The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the
Twenty-first Century

Susan George

Reviewed by David Cromwell

Pluto Press, Sterling VA and London, 1999
$14.99/$9.99, ISBN 0-7453-1532-1

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), the US inventor, architect and writer, once noted, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody." In her latest book, Susan George chillingly demonstrates just how wrong Fuller was. Rather than being for "everybody or nobody", the planet's future may instead be reserved for an exclusive, self-selecting elite few, while the rest of us are shut out if we do not serve their needs. Welcome to a world riven by a million virtual Berlin Walls.

The seeds of this potential future are with us already. Public resources - civic services, land, the atmosphere, the genetic blueprints of life - are being transferred into private hands. The rising dominance of corporations over our daily lives is increasingly acknowledged - and resisted - by people everywhere, though not by the corporate media that encourage us what to think (or not to think). The ongoing liberalisation of global trade and investment, and publicly-funded government stacking of the odds in favour of big business - using corporate-friendly tax breaks, subsidies and legislation - are enabling international investors and transnational corporations to 'enclose the commons'.

There is nothing new about this. Enclosure of the commons developed as a means for the private control of land, forests, rivers and natural resources which had hitherto been public property in pre-industrial Britain. In England, the process first reached a peak in the 15th-16th centuries when landlords fenced in previously open land to which their tenants traditionally had access for grazing livestock. During the Scottish Highland Clearances of the 18th-19th centuries, people were evicted from their land and many were forced to emigrate to make way for the more profitable business of sheep farming.

Today, the last vestiges of the commons are being snapped up. Even the atmosphere - its cargo of carbon dioxide threatening to overturn the climate system - is being sacrificed to the short-term profit motive of a runaway fossil-fuel industrial economy. Global biodiversity is dwindling at rates not seen since the last great mass extinction of sixty-five million years ago. The world's ecosystems are in danger of collapse. Even smart capitalists must realise that things cannot go on as they are.

So, what is to be done? Is it possible to argue that, paradoxically, "a liberal, market-based, globalised world system should not merely remain the norm but triumph in the twenty-first century"? Yes, indeed it is possible. So reports the secretive Working Party charged with the preservation of capitalism in the coming century in George's deeply disturbing The Lugano Report.

The Working Party asserts, "We see an economic system based on individual freedom and risk as the guarantor of other freedoms and values." Needless to say, these freedoms and values are those of the elite. Certainly not those of everyone else in today's industrial capitalist society who may wish to choose fresh air, clean water and healthy soil; or food grown organically and untarnished by genetically modified organisms; the freedom to use energy generated by renewable sources, rather than greenhouse gas-emitting, pollution-ridden fossil fuels; or the freedom to live close to where we work, shop and relax; to walk and cycle in comfort and safety; or the freedom to live in a society devoid of big-monied political lobbying and mind-numbing media whitewashing by powerful vested interests. It is these powerful interests - they remain anonymous in George's book, though we can surely guess the corporations she has in mind - who commission the Working Party to identify "threats" to the free-market system, and to recommend measures to ensure its continuing dominance. The economic premise of their subsequent report is clear: "The market is the best judge of the wisdom and value of human economic activity."

But, warn the authors, "the market cannot tell us when we may be crossing ecological thresholds until it is too late." They focus their attention on the world's rising population, now just past the 6 billion mark. The forthcoming decades will see numbers mushrooming to anywhere between 8 and 12 billion, depending on the adopted scenario. The majority of those additional numbers will be the Southern poor, all allegedly aspiring to a high-consumption Northern standard of living. But if everyone is permitted to exercise his or her putative "reproductive freedom", with the planet already stretched to its limits, "we could not prevent massive deforestation, species habitat destruction, mushrooming, unliveable and polluted cities, lakes and seas dead from industrial and human wastes; all constantly intensified by ever-growing multitudes, until the entire substance of the earth was devastated and consumed." Even the rich elite cocooned in the North would be afflicted by ecological catastrophe and social breakdown.

The conclusion must be "that global neo-liberalism cannot embrace everyone, not even in the most prosperous nations. It certainly cannot incorporate 6 or 8 billion people worldwide." The preservation of capitalism, given the authors' premises and flawless logic, requires that Population Reduction Strategies (PRS) are instigated - sooner rather than later. At this point, the reader is horrified - but compelled to agree with the chain of reasoning. PRS will rely on judicious and - as far as possible - invisible corporate deployment of the apocalyptic horsemen: conquest, war, famine and pestilence. Conquest we have seen already in the shape of enclosure of the commons.

As for other strategies - consider tobacco. Promoting tobacco addiction in expanding markets in China and countries of the South offers great opportunities for population reduction. Indeed, as the Working Party dispassionately points out, "Wherever markets are rapidly liberalised, under duress or not, a favourable terrain for increased mortality and decreased fertility is created". It is crucial, they argue, that transnational corporations maintain and strengthen their involvement in building political structures that allow them to snatch ever more resources, human and otherwise, "just as they have done within the WTO."

The charade of local and national government will necessarily dwindle, as corporations increase their stranglehold on the planet. "Parliamentary democracy should be seen as a 200-year parenthesis between different kinds of necessarily more authoritarian rule." George's mapping out of a truly awful and yet horrendously plausible future is difficult to contemplate, and yet we must do so - for the sake of our own survival. She warns, "dispensability is moving up the social scale. It's not just the Brazilian Indians, the American poor and other remote tribes. You, your family, your profession, your small- or medium-sized firm, your community, your natural habitat are coming into its sights."

As she is at pains to point out, the conclusions of the Working Party - and who is to say there is not a real one labouring away right now - follow directly from their premises. These are, of course, fundamentally flawed. If not the ecological premises - to be sure the environment is suffering unprecedented human-induced stress - then certainly the economic premises: that all values must be subordinate to capitalist growth and efficiency. Echoing the capitalism as Earth-devouring cancer metaphor of David Korten, George is adamant: "Transnational capitalism can't stop.

With TNCs and uninhibited financial flows it has reached a kind of malignant stage and will keep on devouring and eliminating human and natural resources even as it undermines the very body - the planet itself - upon which it depends." In the wake of Seattle, if you are not sure whether the endgame of citizen activism should be about reforming the World Trade Organisation and other institutions of corporate governance, or simply abolishing them, then read Susan George's The Lugano Report. She concludes: "it is fruitless to ask TNCs to do a little less harm: we have to oppose what they are." All well and good - but what is the alternative to global capitalism?

That there is no clear path should not be an excuse to dither. George cogently concludes: "We are in a similar position to that of the Americans or the French in the mid-eighteenth century. They too were groping, not entirely sure how to get out from under an absolutist monarchy and move to a national democracy; to change their status from subjects to citizens. They didn't have a perfect blueprint (no one ever has) and finally they had to fight." Fight we must, for the ultimate prize is not the preservation of capitalism, but our own humanity.

January, 2000

-medialens-
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