Book Worth a Look: "Citizens' Income and Green Economics" by Clive Lord

Clive Lord is said by some to be the oldest Green alive; now in his mid-seventies, it is fortunately likely that there are older Greens in terms of biological age, but as possibly the oldest surviving member of the 14 individuals who established People, the predecessor to the Ecology/Green Party of England and Wales, and as such the first established Green Party in the world, he may well be the longest serving Green member on the planet.
     Clive lived in Batley in Kirklees until last year and I worked closely with him on various local campaigns in our area - I was his deputy when he was the Agent for the last Yorkshire European election campaign, where we were rather narrowly beaten to a successful place by the odious but now collapsing BNP. And he he worked tirelessly with me in a determined but slightly ill-starred by-election campaign for a council ward in Dewsbury a few years ago. He is well known in the Green Party for his efforts at elections around the country and he fought nearly every national and local election in Batley & Spen between 1974 and 2011.
     Clive is not a socialist; but at the heart of his many years of eco-campaigning is a belief in sustainability combined with fairness and he has been a tireless proponent of the concept of the Citizens' Income. This policy (once, interestingly shared by the Liberal Party but quietly dropped in its post-SDP merger) involves the state paying all adults over 18, whether working or not, a basic income. The Green Party has this as a policy, though apart from a Pensioners Income of £160 per week at the last election, it has not set a rate for this and there is some tension inherent in how this would work set against the Party's support for a national minimum wage set at the Living Wage level.
     But a Citizens' Income to my mind is crucial in changing the economic paradigm, including in any shift towards a more ecosocialist economics. This is because it creates the possibility for all sorts of productive new activities by citizens. It would not directly reward activities which are currently not valued and therefore not paid by the capitalist economy - such as parenting, or supporting the local community or any number of non-profit-seeking creative activities - but it would free people to have some new possibility of undertaking these without loss. To anyone concerned with a more sustainable society, where extracting the highest possible financial return on our dwindling resources is ended, the Citizen's Income raises at least the possibility of new courses of activity and a renewal of community and citizenship infinitely more powerful than the devious twaddle of Cameron's evaporated Big Society initiative.
     Clive Lord first published a book on the Citizens' Income in 2003 and this year he is about to launch a newly published updated edition, which he has edited with other prominent members of the Green Economics Institute. Using the example of Easter Island to illustrate the propensity of societies to keep on "developing", i.e., exploiting their resources to exhaustion, the book shows how a society with a more even distribution of economic power can calm the drive to accumulate ever more without consideration of the longer term and how we need to shift to a greater emphasis on conservation and sharing of resources. This touches on the "Commons" concept, a matter of some debate between the ecological and ecosocialist wings of the Green Party and the wider green movement; for ecosocialists, the book holds to arguments about possibilities under the market system which we are unlikely to agree with, but it is a valuable contribution to the debate on how we can move to a fairer world.
     The updated book is available now from the Green Economics Institute - details below.

An Age of Green Economics: A ground - breaking  new book:

 Green Economics and Citizens Income

This collection of essays, speeches & articles Introduces Green Economics and the Citizens Income to the general reader!

Edited by Clive Lord, Miriam Kennet and Judith Felton

Just Published by the Green Economics Institute

This fresh perspective on the theme of how to stop mankind over-exploiting the Earth challenges reassurances that scientific warnings are unduly pessimistic. The fate of Easter Island offers new insights into the dynamics driving economic expansion, and why the major players can never know how or when to stop. Lord outlines how a so-called ‘primitive’ tribe solved the problem which devastated Easter Island, and which now confronts us globally, by a cultural shift based on a strategy of sharing necessities unconditionally, allowing other rules for everything else.

Lord explains why such a strategy is an essential precondition for a sustainable world, and how it can be adopted nationally and internationally. Practical measures, however vital once such a shift has taken place, will do more harm than good if used instead to prop up the existing growth oriented mind-set.

 

Book Overview: 7 parts. No. of pages 337 ISBN: 9781907543074

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Concepts: Tragedy of the commons, etc. 

Part 3: A way out: Making it happen

Part 4: Wider Implications: How the Citizens' Income can form the basis for a paradigm shift

Part 5: Tactical and strategic implications for implementation

Part 6: Case studies of new developments

Part 7: There are no utopias

Normal RRP £ 30.00 plus postage and packing

£20.00 plus p and p if ordered direct from the Green Economics Institute: order via

greeneconomicsinstitute@yahoo.com Special introductory offers: 5% discount on all orders

Special Price £14.99 if bought at one of the four Book Launches in Leeds:

• Central Library, The Headrow 22nd May 10am-12 noon & 2pm-4pm
• Branch Library North Lane Headingley 23rd May 7pm-9pm
• Branch Library 106 Harrogate Rd.Chapel Allerton 24th May 7pm-9pm

Limits to Growth = Limits to Wealth

(Right -The Desert of Capitalism: on the left in this satellite picture is Haiti, whose Government has permitted full-scale exploitation of the forests by big business. On the right, the Government of the Dominican republic has poured public funds into Eco-tourism and conservation - the results are plain to see.)

The mainstream of politics often combines its reluctant nod to the need for environmental protection with a hasty assurance that capitalism can yet deliver "green growth". Like latter day alchemists, they claim a synthesis of the free market with modern technology, and a healthy dose of genetic engineering for good measure, will somehow deliver a nirvana of never-ending increases in production and consumption and, of course, profit in a sustainable way.

This, of course, is the underlying folly of capitalism - that limitless demand can somehow be met ultimately with limitless supply. In any other realm of human activity, under any other title, the concept would be laughed out as fantasy at best, dangerous delusions at worst. But for our planet, its species mired in an unchallenged liberal economy now for over twenty years, if not much longer, capitalism is as essential as the air we breathe (or even more essential, given the damage capitalism is permitted to inflict on our air). Since Fukyama declared the end of history with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have been left with a received wisdom and socio-political consensus that there is only one way forward: free markets, deregulated as far as possible. And through the 1990s and the start of this decade, enough crumbs fell to enough people from the Masters' tables to maintain the illusion that somehow everyone would benefit. The suffering of hundreds of millions of the poorest in all societies, their poverty - both relative and absolute - was effectively shut out of the media as effectively as the thousands of "gated communities" that have sprung up throughout the western world have physically shut out the offending sight of poor from the eyes of the rich.

Of course, we now see this Neverland unravelling before our eyes with the banking crisis and the recession. But how has it been dealt with? After all the wringing of hands, the denunciation of "greedy" bankers (as if somehow there were some who were not) and the declaration that such things could never be allowed to happen again, what do we find? A handful of bankers have departed their well-paid jobs, in nearly all cases with handsome pay offs and swollen pension pots. Even Fred Goodwin, who captained the Royal Bank to ruin, continues to pick up a pension of £342,500 plus pa, along with a seven figure lump sum, while 9,000 of his former employees have lost their jobs. At least he will be able to get the scratches on his car fixed. His worst penalty? "Blackballed" allegedly by the membership committee of Saint Andrews Golf Club - now that's capital regulating itself!

Now this past week, we are told the bankers are now returning to their old habits. Kept afloat with the hard earned money of taxpayers, after spending years themselves doing their utmost to avoid paying their personal income tax and their organisations' corporate taxes, they now feel ready to carry on as normal.

No surprise. The capitalist system has an inherent driver - it is to maximise your return for the minimum investment of effort: You want something I have. My intention becomes to find what is the absolute greatest level of value that you will surrender to me for it. There are no ethical considerations. No long term planning. No morality other than how do I extract the most wealth from you, for me. Now.

So it is little wonder that, with some signs the current downturn has flattened out, that capitalists seek to assert their normal behaviours. They have always done so in the past - why would they not now? It is, we are told, the "natural" way of doing things, so why would their nature suddenly change?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/banks-are-forgetting-lessons-of-crisis-already-warns-turner-1716001.html

The corollary of all this though is that the concept of a "return to normal" IS unrealistic - the imbalance in wealth, globally and in the UK, is at a historic high. The gap between rich and poor has never been wider. Tiny numbers of people hold vast quantities of wealth while resources grow tight and environmental degradation impoverishes hundreds of millions - both developments driven by the voracious need of capitalism to feed the pockets of shareholders rather than the bellies of hungry children.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/04/workandcareers.executivesalaries

It is not sustainable, which is why a return to normal ways can only be a temporary phenomenon. Capitalism is driving the planet and our species to the edge. Any recovery may last a while - a year, two years, a decade even, but soon enough, the impact of passing not just peak oil but peak carbon fuel production will kick in with a thump that will bring whole economies crashing down, banks and governments with them, and social unrest, disorder, violence and war may well be the most obvious result.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatechange
There is another future: a Green one, offering redistribution of wealth, fairer societies, banks and enterprises focussed on mutual protection and community need rather than shareholder dividends and private profit. A sustainable future that has plans for the next 50 and 100 years, not the next 3 to 5 years which fit the common corporate business plans of most capitalist companies. This way recognises that there are limits to growth, there is only so much that can be extracted without needing to replenish. And this in turn leads to the point that if there are limits to growth, there need also to be limits to wealth: that a sustainable society seeking the common good has, by virtue our human condition and our planet's limits, to set a maximum level of wealth that an individual can hold, in income and in wealth. Any other way can only lead to the chaos and collapse of the capitalist scenario.

We face a choice: green and growth cannot be intertwined indefinitely; we need to learn that there are limits - to what we can have, to what we can take. Instead, we have to find how we can do more with what we have - and all the evidence points to those people who already do so have happier and healthier lives than those who are tied in, emotionally, psychologically, financial and physically, to the capitalist treadmill. If this can be translated to the whole community, if it can become the zeitgeist, the underpinning ethic of society, a transformation can begin - but it will involve hard choices and political action.

It won't be an easy option or a soft choice: I am not arguing for a touchy-feely hippy revolution.

But I AM arguing for a revolution.