Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence
Peter G. Prontzos
If poverty is not a result of nature, then great is our sin.
Charles Darwin
When almost 3,000 people were killed in the criminal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States mobilized immense resources in the name of fighting terrorism. On top of an initial $396.1 billion allocated for the military in fiscal year 2003 (Council for a Livable World, 2002: 1), Washington added $40 billion in additional spending after 11 September. In July 2002, Congress authorized another $28.9 billion ‘to fight terrorism’ (Vancouver Sun, 2002b).1
Other governments followed the US lead. The justification offered for these expenditures was the need to prevent the unnecessary deaths of more innocent people. However, as United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan points out, every year ‘more than 10 million children still die from mostly preventable diseases’ – over 27,000 per day, more than nine times the number of victims of September 11 (UNICEF, 2002: 6). And every day, more than 16,000 children under the age of 5 die from lack of food alone – a figure that is more than five times the number of victims of the terrorism of September 11. To be precise:
Every five seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies as a result of malnutrition. That is 700 every hour … 6 million every year. The world has enough food to nourish these children and enough income to afford to nourish them, but their own families or states do not have enough income. They die, ultimately, from poverty. Consider that in the same five seconds in which another child dies this way, the world spends $125,000 on military forces. A thousandth of that amount would save the child’s life. (Goldstein, 2003: 457, emphasis added)
In other words, in the year following the attacks of 9/11, another 16 million children perished from easily preventable diseases and hunger – but there was no global mobilization to prevent this holocaust. The word ‘holocaust,’ with its echo of the Nazi genocide against Jews and others, is appropriate for many reasons, not the least of which is the number of victims. Every year, as many children die from lack of food as the total number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis. And this silent ‘kindercide’ is repeated incessantly, year in and year out.
These deaths, however, are the result not of war or of nature, but of structural violence, deleterious conditions that derive from economic and political structures of power, created and maintained by human actions and institutions. Like the use of military force which results in unintentional death and injury to civilians, the ‘collateral damage’ to people and the natural world that is inflicted by structural violence is an unintentional side-effect of specific policies designed to increase the wealth of transnational financial institutions and corporations. While less dramatic than military violence, structural violence actually accounts for far more deaths than does war.2 The number of deaths in an average year from all structural causes is a matter of conjecture, but it probably totals over 50 million – the total in almost six years of combat in the Second World War. And just as in armed conflict, the cost of structural violence must be measured not only by the death count, but by the number and severity of all its casualties.
Structural violence can be both political and economic, lethal and non-lethal. Political examples include discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and gender (e.g. against blacks in apartheid-era South Africa and Kurds in Turkey today; towards Catholics in Northern Ireland; and against women everywhere). The forms of economic structural violence, however, are even more varied and destructive than the political kind. For instance, ‘the number of people living on less than $1 per day – about 1.2 billion – has grown since the mid-1980s.’ These people ‘live in utter, abject poverty, without access to basic nutrition or health care…. [And over 3 billion human beings,] half of all people globally have incomes of less than $2 a day’ (Goldstein, 2003: 456–7). They often suffer a range of injurious conditions, such as overwork (or, conversely, unemployment); lack of clean water; vulnerability to disease; inadequate housing; little or no medical care; and limited or no access to education. A human being who dies from hunger is just as much a casualty as a soldier felled by enemy fire.
People living in the rich countries are also often victims of economic structural violence, even if it is not always as flagrant as in the developing world. To take one example more or less at random, an analysis of fifteen studies, all from the United States, examined 26,000 hospitals and 38 million patients. The result: private for-profit ownership of hospitals, in comparison with not-for-profit ownership, results in a higher risk of death for patients’ (Devereaux, 2002: 1399, emphasis added). One might also point to the thousands of workers who are injured or killed on the job each year; the millions of people who die annually from air pollution in both developed and underdeveloped countries; and the number of people who succumb every year to such preventable scourges as malaria and tuberculosis (1.7 million each) (Results Canada, 2002: 2).
This chapter will explore the nature and scope of some of the most significant problems associated with structural violence, along with the relatively minor costs that would be necessary to address and reduce them. It then considers the forces, especially the Western-dominated global economic structure of neoliberal capitalism, that have both created the sources of structural violence and now resist their reduction. The conclusion briefly considers possible strategies to reduce the damage that structural violence inflicts on both human beings and our environment.
It is impossible to overemphasize one fundamental truth: there are no longer any material reasons for scarcity in the modern world. As I hope to show, we have had the knowledge, resources, and technology for decades (at least) to construct a rational and humane world order in which no one goes hungry; is denied medical care; suffers harm or death from poisons in his or her environment and food; lacks clean water, decent housing, and education – and so on. Structural violence, then, more than anything results from decisions made by people in power. The suffering and death that result are neither natural nor inevitable.
Examples of structural violence
The lives of billions of human beings can fairly be described as ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ Consider the kind of desperate circumstances, so alien to the world of privilege, described in this report:
a pipeline explosion and fire killed 250 villagers in southern Nigeria, as they were scooping up spilled gasoline with buckets …Villagers hurriedly organized a mass burial for 50 of the charred victims, including many who dived into a nearby river with their clothes on fire … Piles of scorched bodies lay near the pipeline in this village … close to the Niger Delta town of Jesse, where about 1,000 people died in a similar disaster in 1998. (Reuters, 2000)
Extreme poverty drove people to take these chances in order to make a few extra dollars, even though they were well aware of the horrible fate that had befallen their neighbors just two years previously. (A similar catastrophe occurred in 2003.)
Or consider the story of Bangon Phallak, a Thai woman who had to confront a terrible dilemma: ‘What does her four-year-old daughter need more, food or a mother?’ As the New York Times reported:
Mrs. Bangon, a gentle woman whose soft face is framed by thick black hair, explained that the family cannot afford both … her husband has lost his job as a construction worker, and so the family earns only a trickle of cash through odd jobs in this tiny village in northeastern Thailand. That money can be used to buy rice and milk for the little girl, Saiyamon, who has become anemic and malnourished. Or Mrs. Bangon can try to save the tattered small-denomination bills for a stomach operation that she needs to save her own life. For now, Mrs. Bangon has chosen to spend the money on Saiyamon. She herself has already lived for 32 years, she reasons, and what would be the point of preserving a mother at the cost of a child? (Kristof, 1998)
These vignettes are, tragically, not exceptional. Rather, they are indicative of the common dilemma of the majority of humanity who, through no fault of their own, cannot earn enough money to meet basic needs. Again, this is not a dilemma limited to the poor. Even in the wealthiest country on earth, the United States, which is ‘the only Western country without universal health care, nearly 12 million … children have no medical coverage’ (Globe and Mail, 2002). (Over 30 million adults are also not covered by health insurance in the US.)
While it is difficult to grasp the enormity of this problem, the following sample conveys some sense of the human dimensions of structural violence. (All figures are in US dollars unless otherwise noted; some of the statistics overlap.)
•The number of human beings who try to live on less than $1 per day has risen to more than 1.2 billion (CCPA Monitor, 2002b: 3).
•The number of human beings who try to live on less than $2 per day has risen to over 2.8 billion (Results Canada, 2002: 1).
•The number of people in the majority [’third’] world who are chronically malnourished stands at over 800 million (Results Canada, 2002: 3). Meanwhile, ‘Despite a decade-long economic boom, every fifth child in the United States still lives in poverty’ (Koring, 2000). (Washington has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.)
•‘Breathing polluted air in major cities is as dangerous as long-term exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke.’ Air pollution in major cities, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, is linked to such killers as lung cancer, heart disease, strokes, and childhood asthma (Mittelstaedt, 2002).
•Over 2.4 billion people lack access to basic sanitation (Results Canada, 2002: 3).
•‘More than one billion people have no access to clean water,’ according to the World Health Organization (2001a).
•Every year, 5.3 million people die from unsafe water (Results Canada, 2002: 3).
•The global supply of water is also threatened: ‘the US intelligence community concludes that, by 2015, nearly half of the world’s population – more than three billion people – will be in countries lacking sufficient water’ (Globe and Mail, 2001).
•Every day, 1,600 women die giving birth, a form of gendercide that totals almost 600,000 each year. ‘For every woman who dies, approximately 30 more incur injuries, infections, and disabilities.’ Poverty alone does not explain this problem. The Cuban medical system has reduced maternal mortality to 2.4 per 10,000 births, almost the rate in North America. Adam Jones notes that the total cost of funding ‘Cuba’s grassroots approach’ on a global scale ‘would be US $200 million, about the price of a half dozen jet fighters’ (Jones, 1999–2000).
•More than 40 million people have HIV/AIDS, and 22 million have already died from this preventable disease – 3 million in 2001 alone (Results Canada, 2002: 2).
•‘World-wide, some 50,000 people die every day as a result of poor shelter, polluted water, and inadequate sanitation’ (CCPA Monitor, 2002b: 3, emphasis added).
•‘Tobacco use in all forms is responsible for about 30% of all cancer deaths in developed countries and a rapidly rising proportion in developing countries … and cigarette smoking in particular is encouraged by the marketing activities of national and multinational tobacco companies’ (World Health Organization, 2002). WHO reports that the death toll from smoking is ‘now 4.9 million a year’ (Vancouver Sun, 2002a).
•‘Most of the Earth’s people will be on the losing side’ of the effects of global warming, according to a UN panel on climate change (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2001). The results of increasing greenhouse gas emissions will include: rising sea levels, threatening densely populated coastal areas with massive flooding; the melting of polar icecaps, perhaps in as little as twenty-five years; reduced crop yields leading to rising malnutrition; huge economic costs; disruption of natural ecosystems, promoting the spread of ‘infectious diseases like malaria and yellow fever as the mosquito and other insect vectors move north and south from the tropics’ (Recer, 2002); and large-scale loss of life. ‘Global warming may have killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people in the past three years and made up to 300 million people homeless…. The extreme weather … has had its greatest impact in developing nations, which produce only 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide.’ (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2001).
These scenarios, diverse as they are, present only a partial picture of the toll of structural violence. Such violence also wreaks havoc, for example, when people are too exhausted from overwork to care for their families; when they are too poor to purchase medical care; when children are neglected; when stress leads to heart attacks and other illnesses; when rising unemployment increases family violence; when more people find themselves homeless; when family farms disappear due to competition with agribusiness; and when people die because the pharmaceuticals they need are not properly tested, or are too expensive.3 Also, when ‘natural’ disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes strike, they are much more devastating to people in poor countries and poor communities, which disproportionately lack both the wealth and the infrastructure (health services, communications, well-built housing, and so on) to withstand nature’s assault. And there is another, more subtle connection between the violence we inflict on the environment and the effects on human health: ‘Almost one-third of the global burden of disease can be attributed to environmental risk factors’ (World Health Organization, 2001b).
The connections between structural violence and state violence also merit consideration. James K. Galbraith and George Purcell reviewed ‘the relationship between various forms of state violence – including war, revolution, civil violence, and coups d’état – and a measure of inequality’. They found, among other things, ‘a connection between two phenomena that intuitively and theoretically should be connected’ (Galbraith and Purcell, 2001: 211). One particularly striking example of the connection between increasing inequality and poverty on the one hand, and violence on the other, was the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. Harvard economic historian Robert Allen contends that:
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank imposed various macro-economic reforms and structural adjustment programs on the country that first checked economic expansion and after 1990 led to widespread collapse and unemployment. (Allen, 1999: 5)
Allen holds that the violence in Yugoslavia (and later in Kosovo, which served as the excuse for the subsequent US/NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999), was the result, to a significant extent, of the insecurity, fear, and nationalism that followed in the wake of the economic implosion.4
The problems wholly or partly due to structural violence are legion, and the sheer scope of the effort required to tackle them might seem overwhelming. There are, however, important signs of progress in a number of areas. One example is the number of children who die annually from preventable diseases. This figure dropped from 12.7 million in 1990 to about 10 million in 2000 (UNICEF, 2002). Child mortality in developing countries similarly fell, from 168 per thousand live births in 1980 to 93 per thousand in 2001 (Results Canada, 2002: 4). ‘More than 175 countries are polio-free’ (UNICEF, 2002), and, while ‘in 1950 about 55% of the world’s population lived on less than US$1 a day…. By 1992, only 24% of the world’s population had to make do with that tiny amount’ (Cienski, 2002). At the same time, however, more people are poor now than at any other time, and there is no reason to expect the numbers to decrease.
Given the massive global wealth that already exists, the amount of additional resources needed to sharply reduce levels of structural violence worldwide is only a small percentage of what is available today. The unprecedented rise in productivity in the twentieth century means that ‘we are now producing almost five times per person what our ancestors produced in 1900’ (Little, 2000). Another way to view this opportunity is to examine the growth of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) over the last thirty years. By 1998, the per capita GDP of the richest countries had increased significantly compared with 1973. In this period alone, the wealth of Western Europe was up over 55 per cent; Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand averaged growth of over 61 per cent; while Japan’s average wealth per person increased by over 78 per cent. For the world as a whole, the increase in wealth measured by per capita GDP grew from $4,104 to $5,709 (in 1990 dollars) – an increase of almost 40 per cent (Lee, 2002: 2, Table 1). These rapid rises prompt serious questions about the rationalizations offered by neoliberal governments for the dramatic reductions in foreign aid to poor countries, especially since the end of the Cold War (whatever happened to the ‘peace dividend’?). They also reduce the credibility of claims by diverse governments that they are no longer wealthy enough to finance the wide-ranging domestic social programs established after the Second World War, such as old-age pensions, public health programs, unemployment insurance, and low-cost post-secondary education.
Paradoxically, increased productivity and wealth have coincided with increased inequality. The years 1973–98, for instance, witnessed growing economic differences among the world’s regions. The difference in per capita GDP between the regions with highest income and those with the lowest increased from 13:1 to 19:1 (Lee, 2002). More dramatically, the United Nations Human Development Report for 1999 showed that, while in 1960 ‘the top 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income (in terms of total GDP) of the poorest 20% … By 1997, the top 20% received 74 times the income of the bottom 20%’ (Lee, 2002). One of the more striking inequalities shows up in figures for 1997: the income of the richest 1 per cent of the earth’s population was equal to the total income of the poorest 57 per cent – about 3.5 billion people (Rees, 2002).
Even China, which has boasted high economic growth rates for many years, has witnessed a dramatic increase in inequality between the lucky minority and the great majority of citizens, such as the astonishing 200 million Chinese who are either unemployed or underemployed, including ‘the approximately 100 million dispossessed known in China as the “floating population” ’ (Cernetig, 2000).
These growing disparities are found within the most developed nations as well. The gap between the rich and almost everyone else in the G7 countries, even the US, Britain, and Canada, has been widening for years. US government studies found that, in the richest country on earth, ‘the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,’ especially lowincome families. But the middle class is falling behind as well. ‘By the “mid-1990s, there were 40 states where the gap between the highest-income 20 per cent and of families and the middle 20 per cent of families with children was larger than it has been” ’ since the 1970s. ‘The long term trend towards increasing inequality has continued over the past decade despite the sustained economic growth … [and] the widening income gap may get worse’ (Koring, 1997, emphasis added). Indeed, by 2002, the Census Bureau confirmed that the situation had deteriorated, and that another ‘1.3 million Americans slipped below the government’s official poverty line … the first increase since 1993.’ Perhaps coincidentally, the Bureau noted that, ‘In terms of class breakdown, only households with incomes above $150,000 were able to post gains, with the greatest losses … occurring at the bottom of the income ladder’ (Pearlstein, 2002). Moreover,
•‘The financial wealth of the top 1% of US households now exceeds the combined household financial wealth of the bottom 95%. The share of the nation’s after-tax income received by the top 1 per cent nearly doubled from 1979–1997. By 1998, the top 1% had as much combined income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings’ (Gates, 2002: 19, emphasis added).
•Conditions in the UK have also deteriorated since the introduction of the neoliberal economic policies of Margaret Thatcher (and continuing under Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’). ‘More than five million people in Britain are living in conditions of absolute poverty,’ with single parents the worst off, according to a 2001 study. ‘Two million Britons reported going without food over the past 12 months’ (Goodspeed, 2001).
•At the same time, the average worker is spending more time on the job than his or her counterpart did thirty or forty years ago, with the inevitable damage to family life and child-rearing associated with longer hours and greater stress. Health Canada reports that 50-hour work weeks are becoming ‘the standard’ and that one in four Canadians now has to work more than 50 hours each week, a load which approaches that found ‘in the 19th century’ (Jones, 2002).
•Meanwhile, in the year 2000, ‘the net worth of the world’s wealthiest people grew 6 per cent to a total of $27 trillion (US)’ (Dixon, 2001).
•‘According to the UN, the assets of the three richest people in 1998 were larger than the combined GDP of all least developed countries’ (Lee, 2002: 3).
Since there exists far more wealth in the world than is necessary to address the main economic causes of structural violence, the real problem is one of priorities and power. Consider that in the year 2000, before the increased allocations that followed the attacks of 11 September, governments around the world chose to spend $798 billion on their militaries (Results Canada, 2002; the US spends about as much as the rest of the world combined). The US/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia alone in 1999 cost approximately $50 billion, and it is likely that the war against Iraq, and the occupation that followed, will cost much more. The amount spent around the world to prevent the so-called ‘Y2K bug’ was in excess of $500 billion – while over $413 billion was spent on advertising in 1998 alone (CCPA Monitor, 1999: 9). Tens of billions of dollars have flooded into what President Eisenhower called the US ‘military–industrial complex’ for work on ‘Star Wars’ ballistic missile defense systems. The world’s richest individual, Bill Gates, was worth over $58 billion in 2001.
Contrast these expenditures with the relatively tiny amounts that would be required to reduce levels of structural violence drastically. For instance, the annual additional cost of providing basic education, healthcare, food, and safe water for all of the world’s people by 2015 is estimated at a paltry $38 billion. The annual cost to provide reproductive care for all women is less than a third of that sum – $12 billion. The total cost of providing vaccines to every child and preventing the 3 million ‘children who die from vaccine-preventable deaths each year’ would be $1.3 billion (Results Canada, 2002: 1, 4). In the real world of globalizing neoliberalism, however, between 1982 and 1999, there was ‘a net transfer of $1.5 trillion from South to North.’ (McQuaig, 1999: 9, emphasis in original). ‘Meanwhile, in the year 2000, the total value of goods and services produced globally was measured at a staggering $44 trillion (Goldstein, 2003: 19). Finally, British biologists estimate that, while the money ‘needed to protect and preserve the world’s natural ecosystems’ is around US$300 billion per year, the amount spent by governments subsidizing environmentally hazardous activities is ‘up to $1,450 billion per year’ (Report on Business, 2000).
What is to be done?
For supporters of capitalist ‘globalization,’ the key to reducing inequality is for governments to get out of the way and allow market forces to create greater economic growth. This, in turn, will lead to rising prosperity for all classes and nations through ‘free trade’ and exercise of the principle of comparative advantage. As one recent front-page headline in the National Post boldly proclaimed: ‘Globalization cures poverty’ (Cienski, 2002).
While there are, of course, many definitions of ‘globalization,’ the dominant ideological paradigm is neoliberalism. ‘At its core, the neoliberal approach is straightforward: simply let the market operate, get the state out of the way, privatize all the institutions you can, and leave everything to corporations and individuals interacting through the marketplace’ (Langdon, 1999: 39). In this view, neo-liberal capitalism and ‘free trade’ are the ingredients not only for economic development, but for the establishment of freedom and democracy. Many years ago, the Nobel prizewinning US economist (and ‘father’ of neoliberalism), Milton Friedman, wrote that the ‘kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom.’ Friedman argued that there is no alternative to ‘market democracies’ (Bill Clinton’s phrase), since, in his view:
Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals – the technique of the market place. (Friedman, 1962: 13)
If it is true that the only alternative to capitalism is the ‘modern totalitarian state’ (e.g. the former Soviet Union and present-day North Korea), then there is no real choice at all, and perhaps we truly have arrived at the ‘end of history.’ To back up these claims, neoliberals point to significant improvements in human welfare, noted above. There are, however, a number of reasons, both historical and theoretical, to doubt the core propositions of global capitalism. The starting point for any honest evaluation of the system of private ownership of the means of production is the world capitalist system. It would be a distortion, for example, only to consider the prosperity of the wealthy core areas of the ‘North,’ while ignoring the less congenial conditions in the poor periphery of the South. The persistence of the extreme and growing inequalities outlined above, as well as the grinding poverty that afflicts the majority people in the world, cast serious and perhaps fatal doubt on the efficacy of the market as a long-term solution. Thus, while the percentage of the world’s population who try to survive on less than US$1 per day has decreased, the total number of people living in absolute poverty has continued to rise. Given the failure of global capitalism over the past two hundred years to fulfill its promise of prosperity for most people under its domination, it takes a monumental leap of faith to believe that the future will bring a profound change for the better. More importantly, one might question whether it is right for those of us who are relatively well off to expect today’s victims of structural violence to wait patiently in the hope that, decades from now, prosperity might at long last ‘trickle down’ to them; that their grandchildren might not die from malnutrition or preventable disease, and might live long enough to enjoy the ‘privileges’ (safe and sufficient food, medical care, education) that only a minority now enjoys. James Laxer has pointed out that
The defenders of today’s predatory capitalism have to contort themselves to make the claim that the system they advocate is the best way to meet the needs and aspirations of humanity…. Capitalism works best for a small minority of the world’s people, condemns hundreds of millions to exploitation and a stunted existence, and leaves billions, particularly in the Third World, in a state of poverty or near-poverty. (Laxer, 1998: 249)
The capitalist imperative to reap profit at almost any cost is reinforced by the necessity to grow or die. Any business that cannot expand and compete will eventually succumb to other corporate sharks that are more single-minded and powerful. These twin imperatives of profit and competition are constant and essential features of the private sector, and account for the growing inequality in the world. Businesses that ignore the market imperatives of putting competition and growth ahead of all social and environmental considerations will not survive. Milton Friedman, for instance, denounced concern for ‘any social responsibility other than to make as much money as possible’ (Winter, 1992: 106). As Frank Stronach, CEO of Magna International, admitted: ‘Profit means money. Money has no heart, no soul, no conscience, no homeland’ (Hurtig, 1991: 196).
Canadian philosopher John McMurtry sums up this central contradiction of neoliberal capitalism as follows:
However many millions or billions of society’s or the world’s human population are misemployed, underemployed, or starvation-waged with not enough to live on, and however life-destructive and chronically debilitating their hours and conditions of work are – a majority of the world altogether – there is no principle, norm or standard in neo-classical market theory or global market practice which recognizes or can recognize any of these depredations of human life as an issue or a problem…. This is because only humans with sufficient money-demand to purchase corporate products are recognized by this global system as possessing any right to access any good – from food to water to housing, health care, or whatever else. (McMurtry, 2002: 2–3)
It is obvious that structural violence could be significantly reduced if production were primarily oriented towards products and services that met human needs. As mentioned, the potential to establish the conditions for a more humane and egalitarian society has existed for a long time. Almost one hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell observed that:
with the help of science, and by the elimination of the vast amount of unproductive work involved in internal and international competition, the whole community could be kept in comfort by means of four hours work a day…. We may assume that there would no longer be unproductive labour spent on armaments … advertisements, [and] costly luxuries for the very rich. (Russell, 1977: 143, 152)
In other words, poverty, the loss of opportunity for individual development, and the lack of free time, in both richer and poorer countries, are utterly unnecessary. The problem of global hunger exemplifies the paradox: ‘food production is not determined necessarily by the global need for food, it is determined by the market for food, that is how many people have the means to pay for it,’ in the words of Richard Robbins. He concludes ‘that the poverty that causes hunger is a consequence of global economic forces, such as the financial debt that peripheral countries accumulated’ (Robbins, 2002: 172, 193). Hunger and poverty, then, result from the choices that some people have the power to make. They are neither natural nor necessary. Instead, as Murray Bookchin pointed out in 1971, we have the potential to become a ‘post-scarcity’ global community:
Until very recently, human society developed around the brute issues posed by unavoidable material scarcity…. The great historic splits that destroyed early organic societies … had their origins in the problems of survival, in problems that involved the mere maintenance of human existence. Material scarcity provided the historic rationale for the development of the patriarchal family, private property, class domination, and the state…. We in this century have finally opened the prospect of material abundance for all to enjoy – sufficiency in the means of life without the need for grinding, day-to-day toil…. [However] … the word ‘post-scarcity’ means fundamentally more than a mere abundance of the means of life: it decidedly includes the kind of life these means support. The human relationships and psyche of the individual in a post-scarcity society must fully reflect the freedom, security and self-expression that this abundance makes possible. (Bookchin, 1977: 9–10)
Such a social reconstruction will not happen, in Bookchin’s view, as long as the great majority of people have little or no power – political, social, and economic – to ensure that their needs are met. As long as political and economic elites are allowed to set priorities that protect and enhance their own profits and power, significant change to remedy problems with both the global political economy and the environment will be impossible. The alternative to elite domination is authentic democracy embracing all aspects of social, political, and economic life. I stress economic democracy because, without control of the means of production, of their own labor power, and of the means to sustain themselves and their communities, a majority of citizens will find it difficult to resist those who do control the means of life. The power that flows directly from this wealth, such as backing for friendly politicians and political parties and control over the mass media, gives the ‘power elite’ an undemocratic advantage in ensuring that their ambitions for even greater wealth and power receive priority. That is why the struggle for democracy has always been a struggle against the power of wealth. Looked at in another way, ‘Democracy is the most powerful tool for social change history has ever seen’ (Rebick, 2000: 43).
The same lack of substantial democracy confronts those seeking to protect our natural environment. Is there a fundamental flaw in an economic system, the only goal of which is the accumulation of private profit, while objectives like protecting the biosphere must always be secondary and derivative? Is it a coincidence that those interests that most strongly oppose meaningful attempts to reduce global warming through the reduction of greenhouse gases are the very same businesses that profit the most from the wasteful burning of fossil fuels? The global water supply is the next major target of transnationals. This essential resource, according to Fortune magazine, ‘promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations’ (Barlow and Clarke, 2002: 104). Seizing control of water supplies in both industrial countries (e.g. Britain) and poor countries (e.g. Bolivia) is already causing massive problems and even deaths, as residents fight to preserve their access to water (Palast, 2002). Meanwhile, the accelerating destruction of the earth’s natural habitat is one reason why ‘[o]ne in eight of the world’s bird species and one in four of its mammals are threatened with extinction’ (Read, 2002). In particular, ‘[e]very single species and subspecies of great ape on the planet now teeters on the edge of dying out, part of the acceleration of the dinosaur-style mass extinction now under way’ (Mitchell, 2002).
The major sources of these problems, once again, are the neoliberal dogmas that now dominate the global economy. Peter Victor of York University writes:
Conventional economics either ignores the environment or treats it as an appendage to the economy…. In ecological economics, the economy is seen as a subsystem of society, which, in turn, is a subsystem of the biosphere. Climate change is just one example of what happens when economies operate as if the other systems to which they are related do not matter. (Victor, 2002)
Dr William Rees of the University of British Columbia argues that two unsustainable economic myths are driving us towards social and environmental disaster. One is the belief that we can achieve unlimited economic expansion through liberalized trade without irrevocably damaging the biosphere. Rees contends that it is logically impossible to have infinite economic growth in a finite environment, and that orthodox neoliberal economic theory fails to factor in both the economic contribution to economies that derive from the natural world, on the one hand, and the harm being inflicted upon the environment, on the other. Capitalism treats nature as an infinite resource and an infinite garbage dump. Its only value, as Locke wrote, is as a source of economic utility. The late Ralph Miliband summed up the reasons for capitalism’s obsession with profit and lack of concern for any other values: ‘Capitalism is above all about private profit; and this … is not compatible with a good life for all. For capitalism is essentially driven by the micro-rationality of the firm, not by the macro-rationality required by society’ (Miliband, 1994: 12–13). Paradoxically, the micro-rationality of the firm and of the market can only be sustained by its supposed nemesis, the state. For instance, the Earth Council recently estimated that ‘in four sectors alone – water, energy, transport and agriculture – more than $700 billion dollars a year is spent on subsidizing practices that are environmentally and socially damaging’ (Strong, 2000). Merely ending such illiberal practices would benefit humanity and the environment, while a fraction of that wealth, redirected to human needs, could fuel progress that would border on the miraculous.
Rees also takes issue with the liberal notion that maximizing one’s utilities – that is, owning more things and acquiring more wealth – is the only measure of personal well-being. In his view, once a certain point of material satisfaction is reached, the focus on amassing greater wealth results in diminishing returns. In addition, the pathological drive to have more and more ‘stuff’ undermines other values that contribute significantly to one’s well-being, such as clean air, time for family and friends, safe streets, lower stress, learning, enjoying the natural world, and so on.
For Bookchin, ‘the idea of dominating nature is not inherent in the human species’ but springs largely from the ‘domination of human by human,’ which developed in conditions of economic scarcity even before the rise of distinct economic classes (Bookchin, 1999, Overview). Specifically, he believes that any
attempt to solve the environmental crisis within a bourgeois framework must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life, a law which Marx pungently summarized in the phrase, ‘production for the sake of production.’ (Bookchin, 1971: 16)
James O’Connor is a socialist who has written extensively on the connections between the global political economy and the environment, and the intimate connections between crises in both spheres. He points out that
the vitality of Western capitalism since World War II has been based on the massive externalization of the social and ecological costs of production. Since the slowdown of world economic growth in the mid-1970s, the concerns of both socialism and ecology have become more pressing than ever before…. The accumulation of global capital … has produced ever more devastating effects, not only on wealth and income distribution … but also on the environment…. Given the relatively slow rate of growth of worldwide market demand since the mid-1970s, capitalist enterprises have been less able to defend or restore profits by expanding their markets and selling more commodities…. Instead, global capitalism has attempted to rescue itself from its deepening crisis by cutting costs, raising the rate of exploitation of labour, and depleting and exhausting resources. (O’Connor, 1993: 20–21)
While Adam Smith could not foresee, in the late 1700s, the degree to which the natural world would be threatened by industrial capitalism, he did object to the negative effects that unrestrained economic greed, and especially the division of labor, were already having on most workers:
The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments [so that] the man whose life is spent performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding … and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be…. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall unless government takes pains to prevent it. (Cited in Chomsky, 1993)
Smith had it right, even for poor countries. For instance, in 2001, Kofi Annan praised the Cuban model, saying that it ‘demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if they focus on the right priorities – health, education and literacy’ (quoted in Deen, 2000). Looking north, a study in the British Medical Journal that compared death rates in Canada and the US ‘found that income inequality was a significant explanatory variable … that lead[s] to lower mortality rates [in Canada] than in the United States’ (Koch, 2000). A more recent report by Statistics Canada confirmed this important conclusion, finding ‘that the difference in lifespan between low-income and high-income Canadians has declined significantly since 1971 … the year universal medicare … was put into place across the country…. Analysts said other programs aimed at creating income equity and improving early childhood development have also helped.’ Interestingly, one of the authors pointed out that ‘the life expectancy in our poorest neighbourhoods is still higher than the average life expectancy in the US’ (Mickleburgh, 2002, emphasis added).
In the wake of 11 September 2001, we have read and heard a great deal about the supposed ‘root causes’ of terrorism. Several points need to be stressed. First, the self-serving position of the Bush administration, that the source of terror is simply ‘evildoers’ who hate freedom and democracy, is too farcical to merit serious comment. Second, religious fanaticism, inequality, poverty, and misery are not the only sources of terror. The frequent and bloody use of military force by the United States not only outrages many throughout the world; Washington’s resort to force is seen as a model – a way for terrorists to ‘justify’ their own depredations. As ‘unrealistic’ as it sounds, suppose that the United States (and the other G7 nations), in the aftermath of 11 September, had honestly pledged to provide additional billions of dollars in real development aid to the world’s poor, to open up their markets, and to take other steps to tackle poverty, instead of increasing military spending and attacking other countries. Which course would most likely reduce future terrorist atrocities and needless killings? Which course would be more ethical?
Third, as many of the case studies in this book demonstrate, the United States itself has been one of the most significant perpetrators of terrorism – from the crimes against native peoples in the republic’s early days, through to more contemporary actions, such as its ardent support for a host of brutal client states and allies (including, until 1990, Saddam Hussein); its terrorist attacks and economic embargo against Cuba (‘economic genocide,’ according to Pope John Paul II); the slaughter of over 3 million people in Vietnam; the bombing of Yugoslavia, and so on. Such policies, along with the Bush doctrine of permanent US global military dominance and unilateral ‘preventive’ war, more than justify Nelson Mandela’s claim that ‘the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace’ (Globe and Mail, 2002). As US policy towards Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and many other nations has demonstrated, Washington will not tolerate independent governments which put the needs of their own citizens ahead of US corporate and political interests.
Globalizing greed
Today, ‘globalization’ is ‘largely about establishing global rules that act as a constitution for investor rights, and which are beyond any parliamentary challenges’ (Gindin, 2002: 1). These rules are embodied in the neoliberal institutions of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and scores of similar bodies. ‘They are,’ in the opinion of Greg Palast, ‘interchangeable masks of a single governance system’ (Palast, 2002: 53). While other rich nations exert influence in these forums, it is indisputable that the United States dominates them, and uses them to proclaim and reinforce the ideology appropriately known as the ‘Washington Consensus.’ The result has been the fortifying of a global economic system that is in essence an international casino, wherein a relative handful of gamblers (investors) undermine economies and destroy environments in their ceaseless quest for profit. For all the talk about democracy and human rights, there is only one right that is sacred to global investors: ‘to put it crudely but accurately … the primary concern of US foreign policy is to guarantee the freedom to rob and to exploit’ (Chomsky, 1987: 7). Workers are robbed of the value that they have created with their own time and sweat and talent in order to enrich foreign (and sometimes domestic) investors. Thus, every dollar that goes to a Nike stockholder is a dollar not paid to a Nike worker in Indonesia or China, and this zero-sum relationship dooms the worker to a life with little opportunity or hope.
This sort of economic relationship, that of appropriating the wealth produced by the labor of others, is elemental to the concept of ‘imperialism,’ a term the use of which appears to be undergoing a revival these days. Parenti defines imperialism as ‘the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people’ (Parenti, 1995: 1). Two central techniques of extracting wealth from poor countries should be stressed. One is the system of global debt, which has two particularly deleterious effects. First and most obviously, it drains tens of billions of dollars from poor countries every year, so that money is unavailable for health and education, food subsidies, or even encouraging economic growth and development. Thus, ‘Tanzania’s debt service payments are nine times what it spends on primary health care and four times what it spends on primary education’ (UNDP, 1999). As Palast has documented, when the IMF/World Bank ‘ordered Tanzania to charge fees for school attendance … enrollment dropped from 80 per cent to 66 per cent.’ Even worse,
in that African state, 1.3 million people are getting ready to die of AIDS. The IMF and World Bank have come to the rescue with a brilliant neoliberal solution: require Tanzania to charge for hospital appointments, previously free. Since the Bank imposed this requirement, the number of patients treated in Dar Es Salaam’s three big public hospitals has dropped by 53 per cent. The Bank’s cure must be working. (Palast, 2002: 47)
Overall, 15 years of IMF/World Bank management of Tanzania’s economy saw its per capita GDP drop ‘from $309 to $210 … and the rate of abject poverty jumped to 51 per cent of the population’ (47).
The second major effect of debt is that the rich states, operating through the international financial institutions, use the need for loans to service debt to force underdeveloped nations to adopt policies that favor transnational corporations over the needs of their own populations. This often seriously exacerbates domestic problems, as is widely acknowledged even by advocates. Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) are imposed as a condition for loans and/or renegotiating debts, and on condition that the recipient country accepts privatization, capital market liberalization, ‘market-based pricing’ (i.e. higher prices), a reduction in subsidies for public services (water, food, utilities), and increased liberalization of capital for foreign trade and investment (Palast, 2002: 51–2). The results are often disastrous; the collapse of the Argentine economy is only the most recent spectacular failure. Conn Hallinan, a journalist and lecturer at the University of California, wrote that ‘Latin America’s third largest economy has been derailed by IMF policies that … were made right here in the USA,’ and that resulted in devastation to Argentina’s industrial base, skyrocketing unemployment, higher prices, and an unsupportable debt – while foreign speculators made windfall profits (Hallinan, 2002).
The Argentine case is hardly unique. The situation in the former Soviet bloc nations is, in general, even worse under the austerity regime that has ruled since 1991. Poverty has skyrocketed and life expectancy, especially for men, has plunged. One of the leading architects of the introduction of a market system in those countries is Harvard economist Jeffery Sachs, who acknowledged in 2002: ‘We have squeezed these countries to the point where their health systems are absolutely unable to function. Education systems are broken down, and there’s a lot of death associated with the collapse of public health and the lack of access to medicine’ (quoted in Tyrangiel, 2002, emphasis added). It appears that the toll in foreshortened lives may number in the tens of millions in Russia alone. In a scathing indictment of the policies of ‘savage capitalism’ imposed on Russia by the ‘nihilistic zealotry’ of ‘reformers,’ both domestic and in the United States, Stephen Cohen notes that
the lives lost of perhaps 100 million Russians seem not to matter, only American investments, loans, and reputations…. So great is Russia’s economic and thus social catastrophe that we must now speak of another unprecedented development: the literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country. When the infrastructures of production, distribution, technology, science, transportation, heating, and sewage disposal disintegrate; when tens of millions of people do not receive their salaries, some 75 per cent of society lives below or barely above the subsistence level, and millions of them are actually starving; when male life expectancy has plunged as low as fifty-eight years, malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren, once-eradicated diseases are again becoming epidemics, and basic welfare provisions are disappearing; when even highly educated professionals must grow their own food in order to survive and well over half the nation’s economic transactions are barter – all this, and more, is indisputable evidence of a tragic ‘transition’ backward to a premodern era. (Cohen, 2000: 38, 50, 159)
After a detailed study of World Bank policies, Bruce Rich concluded that ‘the poor in most of its borrowing countries are in worse shape than they were a decade and a half before. The poorest fifth of the world’s population has seen its share of global income fall from 2.3% to 1.4% over the past 30 years’ (CCPA Monitor, 2002a: 19). Unequal economic and political power explain this outcome: Hallinan points out that ‘the United States and its allies make all the decisions. The Netherlands … has more voting power than China and India,’ whose populations include over one-third of all humanity (Hallinan, 2002). The situation is much the same at the International Monetary Fund. Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who served as chief economist at the World Bank, recently specified the interests represented by the IMF: ‘Finance ministers and central bank governors have seats at the table, not labor unions … so they push policies that reflect the … interests of the financial community.’ When it comes to the beneficiaries of structural adjustment, Stiglitz is clear that the bailouts are designed for rich investors: ‘These policies protect foreign creditors,’ not workers, the poor, or the general population (Komisar, 2000: 35, 36).
Moreover, every day, over $1.5 trillion changes hands in international financial transactions, the vast majority of which – between 90 and 95 per cent – is pure speculation (gambling on currencies, stocks, and bonds) rather than productive investment. These capital flows not only undermine the ability of all governments to control their own economies and currencies, but the ‘capital flight’ from poor countries robs them of desperately needed funds for productive investment, healthcare, and so on. With this increased capital mobility, and as ‘corporations move their operations around the world, they pit workers, communities, and entire countries off against each other to see who will provide the lowest wages and cheapest environmental and social costs,’ resulting in a ‘race to the bottom’ for the majority of people (Smith and Brecher, 2000).
Rees points out that the neoliberal ‘terms of trade and of the structural adjustment programs forced on Third World countries are exactly opposite to the policies under which the wealthy nations developed.’ All of them – including Britain, the US, and Japan – initially followed mercantile, protectionist policies, and only accepted ‘free trade’ (in certain sectors; see below) when they were developed enough to benefit from such liberal policies. Rees says that ‘the power brokers of developed countries know exactly what they are doing,’ and quotes economist J.W. Smith: ‘Their grand strategy is to impose unequal trades upon the world so as to lay claim to the natural wealth and labors of the weak nations.’ This strategy is remarkably consistent with Parenti’s definition of ‘imperialism,’ cited above. The effect, in Rees’s view, is that ‘the poor countries are actually financing the rich through low pay for equally productive labor, investment in commodity production for the wealthy world, and other dimensions of unequal trade. In the 1960s ‘only’ three dollars flowed North for every dollar flowing South; by the late 1990s, the ratio was seven to one’ (Rees, 2002).
Ironically, too, for states that claim ‘free trade’ as their ideal, the G7 nations use high tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, such as agricultural subsidies, depriving poor states of tens of billions of dollars in income every year. The industrialized countries spend $350 billion every year subsidizing their agricultural sectors, ‘more than the economic output for all of Africa … “Reducing agricultural subsidies is the single most important area where rich countries can do something”,’ according to the World Bank. These subsidies cost poor countries billions of dollars per year (MacGregor, 2002), and even IMF Director Horst Kohler has condemned rich industrialized countries which refuse ‘to drop “selfish” trade protectionist policies that hurt poorer nations’ (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2002). The underdeveloped world is rarely allowed to compete when it has a comparative advantage.
Rich states promote neoliberalism because it works – for the rich. Consider that, in the two decades before neoliberalism was put into practice on a global scale, ‘per capita income grew 73 per cent in Latin America and 34 per cent in Africa’ between 1960 and 1980, while in the ensuing twenty years, Latin American growth was only 6 per cent ‘and African incomes have declined by 23 percent’ (Palast, 2002: 48). If the government of an underdeveloped country does try to improve the life of its people rather than the profits of transnational corporations, ‘the market’ will make it as difficult as possible to succeed. When Luis Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva, the socialist leader of the Workers Party in Brazil, was leading in the race for the Brazilian presidency in 2002, investors ‘drove down the value of Brazil’s currency, stocks and bonds.’ After Lula still received a landslide 61 per cent of the vote, investors were again threatening to hammer Brazil’s economy over his ‘unrealistic’ priority: to end ‘hunger among the country’s 170 million people … in a [nation] blessed with abundant natural wealth’ (Knox, 2002).
What such neoliberal practices primarily accomplish, unsurprisingly, is the transfer of more wealth to the rich at the expense of everyone else, especially the poor. One result is that the ‘combined wealth of the world’s 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined income of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion,’ according to the United Nations (UNDP, 2000: 82). Again, the phenomenon of appropriating surplus labor value is not limited to the working class of poor nations. In the United States, rising productivity in the manufacturing sector has not resulted in proportionately better wages for workers. While productivity has continued its increase since the early 1980s, hourly compensation per worker has fallen behind. Hence, ‘almost the entire gain from increasing productivity since 1980 has been appropriated as surplus by capital’ (Monthly Review, 2002: 7).5
With extreme inequalities in wealth go extreme inequalities in power. This concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few is inevitably in inverse proportion to the poverty and powerlessness of the majority, especially on a global scale. Those who have such economic power seek not only to hold on to it at almost any cost, but to increase their domination, driven by the imperatives of competition and profit-maximization. Their hold on political power is one key element in maintaining their domination. These dynamics are the most important underlying causes of structural violence, and the most powerful obstacles to significant amelioration of the phenomenon.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the only way in which structural violence will be significantly reduced is if the political economy of each nation, and of the world as a whole, is effectively democratized. This will be difficult, especially if McMurtry is correct in his view that the ‘ultimate subject and sovereign ruler of the world is the transnational corporation’ (McMurtry, 2002: 1), and as ‘meaningful … decision-making is vested in private institutions and the quasi-governmental structures that are coalescing into what the Financial Times calls a “de facto world government” that operates in secret and without accountability’ (cited in Chomsky, 1994: 17). Rather, the economy – and the rest of society – must be democratized through a movement of the great majority, in the interests of the great majority, rather than in the interests of a few. Such a transformation is impossible within the parameters of the present system, as Takis Fotopoulos has pointed out in framing his vision of ‘inclusive democracy’:
Within the present institutional framework, the policy options of the elites (either of the neoliberal of social-democratic variety) are severely restricted. Within an internationalized market economy, the introduction of effective social controls to protect the underclass and the marginalized, or to preserve the environment, will create serious comparative disadvantages for the nation-state or economic bloc that will embark on such policies … In other words, within the constraints imposed by the institutional framework of the international market economy, the elites are right in stressing that ‘there is no alternative.’ (Fotopoulos, 1997: 358, emphasis in original)
Dryzek elaborates on the ‘institutional framework’ that constrains any attempt to make meaningful changes within a corporate-dominated society. In an insightful and nuanced examination of the possibility of democracy in ‘capitalist times,’ he argues that, ‘once in place, the market is a constraining mechanism of remarkable power and persistence. Governments in market systems are constrained by the need to induce enterprises to invest.’ In other words, business domination of the economy – hence control of the means of life, employment, and so on – can check most challenges to its rule by its threat to damage or at least limit the production and distribution of essentials. Dryzek explains that ‘governments typically do not dare pursue policies with a significant negative impact on business profitability … for fear of precipitating a “capital strike”.’ In such cases, ‘it is not parliament or public opinion that constitutes the most important sounding board for government policy but, rather, markets, and especially financial ones’ (Dryzek, 1996: 25–6).
Is there any realistic alternative to such elite domination, the entrenched structural violence that it oversees, and the ecocatastrophe that looms on the horizon? Perhaps. In discussing the global movement for democracy (mistakenly termed ‘anti-globalization’), Naomi Klein points out that while ‘neoliberalism is the common target, there is also an emerging consensus that participatory democracy at the local level – whether through unions, neighborhoods, farms, villages, anarchist collectives, or aboriginal self-government’ lies at the heart of the new vision of development. Freedom, empowerment, capacity-building, democracy, respect, and solidarity are among this model’s other features (Klein, 2002: 442). Many forms of local democracy have been proposed, and some are in the process of being implemented. Some are informal and ad hoc, while some – like ‘inclusive democracy’ and the ‘libertarian municipalism’ outlined by Bookchin – have a more extensive theoretical underpinning. What they tend to have in common, as Klein notes, is a focus on broad citizen participation. This emphasis on participatory democracy has recently been summarized by the eminent US economic historian Robert Heilbroner, who contends that it might be possible to construct
a society whose mode of cooperation is neither custom and tradition, nor centralized command, nor subservient to market pressures and incentives. Its integrating principle would be participation – the engagement of all citizens in the mutual determination of every phase of their economic lives through discussion and voting. This principle would touch on the determination of the tasks each person performs, the goods and services produced in the enterprise in which each person works, the share that each is entitled to take from the common flow of goods. Participation thus envisages a world in which widely shared decision-making by discussion and vote displaces decision-making by self-interest alone, or by persons privileged by wealth or position to make unilateral determinations. It assumes that social and economic equality has replaced social and economic inequality as the widely endorsed norm of the society, because equality seems best suited to enable individuals to lead the most rewarding lives they can. (Heilbroner, 1992: 116–17)
Heilbroner does not expect his vision to be realized for decades, if ever. However, should such a political and economic system eventually come into being, it could well spell the end of the worst forms of structural violence. The democratic and egalitarian aspects of a participatory social order would act to promote a just outcome. They are also the most likely paths to achieving an ecologically sustainable economy, since the capitalist imperative of putting profit before all other values would cease to be the operative principle.
Ultimately, people of all countries will need to unite and work towards common goals. Perhaps Chomsky best sums up the role that can be played by those living in the privileged countries of the West:
The struggle for freedom is never over. The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. … Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here…. And that’s just part of the task that lies before us. There’s a growing Third World at home. There are systems of illegitimate authority in every corner of the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds. For the first time in human history, we have to face the problem of protecting an environment that can sustain a decent human existence. We don’t know that honest and dedicated effort will be enough to solve or even mitigate such problems as these. We can be quite confident, however, that the lack of such efforts will spell disaster. (Chomsky, 1997: 100–101)
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