Global Crisis, Global Consumption, Global Citizenship

The start of another academic year, a couple of book and journal projects in the pipeline, and running Interjunction mean that blog stamina is a little low. For the next few months, I plan to post one longish reflection every two weeks or so, and otherwise keep to short comments and sharing interesting things encountered in various media.

For some time now, I've been trying to grasp the big picture about the global, comprised of the many causes and issues about our 'global' destiny that occupy so many of us, in media, academia, activism, and various professions. The global financial crisis, the global poverty crisis, the global war on terror, notions of global civil society and so on. The basic question I have been trying to find an answer to is whether there is any coherent, internally consistent sense of the global at work in these different engagements with the global, especially as they are explored in what may be called public discourse (the category of the global has received significant academic attention, but that is not my focus here). The more I read and think about it, though, the more it seems to me that there are deeply contradictory and inconsistent notions of the global at work in the various initiatives that engage with the category. There is no coherent vision of what our shared global destiny might mean either. Indeed, as I hope to illustrate in this sketch, which here can be no more than an outline of connections and reflections, some of these understandings of the global carry with them highly problematic political implications.

One message that has repeatedly been emphasized in the last several years is that, for various reasons, individuals in prosperous societies need to reduce the amount that they consume-- of energy, plastic, fuel, cards, and everything that you can find in a Target or Walmart. The argument, and it surely bears merit, is that the levels of consumption of people in the West are simply unsustainable when projected globally. But that Western economies and the global economy are highly dependent on Western consumption. So despite all the talk about a radical shift of a way of life in the West, consumption-oriented paradigms of life are going away nowhere anytime soon.

Which, I think, is precisely why we are seeing a lot of emphasis on 'smart' consumption, 'smart' energy and the like. Which is also why every energy industry--- solar, wind, coal, oil--- has been on an advertising and PR blitz in the last year or so, trying to build public support that it is the best option, that it is deeply concerned about innovating, being 'smart' and so on.

The problem, of course, is that there is very little information on exactly how this innovation will solve energy problems or bring down consumption to optimal levels. It is an optimistic wager on the future. Which is all very well-- except that it will also be very profitable for whichever energy industry or combination of energy industries gets to be the privileged leader (in terms of government policies and initiatives for instance) in the race for the new energy paradigm.

The same ambivalence about consumption is also seen in the attitude of first world agencies, businesses, corporations, and policymakers toward the third world. On the one hand, there is the great fear that the hordes in China, India and the developing world more generally will suck the world dry of energy (even though one American consumes as much energy as 19 Indians or 10 Chinese). On the other hand, there is an anxiety that unless these very hordes-- including the poor of these countries and not just the middle classes--- start consuming, Western corporations or West-based multinationals will simply not be able to keep up their profitability.

It is a truism that Western consumers are more or less saturated, and that much of their expenditure goes in paying off existing debt including colossal amounts of interest accumulated as a result of credit card debt, etc. It is also a truism, I think, that the kind of lifestyle that large numbers of people in the West lead is simply unsustainable in the long run: it can only be predicated on low-cost goods and services provided by the rest of the world and the US, whether it is call centers in India or illegal immigrants who provide services at very inexpensive rates. For these reasons, among others, the West will keep knocking at the markets or potential markets of the non-West. The paradox here is that even as levels of prosperity in the West are much higher than elsewhere in the world, the West now does not have the luxury of ignoring the rest of the world (and perhaps it never did: think of the exploitative nature of colonialism masquerading as benevolence)

I do not mean to be cynical about the war on global poverty but this is exactly why, in my view, so many projects of fighting global poverty depend on teaching the world's poor habits of capitalism or, to borrow a phrase from the title of my dissertation co-chair, Professor Allen Tullos' book on labor history, Habits of Industry. In this it seems, the multinationals, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs are united: people in the developing world must be taught a lifestyle where the value of profit, markets, and efficiency and productivity are paramount. The fight against global poverty then becomes a pedagogical project or remaking human habits and practices across the world.

And, it seems that participation in the world as a global citizen is increasingly linked to these practices of consumption. To be a global citizen means learning habits of industry and consumption; it means entering into a set of economic relations with corporations or institutions in the West.

Now, there may be good reasons advanced for this position. But these practices cannot simply be grafted on to existing ways of life without radically altering them (I owe this insight to Prof. Ravi Rajan, where he shared it in the context of a panel discussion). The argument often advanced in favor of such interventions through capital is that 'they', i.e., the poor want televisions and do not want to work in the fields, where in an argument based on a perhaps problematic dichotomy televisions stand in for modernity, capitalism, and industrialization and fields stand in for tradition, premodern life, and so so. Whatever the merits or demerits of the argument, it is one where others speak for 'them'. To be fair, the counter-argument, i.e., 'they' are happy working in the fields, which often romanticizes wretchedness and poverty, also speaks for 'them.' The only viable position is to offer people in positions of poverty the same set of choices that everyone else has, and then letting them choose what they want--- TVs, working in the farms, or both.

Given the problems of untrammeled consumption, however, it is not clear how this pedagogical project of global capitalism will define, dictate, or restrict consumption for the masses in the developing world. Who will decide who consumes how much, of what, when, and for what reasons? Will the process be equal? Who will ensure that?

On a somewhat related note, there also appears to be emerging, in the arena of scholarship, a project of rehabilitating free markets by making the case that colonialism had nothing to do with free markets! It is not surprising that these arguments emerge typically from forms of knowledge, such as certain strains of economics, which are resolutely ahistorical, for they fly in the face of
A brilliant analysis of the relationship between the British colonial state and free market ideology, for instance, can be found in historian Sudipta Sen's book, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace.

And, as a thought experiment, a question: one routinely encounters cliches in the Indian and US media about the natural affinity between the two nations, the world's two largest democracies and so on. If India shut its markets to the US, though, as it did for some 40-odd years after independence, would we still hear these platitudes?