At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:
“I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet.”
Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe. The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit. It’s hard to imagine that its success didn’t have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression.
The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending.
But what’s now being dubbed the “Great Recession” is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable. On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time “freed” by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.
The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty. In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor.
But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization. People all over the world fought back against this “globalization from above” with their own “globalization from below.” They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization. They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, “globalization from below” -- that some in the media even characterized as “the world’s other superpower.”
The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism. Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city. Current leaders of the world’s nations have utterly failed to develop a solution. The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable.
The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.
The times they are a-changing. US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets.
The Clintonite “moderates” who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits. The IMF, scourge of “irresponsible” countries that didn’t balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced “structural adjustment conditionalities” with condition-free loans.
These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy. But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy. That’s one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is. The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.
While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar “solution” would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form. Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal. They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy. But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals. “Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent.” Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.
The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo. But what can we do if the status quo can’t be saved? Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?
It has already started to do so. A landmark was the meeting of a group of social movements and NGOs in October, 2008 on the occasion of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum in Beijing that developed a sketch for a “transitional program for radical economic transformation.” The “Beijing Declaration” laid out alternatives that are “practical and immediately feasible” that put the “well-being of people and the planet at their center.” This requires “democratic control over financial and economic institutions.” It includes proposals for finance, taxation, public spending and investment, international trade and finance, environment, and agriculture and industry. It provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above.
The basic vision of the Declaration is summed up in its title: “The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation.” Its goal, in other words, is not to shore up the status quo and return to the destructive form of globalization that preceded the crisis. Its objective is almost the opposite of the eight-trillion-dollars-and-counting of bail-outs, rescues, and subsidies provided to business in recent months by the world’s governments. It aims instead to provide “a transitional program for radical economic transformation” to a “different kind of political and economic order.”
“Transitional program” may sound like antiquated socialist rhetoric – a call to take state power and nationalize industry. But both the goals and the methods are very different. Indeed, the Declaration points a path between merely reestablishing the status quo and assuming that actions must be “revolutionary or nothing.”
No “maximalism” here. “To capture people’s attention and support” the Declaration argues, proposals must be “practical and immediately feasible.” That is possible because, even under the domination of globalization from above, people have been developing alternatives within the world’s nooks and crannies. The unfolding economic crisis provides the opportunity “to put into the public domain some of the inspiring and feasible alternatives many of us have been working on for decades.”
The goal linking these alternatives is “the well-being of people and the planet.” And that requires a focus not primarily on restoring the financial system, but first and foremost on the great human and environmental crisis the world is facing in relation to food, climate, and energy.
Such common human interests are not the principal concerns of the people and institutions that now call the shots in national governments or the global economy. The “well-being of people and the planet” will not be achieved by economic jiggering. Instead, “democratic control over financial and economic institutions are required.”
The vision of such democratic control, however, is not of either a centralized national or a centralized global economy. It is closer to what Walden Bello elsewhere described as the “co-existence” of a variety of “international organizations, agreements and regional groupings” that would allow “a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances” in which nations and communities can “carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice.”
The current economic crisis creates opportunity for transformation, the Declaration argues, because it severely weakens the power of the US, the EU, and the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. It undermines the legitimacy of the neo-liberal paradigm. And, where global pseudo-consensus once asserted that “there is no alternative” to liberal capitalism, the future of capitalism is now becoming an open question.
Of course, this moment can also be seized by “fascist, right wing populist, xenophobic groups” who will try to “take advantage of people’s fear and anger for reactionary ends.”
What is the agency for pursuing constructive alternatives and resisting destructive ones? It starts with the “powerful movements against neo-liberalism” that have been built over past decades. These will grow along with public anger at the abuse of public funds for private subsidy, the crises of food, energy, and the environment, and the deepening recession.
As social movements from around the world converge in Belem, Brazil at the end of January for the World Social Forum, they will be in a position to take the next step toward realizing their potential as the world’s “other superpower.” Indeed, it is the convergence of the already existing networks and understandings of globalization from below with the new outrage at what neo-liberalism has done to the world that provides the opportunity to show that another world is indeed possible.
[This piece is based on a longer Discussion Paper “Globalization from Below” Tackles the “Great Recession”]
I think we are on the doorstep of a historic opportunity for the ordinary working people of the world to assert control over their own lives and their economic, political and social structures. They are theirs, or should I say ours, because they could not function without us. We need to assert that control by reshaping those structures to serve all of humankind, and not just elites. "Think globally; act locally." We must regain control over our own lives and those institutions immediately affecting us in our communities, and build from there. Then we can realize the Beijing Declaration's goals, when we reach the point of reshaping not just local, but global institutions. That takes networks of people from everywhere working together. Let's do it!
Posted by: Greg King | February 01, 2009 at 02:45 PM
The People Wants The Credit Free, Free Market Economy
Dear, I should say Expensive Chairman Ben S. Bernanke,
All of Our Economic Problems Find They Root in the Existence of Credit.
Out of the $5,000,000,000,000 bail out money for the banks, that is $1,000 for every inhabitant of this planet, what is it exactly that WE, The People, got?
If my bank doesn't pay back its credits, how come I still must pay mines?
If my bank gets 0% Loans, how come I don't?
At the same time, everyday, some of us are losing our home or even our jobs.
Credit discriminates against people of lower economic classes, as such it is unconstitutional, isn't it? It is an supra national stealth weapon of class struggle.
Credit is a predatory practice. When the predator finishes up the preys he starves to death. What did you expect?
Where are you exactly in that food chain?
Credit gets in the way of All the Principles of Equal Opportunity and Free Market.
Credit is a Stealth Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Credit is Mathematically Inept, Morally Unacceptable.
You Bail Them Out, We Opt Out
President Bush Proposed the TARP, Senator Obama Voted It. Who Roots for US?
We Want Some TARP.
My Solution: The Credit Free, Free Market Economy.
Is Both Dynamic on the Short Run & Stable on the Long Run, The Only Available Short Run Solution.
I Am, Hence, Leading The Exit Out of Credit:
Opting Out Is Both Free and Strictly Anonymous.
Let me Outline for You my Proposed Strategy:
✔ My Prescription to Preserve Our Belongings.
✔ Our Property Title: Our Free, Strictly Anonymous Right to Opt Out of Credit.
✔ Our Credit Free Money: The Dinar-Shekel AKA The DaSh, Symbol: - .
✔ Asset Transfer - Our Right Grant Operation - Our Wealth Multiplier - Our Liquidity TARP.
✔ A Specific Application of Employment, Interest and Money.
[A Tract Intended For my Fellows Economists].
If Risk Free Interest Rates Are at 0.00% Doesn't That Mean That Credit is Worthless Already?
Since credit based currencies are managed by setting short-term interest rates, on which you have lost all control, can we still say that are managing?
We Need, Hence, Cancel All Interest Bearing Debt and Abolish Interest Bearing Credit.
In This Age of Turbulence The People Wants an Exit Out of Credit: An Adventure in a New World Economic Order.
The only other option would be to wait till most of the productive assets of the economy get physically destroyed either by war or by rust.
It will be either awfully deadly or dramatically long.
A price none of us can afford to pay.
“The current crisis can be overcome only by developing a sense of common purpose. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.”
- Henry A. Kissinger
What Else?
Until We Succeed the Economy Will Necessarily Keep Sinking Into a Deeper and Deeper Depression
- Will people use the Credit Free money?
- That I don't know yet. What I already know though is that their wives will spend it.
You Bail Them Out, Let's Opt Out!
Check Out How Many of Us Are Already on Their Way to Opt Out of Credit.
If You Don't Opt Out Now, Then When Will You?
Let me provide you with a link to my press release of my open letter to you:
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Quantitative [Ooops! I Meant Credit] Easing Can't Work!
I am, Mr Chairman, Yours Sincerely [As if I really had the choice.],
Shalom P. Hamou AKA 'MC-Shalom'
Chief Economist - Master Conductor
1 7 7 6 - Annuit Cœptis
Tel: +972 54 441-7640
Fax: +972 3 741-0824
http://edsk.org/
Posted by: Shalom | January 27, 2009 at 03:07 AM