reached us that there was still food in Yorkshire. It did begin to feel rather Medieval. Each neighbourhood meets at 10am to plan the day, share out work and raise any concerns about the camp as a whole. It then sends a representative to the spokes meeting so that the whole camp can share planning and decision-making.

I always find camps and festivals the most vibrant source of creative and informed discussion about the world's problems and solutions. The site was well chosen, with an excellent view of the skyscrapers of the city which could be seen beyond the perimeter fence draped with slogans such as 'the planet doesn't do bail-outs', 'soul not coal', and 'capitalism is crisis'.

My own contribution was the Friday night plenary on capitalism and climate change. It began with a camper explaining to a marquee packed with about 500 people, and in pictoral form, Marx's analysis of the crisis of capitalist production. The theory had been brought up do date by the inclusion of 'loadsamoney' and 'shitloads of cash' but otherwise would have been easily recognisable to the man with the beard. Aside from the proliferation of four-letter words, which I probably wouldn't get away with, I might follow this tack in my university teaching next year. As occupation of universities was the theme of one of the workshops over the weekend, I may not need to.

My journey home was chaotic and discordant in contrast to the smooth harmony of the camp. The Blackheath site passed its health-and-safety inspection. My First Great Western train would not have done since there was no water to wash your hands after using the toilet. Given a choice between 'business' and the campaigners I know who I would have running the country, and not just because of the standard of the WCs. Tweet

An Economy with Soul

I can't remember who it was who told me that we need to overturn the God of the market: GOD = Grow Or Die. This is obviously a necessary condition for moving our economic life in a sustainable direction, but we need something deeper and more soulful to go along with this: a shift in consciousness.

For a while I've been thinking about a paper to respond to R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism in which he argued that the personal ethics engendered by the Protestant religion were crucial in underpinning the development of the new economic system as it developed in the 16th and 17th centuries. I see a parallel with the growing interest in mystical and anti-materialist religions amongst many of those who are building the new economic and social paradigm.

I spent the nicest three days of my holiday at Druid Camp, handily close in the Forest of Dean and - naturally - blessed with beautifully sunny weather (although we were all quite capable for worshipping mother nature in all her different moods). In contrast to the academic conferences I go to, the workshop conveners all spoke from their hearts and so were constantly enthralling.

From a shaman I learned how the world appears if you believe that every aspect of the material reality has a deeper spiritual reality or consciousness. How could this type of understanding contribute to a new consumption ethic, one which includes reverence for the natural world? Many of us do this to some extent when we give thanks for our food, or recall the spirit of the animal that died if we are meat eaters.

The traditional role of the shaman in animistic societies is to move between the seen and unseen worlds. S/he is also responsible for identifying what parts of the physical world can be taken into our bodies, hence their role in experimenting with mind-altering (because toxic) plants. The deeper relationship with the enviroment we are seeking as we build a sustainable economy can be usefully informed by this sort of wisdom. Tweet

Ten Ways to Challenge Capitalism That Wouldn't Frighten Your Grandmother

It appears that the salesmen of capitalism have not been entirely successful. Despite the many years of propaganda we have not abandoned care for our fellow man or woman. We still overwhelmingly support a health service paid for from taxation and would rather a decent pension for all was organized along the same lines than be left to the wolves of the financial markets.

Money is at the heart of the economic system that is not called 'capitalism' by accident, and this is the place where you can begin to extract your own life from that destructive and damaging system. It has also been most conspicuously displaying the tendency towards inequality that is the beating heart of capitalism in the past year.

Below I list some further ideas for challenging capitalism in your everyday life in practical ways. It is important not to be daunted and to maintain your awareness that, as you extract your energy and money, along with millions of others, you are weakening the system. From my perspective everyday actions against capitalism, aside from being less risky and more morally acceptable, are far more threatening than violent revolution.

Those who oppose capitalism have the advantages of creativity and imagination, as well as mutual support. It will always be impractical to oppose capitalism by taking on the state with violence, since the state will always be far better equipped in that department than we are. Such action will actually give energy to the growth dynamic, through policing and medical care of the injured, not to mention sales of weaponry.

So here are ten ideas in domestic subversion. Start today and within a year you can be in the clear for a large part of your daily life.

1. Arrange to buy your vegetables through the nearest organic box scheme
2. Switch all your bank accounts to the Nationwide or Co-op/Smile Bank
3. Shop at the Cooperativebetter still, join your local coop.
4. If you work in the private sector, cut your hours of work at least by half
5. Cook more at home, for yourself and your friends
6. Don’t vote, unless the party you vote for has stated anti-capitalist economic policies
7. Whenever you are talking to somebody involved in business, ask them if their business is a cooperative, and have something to back yourself up if they ask why you asked this question
8. Get an allotment
9. Cut down on your coffee intake, and make sure that what you do buy has been fairly traded
10. Before you buy anything ask yourself how much you know about who made it and how, and move towards products where you have more information and closer ties Tweet

Once More Unto the Brink?

The world has fallen silent on the issue of the financial collapse. This blog included, interest has moved elsewhere. Perhaps we are all hoping that we can take a summer holiday from the credit crunch?

Mervyn King, to his credit, is persisting with his doggedly conventional view that public borrowing of the level that we are seeing it is unsustainable. Intermittent but persistent warnings filter through the media - real news occasionally penetrating the celebrity gossip columns that our newspapers and radio programmes have become.

A recent article in the London Review of Books gives a thorough and lengthy account of the crisis, and shares my uneasy sensation that we are pausing for breath rather than breathing easy. The debt crisis has not gone away. Some portion of the debt has been pushed onto the public and out of the private sector. And with our money we have bought insurance that the rest of the debt will be repaid from future economic growth. Growth on the scale to make this bet pay off is unimaginable - even if it didn't signify the death of the planet.

Lanchester has calculated that the money given to banks so far means that each UK household is in debt to the tune of 160% of its annual income. He concludes that debt on this level is quite unpayable and goes as far as suggesting that capitalism - as a system - has failed. This is, presumably, why this message arrives via the London Review of Books and from a novelist, rather than in the American Economic Review and from an economist. (Lanchester extended version of the analysis - a book called Whoops! - is eagerly anticipated.)

The big lie that is circulating at present, and that we are all working hard to believe through various denial and displacement strategies, is that we stared into the abyss and stepped back. A financial crisis threatened but, through paying a huge price and now through working hard in future and tightening our belts we can get through this.

The problem is that this just ain't so. The crisis has been postponed not resolved. As Lanchester puts it the policies adopt are 'not so different from dressing up in a costume and dancing in a circle praying for the intervention of the Market Gods'. The marketeers and their politicians have reached that mental double-bind that leads to insanity. They cannot solve the problem without accepting that capitalism doesn't work. Tweet

Paradigm shift

I'm launching my book this afternoon at Ruskin College in Oxford. The commissioning editor has written a few words for the launch and it reminds me of how much the world has moved on in the 18 months or so since I started writing. He recollects the supreme self-confidence of global capitalism in 2006/7, its claims to be not only the greatest economic system in the history of mankind but the only possible way of organising economic affairs: as unchanging as the laws of physics.

How paltry those claims seem now. Green economists were always aware that the economy was failing in two fundamental respects: it generated huge inequalities which led to deaths and suffering in the poorer countries and the poorer parts of our own country; and its expansionst logic threatened the health of the planet. Now it is failing in its own terms as well.

Unlike the vultures who circulated around Woolworths and other familiar friends on the High Street who are now defunct, few will bemoan the special offer deals that should die with the death of capitalism. As this excellent cartoon by Imogen Shaw shows, we have far more to gain than to lose from the new paradigm we will build together. Tweet

Dreaming the New Economy

I had an exciting experience on Monday, at a meeting of the Executive of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies. This seems an unlikely setting for an epiphany, but perhaps not when you recall I was amongst friends who had not only been expecting the failure of capitalism but working steadfastly as part of a saner and just alternative for most of their lives.

For half the people in the room the end of a capitalism was already a known reality, and the more I thought about this the more I realised that they were right. Had governments not intervened, the financial sector and then the real economies of the leading capitalist nations would have collapsed over the past couple of months. We the people are now supporting the economy - and also owning large parts of it. That is not capitalism according to any definition I can think of.

Sharing this thrilling news with others can be an interesting experience. When I spoke at a public meeting in Lancaster on Tuesday a couple of people had violent physical reactions to the news - as if they had received significant voltages of unexpected electricity. Others warily pointed to the adaptability of the system in the face of past crises and collapses.

This is a good lesson to remember, but what it tells us is not that we are wrong to think that capitalism is finished but rather that now is the crucial time to argue for the utopia we want to put in its place. We have to have the courage right now to dream the future we want to see, to demand it, and to build it together.

When I used the phrase 'building the post-capitalist economy' as the subtitle for my book Market, Schmarket in 2006 it felt like whistling in the dark, singing songs of hope in the face of the juggernaut of globalisation. But the power of capitalism was always more apparent than real, always the power of the conjuror. Let's not be mesmerised now: now is the time to create the better future we have all dreamed of. Tweet

Prince of Darkness Returns

I have been wondering for a while what Mandelson has been up to. Along with Kenneth Clarke - and we've certainly been seeing a fair bit of him on our TV screens - he has been identified as a key member of the Bilderberg Group. Will Hutton has referred to this shadowy bunch as the 'high priests of capitalism'. so we might expect them to have been rather busy recently.

Mandelson has taken a few blows in his time, most recently when the trade talks, the Doha round which had been billed as the round for the poor nations, collapsed during the summer. Globalisation is really about money, but in order to make the extortion of resources from the world's poor seem more decent it has to have trade as well. The terms of trade need to be fixed so that the rich countries will always win the game. It was that which the more powerful of the producer nations refused to accept in Geneva in July, and so the talks collapsed.

And now the financial side has fallen apart as well. No wonder we need dear Peter back in the Cabinet. Some speedy restitching of the global capitalist pact must be achieved without delay. No chance this time of a transparent international negotiation, or a fair balancing of the needs of all the world's people. This will be Bretton Woods on the back of a fag packet and behind closed doors.

So I'm not taken in by the drivel about Labour patching up its quarrels. We long since reached the Cat's Cradle world of Gore Vidal, where the politicians allow us a meaningless choice between policy platforms that are only cosmetically different. Who do you vote for if you don't want capitalism at all? If you're tired of a world where children are allowed to starve so that we can have plasma TVs? Where middle-income taxpayers in this country are subsidising the Bank of England's decision to buy the worthless assets of the morally as well as financial bank-rupt? By the way, this is not a rhetorical question. Tweet

Fair shares?

It has been refreshing to hear the calls for nationalisation coming from union leaders in Manchester this week - quite like old times! Even those with no interest at all in socialism must be beginning to see that crucial public institutions such as banks, transport and utility companies, even telecomms and housing, would be better off outside the risky culture of the marketplace.

But we can't have security for our most basic services because it is too expensive. So the argument runs, but let's look at the numbers. In 2007/8 total government spending was £589 billion (see the government's account here). Last Friday alone the Bank of England 'made available' $40bn, which we can guess is around £20bn and the same day the Guardian reported that the banks controlling the world's reserve currencies had together 'injected' $550bn. into the money markets that week. Given an exchange rate of around 2:1 that is equivalent to half of UK public spending in just one week!

Sums like this are beyond the wildest imaginings of the union members running hospitals and schools. They couldn't be trusted to act responsibly with such vast sums. Much safer in the hand of bankers like Sir John Gieve, deputy governer of the Bank of England, who has particular responsibility for financial stability. Back in May he reassured us that 'London's troubled money markets could soon recover' from the disastrous squeeze on credit. 'The most likely path ahead', he said 'is that confidence and risk appetite will return gradually in the coming months.' I'm so glad my money is in the hands of such a prescient economic actor.

It is capitalism's way to privatise the benefits and publicise the costs of the economy. So in the good times corporation taxes remained low for them who paid them at all, and personal taxation of those on moderate incomes paid for public services. Now the bust has come, companies are rushing into the public-sector fold, demanding our money to keep their bonuses paid.

How many people are going to accept this and just carrying on shelling out for those much wealthier than themselves? How many bags of chips do you have to fill to afford a Maserati? As taxes rise over the coming years will the meek of the earth simply run ever harder on the work treadmill to keep capitalism turning? 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

Thomas Atwood Award 2008

On Tuesday Austin Mitchell received the 2008 Thomas Atwood Award for his services to monetary reform in putting forward EDMs about public credit. I was able to say a few words in support of the award and reproduce them here.

The ceremony took place at the Palace of Westminster in a committee room. While we waited the Chancellor and other cabinet ministers passed by. We felt right at the heart of power, yet it is astonishing how the ideas we were talking about, which are the key ideas of our age, are marginalised from political debate.

So here is what I had to say:

For those of us who have spent our lives awaiting the collapse of capitalism these are interesting times. I work in a Management School and have lived for many years with the slogan that a threat is also an opportunity—suddenly that banal aphorism has taken on an exciting new life!

Capitalism is an economic system that focuses around money. It is a twisted game where the power to control money allows a minority to extract the energy (usually in the form of work) of the majority and of the planet itself for their own exclusive benefit. If the money system fails the game falls apart. Suddenly we are all equal—we become limited only by our own expectations.

To remake the world along just and equitable lines we need two things: a plan and the courage to execute it. It is because Austin Mitchell has demonstrated the wisdom to choose the right plan and the courage to publicly stand by this choice that he is being given the 2008 Thomas Atwood Award.

Courage is a personal matter—a matter of the heart. If we believe in something better we must overcome censorship, embarrassment and fear and stand up for that belief. But the plan is always changing as we learn more and our ideas develop: open minds are invited to engage. I will spend the rest of these few words discussing the outline of plans to change the way our money system operates at three levels: personal, national and global.

First, at the personal level, what should we do about our need to have a bank account and a credit card? There is an easy solution here, since the Co-operative Bank offers both, and other mutuals such as the Nationwide also provide bank accounts. The same applies to other financial services such as insurance and mortages, which can be switched to CIS and the mutual building societies. It is no coincidence that they are not facing the same instability and are rather having to close their doors to new business because of rising demand. Co-operative businesses do not exist to maximize profits but to provide services, and their financial services are more reliable and more ethical than those of their private-sector competitors.

At the national level, we need to be arguing for the reclaiming of the system of money creation so that it is democratized, rather than left to the vagaries of the market and the profiteering of the private sector. Banking also needs to be decentralized, so that local banks can profit from the creation of money to be invested in their local economies, as they did in Atwood’s day. To build resilience in our local communities governments should encourage the flourishing of local currencies through exempting them from tax—at least in the initial phase. And government should take on the major role for the creation of money, as Austin Mitchell’s various EDMs have argued.

Finally, at the global system, we need to go back to the drawing-board, or rather the Bretton Woods conference table. We need to renegotiate an international financial system that uses a neutral currency, as Keynes argued in 1944, and that links to a balanced international trade system. We can go further than this, and by linking the currency to carbon dioxide emissions, use it as a means to tackle climate change as well as global poverty.

We know that the money system we have is flawed, that it is breaking down. Even in its heyday it created massive inequalities and pressurized the planet; now it is failing even in its own terms. What I am proposing here is a massive, radical change and it is easy to lose heart. But the manifest failings of the existing system should give us the courage to believe that we are right.

I would be happy to work with others—especially those with political power—to discuss and develop these ideas. Together we have to decide on the model for money that we want: they we have to just do it. 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

What is the cost of a child?

My original intention was to write a post with this title in response to the news that Tony Blair has been given a lucrative half-a-million-a-year post at J. P. Morgan. Since this bank was implicated in the illegal reconstruction of Iraq, I hoped to find a figure for the number of Iraqi children who died to enable this colonialist wheeze and do the maths. Now who's thinking like an economist?

Economists actually work out the cost of children - and this is part of the problem. Even the most liberal newspapers encourage parents to see their children as 'costs', a recent estimate rising as high as £165,000. This reminds me of the work of economist Gary Becker, who discusses all family relationships as market trade-offs. I laughed at his foolishness; now I realise others were more gullible.

Children have become an important part of the consumer-based economy, with pester power now the subject of discussion in academic journals read by marketing gurus. Parents have been willing to take on debts to over-feed and over-equip their infants - and to assuage their guilt at not giving them enough of what they really want - time and love.


What has finally pushed me into posting on the subject of children is the appearance of Thatcher's feral children in the newspaper headlines. Can anybody really be surprised that the generation that grew up in the 1980s have emerged as bestial and amoral? Wasn't that the culture their generation inherited?

The era of Thatcher was dominated by the law of the jungle so why should we be surprised that it has spawned a generation of wild, untameable people? But this is being unfair to the jungle and its inhabitants. My memory of feral children from Romulus and Remus to Kipling's Kim is that they are noble savages; the stories stand as reminders that the natural world has its own balance and harmony.

Commentators identify the source of the problem as failed parenting whereas they should rather criticise the absence of parenting. In this late and decadent form of capitalism only those who sell their souls in the workplace are accorded value. Even people heroically bringing up children on their own are forced to abandon this most important role to spend hours on the telephone persuading others - perhaps other single parents like themselves - to take on debt to keep the economy afloat.

Many of the children who compete to attract the most ASBOS - a sign of distorted aspiration or an alternative pecking order? - would have probably preferred to be brought up by chimps or wolves since their own parents no doubt spent every waking hour at work on the consumption treadmill. Tweet

Please Stop Talking about Climate Change

It's not just the carbon dioxide emssions associated with the thousands of flights to Bali from around the globe that could be saved if these farcical international negotiations were abandoned once and for all. There would be all the additional hot air produced by over-excited and sweaty men posturing at each other like shaved gorillas. And all that extra methane produced by all those excessive summit-of-extravagance dinners.

Of all the infuriations that arose in my troubled breast during the tortuous days of the Bali discussions the most poignant was the coincidence of the signing of the 'Lisbon' EU treaty, a day before all the HoGs had to be in Brussels, meaning that they had to fly specially to Lisbon only for the tacky signing ceremony, accompanied by lift music. A vast outpouring of C02 just to inflate some Portuguese egos.

I know there are some good people involved in these talks, and I truly wish them well, but the angrier and baser part of me just wishes they would all just fucking shut up. The sight of their hypocritical staged concern while they destroy my planet is more destructive to my soul than can be soothed by the minuscule progress that may have been achieved. How many of those participating are unaware that they can never get anywhere because the negotiators are in hock to the economic interests that cannot tackle climate change without voluntartily giving away their wealth and power?

The pictures show the signatories in Lisbon and the negotiators at Bretton Woods, where this whole crazy system started in 1944. We will never solve the one without addressing the other. A money system based on debt and enforcing geometric economic growth can enver be compatible with sustainability. (I couldn't find a photo of the actual negotiators in Bali - please help if you can). How much has power shifted in the past 60 years: one female out of 27 is an infinite improvement, mathematically, over the no women at all around the table in 1944.


Perhaps the most dangerous thing about negotiations such as those at Bali is the temptation to be sucked into all that displacement activity while what we should be doing is taking the power back into our own hands and sorting out our own economic and social realities. Planet-saving begins at home, not on some paradise island. Tweet

Shit: We're All in it Together!

Amongst many excellent regular events that take place in Stroud are the coffee-house discussions, where, over biodynamic refreshments, we put the world to rights. The quality of the presentations is excellent and for people who think they know it all already (or is that just me?), it is amazing how much you learn every month.

This month's theme was water. The presentations were wide-ranging: water as a cause of war, a source of disease, a fascinating part of our local landscape. The most important message was that 'Water is an energy issue'. Some 5% of world energy is used in pumping our water . . . and sewage.

You can't talk water, it seems, without also talking dirty. We learned how it is fairly recently that we have used water as profligately as we do now, largely as a channel for taking our wastes out of sight and out of smelling distance, thus effectively removing them from our minds. But not from the environment, of course. For they remain just a short distance from us, in rivers and seas, decomposing and providing a friendly home to bacteria and viruses.

Yet just as I have had to learn on the farm that dung is our friend, so can we form a much closer relationship with our wastes. It emerged that many who were at the discussion already proudly fill piss-pots which they use as compost activators. Human 'solid waste' still seems hedged around with taboos, as I have felt impelled to head it round with quotation marks. It can provide excellent fertiliser when treated suitably.

The solutions to the problem of water and waste are very local indeed. The model appears to be to turn your home into a water recycling unit. By taking the rainwater from the roof and the barely soiled water pumped to your home and circulating them you can minimise the need to bring water in and send sewage out.

Why aren't more people doing this? The pressure of the market and of making profits appears to be the culprit again. It is at the points that water enters and leaves the home that profits can be made, hence the political pressure to keep us all tied into a vast, bureaucratic water system rather than playing our role as part of Nature's water cycle.

So, a lot was learned, although the content of the learning was perhaps something we already knew. The economic system Marx called capitalism is just not a very good way of organising things, and taking more responsibility and doing things on a smaller scale can usually work better. A simple, but important message that is being relearned through various more or less savoury media.

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A Rose by Any Other Name . . .

Notable local permaculture gardener Helen Pitel has been teaching us all how to 'Name that Plant!'. Today we reached the noble yet humble rose. Through its history we can trace the evolution of our own culture--our movement away from and back towards Nature.

The dog-rose is native to Britain. It is the small rather unimpressive pink flower, with five petals and yellow stamens that we see in our hedgerows. It is the same plant that yields beautiful orange-red hips in the autumn. Each one has ten times the Vitamin C content of an orange, hence their importance in the Hedgerow Harvest campaign of World War II.

By crossing this native species with Damask roses from the Middle East and musk roses from the Himalayas a huge range of sweet-scented flowers were created. Their seasonal habit of flowering only during June was soon conquered once the China roses were discovered. These flowered right through to the autumn, extending the rose season.

But during the twentieth century rose breeders strayed even further from Nature. By crossing tea roses from China with the existing crosses they achieved a mass of celebrity blooms. Many were named for human celebrities such as Elizabeth of Glamis (the Queen Mother), Princess Diana and Lilli Marlene. The hybrid tea is a rather obvious, in-your-face, sort of rose. It grows to a uniform height, has large bright flowers, but carries no scent, lacks reslience and is vulnerable to disease.

Helen drew our attention to the Peace cultivar, one of the most popular roses of the twentieth century. Ironically it was developed from stock sent from France to the USA during World War II, following the invasion of France by the Germans. You can see it growing around the war memorial in Nailsworth.

As the public's affection for the showy and artificial has declined, rose breeders are developing more natural, interesting and highly-scented blooms, known as English roses, which are also rich in oil. British monarchs have tradtionally been annointed with rose oil, but supplies had dwindled due to the popularity of the hybrid tea, and so the tradition had to be missed for this current Queen's coronation. Prince Charles is a keen rose gardener and is collecting the oil for his own coronation.

And just to prove that gardeners have a sense of humour, as well as a sense of cultural history, Helen told us a joke that gardeners have about the yellow rose the Lady Hillingdon rose--that she is no good in bed but great up against a wall.

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Tracing our roots in space and time

A recent article in the Guardian noted that Britons' two favourite leisure pursuits are genealogy and gardening. This encouraged me greatly, since I had previously thought that the no. 1 was shopping. Thinking more deeply I wondered about the link between these two and what they tell us about contemporary society. The common thread seemed to be roots. Globalisation has led to a loss of identity and our response is to re-embed ourselves in space and time. The huge number of people using online databases of family records and the record-beating queues for allotments are both evidence of the same impulse.

Of the four dimensions recognised by conventional science, time is by far the most interesting. During a recent spell of car-free living I noticed that, quite contrary to my expectation, moving more slowly actually caused time to expand. By rushing less I was doing things more slowly but my experience was of having more time to spend rather than less. It appears that the modern lifestyle actually compresses time, reducing our sense of lived experience. This seems to go beyond the concern of the slow movement with the quality of time and actually have more to do with the perceived quantity of time.

What implications does this have for the organisation of the economy? David Harvey wrote long ago about the way in which culture, whether of the 'high' or 'low' variety (opera or fishing) is a substitute for what capitalist work structures deny people in the workplace. When time is pressured and measured and outside your control you are not really living at all. Your time has been stolen by your employer. Harvey was in fact only expanding on a point made by Marx that the factory system represents the annihilation of space by time.

Stealing time is far more subtle and effective than stealing space. From the Norman Conquest through the Enclosure Movement we have witnessed and protested against our exclusion from the 'common treasury' of land and resisted the domination of castles and corporations. The stealing of time is effected through the creation of money as debt. When a bank creates a debt in this period to generate cash it is buying people's labour in the future to pay back that debt. It is this system of money creation and the vast quantities of debt it generates that has turned us all into wage slaves.

The escape route lies in re-embedding ourselves and our work in our own space and time which is why localisation is philosophically as well as environmentally important. The more you can work at your own pace and exchange things with people you know the more you will be taking back control over your own time and space and emancipating yourself and your community. Tweet