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Seeking a just, inclusive, and sustainable world that works for all
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The Sun
interviews David Korten September 2007
"Living Wealth"
YES! Fall 2007
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In Loving Memory
Donella H. Meadows (1941-2001)
The Global Citizen
Presentation to Bioneers 2000
Marin Conference Center, October 21, 2000
David C. Korten
Bioneers! What a great experience. So many wonderful friends. Three thousand heroes of the great evolution. We all owe a great debt to Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simmons for the vision and creative commitment that brings us all together.
An extraordinary thing happened in America shortly after the 1999 Bioneers Conference. You all know the basic story. On November 30, 1999 some 50,000 union members, people of faith, environmentalists, youth, indigenous peoples, peace, gay and lesbian, farmer, health and other groups represented by peoples of all races, religions, ages, economic classes, and nationalities took to the streets of Seattle to oppose corporation globalization. Committed to nonviolent resistance, they courageously stood their ground in the face of the rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray of violent police battalions. Ultimately they played a major role in bringing the WTO negotiations to a standstill. The week of teach-ins, marches, debates, and seminars involved as many as 60,000 people.
Because Seattle was the epicenter of what happened on that day, some called it "The Battle of Seattle" or simply "Seattle '99." Seattle, however, was only the tip of a very large iceberg. Simultaneous protests around the world brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets on that historic day. Millions more participated in related protests--both before and since--in India, France, Thailand, England, Bolivia, Switzerland, Brazil and many other countries. These many protests have focused public attention on a deepening struggle grounded in two sharply divergent world views.
On one side are the forces of corporate globalization advanced by an alliance between the world's largest corporations and most powerful governments. This alliance is backed by the power of money and its defining project is to integrate the world's national economies into a single borderless global economy in which the word's mega-corporations are free to move goods and money without governmental interference in a quest for ever-greater shareholder return. In the name of increased efficiency the alliance seeks to privatize public services and assets and strengthen safeguards for investors and private property. In the eyes of its proponents, corporate globalization is the result of inevitable and irreversible historical forces driving a powerful engine of technological innovation and economic growth that is strengthening human freedom and spreading democracy throughout the world, while creating the wealth that will end poverty and save the environment.
On the other side are the forces of a newly emerging global movement some are calling -- the Global Movement for a Living Democracy-- advanced by a planetary citizen alliance of civil society organizations. Members of this alliance believe corporate globalization is neither inevitable nor beneficial, but rather the product of intentional decisions and policies promoted by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, global corporations, and politicians on corporate payrolls. In their eyes corporate globalization is replacing democracy with rule by corporations and financial elites, destroying the living wealth of the planet and society to make money for the already wealthy, and eroding the relationships of trust and caring that are the essential foundation of a civilized society.
Seattle also made visible a profound shift in America's political consciousness. Underlying the cacophony of voices two themes unified the Seattle protesters. One was a commitment to democracy--the ideal of societies in which people have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. The second was a commitment to life--to the creation of societies dedicated to the service of life--not money. All were drawn together by a realization that unless people of good will join in common cause to build a truly democratic world that works for all, we will find ourselves living in a world that works for no one. It was an important step toward a grand convergence of political forces beyond identity and single issue politics to a politics of the whole. Seattle also revealed how many of the movement's major constituency groups are redefining themselves and their agendas.
Consider the four major groups with the lead roles in Seattle '99: people of faith, labor unions, environmentalists, and youth. Participation by people of faith centered on the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt forgiveness, which gave expression to a growing awareness within many Christian churches of the centrality of social and economic justice in Christ's teaching. This awakening is bringing new vitality to a growing number of Christian denominations and congregations.
Labor unions expressed their commitment to international labor solidarity in recognition of the fact that in a low wage, high unemployment global economy the rights and wages of all working people are at serious risk unless they are guaranteed for all. Then there were the newly forged alliances between labor and environmentalists. Growing numbers of union members are coming to realize that there will be no jobs without a healthy environment. Environmentalists are realizing that unless working people have secure jobs and labor rights the environment will be destroy in the desperation for survival.
I was particularly heartened by the extraordinary leadership and commitment of the youth who put their bodies and lives on the line to bring the WTO meeting to a stand still. Tired of being manipulated and lied to by a system that is stealing their future they spent months training one another in the principles and methods of nonviolent direct action and have led the movement's most impressive and effective protest actions.
Seattle also brought us face to face with the reality that once you scratch the surface of American democracy you find a brutal police state. It was a powerful consciousness raising experience for the hundreds of white Americans who were beaten by police for simply being there, arrested on trumped up charges, and thrown in jail where they were further brutalized and denied basic rights and necessities. There they found the jails filled with people of color and realized that what they experienced was what people of color experience every day at the hands of the so called "justice" system and learned one of the reasons why so few people of color participated in the demonstrations.
For a white person to get arrested in a protest is a badge of honor. For a person of color it can be a life sentence. It made many of us realize how little we of the white skin know of the real issues facing people of color. We must learn about and embrace their issues to make this a truly inclusive movement. The Fall 2000 issue of YES! magazine focuses on the American gulag--our growing prison-industrial complex-- its devastating impact on people of color, and the alternatives to prisons as the solution to America's deep social problems.
While the most visible manifestations of the movement are political, its roots are cultural. Many of you know the studies of Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson on what they call the "Cultural Creatives." This is a group of 50 million adult Americans who reject the materialistic hedonism, cynicism, and consumerism of the dominant American culture, are progressive on social and environmental issues, and are generally optimistic about human possibilities for creating inclusive, life affirming societies that work for all. Their numbers are growing rapidly.
Cultural Creatives are the leaders of America's most progressive movements and initiatives--including the Seattle protests--and are engaged in crafting a new ecological and spiritual world view, a new literature of social concerns and a new problem agenda for humanity. You may have noticed that the people Ray and Anderson call Cultural Creatives are also known as Bioneers. Think about it. Fifty million Bioneers in America. They also sound like members of the rapidly growing Green Party. They sound like Ralph Nader voters. Suddenly our visions of transformative change seem less remote. Less idealistic. More immediate. Maybe Kenny and Nina should be thinking about finding a bigger venue for our future meetings.
Ray and Anderson trace the awakening of this new cultural consciousness to the civil rights movement, which raised the consciousness of both blacks and whites to the fact that the norms that traditionally defined our relationships with one another are not the natural order of things. Rather were set by an unexamined racist cultural code that happened to serve certain interests.
Once a person recognizes and examines the previously unexamined cultural codes of race relations, they became more conscious of how similar belief systems define the relations between men and women, people and the environment, straights and gays--and between people and the economy. As each successive cultural trance is broken, the way opens to living more consciously in a coherent relationship with our fellow humans and the whole of life.
Educator Parker Palmer has described how this awakening eventually translates into political and institutional change. Once the cultural trance is broken the individual experiences an increasingly painful disconnect between his or her values and the realities of family, work, and community life grounded in the unexamined values of the old cultural codes.
Eventually the individual decides, in Parker's words, "to live divided no more." The initial attempts to live by authentic values in an inauthentic culture result in a sense of isolation that can be broken only by joining with like minded persons to form communities of congruence. Initially small and isolated unto themselves, these communities eventually meld into larger alliances. Step by step authentic cultural spaces are created and expanded. As alliances grow they converge into ever larger wholes, gradually achieving the power to transform the logic and reward systems of society's political and economic institutions.
The Winter 2001 issue of YES! A Journal of Positive Futures focuses on this cultural awakening and its implications.
Given how fast the movement is building, we need to have in mind the outlines of a governance system for the world we hope to create. Here, as in other areas, we must look to life as our teacher. How do living systems govern themselves? How are they structured to make decisions? Who participates? By what rules? To whose benefit?
We know for example that healthy living systems are self-organizing, diverse, frugal, locally rooted, intimately adapted to local conditions, cooperative, share resources to meet the needs of all their members, have permeable, managed boundaries, and are driven to optimize the transformation of the energy of the sun and inert matter of the earth into diverse webs of living organisms with a capacity for intelligent choice and self-direction. In a healthy living system every being right down to the simplest individual cell is involved in making decisions. Each cell, each organism learns to meet its own needs in ways that serve the whole --or it expires. Remarkably, most of the self-organization occurs without any evident mechanism of central control. Life it turns out is wondrously democratic and life serving.
The result is an enormously creative adaptive process through which the whole of life evolves to ever great complexity and self-awareness. It sounds remarkably like the kind of society envisioned by the Living Democracy movement, by Cultural Creatives, by Bioneers, and by Green Party members.
By contrast, our present system of financial and corporate rule seems to have been modeled on a cancerous tumor. As you know, a cancer develops when due to a genetic defect a cell forgets it is part of a larger whole and seeks its own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences. That is pretty much a clinical description of the institution of the publicly traded, limited liability corporation.
Combine this cancerous corporate form with an unregulated global financial market that runs on auto-pilot beyond human control, values only money, pursues the replication of money as its only imperative, and cannot see beyond next quarter's financial statement--and you have a system driven by a deadly imperative to turn the living matter of society and planet into money as rapidly as possible for people who already have more money than they can possibly use.
Bear in mind that money is nothing more than a number that has no intrinsic value beyond the fact that we are culturally conditioned to accept it in return for things of real value--like food, shelter, labor, land, technology, and even our loyalty. Once we are clear that money is only a number, the true horror of our present situation becomes clear. It brings to mind images from the old horror flick "The Blob," in which a mindless, undifferentiated mass of protoplasm moves out across the landscape consuming the flesh of every living being it encounters. Think of the Blob as a kind of mobile malignant tumor and you have a mental image of global capitalism.
Consider the power we have given to unregulated global financial markets. If, a government is inclined to put forward policies that reduce or tax profits to some human or environmental end, the financial markets attack its currency, its economy crashes, and the government falls. Similarly if the financial markets catch the management of a corporation compromising profits for some human or natural interest, they trash its stock, stage a buy-out, or simply fire and replace top management.
Driven by the incessant demands of financial markets, global corporations seek their own endless growth by extending their control over ever more of the world's resources, markets, media, and technology. Corporations with internal economies larger than those of most countries centrally plan the use of these resources to maximize share holder return, eliminate cultural and biological diversity, manufacture a materialistic culture that celebrates greed, profligate consumption and inequality, rewrite our laws to increase corporate freedom at the expense of human freedom, and force people and communities into competition with one another in a life and death struggle for survival.
We have what Bill McDonough calls a design problem--specifically it is a problem of institutional design that most industrial ecologists unfortunately overlook or neglect. It centers on the institutional design of the publicly traded limited liability corporation--a design that traces its ancestry back to the British Crown corporations such as the British East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company that were created to exploit the people and resources of colonial territories. It is a legal form that allows for the virtually unlimited concentration of economic power for the exclusive financial benefit of its shareholders without accountability for the consequences of its use. For anyone whose goal is to exploit people and planet for a quick profit it has no equal. Those who would create societies that serve life, best treat it the way we would treat any cancer. Eliminate it.
It brings to mind the observation made yesterday by Joel Salatin when he proposed that the best way to deal with the problem of the shit from pigs and chickens concentrated in factory production enclosures is to eliminate the factory and put the pigs and chickens back with the land where they belong. It is the same thing with the corporation. The best way to eliminate the problem is to break up the production and marketing functions performed by mega-corporations and return them to human scale, locally owned enterprises.
I don't claim it will be easy, but neither was eliminating the institution of monarchy. Our present task is to create life affirming post-corporate societies. Perhaps we might call them civil societies.
In its most common current use, the term civil society
is simply another name for non-profit, non-governmental organizations.
In its more appropriate and powerful use, which traces back to the ancient
Greek philosophers, it refers to the qualities of a civil or civil-ized
society in which free and equal citizens act in their civic roles with
a mindful consciousness of the needs of both self and community. 
This overhead suggests some differences between a civil society and our present decidedly uncivil capitalist society. Note that contrary to popular myth a capitalist economy is not the same as a market economy. Rather it is an economic system in which the few gain control of the means of production to the exclusion of the many, which is exactly what we now have. It features monopoly, financial speculation, absentee ownership, deregulation, public subsidies, and central economic planning by mega-corporations. A market economy is self-organized by people engaging in the production and exchange of goods and services to as a means of living or livelihood. A market economy features human scale enterprises, honest money, rooted local ownership, and a framework of democratically chosen rules.
In the civil society the cultural sphere is the dominant sphere of public life. The culture is itself a product of the active community or cultural life of free, culturally aware people whose personal identity is grounded in a deep sense of their spiritual connection to the whole of life. Such a culture is authentic, and its values, symbols, and beliefs in turn serve as the foundation on which the members of a civil society create and formalize the institutions of polity and economy.
The life affirming values of an authentic culture lead naturally to the creation of an authentically democratic polity based on a deep commitment to open, active participation in political discourse, and to one person, one voice, one vote equality and consensus based decision making. They also lead naturally to the creation of authentic market economies comprised of local enterprises that provide productive and satisfying livelihoods for all, and vest in each individual a share in the ownership of the productive assets on which their livelihood depends. This creates the possibility for the society to be radically self-organizing and predominantly cooperative in the manner of all healthy living systems, and to maximize the opportunity for each individual to develop and express their full creative potential in service to the life of the whole. The power and values that define the civil society flow upward from the living spirit through people to culture and then to institutions.
The economy is the dominant sector in the capitalist economy. Here power and values flow from money to economic institutions that in turn control the institutions of government to write society's rules and of culture to manipulate the society's values and symbols of identity to serve the interests of money. Capitalism's hold over humanity rests on its ability to impose a fabricated and inauthentic culture that conditions us to believe our capacity for greed, competition and violence exceeds our capacity for sharing, cooperation and love. Its dependence on such a false and unexamined culture is a key its vulnerability, because it depends on what most of us know deep within our being to be untrue.
Our primary advantage in the struggle against corporate globalization is cultural. For this reason, we need a cultural, as well as a political strategy. The 50 million Cultural Creatives--potential Bioneers--are a source of potentially enormous transformational power, yet most feel isolated and powerless. They don't see themselves reflected in the corporate media and their concerns are not addressed by either the Democratic or Republican parties. One of the most important things we can do is break that sense of isolation and help them form and join into communities of coherence from which they can connect to the larger movement.
This is the power of what Bioneers is doing and what YES! magazine and other publications of the movement are doing.
Since the legitimacy of corporate rule depends on cultural myths and illusions simple truth telling to affirm what people know in their hearts can be a powerful revolutionary act. Consider the following such truths:
- There are other ways to live and to organize society.
- Human's have an innate capacity for love and compassion.
- The interdependent web of planetary life is the foundation of our existence and the source of all real wealth.
- Cooperation, not competition, is the key to life's success.
- All the children are our children; all the people are my people.
Whatever we call ourselves, the great struggle between the forces of corporate globalization and the forces of the emerging movement--between financial values and life values-- is far from resolved. But let us hope that humanity's long standing dream of a truly civil society--a dream shared by countless millions throughout human history--is an idea whose time has finally come. It's in our hands to make it happen.