General Assembly of the United Nations Panel on the Financial Crisis, a contribution by François Houtart (30 October 2008)
Gentlemen, Delegates, and Dear Friends:
The world needs
alternatives and not merely regulation. It is not enough to rearrange the
system; we need to transform it. This is a moral duty. In order to understand
why, we must adopt the point of view of the victims of this system, Adopting
this point of view will allow us to confront reality and to express a
conviction, the reality that the whole ensemble of crises which currently
afflict us –finances, food supply, water, energy, climate, social— are the
result of a common cause, and the conviction that we can change the course of
history.
Confronting Reality
When 850 million
human beings live below poverty level, and their number increases, when every
twenty-four hours tens of thousands of human being die of hunger, when day
after day entire peoples, whole cultures and ways of life simply disappear,
putting in peril humanity’s patrimony, when the climate deteriorates to the
point that one wonders whether or not it is worth the trouble to live in
Asia
ourselves with speaking about the financial crisis.
Already this
latter crisis has had consequences which are more than merely financial: unemployment,
rising prices, exclusion of the poor, vulnerability of the middle classes. The
list of victims grows ever longer. Let us be clear. This crisis is not the
product of some bad turn taken by one economic actor of another, nor is it just
the result of an abuse which must be punished. We are witnessing the result of
a logic which defines the economic history of the past two centuries. From
crisis to regulation and from regulation to crisis, the unfolding of the facts
always reflects the dynamics of the rate of profit. When it rises we
deregulate; when it falls we regulate, but always in service to the
accumulation of capital, which is understood as the engine of growth. What we
are seeing today is, therefore, far from new. It is not the first crisis of the
financial system and it will not be the last.
Nevertheless,
the financial bubble, created over the course of the past few decades, thanks,
among other things, to the development of new information and communication
technologies, has added fundamentally new dimensions to the problem. The
economy has become more and more virtual and differences in income have
exploded. To accelerate growth in the rate of profit, a whole new architecture
of derivatives was put in place and speculation became the modus operandi of the economic system. The result has been a
convergence in the logic governing the disorders which characterize the current
situation.
The food crisis
is an example. The increase in food prices was not the result of declining
production, but rather of a combination of reduced stocks, speculation, and the
increased production of agrofuels. Human lives were, in other words,
subordinated to profit taking. The
behavior of the Chicago Commodity Exchange demonstrates this.
The energy
crisis, meanwhile, goes well beyond a conjunctural explosion in the price of
petroleum. It marks the end of cheap
fossil fuels, which encouraged profligate use of energy, making possible
accelerated economic growth and the rapid accumulation of capital in the middle
term. The superexploitation of natural resources and the liberalization of
trade, especially since the 1970s, expanded the transport of commodities around
the world and encouraged the use of automobiles rather than public
transportation, without consideration of either the climatic or the social
consequences. The use of petroleum derivatives as fertilizers became widespread
in a productivist agriculture. The lifestyle of the upper and middle classes
was built on this squandering of energy resources. In this domain as well exchange
value took precedence over use value.
Today, with this
crisis threatening gravely the accumulation of capital, there is a sudden
urgency about finding solutions. They will, however, respect the underlying
logic of the system: to maintain the rate of profit, without taking into
account externalities –that is to say what does not enter into the accounting
of capital and the cost of which must be born by individuals and communities.
That is the case with agrofuels and their ecological and social consequences:
destruction by monoculture of biodiversity, of the soil and of underground
water and the expulsion of millions of small peasants who then go on to
populate the shantytowns and aggravate the pressures to emigrate.
The climate
crisis, the gravity of which global public opinion has yet to take the full
measure, is, according to the International Group of Climate Experts, the
result of human activity. Nicolas Stern, formerly of the World Bank, does not
hesitate to say that “climate change is the biggest setback in the history of
the market economy.” In effect, here as before, the logic of capital does not
taken into account “externalities” except when it reduces the rate of profit.
The neoliberal era, which led to the increase of the later,
coincided as well with growing emissions of greenhouse gases and accelerated
global warming. The growth in the utilization of raw materials and in
transportation, as well as deregulation in the ecological sphere, augmented the
devastation of our climate and diminished the regenerative capacity of nature.
If nothing is done in the near future, 20%-30% of all living species could
disappear in the next quarter century. The acidity of the oceans is rising and
we can expect between 150 and 200 million climate refugees by the middle of
this century.
It is in this context that we must understand the social
crisis. Developing spectacularly the 20% of the world’s population capable of
consuming high value added goods and services, is more interesting from the
standpoint of private accumulation in the short and middle term than responding
to the basic needs of those whose
purchasing power has been reduced to nothing. Indeed, incapable of producing
value added and having only a feeble capacity to consume, they are nothing but
a useless mob, or at best the of object welfare policies. This phenomenon is
accentuated with the predominance of finance capital. Once more the logic of
accumulation has prevailed over the needs of human beings.
This whole ensemble of malfunctions opens up the
possibility of a crisis of civilization and the risk that the planet itself
will be purged of living things, something which also signifies a real crisis
of meaning. Regulation, then? Yes, if they constitute steps towards a radical
and permanent transformation and point towards an exit from the crisis other
than war. No, if they merely prolong a logic which is destructive of life. A
humanity which renounces reason and abandons ethics loses the right to exist.
A conviction
To be sure, apocalyptic language is by itself a sufficient
catalyst for action. On the contrary, a radical confrontation with reality like
that suggested above can lead to reaction. Finding and acting on alternatives
is possible, but not without conditions. It presupposes a long term vision, a
necessary utopia, concrete measures spaced out over time, and social actors who
can carry these projects and who are capable of carrying on a struggle the violence
of which will be proportional to the resistance to change.
This long term vision can be articulated along several
major axes. In the first place, a rational and renewable use of natural
resources, which presupposes a new understanding of our relationship with
nature: no longer an exploitation without limits of matter, with the aim of
unlimited profits, but rather a respect for what forms the very source of life.
“Actually existing” socialist societies made no real innovations in this
domain.
Second, we will privilege use value over exchange value,
something which implies a new understanding of economics, no longer as the
science of producing value added as a way of encouraging private accumulation
but rather as an activity which assures the basis for human life, material,
cultural, and spiritual, for everyone everywhere. The logical consequences of
this change are considerable. From this moment forward, the market must serve
as a regulator between supply and demand instead of increasing the rate of
profit for a minority. The squandering of raw materials and of energy, the destruction
of biodiversity and of the atmosphere, are combated by taking into account
ecological and social “externalities.” The
logic governing the production of goods and services must change.
Finally, the principle of multiculturalism must complement
these others. It is a question of permitting all forms of knowledge, including
traditional forms, all philosophies and cultures, all moral and spiritual
forces capable of promoting the necessary ethic, to participate in the
construction of alternatives, in breaking the monopoly of westernization. Among
the religions, the wisdom of Hinduism in relationship to nature, the compassion
of Buddhism in human relations, the permanent quest for utopia in Judaism, the
thirst for justice which defines the prophetic current in Islam, the
emancipatory power of the theology of liberation in Christianity, the respect
for the sources of life in the concept of the land itself among the indigenous
peoples of the Americas, the sense of solidarity expressed in the religions of
Africa, can all make important contributions in the context of mutual tolerance
guaranteed by the impartiality of political society.
All of this is utopian, to be sure. But the world needs
utopias, on the condition that they have concrete, practical results. Each of
the principles evoked above is susceptible to concrete applications which have
already been the object of propositions on the part of numerous social
movements and political organizations. A
new relationship with nature means, among other things, the recovery by states
of their sovereignty over their natural resources and an end to their private
appropriation, the end of monocultures and a revaluation of peasant
agriculture, and the ratification and deepening of the measures called for by
the Kyoto and Bali protocols on climate change.
Privileging use value requires the decommodification of the
indispensible elements of life: seeds, water, health, and education, the
re-establishment of public services, the abolition of tax havens, the
suppression of banking secrecy, the cancelation of the odious debts of the
States of the global South, the establishment of regional alliances on the
basis not of competition by of complementarity and solidarity, the creation or
regional currencies, the establishment of multipolarity, and many other
measures as well. The financial crisis simply gives us a unique opportunity to
apply these measures.
Democratizing societies begins with fostering local
participation, includes the democratic management of the economy, and extends
to the reform of the United Nations. Multiculturalism means the abolition of patents on knowledge, the
liberation of science from the stranglehold of economic power, the suppression
of monopolies on information and the establishment of religious liberty.
But who will carry this project? The genius of capitalism
is to transform its own contradictions into opportunities. How global warming can make you wealthy! reads an ad in US Today from the beginning of 2007. Can capitalism renounce its own principles?
Obviously not. Only a new set of power relations can get us
where we need to be, something which does not exclude the engagement of some
contemporary economic actors. But one thing is clear: the new historic actor
which will carry the alternative projects outlined above is plural. There are the workers, the
landless peasants, the indigenous peoples, women (who are always the first
victims of privatization) the urban poor, environmentalists, migrants, and
intellectuals linked to social movements. Their consciousness of being a
collective actor is beginning to emerge. The convergence of their organizations
is only in its early stages. Real political relationships are often lacking.
Some states, notably in
already created the conditions for these alternative projects to see the light
of day. The duration and intensity of the struggles to come depends on the
rigidity of the system in place and the intransigence of the protagonists.
Offer them, therefore, a platform in the General Assembly
of the United Nations, where they can express themselves and present their
alternatives. This will be your contribution to changing the course of history
–something which is must happen if
humanity is to recover the space to live and once again find reason to hope in
the future.