The Age of Consent

Their loyalty to other members of the tribe is unimpeachable, but whenever the livestock belonging to another tribe come within range and are insufficiently defended, those men with sufficient arms will attempt to steal them. These forays, especially since the arrival of modern weapons, can be exceedingly bloody. When I was working with the Turkana of north-western Kenya, my visit to a cattle camp was delayed by illness. By the time I arrived, all that remained of its people were their skulls and the remains of their clothes, scattered across the savannah after their bodies had been eaten by hyaenas. Warriors from another tribe had arrived in the night, surrounded the camp, and inoculated it with bullets. Ninety-six of its ninety-eight people were killed.22

The anarchists may respond that the brotherhood of man has, in this case, been corrupted by modern weaponry. There is no question that automatic weapons have accelerated conflict, but long before they first experienced the electrifying sensation of holding the stock of a gun, the people of these anarchist communities murdered their enemies when they perceived that they were favoured by the balance of power. Indeed another anarchist tribe, the Maasai, armed only with spears and knives, seized almost all the grazing lands of what is now central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania within a century of emerging from the region the Turkana now inhabit. So the anarchists, as well as disposing of states, greed, wealth and power, would also need to disinvent all weapons which could be used to harm another person: not just bombs and automatic rifles, but also, as the massacres in Rwanda show, any bit of metal, stone or wood which can be sharpened on one side or knocked into a point. Theirs may be the perfect political system for another planet, inhabited by life-forms whose responses to scarcity and competition are the very opposite of ours. Regrettably, it is not a system destined to enhance the lives of those who live here.

The absence of government, then, is unworkable and ultimately intolerable. Communist government appears to depend on the extermination of entire categories of human being, while vesting power in the hands of unaccountable dictators. The dictatorship of vested interests, which is what passes for governance at the global level today, is oppressive and unjust. Unless some other system, which all political philosophers have so far overlooked, emerges, we are forced to conclude that all we have left is democracy.

Democracy is unattainable unless it is brokered by institutions, mandated by the people and made accountable to them, whose primary purpose is to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to prevent people of all stations from resolving their differences by means of violence. The collective noun for such institutions is government. So democratic government, of one kind or another, appears to be the least-worst system we can envisage. It is the unhappy lot of humankind that an attempt to develop a least-worst system emerges as the highest ideal for which we can strive. But if democracy is the only system which could deliver the Age of Consent we seek, we immediately meet a paradox. The reason why democratic governance is more likely to deliver justice than anarchism is that it possesses the capacity for coercion: the rich and powerful can be restrained, by the coercive measures of the state, from oppressing the rest of us.

This is not the only sense in which democracy compromises consent. In long-established democracies, no living person has volunteered her consent to the system under which she lives, for it pre-dates her. In some of the newer democracies, the majority of those of voting age alive today may well have supported the political system’s formation, but those who are coming of age, and will also be forced to submit to the system, have not been consulted. Succeeding generations are likely to inherit the structures approved by their parents, whether or not they wish to be bound by them themselves. Of course, we can vote for reform and seek to persuade our representatives to change the constitution, but even in the most responsive of democratic systems, citizens are unlikely to be permitted to vote to dissolve the state, not least because so many powerful people have an interest in sustaining it. As Marx noted, ‘Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own making.’23

A further problem is that, even if we do change the system, and a large majority approves of that change, there will always be people who do not. Yet they, just as much as everyone else, must surrender their consent and submit to the will of the majority. This is a distressing property of the democratic order: that it does not permit those who wish to remove themselves from the system to do so. But it appears to be a necessary one, if we are to prevent the powerful from escaping the legal restraints which defend us, however inadequately, from exploitation. This does not mean that we cannot break the rules with which we disagree. Indeed from time to time, many of us in the global justice movement violate the laws against criminal damage, obstruction or breach of the peace for political purposes, and believe we are morally justified in doing so. But the sustenance of the democratic state requires that we should expect it to seek to prevent us from doing so. We can, of course, use civil disobedience to try to change the law when, as it so often does, it discriminates in favour of the powerful. But without a body of law and the assumption of equality before it, the weak are without institutional defence.

In another sense, however, democracy is more consensual than any other political system, in that it is the only one which, in principle at least, consistently provides us with opportunities for dissent. It permits us to express our disapproval of policies and ideologies which offend us, to vote against them, and to overthrow them without bloodshed. No other system offers this. Orthodox Marxist regimes are viciously intolerant of dissenters. Anarchist systems appear to offer great scope for dissent within a community, as well as the opportunity to leave that community and join another one, but because they do not protect us from persecution, the only means of dissenting from the violence of others is through greater violence of our own. If we happen to possess the less effective weapons or belong to the smaller community, that dissent will be pointless. The dictatorship of vested interests offers opportunities for dissent only to those who represent the vested interests.

This is not to say that democracy is without substantial and systemic dangers. The most obvious of these is the tyranny of the majority. There have been plenty of states run by democratically elected governments which have, with majority consent, persecuted their minorities. The theoretical defences against this danger – such as weighted voting and special consultation rights – are flimsy and introduce problems of their own, such as complexity (rendering the political system less comprehensible and therefore less accountable) and definition (the laws designed to defend oppressed peoples can be exploited by oppressive minorities). But in this respect democracy appears to work rather better in practice than it does in theory. In most democratic countries, despite the recent advance of the far right, public acceptance of ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, children born out of wedlock and other oppressed groups appears to have increased with time. The same could not be said, for example, of the Muslim theocracies. Democracies whose people have access to communications technology appear to be self-improving in this respect, because they provide the political space in which minorities can explain themselves to the majority.

Another obvious danger is the crude and clumsy nature of the decision-making process. In representative systems, elections tend to be won or lost on just one or two issues, yet almost every party standing for election has dozens of policies. By choosing one potential government over another, we are forced to select an entire package, parts of which may be disagreeable to us. Representative systems permit a small degree of modification. If a political position turns out to be so offensive to the general will that it can threaten the survival of the government, it is likely to be dropped. But this is an insufficient safeguard, as most policies, though they may be particularly hurtful to a few people, or mildly hurtful to most people, are unlikely to generate sufficient opposition to threaten the entire government, especially if they are so complex that few will bother to discover what all their implications may be. This can be ameliorated a little by introducing an element of participatory democracy into a representative system, though this, as Chapter 4 shows, has its own limitations.

The third major problem with democracy is that a system capable of restraining the oppressor will also be capable of restraining the oppressed. If we are to prevent the rich and powerful from wrecking our lives, we require a government big enough to sit on them; but a government big enough to sit on them will also be big enough to sit on us. Conversely, if the system is sufficiently responsive to the will of the oppressed, it may also be responsive to the will of the oppressor. This, of course, is the great conflict at the heart of all democratic systems, and the one with which many of those in the movement have been rightly concerned. While states, over the past few years, have become ever more willing to regulate their citizens, they have become ever less willing to regulate the corporations. This is one of the problems this book seeks to address.

But while democracy has evident defects, it also possesses two great attributes. The first is that it is the only political system which contains the potential for its own improvement. We can overthrow our representatives without having to kill them. To a lesser extent, we can affect their behaviour while they remain in office. Democracy can be understood as a self-refining experiment in collective action.

The second is that democracy has the potential to be politically engaging. The more politically active citizens become, the more they are able to affect the way the state is run. The more success they encounter in changing the state, the more likely they are to remain politically active. Unhappily, this process appears to have gone into reverse in many democratic countries. As the competing parties offer ever less political choice (partly as a result of the constraints introduced by the migration of power to the global sphere), citizens are alienated from government, which leads, in turn, to a further withdrawal of the government from the people. A system which should be politically centripetal has instead become centrifugal.

The argument for democracy at the national level then seems to be – if not exactly robust – more compelling than the argument for any other system, or, for that matter, the absence of a system. But if we can – as most people do – agree that democracy is the best way to run a nation, it is hard to think of any reason why it should not be the best way to run the world. Indeed, it is surely demonstrable that many of the most pressing global and international problems arise from an absence of global and international democracy. The way in which states engage with each other is much closer to the anarchist model than the democratic one. The US government, like that of other superpowers before it, has seized the domestic mandate provided by its people (the ‘autonomous community’) to assert an international authority to rule the world. It expands its dominion – just like any powerful and well-armed community in the anarchist model – by means of violence and expropriation, in those parts of the world which do not form an alliance with it against lesser powers, succumb meekly to its demands, or successfully resist it with violence of their own. The democratic restraints within a state, in other words, do not prevent it from attacking weaker ones.

There are also, as this manifesto has argued, certain issues which affect humanity as a whole, and yet whose resolution is brokered by nation states. This introduces a number of problems. The first is that it permits powerful governments dominated by special interests to impose their will on the rest of the world. In some cases those governments are led by their domestic concerns to perceive a circumstance which is generally disastrous for humanity to be to their advantage. An administration which owes its election to the funds provided by oil companies, for example, will encourage the increasing use of fossil fuel.

The second problem with this brokerage of global issues by nation states is that even if all governments had an equal voice, our ability to affect their decisions is muted. Except in wartime, global and international issues seldom feature among the priorities of a domestic electorate. As national governments, we elect them, quite rightly, to tackle national issues. Without a separate process for determining what our response to a global issue may be, even a government with the best intentions has no effective means of assessing and representing the national will. This problem is commonly described as ‘photocopy democracy’. A democratic decision is taken, to elect a particular government. That government then mandates an agency, such as a government department, to set certain policies. That agency then delegates people to represent those policies at the international level. With each ‘copy’, democracy becomes greyer and harder to decipher. This can be partly addressed through referenda, but the government still acts as a filter between us and the mediation of global policy. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that other governments would have polled their citizens. Governments which have consulted their people can be outvoted by governments which have not.

A third problem is that brokerage by nation states diminishes the sense that we are all in this together. It encourages us to treat a problem affecting everyone on earth as a matter of national self-interest, and reduces our appreciation of our common humanity. Just as importantly, the lack of democracy at the global level leads to a lack of choice at the national level. National governments can seek to act as if they were free to respond to the will of their people, but they will be relentlessly dragged back to the set of policies imposed (by means I will explain in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) by those who possess global and international power. Without a global transformation, national transformations are impossible.

CHAPTER 3 A Global Democratic Revolution The Case Against Hopeless Realism

Almost everyone who contests the way the world is run is at least vaguely aware of the problem of the migration of power to a realm in which there is no democratic control. Much of the effort of the democrats within the global justice movement has been devoted to addressing it. These people belong to two camps. The first consists of those who have sought to re-democratize politics by withdrawing them from the sphere (the global and international) in which there is no democracy and returning them to the sphere (the national and local) in which we appear to retain some political control. They see globalization as the problem, and believe that the re-invigoration of domestic democracy depends on its containment or reversal. The second consists of those who seek, by one means or another, to democratize globalization.

The most widespread and visible manifestation of the first approach is the strategy known as ‘localization’. A book of this title has been published by the trade theorist Colin Hines.24 His proposals, or something like them, have been adopted as policy by several national green parties. Hines points out that globalization forces workers in different countries into destructive competition, prevents nation states and citizens from controlling their own economies and helps the rich to become richer, while further impoverishing the poor. The trend of globalization, he suggests, should be ‘reversed’ by ‘discriminating in favour of the local’ by means of protectionist barriers. Imports should gradually be reduced, until every country produces ‘as much of their food, goods and services as they can’. New trade rules must be introduced, forbidding states to ‘pass laws…that diminish local control of industry and services’, and a new investment treaty would ensure that countries are ‘prohibited from treating foreign investors as favourably as domestic investors’.25 All states would be forced by international law to introduce the same labour standards.

While some of the measures he proposes are, individually, arguable, his objectives are both contradictory and unjust. There is an argument for permitting the poorest nations to protect their economies against certain imports, in order to incubate their own industries. This, as Chapter 6 will show, was how almost all the countries which are rich today first developed. There is no argument founded on justice for permitting the rich nations to do so. If all nations were to protect their economies, the wealth of the rich ones might be diminished, but the poverty of the poor ones would not. We would, if we followed his prescriptions, lock the poor world into destitution. Trade is, at present, an ineffective means of transferring wealth between nations, but it has massive distributive potential; indeed, far more potential than an increased flow of aid, which reinforces the paternalism of the rich and the dependency of the poor, and which tends to be directed, anyway, towards those nations considered by the West to be of ‘strategic importance’.

Colin Hines is in good company, however, because, though it pains me to say so, the approach of many of the most prominent members of the global justice movement in the rich world has been characterized by a staggering inconsistency. I once listened to a speaker demand, like Hines, a cessation of most forms of international trade, on the grounds of economic justice, and then, in answering a question from the audience, condemn the economic sanctions on Iraq. If we can accept – as almost everyone in the global justice movement appears to – that preventing trade with Iraq, or, for that matter, imposing a trade embargo on Cuba, impoverishes and in many cases threatens the lives of the people of those nations, we must also accept that a global cessation of most kinds of trade would have the same effect, but on a greater scale.

Many of the localizers have demanded measures which are the mirror image of those promoted by the market fundamentalists. While the fundamentalists insist that trade is the answer to everything, the localizers insist that trade is the answer to nothing. While the fundamentalists maintain that no economy should be protected, the localizers maintain that all economies should be protected. They have rightly condemned the fundamentalists’ ‘onesize-fits-all’ approach, only to check it with a policy of equal coarseness.

But perhaps the most evident conflict within Colin Hines’s prescriptions is that his formula for economic localization relies entirely upon enhanced political globalization. Nowhere in his book does he appear to address this point, or even to acknowledge it. His model requires draconian controls on the freedom of nation states to set their own economic policies, enforced by such global institutions as an Alternative Investment Code, a General Agreement for Sustainable Trade and, rather wonderfully, a ‘World Localization Organization’. These would coordinate global controls on capital flows, taxes on financial speculation, global competition and exchange rate rules and debt forgiveness for the poorer nations. He offers no clues as to how this new kind of globalization might come about, how it might be rendered democratically accountable or how enhanced political cooperation could be sustained while nations cut their economic ties. All these new global measures, needless to say, are to be accompanied by the ‘maximum devolution of political power’ and the surrender of ‘control of the local economy to the locality’.26

There is another means of reclaiming power from globalization greatly favoured by theorists within this movement, and that is to bypass governments and the usual political processes, and seek to shape global futures directly, by changing the decisions which govern the daily pattern of our lives. In his beautifully written book The Post-Corporate World,27 the development economist David Korten acknowledges the need for political campaigning and global measures to redistribute power and wealth, but he seeks to contest the power of transnational corporations principally by changing the behaviour of those who work for them, buy their products and own their stock. Through ‘mindful living’ we can free ourselves ‘from the imposed order of coercive institutions that constrain life’s creative power…To be truly free we must learn to practice a mindful self-restraint in the use of our freedom.’ His prescriptions could be summarized as ‘consumer democracy’, ‘shareholder democracy’ and ‘voluntary simplicity’.

Consumer democracy means, in Korten’s words, that, ‘in good market fashion, you are voting with your dollars’. By ‘starving the capitalist economy’, you can ‘nurture the mindful market’.28 By using your money carefully, in other words, you can help to create a world in which other people are not exploited and the environment is not destroyed.

None but the market fundamentalists would deny that there is a moral imperative to spend our money carefully. If we believe that slavery is wrong, we should be careful not to help those businesses which depend on slavery to survive. If we wish to protect the Amazon rainforest, we should withhold from buying mahogany, whose extraction, in some parts of the Amazon, has activated other forms of destruction. But mindful consumption is a weak and diffuse means of changing the world, and it has been greatly overemphasized by those (though David Korten is not among them) who wish to avoid the necessary political conflicts.

The first and most obvious problem with consumer democracy is that some people have more votes than others. Those with the most votes – that is to say, with the most money – are the least likely to wish to change an economic system which has served them well. If we reject the one-dollar, one-vote arrangement which determines the way the World Bank and IMF are run, on the grounds that this is a grossly unjust means of resolving political issues, we should surely also reject a formula for changing the world which relies on the goodwill of those with the most dollars to spend. It should be obvious that the decisions made, in this weighted voting system, by the people with the most money will not, in aggregate, be decisions made in the interests of those with the least.

Those who do seek to make ethical purchasing decisions will often discover, moreover, that the signal they are trying to send becomes lost in the general market noise. I might reject one brand of biscuits and buy another, on the grounds that the second one was less wastefully packaged, but unless I go to the trouble of explaining that decision to the biscuit manufacturer I chose not to patronize, the company will have no means of discovering why I made it, or even that I made a decision at all. Even if I do, my choice is likely to be ineffective unless it is coordinated with the choices of hundreds (or, depending on the size of the company, thousands) of other consumers. But consumer boycotts are notoriously hard to sustain. Shoppers are, more often than not, tired, distracted and drowning in information and conflicting claims. Campaigning organizations report that a maximum of one or two commercial boycotts per nation per year is likely to be effective; beyond that, customer power becomes too diffuse. For the majority of products, therefore, the consumer’s power of restraint is limited.

This problem is compounded by the fact that nearly everything we buy has already been bought at least once by the time it reaches us. Take, for example, the market for copper. I object to the way the indigenous people of West Papua, in Indonesia, have been treated by the operators of the massive copper mine at Tembagapura. Many hundreds of people have been forcibly evicted from their lands; Indonesian soldiers protecting the operation have tortured and murdered hundreds more; and the ‘tailings’ from the mine have damaged the fisheries which provided a critical source of protein for thousands of others. I would like that mine either to cease operating altogether or to operate only with the consent of local people. But I buy none of the copper I use directly. Most of it has been brought into my house by plumbers and electricians, or in the form of components – largely invisible to me – of electrical equipment. I have purchased it, in other words, as part of a package of goods and services, for which I have paid a single price. My leverage over the copper market then depends on the transmission of my will through a number of intermediaries. If I am prepared to embarrass myself, I might be able to persuade the electrician to go back to his company and ask it to question its suppliers, who in turn might be persuaded to approach the manufacturers who in turn might be persuaded to petition the mining company to discover whether or not the copper he is about to use in my house was produced with the consent of local people and without damaging the environment.