[asia-apec 1183] Anne Else paper on globalisation

[Gatt Watchdog]

Subject: Fairy Tales from the Global Marketplace



"And we all live happily ever after":
Fairy Tales from the Global Marketplace

presented at Beware the Miss-leaders:
Women's Conference against APEC,
Wellington, 19-20 June


Anne Else, 1999


Here in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1999, we've been listening to the fairytales
of the global marketplace for fifteen years. For some of us, they are the
only tales we know. Young women now entering university started school the
year New Zealand's first big global storyteller became Minister of Finance.

Of course, like all fairy tales, these tales change shape as they move
around the world. But the basic outlines stay the same.=20

The global marketplace is a thoroughly Western concept, so these tales are
of course based on Western myths and traditions. What are these tales are
trying to teach us about how to run our lives and our countries?



1.Mothers and stepmothers are to blame for everything bad that happens to
poor children. If they run out of bread, lose their way in the woods or get
hooked on candy, it's never the father's or the king's fault. 2.Poor boys
with big bullying older brothers can make it to the top and marry a wealthy
princess. All they have to do is work hard enough, travel far enough away
from home, and do exactly what they're told without arguing. 3.Poor girls
with nasty rich older sisters will get to go to a ball and marry a wealthy
prince. All they have to do is work all day and all night, be sweet and kind
to everyone who orders them around, always try to look their best, and do
exactly what they're told without complaining. 4.Shaggy beasts and slimy
frogs are really kings and princes in disguise. They may look ugly, sound
stupid, and act like cruel tyrants, but they know what they're doing.
They're just testing you. Love and obey them and their true worth will be
revealed. 5.Old women are really evil witches who have the power to blight
the land. If you are too kind to them, they will hold the peasants to
ransom, steal the bread from children's mouths, and keep the country poor.
They must be made to stand on their own two feet and not bludge off the rest
of us. 6.If a strange man suddenly wakes you up and tells you he is a brave
prince who has just rescued you from a spell cast by a wicked witch
disguised as a kindly old granny, believe him - and help him chop down all
those old roses. He knows what's good for you and your garden. 7.If an ugly
old woman builds you a high tower to live in and says it's to keep you safe
from greedy foreign raiders, don't believe her. She's really a wicked witch.
When a charming foreigner comes along, let him climb up your hair. It may
hurt at the time, but once he's inside you'll be much better off. He will
set you free and bring you lots of wonderful overseas gifts. 8.Witches are
always bad, but wizards are always good. They have awesome and unlimited
powers. Not only can they turn frogs into princes. They can turn one old
sheep into hundreds of young sheep. They can turn cow's milk into medicine
and toads into potatoes. But never try to ask them any questions about what
they're doing. Ordinary people are much too stupid to understand the
answers. Besides, they might get angry and turn you into a homeless beggar.
9.Look around your town or village. If you find that where there were once
many ordinary people living in ordinary houses, there are now a few wealthy
people living in palaces and lots of poor people living in hovels, it's a
sure sign that everything is going according to plan. A happy ending is just
around the corner.
=A0



How do these lessons get put across? The same way as the original fairy
tales - by repeating them day in and day out, in hundreds of different
places - newspapers, magazines, books, films, TV, radio, Parliament,
government departments, private organisations.=20

Make no mistake - these are powerful tales, and they have strong appeal. If
we are to combat them, we need to understand what that appeal is. They work
so well with so many people so much of the time because they seem to offer:





simplicity - everyone in the world is fundamentally the same and everything
can be neatly sorted out according to rules. One size can and should fit all
cultures and communities.

individualism - the primacy of the individual in a crowded, homogenising,
mass-culture world. The more the free market is forced on us, and the less
genuine freedom we have, the more individualism becomes a religion.

order - the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. It's a nice
tidy straightforward world, with no such thing as power or social structures
or coercion.

self-reliance - it's all up to you in this New Age, and you should focus on
self rather than others. You are in control of your own destiny, and you
don't need to look out for anyone else.=20

fairness - you get your just deserts, life is what you make of it, the rules
operate the same for everyone. This appeal is very powerful in NZ and the
US. It's the colonial dream come back to life - honest industry will prosper
in a new land.

taking away guilt - removal of responsibility for others and for the ills of
the world generally. If people aren't making it, it's their fault. Anyway,
that's just the way things are - the poor are always with you, so why bother
to try to change things?

hope - everyone can do well if they follow the rules and work hard. If he is
clever enough and works hard enough, any little boy can become Bill Gates.
Any little girl can become a princess, a Spice Girl - or the Prime Minister.
=A0





Finally, the fairy tales of the global marketplace offer us:





new heroes - the rich, who are just the same as everyone else, except that
they have better ideas and work harder;

new scapegoats - sole mothers, dole bludgers, ACC claimants, greedy
pensioners, bureaucrats, tax collectors, or simply those hordes of poor
people overseas who take our jobs;

a new devil - the wicked witch of the state, telling us what we can and
can't do, stealing our money and handing it out to those who refuse to help
themselves - she has to be cut down to size, or preferably done away with
altogether (a strange echo of Marxism here!);

a new god to look up to - the market as a benevolent, wise, all-knowing
allocator of this world's goods - invisible, omnipotent, impersonal,
scientific, rational, incapable of getting it wrong, provided it is left
alone and not interfered with, not even by democracy.
=A0





Another reason that these fairy tales work is that they were well timed. New
Right theories, like all others, were historically developed. They were
successfully introduced to New Zealand at a time when it was becoming
obvious that the traditional Pakeha consensus no longer worked in some
important ways, and major change was urgently required.=20

But now there are plenty of clear indications that the new prescription is
not working either. It is particularly not working for women and children.
We know this is so in the so-called Third World. But the New Right
prescription does not work even in the so-called First World.=20

Acknowledgement of this is now coming from unlikely quarters, and New
Zealand is being held up as a prime example of failure. John Gray, Professor
of European Thought at the London School of Economics, writes:



"The New Zealand experiment is the free-market project in laboratory
conditions: uncompromising neo-liberal ideology animated a programme of
radical reform in which no major social institution was left untouched....In
New Zealand, the theories of the American New Right achieved a rare and
curious feat - self-refutation by their practical application....New Zealand
has experienced an astonishing growth in economic inequalities of all
kinds."(False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism, Granta, 1998,
pp.39,42.)

Unemployment and benefit cuts are of course partly to blame. But not
everyone is unemployed or on a benefit. Most people who do have jobs are
working longer and harder than they did fifteen years ago, for little or no
gain.

Where is the money going, if it's not going to New Zealanders? Basically,
it's going to a handful of elite managers, or it's leaving the country. The
National Business Review - a paper not known for its left wing views - has
just run an article attacking one example of how this export of earnings is
being achieved: transfer pricing.

What is transfer pricing? It is a classic enrichment ploy by multinationals.
They make their subsidiaries in other countries pay inflated prices for
goods or services supplied by the overseas parent companies. This helps to
bring more money home and also helps to avoid tax.

For example, "Multinational companies are siphoning cash from their NZ
subsidiaries through inflated management fees - three years after strict
laws were introduced to stop the practice." Last year, for example, Grey
Advertising "handed over $595.000 on group income of $4.5 million and
reported a loss." (NBR 18/6/99, p.1.)

Some other headlines that have appeared recently in our press give a
stronger taste than statistics do of the brave new world brought about by
the global reach of the New Right:



"2000 new callers a year to gambling helpline." (Dominion 28/9/98)

"NZ health slammed by OECD...access to health care has
deteriorated...substantial waste of resources." (Sunday Star=A0Times=A06/6/9=
9)

"Teens seek sex work in capital...girls as young as 16...high demand for
teenage girls in the sex industry...Thai sex slaves offered for sale in
Wellington." (Evening Post 10/6/99)

And from overseas:



"Septic sludge put in animal feed, French report finds."(Dominion 11/6/99)

"Russian life expectancy falls from 65 to 57...the lowest in the developed
world." (Sunday Star=A0Times=A023/3/99)

"Plague rat makes comeback in Britain." (Sunday Star=A0Times=A020/12/98)

And finally, for those who don't care about sex slaves or plague rats, as
long as the finances look good:





"Balance of payments deficit impedes economic recovery"

"1.9% of GDP at start of recovery, 6% now...external sector performing
pitifully...country's net financial worth put at minus $89.5 billion and set
to drop." (National=A0Business=A0Review=A018/6/99 p.14)





These are the global market's huge and increasingly obvious feet of clay. No
matter what the theory says, in practice - the practice of human life - it
becomes obvious remarkably quickly, even in a relatively lucky country like
New Zealand, that a global free market is simply not sustainable in any
sense of the word. It cannot sustain either ecosystems or social systems.=20

In fact, globalised markets are so anarchic that they cannot even sustain
financial systems.



"Anarchic global markets destroy old capitalisms and spawn new ones, while
subjecting all to unceasing instability." (Gray, 1998, p.216)=20

Human beings simply cannot live for long in conditions of such constant
instability and insecurity. These conditions are inexorably spreading.
Globalisation does not limit itself neatly to Coke and Nike, or confine its
collateral damage to the Third World. Poverty and misery on this scale in
one part of the city, or the country, or the world, will inevitably affect
the whole. Americans know this: they have been in thrall to the free market
since Reagan. Already, 28 million Americans, or one in ten of the entire
population, live in gated communities or buildings guarded by private
security forces. (Gray=A01998, p.116.) In 1995 a baby born in New York, in=
 the
heart of the most materially wealthy society the world has ever known, was
more likely to die in its first year, less likely to learn how to read, and
could expect to die two years earlier, than a baby born in Shanghai.
(Gray=A01998)

The fairy tales of the global market are even less relevant to life in the
21st century than the old fairy tales. But once in place, they're hard to
dislodge, even when real life constantly shows them up as lies. The
important question is, how are they to be replaced?

I have no easy answers, any more than you have. All I know is that the
current state of things cannot last. One way or another, change will come.
The only question is, who will control it.

I have time here to put up just one idea. I believe women are on the whole
much better placed to push for humanly and environmentally sustainable
change, and to write the new sustaining stories to go with it, than men are.


This is because most women have never been utterly convinced of the virtues
of capitalism in general, let alone the New Right version. They have a
concept of work which does not arise from or depend on capitalist economic
concepts. Instead it centres on the work of producing the future and
preserving the past.

This is obviously a kind of work which simply cannot be shifted to the
market, or to the state either, without completely altering what it means to
be human. But this kind of work cannot continue to be done in the kind of
world being forced on us by the New Right.=20

Women are much more likely to understand this than men are. But now
demographers and politicians and even a few businesspeople are belatedly
coming to understand it too. They are realising that many women in the
industrialised world are now voting with their wombs. Women have responded
to the enormous difficulties of combining paid market work and unpaid
reproductive work, as well as the increasing unlikelihood of getting
long-term support from men, by delaying or forgoing child-bearing, to a
point well below replacement level. What happens to women who go against the
logic of the brave new right world and persist in clearly "irrational"
child-bearing just rams the lesson home.

In colonialist societies such as New Zealand, population growth has
underpinned and symbolised every other form of growth. It has been taken for
granted, just as infinite natural resources have been.=20

Now the most fundamental form of growth known to industrialised nation
states over the last 200 years is going into reverse, with age predominating
instead of youth. We've all seen the dire warnings about the costs of an
ageing population. The fact that among the old, women outnumber men, seems
to make the spectre of ageing much worse as far as the New Right are
concerned.

Today anxious articles are starting to appear about how women might be
persuaded to have more children. (One strongly suspects, though it is never
actually stated, that only babies of the right colour are wanted.) But the
overall downward birth trend is very unlikely to alter; demographers make
much more robust predictions than anything economists come up with.

I believe we can use this fundamental shift to focus on what sustainability
really means - not just in terms of population, but in social and ecological
terms generally. But it can also be used to focus on the importance of
equity and justice - sustainability for all, on a global scale. Because in
the end, we know there can be no other kind.

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