I. Equality is the Bedrock of Freedom
A. Conflict over collective and individual self-understanding
“Achieving self-understanding is like hard, slow tunneling”
– Danielle Allen, Our Declaration, p. 188[1]
The central concern of this website is to respond to what Naomi Klein referred to as the inner obstacle to effective action against climate disaster. That deep-rooted obstacle is located within the domain of our human collective and individual self-understandings.
The website is a call to mobilize democratic arrangements and understanding of ourselves individually and as a species, on behalf of the public well-being of planet earth and its life. It is a call to mobilize against anti-democratic forces seeking domination through privatization.
The negative premise is that a fundamental barrier to an effective response to planetary disaster is collective relationships of anti-democracy; that is, relations of domination.
The positive premise is that mobilizing the power of democratic agency can not only defeat the forces of political and economic domination but also take effective collective action towards a healthy, sustainable relationship to the earth and its life.
B. Political equality is the bedrock of collective and individual freedom
Danielle Allen has provided an indispensable starting point for democratic mobilization. Allen, noted for her extraordinary career as a scholar, is currently running for election as the next Governor of Massachusetts in 2022.
In Our Declaration she spells out the most useful, fully articulated concept of the ideal of equality yet proposed, starting with freedom from domination, an ideal in which “neither of two parties can dominate the other.” Over against this negative freedom, she identifies four positive substantive aspects of the ideal, starting with the all-important concept of “equality of agency.”
The Declaration grounds its argument in the claim that all human beings have the natal potential to be co-agents of our shared world. We share, equally, the capacity, the right, the dignity, and what we could call the positive freedom, as persons, to egalitarian access to the tool of government, egalitarian approaches to collective intelligence, co-ownership of public life and the right to be co-creators of our common world.”
Democracy cannot be reduced to voting or other procedural forms alone. Afghanistan did not become a democracy in 2004 when elections were first held there following President Bush’s so-called “global democratic revolution.”[2] Nor in Iraq in 2005 when parliamentary elections were held in that country.
Democracy includes habits of citizenship. It does not mean equal opportunity in a race. It does not mean meritocracy. It does not mean conformity or sameness of agents. Democracy is not an ideal for automatons, or clones, or so-called “humans” who are “equal” in the sense of being reliably driven by one-dimensional uncontrollable appetites. As Allen puts it in Talking to Strangers, her primer on how to be a citizen, humans are imperfectly, wonderfully different, responsive to one another, their common world, and their own deep, rich, individual experience, not sovereign, self-sufficient individual atoms.
Democracy is not utopian. It is an imperfect ideal of individual and collective self-understandings, as befits the finite human condition. Distinctiveness, individuality, eccentricity, and differences are not blemishes to erase but rather constitute the particularity of the gifts of individual agency, the multiplicity of perspectives on our shared reality that makes self-testing against self-delusion possible.
It is essential to understand several points about the relationship between equality and freedom in the Declaration. First, democratic freedoms, negative and positive, individual and collective, are part and parcel of the five aspects that make up the ideal of equality. Contrary to widespread opinion that the ideals of freedom and equality are in conflict or even contradict each other, the Declaration’s ideal of democratic freedom is marked by a categorical insistence that “we cannot have freedom without equality” (p. 21); that equality is “the bedrock of freedom” (p. 108).
Second, a corollary of the first. Seeking freedom without equality turns “freedom” into an enemy of equality.
Third, the power of democratic freedom from domination and for co-creation can only be mobilized through equality. Here is how Allen puts it: “It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows – a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality” (p. 21). This is true economically as well as politically.
C. Democracy is the ground for an empowering political economy
All three of these claims – no freedom without equality; without equality freedom becomes an enemy of equality; equality mobilizes the power of freedom – are spelled out by Danielle Allen in a recent essay on economics, “Political Equality and Empowering Economies: Toward a New Political Economy.”[3] Starting from the shocking political and economic surprises of the last decade – the 2008 recession, Brexit, the election of Trump – Allen traces their origin to “blind-spots” within “the dominant liberal policy-making paradigms.”
Economic liberalism, she argues, uses models which are systematically selective.
Much of its modeling “has abstracted away from the contextual, social, psychological, and cultural particularities of individual economic actors”. The pursuit of utilitarian welfare maximization has typically focused on maximizing aggregate growth—in terms of income and wealth–and on using redistributive policies to spread the benefit of that growth. For example, the World Bank, throughout the late 20th century, applied a set of “boilerplate requirements for economic liberalization” to developing economies as conditions for loans.
According to Allen, the underlying source of such limiting economic abstractions can be traced back to market liberalism’s political concept of liberty, or freedom.
In the course of the liberal tradition the basic rights or liberties were divided into two kinds, private and public, and then treated hierarchically. Private rights, such as personal property rights, assumed primacy over public rights, such as the right to co-ownership of public life. Private rights tended to be associated with “negative liberties,” the right to be left alone, for example. Public or political rights, on the other hand, were regarded as “positive liberties” and tended to be discounted. In other words, economic liberalism, market liberalism, has sacrificed the public rights and freedoms of democratic equality on the altar of private freedoms. The result has been private, corporatized wealth and “freedoms,” concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, at the expense of the public’s representative institutions. Redistribution of that concentrated wealth is now at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful.
Against this dominant policy tradition, Allen calls for a new political economy based upon the “non-sacrificeability” of political equality. Instead of abstracting away from particularities and differences, and then, after the fact, focusing efforts on redistribution of wealth in the interests of economic justice, she suggests starting with “pre-distribution” production policies designed to build empowering economies in the first place.[4] “The political equality lens” puts the focus there. Such an approach takes differences into account from the start, differences recognized in law for example. It “restores attention to the laws that structure how we organize land, labor, and capital”[5]
Allen began this essay by suggesting that economists have in effect become prisoners of their own narrow models and that re-invention of political economy “requires stepping outside the domain of economics” to pose new questions to economists from wider perspectives. Allen has taken up the challenge as a political philosopher, approaching the question from the perspective of political equality. In fact, the essay provides a highly relevant practical application of the five-fold concept of equality and freedom developed by her in Our Declaration.[6]
II. Freedom without Equality turns into Domination
A. Freedom detached from equality turns into both the enemy of democracy and the enemy of liberty
The most important point of Allen’s essay on economics is the notion of democracy as an empowering economic resource. I will take up this point at the end of the post. Before doing so, however, I want to call attention to two examples from the history of economic liberalism that bear out Allen’s critique of freedom detached from equality. Not only does such a liberalism lead to systemic blind spots and the elevation of private over political rights. It turns economic liberalism, market liberalism, into a privatized political rival of political democracy. Its logical end is domination by privatized power, a privatized state. Market liberalism is a particularly insidious form of domination, namely, domination in the name of freedom, a trickster liberty.
B. Corporate Liberalism
The first example is a history of the origins of corporate liberalism from 1890 to 1920. In Corporate Liberalism, R. Jeffrey Lustig spells out the threat to democracy when liberalism assigns to the corporation a monopoly on initiative, precisely that freedom, that power of equal agency, which is at the root of democratic citizenship.[7] Liberalism in its corporate incarnation has turned over to the corporation the birthright, the gift of freedom that makes real persons democratic citizens. And real persons are given over to the requirements of the corporation. The corporation, an artificial “person,” a collective entity, a thing, not a person, has elbowed its way into the space occupied traditionally by private citizen-agents of democratic freedom (p. 11).[8] Not only so, but the corporation also takes over the public prerogatives of rule, authority and control that belong to the state, in order to serve its private interests. At the same time it relies on the state for protection. As Lustig puts it, the corporation is “politically speaking an essential inversion. Since ancient times statesmen have attempted to create a polity that could harness private interests to the public welfare. The corporation succeeds, by contrast, in harnessing vast publics to a private interest.” (p. 10).
C. MarketWorld
“It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself.” Winners Take All, p. 73, speaking of technology.[9]
The second example provides an updated picture of corporate liberalism in the 21st century. In Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World Anand Giridharadas turns a gimlet eye on the most “liberal” manifestation of market liberalism, what we could call Big Philanthropy. Winners Take All is about the philanthropy industry, which has turned elite do-goodism into a new version of the “white man’s burden,” undertaken this time by private corporate agents who have no authorized claim to represent the public. The book is an up-close and personal account, a political ethnography if you will, of what Giridharadas calls “MarketWorld.” This is the world inhabited by the “ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. … a network and community” that is also a “culture and state of mind” (p. 30).
Following Chiara Cordelli, author of The Privatized State,[10] Giridharadas points out that corporate elites, as citizens of a democracy “are collectively responsible for what their society foreseeably and persistently allows; that they have a special duty toward those it persistently fails; and that this burden falls most heavily on those most amply rewarded by the same, ultimately arbitrary set of arrangements.” In Cordelli’s own words, “If you are an elite who has campaigned for or support the right policies, or let’s suppose that you are not causally complicit in any direct sense, still, it seems to me that you might owe a responsibility or duty to return to others what they have been unfairly deprived of by your common institutions” (cited by Giridharadas, p. 258, my italics).
MarketWorld’s privatized concept of agency, says Cordelli, is absurd. Its elites “live their life through a sense of themselves as entrepreneurs, as agents of change.” Their agency works “when it comes to effecting change in a way that makes them feel good – when it comes to building a business, lobbying for certain things, effectively helping some people through philanthropy, then they are agents. … When it comes to paying more taxes, when it comes to trying to advocate for more just institutions, when it comes to actually trying to prevent injustices that are systematic or trying to advocate for less inequality and more redistribution, then they’re paralyzed. There is nothing they can do.”(Cited by Giridharadas, 260, 61).
Cordelli gives two reasons that the winners bear responsibility for the state of those institutions and for the effects they have on others’ lives. First, “because you’re worth nothing without society.” Second “you would all be dominated by others without political institutions that protect our rights.” “Absent a political system of shared institutions, anyone could dominate anyone.” Rather than strengthening a democracy’s public, collective institutions the MarketWorld’s adoption of a privatized mission to effect change has the opposite effect. It weakens and destroys them (cited by Giridharadas 263).
III. Breaking the Spell of Market World Domination: An International Grassroots “Blockadia “
A. Democracy is the only way to heal the earth and its life
I have up to this point focused strictly on the U. S. In the concluding part of her essay on political equality and economics, however, Danielle Allen turns to international relations. Her question to economists now concerns the relationship between America’s political economy and other economies: What kind of responsibility do we have to develop a political economy that won’t be extractive or exploitative of other parts of the globe? How can we avoid treating other parts of the globe as the founders treated indigenous Americans? While pursuing empowering economies at home how can we support the emergence of empowering economies elsewhere?
She suggests taking the Marshall Plan as a useful model because of its grounding policy principle, which was “to help structure the economy again “so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” In other words, it pursued a policy that started from Allen’s own all-important grounding principle, “the intrinsic value to human beings of political equality.”
I said above that the most important point of Danielle Allen’s essay on political economy was the notion of democracy as an empowering economic resource. There has been a groundswell around the globe among citizens of all classes, genders, ages, ethnicities, and political and religious traditions and identities since 2008 rising up and demanding that we the peoples of the planet must take political control of our economic resources away from those who are in the process of privatizing and, in the process, destroying the planet, a global grassroots movement reported on by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014.
These global grassroots resistance movements represent what, as Naomi Klein reports, some have taken to calling “Blockadia.” Blockadia, Klein says, “is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines” (TCN, 294, 295). Such raw, visible extractive projects are the norm for the whole planetary economy extending to money itself, which is being extracted by those at the top from those below.
Not since the populist and progressive furor in the U.S. analyzed in such penetrating terms by Lustig has there been such a surge of interest by ordinary citizens in anything and everything to do with “money.” Above all, it has become blindingly clear that something is fundamentally wrong with a system which is growing top heavy year after year at the expense of the supporting base. The millionaires and billionaires at the top of the upside down pyramid of wealth keep getting more and more of the money while the farther down you are, the smaller and smaller is your share.
IV Democratization of the Power to Create Money
One such money movement is represented by the American Monetary Institute (AMI), which held its seventeenth annual monetary reform conference this year. It was one of the most diverse ever, thanks to zoom, including speakers and participants from Malaysia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Australia, Iran, Finland, the Netherlands, and Israel as well as the US. AMI represents those citizens of Blockadia who have risen up against the privatization of the power to create money in order to assert that that power belongs in public hands; specifically, a democratic government committed to the well-being of people and planet.
In September 2008 and its aftermath the nakedly destructive failure of the leadership of what we still fondly call the private sector was accompanied by the equally transparent failure of our public leaders, both Republican and Democratic. This double failure is what has been so disorienting. If we have lost faith in both the free market and the government, where do we turn? What good will it do to replace private control of money creation with money creation by “public” institutions, if those institutions themselves have been privatized.
I have tried to show in this post, following Danielle Allen, that both failures are the consequence of the effort of our corporatized, marketized, liberal political tradition to possess individual freedoms without democracy. Naomi Klein too suggests that Blockadia “shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival – the health of the water, air, and soil.
V. An Example
I want to turn finally to Old Bjerg from Sweden, who was one of the speakers at this year’s American Monetary Institute. Bjerg’s talk this year focused on one specific monetary technology. He did so from the perspective of the critical link between public and private money creation, on the one hand, and democracy on the other, which he had spelled out in a 15 minute TED Talk, delivered in 2014. I want to focus on that talk, which is available online here.
In that earlier remarkable talk, Bjerg managed, in plain, ordinary English, to cut through the impenetrable web of darkness cloaking the secrets of the money temple spun by the privatized masters of the universe, bring into beautifully sharp focus how their money creation regime works today, and describe how that control can be taken away and placed in the hands of citizens. I urge you to watch and listen to the talk yourself. A transcription of the talk is also available at this link. Here I will simply quote the short proposal and the conclusion. To understand the proposal it is necessary to point out how Bjerg describes the two kinds of money we use today, and the difference between how each is created.
Bjerg begins the talk holding examples of the two kinds of money in his hands. One is paper money, a Swedish kroner. The other is “electronic money,” a plastic credit card. Paper money is created by public institutions of the government. Private banks of course cannot create kroner or dollar bills, but they can create electronic money. And today estimates are that 95% of the money circulating in the economy is bank-created money. Only 5% is created by the government. The consequences of private control of money creation have been instability, inequality, and excessive concentration of power. Bjerg’s alternative is simple: “What we need to do is to update the central bank’s old monopoly on money creation so that it counts not just for paper money, but also for electronic money. So that rather than depending on the commercial banks for our electronic payments we should all have an account with the central bank so that when we want to make electronic payments, we can simply transfer money from our account in the central bank to someone else’s account in the central bank.”
In conclusion Bjerg says simply, “I hope that you will take away from this talk two things. I hope you will take away the confidence that you too can understand and form a qualified opinion about money and money creation. Secondly, I want you to feel that you have a democratic right to be part of the system of the decision of who should create our money in the future.”
VI. What is at Stake?
I want to conclude by recalling the purpose of this website. The purpose is to link the climate crisis to what Naomi Klein calls “the global democratic crisis” (This Changes Everything, p.363). In other words, the climate crisis is a crisis of public confidence in public democratic institutions, a crisis of confidence even in the ideal of democratic equality of agency. We are living at a time when privatized wealth has become a weapon against the very idea of public well-being, or common wealth; when, as Klein puts it, “democracy is getting torn into rubble, chewed up and tossed aside to make way for the bulldozers” (363).
Only by committing ourselves to the non-sacrificeability of a democratized, global public, not a global government, will we be able to respond effectively to the challenge of the climate crisis. To cite Klein again, “any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect” (460).
What is at stake when we allow our collective and individual self-understanding to be shaped by a world in which privatized power can dominate everyone else and everything? One monetary reformer speaks of “the plague of self-destruction” that threatens a society that can no longer flourish, that sacrifices public well-being at the altar of privatized dominators masquerading as the torchbearers of uplift and freedom. Is “plague” too extreme a word? Not in the face of national epidemics which threaten the collective life of a national community, such as the national endemic of violence that is escalating out of control in the U.S.
James Gilligan in 2001 demonstrated that violence is a public health problem. Both its causes and consequences are communal, or collective. Gilligan is a medical doctor and psychiatrist who has written three masterful studies devoted respectively to preventing violence, the causes of violence, and the relationship between both homicide and suicide rates and politics in the 20th century.[11] He shows that treating violence strictly as a problem of individual criminals who must be punished, rather than primarily as a collective problem of prevention, is both perverse in its outcomes – it actually increases violence – and wastes billions of dollars.
What is at stake is not only of course the health and well-being of the U.S., or any other one nation. We are still in the midst of a pandemic which, by definition, affects the collective life of global humanity. At the same time, we are losing the battle to stop the public health threats to the air, land, water, and life of the whole planet.
I want to suggest that the “health” of our relationships of trust, promise-keeping, respect, and acknowledgment of our capacities for violence in those relationships are what are at stake in our collective and individual self-understandings. With this we are touching on matters concerning the life of all of us as peoples of the earth, not simply ourselves as Americans or Europeans, or white, or Western.
“Existential,” I suggest, has become a preferred term in a secular society for speaking of the most basic matters of “existence,” what Garrison Keller used to refer to as “life’s most persistent questions,” questions of dignity, respect, personhood, questions which even secularists would agree are religious, even if those who ask them eschew the monotheistic traditions that pin religion not just to gods but to the more parochial notion of only one such being.
To pursue this question takes me beyond the scope of this post. However, Bruno Latour, in Facing Gaia, has addressed the unfolding global climate threat from an international perspective based on his call for “demo-genesis,” the equivalent of Allen’s principle of the non-sacrificiability of political equality. And he casts the principle in the language of “religion” as follows: “To be religious is first of all to become attentive to that to which others cling. It is thus, in part, to learn to behave as a diplomat” (p. 152. My emphasis). The implications of this somewhat cryptic statement, I suggest, are comparable to the deep implications of Allen’s principle of political equality. But one thing is clear. Here is a profoundly different collective and individual self-understanding from that of the narrowly self-interested, even greedy corporate and individual self proclaimed globally by the privatized market gospel world.
VII. Seeing the whole shebang from another angle
One way change comes about is by seeing things from a different vantage point. “Look, there’s a blue heron.” “Stand over here.” “Yes, I see it now!” Or it can happen when you see something in a different light, or set against a different background. Many optical illusions illustrate more subtle ways the same image may appear entirely different from one moment to the next. One of the most fascinating is “the Monkey Business Illusion” You can try it yourself here.
For the past fifty years or more our leaders, especially our economists, have been telling us to look at literally everything, ourselves, one another, and the earth itself through the lens of the privatized “free market,” a lens they have honed and polished with intricate precision, Here, they have been telling us, if you look at the world through this lens, its going to lead to freedom, as long as the big bad (public) government doesn’t interfere.
But there are, as Allen put it, “blind spots,” things that simply can’t be seen as long as we are only using one lens. This is of course true of every lens, including our own eyes, or every pair of glasses. Looking through a telescope you may bump into a closed door.
Allen is not saying, try my lens instead. Rather than a single master lens, democracy is an arrangement for maximizing the number of different lenses or perspectives on the world, what she calls a “potluck” approach to egalitarian intelligence. Listen to one another. See the world through the eyes of someone different. Try the lens setting of their experience.
To democratize our vision does not mean to settle on some magic bullet, some modern, Western, superior cognitive power, some final, fundamentalized Answer. It means to acknowledge the equality of agency of each natal new and unique way of experiencing the world embodied in the birth of each new person. Look, from this point of view we can each experience the gift of life together offered us by a fertile, generous earth, which is the gift of freedom. Let’s try it together.
[1] Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, 2014.
[2] Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 2006, p.6. Empire’s Workshop is a stark history of what happens when freedom is fundamentalized to justify the imposition of democracy at the point of a gun.
[3] “Political Equality and Empowering Economies – Towards a New Political Economy,” Draft of Introduction to Book, Political Equality as Justice, January, 2018, not for circulation without permission from author. http://henryfarrell.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Allen_equality.pdf.
[4] Here she cites Jacob Hacker who coined the term. Hacker, Jacob. 2011. “The institutional foundations of middle-class democracy.” Policy Network. Accessed Jan. 21, 2015, http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3998&title=The+institutional+foundations+of+middle-class+democracy.
[5] She cites Polanyi among others.
[6] She explicitly points out that the five aspects identified in Our Declaration, are not intended as is complete list but rather are a useful starting point
[7] R. Jeffry Lustic, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory: 1890-1920. 1982.
[8] Compare p.10: A corporation “can own property and money … and buy and sell rather eminent men. It can make binding contracts, expand, contract, manufacture all goods, perform all services. It needs no sleep, takes no vacations. It can borrow and steal, and even beg, … If you prick it it does not bleed; if you tickle it, it does not laugh. It can scream, however, if taxed or otherwise annoyed” (p. 10, citing Martin Mayer, Wall Street: Men and Money, 1955, pp. 33-34.
[9] Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World 2018.
[10] Chiara Cordelli, The Privatized State: 2020.
[11] Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, 1997; Preventing Violence, 2001; and Why Some Politicians are More Dangerous than Others, 2011.