Social Capitalism

Our world's aging economic system is literally creaking at the hinges, and the signs are all around us. Global greed and ignorance, ably abetted by the disregard for regulation, has ignited a crisis of epic proportions. Visionary author and futurologist, Jeremy Rifkin, examines the labour issues in his excellent book, 'The End Of Work':


In 1995, 800 million people were unemployed or underemployed worldwide. Currently, more than a billion people fall in one of these two categories. The great issue at hand is how to redefine the role of the human being in a world where less human labour will be required in the commercial arena. We have yet to create a new social vision, and a new social contract, powerful enough to match the potential of the new technologies being introduced into our lives. The extent to which we are able to do so, will largely determine whether we experience a new renaissance or a period of great social upheaval in the coming years. The twenty-first century will increasingly be characterized by a transition from mass to elite employment as more and more agricultural, manufacturing and service work is performed by intelligent technology. Based on current and projected trends, in the year 2050, less than five percent of the human population on earth, working with and alongside intelligent technology, will be required to produce all the goods and basic services needed by the human race.

Peter Drucker says quite bluntly that the disappearance of labor as a key factor of production is going to emerge as the critical unfinished business of capitalist society. It's not as if this is a revelation. For years futurists such as Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt have lectured the rest of us, that, the end of the industrial age also means the end of mass production and mass labor. What they never mention is what 'the masses' should do after they become redundant. Up to now, productivity gains have been used primarily to enhance corporate profits, to the exclusive benefit of stockholders, top corporate managers and the emerging elite of high-tech knowledge workers. If that trend continues, the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots is likely to lead to social unrest, with more crime and violence.

Yet, its conventional wisdom that the new labor-saving technologies of the Information Age should be used to free us for greater leisure, not less pay and growing underemployment. Of course, employers argue that shortening the work week and sharing the productivity gains with workers will be too costly and will threaten their ability to compete both domestically and abroad. That need not be so, however, competitiveness currently equates to productivity, and that usually triggers the natural impulse for lay offs. As more and more workers are placed in temporary, part-time and contingent employment and experience a decline in wages, purchasing power diminishes. Even those workers with permanent jobs find their wages and benefits falling. The quickened pace of corporate re-engineering, technological displacement and declining income can then be seen in stagnant inventories and sluggish growth, which in turn set off a new spiral of re-engineering, technology displacement and wage cuts, further fueling the downward drift in consumption.

Today, millions of workers are leased out to employers by temporary and professional employment organizations, the so-called 'just in time' work force. Others who once enjoyed full time jobs with benefits are now working under short-term contracts or as consultants and freelancers. Thus, the second Achilles heel for employers in the emerging Information Age, and one rarely talked about, is the effect on capital accumulation when vast numbers of employees are reduced to contingent or temporary work and part-time assignments, or let go altogether, so that employers can avoid paying out benefits, especially pension-fund benefits. As it turns out pension funds have served as a forced savings pool that has financed capital investments for more than 40 years. If companies continue to marginalize their work forces and let large numbers of employees go, the capitalist system will slowly collapse on itself as it is drained of the pension funds necessary for new capital investments.

With the market economy less able to provide permanent jobs and with the government retreating from its traditional role of employer of last resort, the civil sector may be the best hope for absorbing displaced workers. The opportunity now exists to create millions of new jobs in the civil society. But freeing up the labor and talent of men and women no longer needed in the market and government sectors, for the creation of social capital in neighborhoods and communities, will cost money. The logical source for this money is the new Information Age economy; we should tax a percentage of the wealth generated by the new high-tech marketplace and redirect it into the creation of jobs in the nonprofit sector and the rebuilding of the social commons. This new agenda represents a powerful countervailing force to the new global marketplace.

The War On Democracy

Having travelled throughout Latin America for a year in 1984, the abiding memory of that time was the close similarities with South Africa. Similar societies ravaged by the same third world scourges of poverty, illiteracy and corruption. In addition these countries were also deeply scarred by military dictatorships, equally as venal as systemic apartheid. Much of what we know about our recent history is reflected in the political narrative of Latin America; many of our current challenges coincide and, hopefully, so will our future successes. John Pilger's latest film examines these issues and provides the customary fearless reportage:



Pilger wrote this about the film: The War On Democracy is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".

Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.

The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it. The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.

In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.

You Are What you Eat

On our planet, approximately 18% of the land mass is used for agricultural production. According to the ABIC Manifesto, this fraction cannot be increased substantially. It is absolutely essential, it claims, that the yield per unit of land increases beyond current levels given that: the human population is still growing, and will reach about nine billion by 2040; 70,000 km²'s of agricultural land are lost annually to growth of cities and other non-agricultural uses; consumer diets in developing countries are increasingly changing from plant-based proteins to animal protein, a trend that requires a greater amount of crop-based feeds. Hence the efforts, by the industrial farming lobby, for bio-engineered intervention.


Genetically modified (GM) foods, more accurately called genetically engineered foods, are foods that have had their DNA altered through genetic engineering. Unlike conventional genetic modification that is carried out through conventional breeding and that have been consumed for thousands of years, GE foods were first put on the market in the early 1990s. The first commercially grown genetically modified whole food crop was the tomato, which was made more resistant to rotting by Californian company Calgene. Calgene was allowed to release the tomatoes into the market in 1994 without any special labeling. It was welcomed by consumers that purchased the fruit at two to five times the price of regular tomatoes. The attitude towards GM foods would, however, be drastically changed after outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease weakened consumer trust in government regulators; and protesters rallied against the introduction of Monsanto's "Roundup-Ready" soybeans.

The next GM crops included insect-resistant cotton and herbicide-tolerant soybeans both of which were commercially released in 1996. GM crops have been widely adopted in the United States. They have also been extensively planted in several other countries (Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) where the agriculture is a major part of the total economy. Other GM crops include insect-resistant maize and herbicide-tolerant maize, cotton, and rapeseed varieties. Between 1995 and 2005, the total surface area of land cultivated with GMOs had increased by a factor of 50, from 17,000 km² (4.2 million acres) to 900,000 km² (222 million acres), of which 55 percent were Brazil.

The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimate that 75 percent of all processed foods in the U.S. contain a GM ingredient. In particular, Bt corn, which produces the pesticide within the plant itself is widely grown, as are soybeans genetically designed to tolerate glyphosate herbicides. These constitute "input-traits" are aimed to financially benefit the producers, have indirect environmental benefits and marginal cost benefits to consumers. In the US, by 2006 89% of the planted area of soybeans, 83 percent of cotton, and 61 percent maize was genetically modified varieties. Genetically modified soybeans carried herbicide tolerant traits only, but maize and cotton carried both herbicide tolerance and insect protection traits. In the period 2002 to 2006, there were significant increases in the area planted to Bt protected cotton and maize, and herbicide tolerant maize also increased in sown area. However, several studies have found that genetically modified varieties of plants do not produce higher yields than normal plants.

Some argue that there is more than enough food in the world and that the hunger crisis is caused by problems in food distribution and politics, not production, so people should not be offered food that may carry some degree of risk. Some opponents of current genetic engineering believe the increasing use of GM in major crops has caused a power shift in agriculture towards biotechnology companies, which are gaining more control over the production chain of crops and food, and over the farmers that use their products, as well. As a result non-aligned governments around the world started taking action. For example, in August 2003, Zambia cut off the flow of Genetically Modified Food from the UN's World Food Programme. Subsequently Hugo Chávez announced a total ban on genetically modified seeds in Venezuela, while the Hungarian government announced a ban on importing and planting of genetic modified maize seeds. In 2006, even American exports of rice to Europe were interrupted when much of the U.S. crop was confirmed to be contaminated with unapproved engineered genes.

Enforcement of patents on genetically modified plants is often contentious, especially because of gene flow. In 1998, 95% of about 10 km² planted with canola, by Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, were found to contain Monsanto's patented Roundup Ready gene although Schmeiser had never purchased seed from Monsanto. The initial source of the plants was undetermined, and could have been through either gene flow or intentional theft. However, the overwhelming predominance of the trait implied that Schmeiser must have intentionally selected for it. Although unable to prove direct theft, Monsanto sued Schmeiser for piracy since he knowingly grew Roundup Ready plants without paying royalties. The Canadian Supreme Court determined that Schmeiser had saved seed from areas on, and adjacent, to his property where Roundup had been sprayed, such as ditches and near power poles, and found in favour of Monsanto. Currently Percy Schmeiser spends a large amount of his time traveling and speaking about how Monsanto ruined his career as a farmer.

India, for example, has one of the most sophisticated Laws of Biosafety in the world. The Environmental Protection Act is science based, public interest oriented legislation created long before the commercialization of genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) and crops and long before the International Biosafety Protocol of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity came into force. The genetic engineering industry, in particular Monsanto, which controls 95% of all GM seeds sold worldwide, first tried to by pass India's Biosafety Law when it started field trials without approval of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, the statutory body for Biosafety regulation. That is why when Monsanto started field trials of Bt. Cotton in 1997-98, without approval they initiated a case in the Supreme Court of India to challenge the illegal trials. As a result commercialization of Bt. Cotton was delayed up to 2002.

The resultant legislation proposed by the Indian Government points at a significant shift on this issue. Instead of the current multi-ministerial committee, all powers for decision making will be concentrated in one individual who will be a biotechnologist, with skills in genetic engineering but expertise in biosafety. The proposed authority is thus centralized, individualistic, biased in favour of genetic engineering and, hence, will lend itself to easy influence by the genetic engineering industry. The Indian public cannot have confidence in such an undemocratic institution, designed to support an industry that has done everything in the last decade to undermine citizens rights and the public interest. This is a direct attempt to replace India's excellent Biosafety Law with industry friendly legislation, and to replace biosafety with biotechnology.

In a world currently reeling under massive food price hikes, the correlation seems almost too obvious to be believed. Access to affordable food has once more become a political lever; as witnessed by the plethora of food subsidies, market access regulations, production legislation and distribution agreements. Some 230 years ago, give or take, the hereditary privilege of European royalty was swept aside by the agrarian class; their impetus being starvation, despite being the producers of their nations' food. Those that seek control of the means by which humans feed themselves, will do well to heed the lessons of history.

Quotation Nation

"And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it, and reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it." — Bob Dylan