Somali pirate tooled up like a UK rail ticket inspector

Pirates are suddenly everywhere: Indian Navy sinks Pirate Ship, Somali Pirates Hijack Saudi Oil Tanker: Cadbury’s Old Jamaica chocolate bar futures are set to surge. Why the sudden interest? Piracy is not new. Nor is this revival of interest so ephemeral either. We have had quite a few Pirates of the Caribbean to contend with recently. We have software piracy as well as bio-piracy. What do all pirates have in common? Well, they all exist on a frontier that is being enclosed. As Lord Cutler Becket answered in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2‘: “Freedom. Jack Sparrow is a dying breed. The world is shrinking; the blank pages of the map filled in.”

The oceans have a special place in the imagination of a world of states. They are places in between, with a sort of lawlessness that is gradually being enclosed. The Arctic and Antarctic enjoy a similar legal status and also current fate – look at the rush for the mineral rights below the northern melting ice. Markets are in-between spaces (hence perhaps Monty Python’s Corporate Pirates sketch in ‘The Meaning of Life’), regulated as loosely as the oceans. However, they are now also facing regulation and enclosure.

But as bio-piracy illustrates, this enclosure also means that things that were once common property are being placed under private or state control. This is a bit like the process of enclosure in England between 1760 and 1820, where common lands were confiscated and people were driven from the countryside. Indeed this is the pattern with the globalisation and mechanisation of agriculture in India, although sadly the booming service and IT sectors seem not to be absorbing the excess labor as fast as it is being generated. With 50% of people effectively outside the cash economy (on below a dollar-a-day) and with the commons that these people rely upon being taken away, we face an ideological crisis.

We claim that this enclosure, within an increasingly regulated market economy framework, will make people rich. That is, to guarantee access to the horn of plenty, as a Global Consumer in a Global Economy. But the numbers say otherwise. At current levels of inequality, it takes 15 planets to lift everyone out of poverty. So the private tradeable rights that this current enclosure is being built upon will guarantee misery, if not mass poorslaughter. This raises the question of equality. If we are all humans, increasingly enclosed on one planet, increasingly under one rule, what does it mean to be a global citizen?

One glaring common denominator defines us all: We all have a footprint, we all have a niche, a space that we subsist from on this planet. Our right to life is unavoidably based on our right to livelihood. This in turn is based on our footprint. But while all men are born equal, many of us are born with enormous feet. American feet are 20 times bigger than Bangladeshi. These footprints are embodied by the Saudi Oil Tanker that the somali pirates took. Looking at this way, it is not clear who the pirates really are: who is setting sail to loot the riches of the world?

So perhaps the way out of an Age of Piracy is the idea of equal footprints. The world’s most popular response plan (amongst governments) to climate change, is Contraction and Convergence, which is based on equal entitlements to the carbon sink. But since we face enclosure and resource crunches on all fronts, why not generalise this idea? How about “We are all born equal, and with an equal entitlement to a footprint?” This would give a rights-based framework for adapting to climate change, and could move the whole ailing International Development industry out of a Victorian philanthropy model, into a modern rights-based welfare concept. If we want to stop being pirates, perhaps we should start by keeping our feet on the ground.

One concept that has been leaving me speechless recently is how many people will die due to resource shortages if we keep on with this free-market stuff. How do you put this kind of thing into a word or phrase? Well, I entered “genocide by economic means” into my trusty dictionary and the first result was: Supply Side Economics. Who would have thought it? A dictionary with a sense of humour.

I also have to admit to being a wonk (though hopefully not a wonker). But this issue is so huge, it really bears explaining, and also a word of its own. Jared Diamond pointed out that there are a few things that often characterise civilisations on the brink of Collapse. Generally there is a party going on at the top, because this is the point on the exponential curve of resource usage where consumption is maxing out. But at the same time, as basic resource shortages bite, people at the bottom are starting to feel the pain, as basic neccessities start to run short. The problem that Diamond identifies, the one that is a killer risk for civilisations, is that those at the top do not pay attention to the problems of those at the bottom, because they are having such a great time. They  are too consumed by hubris to address the emerging problems. It all sounds eerily close to home doesn’t it?

But here comes the really deadly bit. What happens to the price of a resource in shortage?  Economics 101 says it tends to go up.  What does trying to implement a global free market do? It tries to make prices the same for everyone everywhere, free from distortions. What does this do to people with little purchasing power (the poor) as basic resources run short? It kills them, efficiently.

Now this could be the most efficient killing machine ever invented by human kind, so surely it deserves a name? Genocide is not quite it, because, as people endlessly argue, it implies a deliberate intention to mass murder, and this particular form of wipe-out seems unplanned. We could go from the idea of manslaughter, which is applied to such unplanned or accidental killings by negligence, and generalise it out: mass humanslaughter perhaps? However it is, at least to begin with, a selective kind of killing, so how about mass poorslaughter?

None of these phrases really trip off the tongue, so perhaps we should use the words of Jean Zeigler, the UN special rapporteur for the Right to Food, who described biofuels, which turn land over from food to energy production, as an “Agricultural Crime Against Humanity.” Although I think there is an even snappier way of summing all of this up. Stupid.

Now I hate all the guilt and the wringing of hands as much as the next person, partly because I think it’s displacement activity, if we are not going to do something about it, then we may as well stop pretending and get on with enjoying ourselves. But there is an issue of political imagination in all of this. Every time we make statements about the planet, or about “life” or being human, we are also making statements on behalf of these people. People who probably don’t speak English and so don’t have any access to our elite discussions.

We depend upon these people, they make our cheap Chinese goods possible, and fuel the service boom in India. In many ways they manage inflation on our behalf, since they are, well, so cheap. Since we depend on these people, if we want to chart a political future for ourselves that is stable, then we need to take into account the realities of their lives. Take the food price crisis: How much have we spoken about the price of milk in Tesco? And yet how little have we discussed the possibilities of food riots? The last trade round fell on this point: The developed world just could not get their heads around the developing world’s insistence that their population had to eat, come what may.

In order to have an accurate political imagination, to help us chart our way through the turbulence of climate change, and avoid crunching on the rocks of natural resource shortage, we need to think beyond our discussions where we mostly talk about Us. We also need to get beyond the current war-time mentality where we think about Them as terrorists or usurpers. We really do face tests that are way beyond what our current mentality is geared up to. Thus we need a new political imagination that is beyond Them and Us.

We have very few rules apart from good taste. I won’t publish racist, sexist, bigoted or spiteful stuff. Pass this url to everyone you know. Tell them it’s not about THem and US. Let’s have a revolution and let’s have it for fun.