[mobglob-discuss] A moment of deep hope - Vandana Shiva

[Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA]

Dear Subscribers,
		    This is a fairly lengthy post (500 lines), but this
interview of Vandana Shiva by Geov Parrish is very good.  Both he and she,
with remarkable clarity, show the need for a renewed "living democracy."
There is this growing sense of concentrating our dissident energies to our
particular communities, "localization" in opposition to the neo-liberal
agenda that's come home to almost every community in the north. This comes
across in very clear terms in this interview....
	"One of the things that has given me a lot of hope lately is the
 inability of governments to withstand popular outrage - Bolivia, Argentina,
 Venezuela.  People in the U.S.'s (and Canada's) reactions are very far
 behind where people in the rest of the world already are.  There's a lot
 that can be learned, and some of those links are being made now."  --VS
This makes it pretty clear that we all should be taking our cue and raise
the call that the Bolivians, Venezuelans and all in the global south are
making in taking back their water...their streets and maintaining a dignity
that many of us in the global north have been blindfolded to hold on to in
the disgustingly dominent consumer culture.  
    This is a real good read....apologies for x-postings...  salud, tc
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 --- Forwarded message: --- On behalf of Tom Wheeler
    <twbounds at pop.mail.rcn.net> for the Infoshop News list
	Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:51:29 -0400


http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13698&CFID=2433716&CFTOKE
N=38443462

A moment of deep hope
An interview with Vandana Shiva

Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange
08.19.02

Recently I had the tremendous honor, and pleasure, of sitting down for a
conversation with one of the true heroes of global efforts to create a more
equitable and sustainable world. Indian physicist Vandana Shiva is one of
the most renowned and respected grassroots leaders in the global South. She
has worked extraordinarily effectively to organize and advocate for farmers
and other ordinary workers in India and other poorer countries to retain the
rights to their seeds, their water, and their traditional livelihoods. Her
13 books (in English) have covered everything from feminism to environmental
justice to biopiracy, the abuses of globalization and neo-colonialism, and
means for creating a nonviolent and sustainable future for our planet. I
spoke with her in Seattle two weeks ago.

GP: Three years ago, you were one of the most articulate and inspiring of
the critical voices in Seattle during the WTO ministerials. You're back this
time speaking specifically around water and food issues. Is that instead of
globalization, or is that an entree to the broader issues as well?

VS: It's an entree to the broader issues. Water and food are the broad
issues. What I want to do is revisit what globalization meant in terms of
issues: food and water, which is issues of life, basic needs, and how
globalization both undermines democracy and denies security. Out of that has
come the series of happenings that have become globalization in all
societies, all countries: terrorism, war, fundamentalism, violence.

The phenomenon of violence is the dominant fact of our time. That then
connects further into the vicious circle: a vicious circle of violence, in
which you have a violence of globalization, a denial of basic needs,
usurpation of resources, undermining of democracy. It gives rise to
fundamentalism, exclusion, chauvinism, nationalism of all kinds, fueling
into a politics of diversion, in which the globalization agenda, which could
never have gone through in democratic forms, is scuttled through, in a way,
sneakily.

GP: As in last Saturday, when fast track was passed by the House of
Representatives, unseen and with no debate, at three in the morning.

VS: As in India, the water policy, the patent law, trade liberalization, all
of these have been done in the dark behind the backs of people in periods
when the public is preoccupied with: "My God, we're at war, my God, we'll
have a nuclear war, God, the Muslims! That rule through fear is becoming a
very, very convenient mode for continuing the failed Seattle agenda.

GP: Especially locally, where there was a lot of public education and people
sensitized to the World Trade Organization in a way that most people in the
U.S., certainly at the time, were not, there's a sense now of, number one,
what have we accomplished? And number two, what can we do now? A lot of
people look at these very large issues, immensely powerful global
corporations, global institutions, even democratic institutions clearly no
longer acting as though they were accountable to the general public, and
people throw up their hands, they say, "What can we do?" What can they do?

VS: The tremendous response that people had at the time of the WTO meetings
in Seattle was a response that came of the first awareness: "Oh my God,
there's these huge corporations, they're starting to rule over us, these are
the agendas they have." Then we had 9-11, we had corporate takeover and
corporate unaccountability showing in a very blatant marriage with
unaccountable government.

GP: Not just in this country. All over the world.

VS: It's a world phenomenon. It's absolutely a world phenomenon. This
country unhappily ends up very often being the leader in bad trends. Bad
trends in corporatization, bad trends in militarization. It would be
wonderful to have it lead in the trends of peace, in trends of equity,
sharing, justice.

I think the joint assault on peoples' freedoms and rights from what I call
the fundamentalism of the market and the fascism - fascism in governments as
we've seen them, right now-is forcing all of us to invent democracy anew.

GP: How do we invent it?

VS: We invent it by turning to our advantage the smallness of the spaces
left to us to act. I think when there is formal democracy, when there is
peace, when there is welfare, a good economy, by and large people can leave
it to other structures. They say, "Well, okay, it's all right, you're
looking after education, you're looking after our food, fine, well, you can
have the power." But now, it's become very clear that the system as it's now
created will not allow food to reach the majority of human beings on the
planet, is going to take water away -

GP: And is already doing it.

VS: Is already doing it, and the logic of it will be total denial of the
very right to live. Not just to human beings, the eighty percent of humanity
that doesn't have the purchasing power to play it out on the market, to work
in the economy, but the millions of species whose rights to food and water
are also at stake.

GP: Anything living that doesn't contribute to the bottom line is
extraneous.

VS: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that is why the main things people can do
now are the biggest things people can do, and they're the smallest things
people can do. Ensuring that through the way we produce our food and consume
our food, we open and reclaim the spaces. The food systems that serve the
earth, that serve the farmers, and that serve the consumers. We don't have
to live and tolerate the kind of recall of contaminated meat you just had,
where all the time people are living in fear of either eating bad food and
not knowing it, or eating bad food, knowing about it, and not being able to
do a thing about it.

GP: Is there an argument there for localism as well, for bioregionalism, in
the sense of getting closer to actual food production?

VS: I think there is no way out in creating a new democracy, and a living
democracy-living both in the sense of embracing all life, being a democracy
of life in the deep sense of a shared planet, and also not being the kind of
dead democracy we are experiencing right now.

Intrinsic to that is economies that we shape and influence, in terms of
leaving enough space for people. At this point human beings have been
rendered disposable people. Unfortunately, the security of peoples'
livelihoods, local economies, and localization, all that was civilized by
saying "You don't need all this, because we will manufacture money on scales
you never imagined." That money evaporated as fast as it multiplied.

GP: Except in the hands of the people who needed it the least.

VS: Absolutely. The phenomenon of the stock market crashes and all this
wealth disappearance is a very good reminder of how false the wealth
creation was in the first place and that we need to be involved in the
creation of our own wealth, and real production for basics like food, for
basics like water. It only happens locally. It's an ecological imperative:
if you want to harvest water, you can't harvest it in Paris if the water
drops are falling in India. You can have a headquarters for controlling the
water of the world and overexploiting it in Paris.

GP: We talk about reinventing democracy; it seems to me there's also an
argument for reinventing our relationship to technology: who controls
technology, who controls the decisions over whether to use particular types
of technology. What's the entry point to that? There's so many technologies
that we're told are progress, are inevitable. And they're not inevitable.
They're specific decisions that benefit some and not others. How does that
process become more democratic?

VS: In making it a living democracy. Living democracy is a constellation of
democracies of different dimensions. One of the dimensions is the economy.
You can't have living economies unless you have localized economies.
Otherwise they are either killing economies or dying economies. You just
have to look around the world. Look at the scales of crisis that people are
living through. It's no longer distant countries; its neighbors, it's
friends who are losing their entire futures before our eyes.

Knowledge and innovation is another dimension of the living democracy. We've
had, beginning with the Cartesian revolution, this idea that technology was
something that some people created, and gave a life of its own. Democracy,
also, was made to appear like that: a life of its own in an administration
that depends on the people who put it into power, but forgets between
elections that they have delegated rights and delegated authority.

Similarly, the very technological images and structures that have evolved
have been made to look like there is an autonomous creation of technology,
that it's inevitable, and that there's no delegating. And there is no
accountability, there's no check-out.

For a living democracy, people have control over the decisions on what
technologies are created. Now, there is not scrutiny over them, because the
lack of that scrutiny is created in the technology itself.

Fifteen years of my life have been dedicated to ensuring farmers have their
right to livelihood and biodiversity saved, people have food, And the only
way biotechnology has been adopted-a vilest technology which doesn't produce
more food, destroys farmers' survival, destroys consumer confidence-in spite
of all that, the only reason it's still around in food and agriculture is
because, just like Arthur Andersen cooked up its figures and accounts,
Monsanto's constantly cooking up the figures on what it delivers. And that
happens because of this taking technology beyond the reach of people, even
when the technology's going to hurt people and it's about our lives.

GP: Specialization encourages that, too. It's too complicated for most of us
to understand.

VS: And it's deliberately made that way

GP: Even when it's not complicated.

VS: For example, a monopoly on seed is a monopoly on seed. Now, you can call
it intellectual property rights, and through that, derive huge beautiful
language on the right to have a return on investment to keep innovation
going in society, and all the paraphernalia that has been used for ten years
to justify monopolies on life and ownership of life and the false claim that
corporations create life, create seed, invent plants.

GP: Or even in the case of human DNA strands. The genome.

VS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Technology and science and knowledge have
to be brought back to the subject matter of democratic action.

VS: There seem to be real structural ways in which the institutions of
globalization have been encouraging militarization, have been encouraging
wars-through the arms trade, through some of the economic policies. Talk
about the logic of that.

VS: It's even deeper than the arms trade. The globalization of the arms
trade is the obvious part we see, but there are two other levels at which
globalization and militarism are two sides of the same coin. They're not
even two different coins that are made out of the same metal. They are the
same coin.

The first link comes through the fact that when states expropriate resources
from people-food, water, biodiversity - when they deny people basic needs,
jobs are destroyed, livelihoods are destroyed-the democratic response of any
community anywhere is the democratic fright to protest, and to say, "We want
a change."

Globalization has basically, through taking away the rights of people, and
defining the ownership control over these vital resources, over food and
water, as corporate rights which states have then to defend-it actually has
equipped states to unleash terrorism on their own. I am both remembering the
streets of Seattle and the violence of the police against protesters-and
every protest.

GP: Seattle was almost nothing, compared to a lot of events around the
world.

VS: Since them. Absolutely. Look at Genoa. But look at India, and tribals
defending their constitutional rights to land. In our constitution, tribal
land cannot be alienated. Tribals that have been working their land have
defended it over the decades. Today, when tribals come out, they are shot.
They are killed because the right of the investor who wants their land, the
right of the corporation who wants their water, is treated as the higher
right, which states must defend.

Thomas Friedman played it out better than any of us when he said, "Behind
the invisible hand of the market is the iron first of the military. Behind
McDonald's is McDonnell Douglas." We've seen that unravel.

GP: Unravel in what sense?

VS: When there's reference made to a global war against terror where you
don't know the enemy and you don't know the time limit and it's going to be
limitless, it's not just Al-Qaeda that is in the net. It is ordinary people.
Ordinary people defending their constitutional democratic rights have become
targets of the militarized violence.

GP: And "people defending their rights" becomes the working definition of
"terrorists."

VS: Absolutely. And it's not a surprise that after 9-11 every state could
pull out instantaneously anti-terror laws, even through we know how long it
takes for genuine lawmaking to create a new law-especially laws that step on
peoples' toes.

So you really have-the state being the protector of the people. You have the
state criminalizing their own population.

GP: Or a portion of their own population.

VS: Large portions. The tiny portions they don't criminalize are usually
not-especially in our part of the world-it's not in our population that's
protected, you know. Very often, what is protected is foreign capital.

The third level of this link between the militarization and globalization,
which is the most subtle link, is the link between globalization, destroying
security, livelihoods, and from that insecurity, people are attacked through
the xenophobic fundamentalist racist right wing agendas. It has happened in
this country, it's happened in France with Le Pen, it's happening in India
right now with the right wing becoming more and more fascistic at every
moment, killing 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat.

All of that serves two purposes simultaneously. The first purpose is
basically surviving a period of discontent and creating a mutation in the
democratic agenda. The democratic agenda for people is our food and water,
and peoples' rights. Democratic agenda electoral politics in the mutated
agenda ends up being about who you can kill, who you exclude, who is your
enemy: migrants, another religion, another ethnicity.

The second purpose all this fulfills is it becomes a wonderful screen. It
becomes a screen in which political fascism combines with economic fascism
to continue the globalization agenda, now with it militarized.

GP: Embedded in the convenience of "why don't you go off and attack them?,"
there's a real vent in the sense of people feeling powerless about
institutions they feel they can't control, then being able to identify a
usually less powerful minority of one sort or another that they can then go
and have power over by attacking.

VS: Xenophobic and fundamentalist tendencies-usually they go by the name of
cultural nationalists-it's very interesting, they happen precisely because
globalization destroys economic nationalism and destroys the securities of
people to have their jobs, to meet their needs, and to have economic
democracy. The death of economic democracy and economic nationalism leads to
the rise of cultural nationalism and peoples' insecurities being managed
through allegiances of these narrow nationalisms.

You're feeling as second class citizens. This language comes out all the
time-"We are second class citizens, our jobs are going." So who do you get?
It's the weakest part of your own populations.

It's sort of this cycle of violence. I was just reading this morning about
the soldiers who came back from Afghanistan who are now killing their wives.
That's the model. You went and got innocent people there, you can't live
with it any more, come back and instead of turning around and telling and
becoming a conscientious objector and saying, "Why on Earth are we killing
innocent people in other countries?," you turn around and kill your wife.

GP: We're also trained to view violence of one sort or another as a
solution. As a way to resolve conflict.

VS: Absolutely. That is the real disease. I think that is the real disease.
It's a disease that has a natural next step and evolution built into it
because it's fed by all the mythology we've created around technology. When
we're saying that violence will solve it, we're also saying that the latest
technology will solve it. The biggest bomb will solve it.

GP: Sure. And any problems that the technology creates can be solved by
further technology.

VS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It wouldn't be exaggerated to say that in
addition the war economy ends up being the economy of last resort. When
you've destroyed your peoples' future, they're not buying food, they're not
buying cars, you're off the information superhighway...

GP: We've also seen it as being the only way now in which the IMF, for
example, and the World Bank, leave it as an acceptable route for governments
to prime the pump. They can't spend on social spending, but they can spend
on the defense sector. That's true all over the world, in First World
countries as well.

VS: And in fact the First World countries are our arms merchants. When we
had this buildup of tensions between India and Pakistan we would have U.S.
peace missions, and at the end of each of these peace missions there was an
arms sale.

GP: You had mentioned in one of your essays going down to the upper Rio
Grande and Tierra Amarilla [an area in Northern New Mexico where indigenous
Chicano farmers have struggled to retain their land and water]. How do some
of the struggles and issues there compare with issues that you've
encountered in India and other countries in the South? What are the
differences?

VS: The differences are becoming less and less. Twenty years ago your
struggles in this country used to be primarily about the next safety measure
in a car, you know? Our struggles were food and water. As time has passed,
and as globalization has created more and more insecurity worldwide, and has
started to take over those vital sectors that were people sectors-that were
not corporate sectors thirty years ago, food was not controlled by
corporations, water was not controlled by corporations-these basic issues of
the commons and these basic needs are becoming common.

GP: It was very striking to me, going back and looking at much of the
literature thirty years ago, there was this expectation, genuine or not,
that the South would be developed. You had the whole phrases of "developed"
and "underdeveloped" countries. The "underdeveloped" would catch up
eventually. That expectation is gone. That expectation has evaporated. It's
not even posited as a desirable goal at this point. Similarly, the ethic in
the North of "Our children will have a better future than our parents did"
has evaporated. How can some of those more positive expectations be
reclaimed? Or can they? Or should they?

VS: It was precisely by distorting what the development agenda was, what
"underdevelopment" was, what "developing" was, because "developing" was
defined as reaching the levels of contaminated production and
superconsumerism of the West-which was never in any way available
economically or ecologically to the world - the twenty percent [already]
required eighty percent. You couldn't make that model without five planets,
which weren't available, so all you've done is make our own planet
uninhabitable.

But in addition to that, the aspirations left in the minds of people who
couldn't reach that are also an element in what is leading to the
fundamentalist terrorist upsurge. The peoples' discontent when you know you
can't get somewhere, and you're angry.

That project was the wrong project in the first place. It was manipulated to
introduce systems of inequality, unsustainable systems. I remember in the
'60s and '70s a lot of the development literature used to mention India
being underdeveloped in terms of how little plastic we generated. That was
an indicator. And even though all of us want future generations to be better
than us, the point is, what is that life? What goes into that definition of
"a better life"? The failure of the development project and its obvious
unachievability, in economic and ecological terms, and the failure of the
promise of a better tomorrow for children, where a better tomorrow for your
own life is disappearing in front of your eyes in the affluent part of the
world, is in a way giving us the opportunity to basically say that "a better
life" has to be defined some other way. Not in consumerism, not in
fictitious wealth creation, but in sustainable wealth creation, sharing of
our wealth. That's the real future we need for the children.

The opportunity that this total global disaster is creating for us is
refocusing on life. The problem was, when we said "a better life," what we
meant was "a more expensive fridge."

GP: A bigger collection of stuff.

VS: Or a bigger collection of stuff. We never meant a better life, in that
life was always being taken away. Those are very basic things. Life was
getting eroded in order to fit better into the gadgetry cycle. At this
point, that is also becoming unavailable, to not the deceitful rich, but the
recent rich, who put their trust in Wall Street and in companies and
accountants who weren't trustworthy in the first place.

GP: And who had their own agendas.

VS: Yeah. That's why I come back again to the living democracy. The living
democracy, not just taking democracy back, but taking life back.

GP: Many of the types of changes you're talking about are essentially
revolutionary changes, not in the sense of armed struggle, but in the sense
of going to the root of how our economic and cultural and political systems
work and redefining them, redefining the goals, and redefining who controls
and who makes the decisions. How can we get from here to there?

VS: I think we are in a moment of deep hope, because the corporations have
done a better job of destroying themselves than humans ever could.

Another source of hope comes from a new solidarity, where, while
globalization, in terms of economic and corporate globalization, has been a
dividing, inequality-creating, life-annihilating, democracy-annihilating,
violent phenomenon, the new internationalism that it has given birth to-not
because it linked us together in the benefit-sharing, but it links us
together in the sacrifice of it -

GP: And the common oppressors.

VS: And the common oppressors-we are now in a different moment, where I can
really see five years down the line people looking back at corporations
dreaming of owning the water of the world as a joke. At, okay, they've taken
over a few municipalities, but [laughing] they have many more municipalities
to take over. They have taken over a few aquifers, but have many more
aquifers to take over.

GP: And there are more Bolivias than there are successful takeovers.

VS: Absolutely. I mean, every day there's a Bolivia. There's a Bolivia
happening in India right now. That's another source of hope-that there are
more Bolivias. And they're happening, and people are self-organizing. There
is no mastermind in one place saying "This is how you organize." When your
water is taken away, every community knows what to do about it. No one has
to be told and told and ruled, and they don't have to have Das Kapital in
their desks, nor do they have to have political science theorists advising
them. Water goes, you know what to do. Basic life survival goes, you know
what to do.

GP: One of the things that has given me a lot of hope recently is the
inability of governments to withstand popular outrage - Bolivia, Argentina,
Venezuela. People in the U.S.'s reactions are very far behind where people
in the rest of the world already are. There's a lot that can be learned, and
some of those links are being made now.

VS: And I think the leaders are very far behind. They are still in a Cold
War mentality and the Cold War is over. They are still in technocratic rule,
and people don't trust technology. They still want to have us believe in
their accountants, and they themselves recognize that their accounts don't
work.

And they are exercising power that they already have lost.

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Tom Childs,  Audio/Visual Resources
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