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George
Monbiot is one of the most powerful intellectual voices
that new millennium radicalism lays claim to. He has
been named by the Evening Standard as one of
the twenty-five most influential people in Britain
and by the Independent on Sunday as one of
the forty international prophets of the twenty-first
century. Amongst the beliefs held by him is that the
intervention of the present pope against liberation
theologians in South America was absolutely disastrous
for the poor. And he is not unduly pessimistic about
the resurgence of jingoism in the US, post 9/11, believing
it to be ‘a temporary thing - the product of
the messianic complex of empire where the imperial
power casts itself as both the world's saviour and
the world's victim.’ Nor does he entertain the
notion that nationalism has a healthy future in today’s
world. An outspoken democrat he contends that democracy
is necessarily a compound of dissent and consent.
And he feels that while tens of millions of people
are involved in the Global Justice Movement ‘we
have been very good in formulating our opposition
but we have been very slow to describe what we do
want. So we have been involved in only one half of
the democratic struggle.’ Whether the dissident’s
prerogative or dilemma we are free to speculate.
That
a man committed to the idea of creating a global parliament
would want to visit a place which appears congenitally
incapable of maintaining its own inconsequential local
parliament, suggests that Monbiot, a Guardian
columnist, is perhaps an incurable optimist. While
his attention is normally focused on a bear pit world
ravished by the cancer of poverty and artificial scarcity,
this flea pit is consumed with its own little pimple,
demanding that everybody should, time after time,
come and listen to its whine, oversee a quack-prescribed
cure, and then head off with the sound of the wailers
ringing in the ears, pseudo-mourning yet another lamentable
failure. But George Monbiot knew a thing or two about
the human condition long before he arrived in Belfast
to promote his latest book The Age Of Consent.
When the political class realised it wasn't about
its consent or its obsessions it failed to turn up
at his talks. Those that did were at least spared
having to hear the 'us men' moan about the trivia
that captivates them.
Guardian
readers and those who browse through Socialist Workers
Party stalls will be familiar with the name George
Monbiot. While propelled to considerable public prominence
in 2000 as a result of his book, The Captive State,
which drew attention to the dangers of corporate power
in Britain, Monbiot was scarcely a figure of anonymity.
For long he had been rolling his sleeves up and plunging
his arms into the swamp of exposing injustice. His
campaigning has taken him to Brazil, Kenya and Indonesia
amongst other places. His travels have seen him beaten
and shot at by police.
So
what made him come here? His studies at Oxford in
Zoology perhaps prompted him to think that he could
attain what no one else has - an understanding of
the monkeys that populate our political superstructure.
He, however, was neither so cynical nor ambitious,
pointing out that Ireland is currently developing
a social forum which is part of a wider global movement.
'Social forums are developing in just about every
country of the world.' I put it to him that even those
who designate themselves the most radical amongst
the body politic preferred to go to the World Economic
Forum in New York rather than the World Social Forum
in Rio; they have wined and dined with Blair and Bush
during this year's Hillsborough war summit while their
followers stood locked outside facing aggressive armed
police. Given that these people legitimise Bush and
pointedly refuse to call him a war monger on television,
what chance is there of developing anything here that
would have the fortitude to stand up to the egregious
power of American capital?
Yes,
that’s right. A forward-looking party at the
moment would be engaging with the Global Justice
Movement. And similar parties around the world.
We desperately need to see an alliance of parties
like Sinn Fein with the PT in Brazil, the oppositional
movements in South Africa and Mexico. With the very
big people’s movements we are now seeing in
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
But
how do people actually go about joining the Global
Justice Movement in a city like Belfast where what
passes for a radical idea is closing down hospitals
and introducing PFI?
There
are already groups working at it so do not reinvent
the wheel. In the prosperous countries we believe
in this ridiculous notion called consumer democracy.
We think that if we as individuals decide not to
buy a certain brand of biscuits we can affect political
change. You can only effect political change by
getting together with other people. In December
we hope to set up a website - Globalrising.org -
listing all the organisations in each country throughout
the world that people can join. While our movement
should contest elections the real thrust of politics
is extra-parliamentary.
He
described the Global Justice Movement as something
lacking in coherent structure. Lacking in coherence
is something that would seem to be ready made for
us. Eager, I asked him to continue.
It
is a movement of movements. It pulls together Marxists,
anarchists, liberals, Christians, Muslims, Greens,
Buddhists, conservatives. It is a series of incidental
coalitions, taking place sequentially sometimes
simultaneously, whom come together to contest particular
problems but informed by an analysis of the problem
that says power has by and large been taken out
of our hands. If it is anything it is a movement
of the disenfranchised of the world. There are formal
structures within it that do not describe the entire
movement but provide a means of coordination of
which the most prominent is the World Social Forum.
In
one significant respect Monbiot differs from many
in the wider movement for which he is such a forceful
advocate. He believes that globalisation opens up
space in which strategic advances can be made towards
redressing the grossly unequal distribution of wealth
and resources that characterises the world economic
system today. He refers to what he terms 'political
judo' where the weaker party must learn to exploit
the strength of its opponent 'for our own purposes.'
When pressed to explain:
The
Internet was developed by the Pentagon but it is
has become the most useful tool of the campaigners
for peace who are trying to stop the Pentagon developing
its programmes. In Iraq, the US by insisting on
massively enhanced powers has created massively
enhanced resistance, which may, as Afghanistan destroyed
the Soviet empire, end up destroying the American
Empire.
If
this month's killing of 16 US troops in one Iraqi
resistance operation is an indicator of what is to
come, Monbiot’s logic is compelling.
A
stylistic feature of his book is the strong moralising
tone throughout as he urges people to take action
on behalf of the poor of the world. But do such calls
ever sustain mass movements of the type he seeks?
He is fairly upbeat in his response. While professing
no unshakeable confidence in any particular approach
he feels that there are certain moral characteristics
which almost all people share. One is a basic core
belief that other people should be treated as they
would like to be treated themselves. But to sustain
this with large groups over a long period 'is very
much contingent on people’s economic circumstances
and the grander politics they are subject to.'
Puzzled
by the challenges of motivation I pressed him on his
call for a revolutionary-like experience similar to
Christian joy. Having, over the years, failed to make
it out of the living room in time to avoid being bombarded
with Willie McCrea’s idea of Christianity and
being of the firm belief that the last Christian was
crucified, I felt there was a danger here that Monbiot
was tapping into the same energy which fuels fundamentalism.
After all, one of his reasons for rejecting Marxism
was because its fundamentalism had ruined the chances
of creating a new world order. He came back at me
contending that emotion is essential to sustaining
political campaigning. ‘We become involved in
this because we are passionate about it not because
we are convinced by it.’ Amongst other sinister
things, this struck me as an open door to demagoguery
and leadership-led movements which eventually come
to parody the struggle that threw them up. What if
the balance in the compound tips in favour of the
emotion rather than the intellect and, in the absence
of strong intellectual structures of transparency
and dissent, a leadership basically screws the grassroots
and starts to do its own thing and transfers the radical
energy into a project which was not what the initial
movement was designed for?
This
has happened to just about every revolutionary movement
that ever existed. This is exactly what happened
to the Labour Party. There is a constant tension
between success and the necessary conformity within
the movement that effectively drives success and
the diversity and dissent which is what this movement
is all about and what it should be all about. The
dangers of cooption by powerful charismatic people
within the movement will always exist.
Despite
his disdain for Marxism, a weakness readily admitted
to by Monbiot is that he is ‘excessively devoted’
to a classical view of political economy; something
which hardly puts clear blue sea between him and the
19th century German philosopher. While stressing that
he is a Marxian rather than a Marxist - in that he
accepts the description rather than the prescription
offered by Marxism - he attributes the failure of
Marxism not to Stalin but to Marx himself. I pointed
out to him that in Belfast his visit had met with
some opposition but that it came from the Marxist
led mass movements of two and three who recoil at
his refusal to endorse a dictator of the proletariat.
They refuse to turn up to see him but would sit in
pubs awaiting the second coming of Trotsky. However,
in spite of that the Trotskyite Socialist Workers
Party is one of the few involved in all the ongoing
radical campaigns.
Nobody
organises better than the SWP, nobody mobilises
better. They are amazing. They have the cadres,
the party structures - almost brain washed participants
who virtually devote their lives to what the party
tells them to do. But they are almost impossible
to work with unless you come in on their terms.
There is a constant danger that they use the shared
opportunities that they create purely as a recruiting
ground for their own party. We have to try to work
with them despite all the dangers in that.
Perhaps
Michel Foucault had it right when he wrote, 'Marxism
exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists
in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.'
Maybe Monbiot felt likewise. Having read his book
I was of the mind that he was really about restructuring
the capitalist order rather than mounting a real challenge
to it? He was disarmingly frank:
That
is a problem. What I am calling for in the first
place is a restraint of capitalism. That by democratising
the means of global governance we have the opportunity
if the world’s people so wish to start developing
the means to overthrow capitalism. At present we
have assumed that there is a globalised public enthusiasm
for overthrowing capitalism that does not appear
to be there. We have to permit people to engage
in a wider economic discussion. And that requires
some form of global democracy. If not we are doing
what the IMF and World Bank are doing and ending
up with a dictatorship of the bureaucrat or in this
case a dictatorship of the Global Justice Movement.
I
left him wondering what it was I envied most, his
intellect or his passion for justice. Meanwhile, the
political class continues to howl as if the epicentre
of the world is Belfast. There are some nuts even
George Monbiot cannot crack.
George
Monbiot’s The Age Of Consent is published
by Harper-Collins. HB £15.99. ISBN 0-00-715042-3
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