Is the current financial mess a sign that the “capitalist patriarchy” is “a violent system in its death pangs?” That was the claim of one recent speaker invited to the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill.
While most credible economic experts view downturns as natural or corrective occurrences in the normal business cycle, Dr. Vandana Shiva delivered the above analysis to an overflowing audience of approximately 400 people at UNC’s Fed-Ex Global Education Center on Tuesday. According to the UNC Daily Tar Heel, “the Carolina Women’s Center, Institute for the Environment, Center for South Asia Studies, Carolina Asia Center and the FedEx Global Education Center all helped pay the $5,000 cost to bring Shiva to campus.” (Anywhere but the American campus it would seem strange that a multinational corporation like FedEx would help fund a speech by an opponent of the existence of multinational corporations.)
The title of her speech was “Trading Our Lives Away: The Failure of Capitalist Patriarchy and Women and Nature Centered Alternatives.”
Described by Time Magazine as an “environmental hero,” Shiva is most known for her advocacy about agricultural issues, particularly her opposition to genetic engineering.
She is also a leading proponent of a movement that goes by many names: anti-globalization, counter-development, anti-capitalism and so forth. This movement incorporates many other factions on the political left, including environmentalists, animal rights activists, and feminists. It is usually anti-trade, anti-corporation, anti-technology, and anti-Western as well. And while movement members are very vocal about the need to change the current world economic and political systems, they seemingly offer no coherent alternatives.
The reason for their reticence is because most of their goals cannot be accomplished without a ruthless, top-down, authoritarian system that employs economic central planning. They cannot therefore openly call such a system by its rightful names—communism, socialism, or fascism–for political reasons.
It is likely that very few in the audience questioned her message–one of the event’s organizers even suggested that many in attendance were women’s studies students who would be rewarded by their professors for showing up. Other audience members appeared to be attracted by Shiva’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, and they punctuated many of her statements with thunderous applause.
Yet Shiva’s grasp of fundamental economics seemed highly questionable–she is a physicist by training, not an economist or political scientist. To start, she attacked financial derivatives as if they were the source of the collapse, rather than the bad loans those derivatives were based on. She and others in the anti-capitalist movement very likely approved of the U.S. government’s pressure to increase the sub-prime loans that caused the crisis for political reasons—loans that ordinarily would have been rejected for their high likelihood of failure.
She also scoffed at the use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of an economy, particularly for its tendency to exclude work that is consumed by the producer, such as a farmer growing his own food, a woman doing housework, etc. Such work is defined (in the capitalist patriarchy) as “non-work,” she said, adding that the definition of production is deliberately being changed to the benefit of multi-national corporations, while “the real economy has been turned into non-production”—an absurdly exaggerated claim.
The real reason for the exclusion of the subsistence economy and housework is less nefarious than Shiva indicated: it is because, without a recorded exchange of money, such work defies the quantification necessary to be included in GDP.
Her glorification of subsistence economies suggested that she does not fully understand that concepts such as greater efficiency through specialization and using money to store value are some of the major reasons why mankind has progressed beyond his “short, brutish and nasty” state of nature (as Thomas Hobbes described it). And her attack on GDP suggested that she is either ignorant of, or in denial of, the strong correlation between GDP and almost all other measures of the quality of human existence: literacy rates, infant mortality, average lifespans, and so on. In Shiva’s native India, GDP growth has been dramatic in recent years, largely due to extensive free market liberalization that occurred in 1991. Per-capita GDP rose $307.97 in 1991 to $736.11 in 2005 (in constant dollars). In that same time period, infant mortality saw an equivalent drop, from 84 deaths per 1,000 children under the age of one in 1990 to 56 in 2005. The average lifespan increased significantly in this period as well, from 58 in 1990 to 64 in 2005.
Shiva did not offer any realistic alternative to global capitalism, except in the most vague terms such as “the challenge we have is to hang onto life,” and “the celebration of diversity.” Her speech was mostly rant, and little solution. At times she offered clever yet superficial wordplay to impart a smug cynicism instead of actual knowledge. For instance, she said an assumption of the “capitalist patriarchy” is that “if you go to the forest and chop down the trees, you are creating growth.” One might appreciate the amusing aspects of the contradiction, but the statement is essentially true: those felled trees likely mean comfortable homes or some other desirable utility for people.
She employed hyperbolic leaps of logic to impress the audience, such as likening agri-business giant Monsanto’s patent on sterile seeds (so that they can retain ownership beyond a single generation) to “a war against life itself.”
She also made some statements that border on the irrational, such as a claim that capitalism is “an attack on production itself,” or that “bad food (genetically engineered food) is creating starvation.”
She even challenged the veracity of Western science, suggesting that, by attempting to reduce matter to its basic components, we have “amputated ourselves as beings in a rich diverse world.” In India, however, the people “still have an epistemology that includes all these alternative ways of knowing,” she said thankfully. These statements might indicate that she views the empirical reasoning and underlying principles of science that have permitted mankind to gain understanding of the mysteries of the universe and to shape the natural world for humanity’s benefit as intellectually backward.
Romanticizing a return to nature, for one reason or another, has been part of the fringes of Western civilization at least since Rousseau. Certainly, progress has not been a problem-free process. There are valid reasons to question whether GDP should be the primary measure of economic well-being. There might be a few specific ideas in the “counter-development” movement of Shiva and others worthy of further exploration, such as providing women in undeveloped village societies micro-loans to start their own home-based businesses to spur economic development instead of pursuing development on grander scales. We might discover that organic food is indeed healthier than genetically engineered variants or those produced with chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the long run.
Yet the wholesale reconstruction of the world economy according to radical environmentalists like Shiva is not what the great mass of people on the earth desire.
Throughout history, and in every land, people have consistently chosen to advance materially, technically, and intellectually, through their everyday purchases and activities. Corporations and capital markets, though imperfect, have proven to be effective and efficient means to produce the material needs and desires of the people. To end these things, and to force people to return to a more “natural” life style, with its harsh conditions, short lifespans, and long hours of drudgery, can only by a coercive government—the real goal of the anti-capitalist movement.
What is really sad (and frightening for the future of our country) is that the majority of the students in the audience will not be exposed to more sensible economics and worldviews. To get their degrees, they need not study empirical economics or read classics like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action. Nor will they be required to take rigorous courses in comparative economics or comparative political systems.
These students will, however, regularly listen to lectures by speakers like Dr. Vandana Shiva and take classes from professors with similarly shallow views. And their prestigious UNC diplomas will permit them to assume a wide variety of influential positions: in K-12 education, in government, in the media, in charitable organizations or NGOs (non-government organizations), or in cultural associations. They will be able to attend law or graduate school and move higher up the ladder of influence—without comprehending how the world really works. And they will thereby shape the world according to their ignorance.