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DanT

Allmansratt (Every Person's Right) and the Global Commons

I wrote something in response to a UK Green Poltician talking about Pirate Bay in Sweden:

New Statesman - Sian's been very naughty

This is what I wrote:

There is a very Green issue underlying this. Sweden has held out legally partly because of a different tradition in relation to commons and public goods in Swede.

Sweden has a very specific Scandinavian idea of land ownership. "Everybody's right" means that land that others own can be used by you for certain purposes, including walking over it, camping out and picking berries etc...

This is partly because Sweden is a huge land area with a tiny population, and partly because they are a deeply socialist bunch.

Anyway, hopefully Pirate Bay brings a sense of the commons to the zone of culture, and we can loosen the stranglehold of ownership a little.

What emerges from this for me is that if you want to start a global commons movement, it is a good idea to begin with the politics of copyright, and then extend the debates to ownership in general.

This is an issue that young peple understand (the MP3 generation) and it illustrates perfectly the limitations of private ownership.

Indeed in Sweden there is allready an anti-copyright party. Could this become a movement for Global reform of ownership, and the democritisation of the Global Commons?

This is an area where MP3 politics and Green politics intersect, so it is something that will draw people from many directions.

Our Common Future, or Why we need a Global Public
(or a contribution towards a Manifesto for the Global Democrats)

If we take the viewpoint of the earth as the common inheritance of all of humanity, how good a use are we making of it? And what can we do to improve on this?

New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index

The Happy Planet Index from NEF seems to show we are not really using the earth very well.

They make the point that if we measure from the ultimate resources at our disposal (the natural environment) to the ultimate goals of humanity (defined in terms of long and happy lives) we are squandering the earth with the wrong kinds of political-economic models: Development is mostly going in the wrong direction.

Central American societies come out as the most efficient societies, in terms of happiness for natural resources, with the somewhat morose G8 resource guzzlers being nowhere near as effective.

So if we have some sort of idea, from this index, of what a desirable social model for the long-term wellbeing of humanity might be, what can we do to bring that about?

Well, the countries that do well by the index are middle income countries. This seems to imply that if we redistirbute from the richest countries to the poorest, in a way that improves social engagement (this is an important criterium for happiness) then we are more likely to achieve this, than under the current unequal set of arrangements.

On what basis might such a redistribution occurr? Well that takes us back to our common inheritance. If natural resources in general are legislated as commons, and private usage is something that is leased from the commons for fixed time periods, that are subject to renewal (similar to copyright in relation to the global knowledge commons), this allows two things:

1) A sensible basis for taxation to fund institutions of global governance, hopefully based in directly representative democratic processes, like a global parliament for instance.

2) The possibility of not renewing leases for socially undesirable activities. The leasing body should be such a global democratic insitution.

3) The possibility to build common usage clauses into such leases, to allow a flexible mix of common usage and private usage, appropriate to the particualr resource and time period.

This means that economic activity becomes subject to democratic oversight, and also supportive of it.

Such oversight would allow the benefits of market activity to conitnue, whilst allowing its worst injustices to be addressed.

For instance, such a body could address the huge income inequalities in the world, by operating as redistibutive taxation system. The Aid industry could find a footing in a global-democratically accountable system, with less of the moral charge of giving, since it is rooted in a sense of common ownership of the planet.

It could also deal with the issue of collectivising risk globally. Since the use of the atmospheric commons by the rich is likely to disproportionately affect the poor, this is a sensible response to the current climate change situation.


This is a general principle, which may be hard to translate into practice, given the vested interests that would oppose it.

However it is a reasonably simple and transparent principle, and is likely to hold more legitimacy than the current set of arrangements, since it embodies some sense of susbtantive justice.

In other words it addresses the issue of the justice of outcomes, rather than just the justice of process, without completly stifling liberal freedoms.

New Statesman - The economics of conquest

New Year's Resolutions for the world:

1) Elected Global Representatives: So that the UN has a direct mandate from "we the people"

2) Global Public Service Broadcasting, so that "we the people" have a meaningful forum for democratic debate at a global level

3) Taxation on the global commons (most pressingly the atmosphere, but the seas, space, the internet, and knowledge / patents, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum come to mind, as does biodiversity exploitation) to fund this global shebang.

4) The ICC given powers to prosecute people who break international law, even if they are leaders of G8 countries.

5) Oh yes and stop televising state sponsored murders, it's too depressing.

report this comment Select Daniel Taghioff
02 January 2007

If the United Nations is to act in this way it needs a mandate to do so. Currently there is no direct link between the UN and 'the people' of the earth. It cannot therefore claim to act on their behalf, but only on behalf of the states that send reprasentatives.

So this article is effectively calling for:

1) Direct election of the leaders of the UN.

and / or

2) Direct election of a representative body to hold the UN accountable, a world parliament in short.

3) That would neccesitate a 'global public sphere' where meaningful global debate to support global democracy could occur. This probably implies some sort of global public service broadcasting body, since private media operators are doing such a bad job of representing international law and global issues in a way congruent with a democratised global polity.

4) The ICC would need to be made more meaningful - would we vote for judges as in the states, or would there be an appointment system overseen by globally elected representatives?

and, this is the big one, where would the money come from?

6) I would say that the logical place is via taxes on use of global commons: The internet, space, the seas, the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum, and also taxes on natural resource usage, particularly energy usage, or at leat carbon emmisions (effectively a tax on use of the atmosphere.)

We at least ought to start thinking about "if the world were a state, what sort it would it be."

It looks like a pre-modern feudal oligarchy right now, with the vestiges of rule of law, and control via a small clique of vested interests.

Lets hope things start to change in 2007

Richest 2 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth - Yahoo! News

Why more equality is the best way forwards.

If the richest 2% own half the world's wealth, and half the worlds population share less than 1% of the worlds wealth, how can economists and policy makers avoid dealing with equality as a social good?

Well one answer is to concentrate on absolute rather than relative poverty. If enough wealth can keep on being drawn into the economy, then surely it does not matter how rich the rich are, as long as the poor are getting better off?

But this is not a realistic proposition. You just have to look at the sources of wealth to see that this approach is running out of steam, since there is only so much new wealth you can draw into the world economy.

You can extract wealth from nature, but the current global environmental crisis suggests that we cannot keep expanding how much we do that forever. As that source of wealth dries up we have to start thinking about making better use of what we have, which partly means sharing it out more equally.

Aha, but what about the argument that allowing capital to concentrate in the hands of the rich allows more efficient forms of production to be developed, and so is the most rational way to allocate resources in the long run, because it leads to development.

This is the premise that our financial systems are founded on. This is why we have a system that by its very design concentrates wealth. If, as is the case, you have a financial system based around loaning out money to be returned with interest, by definition capital will accumulate as more more money returns to the source of the loan.

This means that our financial system is designed to make money attract money. It also breeds inequality, since the rich can live on interest, whilst the poor struggle to pay the rents to the rich that this setup implies, since in order to pay high rates of interest, capital, and thus the resources that people need to live, must be deployed for profit.

Privitisation, high cost of living, struggling to get by. Sound familiar?

But wealth cannot be endlessly derived this way either. Yes you can make productivity gains by concentrating capital, but eventually, once you reach a certiain level of productivity, you are producing enough things to meet people's needs, but not employing enough people to do so. Europe, as one of the highest productivity areas in the world, has reached this impasse and now has strong economies with endemic levels of high unemployment.

So capital accumulation has served its social goal, and no longer is a way forward.

But hang on a minute, material inputs and productivity are not the only source of value and wealth, what about services, what about value added from knowledge and skill?

Well, productivity gains and the scaling up of manufacturing companies means that good design can be massively replicated in the information age, so whilst that is adding value, it is keeping fewer people occupied, and this still relies on mass manufacturing and consumption, running up against the physical limits to wealth expansion.

As for services, fine, but what sort of value will they add? Is this the Mcjob approach of using excess cheap labour, by giving them menial minimum age jobs? This is hardly progress, it is regression to a servant based economy, verging on slavery for those without legal rights to reside in a country.

Well, what about doing things for each other that adds value to our lives without necessarily consuming more material goods?

Well yes, that is a good argument, and part of that is economic. Liatier's suggestion about local currencies addresses this, as a way of getting communities to do things for each other without needing centralised accumulated capital, but it really also shows the nub of the issue. What this is about is not economic activity per se, but relationships.

Happiness studies have pointed out that once basic economic security is established, it is good realtionships that lead to significant increases in hapiness. This can come through community, family, religion whatever, but it is, to a large extent, good relationships that count.

As the final major pools of cheap labour start being absorbed into the economy, and as information and services start becoming more and more ubiquitous, it is an increase in the quality of relationships that stands as our last major source of untapped wealth.

This means that we need more equality. The other sources of wealth cannot keep being expanded, and so need to be shared out better, and this last remaining source of wealth is actually directly diminished by inequality.

In happiness terms we have not progressed since the 1960's, we have gone backwards in many ways, so clearly all this wealth and inequality is not geting us anywhere.

And relative, rather than absolute inequality has ben shown to be bad for that. Envy, the pre-emtion of social choice by the richer, the division of people by competitive culture, and the lack of time for each other that characterise an accumulation-based economy are bad for happiness, and inequality, between rich and poor, between breadwinners and carers, is a big part of that.

We stand facing climate change as an issue, and inequality is the biggest stumbling block to dealing wiht that. India and China, the emerging superpowers, are unlikely to rduce their emmisions, because they want we have got. Either we accept consuming less, as part of a deal to persuade them to eventually follow suit, or we can kiss our future goodbye.

What this implies is that we need instituions for a more equal distrbution of resources, particularly in this case natural resources. Now there are two ways of doing this, there is centralised redistirbution in an authoritarian mode, which China is demonstrating is not completely irreconcilable with capitalism, or there is a more democratic mode.

Unfortunately we have allowed democracy to become largely synonymous with inequality, partly by treating it as only meaning political rather than material equality, and partly by not practicing it the level where it counts in terms of the control of natural resources, namely globally.

Unless we start to look at the issue of democratically controlled institutions to equalise natural resource access at the global level, we face the spectre of authoritarianism on one side or social conflict based on injustice on the other, accompanying collective doom based on the inability to overcome such conflict internationally.

All this points to more equality, preferably of a democratic kind, as the best way forward for the human race right now.

New Statesman - A new idea: find out what works

Where is your evidence that government and business are doing evaluation so much better?

Yes the AID industry has had big problems with evaluating effectiveness, and has been agonising about this more than almost any other sector since around the mid 1980s. The main reason for this was that up till then AID was treated as a means to buy off rich world guilt, rather than to really improve conditions for the poor. Oh, and it was also a way of forcing countries into disadvantageous trade contracts, so called “tied AID.”

Now as a sharp critic, I have to admit things have got a bit better in the AID industry. So much energy was spent on project management and evaluation frameworks, by people like USAID (not my favourite organisation, but credit where its due) that some other small organisations have taken these methods on board, er like the HM treasury for instance.

If you want to know where the third way came from look no further than discussion in international development about human development, and about evaluation and evidence based policy. So really this wish for an evidence base has emerged from discussions amongst development professionals, it is not something that government discovered and impose on the sector.

The idea that government and business lead the way in evaluation is so laughable as to nearly cause hospitalisation. Ahh, UK government, highly accountable, errrm Home Office ring a bell, ever heard of Iraq? As for private business, it is the exceptional business-person that does not use the absolute power that the rights of economic ownership and hiring and firing give them to gloss over their own shortcomings. I have seen lively debates about evaluation in international development, but not a lot about it in business, and I have worked in commercial research! (see http://www.mande.co.uk/ )

The only sector outside development I have seen that takes evaluation really seriously is education. You get routinely observed on the job, your place of work gets routinely externally evaluated, with every aspect of its processes looked at. The only deficit here is that bodies like OFSTED do not often get their evaluation methodologies scrutinised, but that is because they suffer from being more a part of government than education.

I have witnessed OFSTED methodologies first hand, and whilst the people involved may well have a good grasp of education, their understanding of research and evaluation methdologies was poor to say the least. But they were powerful and we were weak, so that was not something that could be said.

Education pretty much invented evaluation, and the AID industry has been one of its strongest champions, government and private business have followed suit, but can claim credit because they are more powerful players, and thus ironically, less easily held accountable.

Intelligent design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Intelligent Design debate is dogged by some serious problems. One of the main problems is that each side is arguing from differing terms of reference: Scientists form a belief in the primacy in the Scientific method, and the Religious from the primacy in belief. I personally think that the former is better for producing knowledge, and the better more effective in producing happiness, although I remain agnostic in my personal beliefs.

But I do think Intelligent Design is fundamentally flawed, but it is so within its own terms of reference. If we go with the idea, for the sake of discussion, that there is a God, who is interested in creating a Universe. [S]He is, by most religious accounts, an infinite being, with no constraints of time and space to worry about.

Such an infinite being is clearly not in a hurry, and does not need to be in any one place or any one time, hence his ability, rather like Santa Clause, to answer all prayers in all times and places. Presumably this same God administers to the prayers of aliens, who inhabit other dimensions that we can only vaguely imagine, not to mention Muslims, (although clearly the Anglo-Saxon God is not listening to Iraqis right now): Anyway, infinite is infinite, universal is universal, and it is way beyond what we as finite beings can imagine.

OK fine, an infinite being is pretty damned big, and not limited by the things you and I are limited by. So why then would he need to go about designing things? He has all the time in the universe, and universal access to every variation of the universe, indeed the power to create every variation in the universe, be they possible or impossible by our limited terms of reference.

So he need not go to all the trouble of designing complex systems and dropping them into reality. Why all the hurry, he can just wait for every variation to unfold before his all-seeing eyes. He does not need to fine tune the universe either: Every single variation of physical constants would be laid out before his universal gaze. So a universal god has no need to do anything as particular and clumsy as designing things. That is what finite beings like ourselves need to do.

So the irony of intelligent design is this, to believe in it you have to not believe in a Universal God. Surely this is far more dangerous to religion than the scientific method.

If this heating picture is anywhere near right, then Africa and India are in for a very, very rough ride.

See also:

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 2004 | In Depth

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Ahdaf Soueif: A project of dispossession can never be a noble cause

This is the kind of thinking on the Israel-Palestine question I would support, alongside people like Said, who never rolled over to the Isrealis, but also never lost sight of the need for a solution.

Who shall speak truth to power globally?

One of the key issues of defining democracy at a global level is trying to understand what we mean by 'public' on what is effectively a new and emerging scale for debate. For democracy to operate we need to have ways for the 'public' to define themselves as a body at this level, and for 'public' opinion to be expressed and debated. There is no polity without a population or community that is to be defined in relation it. This leads us to ask not only what sort of polity are we hoping to constitute, and around which kinds of principles and institutions, but also how are the relationships with populations to be built up within this?

This leads in part to question the role of the media. In the UK we have a fairly varied media, parts of which are seen as more or less reliable and legitimate. Two sources that are seen as reliable internationally are the Guardian and the BBC. It seems little coincidence that they both have ownership structures that allow them some independence from the state (in the case of the BBC as a Public Service broadcaster or from business ownership . The Guardian is set up as a trust with the aim of providing independent and socially progressive reporting.

But is this enough at the global level? Can we rely on the few independent sources of news that exist at the national level to speak truth to our feudal masters, our spinning politicians, and to the new owners and executives of modern wealth? The Guardian and the BBC both have websites with a global reach, and the BBC has its World Service with its foreign language broadcasts. Is this enough at a global level, to guarantee a public space with checks and balances in terms of opinion and information?

Well there are serious problems here. The first is that of conflicting interests. The BBC and the Guardian, whilst fairly independent and progressive in terms of domestic news, certainly do not really reflect a diversity of opinions and positions when it comes to international event. To take some examples, during the Iraq war, little of what could be termed a 'Arab opinion' (although this is far too blanket a term) was seen on the BBC or in the Guardian. Arab newspapers regularly showed pictures of casualties, and carried stories of atrocities by occupying forces, whilst there is far less of this in the BBC or the Guardian.

This can be seen as a conflict of interests, in terms of national loyalties. That the World Service depends on a funding stream from the Foreign and Commonwealth office, seems to indicate that part of its mission is to project a British view of the world, in the UK's national interest. It is also a finding within media studies in general that media outlets are far less critical of their own governments in international news reporting when compared to domestic coverage.

But the problems runs deeper than a simple analysis of interests and incentives might suggest. One illustration of this is that there are, last time I heard, no Arabic speaking foreign correspondents within the British print media. This implies that there is likely to be profound gaps between what UK based media, like the Guardian or the BBC, and what outlets based in other polities, with other language-spheres, can represent in terms of public opinion.

This type of problem can even be observed in the media within a single multi-lingual country. Take India as an example. It is the largest democracy in the world, with the largest print media by total circulation, and an incredibly diverse media environment in terms of the languages represented.

I conducted an analysis of the World Social Forum that took place in Mumbai, within the English speaking press in India, and compared that with an analysis of the local vernacular press in and around Mumbai. I found hundreds of articles in the English Language press debating globalisation, democracy, economic development and the role of radicalism in the Indian and Global Polity. These themes, familiar to us, were deemed irrelevant to those other publics who we might so wish to reach.

The local commentators pointed out that the gap in reporting between the English language press and the local vernacular language press is huge. In the former, the World Social Forum, meant to be speaking for precisely the kind of public that might read the local language press, was mostly completely ignored. My analysis was that this reflected the educational influences of the English speaking elites, and their metropolitan concerns, separating them from the concerns in the various vernacular press public sphericules, as Todd Gitlin might term them.

What this implies is that for some sort of global public space to be set-up, where a global demos can be forged, there needs to be an active attempt to overcome these socio-economic and linguistic divides. This leads me towards the conclusion that the English speaking press and broadcasters, such as the BBC, CNN, the FT, the International Herald Tribune and the Guardian, that can claim some sort of Global readership, are not going to be able to create a 'Global Public Sphere' as Colin Sparks has put it, which is reflective of any form of inclusive Demos.

The only thing likely to be able to achieve this is some sort of public service broadcaster. With Television and Radio currently spreading to the global majority like wildfire (alongside mobile phones and to a lesser extent the internet) there seems a need for a publicly-funded broadcaster that addresses this emerging public. Some sort of World Broadcasting Corporation, funded out of democratically accountable international public money would be a good candidate. The UN, or UNESCO might be a good place to start.

Would such a body be able to speak truth to power globally, and help to form some sort of Global Public? Well the former is clearly a concern for the powerful. When UNESCO, in the 1980s, called for a free and balanced flow of information internationally, the US and the UK walked out of proceedings. Clearly they saw the emergence of a more inclusive international public as a threat to their position.

We may well face an uphill struggle in trying to institute checks and balances in the international arena. But if we are not able to check the views of our elites at the global level, to speak truth to power, then where shall they lead us? A publicly-funded and Globally inclusive media body is vital in helping us to temper and balance the level of international hubris we see around us today.


Further Reading:
Media in Global Context: A Reader
Wikipedia entry on the The Anthropology of Media

Justice Means Collectivisng the Risks of Climate Change

Unless we approach climate change as a risk that needs to be managed collectively, the rich will be most able to buy their way out of trouble, whilst the poor will face the injustice of being most affected by the smoke of consumption.

One of the main differences between a private and public approach to managing problems is the way in which risk is distributed. The welfare state is seen as a 'safety net' for good reasons, acting as a form of social insurance, spreading risks like unemployment and ill health as a cost to be borne by the taxpaying population rather than by private individuals.

The ethic of personal responsibility, supposedly leading to good conduct and efficient use of resources, is used to justify privitisation as an ethical and political move. However this ethic operates precisely because individuals are required to take on board and manage more risks. This shifting of the balance of risk, in order to try and instill 'responsible' conduct in populations and amongst decision makers in institutions , is what a lot of the recent debates about welfare have hinged around, in Europe and elsewhere.

But this kind of moralising looks ridiculous in the face of the huge injustice that is climate change. How can we preach individual responsibility, when we have collectively allowed the behaviour of the rich world to impact so brutally on the lives of the poor?

Climate change is overwhelmingly caused by the activities of the rich world. To give an example, Indians still consume on average less than their per capita share of sustainable carbon emmissions, whilst the developed world is over their per capita allowance, by aroud ten times in most cases.

!55,000 extra deaths a year can be attributed to climate change, and these are disproportianately amongst the poor: who was able to flee New Orleans, and who were forced to stay, or to settle nearby in what were effectively refugee camps?

Clearly the rich are better able to buy their way out of trouble. Combine this with the Geographical pattern that so many of the poorest live in dryer than average areas near the tropics, and are dependent directly on agriculture for their livlihoods, and it becomes clear that climate change, whilst caused by the rich, is likely to hit the poor extremely hard.

A privatised and liberalised approach to governance and risk management is not going to deal with these issues in a way that can be seen as responsible, either individually or collectively. Privatised approaches seem inevitably to involve shifting risks from comparatively richer collectives, such as the state or business, onto indivuals or the comparatively worse off.

The reasons for this are clear: Risk becomes part of an economic negotiation, inscribed into legal contracts. Those with skill in negotiating these kinds of deals, as well as bargaining power, can thus be paid for the risks they take, or force others to take those risks. The others that take those risks are often not even present at the negotiating table, especially if they happen to be poor or politically marginalised.

This implies that privatisation and liberalisation are not ways of governing that are likely to deal with highly generalised and public risks such as climate change in a just way. Such public risks affect everyone, and thus should be governed by processes that allow everyone a say as much as is practical.

This means democratic processes rather than private contracts, transparency in transactions rather than commercial secrecy. It means a strengthening of more direct forms of democracy, and it means a more collective approach to governance. This is the only way for the risks that have been generated by the rich world to be systematically spread. Otherwise our consumption will mean their deaths. Do we want to live in a world where the rich effectively eat the poor?

Collectivising to meet change.

It would seem that climate change implies a collectivisation of politics and social action in order to meet the challenges it raises.

It seems pretty clear that the private sector is good at working flexibly in the face of economic changes, given a stable macro-economic and poltical basis. This is why business call for macro-economic stability, and also increasingly for social provision to supply the skilled workforces they require.

However, how well can businesses cope with change that implies instability in environmental, social & political conditions as well as raising major question marks over macro-economic stabilty? Climate change is just such a change, and I would suggest that individualised private action from businesses will fall very short of addressing the social changes that are required.

Basically, climate change is going to require the provision and adaptation of many public goods, such as infrastructure, in order to deal with it effectively. The private sector has a notoriously bad record for producing public goods efficiently, partly due to the mistmatch between private interests and public provision, leading to all sorts of perverse incentives in public provision from private providers.


One example is the astronomical cost of healthcare in the USA, and the unreliable provision from insurance companies there, that cause US citizens to spend a multiple of what UK citizens spend for their healthcare, due to the profit motive of providers, whilst often being denied care for costly chronic conditions, again due to the same profit motive from insurance companies.

Private provision could also produce a similarly bizarre allocation of social resources in relation to the infrastructure changes required to deal with climate change. Take the issue of drought and flooding that we are likely to face in the UK.

Climate change is likely to lead to a pattern of dry hot spells interspersed with more intense rainfull for short periods. This leads to a situation where water tends not to settle into the water table, due to the rapidity with which it falls on the land. Currently water runs off into drains, where it is mixed with sewerage and then sent to sewage treatment plants to be cleaned and released into water courses.

This means that when rain falls rapidly on the land, it mainly serves to overwhelm sewerage treatment plants, rather than haing any chance to replnish ground water. Why do we mix rain water with sewerage rather than using it to replenish the water table? Due to historical conditions of water surplus. However with changing rainfall patterns we are likely to need to harvest the rain that falls rapidly and try and capture it into the water table. This implies new drainage and sewerage systes, or in other words massive new infrastructure provision.

Is the private sector likely to be able to privde this efficiently? Well with early private finance initiative deals costing six to seven times what they would have done via the public sector there are seriosu doubts over this. Thames water has only recently begun to deal with its huge leaking pipes issue, after massive public outcry over their inneficiency in this area. The reason for this can be foundn in the incentives they have: They are not paid or regulated for how efficiently they manage the pipes, but htey are responsible to their shareholders to deliver profit. So in a culture of wealth creation, we end up with water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

It could be argued that if Thanmes Water were regulated properly, the problem would not arise. Also Private Finance initiative contracts have been imporving as public sector organisations start to get their heads round complex contract law, or at least employ lawyers to represent them that do so. Whilst Private Finance initiatives are likely to improve (they could hardly get worse) this still does not resolve a basic problem: Private companies are not keen to make the type of massive investment that is necessary for the long term good of society, in terms of infrastructure provision in the face of environmental change.

Private incentives do not lead to generalised systemic solutions. A good example is the proposal for desalination plants to deal with the water shortages in the UK. It seems like madness to let drinking quality water run out of pipes into the ground, and to let rain run off into rivers rather than replenish groundwater. The net effect is to turn drinking water into sea water. Then to try and reclaim the same drinking water from the sea, using tonnes of fossil fuels in the process, and ths exacerbating the processes of climate change that contribute to the original problem, seems like madness on stilts.

However such an approach has one advantage, it is easier to fund building a desalination plant privately, than to try and fund long term infrastructure investment. A factory is a clear and discrete product, that can be built in a clear timescale, and where return on ivestment can be calculated relatively easily. Infrastructure is a public good par excellance, where such calculations are far more difficult.

Surely it is rational to try and fund the coming required infrastructure changes via taxation , in order to allow concerted collective action in the face of climate change, rather than the patchwork reponse of the private sector. Sweden for instance, with its high-tax publically oriented economy seems set to hit its target of phasing out Oil from its economy by 2020? Could we even dream of such concerted collective action in the privatised patchwork that is the British Polity, I think not, even if I hope so.

So I think that in order to meet the challenges of climate change, we are getng to need to collectivise, to start to think more systematically and socially, in order to make the changes in the public environment that all this change is going to require. And business will just have to accept that this is what 'corporate social responsibility' really means.

A culture of irresponsibility

I went to see Tom Stoppard's play 'Rock and Roll' last night. It was interesting precisely because it was so predictable. I was suprised by how well it fitted with ideas I had been rolling around in my head for a while.

What was predictable in Tom Stoppard's script was the celebration of 'not caring' and 'doing your own thing.' In many ways it was an honest social document of idealism caving in to the relativistic individualism of the 80's, with the fall of communism and the rise of 'liberated' consumption.

However the calculated irresponsibility of Stoppard's play is not just a piece of social history, but also something very contemporary. It is part of a huge denial of reponsibility by the rich and powerful, a denial that has eaten its way in to almost every area of contemporary thought.

On the face of it "flexibility" is a wonderful ethic. The world is changing in ways we can't always predict and we need to be able to respond to that. But such 'flexibility' means something different to people at the bottom than to people at the top.

To put it simply, it is easier to be flexible when you have resources saved to fall back on. However, if you are living on the breadline, what you most likely want is stability and security, to stave-off survival fear. So this ethic of 'flexibility' can be seen as a sort of calculated irresponsibility by the rich.

This is a widespread trend, related to the current ethics of business. Look at how business people behave: they are constantly trying to do things with their money that will guarantee them a return. Sure they will take risks where they see it as necessary where the return is likely to be good. But they would far rather displace that risk onto someone else and the big players have learnt to use their economic might to do just that.

What do you think outsourcing, brand/logo-driven companies and just in time production is about? I see it as being about not investing in fixed assets that you might not be able to use if things change: Flexibility. So the investment is made by others, who carry the risk. This is often in third-world countries, where the producers of goods have little guarantee that the big companies will keep buying if things change. So the powerful pass on the risks, in a calculated way, to the less powerful.

This is a trend present in economic theory, which tends to assume a perfect allocation of resources. This is justified in more practical terms by the idea that big players got big by rationally allocating resources well, and so a competitive economy will tend towards being run by those who can invest well. However this does not take into account that this 'perfect allocation' is most often based on a basic injustice, of the rich passing on their risks to the poor. For instance, this is reflected in the international order: The IMF and the World Bank, suggest 'stabilisation' programmes for poor countries, so that they can pay off debts that have become onerous due to changing interest rates.

But what is the value of these huge loans to those that deal them out? They guarantee a rate of return on the money loaned out, one that is linked to the level of return that the market expects. In other words they can pass on the risks associated with holding that money to those they lend to, and so try to guarantee their profits.

The poorer countries are told to mortgage their futures (their health and education systems) in order to prevent bad debts putting this risk transfer mechnism in jeapordy. In this way global poverty is based on this ethic of calculated irresponsibility. This is doubly so when you consider how the international trade regime, and the business practices associated with it, work to displace risk onto the already vulnerable.

And what of the social sciences? Surely here such anti-social irresponsibility is held in check? What about the risk society? Isn't that an ethic of responsibility?
Well not necessarily. What does calculating risks do? Does it place a burden on those in charge to deal with that risk, or is it a mechanism for transferring the responsibility for coping with that risk to the many?

'If you eat fatty food, there is a risk of you having a heart attack.' We had better not ban the sale or advertising of fatty foods, since that might taste like fascism or communism. However since every individual 'knows the risks,' then we can leave it to them to choose, and so we need not worry about it ourselves. And businesses need not worry about damage to their profits, and business people can salve their consciences with the thought that people know the risks and are surely choosing, in thier own rational way, to destroy their own health.


Calculated irresponsibility is powerful stuff. So much so that I think it is an ethic that makes many of us ill. If we are all supposed to be 'rational choosers', than we are burdened with allocating our resources perfectly, in order to deal with all the risks that are loaded onto us. Risks loaded onto us by our 'flexible' employers and by our 'prudent' mortgage companies, as well as by our 'informative' government. Surely this means that our lives become dominated by dealing with 'information@. With calculating returns on investment, buying insurance, working out tax regulations, comparing mortgages, and generally worrying about money and our futures.

That we live in a culture of fear and terror to boot, and that we ignore more pressing risks like climate change, seems to compound the sense of this culture of calculated irresponsibility being a very sick one indeed. I would venture that depression becoming one of the biggest health problem in the UK is to do with this. With the ways in which people are loaded down with the risks that the powerful in this country seem to refuse to take onboard.

In response to this, I would say that we don't need pills and we don't need therapy to teach us how to bear too much. Rather what we need is responsible leaders. People who are there to guarantee all our futures, rather than just their own.

Mass, Miles and Multiplier Effects

Problem
The movement of heavy goods has many environmental impacts associated with it. In a city like London, limiting the movement of heavy goods is key to reducing air pollution, road injuries, noise pollution, as well as for meeting carbon emission targets. With the Mayor’s current emphasis on such issues, alongside a consultation on a possible low emissions zone for London, this seems like a time to address such issues.

The procurement strategies of large institutions are a major issue, in terms of heavy goods deliveries. If these institutions could be persuaded to purchase their heavy goods more locally, this could have a great impact on the amount of large-vehicle traffic on the streets.

But in order to do this, there first need to be indicators of the knock on effect of procurement strategies on heavy-goods traffic. The Mayor has cited local government procurement in London as an area where heavy goods traffic could be influenced downwards, so it seems like a good time for procurement indicators to be developed further.

Existing Indicators
The New Economics foundation has devised Local Multiplier 3 (LM3) indicators for finding out how much money circulates in the local economy, in relation to procurement spends. This indicator deals with the distance part of the issue, but not with the problem of mass.

Forum for the Future has developed mass-balance accounting techniques, but these are not directly geared to measuring distance, or addressing issues of what happens when suppliers re-spend the revenues provided to them by procurement.
Proposal
What I propose are procurement indicators that combine mass, distance and multiplier effects in a simple and easily understood format. I break this down into 2 indicators. The simplest one is an expression of mass multiplied by distance travelled, which I call the Mass Miles (MM) indicator. The second one is an indicator of how many such Mass Miles might be stimulated through payments to other companies, and is called a Mass Miles Multiplier (MMM).


Calculating Mass Miles(MM)
A procurer can calculate MM by obtaining simple data about their suppliers.

They need to:
1. list the top 3 sub-suppliers that they use, in terms of the mass they receive from them per month;
2. find out figures for the average delivery distance from these suppliers;
3. find out the mass supplied per month.


The figure for each supplier, is calculated by multiplying the mass of delivery, by miles travelled by delivered goods, adding the result up for a suitable time period, such as a month.

This is then added up for all of the top three heaviest suppliers to give an indicator of the direct impact of procurement practice on heavy goods transportation. This is the Mass Miles indicator (MM).


Calculating the Mass Miles Multiplier(MMM)

The procurer can also ask their suppliers to do a similar MM calculation for their top three heaviest sub-suppliers. At this stage procurers are interested on the effects of their spending, rather than the direct effects of ordering goods to be moved around, as above. This means that they should ask their top 3 suppliers in terms of spend to do this calculation, rather than the top 3 in terms of weight.

The procurer would need to ask their supplier to provide them with the information listed above, so that they can calculate the supplier’s MM. The multiplier effect can be found by working out the MM for a supplier, and multiplying that by the amount a procurer spends towards that supplier. This is a Mass Miles Multiplier (MMM) indicator.

Uses of these indicators
From this data you can indicate both the immediate effect of your buying, in terms of mass arriving at your organisation, as well as the knock on effects of your spending, in terms of mass arriving at your suppliers, via the economic activity your spending is contributing to.

These indicators allow an overview of procurement impacts. Procurement policies could be modified in the light of this, either by direct means, in terms of ordering smaller amounts of heavier goods, or procuring them from a lesser distance, and also indirectly, by directing spend towards suppliers that also do so.

This is the simplest and most minimal approach to this kind of indicator I can conceive of. More sophisticated users might use additional rounds of multiplier effects, or include more suppliers. This could be extended as far as integrating the Mass Balance approach of Forum for the Future with the type of input-output tables used to forecast the regional effects of inward investment by the government agencies dealing with such issues.

However, starting with a simple user-friendly indicator seems like a promising approach for prompting discussion of the relationship between procurement and heavy transportation amongst those who can actually change procurement practices.


References
Local Multiplier Effect 3 on the New Economics Foundation website
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/tools_lm3.aspx
Mass Balance Approach on the Forum for the Futures Website
http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/publications/MassBalanceOrgs_page2440.aspx?emailpage=yes
Mayor’s Environmental Strategy
http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/environment/strategy.jsp
Mayor Plans Healthier Food for Londoners on Guardian Website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1681199,00.html

Where to start with a global constitution?

Constitutions and revolutions are born out of discussion. A blog seems like a good salon for discussing a global constitution. But where should we start?

There has been quite some debate on such issues recently, much of it can be seen on the website Open Democracy. For instance, George Monbiot

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/George_Monbiot.jsp

and David Held
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/David_Held.jsp


have both put forward their ideas there.

What do we mean by 'humanity'?
However both of their approaches seem to me to need a stronger initial focus, or philosophical starting point. They both seem to hinge around an emerging ‘human’ identity, born of a globalising moment, some sense of cosmopolitanism.

However the ‘clash of civilisations’ or of ‘fundamentalisms’ (see Tariq Ali) seems to show that there are irreconcilably different views of what it is to be a human being, differences that show no sign of resolving quickly.

In addition Fukuyama points out that genetic engineering might bring us into a ‘post-human future’ where what it is to be human is increasingly called into question by our ability to re-engineer our biological selves.

I would claim that we have never been human. Anthropology has put plenty of nails in that coffin, charting the myriad ways in which people learn to be human all over the world. Evolutionary biology shows that our ability to learn and adapt, shaping our-selves and others through communication, is our single most striking feature. This all places a singular idea of ‘being human’ on very shaky ground.

So I think we need to dispense with cosmopolitanism as our central common reference. We need another common reference, since people tend to define and redefine what is is to be human in continuously shifting and a politically expedient ways.

The problems of legislating the good
Legislating globally on labour and trading standards is a shaky starting point for a global polity, and this is a problem in Monbiot’s argument in The Age of Consent.

There as yet there is no stable consensus definition of what “fair trade’ and ‘fair working conditions’ are on a global level. What is more, such a stable consensus is unlikely to emerge, as these are definitions that are very likely to shift over time, alongside framings of what it is to be human and have needs.

A reference point that is marginally less easy to redifine in its entirety is the planet or the material world of co-existence. This is something that is continuously redifined, but where the limits to this redefinition seem clearer than with some catch-all sense of humanity.

In the spirit of a sense of public that a global approach to democracy implies, my starting point will be that this planet should be the common property of us all.

Some principles to think about
Proceeding from this starting point, here are my principles for a global constitution:

1) The world is the common property of the whole human race.

2) Those that draw from this common pool must:
A) pay back, where this drawing is mainly for private gain;
B) invest to safeguard and renew this common pool.

3) The payback principle (2A) should form the financial basis of a global polity.

4) Enforcing the investment principle (2B) should be one of the primary goals of a global polity.

5) Principles 3 and 4 should be implemented via institutions that embody direct democratic accountability to the global majority.

These principles are in need of debate. I want to move on to discuss applications of these principles in order to aid debate, not in order to forclose it.

Tax shift as one possible implementation
Fortunately, the Green movement has been debating the planet for quite a while. My notion of a common pool and a payback principle is derived from Green Economics, and specifically from the conceptual basis of James Robertson’s work on ‘The case for a tax shift.’ (http://www.jamesrobertson.com/article/taxshift.pdf)

His main point in this is simple: From an ecological point of view, there are 2 main types of inputs into the economy:

1. human energies and;
2. natural resources.


Governments can influence the economy via how they place their tax burden. By burdening incomes rather than natural resource inputs, they increase the amount of natural resources used compared to people employed. This is via the price mechanism, since they have made people relatively more expensive, and thus natural resources cheaper. If you shift the tax burden, then you shift the balance between natural resources and people as inputs to the economy.

Some advantages of a global tax-shift approach
Globally we clearly have a shortage of natural resources, and more people than we know what to do with. So we need a regime that reflects this. A global polity based on natural resource taxation is rational: It is likely to move us towards a more sustainable economy, and is also likely to encourage more employment-led types of economic activity.

One of the main lessons of development is that people are better off in the long run if they earning a living, rather than depending on charity. As the overall demand for labour increases, so does labour’s bargaining power. So shifting the tax burden towards natural resources has a real prospect of being a way of improving labour standards in the long run, without directly intervening in individual countries’ labour laws.

Taxation of natural resource usage is a good starting point from this point of view, because it corresponds with what governments already do. Taxation is an existing institution nationally, sometimes already aimed at natural resource usage, that can be extended to the Global level.

This is much more realistic than attempting to start the ball rolling by extending labour and fair-trading standards globally. These moves could follow on when a democratic global polity starts to take shape: the increased demand for labour alongside global democratic mechanisms would support the generation of standards.

Taxation a global level has an inbuilt advantage for the poor: it is redistributive, since it can operate as a percentage of prices, and prices are generally lower in poorer countries. In addition the poorest often operate in informal economies, beyond the reach of taxation. This redistributive aspect would be heightened if the resources gathered were administered with global democratic oversight, since the majority live in the poorer countries.

It might also act as one way of addressing unequal trade relations. Historically colonialism saw a pattern of natural resource exploitation, combined with the suppression of industries in the colonies that might compete with the coloniser’s economy.

This pattern is continued under the doctrine of comparative advantage in international trade. The idea of comparative advantage is to stick to producing what you are good at, and trade with others for what you need, since then, overall, everyone will be better off.

This is a short-term and conservative approach. If you are high up in the international division of labour then it is great, you keep doing what you are doing and maintain your comparative advantage. If you are low down, you are encouraged to stay there. All is well if you keep doing your job, which internationally speaking often means supplying natural resources to those with more lucrative advantages.

However, where the international economy is shifted away from cheap natural resource inputs as its basis, towards services and skills as its preferred primary input, these relations of dependence based on natural resource exploitation are likely to wane somewhat.

Also, if a tax is placed on the non-renewable use of resources, this obviously gives an incentive for renewable use. This is a crucial development issue in itself; natural resource exploitation is generally not renewable, which is what is so tragic about it. Once the wealth is gone the client states, and their still-impoverished people, are left high and dry.

If services become a stronger sector of the economy, then there are more incentives to invest in education, and pursue a high skills path of development. This means that this kind of approach fits well with existing governmental and development discussions about ‘human development’ and ‘the information society.’ In other words there is already some support for these kinds of ideas to be found amongst governments.

There are also security implications for this approach. If a tax shift occurs internationally and this shifts economic activity, there are less incentives to invest in arms in order to police natural resources. This applies both to your own natural resources, and crucially to the natural resources of others that you may be busy expropriating.

Finally, a lot of the odious debts that third world countries suffer under would lose some of their motivating rationale, if expropriating the natural resources of poor countries was less central to the international economy.

Why might such an approach be doable?
Obviously there needs to be much more debate on this as a set of ideals, but leaving that aside for now, I’d like to move on to how I see us proceeding from where we are towards such ideals, and why this implies the need for democratic solutions.

Why on earth would sovereign states submit to an international taxation of natural resource use which is aimed at setting up a competing level of governance?

The short answer is because they are in serious trouble. States of all types rule not only by coercion, but by delivering the goods to their populations. States that fail massively in this tend to fall fairly quickly without outside support (the loans under structural adjustment programmes being a disturbing case of this kind of outside support.)

The environmental crisis is likely to stop states being able to deliver the goods. It is therefore a crisis of legitimacy, and not one that they seem to be unable to solve on their own. Monbiot gives a powerful diagnosis of why this is so in both The Age of Consent and Captive State. It is enough here to note two points:

1) The current international system of anarchical relations cannot prevent either this domination by vested interests, or the associated ‘tragedy of the commons’ between states.

2) States are far too close to the vested interests that consume huge amounts of natural resources.

In short the current structures of governance we have nationally and globally are not up to the job of addressing our global ecological crisis. If this doesn’t change it will lead to the fall of states; to revolution, war or chaos.
The difficulties around the Kyoto agreement are a good example of this problem. How do you overcome powerful vested interests in the world’s dominant state (the US) whilst bringing onboard the emerging powers, who want their slice of the cake (e.g. India and China.)

One approach to this problem is to try and use force to overcome the crisis. Iraq is an example of this. To my mind, the US is trying to regulate China and India’s future share of the oil commons, by having a strong military presence in the Middle East. However China and India both have nuclear weapons, and others will surely follow, so this approach is both dangerous and unsustainable.

How do we get the emerging nations onboard a global regime on natural resource usage, with a less coercive basis? Well we could try carbon credits. However, this is a new indicator requiring new offices to deal with them.

These new offices have to discover and close all the new loopholes associated with this legislation, before they have half a chance of being effective. This is a profound problem, since carbon credits hinge on what people are not doing. This is a hard thing to check up on, since by definition it doesn’t exist.

When many countries have trouble collecting taxes, how can they be expected to oversee whether people are being dishonest about their carbon credits? It is probably wiser to strengthen these governments in doing what they need to do anyway, e.g. collecting taxes, and use this as a way to achieve the desired goals.

Why should governments submit to such a regime?
Well these emerging countries have really big populations: India and China account for nearly a third of all of us.

Firstly they would stand to benefit from an expanded service economy, since they also face the problem of what to do with their huge populations.

Secondly, if the systems of such a global polity were to be administered through direct democratic representation from populations, they would stand a good chance of benefiting from them.

For India, this democratic aspect is not as problematic: They are already a democracy, and have several levels of governance. Another level of governance might not be too huge a shock, especially if it might also head off a revolution.

For China it is much more problematic, since direct democratic representation for their people would be a revolution in itself. However, if we feel we need to live in a democratic world, then we have to face this.

And so does the Chinese government. They cannot keep the current economic miracle going in its current form: There are not enough resources to go around.

The environmental movement in China is gaining strength. Indeed if the other world powers really fear China as a totalitarian super-power, then the linking of natural resource usage to democracy is an area they should consider carefully.

How do we get vested interests globally to relax their grip on governments?
They need a chance to shift their investments in to something more renewable, and phasing in such a tax regime would make adjustment more gradual, rather than suddenly enforced by oil shortage or climate chaos. However, this might be a very hard case to make politically.

Which brings me to my final point. If such a global constitution is to come about, it would need enormous pressure from populations in order to convince governments that it is the lesser of two evils. If climate change is as serious as it seems, this pressure will come, as the material impacts on people emerge.

However it is better if this pressure comes sooner rather than later. This approach to a global constitution has another advantage, one of political resonance. All around the world there is a similar conversation going on, and the same issue keeps coming up: this is our planet.

I was thinking very naively about the world. It struck me that there should be some simple principles by which the world is run:

1) The world is the common property of the whole human race.

2) Those that draw from this common pool must:
A) pay back, where this drawing is mainly for private gain;
B) invest to safeguard and renew this common pool.

3) The payback principle (2A) should form the financial basis of a global polity.

4) Enforcing the investment principle (2B) should be one of the primary goals of a global polity.

5) Principles 3 and 4 should involve democratic accountability to the global majority.

The Pedant General's frienndly challenge and my reply

The Pedant General made this interesting point to me by email , he will likely post a fuller retort when he is ready, but I liked the provocation, and so posted it and my response:

On this particular issue, my steer is that Mrs T's "no such thing as
society" has been fearfully misrepresented, particularly by those on
the socialist end of the political compass. My understanding is that
this was a reminder that we are all individual responsible for our own
actions, that the state (at a high level) cannot - and should not -
look after you. This was not a call for a "dog eat dog" world.



Indeed, your argument that free markets have created the breakdown in
civic responsibility is, I think, wrong. From my perspective, it is
much of left wing politics through the 80s that is to blame here: it was cultural relativity and
welfare dependence that broke down the bonds of individual
responsibility. Free markets are rather ruthless at showing you the
effects of your own actions: welfare dependency does not.



However, your solution, as regards local democracy, is a good start, though not the whole answer.

My response:

But to address the main point you are making, I have an interesting
comparison to make having lived in Sweden for a few years. Sweden is
out on the left of the European political span, with the UK pretty
close to the right-most end, especially in terms of its political
structure. There has, however, been a strong tradition of welfarism in the UK,
but it was not a very modern one, and it did get thoroughly gutted
under lady T.

What I detect in your appeal is a sense that the
state is here to discipline the citizens via the market. This is an
interesting position. Firstly it is not necessarily the state's role to
discipline its citizens, social goals can be about more than disciplining
populations to be productive producers: Politics also must include some
element of what we see as 'humanity' and how might we arrange things to
best support human existence in all its facets. This is not the same as the type of productive efficiency, and rational ruthlessness that a
market morality will tend to converge on.

Secondly, the market is not that efficient at disiciplining people. You only
have to see what happens when directors of companies are negligent,
their companies fold losingmillions of people their money, their
employees die through their cutting corners on safety stnadards etc...
They get golden parachutes anyway: These are the moral exemplars that
stand out at the top of the market, and responsibility is not the
message. If we had strong legislation of business perhaps, but under a
laissez faire approach: No I don't see much moral fibre coming out of
that.

Finally the market cannot be efficient in showing people
the rigth way to act. It only transmits price information and
consumption choices. Thus it is a blunt and fairly random instrument
for prediciting the future: You have cycles of boom and bust, over
investment in productive capacity due to the inability to track the
contemporary behaviour of competitiors, since markets actually adjust
quite slowly, you have the problems of imperfect reporting (e.g. Enron)
which makes the market very irrational, you have the hype factor (dot
com boom) where enthusiasm becomes its own driver for a while, you have
cartels and monopolies dirven by economies of scale and barriers to
entry to markets, including both technical factors and anti-compeitive
practices: the list goes on and Hayek's model bears little relation to
reality: Any even vaguely efficient market is hyper-regulated, and
anyone, like me, with first hand experience of business, will tell you
that the rule is inneficiency rather than the reverse.

The serious theoretical flaw in Hayek is that he assumes communicative
efficiency, and the commensurability of signals to produce rational
choices. This is completely at odds with any substantive research on
human communication and decision making. QED.

Actually people are more disciplined by their relationships than by consequences
per se, thus it is not the market, but the social that is the source of
morality. Badly designed welfare policies that promote dependency are
problematic, and we are fairly retrograde in the UK, due to our
adherance to an Anglo Saxon model of largesse by the wealthy as the
model for welfare.

However the Swedish model of welfare, whilst having
their problems, are actually both more comprehensive (hence less abject
poverty) and tougher (hence less chronic dependency culture also. I am
not saying Sweden is perfect, but the people are moral, and
hardworking, and yet have a massive welfare state.

They have adopted market oriented policies, and their markets work well, and
their companies are massively competitive partly because they arfe
disciplined by the state and unions. There is a culture of collective
baragainign their that fosters co-operation between employers and
employee representatives in decision making, and this helps massively
with productivity. There is actually a very strong positive
correlation between productivity levels and unionisation levels within
the OECD (long working hours being and example of why.) Again this runs at odds with the economic dogma that free-er markets are necessarily more efficient.



Anyway, this is slightly unfair the Pedant General deserves to lay out his position more strongly before I launch into all this, but at least he has more to take aim at now...

Respect: It's the social contract stupid.

Tony Blair has some strange ideas...

Schnews amongst others, including The Guardian, and pretty much every social researcher in the land, have noticed that a lack of respect has something to do with the breakdown of local social institutions, and that this might have something to do with excessive free-market policies, which were originally championed on the basis that there is 'no such thing as society.' This was always about replacing old fashioned ideas like social solidarity, local institutions, local politics, community etc... with the market. How quickly we forget.

But now we life in an 'information society' where we need a highly skilled and well-functioning population, produced cheaply via state run services, to drive the engines of high tech, skilled services, economic growth.

So Blair wants all the bright poor kids to have a chance at success, and those rotten undeserving poor that mess it all up for them, should be kept under wraps. Welcome to a meritocracy that seems to be based on the ethic of the victorian workhouse: Reform the poor and make good use of them.

But is this combination of 'market freedoms' and old style respect for authority so very rare? It would seem not. The right wing Hindutva party in India combined hard-core disciplinarian old style Hindu family morality with trade liberalisation policies, Bush is on the same track in the US to some extent, re-animating Reagonomics, alongside abstinence and chastity ( greed is good, sex is bad, go figure...) not to mention the right wing authoritarianism of the original experiment for the 'free market' Pinochet, who inspired respect from his population in a very old-fashioned way indeed.

I don't think Blair is the same as Pinochet, but I think the trend is telling: The free market undermines the institutions that hold us together, namely local ones, preferably ones that involve some meaningful democratic control over our own lives. These 'liberalising' reforms place these insitutions in private hands: The town square becomes a cafe area where you have to pay to sit, you are required to pay to use the toilet, you go to a private school, private health: Democratic local governance and 'self-control' is given over to private ownership and competition. In this climate what do you learn: Look after yourself, get as much as you can, and 'self control' be damned, especially on any collective level.

Globally we see the same thing: Nations not working together particularly well, because the overarching framework is anarchistic: A free for all amongst nations where the strongest competitor takes all. Whatever happened to 'self-control' in this arena? Did the USA exrecise self-restraint and respect when it invaded Iraq? Was it freeing the world, or looking out for number 1, trying to make sure it had its slice of the Energy pie in the long term game? Again the problem is that the institutions are lacking, and we are talking about democracy here, since we want to bring people on board.

My point is this: Respect is not about individuals, or coming down on individuals. It is about the collective arrangements, agreements by which we are ruled, and crucially it is about feeling a part of those agreements in some way. If you don't give social services, if you don't have public spaces, if you don't have meaningful local democracy, then it is clear those arrangements do not respect you, and you follow their lead, you stop respecting yourself and others. You compete in a world premised on the lowest of expectations of one another and of one' self: Looking after number 1.

Coming down hard on people is hardly giving the right message, but is carrying on the same free - for - all mentality, but in a Hobbesian fashion. The basic assumption is the same, that people will engage in a ruthless free-for-all. There is no real element of democracy in it, and no real confidence in people: Rousseau, the social contract and social liberalism be damned.

An ASBO will not solve any of this because it only engenders the kind of respect
that says "I can fight the system." But why not if the system doesn't do
very much for the people concerned, and does not treat them with any respect? It is not enough for democracy to be centralised to Blair going and chatting to the poor (in front of the cameras): That kind of democratic conversation and control needs to be going on at every level via institutions owned not by shareholders, but by the people concerned.

Blair is currently creating a system of medals in the silent warfare that is competition. He is decorating the warriors who oppose the social, partly because, on some level, he is their Leader: The champion of choice is not the champion of respect.

My Article in Response to Nasser Amin

When will only violence do?
Nasser Amin should be more reflective about the resistance of the oppressed.

Should we advocate violence against minorities at SOAS? Is this justified? Nassir Amin, in the last issue of the Spirit, argued that he thought so, in the case of Jews, and effectively did just that. Thankfully no-one has taken him too literally yet, and there have been no shootings or bombings in the JCR, no checkpoints set up in the halls of SOAS, and we have not yet erected a wall between Jewish and Palestinian students, at least not a physical one.

‘People who are in a wretched state, being deprived of basic moral justice, because of the ongoing deliberate actions of others, have a right to violence against them [‘them’ presumably meaning those doing the injustice, not the oppressed themselves, although admittedly the difference is hard to see in the Palestinian case], if no other course of action is as likely to meet their objective of improving their predicament.’ (Nasser Amin, When only violence will do, SOAS Spirit, Issue 3, 2005, my emphasis)

Actually I agree with this starting position, if a people are being systematically, severely and violently downtrodden, they have a right to resist this, if there is no realistic non-violent alternative (I take issue with violence having equal weight as non-violence, but the overall point remains as I have expressed it above.) But the if is a very big if, especially in the Palestinian case. Peace talks have been tantalisingly close before, and are on the menu again. Should we assume there is no chance for peace, and continue advocating a cycle of violence and counter violence? This seems an unfortunate position for Nasser Amin to choose to put the Palestinian people in, considering how much greater the rate death for Palestinians is, than for Israelis, in the current conflict.

What is the aim of the violence that Amin is advocating? Surely it is to bring the Israelis to the negotiating table. Surely it is to highlight the issue in the Media, to bring international pressure to bear. Amin cannot be seriously proposing that the Palestinians are to drive one of the world’s most advanced armies, equipped with nuclear weapons, into the sea, through the use of sticks, stones and the odd suicide bomb? I prefer living on this planet, however shitty it may be, to inhabiting that sort of violent fantasy. So really, only violence really won’t do in this case. Ultimately, the only thing that will really do it is negotiation. Perhaps violence is part of the background to the negotiation, but it certainly, on it’s own, won’t do what almost everyone wants, which is to achieve peace.

Amin assumes that neither a peace process, nor international pressure can work. ‘Negotiations can only result in what the powerful party, the Israelis, desire to give to the Palestinians.’ This totally ignores another powerful party in this, America. It also ignores the role of international pressure on Israel, in bringing them to the negotiating table before. It also ignores that fact that many, many, many Israelis have no wish to oppress Palestinians, or to get blown up, and really want an end to all this, and are pressuring their government, who they don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with, to achieve this.

Then things get really nasty in Amin’s article. Not only does he assume no peace process can happen, and that international pressure is meaningless, and that peaceful protest never achieved anything (apart from Indian decolonisation, votes for women, the end of apartheid etc… but let’s not dwell on details and side issues) but he also assumes that Israelis are all mindless automata, who all agree with their state’s actions, and therefore all deserve to die. Plainly and simply this is prejudice. It is violent and hateful prejudice. Admittedly it is born of violence and hate, oppression and slaughter by the Israeli army, but it is still unacceptable.

‘They are personally complicit in national wrongdoing, exacerbated by the fact that all Israeli adults, including women, serve in what is indubitably an imperialist-terrorist organisation, the IDF.’ (Nasser Amin, When only violence will do, SOAS Spirit, Issue 3, 2005.)

Strong stuff. Well to start with, we are all complicit in massive wrong-doing. We all, voluntarily participate in the single institution that has simultaneuosly created the most wealth, and led to the most deaths, of any human institution, namely the market. We profit personally from the exploitation of African, and now more directly for the UK, Iraqi natural resources. This undoubtedly has led to a level of mass death that makes Palestine look like a tea party. I don’t really think that this justifies all violence against the rich (I mean us by the way, we are children of privilege at SOAS.) We could opt out of the market, but we don’t. So we should all die, right? Perhaps ritual mass suicide is in order, to make this world a better place.

Do Israelis all join the army as happily as we all join the market? Not to my knowledge. Many Israelis are openly refusing to serve, many more privately dislike the role they are put in. Many of them vote against Sharon, most of them want peace. Also, I seriously question that there is no doubt as to the identity of the IDF, from the perspectives of Israelis. I may happen to think it is an Imperialist force, but I don’t assume all Israelis share my point of view, and that my view would therefore be a justification for their death. A moral judgement implies a sense of some-one’s intention, and I am not sure that all Israelis, on being conscripted into the IDF, have the intention of oppressing the Palestinians. Besides which, I still wouldn’t advocate killing them all, even if they did all see things my way, because I think there is a realistic prospect for a peace process.

“Those who espouse a negotiated ‘settlement’ ought to come to terms with the inconsistency of their view: it is contradictory to call for a West Bank-Gaza State and affirm the ‘right’ of the Israeli State to continue to exist. Rational consistency demands that if some Jewish colonies are wrongful, then all Jewish colonies are wrongful and all ought to be dismantled, not just those established after an arbitrary year 1967.” (Nasser Amin, When only violence will do, SOAS Spirit, Issue 3, 2005.)

This reminds me of the British National Party advocating that all immigrants to the British Isles should leave, and only the ‘Original British’ remain. Someone asked one of their representatives if that included the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, and ultimately the Celts who wandered in from the European continent. Problem is we are all colonisers. Life simply doesn’t stand still, so we can stand back and add things up, and work out rational principles of justice that work in all times and all places, for all people.

Yes, 1967 is arbitrary, as all such boundaries tend to be. What matters here is not what “rational consistency” demands (although quite how a noun phrase developed a voice box and tongue of it’s own I fail to see, I suspect that Nasser Amin means himself when he uses the phrase.) It is the lives of those who are alive and suffering NOW. Justice is an idea we use to try and make better arrangements for living together, hopefully without killing each other. Ideas don’t make decisions on their own, they are mobilised in particular times and places for particular reasons. Amin seems to see peace as involving Israelis ‘going home.’ But where is home for them now, for the children that have grown up in Israel and know nothing else? Amin’s vantage point here is that of the detached rationalisation of populations, it is otherwise known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and it simply won’t do anything except violence to all those concerned, on both sides of the conflict.

There are now two groupings of people settled in the area once called Palestine. This may be a result of gross historical injustice, and perhaps compensation is in order. However, the only realistic peaceful outcome for the human beings concerned in this conflict, is one that includes both groups in the solution. When will only violence bring about this peaceful solution that the majority want? Certainly not in my lifetime, and most probably not in Nasser Amin’s either, since if we take him at his word, he plans to live a short and bloody life. I plan to live to see my daughter grow up, hopefully in a more peaceful world.

Daniel Taghioff

Our Motion on Freedom of Speech at SOAS

Motion to the Students’ Union clearly defining the limits to freedom of speech at SOAS.


This Union notes:

1.The motion “opposing all racist manifestations” passed on the 14th of November 2003, has been used to ban speakers invited by minority groups at SOAS, on the basis that these speakers are representatives of racist social groupings. However this motion does not define racism carefully:

“9. That any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and our expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures.”

2. The decision to ban speakers based on the above motion was over-turned by the school’s management, indicating that the above policy is ineffective.

This union believes
1. The existing relevant student union policy, given above, is based on a very shaky definition of who should be considered racist, one very open to narrow political mobilisation. It is also a definition, if applied in full, which would exclude a huge number of speakers, since most nation-states are founded on some sort of doctrine of “racial differentiation.” This motion has also opened the door for banning people based not on any knowledge of what they plan to say, but purely on the basis of their affiliation to a particular group. This has therefore led to a prejudicial policy.

2. To avoid being open to charges of being “undemocratic” the Union needs to have a clear policy for excluding speakers it deems unacceptable. Part of the problem is that the limits to freedom of speech have not been defined clearly enough. Any such policy limiting freedom of speech needs to be non-prejudicial. It needs to be based on what particular speakers actually plan to say.

2. It is important to have such a clear and non-prejudicial policy, so that SOAS can ban speakers it deems unacceptable, through clear and defensible criteria, which are based on defending the principles that freedom of speech attempts to uphold. This would make SOAS’s student union better able to represent minority voices in wider debates, from a strong and defensible position. This approach is also in line with the School’s statement of principles, see further materials, so is more likely to produce a decisions that won’t simply be overturned by the SOAS management.

/>This Union resolves:

1. The criteria for limiting freedom of speech should be based on defending freedom of speech. Speakers should only be excluded when advocating things that contradict the goals of freedom of speech, namely advocating:

A) Violence as preferable to political, or non-violent, approaches to conflicts of interest. Advocating policies deemed as “forms of collective violence” by the union (see section 2 below) would come within this, since advocating these forms of collective violence contradicts the principle of the promotion of the non-violent resolution of conflicts, which the notion of freedom of speech is founded on.

OR

B) The censorship or marginalisation of groups within non-violent approaches to conflicts of interest.

Speakers advocating these types of actions should be considered for exclusion. These exclusions should not be applied solely due to their association with any social grouping, as this would be prejudicial to the particular speaker. These exclusions should be based on what the particular speakers are actually advocating.

2. To define ‘forms of collective violence’ as ‘actions taken by the individuals themselves, or advocated as a set of actions to be carried out by others, where it is either foreseeable or known that these actions may result in a significant increase in morbidity or mortality, in a definable and numerically significant subgroup of the set of people that are affected by these actions.’

These actions or policies need not have this mortality or morbity as their main aim. It is up to the social groups taking, or normalising, these actions to prove that they are not a ‘form of collective violence,’ where credible evidence is presented that this may be so, and where, based on this, the UGM has decided that this is so. This might be expressed in terms of denouncing a policy as ‘a form of collective violence.’

3. judged potentially excludable by the union, based on the guidelines above (sections 1 2), should be asked to submit an outline of what they are planning to say in advance, which can be the basis of a decision to allow them to speak or not. Where speakers substantially depart from the outline given, and what is said is deemed as in breach of the principles above (sections 1 this can be grounds for not inviting them back, for a period to be decided by the UGM.

4. Where a text has been requested from a speaker due to their association with social groupings deemed as advocating or carrying out ‘forms of collective violence’ by the UGM (see section 2 above) they should only be allowed to speak where 1) they clearly indicate in their talk that they do not agree with these policies OR 2) where their talk deals substantively with why this policy is not a form of collective violence OR 3) where they are presenting proposals for modifying the policies to remove their collectively violent aspects, or for modifying the context of the policies to avoid the collectively violent outcomes of those policies OR 4) They can present a coherent case for their actions leading to an overall lessening of violence.

5. Such bans should be decided at a UGM. Where Union officials decide to ban a speaker in advance, based on the text they submit, this should also be brought before the UGM after the event, to verify if the decision reflects the will of the student body, or not. There is a strong subjective element I deciding wether a talk meets the criteria in the above section. It should be borne in mind that this motion is designed to prevent issues of collective violence being ignored or brushed aside as of little importance. The focus of the decision should therefore be on if the issue was addressed in a substantive way, rather than being on if the Student Union holds a consensus in agreement with the arguments presented.

6. This motion should supersede all previous policy, and where it contradicts previous policy, then this motion should be taken as the policy of the union.

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Freedom of Speech at SOAS

There has been a big debate on Freedom of Speech at SOAS, which I participated in. It revolved partly around an article by Nasser Amin. You can find more detail on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasser_Amin

I actually disagreed very strongly with Amin's article in the SOAS magazine New Spirit. I got an article accepted as a refutation of what he said, but that issue of the Spirit never got published. I reproduce the article below:

http://danieltaghioff.blogspot.com/2006/01/my-article-in-response-to-nasser-amin.html

However, I do think Amin had the right to air his opinons and have them debated, and the subsequant censure of him shows how people don't really think about consequences properly.

I actually drafted a motion with some colleagues at SOAS, one also in the Media Department, another in the Law Department, about the limits of free speech. we put a lot of work into it, but never managed to get it to a union meeting to get it debated. I publish that below also.

http://danieltaghioff.blogspot.com/2006/01/our-motion-on-freedom-of-speech-at.html

In the motion I held the position that one limit to free speech is when advocating violence against others. I had the issue of collective violence advocated or condoned by states in mind here. I think it is objectionable to let what Israel is doing in the occupied territories go unchallenged in public, and that representatives of Israel should at the very least be required to explain themsleves, and to be called to account for violence: Ignoring the situation is akin to condoning the violence, my Palestinian fellow students managed to convince me of this.

Amin's original article in the spirit did call violence against Israeli citizens legitimate, since he sees them as complicit in the violence against the Palestinians. I disagree with this totally, and that is why I wrote the article objecting.

However I think it is more important to allow an individual like Amin a voice in such matters, because their opinions are less likely to lead to violence. A representative of a state, when they speak, is more likely to influence events, and so should have greater moral responibility, scrutiny and limits placed on them.

Currently the framing of freedom of speech lets representatives of states condone or ignore violent policies. At the same time it comes down hard on individuals who express their anger at such violence. I do not think calling for violence is a good idea, but I think the balance should be the other way around: Indivuduals should be freer to speak, becuase they tend to have less voice in public anyway, their voice is crucial for democracy and because their words are less likely to lead to violent outcomes.

Anyway, I support Amin's freedom to speak his views, even if I think he is foolish. I also think that representatives, even from student societies, but especially from states, should be forced to explain the violence in the policies that they advocate, and should be restricted in public life where it becomes clear that their position constitutes a consistent advocacy of collective violence and thus oppression.