By Greg Ogle
While Paul Keating was holding his November 24-25 national strategies conference, there was another economic forum addressing the problems confronting Australia. This was, literally, The Other Economic Summit (TOES), a people's summit advocating socially and environmentally sustainable economics.
TOES began as meetings to shadow the world leaders' G7 meetings. Separate TOES organisations have been set up in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the US. The recent conference in Melbourne was the second Australian TOES. It boasted an impressive line-up of speakers and a great diversity of opinion.
At one end of this spectrum were a variety of prophets plugging their books and pamphlets drawn from a tradition of popular dissent. Many TOES participants saw money itself as the problem. Thus, a variation of the 1930s-style social credit movement was proposed with direct, low-interest loans from the Reserve Bank funding government social expenditure.
Alternatively, if money itself was the problem, then LETS (local, non-monetary exchange economies) holds the answer. And if lack of democracy was the problem, then what was needed was the introduction of Citizen Initiated Referenda, or secret ballots in parliament, or a return to local communities. These may be worthwhile initiatives, but this populism tends to ignore more basic social, political and economic power structures.
More in the mainstream, Democrat leader Senator Cheryl Kernot set the anti-economic rationalist theme by noting that politics had been captured by economics and social goals subordinated to economic "logic". She called for policies to promote fairness and greater equality: between members of the community, progressive tax reform; between generations, environmental sustainability and infrastructure investment; and between nations, fair trade not free trade.
Her comment that free trade was the freedom of the fox (transnational corporations) in the henhouse was a useful image. Another memorable quote was that, on current plans, by 1997 the Keating government will have implemented all of the Opposition's "Fightback!" hit list of privatisations.
John Wright, leader of the New Zealand Democrats (one of the Alliance partners) gave a depressing picture of the effects of "economic rationalism" (which he rightly insisted on calling neo-classical economics) on New Zealand.
While he still saw the solution in terms of national government, sovereignty and democracy, later speakers like Belinda Probert better analysed capitalism as an international system. She recognised that it had always been an international and changing system, but she identified the new features of global capital which are driving economic restructuring.
Activist and academic Joe Camilleri argued that the appropriate response for the left was a "new internationalism". While nation states are not irrelevant, we can not simply promote old ideals of national political and economic sovereignty and old national forms of political organising. He argued for regional cooperation between non-government organisations in different countries.
This was at odds with some of the other speakers, who focused on national policy and more particularly on local community and initiatives. Overall, it was a fascinating and useful exchange of ideas showing the diversity of "new" economics which draws from the liberal, socialist and anarchist traditions.
Future TOES conferences are planned, but my reservations about TOES are also my reservations about green economics generally. The focus on "local community" ignores the fact that this "community" is divided by structures of gender, class, race and more.
As one speaker pointed out, preferring the local over national politics would have allowed the Franklin Dam to be built, and the rights of gays in Tasmania would continue to be officially abused. Isn't political content at least as important as political space/scale?
Similarly, much of green economics (and TOES) fails to address the question of political power and particularly state power — except as an anti-people conspiracy. Can "the people" achieve absolutely anything, or does the structure of a system constrain "the people"? And if the national state cannot adequately confront transnational capital, can a local (divided) community be any more powerful?
These are genuine questions. I think that the liberal and anarchist types of green political economy provide a good balance for traditional state-centred left politics with its constant danger of cooption or bureaucratisation (or ultimately Stalinism). On the other hand, left perspectives on power, the state and the structures of capitalism (and patriarchy?) provide a balance for the liberalism and naivety of some green politics. Let the debate (and TOES) continue.