Agenda for a New Economy

by David C Korten

  Chapter 19, “Learning to Live, Living to Learn,” frames the threefold strategy by which millions of people are living the New Economy into being through a process of learning by doing. It then outlines the contributions needed from media, education, religion, and the arts and provides guidance for people from all walks of life who seek to contribute.

  The book closes with an epilogue that presents “The View from 2084” of the world we may yet leave to our grandchildren if we succeed — a world defined not so much by dazzling new technologies as by the opportunities it offers for meaningful fulfillment.

  CHAPTER 16

  WHEN THE PEOPLE LEAD, THE LEADERS WILL FOLLOW

  There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

  HOWARD ZINN

  It is time to stop trying to fix what can’t and shouldn’t be fixed, declare national and global independence from Wall Street, and get on with building the New Economy and the new institutions required to serve its financial needs.

  Judging from the record to date, we cannot expect the leadership to come from either Congress or the Obama administration. As demonstrated all too clearly by the events both before and after the financial crash, Washington operates as a wholly owned Wall Street subsidiary. This can and must change, but it will happen only as an engaged citizenry mobilizes to demand it.

  The idea of ordinary citizens being able to free democracy and the market from the grip of the Wall Street–Washington axis would seem a naive fantasy if not for the fact that we live in a unique historical time in which seemingly impossible transformations of unjust and deeply destructive relationships of power can and do occur on a global scale with heartening speed and regularity.

  * * *

  WITNESS TO HISTORY

  My belief that an economic restructuring of the magnitude I am proposing is possible reflects my experience with the transformative power of social movements.

  In my early youth, I rode a bus in Miami in which “colored” people were confined to the last rows. It was beyond imagination that I would live to witness whites weeping tears of joy over the landslide election of a black president.

  Fran, my wife, was warned by her father when she went off to college that if her grades were too high, no man would marry her. She had a straight-A average when I met her. I married her anyway — a smart choice, as it turned out — but assumed without question that she would follow me without complaint and subordinate her career to mine. Years later, she was the primary wage earner and I happily and productively followed her path from the United States to Asia and back again, fashioning my career to fit hers.

  In 1994, when I was writing When Corporations Rule the World,corporations were acting with impunity to circumvent democracy and consolidate their power, using trade agreements to rewrite the rules of global commerce. There was little public awareness that trade agreements were an issue, and seemingly little interest in them. In 1999, a historic Seattle protest brought the powerful World Trade Organization to its knees in a shock from which it never recovered.

  * * *

  IMPOSSIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS

  An advantage of reaching my elder years in this historically unique time is that I have experienced many such transformations and have seen, sometimes firsthand, how committed groups shape and accelerate them. My lifetime has spanned the liberation of India from rule by the powerful British Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the People Power Revolution that brought down the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. All came quickly and were achieved through largely peaceful means.

  From my vantage point as an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon as the Vietnam War began to wind down, I witnessed the beginning of the defeat of the world’s most powerful military, by decidedly violent means, by an ill-equipped, ragtag army of Vietnamese peasants. From that experience I learned that attempting to resist the will of a determined people is futile, no matter how many guns and how much money you have at your disposal.

  I have also been witness to the dramatic changes wrought by the great social movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, including the civil rights, women’s, and environmental movements.

  GLOBALIZED PEOPLE POWER

  Most of all, my sense of our human potential to choose our future through conscious collective action comes from my involvement in the resistance against corporate globalization that gave birth to global civil society. The organized resistance began with a few small conversations in the early 1990s. It announced itself to the world with the historic Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999. It mobilized millions of people in subsequent protests wherever corporate elites met with national political leaders and bureaucrats to negotiate away the people’s rights,1 and it stalled Wall Street’s free trade juggernaut. It is the leading edge of the emerging New Economy movement.

  From the beginning, the defining issue has been democracy, not trade, and the demonstrations have given a visible face to the confrontation between the opposing forces of globalized people power and globalized corporate power.

  Democracy was also the underlying issue when more than ten million people mobilized on February 15, 2003, to protest the anticipated U.S. invasion of Iraq. Made possible by the Internet, this protest was the largest, most inclusive, and most global expression of public opinion in human history. A New York Times article dubbed it the second global super-power.2

  Chapters 6 and 8 placed the resistance against Wall Street colonization of the U.S. and global economies in the historical context of a larger human struggle against the violence, domination, and exploitation of five thousand years of Empire. The civil rights, women’s, and environmental movements are all expressions of this struggle. Each of these has contributed to the foundation on which the emerging New Economy movement and its drive to true democracy is building.

  Because economic democracy and political democracy necessarily go hand in hand, the New Economy movement is an essential leading edge of this next phase in the larger human struggle to liberate ourselves from cultural and institutional chains of our own making. It bears striking and informative resemblance to the experience nearly two and a half centuries ago of the early American colonists who launched this epic experiment when they rebelled against the predatory excesses of a distant king.

  As we saw in chapter 8, what became the American Revolution began not with the founding fathers but with the self-organization of an engaged citizenry. The founding fathers assumed the leadership and issued a formal declaration of independence only after it was clear that events would otherwise sweep them away.

  Wall Street is a formidable foe, but so was Britain. At the time of the rebellion, it was the most powerful empire on Earth. Fortunately, the advantage in any such struggle ultimately lies with a motivated and organized citizenry.

  TWO EPIC MOMENTS IN THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT

  The parallels between the independence movement that liberated thirteen colonies on the east coast of what is now the United States and the efforts of those seeking independence from Wall Street are both revealing and instructive:

  As the economies of Britain’s thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America began to grow in their production of real wealth, their prosperity attracted the attention of the British Crown, which sought to increase its share of that wealth through new taxes and the grant of a tea monopoly to the East India Company, in which the king held a financial interest.

  In the years following World War II, the policies of the Roosevelt New Deal created a prosperous middle class and flourishing Main Street businesses growing the real wealth of their loc
al communities. Main Street’s prosperity attracted the attention of Wall Street, which gradually asserted its economic and political power to increase its share. It charged Main Street usurious interest rates and fees; asserted monopoly control of intellectual property rights, markets, money, and natural resources; and accelerated the creation of phantom wealth that enlarged Wall Street’s claims against the real wealth of the rest of society.

  As the threat to their liberty and prosperity became evident, the colonists mobilized in resistance to the British Crown. Some colonists formed local resistance groups, with names such as Sons of Liberty, Regulators, Associators, and Liberty Boys, to engage in acts of noncooperation such as refusing to purchase and use the tax stamps that the Crown demanded be applied to all colonial commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, and almanacs.

  The New England merchant class given to slave trading and piracy had no reservations about evading import taxes by adding smuggling to their business portfolios. When the Crown decided to assert its authority over the Massachusetts Supreme Court by paying its judges directly from the royal treasury, the people responded by refusing to serve as jurors under the judges.

  Other colonists formed Committees of Correspondence, groups of citizens engaged in sharing ideas and information through regularized exchanges of letters carried by ship and horseback. These committees linked elements of diverse citizen movements in common cause across the colonial borders that had long kept them divided.

  As the threat to their liberty and prosperity became clear, the people began mobilizing in resistance to Wall Street. They formed organizations with names like Art and Revolution, Direct Action Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the International Forum on Globalization, National Farm Workers Association, Public Citizen, Rainforest Action Network, the Ruckus Society, and United for a Fair Economy. They organized Internet forums to engage in sharing ideas and information and to unite movements in common cause, reaching out even across the national borders that had long kept them divided. In alliance with similar groups in other nations, they mobilized millions in global demonstrations that regularly disrupted the international meetings in which the rich and powerful gathered to circumvent democracy, rewrite the rules of commerce to remove restrictions on the consolidation of corporate power, and negotiate their division of the spoils.

  The colonists also undertook initiatives aimed at getting control of economic life through local production. They boycotted British goods and subjected merchants who failed to honor the boycott to public humiliation. Artisans and laborers refused to participate in building military fortifications for the British. Women played a particularly crucial role by organizing Daughters of Liberty committees to produce substitutes for imported products.

  Local Main Street businesses, workers, and consumers under took initiatives aimed at getting control of economic life through local production and the patronage of local business. They organized farmers’ markets, food co-ops, “local first” campaigns, local investment funds and credit unions, and consumer boycotts of big-box stores and the products of corporations that harm the environment and pay substandard wages. Local businesses formed national alliances like the American Independent Business Alliance, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and Transition Towns. Local chambers of commerce disaffiliated from the corporate-dominated national Chamber of Commerce and joined these new alliances. New organizations like Americans for Financial Reform, the New Economy Network, the New Economy Working Group, and a New Way Forward formed to mobilize popular support for new rules to break up the big banks and hold financial institutions accountable to the public interest.

  You get the picture.

  A TRIBUTE TO HUMAN POSSIBILITY

  Both of these historic resistance movements demonstrate the enormous and often-unnoted human capacity to organize in causes larger than the self-interest of any given individual. They accomplished everything reported here without establishment leadership, support, or sanction. There were many organizations, but the movement that brought them together had no organization charts and no central budgets. There were only thousands of leaders — millions, in the case of global civil society.

  The organizing accomplishments of the colonists are all the more remarkable given their inauspicious circumstances. They had neither motor vehicles nor any form of electronic communication. Their speediest means of communication was a rider on a fast horse.

  The colonists who pulled it off were themselves a generally scruffy and unruly lot unburdened by an excess of formal education. The earliest colonial settlements were operated as privately owned company estates ruled by overseers accountable to British investors. Many of the subsequent settlements were organized as parishes ruled as theocracies by preachers who taught that democracy is contrary to the will of God.

  Many settlers were misfits and criminals forcibly shipped from England by a government eager to be rid of them, debtors escaping their debts, and rogues who came to seek their fortune by any means. The colonial economies depended on slaves and bonded labor, and the family structure placed women in a condition of indentured servitude. The lands the colonies occupied were acquired by genocide, and their social structures embodied deep racial and class divisions.

  Precious little beyond a shared antipathy to British taxes and corporate monopolies bound the people together. Nothing in their experience hinted at their potential to organize a radically democratic self-organizing social movement. Yet organize they did. Through dialogue and participation in acts of resistance, they awakened to possibilities long denied, mobilized to walk away from their king, and created a new political reality that changed the course of human history. In the process, they invented the arts of democracy through their practice.

  The historian Roger Wilkins named the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence the most important in U.S. history. In addition to drawing attention to the reality that we learn democracy only through its practice, his words are a guide to those who would ask in our time, “What can I do?”

  The stunning achievements of the 1765–1775 period were not only instances of resistance to specific obnoxious acts of the British government but also key stages in the development of a continental revolutionary consciousness and impulse toward self-government, as well as the creation of the rudimentary instruments to carry out those purposes. . . .

  All of the practices and arts of politics were deployed in that fruitful decade. The colonists paid careful attention to public affairs. They spent time alone exploring and honing their opinions on important issues by reading history and philosophy as well as the latest correspondence, dispatches, and political tracts. They thought hard about what was occurring and consulted with others in order to inform and sharpen their views. They became involved in local and colonial politics by standing for office and putting for ward proposals for action. When necessary — when, for example, colonial legislatures were disbanded, or when new instruments for protest and self-governance were required — they crafted appropriate new mechanisms. But most of all they thought, talked, debated, listened to one another, wrote, and created in ever-widening circles. All the while, their activities were fraught with great personal, political, and financial risk.3

  The experiences that birthed the phenomenon of global civil society have had the same quality and serve the same ends, but on a far greater scale, with far greater diversity. And they are supported by far more advanced communication technologies. They hint at our possibilities for creative, radically democratic self-organization far beyond any historical experience, now that modern communications technologies have obliterated the barriers of geography.

  In many respects, our situation bears a striking resemblance to that of the early American colonists who refused to accept the authority of a distant British monarch and his rapacious appointees and chartered corporations. Through word and deed they created a political imperative to which the political leaders we
call the founding fathers were compelled to respond by issuing a Declaration of Independence and raising an army. The founding fathers acted, however, only after the people had mobilized and a self-organized popular rebellion was well established. Once the people led, the leaders followed.

  Yet ours is a moment of history like no other. The confrontation with planetary limits creates the imperative for a new ethic of sharing and cooperation on a global scale. The unprecedented opportunities for cross-cultural contact and immersion made possible by global travel are opening the human consciousness to previously unrecognized possibilities. Breakthroughs in communications technology have erased geographic barriers to make possible the nearly instant global spread of ideas and information.

  Together these historic developments are unleashing a new phase in the great human experiment in democratic self-governance. The mobilizing political force demanding and driving the transition to democracy invariably and inevitably comes from those who bear the injustice of exclusion by imperial institutions that serve only the few. The resistance to this democratizing force comes from those who enjoy the privilege that imperial institutions afford them and from those who find comfort in the promise of certainty and security these institutions make to those whose acquiescence they seek.

  Would-be reformers who work within the halls of power, no matter how sincere their intention, face nearly insurmountable constraints. Their inside influence depends on the power afforded them by the very institutions they seek to transform. If they overtly threaten the power of those institutions, they will be cast out from the positions on which their influence depends. This is a fundamental dilemma for those who would transform the system from within.