What are the signs of a world in crisis?
The major symptoms are the growth of inequality and the number of poor and excluded people, the breakdown or approaching breakdown of ecological systems, and the crisis of democracy and empowerment which makes people feel that they have no influence over policy or the circumstances of their lives. These symptoms are produced by the kind of globalisation which is driven by transnational corporations and financial markets. The post-war gains achieved by the welfare state are being beaten back, and I think if they could, the neo-liberals would cheerfully take us back to the 19th century. More and more decisions, no matter where you live, are being taken at the international level where no citizen has a prayer of influencing or intervening. So people protest. They come out into the streets because all other avenues are closed to them.
But you could argue that periods of dislocation are quite common in history, and that in the end you have a much more productive and wealthy society?
Advertisement
If you wait long enough, maybe. I don’t subscribe to that, but in any case, we don’t have time, or hundreds of millions of people don’t have time, to see if this secular experiment works. My argument is, rather, that we’ve got the money, except that right now wealth is completely concentrated at the top. It really would be possible to ensure a decent and dignified life for everyone and it would be in everyone’s interests to do so. The solutions exist, we know what they are.
But what will it take to make people try those new solutions?
I thought naively that 11 September might be enough to push our political leadership into changing policy, just as the Second World War did. But clearly it wasn’t a big enough shock. So how big a shock do you need to make these people say, “Right, we must restructure in order to share the wealth, provide the basics, save the environment and do it in such a way that the process is managed to a great degree by popular participation and cooperation”?
That’s going to sound very idealistic to those who think that competition is our natural condition?
It’s sheer ideology to assume that society should be based on competition alone, to pretend that competition and untrammelled capitalism are the natural state of humanity and the condition for our survival. If that premise is false, as I believe it is, then virtually everything in our society is organised to be dysfunctional.
For example?
Take jobs. According to the International Labour Organization, at least 1.5 billion people are jobless and many more aren’t working as much as they would like. And it isn’t just unemployment but the temporary or casual employment which is more and more the rule, especially for young people. It’s the not knowing from day to day. It makes me think of the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim when he wrote about the concentration camps that the biggest advantage the guards and the hierarchy had was total unpredictability. You could do something one day and be rewarded, then do the same thing the next day and be punished. If you destabilise people through constant uncertainty, they become passive and infantilised. But also, sometimes, they revolt. It’s that kind of uncertainty that has been programmed into most people’s lives unless they are at the very top of the tree. A society programmed that way eventually becomes dysfunctional because cooperation and stability are discouraged.
Where do you see the new solutions?
I was at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, recently. This city of about 1.4 million people has developed a participatory budgeting system in which the citizens determine how a portion of the city’s income is spent in their own neighbourhoods, on their chosen priorities. As a result, waste and corruption have been reduced to virtually zero, and the system produces informed and politicised citizens.
What are your solutions?
Too many people still believe Margaret Thatcher’s TINA, There Is No Alternative, whereas we should say TATA, There Are Thousands of Alternatives. But although I can make a lot of suggestions, the point is that it’s not up to me to provide solutions, it’s up to the people concerned. Their solutions will be diverse because of the diversity of their cultures, and will depend on the problems they face, where they face them and so on. Just one example: in a predominantly Muslim community in India, the people were asked what they wanted. Did they need piped water, street lighting… what? And they said, no, we want a mosque. The development agency thought that was clearly the wrong answer because it was a cultural, spiritual answer. But it turned out that a mosque really was what they needed because they had no place to meet, to have discussions and develop a sense of community.
In The Lugano Report you write: “The burden we must shoulder… is nothing less than the invention of international democracy.” Did you mean something beyond the local level?
The local level is very important, as is the national level. I don’t believe the nation state is done for and I don’t dismiss it. People fought and died for us to get the vote and to have a welfare state, and I think we should use past gains as a basis. International democracy should be the next stage. Too many decisions that affect all our lives are being taken at a level where there’s no popular control, electoral or otherwise. We’ve got to reform institutions such as the World Trade Organization where a lot of the rules have been made—at least indirectly—by transnational corporations. And faced with the huge and dangerous inequalities and ecological devastation I mentioned earlier, we’ve got to solve these problems internationally.
How?
By taxing destructive and predatory activities, and by offering material incentives to governments to improve the situation of their own poor people and to preserve their environment. At present, no institution, nobody, is in a position to do that. Unfortunately, on the whole, the international institutions we have are making both the lives of poor people and the environment even worse. The failures of our intergovernmental institutions certainly don’t make a good case for a world government and personally I don’t want to see one anytime soon.
So how do we reform these institutions?
Well, for a start, we could institute the so-called Tobin tax, an idea first mooted more than 25 years ago by the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate in economics. His idea was to tax transactions on international currency markets which now amount to more than $1.5 trillion as day. These foreign exchange transactions have virtually nothing to do with financing the real economy. If they were taxed at a very modest rate—and experts speak of 0.1 to 0.5 per cent at most—we would have large new anti-poverty revenues. These revenues could then be distributed by a new international institution, drawing on the best expertise from existing organisations but not replicating them.
How would it be democratic?
That institution could encourage democracy locally if it made funds conditional on democratic participation of the people of each country. In other words, you would say to a government, “Do you want some of the Tobin money?” Then you have to involve the genuine representatives of your own civil society. The Tobin tax and probably other international taxes could encourage participatory democracy with a simple rule: no democracy, no money. Such an institution wouldn’t need to be a vast bureaucracy—it could be quite streamlined. I think international taxation and redistribution—a sort of worldwide Keynesian programme—is clearly needed as the basis for reducing poverty and inequality and for fostering international democracy.
You’re vice-president of the French arm of ATTAC, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. What is ATTAC?
Practically everyone in France, Spain or Scandinavia has heard of ATTAC and I find it odd that even though we have branches in over 40 countries, ATTAC simply has not penetrated the Anglo-Saxon world. In France, after nearly four years, we have 30,000 members and over 220 local committees—and it’s growing very fast in Italy, Scandinavia and Latin America. We call ourselves a “movement for popular education turned towards action” and we campaign for international democracy in very concrete ways. We argue for adopting the Tobin tax, for closing down tax havens, for cancelling Third World debt and for deep reform of international institutions.
It’s become almost trendy to talk about inequality—even Bill Clinton was talking about it recently…
Clinton was talking about terrorism stemming directly from inequality. While I think that frustration and deprivation can obviously contribute to violence, I don’t think that 11 September stemmed from such roots at all. From what we know, the people involved in the suicide bombings were middle class, educated people and frankly I don’t think they gave a hang about the poor people in their own societies. The argument that claims we can wipe out terrorism by wiping out inequality is false, or at least partly false. Yes, we could get rid of some of the underlying conditions, but we have better reasons to do the right thing.
What about the integration of poor people into the world? In addition to economic dominance the media makes them feel they are outside looking in
It’s clear that poor people now know they are poor. They didn’t perhaps know that before but now everyone has access to television. In poor communities in the South, you may well not see plumbing, but you will see antennas all over shanty towns, and every day they broadcast a completely distorted picture of the West. It’s scary that people really believe the soap operas. I’m surely not the first to have written that shopping malls are the new cathedrals. The parallel is not as far-fetched as it might seem. While a real cathedral or mosque charges no entrance fee, you can’t partake of the communion of the mall unless you have money. This is a big sociological change, perhaps the biggest: you now have to pay in order to secure admittance to the globalised community.
Are there grounds for optimism? Has there been significant change since Seattle?
Yes, I’m extremely hopeful. The tide began to turn with the fight against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a kind of bill of rights for transnational corporations which we managed to defeat. It then continued with Seattle and general militancy against decision makers who cut themselves off from ordinary human beings. This tide is swelling and people are making themselves heard. I haven’t seen anything like this movement in 30 years. I think young people especially are spontaneously internationalist and seeking antidotes to globalisation. I was in Britain giving a talk a while ago and some in the audience didn’t find me radical enough. A kid of about 18 stood up and said: “Look, the point is that in 15 years, this planet’s going to be totally f**k*d.” I thought that was a fair assessment.