While I found some parts of John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man slightly lurid and others pompous, my critique focuses on his admittedly vague suggestions for resolving current crises such as world hunger. This critique may apply to other techno-modern optimisms too.
But first a warning not to use my argument, or anyone else’s, including the NSA’s, as an excuse to dispose of Perkins’ entire work. Using a flaw in one argument to dismiss all of them is fallacious, and often wishful, thinking.
Perkins suggests in Confessions that the highly efficient and capable systems of worldwide transportation and communication could be used to help avert and remedy crises, rather than merely enriching the corporatocracy. Simple logic would seem to agree… and I also imagine most people are already asking some questions like why would the wealthy, powerful people who own and control those communication and transportation systems, ever use them to help poor people? Where’s the money in it?
To be fair, Perkins’ focus in Confessions was not upon solutions, and he has written and worked a lot since 2004. Nevertheless I think we’d benefit from someone with his background: corporate, shamanic, and Tom Paine patriotic; suggesting a strategy for those worldwide systems to actually serve the people.
Power Corrupts --Lord Action
Perkins seems to want people to have democratic control over their natural and cultural resources. I argue that if the worldwide transport and communication systems are essential too, they too need to be under the democratic control of those affected, rather than the corporatocracy. Confessions makes a strong case that the corporatocracy is the antithesis of democracy — only a stone’s throw from dictatorship. While a benign dictator is better than a tyrant, I think most of us know that the structure of dictatorship is the ultimate problem, recalling that old phrase that power corrupts.
Benign corporatocrats, to which Confessions might have alluded, are no more a solution than benign dictators. And keep in mind that benign personal values often cannot be followed by corporate executives on the job. The CEO of a lumber company may be a devout environmentalist, but their fiduciary duty requires them to clear-cut forests whenever possible or be prosecuted and replaced.
Further complicating the desire to serve people before profit with those systems is their very structure. Most people like to think that technology is inherently neutral. Jerry Mander effectively argues otherwise in his book The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
These communications and transport systems are efficient, including cost efficient, as a result of high specialization and eliminating redundancy. The small numbers of those systems (think: corporate consolidation) and the specialized skills (internet and shipping/transport control citadels) and resources (undersea cables and seaports for example) structurally lend those systems to control by a few and incidentally makes them rather fragile. Those few with their hands on the levers of those systems have much more power than most other people, which sounds familiarly anti-democratic, oh, and power corrupts.
I don’t think that those possibly-world-changing systems will magically become run by a benign corporatocracy nor that that is a desirable long-term outcome. I also don’t think they’re likely to fall under the democratic control of the people. But if either were to begin to happen, the pernicious systems fragility would be used, possibly by Perkins’ successors, to threaten them back into serving the rich and powerful, or fall to the disgruntled. I’d like to be wrong.
Economic relocalization efforts, which are mentioned on Perkins’ web site, seem to be one response to helping people help themselves in spite of the possibly-useful worldwide communication and transport systems. I feel satisfaction in realizing that economic relocalization is the exact opposite of the scheme in which Perkins played his role, and against which we began protesting in the US, ten years ago, in Seattle.