One particularly vivid way to raise these issues is
through a confrontation of three different perspectives
― a neoli
the interactions of numerous factors
― demographic, technological, political, cultural, and
environmental
― that constitute societies and shape
their future outcomes.
Drawing from this project, Which World? attempts
to map how such dynamics currently operate in various regions of the planet, and
how they interact in the global economy, as it seeks to project various possible
outcomes of current social processes. The emphasis here is on possible because,
in line with his systems theory approach and the postmodern science known as
"chaos theory," Hammond insists that while current trends may
predispose societies to certain outcomes, these futures are too complex and
contingent on uncertain variables for exact prediction.
This means that however things are presently
constructed, they can be deconstructed and reconstructed by human beings in
different ways. It means, moreover, that whatever futures might be likely or
probable, such as one of global social and environmental collapse, they can be
anticipated and prevented in favor of quite different results. The important
point is that unless we first imagine various futures, both good and bad, and
utilize socially progressive and ecological visions as ethical and institutional
maps, we will have nothing to guide us in the constitution of a viable world,
and we will travel in time like lost seafarers. To begin marking the signposts,
Hammond argues, our first task is to examine long term trends in various regions
and the globe as a whole.
Hammond is a sharp dialectical thinker able to
hold simultaneously in his mind both the negative and the positive, seeing how
we are barreling down the road to hell, but also how other paths open at our
current developmental crossroads. Specifically, Hammond envisages three main
possibilities for humanity: we can journey into the Market World of untrammeled
capitalism, the Fortress World of social collapse and authoritarian control, or
the Transformed World of benign capitalism that prioritizes social justice and
establishes a rapproachment with nature. If the menu of options seems slightly
limited, something like what a steakhouse offers a vegetarian, indeed it is, for
Hammond fails to consider a Left or anarchist vision of a revitalized socialist
economics and municipal confederations.
In its interesting design, Hammond's book begins
with the importance of constructing stories or "scenarios" as critical
maps of the present and guideposts for the future. He then broadly describes the
nature of the three worlds/roads he believes face us in the current crossroads
of social evolution. Finally, he applies each scenario to various regions of the
world, always with a close eye on how each region interacts with the global
economy as a whole, and how social development is inextricably bound to the
ecological systems of the earth. Specifically, Hammond studies crucial regions
such as Latin America, China and Southeast Asia, India, Sub-Saharan Africa,
North Africa and the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America,
Europe, and Japan.
Thus, the regional and the global, the social and
natural worlds, are theorized together as one system, but with different
outcomes available to society and nature, depending on the wisdom and effects of
human choices. In each region, Hammond advances an empirical analysis of current
trends relating to issues such as population, economics, and technology, and
from there imagines three possible futures such trends could foster. The
scenarios are highlighted in italics and read with the vividness and realistic
effect of the morning paper. In confronting Hammond's projected outcomes, one
can easily imagine being in a different future, with all the repulsion, joy, or
skepticism this experience may bring. The first scenario Hammond investigates as
one possible future is the Market World. As championed by entrepreneurs,
corporate leaders, and political conservatives and liberals alike, this world is
an extension of current capitalist globalization dynamics. The idea here, as
trumpeted ubiquitously in the media, is that free markets and technological
innovation can bring peace, prosperity, and stability to nations around the
globe. With the development of NAFTA, the loans of the IMF, and the
computerization of the planet by IBM and Microsoft, this capitalist utopia will
bring the dream to as many people as possible.
This scenario asks us to believe in trickle-down
economics theory on a global scale, even though so far it has not worked in any
single country. Conspicuously absent from the Market World vision is a keen
appreciation of the environmental toll global consumerism and prosperity would
involve. To the extent such problems may be anticipated, thinkers from this
paradigm hold they will disappear with a wave of the magic technofix wand,
whereby some technology or "revolution" or other (like the celebrated "Green
Revolution") will save the day
― and hopefully the whales too.
Should this future fail to materialize, should its
technofixes, tepid reforms, and free market voodoo prove unable to solve the
world's problems, Hammond voices the fear of many others that something like a
Fortress World will come about instead of the Happyville of the Market World. On
this scenario, tracing another possible outcome of contemporary dynamics,
Hammond projects how the growth of the market might fail to bring greater
prosperity to anyone but the elite, such that the intensified class differences
and social insecurities could bring a Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all. This
would be an inverted Market World characterized by "islands of prosperity,
oceans of poverty" (Madhav Gadgil). As social insecurities advance, armies
of the disaffected would arise. Here, as Hammond describes, the dark side of
global capitalism would emerge, leading to greater worldwide poverty, a growth
in social instabilities and violence, and environmental ruination and collapse.
In such a volatile state, society may become militarized, where the elite use
whatever means necessary to defend their property and privileges. Looking at
countries such as China and India, Hammond finds that current trends make this
scenario possible (42-43).
But if, for Hammond, the PR of the
Market World is too optimistic, the autopsy on the Fortress World is too
pessimistic. Hammond believes that current trends could lead to still another
possible future -- the Transformed World. Here too, capitalism makes good on its
promises for greater peace, prosperity, stability, and environmental protection.
The main difference between the Market World and the Transformed World is that
this third future is created out of the realization that an unfettered
marketplace and unregulated technological innovation alone cannot bring social
and environmental progress. Rather, on this vision, progress requires some form
of deliberative and democratic shaping of economics and technology, more
participation from citizens, and a different set of values that overcomes the
pathologies of competition, individualism, and greed in favor of more communal,
cooperative, and "spiritual" outlooks. Sheer quantitative change alone
― more production and more technology
― cannot bring about the kinds of qualitative
changes Hammond thinks are necessary for a truly Transformed World.
Looking at current trends, Hammond finds evidence
that present tendencies could evolve into the Transformed World. Among other
things, he cites the emergence of a variety of local democratic cooperatives and
grass roots organizations, numerous projects for urban renewal, a peaceful
transition of power from whites to blacks in South Africa, the spread of the
Internet and new possibilities for communication, new partnerships between
environmental organizations and corporations, a new concern for
"sustainable development" and the environment in the corporate sector,
increased philanthropy, world environmental conferences such as occurred in
Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and a more effective Environmental Protection Agency.
Hammond makes it clear that he intends these three
possible futures to be ideal types. "In reality," he argues, "the
world in 2050 is likely to contain elements of all three scenarios ... [b]ut the
scenarios nonetheless provide a convenient shorthand for widely held but
contrasting visions of human destiny" (24). While the future is yet to be
invented, Hammond usefully underlines the available resources for progressive
social change, for a world in relative harmony with itself and its natural
surroundings. Whatever happens in any country or region, Hammond is quite clear
that different national and regional fates are intertwined; in the world of
NAFTA and the WTO, the economic and political systems of all countries is so
interlocked that "global destiny depends on regional choices" (178).
Hammond is well aware that current dynamics could
unfold in catastrophic ways. He points, for example, to gradual destruction of
the rainforests, the reality of global warming, the impending doubling of the
human population, the growing diminishment of useable land and water supplies,
the aging and economic strain of advanced industrial societies, in addition to
the rise in crime rates, the global arms market, and the number of diseases
afflicting human beings. To Hammond's list we could add the resurgence of
fascist ideologies in the U.S. and Europe, the technocratic takeover of
universities and resulting instrumentalist myopia, ecological troubles in China
(as a fifth of the world's population begins trading in its bicycles for cars,
its rice paddies for hamburger patties), a portentous economic unravelling of
Russia, attacks and counter-attacks in the "new war" of terrorism,
nuclear saber rattling between India and Pakistan, and the worldwide rise in
meat consumption that exacts a huge toll on animal life, human health, and the
environment.
Most likely, I am not alone in being unconvinced
that the current global dynamics will not carry us very far toward anything but
the Fortress World, and that our salvation does not lie in "green
capitalism," the "green revolutions" of mechanized agriculture,
genetic engineering, or Bill Gates' "road ahead." Despite the useful
empirical analyses and the value of his scenarios, Hammond's book ultimately
represents a massive collapse of critical thinking and a stupendous failure of
the utopian imagination.
It is outrageous, for example, to see progressive
value in alliances between McDonalds and the Environmental Defense Fund in order
to achieve better waste recycling (55), while saying nothing about the relation
between cattle grazing, rainforest destruction, and global warming, all of which
dwarf the ludicrous insignificance of better packaged Happy Meals. Such
alliances do more harm than good, and this particular relation is symptomatic of
a new stage in the history of American environmental movements, a "third
wave" premised on forming close ties with corporations and the subsequent
cooptation of mainstream environmental movements (see Mark Dowie, Losing
Ground). Similarly, the world environmental conferences in Rio de Janeiro (1992)
and Kyoto, Japan, accomplished very little except to provide vehicles for
corporate propaganda. In general, Hammond is totally blind to the phenomenon of
greenwashing (see below) and takes the environmental propaganda of Shell Oil and
the like as facts rather than lies and disinformation. He offers no critical
analysis of institutions like the EPA, which is notorious for its ineptitude and
corporate-friendly policies. The EPA protects our environment about as well as
the USDA protects workers, animal welfare, and the health of consumers (see Gail
Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse).
Hammond's blindness to institutionalized
exploitation of human beings and the earth, to the blatant lies of corporate PR
industries, to the failures of government reform and monitoring agencies, as
well as to the inadequacies of mainstream environmental movements, is very clear
if we turn to Tom Athanasiou's Divided Plant: The Ecology of Rich and Poor and,
especially, Takis Fotopoulos' Toward an Inclusive Democracy. From, respectively,
socialdemocratic-Green and libertarian Left-oriented perspectives, both writers
offer a far sharper analysis of our social and environmental problems, but
Fotopoulos alone goes beyond rhetoric to project concrete possibilities for a
postcapitalist world and revitalized radical ("inclusive") democracy.
Like Hammond, Athanasiou and Fotopoulos offer empirical and political analysis
of both social and environmental problems, but they cover a wide body of
literature and issues outside of Hammond's limited scope. Both effectively
demolish the naive optimism of the Market World future, the
"ecorealism" of Gregg Easterbrook (A Moment on the Earth) and others
that assure us environmental problems are fixable, and even Hammond's
Transformed World vision, which itself proves far too optimistic under critical
scrutiny.
Athanasiou's key premise is that the
"environmental movement" (to use that abstraction) is itself
experiencing a crisis, and is in a key transition between the past and the
future. Something clearly is wrong if, despite all the efforts of the last four
decades, the overall environmental situation is rapidly worsening. To use Mark
Dowie's typology in his book, Losing Ground, Athanasiou sees contemporary
environmental politics to be beyond the "first wave" of nineteenth
century preservation and conservation movements, past the "second
wave" that institutionalized the environmental movement during the 1960s
and 1970s, and over the "third wave" that tried to harmonize
environmentalism with free markets during the 1980s, to form a "fourth
wave." This new form of environmental politics is comprised of grass roots
movements that renounce alliances with corporations and, often, mainstream
environment groups, to pursue a more radical anti-bureaucratic and
anti-capitalist politics, such as do many "environmental justice"
groups. "The old environmentalism has hit its limits," Athanasiou
argues, and he calls for a "new ecology" that seeks to link social and
environmental problems -- a move clearly inspired by Murray Bookchin's work,
while leaving behind Bookchin's radical politics.
Athanasiou's book is far-ranging, covering
environmental issues and debates in the industrialized "West" and
"North," the developing "South," and the communist and
postcommunist countries in the "East." Eschewing the ecorealism of
Easterbrook, Athanasiou advances a qualifiably "apocalyptic" position
which insists, against Easterbrook, that the ecological crisis is all-too-real,
as apparent with global warming, rainforest destruction, species extinction,
overpopulation, and other grave problems. Athanasiou argues that such change
will not come until forceful and direct links are made between environmental and
social issues. Among other things, Athanasiou sharply rejects Malthusian
positions that reduce the social dynamics behind overpopulation to a mere
biological problem of overbreeding, targeting the world's poor instead of the
consumption habits of the middle and upper classes. In addition, he vituperates
against the misanthropic positions of Earth First! (known to chant "Four
Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!"), and any apolitical deep ecology position that
absurdly claims to be "neither Left nor Right, but Forward."
For Athanasiou, new articulations have to be made
between traditional Left issues and environmental problems, without succumbing
to the flawed legacy of Left politics, such as factionalism and bureaucracy.
This means we cannot adequately solve or even formulate environmental problems
until we draw the connections to issues of social justice, class, redistribution
of wealth, land reform, poverty, unemployment, corporate hegemony, and so on. As
Athanasiou argues, "It is folly to believe that a realistic environmental
and development agenda, one that seeks peace rather than new kinds of war, will
not be compelled to take up the unfinished business of the old left
movement" (52).
Athanasiou's book is rich in empirical analysis
and statistics, and it is worth examining some of this to underscore his point
that socioeconomic conditions today are worse than ever, and that high levels of
consumption and poverty alike take a huge toll on the environment. According to
Athanasiou's figures, the gap between the world's rich and poor doubled between
1960 and 1989, "by which time the richest fifth of the world's people
received 82.7 percent of the world's total income and the poorest fifth received
only 1.4 percent -- a ratio of 60 to 1!" (53). In addition, "the
North, with a fourth of the world's people, consumes 70 percent of the world's
energy, 75 percent of its metals, 85 percent of its wood, and 60 percent of its
food" (ibid). Between 1981 and 1987, wages throughout Latin America fell 41
percent. "By 1990 over 1.3 billion people lacked access to safe drinking
water, 880 million adults could not read or write, 770 million had insufficient
food for an active working life, and over a billion lacked even the most
rudimentary necessities. Today, as then, an estimated 13-18 million people,
mostly children, die from hunger and poverty each year. That is about 40,000
people per day, or about 1,700 people an hour" (ibid).
Given these shocking statistics, Athanasiou hinges
the fate of the earth on whether or not the ever-widening gap between the
world's rich and poor can be bridged in a politics of social justice. For
Athanasiou, the environmental crisis stems from a crisis in democracy that
allows an privileged elite to control the world's resources and devour them in
their insatiable consumer appetites, while the poor languish and die in droves.
Hence, as the title of his book suggests, one needs to study the ecological
problems that stem from an economically "divided planet." In addition,
new definitions of "progress" and "development" have to be
articulated that break with the unlimited logic of growth and competition, and
measure these terms according to advances in overall human and ecological
well-being.
An important chapter of Athanasiou's book
thoroughly examines "greenwashing" and its "professionally
organized systems of appearance management" (228). Greenwashing techniques
substitute image management for crisis management, involving the corporate
world's various attempts to present itself as environmentally friendly, while in
fact they are hastening ecological collapse. Corporations like Exxon, Du Pont,
Chevron, and Waste Management are notorious for their "green"
advertisements, but perhaps the most sustained propaganda barrage is the ads
that Mobil Oil regularly place in the New York Times editorial page.
Greenwashing is a multi-billion dollar industry that involves not only images
and PR onslaughts, but also powerful lobbying forces that dominate the political
process, and the use of "junk science" that disseminates
disinformation about environmental problems (as groups like the Cato Institute
try to assure us that the chances for global warming are "ludicrously
small"). Unfortunately, Athanasiou claims, "even crude greenwashing
works surprisingly well" (282), not only in its Orwellian logic that
transforms the rape of the earth into a lovefest, but also in its demonization
of environmental groups and activists as "anti-progress" or even as
"terrorists." Athanasiou sees greenwashing as here to stay, and as a
major obstacle to social and environmental regeneration.
Divided Planet is written on the cusp of a
paradigm shift in social-environmental thinking in relation to which Hammond's
book lags far behind. The book smashes various myths, such as the poor are the
problem, markets or technology alone can save us, more aid will end the crisis
in the South, or that "sustainable development" (vague enough to be
caught in any greenwashing net) is the way forward. Like Hammond, Athanasiou
argues that the various modes of Panglossian optimism that envisage only win-win
scenarios obscure the fact that humanity now faces some tough choices and
problems. After a read of Athanasiou's critique of corporations and mainstream
environmentalism, however, Hammond's vision of a Transformed World looks timid
and implausible. But Athanasiou utterly fails to offer concrete alternatives to
the various capitalist models he assails, and on this point Hammond's visionary
approach is superior, however limited.
At best, Athanasiou has a vague, utopian notion of
a global "New Deal" that involves a massive redistribution of wealth
within nations and across hemispheres. In the end, despite his glimmer of hope
for change, Athanasiou offers a variation on the Fortress World scenario, a
vision of a Tragic World that cannot come to grips with the enormity of its
problems and enact viable solutions:
Our tragedy lies in the
richness of the available alternatives, and in the fact that so few of them are
ever seriously explored. It lies in the rigidity of the war machines, the
legacies of colonialism, the inflexibilities of the industrial tradition, the
solaces of consumerism, the cynicism born of long disappointment, the habits of
power. No wonder, given this, that our age seems not merely tragic, but tragic
in the classical sense, that despite all possibility, we seem trapped in the
that remorseless `working of things' that the Greeks saw as the core of
tragedy" (307).
It is quite possible that the Tragic World is our
future, that homo sapiens may follow the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals into
oblivion, taking other advanced life forms with us. But, as Hammond and others
are trying to rise the third wave, the fourth wave emerges as a hope for more
substantive change, for a social ecology that challenges capitalist logic and
institutions on all fronts, advancing a new alliance politics among, say, social
justice, environmental, animal rights, and health groups.
Immensely informed by recent developments in
history, politics, and social theory, Fotopoulos rides this fourth wave of
thinking past the limitations of both Hammond and Athanasiou, into a Left
libertarian, radical democracy framework. Fotopoulos succeeds where they fail by
offering substantive critiques of global capitalism, detailed empirical analyses
of social and ecological problems (with plenty of alarming statistics of his own
[e.g., see 142 and 158 for data on unequal global income distribution]), and
sketching concrete institutional alternatives to the twin evils of modernity,
the two faces of the same bad coin
― the bureaucratic, growth-oriented,
ecologically-devastating economies of capitalism and "socialism."
Fotopoulos broadly diagnoses the fatal flaws of neoliberalism, socialist
statism, and social democracy to project concrete visions of a revitalized
liberatory project. Fotopoulos picks up where Athanasiou leaves off and paints a
most suggestive picture of an alternative politics and economics that could
provide the beginnings for a stateless, moneyless, marketless society that is
the foundation for an "inclusive democracy." Crucially, Fotopoulos not
only diagnoses the multidimensional crisis of advanced capitalism, he shows
achievable ways out of it.
Beginning with the radical premise that capitalism
is a grow-or-die system antithetical to democracy, human needs, and ecological
sustainability, Fotopoulos provides a valuable overview of the restructuring of
global capitalism. In his genealogy of the modern state and economy, he traces
the capitalist marketization process (that transforms all goods and services
into commodities as it transmogrifies the citizen into the consumer) through
three phases: liberal, statist, and neoliberal. In the classic liberal stage,
the market became separated from society for the first time in history, as
competition within capitalist nations played out with little or no social
control. In the statist stage, which in the U.S. emerged after the depression of
the 1930s, the economy is partially managed by the state as social welfare
institutions are set in place. Finally, in the current neoliberal stage, which
unfolded rapidly since the conservative revolutions in Britain and the U.S. in
the 1980s, marketization processes are universalized and the long-sought goal of
the maximal role of the market and minimal role of the state is attained.
On Fotopoulos's reading, because of the growing
globalization of the market economy and triumph of commodity logic, capitalism
has already passed through its "statist" phase of organization, where
nation states intervened in the market in order to control its crisis tendencies
and fashion a social welfare state designed to secure full employment and
allocate resources to those most in need. Forebodingly, he argues that the
neoliberal stage is not merely "a temporary phenomena," rather it
represents "the political consequence of structural changes in the market
economy system that could lead to the completion of the market -- a historical
process that was merely interrupted by the statist phase" (145).
Marketization processes have knitted capitalist nations into a global system
dominated by acronyms like NAFTA, the European Union (EU), the Association of
South-East Asian nations (ASEAN), the Southern Cone Common Market in Latin
America (MERCOSUS), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nations still have a
role to play in managing their own affairs and protecting society from the
market, Fotopoulos insists, but in a global competition among various economic
blocs, this role is diminishing, as politics, citizenship, and democracy
themselves decline.
The implications of the neoliberal stage of
capitalist marketization are enormous as capitalism defeats its enemies, and
purifies and internationalizes itself. "A neoliberal consensus has swept
over the advanced capitalist world and has replaced the social-democratic
consensus of the early post-war period" (39). Not only have "existing
socialist societies" been negated in the global triumph of capitalism (and
Fotopoulos provides a lengthy and acute analysis of how socialist statism
mirrored its capitalist other and dissolved through its own contradictions), but
also social democratic movements. National governments such as Sweden
increasingly have abandoned government regulation of the economy and attempts to
provide social services, as social democratic parties themselves ignore or
parody the social dimensions of their tradition in favor of neoliberal policies.
If statism is now obsolete, the social democratic project becomes unrealizable.
Indeed, Fotopoulos argues, nations find it difficult to maintain social policies
in the new competitive environment. "[N]o national government today may
follow economic policies that are disapproved by the capital markets, which have
the power to create an intolerable economic pressure on the respective country's
borrowing ability, currency value and investment flows" (42).
Thus, Fotopoulos diagnoses troubled conditions
where both bureaucratic socialist countries and social democracies have failed
to overturn capitalism or to reform it in any enduring and substantive way.
Fotopoulos shows how Marx himself fetishized growth, industrialism, and science
and technology (which when fully developed would almost automatically bring
human liberation), and how Marxists and dependency theorists alike fail to
challenge the socially and ecologically destructive logic of a growth-oriented
economy. These consequences become staggeringly clear when Fotopoulos takes the
reader on a tour of Southern nations (110-139), where the juggernaut of
capitalist development leaves in its wake poverty, hunger, disease,
overpopulation, environmental degradation, and a growing economic gap with the
North as the main export of overdevelopment is underdevelopment.
Either the vision of a radical democracy must die,
and we acquiesce to something like Fukyama's notion of the "end of
history" (i.e., the triumph of capitalism at the endgame of human moral and
political evolution), or we radically reconstruct the project of democracy.
Fotopoulos takes the latter path. But given the power of liberal and neoliberal
ideologies, much debris has to be cleared out of the way, and Fotopoulos
powerfully diagnoses problems with communitarianism, deep ecology,
postmodernism, Greens (like Athanasiou), and "appropriate development"
and "sustainable development" approaches. In each case, he finds these
approaches both "ahistorical and utopian": ahistorical in that they
fail to recognize the enormity of the neoliberal restructuration of capital (and
typically replicate its individualist and market-based ideologies); utopian
because they ignore the grow-or-die logic of the market economy, the
universalization of this process, and the irreversibility of the poststatist
phase of capitalist reconstruction which nullifies any attempt to return to
social democracy policies for state protection of labor, various social groups,
and the environment.
Drawing inspiration from classical Greece, major
social movements for change in the modern world, Bookchin, Castoriadis, and
radical Green, libertarian, and feminist traditions, Fotopoulos projects a new
liberation project in the form of an "inclusive democracy." On the
hypothesis (argued throughout the entire first part of the book) that inequality
and hierarchy are the sources of crises in culture, politics, economics, and
ecology, Fotopoulos seeks the abolition of the unequal distribution of political
and economic power, as well as the elimination of all hierarchical relations in
society. It is imperative to emphasize that this is no mere utopian
"vision"; rather, Fotopoulos shows, the new democracy is necessary,
given the multidimensional nature of the crisis which stems from the
concentration of economic power that inevitably results from a market economy
and attendent "representative democracy," and it is possible, as he
demonstrates institutional preconditions that can be constructed to abolish
concentrated systems of power. Only in local, decentralized, self-governing,
interconnected communities can individuals realize the necessary and sufficient
conditions of democracy (which Fotopoulos notes never have been realized
historically), since only on a local scale can people participate meaningfully
in society as citizens and attain "demotic" (or, community) ownership
of productive resources and their confederal allocation. The new society, sprung
from the political and cultural organization for a new economy, begins with the
transformation of city governments into inclusive democracies and their linkage
into confederations.
Since political democracy requires economic
democracy (or money creates hierarchies and controls votes), the new liberation
project must be rooted in economic democracy. Key to Fotopoulos's vision is the
assertion that "the objective of a new liberatory project should not merely
be the abolition of capitalist property relations but that of the market economy
itself" (6). Thus, Fotopoulos rejects attempts to reconcile capitalism and
socialism by creating a "mixed economy" or a market consciously and
democratically governed; for Fotopoulos, a "socialist market" is an
oxymoron, since markets are growth mechanisms and commodity logic breeds
uncontrollably. Seeking to meet basic human aims and secure freedom of choice,
and to synthesize collective and individual decision making, Fotopoulos roots
his vision of a decommodified economy in a voucher system designed to meet both
essential and non-essential needs (257-262). There would be a social allocation
of work, along with rotating functions (262-6). By placing heavy emphasis on
freedom of choice and localized institutions, this theory differs significantly
from socialist views of "economic democracy" that fail to minimize the
dangers of a new bureaucratic system of planning emerging, as well as Bookchin's
notion of a "post-scarcity" anarchism, which Fotopoulos criticizes for
lacking specifics on alternative economics and how to allocate resources in the
new society, talking instead in vague terms about a different "moral
economy." Breaking with Marx and Bookchin alike, Fotopoulos advances a
provocative argument that freedom and autonomy do not require any material
preconditions, and he argues that the notion of "objective conditions"
of freedom (laid down through advanced science and technology) entail an
ecological burden the earth cannot bear (see 198-9), as it also obscures the
vital role of freedom of choice in radical democracy. Whereas emphasis on
confederalism is common among social anarchists and left libertarians, what
distinguishes Fotopoulos' analysis is his concrete emphasis on producing and
exchanging goods in a nonmarket economy and allocating scare resources in a way
that reconciles the social and individual dimensions of community life.
Throughout the book, Fotopoulos states his main
point forcefully: "all the proposed strategies for political and economic
change and the transitional projects involved are useless unless they are part
of a comprehensive programme for social transformation that explicitly aims at
replacing the market economy and statist democracy by an inclusive
democracy" (275). Acutely aware of the difficulties of revolutionizing
global capitalism along the lines of inclusive democracy, Fotopoulos
nevertheless feels a revolutionary project is "realistic" to the
extent local economic and political bases of inclusive democracy can take root,
interconnect, and nourish new cultures and subjectivities and win over a
majority of the population, such that "an alternative social paradigm will
have become hegemonic and the break in the socialization process ... will have
occurred" (285). As for the ever-present threat of violence, Fotopoulos
claims it will be a real threat only when it is too late, already after new
institutions and sensibilities securely are in place. Debates over whether such
views are "utopian" or not seem academic in comparison to the real
task of beginning to implement practical means to achieve a viable inclusive
democracy in as many local bases as possible.
Fotopoulos's vision, then, is creating and
securing a counterhegemonic inclusive democratic culture, stage-by-stage, until
a new global economic, political, and cultural order is achieved. Perhaps the
most valuable aspect of the book is the resolute, militant, holistic insistence
on the need to negate hierarchies and power structures in order to
comprehensively rebuild society from below: "Town by town, city by city,
region by region will be taken away from the effective control of the market
economy and the nation-state, their political and economic structures being
replaced by the confederations of democratically run communities" (285).
Of the three books reviewed here, Fotopoulos'
alone offers the kind of radical insights to be truly visionary, to be utopian
in the best sense of the term which means to identify existing potentialities
for systemic change (thereby not being the u-topos of a nonsociety that cannot
possibly exist, but rather the eu-topos of a good society existing in potentia).
Toward an Inclusive Democracy is a richly researched, clearly written,
well-argued, historically-grounded thesis that humankind must find a way beyond
the Charybdis of an internationalized capitalism and the Scylla of socialist
statism. There is a third way, one most promising yet insufficiently explored in
historical struggles, predicated on building a federation of inclusively
democratic political and economic institutions at local levels. Whatever choices
human beings make, they are not capricious; steering clear of the false dilemma
of objectivism and relativism, Fotopoulos brings into play some elaborate
philosophical machinery (Chapter 8) to demonstrate that while human choices
cannot be justified or "proved" through appeal to Divine or historical
"laws," neither are they arbitrary or of equal value. Laying claim to
freedom as the highest human value, the task becomes to justify it as such, work
through its implications (such as lead to inclusive democracy), and find and
struggle for the institutional mechanisms best able to realize it.
Hopefully, the fourth wave of social and
ecological struggle that is emerging will rock this world, but we still need the
vision, maps, and compasses of a new world, one that begins by saying "ya
basta!" to statist socialism, moribund social democracy, individualist
"lifestyle" strategies that fail to build an alternative power base,
and the tired, oxymoronic illusion of a "green capitalism." We need
visions of and struggles for a Postcapitalist Green World that rebuilds
political and economic institutions for participatory democracy, as it
harmonizes social and natural evolution. All three books contribute to this
project, and, read together, they delineate urgent crises and roads that lie
ahead.