GUSTAVE MASSIAH :
Stands center stage – Countryman mic

Interview Vancouver

18-10-2013

Provides highlights of the key aspects of Neo Liberal Capitalist Globalism that the Alter Globalization Movement challenges and provides brief explanations of why – with attention to the scripted questions provided below that the moderator will ask later in the session.

Globalization is relatively recent, but not so much; let us say 500 past years. From the beginning, globalization is capitalist and capitalism is global as it can be seen with the example of the city-state of Venice. But during these five centuries, there are changes, phases, cycles. Since the 1980s, we are in a phase of financialization. Financial capitalism succeeds to industrial capitalism. The dominant rationality; that of neo-liberalism, is the one of the capital world market and that of the structural adjustment of each society, each country to the world market.

The present situation is characterized as a structural crisis as it is generally recognized since 2008. It is the consequence of the financialization. Social inequality, unemployment, social insecurity and precarity have reduced popular consumption and opened a crisis of "overproduction". The over-indebtedness to maintain consumption has reached its limits. The extension of financial derive markets has infected all securities markets. The explosion of "subprime" marked the transition of household debt to banking debt. The rescue of banks by the states opened the public debt crisis. Budget deficit reduction by the austerity plans is supposed to allow a solution that will maintain profits and privileges of shareholders. People’s resistances opposed to that.

The structural crisis combines four dimensions: the economic and social crisis, with social inequalities and corruption; the geopolitical crisis with the end of the Western hegemony and the rise of new powers; the cultural crisis with the questioning of democracy by discrimination. The new dimension is the environmental and ecological crisis. It is new because the organization of the world entered in contradiction with the planet ecosystem and it is the first time in the history of the Humanity.

What movements say of the crisis? I would like to emphasize on the anti-globalization movement which organizes the convergence of movements. It carries a new political culture: that of diversity, horizontality in spite of hierarchy, self-organized activities, new relationship between individual and collective. These new approaches transform the movements. For example, on the diversity, it is the women’s movement that carried the change. When women fight for their rights in the 18th century, they were told, please wait to not divide the people. When they fight for their rights in the 19th century, they were told, please wait, the main contradiction is social. When they fight for their rights during decolonization, they were told please wait, after state independence all your problems will be solved. Then, the women's movement have said, we are not a secondary contradiction, we will not subordinate our rights to other rights. And all movements did the same and decide that all struggles against oppression are legitimate and will not be subordinate to another.

For the movements, the structural crisis is in fact a triple fitted crisis. At first, a crisis of neoliberalism considered as a phase of capitalist globalization. Then a crisis which questions manners of producing and consuming, that’s means a crisis of the capitalist system itself. But we must go further. In the World Social Forum of Bélèm, in Amazonia, in 2009, several movements, women, peasants, ecologists and native peoples, the first peoples, intervened to say. If the challenge is to re-questioning relationships between human kind and Nature, the relations which defined modernity and which marked some of the foundations of modern science, then it is a crisis of civilization. We are facing this triple crisis, of neoliberalism, of capitalist system and of civilization. And in each crisis, there are great dangers and great opportunities.

Question 1

Gustave, what some view as the neo liberal crisis certainly has been accentuated by global resistance to it, but that doesn’t mean capitalism has been surpassed. So in terms of the structural crisis the global economy has undergone, how are the citizen and social movements thinking through the crisis to act on this opportunity even more boldly?

In every phase, there is a dominant rationality and dominant forces. But there are also anti-systemic forces. And it is the confrontation between the two which makes ​​history. The resistances of the peoples stressed the crisis of the neoliberalism. In the three past years, new movements showed the exasperation of the peoples. Arab Springs in Tunis and in Cairo, indignados in Spain, occupy Wall Street, Chilean students and the carrés rouges in Montreal, Istanbul and Rio. There claims are: social justice, freedoms and democracy, national and popular sovereignty, ecological urgency. They contest oligarchy and say you are 1%, we are 99%. They question the fusion between the political class and the financial class which carry the corruption and the inequalities and undermine democracy.

The alter-globalization movement proposes as orientation, the access to rights for all and the equality of rights. We think that it is possible to organize every society and the world on this basis. It is another globalization. We are told that it is not easy, but capitalism also is not easy.

The alter-globalization movement extends and renews the previous historic movements. That of the civil and political rights from the 18th century, that of the economic, social and cultural rights from the 19th century, that of the people’s rights of the decolonization, that of women’s right, and today that of the new rights, in particular, the ecological rights.

The anti-globalization movement also proposes a strategy: To articulate urgency and structural transformation; to include the answers to urgency in a long-term project. The urgency is to improve living conditions of the people, to fight against discriminations, and to answer to ecological urgency. It is possible with public policies based on general interest and access to rights for all.

Question 2

Jeff,  you’ve written and spoken extensively about the mis-interpretation of the cause of the global financial crisis the world is still struggling to climb out of.

Can you clarify for our audience why you think the symptoms of the global recession get more attention than the root cause you have identified, and how do you think this confusion impacts the divide between a capitalist globalism perspective and that of the citizen and social movements pushing against it.

I agree completely with the diagnosis. The question of the energy recuts all other questions: debt, geopolitics, wars, environment.
It reminds us that the world market it is a rental and oligarchical economy: With rental companies and countries.
Allow me to insist on the geopolitical dimension. The energy sends back to the war. Take a map of oil and raw materials in the world and a map of wars, it is the same!
We are living a crisis of the first phase of the de-colonization, that of the independence of States: on one hand, because of the break between the peoples and the elites on freedom and democracy; on the other because of the attempt of re-colonization by debt crisis, structural adjustment programs and wars. We are going to enter in a new phase of the decolonization.

Question 3

Gustave, if jeff rubin is right and the rising price of oil means economic growth in the industrialized world will halt and contract – sending our focus back to the local economy which will be revitalized in the process – how would citizen and social movements respond and how might this impact the future of persistent wage and wealth inequality and unequal power structures?

I think that Jeff Rubin is completely right. And he opens very interesting perspectives. The movements are very interested in the relocation as an orientation and a strategy. It is in fact an alternative to current globalization.

The relocation is not a closure. It does not propose the autarky. It suggests building another globalization based on local scale, on a bottom-up approach. The local economy allows an anchoring on the realities of territories and populations.

The proposal is in fact of strengthening autonomy: autonomy of  individuals, groups, territories. Let us take the example of the strategy of food sovereignty. It is the answer of peasants’ movements, movements of consumers and ecologists. Via Campesina who groups hundreds of million farmers, the large majority of them are women, suggest strengthening peasant agriculture, organic farming, peasant seeds, food sovereignty. It is an answer to the speculation on agricultural prices, the famines, the rural exodus and the unemployment, the environmental protection and the new forms of consumption.

The relocation organizes the connection, from the territory, between population, activities, environment and institutions. Today, the globalization differs by big regions. For the movements, it is a question of combining scales: the world, big regions, national, and local; By starting from the local.

I will emphasize on the actors of social transformation. Dominant representations admit two main actors able to change the world: companies and administrations. And the democracy which we know organizes the distribution between economic power and political power. But there are two new emergent actors; the movements and the civil society on one hand, the local authorities on the other. Movements propose a strategic alliance between the movements and the local authorities to reconstruct from the local, with a bottom up approach.

Question 4

Gustave, how do the forums see this playing out?

In the absence of globalization as we know it today, or in a post capitalism world – what do work, wages, property, producing, consuming, ecological concerns, taxation, profit, markets, and trade look like?

The exhaustion of neoliberalism does not mean the overcoming of capitalism. The strategy of the movements defines itself with regard to the possible futures and to the conceptions which underlie them. Three are possible.

The first conception is the one of the extension of the world market with the financialization of Nature, the commodification of the alive and the generalization of the privatizations. Nature produces essential services (it captures carbon, it purifies water, etc.). To improve them, it is proposed to merchandise them and to entrust them to the multinational large companies. And for this, to subordinate the international law to the business law.

The second conception is the one of the Green New Deal, supported by eminent economists of the Establishment as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Amartya Sen, often considered as neo-keynesian. It proposes to master the "green economy" and to reorganize the capitalism with public regulation and income redistribution. It implies a confrontation with the logic of the neoliberalism, still in power.

The third conception was clarified in the process of the world social forums. It is the one of a break, that of the social, ecological and democratic transition. It implies new conceptions, new manners to produce and to consume. Let us quote: the common goods and the new forms of property, the rupture with patriarchy, the control of the finance, the buen-vivir and the prosperity without growth, the reinvention of the democracy, the public services based on free access. It is based on access to rights for all.

Each concrete situation will be characterized by specific articulations between these three logics. The strategy of the movements defines the alliances with regard to these possible futures. The movements are not indifferent to the improvements in terms of employment and redistribution that the Green New Deal could bring. The urgency is to join together all those who refuse the first conception that of the financialization of the Nature.

Question 5

Ann, in terms of the capitalism’s core tenets:  the private ownership of capital, free and open decentralized markets, free wage labor, profit, and non-discrimination – how do you see these principles being re-shaped and evolving in places like scandinavia, switzerland, germany, singapore and south korea where success has been enjoyed, and what impact might that evolution have on the future of capitalism in the world as we know it?

Allow me three reflections.

The world market is not a free market. It is controlled by the financial giants. It is not really a free exchange. It is the law of four dumping: social dumping, environmental dumping, fiscal dumping, monetary dumping. It is necessary to redefine a fair world trade and especially more just for the peoples.

In every country, the game is to reduce the labor cost, but we don’t really worry about the capital cost. It is first the cost of shareholders who pull their profits of speculation and not of investment. Companies are not only shareholders. It is necessary to define stakeholders on the place of shareholders.

The last forty years were characterized by a tremendous creation of wealth on one side and many impoverishments, insecurities and precariousness on the other. As said Joseph Sytiglitz, “inequality is a choice”. It is the consequence of the neoliberalism and the movements refuse the approach of Mrs Thatcher, known as Mrs TINA "There is no Alternative". We say, there are alternative, many alternatives. Another world is possible.

Question 6

GUSTAVE MASSIAH responds  (1 minute max) 

 Gustave, in follow-up, why is the rise in power of public regulation essential to the successful outcome of citizen and social movements?

Ann, can you comment?  What are the risks and pitfalls of a heigthened regulatory environment for the future of business and are there any potential rewards in your view?

For the movements, the question is how to define the general interest. We are very attentive to public authorities and to public space. All the movements of the three past years claimed the public squares and refuse their privatization.

Take the last systematic crisis, that of the 1929, and all the others before, it is public authorities which allowed to get out of the crisis. It is the sense of the proposals of the neo-keynesian in the Green New Deal.

It is not a question of rejecting the private property in a general way but of disputing what the property of the capital produced through the dictatorship of the shareholders and the financial oligarchy. The democratic system is the one which respects the individual and collective freedoms and which organizes their contribution to the general interest.

The recourse to public authorities does not mean the recourse to State of any kind. Freedoms and democracy requires fight against bureaucracy. It is necessary to democratize States and to protect the autonomy with regard to States. That is why the movements speak about public and citizen regulation rather than about state regulation.

Question 7

Una, certainly energy is at the heart of the global debate surrounding  the future of busines, economy and society.

As we have learned, canadian oil sands are not a new discovery – what’s new is that they can be considered a source of viable supply.

Can these supplies run at a price we can afford to pay at the pump and what future impact do you see this aspect of your business having on the strength of the global economy?  Is there energy security in our future?

The ways of exploitation of the shale gas and oil sands, in particular the hydraulic fracture put in great dangers the natural balances. It is necessary to see how these methods upset territories and to listen to what say the populations which live there. It is necessary to listen to natives peoples and the idle no more.

The question is how to measure the risks. That does not mean taking no risk. It implies not to decide according to the short term and to the interest of a few companies, and to postpone the consequences on the others and the future generations.

From the point of view of the collective interest, the energy security passes by the change of the modes of consumption. The best source of energy remains the energy saving. It is a very plentiful source.

Question 8 

Last question and your answers must be quick  

How do you think movements underway will shape the tension between a singular market civilization and the possibility of a diversity of civilizations in the struggle for the future of business, capital and wealth?

Movements do not propose the abolition of the property or of the market. The market existed before the capitalism and will exist later. But there are several forms of market and that is the political debate to carry.

It is not the end of history. The capitalism as any system had a beginning and it will have an end. To carry collectively the responsibility of the future of the world, it is necessary to accept that there are other ways of thinking the world. It is the way that women's movements chose.