Global Commons and Common Sense

Citizenship for Change and Change for Citizenship

By Jorge Buzaglo

This paper was given at the conference: The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and African Partners Conference Johannesburg 19-21 November 2009

I would like to thank the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation for being able to come to this important conference. I am very happy and proud to be here. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most (if not the most) honest and lucid humanists and socialists of the past century. May her moral and intellectual courage inspire us at this conference.

I would also like to thank the organisers for their work, and for their pertinent call to concreteness and ambition in our analyses and our proposals.

The whole world needs our perspectives and our proposals. The whole world needs now Africa and the Third World. The world does not need Africa and the Third World for the continued exploitation of their natural and human resources. The world needs the impoverished people of Africa and all countries in order to leave behind the long regressive period of neo-liberalism and neo-imperialism that started in the mid-70s (one could say that it symbolically started with the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973).

The concrete proposal that I would like to bring to this conference is the proposal of citizenship. I think that real citizenship for all is the aspiration that can unite and mobilize those large majorities of the world that have been impoverished, relegated and despised during the past period of wild extension of unbridled, global capitalism. We need a global, regional, national and local struggle for citizenship. I think we should unite for a powerful African, Third World, and global citizenship movement.

One could say that citizenship is the right to have rights. Large majorities in poor and dependent countries are not really, or not fully, citizens. Even in rich countries there are large masses of people who are not really, or not fully, citizens. They are not real citizens in the sense that they don't fully enjoy the rights that they would have the right to have, if they were citizens in the full sense of the word.

“Neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments.”
Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, 1789

Full, real citizens enjoy all the rights recognized already in 1948 and in subsequent conventions as basic human rights of all humanity. National states and the global society have not respected that mandate of 60 years ago. Almost nowhere have these rights been respected and given the means to be implemented. That is, the solemn admonition of the French revolutionary declaration of 1789 has been consistently ignored. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen says that the "neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments."

Citizenship rights

Life and liberty,
a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing, including food and housing,
social protection in times of need,
the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,
work and to just and favourable conditions of work,
education and to access to information,
participate in the political process and in cultural life,
physical security and integrity.

Basic citizenship rights include the rights to:

life and liberty,
the right to an adequate standard of living, that is, a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing, including food and housing. In other words, poverty is a violation of a basic human right
social protection in times of need, (that is, social security and unemployment insurance are human rights)
health care is also a basic right - the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,
it is a basic right to have a work, that is, the right to work and to just and favourable conditions of work, are human rights
education and access to information are basic human rights
as also the rights to participate in the political process and in cultural life,
the right to physical security and integrity is an important right, that depends in fact on the fulfilment of the other rights).

I think that a strong, wide global movement for citizenship - of global reach, but also of course regionally, nationally and locally organized - can be formed around these basic goals for real citizenship.

As I said at the beginning, these aspirations to real citizenship of the excluded and ignored parts of world society are in this moment functional to the needs of the world economy. The world economy needs in this moment a well designed, large demand push in order to avoid an indefinite prolongation of the present crisis - that is, an indefinite, long term stagnation or depression. The US economy can not play any longer the role of great creator of world demand through its huge debt accumulation and its enormous trade deficits. What is needed now in order to avoid a new protracted Great Depression is a systematic world redistribution of incomes and financial and other resources towards the impoverished segments and regions of world society.

We need a radical reorientation. We need to change a world economic system that only works in favour and only benefits the richest 1% of the population. We need to create a system that benefits the large majorities who didn't get any share of the great productivity increases of the last decades. We need a policy and a system that works on the basis of the general advantage of the whole world society and its natural environment. The present system, which works for the advantage of a small financial oligarchy, is bankrupt. This system, presided by an incompetent and corrupt financial aristocracy, has shown that it cannot serve the equitable development of the world society.

The global financial oligarchy will not change by itself. They have the power, a power that they use irresponsibly and irrationally. They are in fact the only real citizens of the world, in the sense that their daily decisions about the trillions of dollars that move around the world economy change our lives in crucial ways, the lives of billions of people who have no say at all on these changes. This is why we need a global movement for global citizenship. We need a global movement for us to become global citizens, with the right to change the ways in which the global economic and financial system functions. The global system must be made to work in our interest, in the interest of the global citizenry. We must empower ourselves into the new global citizenship, and to replace the financial oligarchy that has usurped a power that should be in the hands of the citizenry.

Reclaiming the Global Financial Commons

Creation of a World Financial Authority
Large expansion of the liquidity of the commons
Cancellation of developing country debt
Introduction of a foreign currency transaction tax (“Tobin Tax”)

Without a new global citizenship, the problems of our common atmosphere, our common financial system, and our common natural resources have no solution - I mean, no solution if we accept that permanent war and dictatorship are no solution. A global citizen movement should work for the management of the global commons of the atmosphere, of finance and of natural resources as what they are, as global commons. Instead of being freely polluted with carbon dioxide and with financial pollutants such as so called "toxic assets," the global commons must be managed in the interest of the global citizenry. We must recall that the global commons are being polluted by those who have the resources to pollute, by the rich, mainly in rich countries. Management on the basis of the general social advantage of the global citizenry means that the resources produced by global taxation of carbon emissions (or emission rights) should be distributed equally to all citizens, because all citizens have the same rights to the global commons. (These are very large revenues indeed - I refer in the paper to a German study that quantifies that.)

Citizenship rights at the national level

Policy sovereignty
Social justice: poverty reduction and reduced inequality
Industrialization and structural change

In the case of the financial commons, global management should mean at least the following: . An immediate goal should be the creation of a World Financial Authority (this has been proposed be the UN-Stiglitz commission and the Global Labour Unions organization) . This new World Financial Authority, that would replace de IMF, should envisage a large expansion of the liquidity of the commons. This can be done through a new emission of so called "Special Drawing Rights," an already existing global currency composed of all national currencies. This expansion of international liquidity should at least be large enough to compensate the decline in the US trade deficit-that is about 2% global GDP. (This is also part of the UN-Stiglitz proposal) . Cancellation of developing country debt. (This needs no comments.) . Introduction of a foreign currency transaction tax (the so called "Tobin tax"). At a rather low 0.1% rate, this tax would give around 200-250 billion dollars a year - five times the additional amount necessary to attain the Millennium Development Goals. (UN and Global Unions proposals.)

These large resources, together with the revenues of a carbon tax, shared according to the equal rights principle of the commons, would imply a big injection of resources for poorer countries and for low income citizens. This would imply therefore a strong demand push for the world economy. Africa, the Third World, and low income people in the world in general would thus become a central element of a restructuring of the world economy.

This restructuring of the world economy is fact the only way for seriously attempting to accomplish in time the Millennium Development Goals (in particular the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015). This restructuring would moreover make possible to seriously attempt the fulfilment of basic human rights for all humankind within the present generation.

I think these steps at the global level of the world system should allow for increased real economic sovereignty at the national levels. The citizenship movement at the national and local level should thus have a widely increased policy space and a favourable international environment for credibly struggling for the achievement of objectives such as

Policy sovereignty, that is, having the effective power of autonomously deciding the countries' own policies
Social justice: poverty reduction and reduced inequality. This means reverting a 30 years' regressive period of increasing inequality in most countries
Structural change and industrialization. This means reverting de-industrialization and the involutionary return to old pattern of raw material and natural resource export specialization in many countries of Africa and the Third World.

These citizenship goals at the national level are totally consistent with the citizenship goals at the global level; they even are the precondition of each other and they reinforce each other. Policy instruments banned by the Washington Consensus, such as regulation of financial flows and the capital account (influencing the level of economic sovereignty), redistributive policies such as taxes, subsidies and reforms, particularly the reform of the ownership of natural resources (contributing to increased social justice and equality), and industrial and other investment policies to promote increased productivity and structural change.

The citizenship movement would also give the local level strong autonomy, initiative, and resources, because resources generated by regulation of the financial commons would be distributed, as said before, according to equal rights, per capita criteria. And the practical implementation of investment programmes and projects would be the provinces of local economic governance, with regional and national support.

These would be the basic elements of a draft for a constructive program for real citizenship at the three levels of the world economy and society. These would be the possible components of a broad movement for global, national and local citizenship. This citizenship movement would thus have realistic objectives for reorienting and democratizing a world society in a state of deep ecological, financial and economic crisis.

I think these goals are widely shared by social movements in most countries and by large sections of the world society. I believe they could attract a majority of democratic and progressive individuals and organizations. Such a wide movement could aspire to be an effective instrument for real change in the best interests of all humankind.

This paper has been submitted as a contribution to the discussion on the draft Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions.

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