HOW CORPORATE POWER undermines democracy

1975 saw the publication of the infamous The Crisis of Democracy – report on the governability of democracies by the Trilateral Commission which argued that democracy had gone too far and was endangering the very stability of the system. It carried the names of Michel Crozier and Samuel Huntington; made respectable the phrases “state overload”; and effectively launched neoliberalism. Some 2 decades later – when communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe – the effort moved into a higher gear. “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard is a rare book which charts the way the corporate coup d’état was orchestrated. It examines the use of an international legal system (International Centre for the Settlement of International Disputes or ICSID) to control and plunder the resources in the developing world, including the overthrow of governments that challenge corporate dominance. Although one of the authors has been a Financial Times journalist, the MSM has been remarkably quiet in its reviews. One of the few journals prepared to review the book was a leftist one

By mid-2014 it had heard nearly 500 cases almost all since the mid-1990s. This was 

the era when neoliberal free market capitalism was let off the leash following the 

collapse of the Stalinist states in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. This temporarily 

opened an era of a unipolar world dominated by US imperialism, which by the early 21st 

century gave way to the multipolar world we have today.
By 2021, the number of cases heard by the ICSID had risen to almost 900 – with more than 

one new case a week that year. This growth reflects the new multipolar world and the growth 

of the power of multinational giants. It is part of the international investor-state legal system.

Little-known legal system
What has developed over decades allows investor access to a little-known legal system. 

Through thousands of treaties, a state gives advance consent to allow foreign investors to 

take them to international tribunals, such as the ICSID. This means that countries that 

signed up contracts for foreign investors were also signing up to resolve any dispute between 

the national government and companies by agencies such as the ICSID – a subcommittee of 

the World Bank and other imperialist institutions. A huge lucrative legal industry has sprung 

up around this system.
In the early period of the ICSID, most cases were from companies taking legal action 

against countries in the neocolonial world. Now, as this book reveals, this is in the process 

of changing. German investors had filed cases against countries in the neocolonial world. 

But in 2009, Germany found itself in the dock, when the Swedish company Vattenfall filed 

a case against Germany with the World Bank’s ICSID over its controversial new coal-fired 

power plant near Hamburg. This change illustrates the growing power of these enterprises, 

to the point where they come into conflict with competing nation states.

The international investor-state dispute system has evolved over decades; possibly being traced back to a conference of international bankers held in San Francisco in 1957. Around 500 of the world’s senior bankers, industrialists, and politicians gathered together and began campaigning for a new ‘capitalist Magna Carta’ to enshrine and protect the rights of private investors worldwide. A key figure at this gathering was the German banker, Hermann Josef Abs, head of Deutsche Bank and director of several giant corporations like Daimler-Benz and Lufthansa. His rise in the financial world took place under the Nazi regime in Germany, but it didn’t end with its fall. Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Deutsche Bank had handled its accounts. World events in this era in the neocolonial world, such as the nationalisation of the oil fields in Iran in 1951 and the Suez Canal in 1956, were undoubtedly events that drove the ruling capitalist classes in the imperialist countries to instigate steps to muzzle democratic voice.

WHY SHOULD THE CHINESE PAY ANY ATTENTION?

I’ve been reflecting on my last 50 years of efforts at reforming public service systems – seeing if there was anything I could add to what I’ve already written, particularly about one of my last projects - in China.

Initially I belonged to the school which felt that the bureaucracy had too much power. A combination of Thatcher, “Yes, Minister” and New Labour saw my attitude swing back to the political system. More recently, the technocrats seemed to have wrested power back – only for Trump and Brexit to remind us that “the people” also have a voice.

The grand old man of this field is B Guy Peters whose The Politics of Bureaucracy first came out in the 1970s, is now in its 5^th edition and is considered the bible on this issue. He has been an inspiration and active presence since 1990 in the network of schools of public administration in central and eastern Europe (NISPAcee) – Politico-Administrative Relations – Who Rules? (2001) very much showing his influence. That this is still an important issue in the region is evident from recent publications such as The Principles of Public Administration produced by SIGMA (OECD) in 2016 and Quality of Public Administration – a toolbox for practitioners (EU 2017).

A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice. Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks.

· But civil service appointments and political structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. Rules were set aside to keep religious and political blocks (or pillars) happy.

· In some countries indeed such as Northern Ireland (until recently). the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public were completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

· The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. US influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration –

· the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform.

· And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country – the system of senior civil servants moving to business was known as “pantouflage”. And Macron recently decided to close the school

It is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing. Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold –

- first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and

- second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees.

Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes in the behaviour of the political and administrative elites. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. The acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way!

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Bill Clinton was famous for his election mantra – “economics, economics, economics”. In similar vein, instead of “best practice”, consultants should be repeating “CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT”

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-power-elite.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/03/corruption-outsiders-overview.html

Social Justice and Capacity Development

Two issues have dominated my life – for the first 20 years what we in Scotland initially called (in the 70s) “multiple deprivation” but which has subsequently become better known as “social injustice” and “inequality”, Straddling then the worlds of politics and academia, I helped shape Strathclyde Region’s social strategy which is still at the heart of the Scottish Government’s work

In the 1990s , however, I changed both continents and roles – and found myself dealing, as a consultant, with the question of how new public management and governance systems could be built in ex-communist countries to give ordinary ordinary citizens in ex-communist countries a more effective “voice” – against the “powers that be”…..

Until recently I saw these two strands of my life as very separate - but I now realize that there is a profound link between the 2 fields of work and indeed some others which have occupied me in my retirement. The overriding theme of my life’s work has been that of managing change – and I find myself in this latter stage of my life wrestling to make sense of the change which seems to be overwhelming the human race

I wanted to put a table here - but BLOGPOST as usual is making a mess of it - so I have had to createtable on my 5 theories of change

I’ve tried several times to pull out some lessons from the rich experience which had its beginning in 1968. Last year it was Modernity’s Last Gasp? Strathclyde Region's theory of change and this year A short note and bibliography on change.

But I haven’t done justice to the period 1990-2010

True in 1999 I did produce few hundred copies of a book In Transit – notes on good governance which I used aș a calling card for my eight years în Central Asia - but this was actually notes about what I had learned from my Scottish and west european experience (it included a chapter on managing change)

And in 2011 a brief Chinese adventure gave rise to Administrative Reform with Chinese Characteristics“ The same year saw “The Long Game – not the logframe” - a caustic paper I presented to the 2011 NISPAcee Conference ( building on an earlier paper to the 2007 Conference) in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats seemed to be making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.

And in 2018 I produced No Man’s Land – journeys across disputed borders but this was simply the notes from my various projects in central europea and central Asia with some initial and very tentative conclusions.

So I have work to do!

Amitai Etzioni RIP

Today I want to celebrate the life of one of the most interesting sociologists of the modern age - Amitai Etzioni may have lived to the grand old age of 94 but I was still sad to learn of his death this May. I vividly remember reading his “Social Problems” at University in the early 1960s and being deeply impressed with his 3-fold classification of ideologies; he was one of the architects of Bliar’s “Third Way”; and, on his 90^th birthday, was still convening civil dialogues on the variety of subjects for which he was famous but, generally, had to do with his lifelong search for the good life.

But it was German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck who brilliantly caught the man in this tribute

I first met Etzioni in the fall of 1972. Having just earned my Diploma in sociology at the University of Frankfurt, I was lucky to have been offered a quite generous scholarship that allowed me to study for two years at an American university of my choice, including travel to New York by one of the two remaining ocean liners, the QEII. For me, this was a welcome opportunity to leave behind the intellectual and political confusions of Frankfurt at the time, where I felt hard-pressed to choose between an academic and a political career. As to where in the United States I wanted to study, I didn’t need to think long. Sociology in Frankfurt was then divided between the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics, the so-called “Frankfurt School” being housed in the former. Experience had convinced me that if I wanted to make a contribution to the practical pursuit of democratic socialism – which I definitely did want – “critical theory”, as it called itself, was not enough. So I sometimes took classes in the other, less esoteric branch of sociology, among them a seminar held by the late Wolfgang Zapf that was devoted entirely to Etzioni’s book of 1968, “The Active Society”. That book, scoffed at by critical theorists who at the time were becoming enamored with a normative version of structural functionalism, was a revelation to me. Since with the scholarship I had the means to do what I wanted, I decided to indulge myself and go to Columbia to study with Amitai Etzioni.

Today “The Active Society” is almost forgotten. It never really registered with the sociological mainstream, for which it was too long, too complex, too much political science, too political I presume. To me, it is to this day one of the great books of the sociological tradition, perhaps even its culmination: a heroic attempt to give Parsonian functionalism, the dominant macro-sociological paradigm of the time, an activist twist – conceiving societies as self-governing rather than self-stabilizing, as collective actors rather than collective entities, actively self-transforming rather than passively being kept in a preestablished equilibrium by nature-like mechanisms of social integration. The book, in short, undertakes to explore how a human society should and must be organized to be able democratically to take charge of its future – no longer to be subject to sociological laws which it has no choice but to trust, but rather to discover and discuss alternative futures for itself, choose between them, and make real what it has chosen.

If this was close to themes in the Marxian tradition – the end of prehistory and the beginning of history – Etzioni didn’t really care, and he may not have been aware of it. Capitalism appears in the book’s index only once, pointing to a passage where it is claimed no longer to be a problem as Keynes had devised the tools to discipline it. All that was now required was for society to learn how to deploy those tools to make capitalism serve the collectively determined collective interests of society. The late 1960s when the book was written were the heyday of postwar democratic capitalism, and it was not only Etzioni who was convinced that the issue was no longer to fight capital but to build an effective democracy able to put it to good use. It was in the crises of the 1970s that the political optimism of the Golden Years vanished, and with it the hope for a politicized social theory offering “guidance” – one of Etzioni’s key terms – for a democratic politics in a democratized society.

Soon I found myself hired as research assistant, to work with him on the second edition of his first major book “A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations”, published in 1961, a standard text at the time in the sociology of organizations. I never learned more on the craft and art of doing sociology than in those twelve months or so.

For those who want to know more about the man, this is an excellent 90 page piece which does full justice to him.

And this 2017 retrospective gives a very useful flavour of the breadth of his writing

In the 1990s he became famous for his commitment to communitarianism

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS?

Faithful readers know of my fascination with CHANGE and my relatively newfound interest in global warming. The two came together yesterday with my discovery of a new book “Forgiving Humanity – how the most innovative species became the most dangerous” by Peter Russell (2023) who has gone so far as to give us a video discussion between himself and his AI clone (!!) about the book. Because its so new, I'm not yet able to download it (which I can do for more than half the books which interest me). 

Instead I've put a link in the title which accesses an article which appears as a 

chapter in the book which is one of the best analyses of CHANGE I've ever 

come across – so good that I've just added it to the latest version of my (short)

 Annotated Bibliography of Change which offers notes on some 100 books on the 

subject. It's based on the concept of exponential change/growth which the 

“Blindspot” article explains 

Although we are all well aware of the accelerating pace of change in our own lives, we find it difficult to think in exponential terms. You may have heard the story of the king who was asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the second, four on the third, doubling each time till the 64th square would have how many grains? A mind-boggling 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, about 45 trillion tons, a heap as high as Mount Everest—far more than most people intuitively expect

If the whole of Earth's history were collapsed into one year, then human beings appeared in the last fifteen minutes, civilization thirty seconds ago, and the Information Revolution in the last half second.

A crisis of acceleration

The crisis we are facing is, in essence, a crisis of acceleration. Clearly the human population explosion is the result of exponential-like growth. Thankfully, it is beginning to tail off, nevertheless the implications for food, water, housing, geo-politics, and other issues are major and growing. Oil reserves are running out because we are now consuming it a million times faster than it was created. Similarly with many other resources whose supply is becoming critical—platinum, copper, zinc, nickel, and phosphorus, all of which are crucial for contemporary technology—will have run out, or be very limited, within a few decades. Yet our demand for them continues to grow, especially with the rapidly growing needs of developing countries. On the other side of the equation, rapid growth in industrialization has led to an accelerating growth in the release of pollutants into the air, soil and sea. And they are being released thousands, or in some cases millions, of times faster than the planet can break them down and absorb them. Climate change, for instance stems from our accelerating consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying increased emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Normally the CO2 is absorbed by plants and the oceans, but we are now producing it hundreds of times faster than the these systems can handle.

We known about all this for some 40 years - ”Limits to Growth” of course came in 1972 but people needed some time to get their head around the message of that book but the definitive warning was contained in Overshoot – the ecological basis of revolutionary change by William Catton in 1982 which cropped up in this useful recent video discussion

UPDATE; Still on global warming, this is an interesting discussion on the excellent site "Plant Critical" which interviews thinkers about the issue 

Does the Internet sustain or stifle democracy?

In one corner we have Jeff Jarvis, the optimist – in the other Efgeni Morozov, more of a pessimist although this article of his disputes the very meaning of the terms used in the debate

I'm currently reading Jarvis' recently published The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the internet (2023) of which you can get a very good sense in this interview which gives a marvellous timeline of the history of print. Hopefully these excerpts from the early part of the book will persuade you that it is one of these rare books which throws new light on an issue -

Halfway through the fifteenth century came Johannes Gutenberg with his Bible and the development of movable type. With the printed book, knowledge came to be bound in covers, with a beginning and an end. Text evolved to become fixed, unchangeable, permanent. Eventually, texts were identical, consistent, no longer subject to the idiosyncratic edits, amendments, whims, and errors of scribes. That is how print gained trust. Society gravitated from collective credibility to that of the certified expert, honoring the graduate, the professor, the published writer. Print gave birth to the author as authority. Institutions were challenged: popes and princes. And institutions were reborn: new ideas of publishing, religion, education, childhood, the public, and the nation emerged. It took more than two centuries, but the industry found its economic foundation with the enactment of copyright law in England in 1710. Then writing, text, and creativity were seen as products and property: a commodity we call content. Content is that which fills the container, the book. Society no longer conversed so much as consumed.

Now comes the internet and the closing of the Parenthesis. Today, as the world moves past the Gutenberg era, knowledge is again passed along freely, link by link, click by click, remixed and remade along the way. The value of authorship and ownership of content is diminished—thus we find ourselves in rancorous legal and political battles over the enforcement of copyright.

As the book proceeded, I must confess that I found its historical treatment of the progress of the book from its birth in the 15^th century a bit too detailed for my taste.

Gutenberg was the early industrialist who brought scale, speed, and standardization—an assembly line—to craftsmanship. He was the early entrepreneur who sought risk capital from his partner, Johann Fust, to pay for the paper, metal, labor, experimentation, and space needed to produce books before customers could buy them. Printing is often called a catalyst of capitalism. In Benedict Anderson’s theory of print-capitalism, the market for vernacular publishing standardized dialects as languages, which helped draw the boundaries and concepts of the nation and nationalism. (“A dialect,” in Umberto Eco’s definition, “is a language without an army and navy.”

Thus one of the most momentous decisions made by the first bestselling author, Martin Luther, was to publish in German rather than Latin, gathering a public around his ideas and standardizing the language. The printing of indulgences, starting in Gutenberg’s shop, provoked Luther to wage his Reformation, and print was the weapon he wielded to challenge the authority of the Church. The book seeded new methods in research and science as scholars no longer needed to travel to information; it could travel to them, eventually providing distant minds the same information around which they could compete and collaborate to advance knowledge. Printing— with the important and coincident development of postal networks—opened the way for a culture of news, information, and debate that, according to Jürgen Habermas, fostered the public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of eighteenth-century England and Europe. Others say publics emerged earlier and elsewhere, but print played a role in any case.

Print stoked the engines of bureaucracies in the modern state with forms, records, laws, proclamations, and other ephemeral documentation and data collection. The book revolutionized education—allowing students to read themselves rather than be read to—thus, it is said, transforming our idea of childhood. And reading, once it became silent and solitary, drew us into ourselves, altering our interaction with others and our view of our world.

The history of printing is a history of power. The story of print is one of control, of attempts to manage the tool and fence in the thoughts it conveyed, to restrict who may speak and what they may say through gatekeepers, markets, edicts, laws, and norms. And so the opportunity facing us now is to use our new tools to redress that crime and pay attention and respect to the people too long not heard. Or will incumbent institutions instead succeed in protecting their past, dismissing those the powerful see as rivals, invoking fear and panic, and passing laws—as princes and popes did a half a millennium ago—to restrict who may use these new tools and what they may say and do with them? That is our choice as we decide what the net should be and how we should use it: to what end?

At this point, the language becomes a bit excessive for me -

Again, what is the net? Thus far, I see it as a mechanism of connection. It connects people with information, people with people, information with information, and machines with machines. What is different about that? This, I think: Everyone can be connected. One-to-many is replaced by any-to-any and any-to-many. The mass is dead. Communities and movements rise (and with them sometimes conspiracies and insurrections).

Everyone will be able to speak. When and if connection is universal, speaking need no longer be a mark of privilege, which is just what upsets those who held the privilege. Voices too long not heard in mass media now can speak by new means, raising fresh opportunities and issues. Who will listen? Will all this talk remain cacophony or can it be productive discourse?

And who can really believe that conversation is being reinvented???

Today we think the internet is a story of technology. That is why, in the coming chapters, I will explore the story of print as a technology: its invention, spread, development, exploitation, and control. Yet the real story of print is not about the machines but instead about what people could do with them, what they could invent—from fiction to essays, encyclopedias to dictionaries, newspapers to magazines, bureaucracy to propaganda.

Fundamentally, this is the story of society relearning how to hold a conversation with itself. The early days of print were conversational in nature: Martin Luther in disputatious dialogue with the Church in pamphlets and books; Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus conversing with Sir Thomas More via the Adages and Utopia ; Montaigne deciding whether he was holding a conversation with himself, his friends, or the world in his Essays ; John Milton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Wilkes defending the importance of public debate in their publications—all carrying on the grand traditions of Plato, Socrates, and Cicero in valuing conversation as a tool of friendship, of learning, and ultimately of democracy. The public conversation was drowned out as media became top-down, one-way, one-size-fits-all. That, too, is a story of technology: of steam-powered machines bringing scale to printing to create the mass market, mass media, mass culture, mass politics, and the idea of the mass. For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions? The internet finally allows individuals to speak and communities of their own definitions to assemble and act, killing the mass at last. I celebrate the closing of the Mass Parenthesis. As for Gutenberg’s Parenthesis, I do not cheer its end. Instead, I believe this is the moment to honor its existence and all it has brought us, and to learn from it as we enter a next age.

Efgeni Morozov comes from a younger generation and has a fascinating background – with a couple of books already to his credit the first of which takes a very different view - viz The Net Delusion – the dark side of the internet (2011). The other is “To Save Everything, click here – the folly of technological solutionism” (2015), the subtitle giving the show away.

WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/