Suiting Themselves, How Corporations are Driving the Global Agenda
By Sharon Beder
Earthscan, London
258 pages, $55.50
available in Australia from <http://www.dadirect.com.au>
Escaping the Matrix, How We the People Can change the World
By Richard Moore
The Cyberjournal Project, 209 pages
available from <http://www.cyberjournal.org>
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
These two books relate to the uneasy feelings pervading our society, the sensation that globalisation means that democracy is reduced to a sham and everyday people have little control over civilisation.
Sharon Beder's effort is academic (she is a professor at the University of Wollongong) and it builds a powerful case, fact by well-researched fact, to reveal the history of how corporations have come to dominate international forums and decision-making.
Richard Moore began working life as a computer boffin in Silicon Valley, where he pioneered blogging. His work comes from the blogosphere and he is hoping to inspire readers with what he considers to be groundbreaking revolutionary alternatives in confronting power.
Beder bases her analysis on the statement that people "... in many parts of the world feel that they cannot make a difference ... as corporations increasingly determine policy decisions and governments increasingly leave social planning and decision-making about the public good, public services and infrastructure to the market."
This is because capitalism requires constantly expanding markets. As markets saturate, the global search pokes into areas of private and social life that have previously not been commodified.
Corporations have built their power through a dizzying array of think tanks and lobby groups and Beder leads us through this complex world of shared boards and cosy back room deals. Luckily, she supplies a list of acronyms before the first chapter starting with AAFTAC (American-Australian Free Trade Agreement Coalition) and stretching for four pages before ending with the WTO.
She weaves her way from the origins of these capitalist attack-dogs decades ago through to their increasingly complex operations today. She skillfully moves through history and geography highlighting the disastrous consequences of globalisation in country after country.
The interlocking capitalist institutions enforce what is known as the "Washington Consensus" of economic reforms on the rest of the world. The World Bank summarises the Washington Consensus as "the market-friendly view". Carrying out these neoliberal measures has devastated the Third World.
"Structural adjustment is now carried out in the name of poverty reduction, rather than economic growth", Beder writes. "It achieves neither; but the failure to achieve economic growth is easier to measure. The policy prescriptions remain unaltered."
But globalisation doesn't just overrun the Third World; the privatisation of electricity supplies in Britain means that an estimated 30,000 extra deaths are caused each winter by the problem of "fuel poverty". Such devastating facts are liberally peppered through Beder's book and she is well prepared for the battle of the footnotes with right-wing opponents. Several sources support every claim.
Beder raises an impassioned call for citizens to start imposing democracy onto corporations. She counterposes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the tawdry game playing of capitalist power mongers.
Richard Moore, on the other hand, sets himself a grander project. Using the analogy of the Matrix, taken from the film of that name, he wants to show that the whole of history has been nothing but an illusion organised and directed by elites, since the inception of human civilisation.
It would be easy to satirise this book, and indeed there are many howlers in it, but it is clearly well intentioned and a genuine attempt to deal with the suffocating sensation of capitalist alienation. It also has a following; Moore's blogging is well known and reaches many people.
The first half of the book is largely a history of the world, designed to reveal to the reader the underlying forces that maliciously construct wars, conquest and domination. He earnestly and effectively delves into the background of many events but overstates his case several times.
For instance: he presents World War I as the result entirely of a conspiracy of bankers in New York and London. While some bankers certainly gambled on war leading up to August 1914, others were conspiring in other directions. Even if totally uncorrupt individuals ran capitalism it would still be unjust and would still produce wars and depressions, it is built into the economic system.
Not so, says Moore: "In terms of the Matrix, the biggest myth about capitalism is the belief that capitalism is a branch of economics."
At worst, Moore's view is simply a liberal conspiracy theory. At best, he expresses a deeply felt anxiety about the world, one that is very common, and is honestly striving to understand the huge contradictions between official power and widespread misery.
What he is articulating is what Karl Marx referred to as alienation. Alienation entered human society on a mass scale when peasants were driven off the land and into the factories.
It is important to recognise the anti-democratic bent of all conspiracy theories, they inevitably lead to dominating gurus. Moore, being a liberal, doesn't want to be authoritarian. His hope is that communities can bridge what he sees as artificial ideological boundaries through enhanced facilitation techniques called "Harmonisation". Harmonised communities will link up and overwhelm the Matrix manipulators through sheer force of numbers before they can organise resistance.
After painting such a massive dominating conspiracy Moore's solution is, well, simple. It indicates his good intentions, if nothing else.