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INTRODUCTION
The
open secret of the Global Justice Movement is that
its target is not globalisation as such. The objective
of the movement is to expose and resist an attempt
to replace the world’s multiple, diverse and
essentially imperfect experiments in democratic freedom
and human development with the tyranny of a ‘common
future’ – where the exercise of all choices
is reduced to exclusive acts of consumption and production;
where the ultimate product is the human being hardwired
to pursue ‘his and her’ consuming passions
in a life reduced to a prolonged act of grazing. Someone
in the movement once asked, ‘what does it mean
when a whole culture dreams the same dream?’
The movement responds: ‘let’s not wait to
find out’.
This
two-part article will explore how the Global Justice
Movement – which celebrates the conviction that
– ‘another world is possible’ –
represents, both politically and symbolically, an
essential counterpoint to the threat of a final act
of symbolic but real enclosure, in which peoples,
economies, cultures and neighborhoods are to be deprived
of their power and freedom to know, to think and act
otherwise. Globalisation is viewed as a coded neoliberal
assault on the rule of the many by the rule of the
one: a code in which all other codes are reduced to
one message that reads ‘Trade rules, okay?...There
was never more to the future of development than the
promise of a goods life’. Economics and reality
itself are conflated: as in the view of a former chair
of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development,
who has suggested that economics and the rule of the
market is as near to reality that we get.
Those
who champion the ‘Washington Consensus’
describe themselves as realists. The potential power
of the realist lies not in his or her ability to describe
the world accurately but rather in their power to
mould the material world in their own image, a world
that conforms to their geopolitical/economic ambitions.
Their ‘one world’ vision, or common future-as-destiny,
is a ‘forced disclosure’: an act of heavily
armed imagination and vested interest which masquerades
as an Empire of Truth.
In
the flow of time and infinite possibilities for constructing
alternative and sustainable worlds, the champions
of the ‘Washington Consensus’ are advocates
of the ultimate ‘false arrest’. A false
arrest of history, imagination and struggle, supported
by a spurious warrant stamped with the fictional claim:
‘End of History’.
In
playful counterpoint to those who proclaim that the
last word has been spoken, that our excavation of
reality(s) has been exhausted, ecologists and their
allies point to the most profound human limits of
all: the limits of the human capacity to comprehend
and order the world. A recognition of these limits
does not await the confirmation of a scientific hypothesis,
but informs the often forgotten nature of scientific
knowledge itself as limited and tentative, as a kind
of knowledge that in principle can neither assume
nor finally demonstrate a comprehensive order. Categories
are only a compromise with chaos.
The
Washington Consensus, neoliberalism and governmentality:
‘The Way the World Works’
Thomas
Lemke (2000) has characterized the three main lines
of critique of neoliberalism prevalent in contemporary
political discourse:
- Neoliberalism
is treated as a manipulative “wrong knowledge”
of society and economy, which has to be replaced
by a right or emancipatory [project], which means
scientific or “impartial” knowledge. Criticism
focuses on “inherent contradictions” or
the “faulty theory” of neoliberalism:
neoliberalism as ideology.
- Second,
critics see in neoliberalism the extension of economy
into the domain of politics, the triumph of capitalism
over the State, the globalisation that escapes the
political regulations of the nation-state. The prescriptive
emphasis is on re-regulation and re-embedding: neo-liberalism
as political reality.
- Thirdly,
criticism is leveled against the destructive effects
of neoliberalism on individuals; the process of
individualization is presented as endangering collective
bonds, the imperatives of flexibility, mobility
and risk-taking threatening family values and personal
affiliations: neoliberalism as “practical anti-humanism”.
Lemke
(2000) does not dismiss these critiques; however he
has identified important shortcomings which are important
in understanding the immanent and effective critique
of neoliberalism presented by the Global Justice Movement;
the critique or critiques being formed by the Global
Justice Movement are novel forms of political counter-knowledge(s)
to service the new opportunities for political action,
which are at once local and global; economic and democratic;
and applicable above and below the level of the State.
Above all, these counter-knowledges challenge the
political and epistemological bias of the dominant
technocratic discourse and practices of sustainable
development, which sits comfortably within a neoliberal
paradigm. For Lemke the main problem with these critiques
(above) is that they undertake a critique of neoliberalism
by relying on the very concepts they want to criticize.
They operate by confronting power and knowledge, State
and economy, subject and power, when a deep critique
should be asking what role these dualisms play in
constituting and stabilizing liberal-capitalist societies.
The
value of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality,
for Lemke, is that it does not juxtapose politics
and knowledge; it articulates a “political knowledge”.
Foucault does not pose the question of the relation
between practices and rationalities, their correspondence
or non-correspondence in the sense of a deviation
or shortening of reason. His “main problem”
is not to investigate if practices conform to rationalities
“but to discover which kind of rationality they
are using” (Foucault 1981:226).
For
Foucault, a political rationality is not pure, neutral
knowledge which simply “represents” the
governed reality. It is not an exterior instance,
but an element of government itself which helps to
create a discursive field in which exercising power
is “rational”. For Lemke (2000:8) the concept
of governmentality suggests that it is not only important
to see if neoliberal rationality is an adequate representation
of society, but also to understand how it functions
as a “politics of truth”, producing new
forms of knowledge, inventing new notions and concepts
that contribute to the “government” of new
constituted domains of regulation and intervention.
Lemke
believes that the decisive power of neoliberalism
lies in role as a political project that endeavors
to create a social realty that it suggests already
exists.
POLITICS
AND ECONOMY: GOVERNMENTALITY
For
Lemke (2000) governmentality takes us beyond a perspective
common to popular critiques including those of neoliberalism:
the positing of separate domains of the State and
market. The perspective of governmentality makes possible
the development of a dynamic form of analysis that
does not limit itself to stating the “retreat
of politics” or the “domination of the market”
but deciphers the so-called “end of politics”
itself as a political programme (Lemke 2000:10).
In
his work on disciplinary power, Foucault repeatedly
pointed out that the power of the economy was vested
on a prior “economics of power”, since the
accumulation of capital presumes technologies of production
and forms of labour that enable it to put to use a
multitude of human beings in an economically profitable
manner. Labour power must be first constituted before
it can be exploited: that is, life time must be synthesized
into labour time, individuals must be subjugated to
the production circle, habits must be formed, and
time and space must be organized according to a scheme.
In
an observation that explains the essential exteriority
of the critique of neoliberalism which the Global
Justice Movement has introduced, Lemke (2000) points
out that Foucault did not limit the field of power
relations to the government of the State; on the contrary,
what Foucault was interested in was the question of
how power relations historically could concentrate
in the form of the State – without ever being
reducible to it. For the Global Justice movement,
critique and opposition follow the logic of governmentality
– critique and opposition cannot be reducible
to the State; effective critique is transversal, while
also grounded for practical purposes in local communities,
cities and state spaces. The nature of power is both
constitutive of and derivative of the history of State
formation, notably insofar as the modern State shares
a history of co-emergence with modernity, science
and technology.
Foucault’s
discussion of neoliberal governmentality shows that
the so-called “retreat of the state” is
in fact a prolongation of government, neoliberalism
is a transformation of politics:
Lemke
(2000:11):
What
we observe today is not a diminishment or a reduction
of state sovereignty and planning capacities but
a displacement from formal to informal techniques
of government and the appearance of new actors on
the scene of government (e.g. NGOs), that indicate
fundamental transformations in statehood and a new
relation between state and civil society actors.
This encompasses on the one hand the displacement
of forms of practices that were formerly defined
in terms of nation state to supranational levels,
and on the other hand the development of forms of
sub-politics “beneath” politics in its
traditional meaning. In other words, the difference
between State and society, politics and economy
does not function as a foundation or a borderline,
but as an element and effect of specific neoliberal
technologies of government (Lemke 2000:12)
By
situating the processes of theory construction and
the invention of concepts in a socio-historical space,
the concept of governmentality allows us to problematize
their truth effects. Lemke (2000) concludes that in
the perspective of governmentality we always have
to reflect on the historical and social conditions
that render certain historical knowledge of society
“real”, taking into account the possible
theoretical and non-theoretical consequences of these
“truths” (Lemke 2000:14)
THE
WASHINGTON CONSENSUS
The
‘Washington Consensus’ is the title of a
Business Roundtable manifesto published in the United
States in 1979. The ‘Consensus’ view is
informed by a neoliberal discipline of balanced budgets,
tax cutting, tight money, deregulation, and anti-union
laws. With the ascendancy of this prior economics
of power domestically there followed, by virtue of
American influence on international institutions such
as the IMF, a globalisation of the same logic or rule.
Starting from a tiny embryo at the University of Chicago
with the philosopher-economist Freidrich von Hayek
and his students like Milton Friedman at is nucleus,
the neoliberals and their funders created a huge international
network of foundations, institutes, research centers,
publications, scholars, writers and public relations
hacks, to package and push their ideas and doctrine.
The institutionalization of neoliberalism as an authoritative
and globalized form of political knowledge is more
than an achievement at the level of policy; it is
an achievement insofar as it has produced a “politics
of truth”: leading one British Prime Minister
to celebrate her commitment to the project with the
words “There is No Alternative (TINA)”.
This, of course, is the antithesis of the claim now
championed by the globalisation movement: “Another
world is possible”.
Pierre
Bourdieu (2001) described neoliberal newspeak as the
“new planetary vulgate”: a vocabulary which
seems to have sprung out of nowhere and is now on
everyone’s lips: ‘globalisation’ and
‘flexibility’; ‘governance’ and
‘employability’; ‘underclass’
and ‘exclusion’; ‘new economy’
and ‘zero tolerance’.
By
imposing on the rest of the world categories of perception
homologous to its social structures, the United States,
according to Bourdieu (2001:4) is refashioning the
entire world in its image: the mental colonization
that operates through the dissemination of these false-true
concepts can only lead to a sort of generalized and
even spontaneous “Washington Consensus”,
as one can readily observe in the sphere of economics,
philanthrophy and management training:
Indeed,
this double discourse which, although founded on
belief, mimics science by superimposing the
appearance of reason – and especially economic
or politological reason – on the social fantasies
of the dominant, is endowed with the performative
power to bring into being the very realities it
claims to describe, according to the principle of
the self-fulfilling prophecy: lodged in the minds
of political and economic decision-makers and their
publics, it is used as an instrument of construction
of public and private policies and at the same time
to evaluate those very policies (Bourdieu 2001:4).
Will
Hutton, in his book The World We’re In
(2002:183-4), has described how the Washington Consensus
operates. First, the US looks to exercise its power
unilaterally rather than have its autonomy constrained
by international alliances and treaty obligations.
Second, it focuses aggressively and unilaterally on
promoting the interests of those sectors and companies
that plainly benefit, because of their ascendant market
position or technological lead, from globalisation
– notably financial services, ICT and, latterly,
those with leadership in intellectual property. Third,
it instinctively looks to market solutions and remedies,
both as a matter of intellectual and ideological conviction,
and because over a period these render it more likely
that American interests will prevail.
The
United States has always acted as one expects a national
power to act in the international system: primarily
in pursuit of its own interests. This was true of
the post-War period, when for twenty-five years, the
United States chose to prosecute its interests through
a web of multilateral treaties and alliances –
albeit always as first among equals. This was the
case under the system agreed at Bretton Woods in New
Hampshire in 1944. Those negotiations were not free
of American power plays. The United States insisted
that the dollar, backed by gold, rather than a new
international currency, bancor, should be the
international unit of account. The United States also
gained decisive votes in both the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank. Nevertheless, this was a
power play within the context of a multilateral framework.
A
mortal wound to the system came between 1971 and 1973
when the Americans refused to continue its role as
banker of last resort to the world financial system,
due to hemorrhaging gold reserves. The crunch came
in the early 1970s, when the Nixon Administration
ensured that the dollar became the paramount currency
against which other currencies would have to float,
in a system of market-based floating exchange rates.
Following a quadrupling of oil prices in the autumn
of 1973, the world moved from a gold exchange standard
managed by international agreement to a dollar standard
in which the United States effectively freed itself
of any obligations to manage its own currency. Two
days after the abolition of the gold standard, Nixon
told the German Bundestag that the United States needed
to appropriate 80 percent of the industrialized West’s
current surplus for its own strategic and military
purposes. And that’s what the Americans did.
The
liberalization strategy of integrating the world’s
principal capital markets around a dollar standard
has served United States interests twice over, according
to Hutton (2002:191). It has enlarged the dominance
of United States financial institutions and made financing
the American trade deficit much easier, latterly with
the help of East Asian economies. Hutton comments:
…enlarging
the role of the New York markets as financial intermediaries
and insisting on the pivotal role of the dollar,
the US has created an environment in which essentially
the rest of the world adjusts to US economic choices
(Hutton 2002:192).
The
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank became
de facto agents or ‘missionary’ institutions
for the globalisation of the United States foreign
economic trajectory (i.e. the United States Treasury)
once the liberal rationale for the two institutions
was removed with the collapse of the Bretton Woods
institutions. There was no longer a system of exchange
rates to be policed and managed by the IMF; if countries
wanted short-term credit, they could negotiate terms
with American banks now freed from the controls that
had inhibited their lending. The former United States
Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, once summed up
globalisation as another word for American domination.
PART TWO:
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE GLOBAL JUSTICE
MOVEMENT
Unlike
much of the sterile state-sponsored discourse of sustainable
development which has followed the Rio ‘Earth
Summit’ and persisted at the WSSD in Johannesburg,
the true and somewhat messy history of the struggle
for an equitable, ecologically sustainable and economically
viable world must be located within a much older and
richer heritage: the history of humanity’s timeless
and diverse popular struggles to extend the horizons
of human freedom and participation in the enjoyment
of the fruits of the earth and human labour. These
struggles have arisen in response to a series of systems
of domination and exploitation, ranging from imperialism,
colonialism and neo-colonialism to the contemporary
global imposition of a nascent system of market fundamentalism
which threatens to reduce all of nature and humanity
to the status of a ‘standing reserve’ –
deriving value only from its potential to serve the
machinery of consumption and production. The Global
Justice Movement – a diverse network of movements
which incorporates trade union, fair trade, “Third
World” solidarity, environmental, anti-militarism,
and other assorted interests – is the globalized
successor to earlier struggles to overcome anti-democratic
forms of economic and political organization, stretching
back to resistance against the enclosure of open fields
and the conversion of arable land to pasture during
the early Tudor period in England, when fields and
commons were hedged by the lords, and whole counties
were threatened with depopulation: an early example
of unregulated economic improvement in what became
known as a revolution of the rich against the poor.
In a more immediate sense, as Joseph Stiglitz (2002:3)
has noted, there is a continuity between the riots
against austerity programmes, which have taken place
for decades in the developing world, and the anti-globalisation
demonstrations in the West. Riots and protests against
the policies of and actions by institutions of globalisation
are hardly news.
Moreover,
politicians and their advisers grappling with sustainable
development seem to be bereft of an adequate language
and differently framed knowledge. The Global Justice
Movement has grasped that more knowledge and information
is insufficient; resistance to enclosure in a postmodern
world must extend to resistance to an enclosure in
the institutions and language of efficiency, competitiveness,
and the market. The protesters are involved in a parallel
process of debunking the technocratic myths of modernity
and restoring a new attitude to the limits of modern
knowledge, which suggests that we must also embrace
a dimension of the mythic in its positive sense.
Membership
of political parties in Europe dropped by 50% in the
last 15 years of the 20th century. These facts stand
in stark contrast with the mobilizing power of the
global protest Movement, which is attracting a new
generation of young people to a radical form of politics
(Harden 2001). The politics of sustainable development
cannot be insulated from broader political developments,
notably the crisis of legitimacy emerging around the
unqualified advocacy of a neoliberal model of globalisation.
The
origins of the word ‘environment’ evoke
an appropriate set of meanings and associations as
we consider the rise of the anti-globalisation movement,
its contribution to our understanding of sustainable
development, and the often violent State responses
the movement has provoked on the streets of our major
cities, from Seattle to Genoa and Dublin.
In
its original sense, which is borrowed by English from
Old French, an environment is the result of the action
signaled by the verb meaning to environ. Environing
as a verb is actually a type of military, police,
or strategic action. Timothy Luke, who has drawn our
attention to these origins in his book, Capitalism,
Democracy and Ecology:Departing from Marx (1999),
writes:
To
environ is to encircle, encompass, envelope, or
enclose. It is the physical activity of surrounding,
circumscribing, or ringing around something. Its
use even suggests stationing guards around, thronging
with hostile intent, or standing watch over some
person or place.
I
want to borrow these textual associations with a disciplinary
act of encirclement, enclosure and discursive closure
to suggest that certain forms of state-centric environmental
knowledge can also accomplish a kind of closure, by
setting up a legitimate body of acceptable knowledge
and practices while placing guards at the perimeter
of the enclosures to guard against dissent.
If
we are to understand where the pursuit of sustainable
development as pursued by States and the Global Justice
Movement diverges, it is useful to take note of the
interpretive frames each is using to define problems
and generate solutions. Luke again: ‘Once enveloped
in interpretive frames, environments can be redirected
to fulfill the ends of other new scientific scripts,
managerial directives, and administrative writs. All
environing actions engender environmentality, which
infiltrates instrumental rationality into the productive
policing of ecological spaces.’
Ecology
must be framed inside the practices of power –
enframed by the globalizing knowledge system now associated
with neoliberal fundamentalism. Once we move in this
direction for an analysis, ecology together with the
questions it raises about the nature of power, the
State and governance, becomes a provocation to resist
and deconstruct manifold acts of enclosure. This is
precisely how I see the function of the Global Justice
Movement, a movement attuned to dimensions of sustainable
development that remain invisible to the eye (or the
frame) of the seasoned diplomat and many of the experts
who make up the epistemic communities sealed off in
their very own discursive biomes.
The
sounds and images of the movement that is rising against
capitalism and corporate-led globalisation on the
streets of cities across the world are unmistakable.
The demonstrations are often marked by drama and humor
accompanied by the beat of drums and colorful displays
designed to appeal to our sense of the mythic and
poetic – and to awaken our sense of justice.
The protesters set out to subvert not only the workings
of the World Trade Organisation, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They also target
the language and seductively reasoned discourse of
contemporary politics and economics. The anti-globalisation
protesters operate in a sophisticated universe of
signs and form part of a media-literate generation
of dissenting voices in a mediascape where spectacles
are too often the guardians of sleep and passivity.
Unmistakably,
the resistance to global capitalism and corporate-led
globalisation is well armed with comprehensive backroom
political and economic analyses, however the shock
troops who take to the streets also understand that
“revolution is not showing life to people, but
making them live”. It is activism, yes. But more;
it is activation and reaffirmation of lifestyles and
counter-cultures. Just below the surface is a profound
rejection of life as an endless series of acts of
consumption; a ceding of all valorization to the demands
of the machinery of production and trade. In the crossfire
of media sound bites and information war, provoking
change takes something more than information.
The
global movement of decentralized networks is gathering
pace to seize the rhetoric of equitable and sustainable
development and threatens to transform half-hearted
institutionalized rehearsals for global system change
into a gripping drama that will simultaneously transform
the meaning of revolution as well as its targets in
politics, business and the media. Their motto: “We
the peoples believe another world is possible”
confronts the fundamentalist vision of neoliberalism,
which has almost achieved what all myths of Empire
aspire to: a concealment of its particularisms and
historical origins in order to present itself as ‘the
way things are’. Such is the operation of the
vulgate, neoliberalism; and via its operation as governmentality,
its newly constituted domains of operation continue
to proliferate – from the university campus to
the shopping mall.
Loyalty
to governments and inter-governmental organisations
is not being undermined by the Global Justice Movement;
the movement is an indicator of a crisis of confidence
in institutional problem-solving based on a technocratic
and bureaucratic model of framing problems and solutions.
Robin Grove-White (1996) has made a prescient observation
that the tacit model of sustainable development on
which most of the current and high profile negotiations
appear to rest continues to be one defined by expert
(principally natural scientific) knowledge, and that
such a top-down discourse of sustainability lacks
appropriate public resonance. Grove-White suspects
that the weakness reflects the alienating character
of the tacit models of human nature and needs embedded
in epistemologically realist representations of sustainability.
(Grove-White 1993) Grove-White (1996:269) reflects
the concerns of many green activists when he points
out that much of the fuller ‘meaning’ of
the environmental movement as a culturally significant
phenomenon in its own right has been firmly excluded
by governments.
The
Global Justice Movement has begun to confront the
power and knowledge system of the global political
system, unpacking the relations between State and
economy, subjectivity and power, democratic norms
and trade. The Movement is participating in a process
of politicizing the politics of the environment (political
ecology), the tensions between consumer subject and
active citizenship, and the boundaries created between
the norms of democratic accountability and some of
the most significant actors in the political system,
notably the multinational corporations.
The
Movement refuses to take for granted the hierarchy
of trade over environment and development multilateral
agendas, and will continue to press for a trade justice
agenda as a cornerstone of sustainable development.
Mainstreaming sustainable development – for the
Global Justice Movement – will demand more than
an integration of environmental considerations into
trade-related decision making; but will, in addition,
require an over-turning of the power relations which
currently inform the unsustainable hierarchy of trade,
development and environment priorities in the international
system.
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