The G20, by contrast, arrived suddenly, and in the midst of a recession. It produced more confused head scratching than bold political strategies. With the world’s attention soon to be focused upon London, those seeking to steal the limelight with opposition and alternatives were scrambling to prepare.

Political meetings in the early months of this year – from liberal NGOs to anarchist forums and everything in between – were filled with a sense of panic, but also expectation. Would this be the turning point, the mass outpouring of popular discontent over the government’s handling of the recession? From this expectation emerged the Put People First coalition. It draws together a dazzling array of organisations. Usual suspects like War on Want, Greenpeace and the Jubilee Debt Campaign work alongside smaller groups ranging from Sudanese Women for Peace to Performers Without Borders. There are even several Christian groups – whoever expected to see the Salvation Army marching unto class war? This is all knitted together with the combined might of the Trade Union Congress’s six million members.

The coalition’s 28 March demonstration created much excitement. Organisers speculated that the turnout would be the highest of any demonstration since the peak of the anti-war movement in 2003.

Titled ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’, the march aimed for the broadest possible appeal. Coach-loads of protesters from across the country converged on the capital. But in the end, it felt somewhat muted. With an estimated 35,000 out on the streets, it wasn’t even the biggest demonstration this year – the Gaza protests in January were far larger.

Solidarity – but not quite unity

There was certainly a diversity of attendees, but it seemed most had simply brought their own particular issue along. Anti-war activists had come about the war, environmentalists about climate change, trade unionists about jobs. There was a clear sense of solidarity, but not quite unity. What for instance, of the dispute between environmentalists and the Unite union over the third runway at Heathrow?

Possible tensions were smoothed over by the ambiguity of the demonstration’s purpose. Although an accompanying policy document compensated somewhat, policy documents don’t get feet on the street – the core message matters. Instead of bold, concrete demands such as for the public ownership of major banks, a bailout for the unemployed or a proper green stimulus package, Put People First offered only vague principles. Perhaps many stayed away confused or uninspired?

The TUC’s head of international relations, Owen Tudor, is more optimistic in his assessment. ‘Dealing with such broad issues can be difficult,’ he says, citing disagreements over priorities between climate activists and trade unionists as a key sticking point. The key question in retrospect, he asserts, is: ‘Were these three areas, “Jobs, Justice and Climate”, tacked together, or are they integrally bound up? The more radical outcomes of this alliance will depend on how far we see these things as integrated. People are now coming to a conclusion that they are.’

If it manages to stick together – Copenhagen will likely be make or break time – Put People First could create the grounds for a more forceful expression of progressive forces in society. It’s certainly unfair to judge an organisation too harshly on its first outing.

Nik Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, says: ‘We were actually pleased with numbers on the day, but even more pleased with some of the meetings that had gone on beforehand. We got trade unionists sitting down with development activists, and climate activists, discussing not just a Make Poverty History type agenda, but something central to all our interests. The structure of the world economy is affecting poverty in Zambia, but also people losing their jobs in this country. We need to bring that whole agenda together to tackle it.’

Those at the top of the participating organisations seem enthused, but is this shared throughout the ranks?

Derek Clarke of Tameside NUT feels Put People First’s ability to mobilise more people depends on orientating itself towards the grassroots. ‘It needs to start focusing on local campaigns and how to link them up, as opposed to just national campaigns and national demonstrations. We need to get people talking about it in the pubs and clubs and the only way you’ll do that is to energise local groups.’ Gary Hassell, of Brighton RMT, shares the sentiment. ‘One demo like this won’t be enough – we’ve got to take it back to the regions, back to the workplaces, and we’ve got to start making political demands. Hopefully this protest today will act as a catalyst.’

Similar hopes were attached to the more confrontational Financial Fools Day protests on 1 April. Two loosely anarchist-orientated groups, the Camp for Climate Action and the hastily assembled G20 Meltdown, planned to bring the financial district to a standstill for the day and spark off the feted ‘summer of rage’. A hungry media latched on. The Climate Camp and its slick PR machine took an unfamiliar place in the shadows for the week as ‘good protesters’, and attention focused on the more colourful characters of G20 Meltdown and their talk of insurrection.

As with Put People First, the hype didn’t quite match reality. But the difference was the electric atmosphere on the streets – a heady mixture of carnival and passionate dissent in the blazing sunshine at the Bank of England and Bishopsgate. It reflected the heritage of the protests (often physically embodied in the organising groups) in the 1990s Reclaim the Streets, anti-road and alter-globalisation movements. A friend who had seen the best of those years drew a good comparison: ‘The sound systems are smaller, the music’s not as good and people are taking less drugs. But people have a better idea of what they’re here for, there’s more politics. Maybe it’s better overall!’

What about the politics?

Like Put People First, G20 Meltdown tried to include everyone. Four marches, led by the red horse of war, the black horse of borders, the silver horse of financial crisis, and the green horse of climate chaos, converged on the Bank of England.

The crowd was wonderfully eclectic, but like Put People First there was a sense of confusion over what was being demanded. Climate Camp attempted to use the occasion to draw attention to the issue of carbon trading, drawing analogies between the reckless management of the economy and the handling of climate change. It seemed self-consciously aimed toward a distinct kind of protester – as style mag Grazia (don’t ask) put it, ‘smartly dressed … young professionals, many of whom have never demonstrated before.’ The organic food stalls set up in the middle of Bishopsgate under the slogan ‘farmers market, not carbon market’ seemed particularly apt.

The common thread uniting the week’s protests was the scapegoating of finance capital. Laying into greedy ‘bwankers’ is hard to resist given recent events, and even harder so when said creatures lean from their offices and wave banknotes at you (it really happened).

But it was a shame to see so much replication of mainstream views of the crisis being caused by recent financial mismanagement, rather than deeper, structural problems in the world economy. If things continue like this, it will be all too easy for mainstream parties to co-opt the anger into petty banking reforms.

In the short term, the broad public discussion on policing is the most tangible political result of the protests. Police behaviour at the protests was nothing new, but the subsequent media interest in it is. Much energy from campaigners has gone into making the most out of the furore – a more timid, better behaved police force will be welcome if protests are to grow.

The G20 demonstrations were always going to be, at best, a starting point. But even when big street mobilisations lack coherence, they can inspire participants and distant spectators alike.

As the dust settled in the financial district, workers quietly went into occupation in Enfield. Many protesters went straight to join them. Parents outraged by privatisation took over their school in Glasgow. This is where real pressure will come from. Maybe this really was just the beginning?

I spent a couple of hours on Cornhill Street after that. It is one of the main streets leading to the Bank of England, and had a lot going on. After an hour or so of rubbernecking to see the protesters on the other side of the police lines, the crowd on the outer side of the police line got bolshier and more aggressive, as did the police. Both seemed to be egging each other on a bit. Channel 4 and the BBC were both there at the time, so the troublemakers in the crowd (both protesters and police) may have been playing to the cameras.

Anyway, for whatever reason, a couple of police thought it would be a wonderful idea to arrest someone and drag him through the crowd. This happened around 7:15pm and was not a very bright thing to do.

In response to this, three dozen or so people chased the police with the protester up the street. Debris was thrown at the cops, various names and epithets were uttered, and the police had to get their backs to the wall and wait for some of their colleagues to rush up with their batons a-batting people left, right and centre in order to clear a bit of space and leave.

Shortly after that, just off a side road from Cornhill Street, came the police with their German Shepherd dogs without muzzles. I went to check on this because I thought I saw someone get chomped by one of the dogs. Getting closer didn’t make for much fun, however, because things were in full psycho mode by that time. The police were moving fast and got either side of me, and when I moved after a cop told me to move, another one was behind me, baton at the ready and German Shepherd barely under control on his leash. Since I had just seen a cop let his dog loose by accident, and only just get the dog under control before it was too late, I was not a happy camper.

I said, ‘Which way should I go? Your buddy just told me to go this way?’ He yelled at me to move, two or three times, and threatened me with his baton and his dog and said he would ‘take me in’. Since we hadn’t even been introduced, and I didn’t fancy a nip of that sort, I left his, ahem, embrace and buggered off 30 yards or so.

A few minutes later, one of the protesters, a man in his 20s or 30s, collapsed on the pavement. The guy was totally out of it when I went to take a look at him. Protesters informed the police, and then allowed the police to carry the man back to their lines using what looked like a tarpaulin to carry him away. Twenty minutes or so later, after the police had used their dogs and more riot cops to clear Cornhill Street back up to Bishopsgate, two ambulances came up Grace Church Street and were let down Cornhill by the protesters and police to attend to the injured. I have since been able to confirm that the person who died was the one I saw.

Ten minutes or so after that, three police vans came up Grace Church Street, which runs directly into Bishopsgate. Various protesters/rioters threw bottles and debris at them. A very solid hit on the side window of one of the vans by some masonry led to the police hightailing it back the other way.

After a bit of time in that area, I noticed that some city workers who had gotten well pissed, and were looking for a fight, were all holding empty beer bottles behind them so that people could not see them. After seeing these guys trying to pick fights with some of the protesters, I did my civic duty and told a police officer about them. It seemed like the right thing to do since they (the police) were wasting their time trying to protect a store that no-one was bothering. Said city boys, all suited and booted and looking as if they were rugby players, were made to drop their bottles and escorted out of the area.

Following a notice about the Climate Camp being charged by the police, I headed back to where I had started. Over the next couple of hours I witnessed a generally well behaved crowd on either side of the now rock-solid police lines. The odd yahoo on my side of the barrier, sure, plenty of alcohol was openly being consumed, but there was no reason why the police had to be so heavy handed with the Climate Camp. The camp was full of fluffies, not so-called Anarchists.

For my swan song of the night, I had my ‘friends’ the police dogs back in the frame. I stayed well clear of the buggers this time. Once they were out of their pens in the back of the police vans they had been brought in, it took the police about 45 minutes to push the crowd on the outer side of the penned-in Climate Camp back up Bishopsgate towards and then past Liverpool Street station. From what I was told, the Climate Camp people were slowly being let out around the same time, allegedly being ID’d under the terrorism laws. I can’t confirm that yet, but the police have misused the terrorism laws in the UK on dozens of occasions, and have been reprimanded by judges for doing that, so what’s one more time, eh?

In fact, the carbon market approach that is intended to encourage polluters to change their ways is more likely to throw them a lifeline in the short term, and contribute to a further financial collapse in the longer term. No wonder, then, that the European Climate Exchange in the City of London is the target for the next Camp for Climate Action on 1 April.

‘We’re in the midst of an economic crisis based on wild speculation and blind faith in the market,’ says Climate Camp activist Matt Megerry. ‘If we want a viable future for everyone on this planet, we can’t let City traders be the guardians of our climate system.’

The carbon crash

Climate change is ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, lead author of the British government’s influential review, The Economics of Climate Change. Carbon markets are supposed to address that failure. The idea is that governments give out a limited number of permits to pollute; the scarcity of such permits should encourage their price to rise; and the resulting additional cost to industry and power producers should then encourage them to pollute less.

It is a neat-sounding theory, but the practice is considerably messier. In the first phase of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS), which is the world’s largest carbon market, the ‘cap’ on emissions was set so high – as a result of industry lobbying – that it failed to cap anything. Prices collapsed, and no pollution was reduced.

In the second phase of the scheme, which began in 2008, prices rose to around EUR30 per ‘ton of CO2 equivalent’ emissions, but have since crashed to around one-third of that level. The explanation is relatively simple. Allocations were made on the assumption that European economies would keep growing, but the recession has reduced output and power consumption, leaving companies with a surplus of permits. Since these were mainly given out for free, the net effect is directly opposite to the scheme’s intention: polluting industries are offered a lifeline by cashing in their unwanted permits, while the ‘price signal’ that is meant to change their polluting ways is rendered largely meaningless.

Repackaging pollution

The failure of carbon markets at a time of general economic turmoil is perhaps unsurprising – a market-based corrective to market failure is hardly likely to go against the grain of current trends. But the failings of carbon trading run deeper, and bear a disturbing resemblance to the conditions that triggered the financial crisis in the first place.

The ‘carbon’ that is traded is in fact a euphemism for a range of greenhouse gases produced in very different ways. The uncertainties involved in comparing these processes are overlooked in order to ensure that a single commodity can be constructed and exchanged.

It doesn’t take a climate scientist to see that burning more coal and oil is not eliminated by building more hydro-electric dams or capturing the methane in coal mines. Funding the latter to ‘cancel out’ the former can end up subsidising the very industries that need to change if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

As the market matures, even this set of equivalences becomes harder to measure. The EU ETS is now witnessing the development of more complex carbon market products, which package together credits from several installations, then slice these up and resell them. In essence, this is the same structure that brought the derivatives market to its knees, and the same problem: carbon markets involve the selling of a product that has no clear underlying asset – fertile conditions for the creation of a new ‘bubble’. Not only do traders not know what they are selling, but it becomes increasingly meaningless to talk about ‘emissions reductions’ in this context, since what is reduced on paper is so far removed from any process of any measurable change in industrial practice or energy production.

Sub-prime carbon

The integrity of the EU ETS has been further watered down by allowing ‘offset’ credits from the UN’s clean development mechanism (CDM) to be traded within it, contradicting its basic purpose. The ETS, as a ‘cap and trade’ scheme, is meant to limit the availability of pollution permits, while the offsets approach is a licence to print new ones. One system applies a cap and the other lifts it.

Carbon offsets from the CDM are issued for projects in the global South that would ‘not otherwise have happened’ – rewarding companies and consultancies for turning stories of an unknowable future into bankable carbon credits. They are treated as directly equivalent to actual reductions, even though a recent survey by the NGO International Rivers found that 76 per cent of CDM projects were already completed by the time they were approved as eligible to sell credits – and they therefore were clearly not ‘additional’. Such failings can in themselves contribute to market failures, as Marc Stuart of EcoSecurities, a leading offset project developer, admitted last year: ‘In many ways it’s akin to sub-prime … You keep layering on crap until you say, “We can’t do this anymore.”‘

Ultimately, the whole approach distracts from effective solutions – trapping us within a framework that sees the climate problem in primarily financial terms, restricting our horizons to ‘emissions reductions’ while sidestepping the key questions of how and when these are made. As Larry Lohmann of the Corner House research and advocacy group explains, carbon trading ‘disembeds the climate problem from the challenge of initiating a new historical pathway to overcome current dependence on fossil fuels, which are by far the major contributor to human-caused climate change’.

A Green New Deal

So what should we do instead? In the face of failing carbon markets, talk of a Green New Deal (modelled on President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ package for reviving the US economy in the 1930s) might seem to offer a welcome alternative. Advocates of such schemes, such as the New Economics Foundation, suggest that massive investment in renewable energy projects could stimulate renewed economic growth as well as providing thousands of new ‘green collar’ jobs. But most actual stimulus packages so far have not followed this model.

The car industry bailout, which in the UK alone could be worth up to £2.3 billion in loans, is one obvious case in point. Around £1 billion of this will come in the form of soft loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB) – expenditure that was earmarked for ‘lower carbon initiatives’. At present, it remains unclear whether this means any more than simply obeying new EU laws on fuel efficiency – which were anyway significantly watered down as a result of a long lobbying campaign by the car industry.

The EIB, which is Europe’s main vehicle for such bailouts, is also ‘alone among international financial institutions in having no binding operational standards, nor an independent accountability mechanism for affected people,’ says Greig Aitken of CEE Bankwatch. In fact, the EIB lacks any clear environmental or social safeguards, and it bankrolled fossil fuel extraction across the globe to the tune of EUR3 billion in 2007 alone.

Elsewhere, the United Nations Environment Programme has announced what it calls a ‘Global Green New Deal’. This recommends, among other things, investment in biofuels and the channelling of money through the World Bank’s controversial clean investment funds, whose remit includes subsidising new coal plants and large-scale hydroelectric dams.

Such schemes might seem a long way from the good intentions of the more progressive Green New Deal advocates, but they do flag up some of the problems of advocating for massive public investment in a context of unaccountable global financial institutions. Even where ‘state’ expenditure is envisaged it is often channelled through these unaccountable bodies, and accompanied by requirements to partner with the private sector.

There is a further question, too, about how and which ‘green’ technologies are being promoted. Public funding for research on new energy technologies remains lower in real terms than in the 1970s, while public research agendas are today set by corporate ‘stakeholders’ whose leading concern – as witnessed in the case of biofuels and ‘carbon capture and storage’ – is to create mildly greener versions of their same basic business-as-usual approaches.

To wrest control of such processes and put them to more genuinely progressive ends ultimately requires them to be embedded in a political response. Unless we understand and reproduce ‘the real social force relations that gave rise to the original New Deal’, including social movement militancy, it is likely that such proposals will be reduced to ‘little green fig leaves’, says Tadzio Müller, author of a forthcoming Rosa Luxemburg Foundation report on green capitalism. Even then, he concludes, ‘None of the proposals for a Green New Deal … has shown convincingly that it is at all possible to delink global economic growth from massive continued greenhouse gas emissions.’

The Climate Camp Against Carbon Trading takes place on 1 April at the European Climate Exchange in the City of London

Because the system of carbon trading they oversee will be the billion dollar elephant in the room at international climate talks later this year in Copenhagen. We’re in the middle of an economic crisis based on wild speculation and blind faith in the market. With the recent crash in the price of carbon price within the European Trading Scheme, the flaws inherent in this elaborate system of offsets have never been more exposed. If we want a viable future for everyone on this planet, we can’t let city traders be the guardians of our climate system. In short: Carbon trading doesn’t work.

What kind of actions will take place on 1 April? How do people get involved?

There’ll be sorts of stuff going on: from debates on the alternatives and workshops on the finer points of the trading system. There might even be a bit of creative naughtiness and perhaps some direct action. People just need to show up in London on 1 April and get stuck in to whatever takes their fancy. Delicious vegan food for a small optional donation will be provided. Bring sleeping bags and tents if you have them – we’re having a climate camp in the City!

The Daily Mail expects a riot – how do you respond to that kind of scaremongering?

The Daily Mail expects all sort of things. We’ve learned not to take too much notice. For me, one of the most inspiring moments of last year’s camp was the sense of calm focus and togetherness that everyone showed in the face of outrageous police aggression. At the top gate, repeated police incursions were met with successive waves of climate campers peacefully resisting; sitting down, singing songs and telling stories, and demonstrating the power of collective action. We’ll stand up for what we believe in, but we’re not the mob the Daily Mail wants us to be.

What do you hope will be the outcome of 1 April action in the City?

I think it would be great if loads of new people turn up and imagine something different for the future. Hopefully that sentiment will travel far and wide, along with the message that world leaders have got their response to climate change very wrong indeed.

Why carbon trading? How does this relate to the previous climate camp actions at Drax, Heathrow and Kingsnorth?

Every time we’ve set up camp outside a major emitter, some big business or government spokesperson has always popped up and said ‘Don’t worry! Carbon trading will sort it out!’ It’s widely accepted that the richer, carbon-heavy nations should be the ones to make drastic cuts in emissions. But plans for new runways and coal-fired power stations will make it impossible for countries in the north to do their fair share. NASA’s Jim Hansen is now suggesting that we may be perilously close to the danger zone in terms of greenhouse gas concentrations. So we need to cut emissions and help with climate friendly measures in other parts of the world. It’s not a choice: we have to do both.

Is this a one-off action, or part of a longer campaign focusing on carbon trading? Is this part of a build up to (or related to) other actions in the run up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December? If so, what will those be?

It’s part of a longer campaign focusing on the current economic system and how it’s got us into this mess. Carbon trading is just one part of that. Our summer camp will explore the economic crisis (and the system that caused it) and how it relates to climate change and other social justice issues. Carbon trading and free market dogma have dominated UN negotiations in recent years, so yes, we’ll be taking action around the time of the Copenhagen Summit as well.

What form will these events and actions take?

As yet, those questions are largely unresolved. But anyone can turn up to one of our monthly national gatherings to answer them! See www.climatecamp.org.ukfor details.

What has the G20 got to do with climate change discussion and carbon trading?

The G20 focuses on efforts to kick-starting the economy, on getting people spending again and things like bailouts for the automotive industries. These are not futureproof plans. This is precisely the time we could be concentrating on creating jobs that will help stop the climate crisis. The G20 governments have been particularly blinkered by the neo-liberal discourse around false free market solutions to climate change. Their agenda is one of a future for business as usual. So we’re camping on April Fools’ Day, to show that that future is bleak.

Is the financial crisis good for the climate?

In terms of changes to investments and output, to various climate friendly and not so climate friendly projects, its a bit of a mixed bag. But that’s not really the point. The financial crisis could be an opportunity for renewal. For making the changes we need to tackle climate change and finally bringing some sense of equity to the world. But we can’t just hope for change and we shouldn’t rejoice in something that’s bringing ever more suffering to millions in the here and now. For the crisis to really be good for the climate, we need to use it to expose the inherent contradictions in the financial system and empower people to imagine something new. The crisis certainly exposes the insanities of carbon trading to a whole new level.

Is this a re-run of older summit protests (like the J18 Carnival Against Capital in the City in 1999). What lessons have been learnt from the successes and failures of other counter-summit protests?

People who went to, and helped organise, the J18 Carnival will probably be involved again. And the way we’re organising the 1 April day definitely draws upon the same model of open, consensus based meetings. Indeed, the idea for Climate Camp came out of the ‘eco-village’ that was set up at the G8 in Scotland a few years back. But I think after three summer camps, the Climate Camp has taken on an identity all of it’s own. Absolutely lessons have been learnt, but the camp in the City will be something new: expect pop-up tents on tarmac, workshops in bus stops and actions in the avenues of power!

Where to go/what to do …
Gather at noon, 1 April, at the European Climate Exchange, Hasilwood House, 62 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AW. Bring a pop-up tent if you’ve got one, sleeping bag, wind turbine, mobile cinema, action plans and ideas … let’s imagine another world.

Matt Megarry was a participant in the Camps for Climate Action in the summers of 2007 and 2008, at Heathrow Airport and Kingsnorth coal-fired power station.

However, in the face of a series of summits of critical importance to the future direction of global politics, this year activist networks across the world are coming together once again. And the old debates surrounding the efficacy of summit mobilisation are back too.

‘Summit season’ begins on 2 April, when Barack Obama will make his first presidential trip to Europe to attend the G20 summit in London. Delegates from the most powerful nations in the world are coming to discuss how to give capitalism the kiss of life.

While those inside focus on financial reform, the protesters on the streets outside the summit will march under the banner of ‘Put People First: Jobs, Justice and Climate’. Others are seeking to intervene more directly. The Camp for Climate Action plans to pitch tents in London’s financial district on 1 April to highlight the role of the ‘fossil and financial fools’ in causing both climate change and the economic crisis.

Many of the G20 delegates will jet off to mainland Europe the day the summit ends – and the protests will follow them. This time leaders will be meeting for a Nato conference held jointly in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden. As well as discussing escalating the war in Afghanistan, delegates will also be celebrating Nato’s 60th birthday. A large demonstration is being organised by unions, NGOs and the anti-war movement (including the Stop the War Coalition and CND), and decentralised direct action will be staged to impede the summit.

The momentum will continue into the summer. The G8, the focus of dramatic past counter-mobilisations, will be hosted in Italy, on the remote island of Lampedusa. Although Italian activists are principally organising around education and anti-racism issues at present, a coming together of southern Europe’s radical left networks is to be expected. Meanwhile, a series of climate camps modelled on the UK’s will take place across northern Europe.

Finally, in December, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will meet in Copenhagen for the ‘COP-15′, to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is set to expire in 2012. Environmentalists across the globe are already discussing how to intervene. The debate is split between those wishing to pressure delegates into making the ‘right choices’ and those seeking to shut down the summit entirely. Klimax, the Copenhagen-based organising group, proposes a ‘mass action concept’ to bridge the divide. Arguing that ‘a good deal is better than no deal – but no deal is way better than a bad one’, Klimax has called a counter-summit to run in parallel and inform actions.

Similar debates are being played out across the different counter-mobilisations, usually involving a split between the coalitions of NGOs and unions organising large demonstrations and radical groups planning civil disobedience and more militant interference.

Even if this year’s counter-summit mobilisations successfully encompass a broad political spectrum, many question the efficacy of this form of protest. ‘Summit-hopping’, as critics call it, can sap energy from long-term local campaigns and focus it on mega-spectacles that produce questionable concrete results. Proponents, though, see counter-summits as inspiring symbolic manifestations of resistance, and opportunities to reach out to other social groups.

However we on the left intervene, we must ensure that our message is relevant. Now more than ever, society needs a coherent and viable alternative to ‘business as usual’. If done well, this year’s mobilisations might just provide the necessary ‘jump start’ for serious oppositional responses to the ecological and economic crises.

Sitting by a campfire backstage at Glastonbury, Manu Chao is just getting going. Fifteen minutes ago he was closing the festival on the Jazz World stage, to an audience of thousands. Now he’s passing out beers and talking about politics, stressing that he cannot be a leader providing ‘a voice for the voiceless’, but can sometimes open up a space for political concerns that otherwise go unvoiced.

Manu Chao offsets his global celebrity with a disarming humility. He has played to 100,000 people on the Zocalo, the enormous main square in Mexico City, but still busks at bars in Barcelona – one of his adopted home cities. He frequently plays political gigs too, from the G8 in Genoa to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, and numerous others – often unannounced – to striking dockers or in prisons or at many other unexpected venues. If you want an analogy, then Manu Chao is to the alter-globalisation movement what Bob Dylan was to peace and civil rights in the 1960s. His albums sell millions of copies worldwide, but the English-language bias of most UK radio stations means that Manu Chao could be the most famous singer you’ve never heard of.

Neighbourhood politics

Manu Chao’s political education went hand in hand with his musical awakening, but he can’t be drawn on which of them is the stronger influence. ‘First of all I’m Manu,’ he says. ‘Then music is a passion. And politics is part of me too.’

That politics began with his family history, which remains strongly etched onto his consciousness. His family fled Spain after his grandfather was sentenced to death by the Spanish dictator Franco, and he grew up in Paris, where he was born in 1961 to Galician and Basque parents. The sense of responsibility to his neighbourhood, he says, is paramount. ‘That’s my culture, that’s my education. My mother gave me that education. My father and mother were activists, so from when I was a kid I know about that.’

But he has never seen that need to root action locally as reflecting any kind of parochialism. ‘What is interesting in neighbourhoods is that each one is a little representation of society, of the world,’ he says.

Having lived in Rio, in Mexico, in Barcelona, and spent much of his life without a settled home, how does he square this paradox of being constantly on the move with his strong sense of responsibility towards his locality? ‘I have a lot of neighbourhoods in my life,’ he says. ‘So I go from one to another, and I organise, I work and try to dynamise things.’

Music that sounds like the world

The easy movement from one neighbourhood to another is reflected in Manu Chao’s music too. The music industry, for its part, tends to pigeonhole Manu Chao as ‘world music’. But he is dismissive of that category, describing it as a ‘neo-colonial’ label for songs not sung in English. If they are not world music, though, Manu Chao’s songs are very much music that sounds like the world. He sings in French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Italian. His albums are littered with samples and street sounds, and often feature non-professional musicians he has pulled in off the street.

The Clash and Bob Marley are the most obvious influences. The Clash’s Joe Strummer was known to be a fan (as is Robbie Williams, who collaborated with Lily Allen to cover the song ‘Bongo Bong’). The affinity with Bob Marley, meanwhile, saw him dedicate a song to ‘Mr Bobby’, an artist he celebrates for his simplicity and global reach. But that doesn’t fully capture the punk-ska eclecticism of Manu Chao’s music, or his seamless ability to blend these different styles into a distinctive sound.

That fusion of styles comes from a long time spent on the road, listening to the responses of his audiences and learning from the music to which they exposed him – in Latin America, especially.

When he first came to prominence with the band Mano Negra in the late 1980s, he was advised by his management to tour America. They meant the United States, but Mano Negra instead journeyed around South America by ship, playing gigs in port cities as they went. A year later, in 1993, Mano Negra returned to the continent, bought an old train and toured Colombia – playing to audiences of guerrillas, peasants and drug traffickers.

These experiences still influence his outlook today. ‘I got the chance to spend a lot of time [in Latin America], I love this continent, and I’m building my family there,’ he tells me. ‘It is an incredible school of life.’ But the pace and intensity of their travels took its toll on Mano Negra, and the band split up shortly after the tour ended.

Manu’s response was to go backpacking, recording most of his debut solo album, Clandestino, on a portable eight-track recorder as he went. Released in 1998, the album was a huge success, selling more than five million copies. His next album, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (‘Next stop: hope’ – a reference to a metro announcement in Madrid), released in 2001, consolidated his place as one of the world’s most successful recording artists.

It then took another six years for Manu Chao to record his next studio album, La Radiolina, which came out to critical acclaim last autumn. Not that he hasn’t been busy with writing, political activism, touring and DJ-ing in the interim. In 2004, he did, in fact, return to the studio to produce Dimanche À Bamako, an album by a blind, middle-aged Malian couple, Amadou and Mariam, which went on to sell half a million copies in its own right.

This passion for new musical encounters and travel, rather than concentrating on his recording career, speaks volumes for Manu Chao’s sense of priorities. Listening from one album to the next, you find similar themes – and even whole backing tracks – return in different forms. In this sense, he is not so much a studio musician as he is a troubadour, evolving songs and sounds as he goes.

Politik kills

That sense of the importance of everyday encounters lies at the heart of Manu Chao’s politics too. Asked what events most clearly influenced his political outlook, he says ‘It’s difficult for me to answer that. I think there’s no ranking in activism. The important thing is the everyday.’

There is actually a vital consideration before engaging in politics, he continues: ‘Before talking about activism, if everybody in this world acted with honesty, it would be a nice step. That’s what I learnt from my grandfather – honesty. I bless him for that.’ But honesty only takes you so far. ‘The situation today is so problematic that honesty is not enough anymore. People have to do more.’

Manu Chao’s sense of what it means to do more is as deeply political as it is suspicious of organised politics (or ‘politik’, as he dubs it on his latest single, ‘Politik Kills’). He sees this sense of honesty, and ‘re-organising at the level of your person, your family and your neighbourhood’, as standing in opposition to the kind of politik that needs ‘ignorance’ and ‘lies’.

As Manu explains to me a vision of the world that is unremittingly bleak, yet somehow without being cynical, I imagine his discussion punctuated with that song’s refrain: ‘That’s why, my friend, it’s an evidence – politik is violence.’

‘The big problem is money. The economic power is more powerful than the political. So we vote, but the politicians – they’re all puppets,’ he says, gesturing with his arms as he searches for the appropriate word. ‘It is not a real democracy.’

He is equally scathing about the distorting influence of media ownership on democracy. ‘In Europe,’ he says, ‘the first big problem was in Italy when Berlusconi took power for the first time, ten years ago. That was the proof that if you control the media, you’re president. And after Berlusconi, I think with Sarkozy in France it was the same.

‘So more and more people are not going to believe any more in democracy; and that’s very dangerous. I feel like a democrat – I think it’s the least worst way we’ve found to live all together. But the professional politicians have totally distorted the word and what it really means.’

His distaste for politicians is matched only by that he reserves for the influence of television. ‘Television doesn’t respect anything, so there are a lot of kids growing up respecting nothing. I think that’s the most dangerous thing happening in society … and it is very important that there aren’t another two or three generations coming like that, totally brainwashed by television, because its going to be terrible – all quick money, a lot of violence, everything must be easy, everything new, not a single work ethic.’ Here too, if nothing changes, he thinks the result will be ‘a lot of violence’.

Nature’s revenge

Asked if he sees any possibility of change, Manu says he does, but talks about the sources lying in fear rather than hope.

‘I think things are changing. It’s a kind of race between the craziness of the system and the sense of conservation of the human being. In the last couple of years, I saw that people are getting scared. They talk a lot about the change of the weather – shit, it’s raining in July. Full sun in December. Something is going wrong. And lots of people who aren’t politically conscious are starting to change.’

At this point, Manu – who has grown more agitated as our interview has progressed – rests his hand on my knee and takes on a look of greater intensity. ‘I’ll say something politically not very correct but I really believe it. I’m not afraid for nature. We’re doing a lot of harm to nature, it’s terrible. But nature, one day she’s going to get nervous and she’s going to … phoooosh!’

With that, he reaches back in a dramatic gesture that signals the end of civilisation. ‘And we’re all going to get out of this fucking planet in one minute!’

‘We’ll make a lot of problems for nature,’ he continues. ‘She’s going to take one million years to cure herself. One million years for nature is one day for us. When we attack nature we’re attacking ourselves. Nature is much more stronger than us … We’re not going to win this battle, she’s going to win.’

Next station: hope

That may sound an apocalyptic outlook, but it is not unremittingly so – since, despite his pessimism at global changes, he still draws hope that meaningful changes can grow out of what goes on at a neighbourhood level.

‘You cannot change the world, I cannot change the world. I cannot change my country maybe – if I know what my country is – but everybody can change his neighbourhood. I try. That’s a responsibility of everybody. I hope the solution is there. I don’t believe any more in one big revolution that’s going to change everything. I believe in thousands and thousands of little neighbourhood revolutions – that’s my hope.’

With other journalists circling, and a succession of well-wishers demanding attention and congratulating him on a great show, Manu Chao beats a retreat to catch up with his friends. Interview over.

Then something remarkable happens. Manu’s guitarist, who had been thrashing out punk chords on stage, has picked up an acoustic guitar and is strumming some familiar tunes. Manu returns and starts singing by the campfire. Songs of liberty and rebellion: the songs of Manu Chao.

A crowd slowly forms. Another band member starts assembling his trumpet, playing in accompaniment to ‘La Vida Tómbola’ (‘A Life of Chance’) – a song about the footballer Diego Maradona, first recorded for an Emir Kusterica film. The campfire burns on. At one point, a chorus of ‘Campiones, campiones, Ole ole ole’ rings out – a reference to Spain’s victory in that night’s European Cup final. Manu smiles broadly but noticeably doesn’t join in. As he put it earlier, ‘Maybe they can be very proud, I’m very happy for them, but its not going to change nothing.’

Someone gives Manu a hat, which he plays, instinctively, as a tambourine. His manager repeatedly tries to coax him onto the tour bus. He promises her that he’ll go, then plays on – visibly enjoying himself. It is early in the morning already by the time the singing stops and he kisses friends goodbye.

I’d been thinking about how to square Manu’s gloomy predictions about the world with the radiant hope that is embodied in his music, and about how that music has kept a party of strangers together for hours. ‘You made yourself a neighbourhood here,’ I say as we bid farewell. Manu’s reply comes with an infectious smile: ‘That’s what we try to do.’

Most of this increase is in the dairy and grain sectors, but the entire planet feels the effect. In its understated way, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations puts it like this: ‘Rarely has the world felt such a widespread and commonly shared concern about food price inflation, a fear which is fuelling debates about the future direction of agricultural commodity prices in importing as well as exporting countries, be they rich or poor.’

Agflation (as it’s somewhat inelegantly called) hurts those least able to afford it. It is they who spend the greatest part of their income on food, and they who will find it hardest to span the price jump.

In Haiti, one of the most mercilessly punished countries on the planet, the poor in Port-au-Prince are finding themselves priced out of the market for food. Never let it be said, though, that the market cannot provide. In the poorest districts, there is now a brisk trade in mud cakes. Mothers feed the biscuits, made with water, salt, margarine and clay, to their children. The cake puts a dampener on hunger, at least for a couple of hours, but leaves your mouth dry and bitter for several hours more.

In some respects, the city’s clay cookie eaters are the lucky ones. At least they’re in a position actually to buy something, no matter how awful. By far the largest number of people who die from hunger die in rural areas, where the food is produced, and not ultimately for want of food, but for want of money to be able to buy the food that is available.

There’s a bitter irony here. Most of the world’s poorest people are the farmers and farm workers who actually produce food. One might think that they’d benefit from the fact that food prices are going up. And some farmers will undoubtedly be better off, particularly those growing cereals for export.

But most countries in the global South have a very particular pattern of agricultural production, which involves a few, very large scale farmers producing the bulk of export crops. The majority of poor rural people – and four out of five poor people on the planet live in rural areas – either work on or, if they’re lucky, own a very small amount of land. Their food production has been largely destined for the home market. With the World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) pushing for increased levels of free trade, they’ve found themselves shut out of their own markets by imports dumped from the global North.

Consider rice, a source of income and sustenance for more than two billion people. As part of its ‘structural adjustment’ policies, the World Bank has insisted that countries in the South reduce government support for agriculture. This has meant that in order to feed the people, governments have become increasingly reliant on the global economy.

But the giants of the international economy, particularly the US and EU, haven’t had to play by the same rules. While the WTO removed tariff barriers in order to ‘level the playing field’ in developing countries, many large scale farmers in the North remained heavily subsidised by their governments, with inducements to export surplus production. So when US rice farmers sold their product overseas, the subsidies they received undercut the local competition. That is why a 50-kilo bag of rice will sell in the US for $19, but in the Ghanaian market the same bag will cost you $15. The latest available data show import prices running at a third of what you’d be able to get for a similar locally produced bag at wholesale prices. No Ghanaian farmer can compete with that for long.

Following the money

Between 2000 and 2003, this dumping of rice into the countries of the South was compounded by another feature – low rice prices. It meant that the poorest farmers were ground out of the market, unable to make a living. Again, the World Bank puts the positive spin on trade liberalisation. In its 2005 Global Agricultural Trade report, the Bank put it like this: ‘The real story is the large transfers between consumers and producers that lead to these net gains. In [rice] importing countries consumers gain US$32.8 billion, while producers lose $27.2 billion.’ But since those farmers were among the countries’ poorest, transferring money away from them to slightly richer working people in the cities meant that poverty deepened.

What are ex-rice-farmers to do? The World Bank would like them to move to the city. In countries where they have followed the Bank’s advice, there have been explosions in urban poverty. The industrial jobs that should have been there to feed the displaced rural poor had themselves been whittled away by the same liberalisation policies that had just put the boot in to agriculture. It is a double whammy that millions of farmers continue to face, and one that has recently been adopted as an official development policy by the World Bank, under the banner of ‘agriculture for development’. And it becomes a triple whammy when displaced agriculturalists end up in cities forced to pay far more for food than they ever thought possible.

So what’s behind the food price rises, and why aren’t poor farmers benefiting? We’ve got an intuition that helps us here. When the price of oil goes up, we don’t think for a minute that the beneficiaries are oil
workers or the people on the petrol station forecourts. We understand that oil is a commodity controlled by a few powerful corporations, and that it is they, and more specifically the oil financiers, who are getting fat pay cheques. This intuition helps us understand why most farmers aren’t getting rich off the price rises – if they’re involved with the international economy, it is, with few exceptions, invariably as peons.

That explains why farmers aren’t getting the lucre. But where, then, does it go? One clue is to be found through a longer historical view. We’d like to think that food price rises are new, but if you look at the real cost to consumers, the price of food has been increasing, while at the same time the price that farmers receive on that food, the farm gate price, has been falling in real terms. Driving a wedge between the consumers and farmers are the food corporations, and it’s unsurprising that they’ve been one of the most consistently desirable stocks on the market.

But there are other factors at work too, ones outside the control of even the most powerful food companies. Most important, the harvest has been incredibly poor over the past year because the weather in several key growing regions has been erratic. Some are already calling this the first climate-change famine and the harbinger of worse to come. In Africa, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, studies suggest that within a century, crop revenues could be down by up to 90 per cent as a result of climate change. This could be compounded by up to 50 per cent of animal species becoming endangered (so no relying on tourism) and up to 250 million people being affected by water stress as a result of a very conservative one-degree temperature increase.

The oil we eat

At the heart of this, of course, lies oil, and oil matters to food more than global warming. Take, for instance, the price of oil. It makes sense that, with higher energy prices, the costs of food distribution have soared. But this isn’t the only way that oil matters for our food. Industrial agriculture, by definition, involves the use of inorganic fertiliser. Making inorganic fertiliser requires a great deal of energy, and one of the primary elements in fertiliser manufacture is natural gas. Dearer oil means dearer gas means dearer fertiliser means dearer food.

Ironically, one of the other major reasons why prices are going up is because of an intervention to wean us away from oil: agrofuels (the combustible plant products that we’re being induced to call ‘biofuels’). The source of these fuels varies from country to country – from palm oil in Indonesia to sugar cane in Brazil. Their production is peddled by politicians as an unmitigated good in the battle against climate change, even though study after study suggests precisely the opposite.

This research will come as small comfort to those displaced to grow agrofuels, those going hungry because of them, or even those directly involved in growing them. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 50,000 slaves in Brazil, mainly on sugar cane plantations. The cane is thirsty, and is drying up the largest aquifer in South America- the Guaraní. In the US, the government has backed the transformation of corn (maize) into ethanol, a move that has pleased farmers and delighted the ethanol producers (food giants Cargill, ADM, Bunge, joined by the more familiar ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil) who lobbied hardest for it.

The demand for agrofuel corn means that there’s less corn around to eat, and the price goes up. Farmers being astute and very aware of the market, see the bright future for corn, and switch to it from other crops. This means that not only has the price of corn gone up but there’s less of the other cereals, leading again to higher prices. And tilting the market yet further, the US and EU have explicit policy targets and subsidies for agrofuels to reach the political nirvana of ‘energy independence’.

As a result, there is less food on the market. But there’s a further force at work, which means that an even smaller fraction of it ends up in the bellies of the hungry. As the incomes of the new middle classes in India and especially China increase, the demand for meat has spiked. To produce a kilo of chicken requires two kilos of grain, to produce a kilo of pork needs four kilos, and to produce one kilo of beef needs seven. The demand for millions of tons of meat means that multiple millions of tons of grain are being fed to animals, rather than people. Reducing the demand for meat loosens some of the supply constraints on grain, which means that it’s more accessible to the poor. And that’s independent of the ethical reasons to cut out meat, and ignoring the environmental damage done by livestock, not only through methane emissions but through toxic levels of agricultural run-off from the farms that breed them.

The peasant way

There is a gamut of reasons both why prices are higher and why farmers are seeing less and less of the revenue. Those hurt the hardest are rural workers and small farmers. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that farmers are at the forefront of understanding the effects of international agricultural trade. For decades, they’ve been schooled in the violence of the market, and in the use of food as a political weapon by agribusiness.

Recently, though, modern communications technologies have allowed conversations between different struggles in different parts of the world. One of the largest farmers’ movements in the world, La Via Campesina (Spanish for ‘the peasant way’) is an international association of millions of farmers, peasants, and landless labourers. It has long organised against the predations of international capitalism. It was in 1992, for instance, that farmers were reading and critiquing, in the fields of Karnataka, India, a Kannada translation of the charter text that was to found the World Trade Organisation. This was fully seven years before the Seattle WTO protests.

One of the movement’s major outcomes has been the development of a coherent international alternative to modern industrial agriculture. It’s called ‘food sovereignty’. To fully understand it, it’s important to contrast it with the dominant liberal goal – food security. Food security has a technical definition, along the lines of this, taken from the US government: food security is characterised by ‘access by all people at all times to sufficient food and nutrition for a healthy and productive life’. This sounds all well and good until you realise that it’s compatible with everyone getting vouchers for McDonald’s and a baggie of vitamins to fill the nutritional gaps.

Crucially, what the definition of food security omits is any idea of who controls what and how food is grown and distributed. The definition of food sovereignty is fairly long; Wikipedia has a good summary. The most
recent iteration of it is this: ‘Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.’

It’s a bold vision, and it has two sets of demands. The first is that food policy must be decided by everyone in a democratic manner, rather than a small cabal of plutocrats in a smoke-filled room. Nonetheless, there is a second set of demands that are non-negotiable, demands that protect women’s rights and ecological sustainability. The insistence on women’s rights is, incidentally, the clearest indication that what Via Campesina is lobbying for is not some misty-eyed recuperation of traditional agriculture, but a thoroughly modern and socially just system of food production and consumption.

It’s ambitious, yes, but it offers to solve some of the biggest troubles with food. First, the demands of ecological sustainability mean that industrial agriculture and agrofuels are off the table. There are ways of growing food agro-ecologically, free of inorganic fertiliser, that have a far smaller ecological footprint, foster biodiversity, and provide outputs at levels in excess of conventional agriculture. These techniques have been pioneered in Cuba, which used to be one of the largest importers of fertiliser and pesticides on the continent, but has since turned its agricultural production around. The fall of the Soviet Union, in combination with the US trade embargo, forced the country first towards two years of widespread hunger, and then the development of some of the most sophisticated oil-free agricultural science on the planet. Today 70 per cent of food eaten in Havana comes from Havana.

Cuba has become an agricultural leader by reforming its land tenure system, offering relevant and public scientific support to farmers, and paying attention to the effects of geography and town planning on access to food. They are lessons from which the rest of the world can profit. But in order to be able to implement them, the South needs to have a little more wiggle room in agriculture than it currently does. Which means that agricultural concerns should be removed from the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank (responsible for a great deal of damage to agriculture over the past 30 years) should be defunded, and the subsidy systems in the global North and South need to be overhauled to benefit the poorest, rather than the wealthiest, to promote local food democracies.

From ethical shopping to political hedonism

While there are elements of Cuban agriculture to wish for everywhere, it’s easy for the majority of us, living in cities, to feel rather disconnected from agrarian struggles. The solution we’re offered, to eat sustainably, is sold to us as a lifestyle choice for a kind of consumerism that somehow aspires to short-circuit capitalism. This is a deep contradiction in terms, of course, but it has its seductions. After all, which Red Pepper reader hasn’t bought fair trade coffee? I certainly have.

But while fair trade is preferable to its alternative (super-exploitative trade), it’s not going to do anything about the major inequities of the farming system. Most of the poorest and most militant farmers are demanding not slightly higher prices for a sack of beans, but land reform and comprehensive agrarian change. This isn’t the sort of thing that one can shop for, and even the best fair trade programmes don’t pretend to be advancing this agenda. This is precisely the limitation of consumer activism – that it makes us feel that through judicious shopping we’re engaging in structural change when our behaviour is entrenching precisely the structures of domination we would range ourselves against.

So what are we to do? The principles of food sovereignty suggest that the solution doesn’t lie in abdicating responsibility and doing whatever passing fancy crosses one’s mind. One solution to put growers and eaters back at the heart of the food system is to be found, paradoxically, in a particular kind of hedonism, one that comes from a country where leftist politics and food are both treated very seriously: Italy.

One of the triumphs of the Italian left has been the staking out of a particular territory of joy. In 1986, the Italian communist daily Il Manifesto published an eight-page insert fighting for, among other things, the right to food. The publication was called Gambero Rosso – meaning ‘red shrimp’ but also a play on the words ‘bandiera rossa’, ‘red flag’. The thinking behind it was this: why should pleasure be only the domain of the bourgeoisie? Is it not every worker’s right to be able to enjoy food?

From a class analysis of pleasure came a realisation that in order to enjoy food, workers needed two things: time and money. And the getting of these things was to be a social and collective pursuit, in defiance of, rather than through the market. The organisers worked with unions for an increase in wage rates, and then campaigned for a two-hour lunch break, freeing time in the middle of the day for agricultural workers to be able not just to eat but to savour their food. Soon, the original founders were joined by a range of activists, artists, writers, workers and cooks from across the world. They wrote their vision into a manifesto, with lines like ‘In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes.’ Their answer became the name of their organisation: Slow Food (see Red Pepper, Oct-Nov 2007).

The Slow Food movement suggests that enjoying food more is a way of reclaiming our nourishment from capital. The kind of enjoyment they’re fighting for involves not just individual choices but social ones, and requires more than simply opting for a more ethical shopping basket. It is in the direction of Slow Food that the principles of food sovereignty point those of us living in cities.

Food sovereignty offers a paradoxical solution to agflation. The answer isn’t to lower prices – most farm workers and farmers see little enough as it is. The solution is simultaneously to increase farm-gate prices, to promote land reform, appropriate technology and women’s rights, and also to increase wages and social supports. These outcomes can’t be shopped for. They’re the fruits of organising and agitation, a necessary step if we are all to be able to savour our food. And they’re fruits well worth struggling for.

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Portobello Books) www.stuffedandstarved.org. He is a researcher at the University of California, at Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

- World output increased between 1870 and 1913 by 1.3 per cent per year; by 2.9 per cent per year between 1950 and 1973; and by 3.2 per cent per year from 2000

- If the so-called third world keeps up its current growth rate, by 2027 it will produce two thirds of world output
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Living longer, living better

Consider this. In 1950, the average life expectancy of someone born in India was 32. Imagine what that means in terms of the slaughter of infants, of mothers in childbirth, of the sick, the aged, and the disabled. By the end of the century, the average Indian could expect to live for 66 years. Life itself had been doubled in the course of less than a lifetime.

This staggering enhancement of the life expectancy of hundreds of millions of human beings has been accompanied by an unprecedented growth in their material prosperity, particularly in recent decades. According to India’s official figures, 45 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line (surviving on less than one US dollar per day) in 1983; in 2005, it was 27.5 per cent. The material progress has been even more dramatic elsewhere. For example, in 1981, 64 per cent of the Chinese population lived below the poverty line. By 2001, this was down to under 10 per cent.

Similar stories can be told about much of the rest of the so-called third world (with some well-known exceptions, especially in Africa). Of course, such statistics can conceal as much as they show – most notably, growing inequality. Indeed, reports from the recent Chinese Communist Party congress point to increasing rural poverty (largely due to lousy medical and school services) – as well as widespread revolt. India, despite its progress, is still notorious for infant and maternal mortality, for undernourished infants and atrocious village schools.

In the end, though, whatever the qualifications, we have to rejoice that never before has there been such a gigantic reduction in global poverty. Nelson Mandela’s slogan about ‘making poverty history’ may sound dottily utopian to some, but it is, on this economic record, realistically within our grasp.

Alongside the great technical triumphs of capitalism – from the steam engine and electricity to the worldwide web, air travel and astronauts – this massive reduction in poverty and the implied reduction in the sum of human misery has to be one of the greatest achievements ever. It is part of a process – globalisation – that has stimulated and enhanced unprecedented and sustained high and rising rates of world economic growth. The increased body weight of Chinese or Indian babies and the improved protein intake of their mothers is the accidental – and unintended – spin off of this extraordinary process of the pursuit of profits and the development of global markets.

Monstrous sacrifice

Getting here was never guaranteed. Getting further is equally dodgy. Why?

It is because national governments invariably subordinate or sacrifice the welfare of their own – and the world’s – population to maintaining their own grip on power and their position in the world. They are all Mugabes at heart.

You can see this in the monstrous scale of sacrifice in the four decades of the cold war between east and west, constantly sucking resources out of welfare and into waste – the means to kill and destroy. Once that terrible burden was eased, the world economy began to grow with unprecedented speed and its effects have spread throughout the globe as never before.

Yet despite the high hopes at the end of the cold war, the burden was only eased, not ended. Washington soon resumed its long march to global military dominance. And the rest of the world’s governments were forced to compete in the madness.

Consider the extraordinary sacrifices required of the American people to finance the Iraq and Afghan wars. The total cost up to 2017 has just been put at £1,175 billion. What wouldn’t that do for the reduction of world poverty, not to mention a lasting peace in Afghanistan and Iraq?

George Bush has also just asked for a $200 billion supplementary military budget. That’s about four times the official aid flows from all developed to developing countries – more than enough to lift the 40 million US families who live in poverty above the poverty line, or radically cut infant mortality rates or improve the position of the 815 million people worldwide who are chronically undernourished (without enough food to meet their daily energy requirements).

And why is Washington fighting in Iraq anyway? The US is supposed to believe in free trade – the policy agenda of globalisation. But that would mean letting Iraq freely sell its oil on world markets.

In practice, of course, Washington does not at all trust free trade to deliver its oil. The US employs its military muscle to secure and hold privileged access to Iraqi oil, to capture and hold oil reserves by physical violence – to the heavy cost of Iraqis, Americans and the world at large.

It’s worse than that, moreover. Washington sets the military standards that the rest of the world must try to match.

If China wasn’t squandering resources on arms (and space travel – for military purposes), it could provide decent medical and educational services for its rural poor. If India wasn’t doing the same – including the monster extravagance of nuclear weapons – it could radically reduce its appalling infant mortality rates. All the powers, rich and poor, bleat about not having enough resources to help the poor, yet when it comes to their military budgets, resources are thrown to the wind. In the worst cases, Washington patronises whole military states – Turkey, Israel and Pakistan, for instance – where the military sucks civil society dry.

Free movement

War is only the most blatant example of the insanity of the system whereby states blithely sacrifice the welfare (and lives) of the world’s people to maintain their own power. Take the different example of the way that nation states prevent the free movement of people.

It is clear that an increase in immigration to America and Europe (a relaxation of immigration controls) would do more to reduce world poverty – through workers sending home part of their earnings – than any reforms of trade or increases in aid. The latest estimates put this flow to the developing countries at $300 billion. If increased immigration brought in new workers equal to three per cent of the existing European and American labour forces, that figure could be doubled and more. That would make a real dent in world poverty.

But governments in developed countries won’t do this because they believe it undermines their own state power. They face a contradiction. They know they do not have enough workers and need to import them if they are to sustain economic growth. But they also believe that they need to isolate their citizens from the world, supposedly pure in culture if not any longer in race, to reinforce their loyalty – and therefore willingness, if required, to go out and murder foreigners (or, if need be, the ‘disloyal’ native-born).

In the end, the needs of the nation state override anything else. All the din of world politics, the babble of the ‘world community’, is about this hypocrisy – governments holding on greedily or trying to expand what power they have while conceding to markets only so much as is needed to maintain their revenues.

No wonder US president Bill Clinton sympathised with the anti-globalisation demonstrators against the WTO’s easing of trade barriers at Seattle in 1999, just as Jacques Chirac of France had done earlier over negotiations to ease international capital flows. Governments are delighted to have popular support for a chauvinistic resistance to the rest of world. Clinton was not dreaming that another world was possible, only that he needed to rally the xenophobes to shore up Washington’s power.

Capital’s escape

The state – the concentrated force of society’s violence – has always been the biggest obstacle to social transformation, to socialism. It has always functioned both to defend the existing national order of society (even if on occasions it has been forced to concede reforms) and to fight foreigners.

That order in the old days included a defined share of world capital – hence ‘British capital’ or ‘American capital’ or whatever. But globalisation has been the process whereby capital escaped the state and went global. The state has been forced to give up significant powers of economic decision making to global markets.

It is a blind process. As always under capitalism, markets reinvent the world. Nobody intended – or even envisaged – the outcome. Everyone merely reacted to the imperatives of global markets, themselves the unforeseen – and unintended – outcome of millions of individual decisions.

Being blind, as always, the world cannot design, let alone implement, an acceptable human outcome to the transition to a single world economy, one that would protect those most vulnerable to radical economic change and minimise the damage. And we know from the past record that just as markets and competing capital have a spectacular ability to increase output and generate innovations, so they also tear the heart out of social collaboration, reducing all to competing atoms.

Yet even as capital has escaped the national state, and the old institutions that embodied national political power – from parliament to parties to trade unions – declined, new forces have been created on an extraordinary scale, still so new we barely have concepts to describe them. These range from great multinationals like Oxfam, Care, Save the Children and Greenpeace, through global monitoring agents such as Amnesty and occasional glittering campaigns like Band Aid, to unknown local activist outfits in the slums of Mumbai or Sao Paulo or Sheffield, to the thousands of lobbies that agitate on particular issues around the old structures of national and global political power. And the World Social Forum process, with heroic ambition (and, it must be admitted, the support of local and, in Brazil, national state support), has begun to focus a global opposition to world capital and its state allies.

It is a new civil society, vast, inchoate, constantly changing and creative, far removed from the conventional political categories, and with no easy ‘progressive’ agenda. The decline of national politics has not at all involved a decline in politics, but rather a liberation that goes well beyond the national prisons imposed by governments.

Half a century ago it would have seemed inconceivable that this public space could be so densely occupied. Then, the state – or aspirant state – agencies smothered all the ground. Indeed, alongside the defeat of the old statist left, the rise of the green agenda, penetrating now the highest echelons of the world political order, is a quite spectacular triumph.

The NGOs are urgently needed. Globalisation, in weakening the state, has also weakened the formal structures of national democracy. What now is the point of voting, it is asked, if it is world markets, not governments, that alone can deliver on the politicians’ economic promises?

The counter to this, of course, is that nation states still loom so large politically that struggles within them, on them and around them are inevitably of key significance. This remains the case even if the restoration of the old forms of national state power as an alternative to the present order is now utopian – and reactionary.

States – or quasi-states – are still needed to establish and implement common standards, to regulate individual territories, to deal with crimes and natural catastrophes and so on. And even (perhaps especially) in the era of declining national state power, they will continue to have the capacity to destroy themselves and all the rest of us – just as, at various stages in history, those who control them have been willing to destroy their own countries in order to hang on to power.

On the other hand, the burgeoning NGOs are as mixed a bag as capital. Indeed, some NGOs are no more than opportunistic private businesses, often trading on the gullibility of donors and public. Establishing the democratic credentials of the NGO sector itself is a long process of creating democratic governance through state and self-regulation.

In the midst of all this immense diversity of creative activity and agitation, however, the task of creating a new world social order is, in the end, overshadowed by the jungle of warring states – led by the biggest and most ferocious tiger of all, Washington.

The warring states try to shore up their national control by blocking any bonds of solidarity that go beyond their borders and enforcing national subordination. Yet patriotism has become chronically dysfunctional. It is the glue that simultaneously holds together the American armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dragoons the American population in support of the state system. The urgent need of the hour is not patriotism but mutiny in the world’s armed forces.

It is possible, though, that the competition of states is producing its own antidote: the increasing paralysis of the military machine. As their powers of destruction rise exponentially, their capacity to win grows increasingly weak – as in Vietnam, as in Iraq, as in Afghanistan.

A global left agenda

So what should be the agenda of the left in this era of declining state power? It is, of course, immense – but above all the following:

- to push on the process of globalisation that capital has begun but states increasingly resist – as, for example, in the exposure of the fraud by the dominant powers in the WTO;

- to recover and expand society – social cooperation – against the insidious reduction of people to competitive atoms by markets;

- to relentlessly expose and challenge the attempts of states to control the world through physical violence, secrecy and fraud;

- to protect people in transition, facing the violence of structural economic change, through all the available mechanisms of governance – international, national and civil society, including trade unions;

- to make the system increasingly transparent and accountable, as the alter-globalisation movement has done with the apex global organisations – the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF and so on;

- to make the system, by whatever means possible, increasingly subject to democratic rule.

We do not know what structures of governance will emerge, but emerge they must. The left’s role is to ensure they are directed to protecting all equally – to establishing the equality of all in the world, and, insofar as national governments survive, that they are obliged to accept the free flow of people internationally and the protection of all within their territories, not merely their supposed citizens.

In essence, the left has to help and lead in recreating a world society that corresponds to the new world economy. Within that poverty really can be conquered and war eliminated.

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Harris exaggerates when he writes of a new global civil society, ‘vast, inchoate, constantly changing and creative’. The organisations he mentioned are mostly admirable but, far from being vast, they are – in global terms – tiny, fragmented and often without any real purchase on the accumulation process. While there are a handful of such humanitarian ‘multinationals’ and monitors there are around 40,000 multinational corporations with many millions of employees, billions of semi-captive customers and command of the lion’s share of the world’s resources.

I heartily agree on the need for innovation and for thinking outside the space of the state. The confusion of ‘nationalisation’ with public ownership and the insistent portrayal of the welfare state as a vehicle of national impulses must change.

But the national phase did embody some achievements – the NHS, the US social security programme, pensions in a number of countries. These must be defended from the marketisers and privatisers – as well as being supplemented by new global programmes.

A significant omission from Nigel Harris’s manifesto is any mention of the need to build a new global system of social protection, to finance this by obliging the multinational corporations and banks to contribute as they once contributed to national welfare states and to begin to socialise and democratise the accumulation process.

The improvements in longevity Harris mentions will lead to a steadily ageing population over coming decades. At present there are 560 million older people in the world (over 60 in poor countries or over 65 in richer countries) and the over-80s are the world’s most rapidly expanding age cohort. By 2050 there will be two billion older people and, if nothing is done, the great majority will be immersed in great poverty. At present four fifths of the planet’s adults have no pension coverage at all and little prospect of ever receiving any.

In February 2007, Global Action on Aging organised a briefing session at the UN building in New York for the Economic and Social Commission, at which the idea was floated of a global pension of a dollar a day. In July the commission published a report showing that even at such a modest level a global pension would have a major impact in reducing world poverty. South Africa, since the downfall of apartheid, has shown the way, becoming one of the few developing states with a universal pension scheme. Indeed the pension has played a vital role in a country where – because of the ravages of Aids – grandparents have often had to step into the parenting role.

While many might agree that a global pension of a dollar a day would be desirable, how could it be financed? The first pensions in advanced countries were set at at a time when those they catered for comprised only 5 per cent or less of the population. Today they are nearly ten 10 per cent and they are on course to become 20 or 25 per cent. The governments in today’s poor countries have many calls on their resources and few sources of income.

I have suggested that a very mild tax on global corporations – set at a level of no more than 2 per cent of global profits or 0.5 per cent of global share transfers – could come up with the $205 billion needed to finance the global pension. In a previous issue of Red Pepper (‘Sharing the burden’, March 2007). I discussed potential new taxes. The most suitable would be a requirement on corporations to issue new shares equivalent to 2 per cent of their profits each year. But an acceptable substitute would be a 0.5 per cent tax on the buying and selling of shares.

It might be thought that any idea of global taxes is hopelessly utopian. But 120 years ago national tax regimes were very modest and no country had a state pension. Today taxes take 40 per cent or more of GDP and there are a multitude of social programmes that would have been seen as utopian by the Victorians. Is one dollar a day for the elderly really such an outrageous demand?

Notwithstanding tax havens, governments still raise serious sums from corporate taxation. They know that they could raise more by tackling the havens and the OECD has cautiously begun to tighten regulation. But it is not easy to agree on who should benefit. A global profits tax paid to a global fund network for a universal old age pension would surely be a deserving candidate as beneficiary. The money or securities could be distributed to roughly a thousand regional funds throughout the world. The pensions would be paid directly in cash to those who qualified. It would not be appropriate to explain this further here but I go into further details in ‘A global pension plan’ (New Left Review, Sept/Oct 2007).

The global pension could be paid directly to many of the world’s poorest by a network of regional funds. These would assist poorer communities to manage funds efficiently with a mixture of expert and local recruitment. South Africa has pioneered some of the necessary apparatus with mobile ATM machines activated by a finger print device.

The regional fund network would have its own staff and be accountable to local communities. The regional fund would not be able to vary the size of the pension, but would receive needed resources commensurate with their demographic profile and would have some scope for investing revenue from their holdings of securities. They would also be able to vote the shares they held at company AGMs. The role of the local funds could be compared to Fairtrade schemes, which often use the extra revenue from a premium price to build locally-controlled social funds.

Of course this is just an example designed to show how global civil society might be empowered to really take on the corporations that run the world. The strategies we need should propose specific measures for redistributing and socialising capital or they will flounder and fail.

Robin Blackburn is author of Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us, (Verso, £19.99). He has set out ‘A global pension plan‘ in New Left Review (No 47, Sept/Oct 2007)

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Or you could see it in a different way. The British economy has become too big for the resources available on the territory.The UK has become the centre for global networks that operate far beyond the reach, let alone the knowledge, of any British government. Indeed, most of those who work to produce the ‘British’ output don’t work here geographically and know nothing of any connection to Britain.The old national self-sufficiency – in workers, in goods, in capital (if it ever existed) – has trickled away.

The unskilled

Governments talk a great deal about the need to search abroad for skilled workers (doctors, nurses, engineers, among others) to create a ‘high skill economy’. In fact, the skilled have always been allowed to get round immigration controls.

But the skilled are not the problem. Vast armies of low-skilled workers are needed to make possible the work of the skilled. Think of a hospital and all those thousands – porters, drivers, guards, gardeners, cleaners, canteen and laundry workers and many more – needed to make doctoring and nursing possible. The most notorious shortages of workers are here, not among doctors. The scarcities are worst in the building trades, agriculture, hotels and restaurants, cleaning services, shops, the health service, public transport and so on. The problem is at its most extreme in London and the big cities. There are just not enough native-born workers to keep the show on the road. With an increasingly aged population, the numbers of workers needed in the caring professions will make the shortages of workers much worse.

When the Labour government first came to power, it broke with the old Tory policy of not allowing entry to low skilled migrant workers at all. Special schemes allowed entry to selected low skilled workers for given periods.The economy boomed – employment had never reached such high levels and unemployment record lows.

Then, in May 2004, ten new countries joined the European Union.Workers from the new member states had the right to work anywhere in the EU. Most EU governments opted temporarily to suspend this right (something they are allowed to do for a transitional seven year period). Only Britain, Ireland and Sweden did not – and their economies experienced continued rapid growth. In retrospect, they stole a march on the rest of the EU.

The new EU accessions were a godsend for the government since it was able to allow entry to as many low skilled workers as the economy needed without passing new immigration bills. (They also, in effect, gave an amnesty to all those from eastern Europe working here illegally, something the government said it would never do.) Before that, in addition to the special groups of low-skilled workers allowed entry, labour demand continued to draw in workers from abroad illegally, despite their being treated with horrifying brutality on the borders and gross exploitation once here. And the faster the economy grew, the more workers were pulled in illegally.The white economy was shrinking before the government’s eyes.

The new EU member countries won’t save the British again. The east European economies are beginning to grow quickly and wages there are rising fast. They will try to keep their workers at home and get those in Britain to return.

If the rest of western Europe starts growing quickly, there will be a fierce scramble to grab whatever Polish plumbers, Latvian truck drivers or Lithuanian farm workers are available. Then western Europe will need to recruit Bulgarians, Romanians and Turks.And when the same thing happens there – the supply dries up – employers will have to start trawling for workers beyond the EU. Or illegal migration on a massive scale will make up the difference.

Governments can’t carry on living from hand to mouth, changing the rules every other year so that only lawyers – and traffickers – can find their way through the legal jungle and the black economy booms.

Global labour

What is happening here? Why, suddenly, can’t Britain keep going with its own workers?

The short answer is globalisation – the emergence of a set of global markets that are absorbing the national economies of the world in a single economy, so that it is no longer possible to manage one national patch in isolation from the rest of the world. It is as if Britain in the world is becoming like Leeds or Bristol in the UK. In terms of workers, a global labour market is already refashioning Britain on the inside.

As always under capitalism, the process is blind, out of control. Nobody intended it, foresaw it or managed it. Everybody – including the strongest governments and the multinationals – is dragged along, adjusting, willingly or not, at each stage. Being blind, the potential to damage the vulnerable is enormous, especially to undermine the progress of the last centuries in protecting workers.

Governments generally hate the process since they lose their old power to manage their economies without reference to anyone else.They particularly want to keep separate their own captive share of the world’s population, vital in the capacity to fight wars. Migration, they fear, muddles national loyalties and confuses the young men and women that can be summoned when needed to go out and kill foreigners. Xenophobia is not by accident the default setting of every established state. It goes with the attempt to drill us into uniformity to fight (even though the day of mass armies – like Trident submarines – is long since gone).

The fears of the government at the mixing of population has produced a decade of Labour ministers wittering on about the need for ‘integration’ – forcing immigrants to assimilate, to become ‘British’ (whatever that is).

The argument is that if people circulate freely, if they mix, they won’t know who they are and to what state they should be loyal. The power of state violence is undermined.That is the implicit agenda involved in immigration controls – not locking people out but locking them in.

For a couple of centuries, the national state forced the inhabitants and capital into alignment with its own interests. It invented the myth of the nation and pretended it had existed through all the centuries in which king and nobles rode roughshod over the rest.

But the operations of capitalism itself have now undermined this national order. Capital has escaped and gone global.The population is going to follow suit. More and more foreigners will live and work in Britain; more and more Brits will live and work abroad – or, in both cases, circulate (as they do now within Britain).Transnational families, living in many countries, will come to be the norm.And the mixing will undermine the power of the state to make national war.

Note that this is not about the old internationalism of the left, cooperation between nations, but about the abolition of nation states, the melding of us all into one world association of peoples – who don’t have to kill each other just to keep going.

Loosening controls

The loosening up of the migration system is excellent news for those of us who have always opposed immigration controls. But easing controls has exposed some real problems. It has exposed the abominable treatment of many migrant workers, especially those who migrate and work illegally (let alone refugees fleeing terror). This bad treatment, in turn, undermines conditions and pay for nativeborn workers, especially in low-paid jobs. And that contributes to support for the toxic ultra right-wing parties who would pull down the roof on us all.

The fierce competition for skilled workers (especially doctors and nurses) is also stripping the third world of its scarcest skills. Africa, with a quarter of the world’s ailments, has only 3 per cent of the world’s medical care.This competition is now coming to dominate the recruitment of foreign students – make them pay full fees for their education (and so subsidise the native born students) and then, after they’ve paid for their training, nail them down by offering them work and residence permits.

But loosening migration controls has also opened up new opportunities. Because of differences in the cost of living, a low income in Britain is a high income in, say, India – if you can earn here and live there.That explains why a young Warsaw doctor might think about doing a temporary job as a cleaner in London (‘deskilling’). Of course, the opposite applies: if you settle permanently in London, a low income will make sure you are and stay poor – even if you have a medical degree.The best deal for the migrant is temporary circulation so you can earn in one place and spend in another (or work, save and go home).

Remittances – workers sending money home to their families – have become a gigantic flow, the biggest mechanism in the world for the redistribution of income from rich to poor.They are increasing rapidly. This year, it is reckoned, the total will top $300 billion – nearly $200 billion of it to the third world, almost three times the value of official aid. And that is only what is officially recorded – in total it may be $400 billion, and in value terms, very much more (if you allow for those differences in cost of living). So western immigration controls are a most powerful obstacle to the reduction of poverty in the third world.

Migration is good in another way. It is not just that people find jobs, earn money and keep their families going at home. They also often learn new skills (including a foreign language) and gain valuable work experience, along with broader horizons. The professionals get much enriched skills and experience; temporary deskilling for some while they work abroad may go with skill enrichment for many others. If people circulated freely instead of getting stuck in one place or another, the third world could benefit from migration even more than from remittances. And if it were more organised, migration could become a deliberate strategy to raise massively the skills of the third world – and that could do something serious for the reduction of world poverty and the drive to achieve world full employment.

Practical reforms

There have always been people on the left who understood instinctively the reactionary role of immigration controls in enhancing the power of the state. But they have had no way of turning this principle into practical reforms, steps that could culminate in freedom for people to move about the world as they wish. That agenda seems both utopian and plain dotty in present electoral terms. Indeed, the left itself has often been imbued with nationalism, lining up with the state against immigrant workers in defence of jobs for the native born.

But now capitalism itself – those global markets – is beginning to force the freeing of peoples to move, to weaken the barriers between countries. Do we oppose it or welcome it – and bend all efforts to protect those most endangered by the process, migrants and native-born low paid workers?

We are already well into the transition to a single world economy. Over the next 50 years it will be accomplished. But as usual in these things, the old order will fight bitterly to hang on, destroying those who try to anticipate the process, to prepare so that people need not be sacrificed.

In an ideal world, the receiving and sending governments, with trade unions and NGOs, would set up a permanent Worker Recruitment Service to do three things: