Page 158 - Culture Society and Economy

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ALTERNATIVES

essential. The issue is not to abandon such centralizing institutions and
to retreat to some kind of local or even national economic arrangement.
Such a move would in fact preserve and increase global poverty, not
reduce it. Such a retreat would have devastating consequences, given the
scale of the currently existing productive forces and the huge pools of
capital which already have been created. The real political challenge is
how to democratize such centralizing institutions and to devise ways to
ensure that they operate with fairness and democratic accountability. The
real economic issue is how to ensure that these institutions act to main-
tain a global economic balance (low inflation, control of so-called ‘hot
money’, international trade and currency stability) while channeling sub-
stantial resources into productive investment in both the developed and
developing countries.
This is not the place to go into detail on the formidable institutional
challenges which such issues present. These problems certainly will be
difficult but not insurmountable. In general, the solution lies in specify-
ing democratic voting rights for member states, mechanisms of trans-
parency and access to information, regular, independent public review
and auditing, worker participation mechanisms to ensure accountability,
as well as enhanced systems of anti-trust and anti-competitive oversight
and regulation. Once it is understood that, contrary to what many may
think, overcoming the problems of globalization means more globalization
not less, then this issue of how to democratize public international and
national institutions – economic as well as political – necessarily becomes
the crucial one in the formulation of any realistic alternative to capitalist
globalization practices.
The purpose of the restoration of exchange controls and the consider-
able expansion of the soft loan window of international public financial
institutions is two-fold. On the one hand, the accumulation of huge bal-
ances of trade surpluses in a handful of economies at the expense of the
global economy as a whole would be addressed. On the other hand, a
mechanism would also be established for the orderly transfer of the vast
pools of existing investment funds to be channeled to where they are
needed in a relatively orderly manner. It should be fairly obvious that
accompanying this global re-structuring would be an enormous ‘peace
dividend’. Defense budgets would have to be cut on all sides and the
funds released re-directed to the re-development of the productive forces
and the provision of substantial social benefits in both the developing and
the developed countries.
In this connection, it seems essential to me that the proposal, most
extensively argued for by Parijs, for a substantial annual basic income for

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