The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order
By George Monbiot
Flamingo, 2003
256 pages, $35
BY DANNY FAIRFAX
As a columnist for the British Guardian, George Monbiot has become renowned as a leading voice of the world-wide global justice movement. Unlike other journalists, who prefer to remain detached from the movement, commenting on it from an outside perspective, Monbiot has immersed himself in it and identifies primarily as a movement activist.
He has provided intellectual leadership of a movement that habitually has had a healthy distrust of leaders. However, his leadership is not of the self-proclaimed power-figure variety, but has been won by his ability to offer ideas (in his columns and elsewhere) on the way forward for the social movements.
Particularly memorable for me was his clarion call in April 2002, after Israel's acceleration of its attacks on the Palestinian people, for the movement to actively take on the issue of Palestinian solidarity, asserting that "the World Bank and the West Bank belong to the same political territory".
In his latest book, The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order, Monbiot submits his suggestions for a manifesto for the global justice movement.
While seeing the lack of such a manifesto as an impediment to the further success of the global justice movement (as he told British newspaper Socialist Worker, "There is no future in a movement that does not have a program"), Monbiot does not see his work as the comprehensive program for the movement. "On the contrary, I hope that other people will refine, transform and, if necessary, overthrow my proposals in favour of better ones", he states
The most heartening aspect of Monbiot's book is his recognition of the fact that any serious attempt at constructing a world in which social and environmental justice reign globally is that it will meet with harsh resistance from those who profit from the status quo, what he calls the "global dictatorship of vested interests". In fact, he contends that, "we will know that our approach is working only when it is violently opposed".
His answer is not some vague notion of "anti-power" but a thoroughgoing "global democratic revolution". In this era of globalisation, where huge power resides in multinational corporations and the global capitalist financial institutions, the alternatives must also be sought on a global level. Those who ignore the global perspective and choose to rely on purely local or national solutions are bound to be confronted with major, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles.
Monbiot does not see globalisation itself as the problem, if globalisation is viewed merely as the growing interconnectedness of peoples throughout the world by trade and communication. In Chapter 3, "A global democratic revolution", not only does he reject "localisation", as propounded by figures such as Colin Hines and David Korten, but also other measures such as consumer democracy and "voluntary simplicity", explaining: "delightful as it may be for those who practise it, quiet contemplation does not rattle the cages of power".
Instead, Monbiot's call is to "democratise globalisation" in a revolutionary manner. To achieve this, Monbiot's manifesto makes four main proposals: a democratically elected world parliament; a democratised UN General Assembly; an International Clearing Union, "which automatically discharges trade deficits and prevents the accumulation of debt; and a "Fair Trade Organisation, which restrains the rich while emancipating the poor".
While containing a sanguine analysis of the gross injustices and inequalities inherent in the present global hegemony and the ideology of "free market fundamentalism", the proposals he puts forward fall short of truly addressing this situation.
The idea for the International Clearing Union, which punishes countries for having a trade surplus equally as much as a trade deficit, is quite consciously a revival of Keynesianism — the idea was proposed by economist John Maynard Keynes when acting as Britain's representative to talks in 1943, which discussed the shape of the post-war international economic order.
The "Fair Trade Organisation" is designed to replace the WTO, and the idea has been adopted by prominent sections of the global justice movement. It at least introduces elements of environmental and social justice into the equation, by incorporating these factors into rules governing trade, and by actively protecting and fostering the economies of Third World nations.
The main flaw in these two proposals is that they concentrate solely on international trade and financial transactions without delving into how countries' national economies are run. As such, they do not really challenge the capitalist system upon which the current, unjust, trading rules are based.
Monbiot evades the issue of how a Fair Trade Organisation could function while the major economies of the world still operate on the basis of a neoliberal economic agenda, with multinational corporations dictating production and distribution.
Monbiot's call for a democratised UN General Assembly and a globally elected World Parliament suffer from different, but equally cumbersome defects. His proposed reforms would be a major improvement on the current UN structures, whose failings were clearly demonstrated in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and could be useful as immediate demands.
However, it is impossible to see how a World Parliament would not suffer from the same deficiencies of unaccountability and manipulation by vested interests that plague national parliaments in capitalist nations. In fact, with projected electorates of 10 million people, straddling national borders, such problems would be magnified.
These limitations stem from Monbiot's view that liberal democracy is "the least-worst system". In Chapter 2 he offers substantial critiques of the two ideologies which have consistently offered broad alternatives to the present system — Marxism and anarchism. Unfortunately, his critiques are little more than caricatures.
This significantly hamstrings Monbiot's ability to offer viable proposals for the radical global justice movement and any future global democratic revolution to adopt. In essence, he proposes that the masses take power in the face of trenchant and potentially violent opposition from the rich elites, but to limit their revolution to revamping rules governing world trade and creating a more democratic (but equally ineffectual) United Nations.
Nevertheless, Monbiot's book is a valuable contribution to the debate around the urgent task of providing more tangible programmatic content for the world's social movements. Recent months have also seen the publication of Parecon by Michael Albert and Time for Revolution by Antonio Negri, which also add to this discussiuon. We can only hope that this flowering of ideas continues to bloom.
From Green Left Weekly, August 13, 2003.
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