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The
politics of north-south relations John Rensenbrink |
John Rensenbrink is one of the founders of the Association of State Green Parties and the Maine Green Party. His latest books is Against All Odds, about the history and future of the Green Party. The following is a speech given by Rensenbrink at the Green Millenium Conference, September 20-25, 1999 at Oaxaca, Mexico.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife Carla and I were shopping for groceries at the Shop N Save store in our town of Topsham, Maine in New England, USA. We paused at a display of apples. They were Braeburn apples. They were on sale at a specially reduced price. They looked delicious, I thought. Carla, however, said, they're from New Zealand, and this is apple season time here in Maine! What are these apples doing here! Quite clearly, the corporations that brought these apples at reduced price into that store in Maine from half way around the world, and did this during our apple season time, were undercutting the local product. The store we were in had been part of a small chain of grocery stores owned by a Maine family. But the chain had been bought out a few weeks before by a multinational corporation based in Belgium.
This is how things are going in Maine. This is how things are going in the world. It's called globalization, but it should be called globalization-from-above. Maine, my home state, is fast becoming just another colony of the supercorporate world machine. Walmarts -- huge retailers of consumer goods of all kinds, most of them made under sweat shop conditions in the Southern part of the world-- are being built in every part of the state of Maine, and in every part of the United States and other countries. Before opening their doors in a given town or city area, the proposed Wallmart store finds out what the prevailing retail prices are in the area and then they deliberately peg their prices lower than that. Soon the Wallmart has the business and the local native owned stores are ruined, and of course the prices go up. This happens not only in groceries, dry goods and hardware, but also in drugs and pharmaceuticals, it happens in banking, in fast food, in energy production, in oil and gas retailing, in the fishing industry, and -- Maine's biggest resource -- in the forest products industry. It is also now happening in seeds for farmers, where the world giant Mansanto with head quarters in St. Louis USA operates to make farmers all over the globe dependent on their monopoly, and on genetically altered seeds. A word for this is economic imperialism.
But it wouldn't be feasible or even possible for corporations to do this if they did not have the government, the laws and the politicians on their side. So it's political imperialism as well. The conquest and domination of political power provides the muscle for their far flung economic empires. It is political power that gives them the opportunity to gradually squeeze out local businesses and force local markets into total dependence on their planetary operations. Through politics they have set up GATT and NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The WTO is nothing but a rogue government operating in secret in Geneva to advance the cause of the supercorporate world machine.
A Closer Look at the North/South Relationship That is one part of the problem that faces us. I will get back to it. But first, there is another part of the problem, closely connected, that is equally disturbing and dangerous. It has been called the North/South problem. This is a misleading way to pose the issue. In fact, it's wrong. It makes it sound as if it's a conflict, if not a war, between the people of the South and the people of the North. According to the conventional wisdom the North is advanced and progressive and well developed; whereas the South is backward, reactionary, and not so well developed. In the past the South has been called undeveloped or under-developed. Now a fashionable word is Less Developed. This kind of talk completely obscures the real situation and functions thus as a lie. The lie is fostered by the established powers in all our countries, North and South. It distracts people from seeing the problem that I've just identifed, which is the domination of world trade and world markets by a few hundred supercorporations. So let's try to get real about this question of North and South. It's complicated, that 's true. But the general outlines are clear enough.
Something strange and really horrifying has happened to the human family since the start of the industrial revolution in northwestern Europe three centuries ago. War was declared on nature and on people related to nature, or people perceived as being close to nature: people in their local communities and their local markets; peasant farmers; workers in the new factories; women in the home and outside the home; children; small business people; people identified as savages; people stereotyped as belonging to an inferior race; and then also the people who rebelled against all this kind of war, who rebelled against the so-called march of progress for the very good reason that it warped and ruined their land and livelihoods, threatened their religion, disrupted their communities. poisoned their rivers and streams, poisoned the air they breathed, the water they drank, and because it made the factories in which they were forced to work dangerous to life and limb. War was declared on all these people. It was declared on behalf of the myth of unlimited progress -- progress that would come to us some day, they said, and still say, if only we would put unlimited faith in the industrial model of production driven by fossil fuels and, more lately, nuclear power as well.
This war has been eagerly embraced by the captains of industry, usually men, in country after country,-- eagerly embraced by them whether they called themselves capitalist or communist or socialist or fascist. The captains of industry and their supporters in governments and universities were, and are, all entranced by the same myth of unlimited progress. They were, and are, addicted, just as much as a person hooked on cocaine or alcohol is addicted, addicted to the belief in the sanctity of ever more production and consumption by ever bigger industrial and financial institutions and ever bigger retail outlets as the way to the good life. Looked at from this angle, it is not the search for profits that drives the engine of this so-called progress, but intense faith, faith in an outrageous myth. It is idealism run amuck. Few religions have received the degree of devotion or sought converts with such evangelical zeal as the religion of unlimited progress.
The industrial model of progress is rooted in the violent extraction of coal and oil from an unhappy earth, and rooted also in the equally violent harnessing of nature's waterways with megadams and vast irrigation projects. The industrial model has behaved like a juggernaut. It has spread from continent to continent, from region to region, from country to country, so that it now embraces the entire planet. The primary agent of this immense transaction is the modern supercorporation, related super-banking institutions, and related government financial institutions like IMF and the World Bank. Let us be clear about the fact that this success has come from their success in harnessing political power: they have found a way to manipulate behind the scenes, or to dominate directly, the political system and the political process in every country which they penetrate with their money and markets. They have the temerity to call what they do democracy; and they even have some success in painting what they do in these borrowed colors. What Has Been the Response of the People? This brings us, doesn't it, to the response of the people. What has been the people's response to this juggernaut? We the people.
We've bought into this, North and South. We've been lured by the myth of progress. We've put up with poisoned air and water, degraded landscapes, eroded farmland, declining aquifers, sprawling cities and suburbs, immense traffic jams, impoverished shanty towns stretching for miles and miles, dangerous and mind-numbing jobs, etc. etc. Why? We were led to believe, and we allowed ourselves to believe, that this is the way to progress; we were even led to believe the lie, that this was the only way to progress, to a better life, if not perhaps for us, then for our children, and certainly for our grandchildren. We were instructed to keep a stiff upper lip, keep our heads down, and work diligently for the coming of the golden millenium when all our sorrows would end.. More lately, in the last several decades, the myth of affluence has arrived in the North. Instead of being told to work hard, and suffer hardship, for our grandchildren, we in the North are now pelted with propaganda that we must work doubly hard to bring about and maintain a cascade of consumer goods now, and that this in fact represents the coming of the golden age. So, again, we've allowed ourselves to be bought off by the stream of consumer goods that the industrial fossil fuel model has poured out in endless and wasteful profusion. Likewise, the people of the South are now being invited and propagandized to hope and expect that this stream of consumer goods that the Northern people have will also become available for you. Available, however, only if you in the South will imitate the North's pathway to progress; meaning, if only you too will also implement the full scale model of industrial growth. Thus: to hell with your communities and eco-systems and local markets, and the dignity of the family. Grin and bear it, do the industrial growth model to the hilt, do it fast, and you will be where we are, we the people of the North with our consumer goods paradise.
Notice the lies here. It of course is not true that we in the North have this cascade of consumer goods, as if everyone in the North has it. Some, but not that many. Some, the very very few, live absolutely opulent and obscenely over-privileged lives. But many live in total squalor and deprivation, beleaguered, exploited, and debased by the same kind of forces that beleaguer, exploit, and bebase the people of the South. Others in the North, people of middle income, may have this affluence to a degree but only by distorting their lives so that husband and wife must both work, often at more than one job, for marginal wages, no health care protection, and kids deprived of their parent's love and attention. It is not true that, barring a few pockets of so-called backwardness, we in the North have somehow arrived at bliss. Our environments, our communities, our belief in ourselves have eroded to dangerous levels. It is also a lie that the North has achieved this consumer affluence by itself. Many of the consumer good we purchase in the North at prices we can afford have partly come at a cost, a prodigious cost, to the people and the economies of the South. The export-mania that is part of the industrial model of growth, imposed on the South by supercorporations and their backers in the IMF and the World Bank, has warped the economies of the South. Land has been torn from the hands of peasant farmers and put into cultivation by big landowners and/or by Northern based corportions, for export crops destined for Northern shores at prices that reflect the low low wages paid to Southern workers. We know the tragic story. Peasant farmers forced onto less and less productive land, forced to over-use and ruin their own eco-systems in order to survive, unable to feed themselves, driven into frenzy of rebellion, and put down with ferocity by the arms purchased by the big landowning and world-corporate related classes. The arms are purchased -- from the North by and large -- with the money that comes from the exports. It is a vicious and self-destructive pattern.
There is another lie, assumed as gospel truth by most of the big managers, financiers, and their stable of professionals North and South, who run the world mega-machine of industrial corporate growth. This lie is that the industrial model of progress based on fossil fuels is the only one that brings you the wherewithal to grow your economies in the South. This lie is perpetuated North and South in the face of rising mountains of research and the rising number of alternative ecologically based, development projects all over the wold. These cry out for immediate and massive implementation, North and South. We can begin the rapid phase-out of the industrial growth model and phase in the ecological development model. The latter is just waiting to be born, to get moving. Ivan Ilich, who spent much time in Cuernevaca, was a great prophet of a new way of thinking that goes beyond the bigger is better idea of progress and beyond industrial fossil fuel based technologies. Amory Lovens and Paul Hawken and the WorldWatch Institute of Lester Brown are names of similar trailblazers that immediately come to mind in the United States.
The Ecological Development Model The ecological development model calls for solar technologies to replace oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. It sees in these new solar technologies a turn towards decentralization, towards community based ways of doing things, towards small businesses and cooperatives, towards low impact forestry, organic agriculture, and appropriate fishing technologies. An ecological development model, rooted in solar technologies, goes hand in hand with the following: new attitudes of respect for nature's ways and for people related to nature or perceived that way. It goes hand in hand with a will to achieve a sustainable economy within the perspective and framework of ecological rationality and survival.
It goes hand in hand with and inspires the recognition that everything is connected to everything else. Because this is so, and because a people, and the human family as a whole, are only as strong as the weakest link, that therefore considerations of equity and fair distribution of the goods of life and well being, that equity and fairness are more than just humanitarian ideals, but are indeed absolutely necessary for the survival of society and culture as whole. The people of the South have been encouraged to ignore, to not examine very closely, the horrible price we people in the North have paid for our enthusiastic embrace of the industrial fossil fuel model of development. The price has been and continues to be the poisoning of our bodies and our food, water, land; we've seen the destruction of our communities and the gradual loss of our freedom to the modern corporate machine that has come to dominate every aspect of our existence; and we've seen a monstrous disparity in wealth and income and power between the top one to five percent of the population and the bottom 50 to 60 percent. The insidious result of this is the squeezing out of whatever democracy we still have left.
The Common Ground But note the common ground between our experiences, North and South. It is the same experience. It is the same situation, reproduced now in the South with even greater anguish and terror than in the North. Yes, greater anguish and terror. Because the supercorporations got their start in the North and have found it possible to maintain their political power in the North by exploiting the South even more than they exploit the populations of the North. The hold they have over the political processes and politicians of the North comes partly from their success in shifting the price of industrial growth from the backs of the people of the North to the backs of the people of the South. Thus, the people of the North are to some degree insulated from the worst effects of the industrial growth model that is being practiced upon them in the North and practiced upon the people of the South. It gives the masters of the supercorporate machine the opportunity to play the people of the North against the people of the South.
It is a political bond that united us. But that, too, makes our struggle a common one. It is a political bond that unites us, people of the North and of the South. We are of different and diverse cultures. We speak different languages. We live in different climates, are affected by different circumstances of history and geography. But across all these differences we have had and are having a similar encounter with similar forces that seek to destroy what we hold dear. We have a choice whether to bow down to these forces or to promote and defend a better model of development. Do we continue to enslave ourselves to the model of industrial growth or do we fight for a model of ecological development. This is not a choice of class against class. It is not a choice of ethnic group against ethnic group, or of race against race, or of male versus female. Or of North versus South.
This is a free and genuine political choice that we make in our being as citizens. As we make that choice there grows a bond of unity with all peoples all over the world who are making a similar political choice. It is the Green movement and Green parties everywhere that are taking the lead in this struggle for the planet. We who are Greens North and South need to do at least three things to promote the bond that unites us, to defend and implement the model of ecological development, and to make the choice more real as the days of our years go by. One of these three things is raising our consciousness about the true nature of the problem facing us and to foster an ever deeper understanding of the values that underly the model of ecological development. This is a cultural and educational task.
A second thing is to build alliances with the multitude of Non-Governmental Organizations active in our countries and in the world at large; to do this in a strategically creative way so that the particular issues each of the NGOs fight for are related to the overall model of ecological development. A third thing is to build strong Green political parties. and federations of these parties. This to me is supremely important right now. It holds the key to the entire stragegy for survival on this planet. It is a uniquely political task. We must contest for power. We must transform the power as we contest for it and transform the power when we get it. We must, through our success in the political sphere of power in each of our countries, reach out to Green Parties in other countries. We are building federations of Green Parties and we must work hard to develop our mutual ties and learn from one another. We can now begin an effort to create a Global Green Network that spans the whole planet. This is a work that we can consummate at the global gathering of Greens in Canberra, Australia in April of 2001. We must help move the world and each of our countries towards the model of ecological development and full scale democracy. This is our calling. This is our responsibility. On our response, I believe, hinges the fate of our planet.