A short prehistory of the future - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Morton
THE CONTINUING LEGITIMACY of liberal capitalism cannot rest on the ‘democratisation of consumption' alone. The crisis offers the potential for a much more far-reaching democratisation of global institutions, the global public sphere and global capital itself. There are a number of concrete and feasible directions this might take.
Just as the ‘democratisation of risk' exposed the retirement savings of a generation of workers in the Anglo-Saxon economies to the vagaries of the market, it also created what the late Paul Hirst described as the largest pool of socially owned capital in history, in the shape of pension funds. At present, the owners of this pool of capital exercise little control over the way it is invested and the consequences of its use. It might surprise many members of Australian superannuation funds, for example, to know that fourteen of the largest industry funds hold investments which directly generate nearly six million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
My financial interests as a stakeholder in a super fund may not coincide with my interests as a citizen who is worried about global warming and the kind of world my children will live in. Neo-liberal capitalism created a dismembered citizen whose interests as shareholder, consumer, parent, partner, child and individual subject of the democratic process could somehow be compartmentalised, partitioned off from each other. A more democratic liberal capitalism would attempt to put the dismembered citizen back together, and recognise the common interests of the individual owners of capital in broader forms of social solidarity.
But this is not enough to restore legitimacy to globalisation as an economic and political project. If this is our goal, we will need to end the domination by the developed economies of institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, or replace these institutions with new ones which can better reflect the interests of people in the developing world – and, in particular, the poor.
Just as western governments after World War II set about redistributing wealth within their economies, a democratic global order can and should seek to redistribute wealth from richer to poorer citizens of the global economy. This may sound like a utopian project, but in fact one simple mechanism for doing so, the Tobin tax, was first suggested more than thirty years ago. The tax, now known as a currency-transaction tax, would impose a small levy on international currency transactions and use the proceeds to fund development projects. It is, as the former French President Jacques Chirac said, a tax on the benefits of globalisation, albeit a minuscule one, amounting to a ‘development levy' of 0.005 per cent. Such a levy would yield an estimated US$33 billion, which could be invested in the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in September 2000. The practical means of collecting and distributing the revenue has been explored in research by the North-South Institute in Canada, and the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has supported its proposals.
As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the bourgeoisie has played a revolutionary role in history. The bourgeoisie of the developed world has reaped huge benefits from the first phase of neo-liberal globalisation, and it can continue to play an important role in a new phase of democratic globalisation; but only if it can find a new language in which to speak to the citizens of the developing world, stripped of the moralising tones of the well-fed.
The ascendancy of a new bourgeoisie in the South and East will not, of itself, guarantee the emergence of a more democratic and liberal global order. This will only happen if the global poor – the slum-dwellers, landless peasants and migrant workers of Africa, Asia and Latin America – receive a greater share of the benefits of globalisation.
The essential questions Marx asked – questions about human dignity and social justice in the conditions of modernity – are no less urgent now than they were more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Marx's answers to those questions were wrong, and the history of the twentieth century is littered with the corpses of tens of millions of people who, if they could be raised from the grave, would bear witness to how wrong they were. The global financial crisis marks a turning point no less significant than the collapse of communism in 1989: in Heiner Mueller's terms, we have moved beyond the point where the only choices open to us are between Stalin's ghost and the Deutsche Bank. But unless we can find some new answers to those same old questions, we will produce nothing but a new, global generation of gravediggers in the twenty-first century. ♦