The Public Voice in Electronic Commerce
La place du citoyen dans le commerce électronique

As the appointed Chair-Moderator of this last Panel, mine is the privilege, bestowed upon me by that exalted capacity, of introducing our debate.

I shall not abuse such a license, keeping in mind what Abraham Lincoln used to say, in an age that allowed him much unbridled machismo: that any speech should be like a woman's dress : long enough to cover the subject, but sufficiently short as to keep the audience awake...

That is why I will, for the moment at least, confine myself to a few remarks - and then a few questions to you - about the context, the framework within which we develop today our discussion and the OECD Conference, with whatever little input we will be able to insert therein, will tomorrow elaborate their deliberations, much more focused as they will be on the miracles e-commerce will offer the world..

***

Let me start by recalling (I can quote you chapter and verse, if you want) that, three years ago, the World Bank suggested to use labour in Africa to monitor the closed circuit Tv camera systems of American shopping malls. One of the Bank's spokespersons explained: "there is potential for African countries there to come into the global economy through these types of technologies" [1].

Of course, years before [2] a leaked internal memo of the then chief economist of the same Bank, now the US Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, already suggested, that - and I quote - "more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs" from the advanced world should be encouraged, since "the measurement of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality"; and, therefore, were it not clear enough, "a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest costs, which will be the country with the lowest wages". His unbiased conclusion: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that"...

***

Well, friends. That's the nature of the beast. It is not true - it never was - that what is good for General Motors (or Fiat, for that matter) is good for the rest of us. Not necessarily. Not always. Quite rarely, in fact.

But, of course, it is true that while not relying on any such developments, we should welcome any civilising of the antics of the global capitalism we are living in. And we should - that, I believe, is the job of trade unions and good will people anywhere - help bring some of that civilising about.

Which means laboriously striking a balance between the challenge of a consumerism which happens also to be consuming our planet and the need to shun any ferocious Luddite despair about the promise of technology and the future of human civilisation.

But the question is there: what would ever become of all of us if the 1 billion and a half Chinese ever really used for all of their needs the per-capita amount of electricity that 270 million Americans burn-up just for air conditioning?

A balance is what we need. As John Maynard Keynes once said - and, unreconstructed Keynesian that I am, I am well aware that simply by quoting the fellow I chafe nerves both on the left and on the right of the ideological spectrum - "capitalism is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous : and it doesn't even deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we become extremely baffled and mystified" [3].

***

Of course, reformism - which, after the unregretted demise of revolution from above, is now the only game in town - has, at least for some thirty years, been rolled severely back. Not only because of the unthinking acceptance of the market über alles ideology by economic and political elites but also - and very much so - because of "objective" changes in the nature of capitalism itself, in its structures of reproduction and accumulation and - our subject today - because of many new forms of cross-border integration.

Today, goods are moved worldwide for global trade, as they always were. That is not what is new. What is new is that any plant, enterprise, production facility is increasingly looked at - and really is - just as another workstation in a global plant. That those plants are thousands of miles apart doesn't make any difference to the people trying to organise them. The strategy is the same as if they were simply different delivery gates at the same factory site.

Capital understood that well and quickly and now, most often, the state seems to be standing at the factory gate handing the keys to capital. A lot of beatings, and a few victories, many struggles and a quantity of tough thinking are now helping drive the point home to labour.

The point being probably summarised best in the tale of the Nile river, because with globalisation and its effects is just as with the Nile river floods. Useless to chide and berate: the floods are there, just as globalisation is there, and both don't pay much attention to our anathemas, nor are they much affected by our most vigorous struggles.

But, of course, since Menes - the founding Pharaoh of their first dynasty, three thousand years ago - the Egyptians learned to tame the tides of the Nile. What we need now,with the oncoming floods of this new deregulated, unregulated economy, is the equivalent of their canals, ducts, locks, sluices, barrages and dams: whatever can actually help moderate, regulate, civilise the mad-dog onslaught of globalisation.

Rules, that's what I am talking about. Rules with biting teeth, not only good-looking and good-sounding but toothless codes of conduct. Rules to help us not swallow la mal bouffe, the lousy grub of genetically modified crops and one sided globalisation of trade and culture.

Therefore, rules which must be discussed, elaborated and passed with us. Not against us.

***

Sisters, brothers, colleagues. I haven't answered any of the scathing questions put to us by the subject we are supposed to tackle here and now.

. Who will still enjoy access to jobs in the new hierarchy of mobility?

. Or are we really going for a labourless production system? that is, workers losing their jobs to robotic intelligence and, therefore, with no money to become consumers of goods and services produced by the technology of bits and digits?

. But aren't we, that way, leading the economy down the drain?

. And, then, in order to keep up consumption and, therefore, production, won't we somehow be compelled to device alternatives to the appropriation of capital and the pains of labour, the usual ways presently distributing and very unfairly re-distributing income and wealth?

. But is that really - not hopefully nor ideologically, but really - possible, in the context of today's culture and economic strictures? what, for lack of a better concise description, I will resign myself to call la pensée unique?

Recent technological developments, most notably the Internet, globalisation (where time is accelerated and space is compressed) seem to be for a while the fate of the world.

They divide, though, at least as much as unite humanity; they actually create an ever widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots; they also seem to bring about the decline of most truly public spaces and often, in the hallowed name of the marketplace, they help overrule democracy, if democracy is still defined as the will of officials elected by the people and for the people.

. Well, what are we going to do about it? Are we at least going to try the taming of the shrew?

. Will we, all of us, attempt coping with the most blatant unequal terms of the global market (haves and have-nots, capital and labour, ins and outs, center and periphery polarisations)? by the in depth reform - not the re-furbishing, nor even the re-architecturing... of the IMF and the World Bank?

Of course, even in the digital age we can't just press "delete" and wipe out inequality.

. But are we going to press for the actual re-structuring of the IMF and the World Bank?

Mr. Keynes once warned the Governors of his newborn children, the IMF and the World Bank: "there is scarcely any enduring successful experience yet of an international body which has fulfilled the hopes of its progenitors. Either an institution has become diverted to be the instrument of a limited group, or it has been a puppet of sawdust through which the breath of life does not blow." [4]. Yet, he said...

One must acknowledge that, over the last few months, the Bank has started reconsidering some of its mainstream analyses and policies, those it preached, over the last two decades - and to such dire effects - together with the IMF. But they just started...

. Well, are we going to try and turn both of those instruments back from what they have become, essentially managerial mechanisms protecting the profitability of capital, to what was their essential mandate, help prevent future wars by lending for reconstruction and development and smoothing-out temporary balance of payment problems without the practice of any unequal encroachment upon any country's basic rights?

. And what will us, our children, attempt to do about the contradiction of the most crucial human affairs now taking place on a global scale, while we are still quite unable to direct events at that level, and only - well, mostly - capable of watching boundaries, institutions, loyalties shift in rapid, unpredictable ways?

Last, in a long and certainly not exhaustive list but, as they say, not the least of our problems for sure.

. Will we - labour and all other solidarity organisations - ever be able to make full use of the digital advantage?

Because one sure thing is, for instance, that the ability of any union structure - the ability: that is the rub - to access the net and, thereby, to interact in real, live, time before a decision is taken on leadership policy proposals, would really create an otherwise unimaginable resource for our democratic life.

And the other sure thing is that, without the Internet's single most significant effect - that of cutting the cost of interaction: of searching, monitoring, informing and co-ordinating people and coalitions, and not only goods and services - we will never organise real global solidarity: not with our present resources, working methods, attitudes where international issues pervade every moment of our life but remain topics for seminars, for matters international, foreign to us and to our day-to-day activities.

Schematically, I dare say that any conceivable new internationalisms will be - will now have to be - to a large extent "communication internationalisms": just look at what the Internet did - and no other instrument could have done - to the original MAI...

***

That, my friends, is our agenda: the digital revolution, the future of work, the quality of life...

And yes, I know that the approach I sketch here is marked down, by some good friends of mine, as what Ralph Nader, in another context, termed once "defeatist realism".

But I submit that any "all or nothing" alternative route towards the goal of a better society would bog us down into what Ralph Nader himself, on another occasion, referred to as "defeatist utopianism".

The floor is now open to you. I hope, maybe, also for a few answers.

[1] S. Graham and S. Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Spaces, 1996.
[2] The memorandum, dated 12.12.1991 (it can still be easily found on many of the environmental community web sites), was later akwardly but unconvincingly explained by the Bank as a "joke"... Whatever... It seems to remain quite relevant.
[3] J. Maynard Keynes, Address to the Governors of the IMF and the IBRD, 9.3.1946.
[4] J. Maynard Keynes, Address...