Redefining progress

Economic globalisation has resulted in many opposing the concept of a free economy. The fundamental issue posed by such protests is the pain inflicted on people in the name of development. RAJNIBAKSHI writes on the growing recognition of economists and lay people that human welfare, and not profits, should be the ultimate aim of progress.

"ECONOMICS as if people mattered" is the purpose of a movement that is suddenly making international headlines. This is the inspiration for thousands of protesters who recently blocked the streets outside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C., to "Spank the Bank". Four months earlier even larger groups of similar protesters succeeded in disrupting the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation at Seattle, U.S..

Here are people, says the international media, who are resisting the inevitable and "natural" forces of economic globalisation. Most published photos of the protests show scruffy looking long- haired youth who look like the Hippies of the Sixties. The protesters are presented as, at best, romantic dreamers more concerned with the preservation of turtles and dolphins than the progress of mankind. At worst, the protesters are accused of promoting narrow parochial interests.

This distorted picture is due to a virtual blockade by the mass- media, of the fundamental issues being posed by these protests. The street actions are a signal of the ideological battles which will dominate the first decade of the new century. The "free" market mindset of Wall Street is now being challenged by those who simultaneously reject Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

This is only partly an intellectual exercise. The real pressure for this movement is rising from the ground up. It is rooted in the pain inflicted on millions of people by both the State and the "market" in the name of development and progress. This was clearly illustrated at a Public Hearing organised recently in Mumbai, by activist groups from all over Maharashtra. The Hearing brought together hundreds of people, most of them Adivasis, who are losing their lands and livelihood because of various development projects.

The basic question of these villagers is: why are development projects "for the larger common good" so destructive for them? Are we not part of those included in "common good"? Why is it that subsidies for the poor are being abolished but the government offers many hidden subsidies to the large corporations which undertake such projects?

This violation of basic human rights has been widely documented over the last decade. Today the Indian middle class is more aware about these issues than ever before. But the impression persists that this human toll is an unavoidable "price for progress". It is not widely known that these struggles in village India and on the streets of Washington D.C., tie up with over three decades of intellectual work to re-invent and redefine economics. "Economics as if people mattered" is the crux of these efforts. This term was coined over 25 years ago by the British economist E. F. Schumacher. It was also the sub-heading of his famous book Small Is Beautiful, published in 1973. Schumacher was among the earliest people to point out fundamental flaws in modern economics.

By the late Eighties these problems were being recognised by mainstream economists, such as Mahbub ul Haq, who was then a senior advisor to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). "After many decades of development we are rediscovering the obvious truth that people are both the means and the end of economic development" Haq wrote. This simple truth, he added, tends to get obscured because "we are used to talking in abstractions, in aggregates, in numbers. In the process human beings are conveniently forgotten," Haq admitted.

Over the last decade many more economists have begun stating the obvious - that human welfare is the ultimate end of development, not Gross National Products (GNP) figures. This means recognising that increased productivity is not development. We need to ask "increased productivity of whom and for whom?"

Over the last three decades a wide range of academics and activists all over the world have been engaged in working out just how equitable and sustainable structures of production can be created. Many of them are inspired by the Buddhist concept of Right Livelihood, which means meeting your material needs by means which respect the needs of other human beings and other life forms. The practical work of many alternative groups all over the world shows that this is not some pure, dream-world, ideal. But it is true that this vision is unattainable in the existing global economic order.

One of the greatest obstacles for this vision is the international "market" in which stocks, bonds and currencies are traded every minute. This market, which has been called the Global Casino, is a "structural element blocking the aspirations for real and sustainable development of most of the countries of the South" says Hazel Henderson, author of The Politics Of The Solar Age: Alternatives To Economics.

The unsustainability and inequity of this model of global market is self-evident. And the alarm bells are not being rung by radical activists alone. George Soros, the billionaire and famous money manager, has warned that global capitalism is inherently unstable and thus endangered. Soros has berated "market fundamentalism" because it disregards altruism and cooperation and justifies notions like "survival of the fittest".

The consequence is that out of the world's six billion people, about 800 million go hungry every day. Even the World Bank acknowledges that this number of the absolute poor is expected to soar. This is because the present global economy is most efficient at transferring wealth from the many to the few, argues David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule The World. The answer, plead a wide range of humanist activists, is to once again reaffirm that "Life is about living, not consuming."

This means challenging some of the basic negative assumptions on which both capitalist and socialist economics are based. In the book Future Wealth: A New Economics For The 21st Century, James Robertson has listed these as follows:

* Humans are selfish individuals bent on maximising their own satisfaction;

* Satisfaction comes from consuming;

* People's needs are expressed in terms of what they are prepared to pay for and how much;

* People are driven to maximise the monetary value of what they can get from economic activities.

* Twenty-first century economics, Robertson suggests, "must recognise that, because human beings are moral beings, the basic questions about economic life are moral questions." Such an economics would be a system of rights and obligations, risks and rewards which:

* Channels people's selfishness into the common good;

* Prevents people's selfishness from damaging other people's interests and especially the selfishness of the powerful from exploiting the weak;

* Energises the altruistic desires and capacities of people to help one another as well as themselves and to contribute to creating a better society and better world.

"This new approach will involve recognising (that) people are not impersonal automatons, governed by the impersonal dictates of market or state . . . Since people have a capacity for moral responsibility and choice, they often act altruistically instead of mechanically following the demands of the market or the state" writes Robertson.

"Our common task is to replace the laissez faire model with some kind of new economics that takes care of everybody, the poor as well as the rich. Local people have to regain control of local resources and gear local economic systems to meeting local needs rather than the needs of the international market," argues Martin Khor of the Third World Network, a major Asian non-governmental organisation.

Thus the growing demand for a very different kind of international trade regime, perhaps a General Agreement on Sustainable Trade. Healthy trade rules would permit import restrictions on goods produced in environmentally damaging circumstances. They would also include social clauses to protect basic workers' rights and address the most exploitative forms of child labour. In its present form the WTO does just the opposite.

The opposition to the mindset which dominates world trade, through the WTO, has been building its case slowly for over two decades. The Other Economic Summit (TOES), an international forum for alternative economic ideas and practices, has been active since 1984. The Right Livelihood Foundation in Sweden makes news every year for its "alternative Nobel prize" which is given to groups or individuals working out social, economic and technological means to ensure a more just and humane form of development.

Much of this work is often criticised for not having concrete, ready-to-apply, solutions. But the undogmatic exploration of creative possibilities is actually the greatest strength of global alternatives "community". "The laboratory for the future is out there in thousands of 'experiments'" says Trent Schroyer, the Program Coordinator of TOES and editor of the book A World That Works. "Our focus is the innovative learning that is done by people and people's organisations. We want to bring together the mosaic of successful alternatives that forms the basis for working alternatives to economic globalisation."

This struggle for alternatives is not limited to the Adivasis and marginal farmers of countries like India. Even in the U.S. there is a flowering of community fights to shape their own economic destiny. This is why thousands of Americans are out on the streets condemning not only the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, but their own government.

It is not clear if, and when, this public pressure will make a dent in the power structures within the U.S.. For "the culture of international economic policy in the world's most powerful democracy (U.S.). is not democratic" according to Joseph Stiglitz, who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. Stiglitz has written a scary account, in the April issue of New Republic magazine, showing how the IMF persists with policies which create more poverty and economic instability. It is time, Stiglitz urges, for those in power to pay attention to the demonstrators on the streets.

"If the people we entrust to run the global economy, in the IMF and in the Treasury Department, don't begin a dialogue and take their (protests) criticism to heart, things will continue to go very, very wrong. I've seen it happen."

The process of forging a different kind of globalisation is well under way. The protesters on the street are only a small part of an intricate mosaic of resistance.

This quest to forge a more creative model of development depends also on people, within the establishment, who have the courage to openly dissent.

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