G8 in crisis and the alternatives of the town of Joseph Hunt A first consideration that can not relate to the function that summit, like the Ministers of Agriculture the G.8, they take in this new era, marked by the crisis, we have entered.
On the one hand, it must be emphasized that these appointments thematic G.8, whose task is to prepare the summit of La Maddalena, serve their very great difficulty, its Summit of Heads of State and Government to be held in July next. The fact that they can count on a very limited composition, which can no longer, for a variety of reasons that just the London Summit of the G.20 had deepened, claim for himself the role of "the dome of the world government" to driving a form of sovereignty in the process of planetary formation.
not forget that the same theme G.8 Agriculture is an absolute novelty: his call had been decided by the Heads of State and Government at the last summit in Hokkaido (Japan) in July 2008. We keep in mind the context in which this decision was taken. Between the 2007 and 2008 the world experienced the most serious agricultural crisis and food for decades now. He had triggered a real spiral, starting from the dramatic increase in consumer prices of basic commodities such as cereals (among them in particular rice and wheat). Among the contingent factors that have most affected the increases in the context of agricultural markets, which in previous decades, before, on a national scale were been invested by so-called "structural adjustment policies" of the International Monetary Fund, and then were forced to "liberalized" the directives of the World Trade Organization (WTO), thus dislocating the South of subsistence crops, biodiversity and local economies associated with them, there is the total unpredictability of the production cycle in agriculture as a result of global warming and related climate change. To this was added to the growing use of these cereals in the production of so-called bio-fuels, which took away very broad areas to food crops, such as the capitalist response to the problem dell'insostenibilità emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the primary cause of global warming, and the relentless growth in oil prices. And, if this were not enough, it was on the scene here too the financial system: crisis in the stock market and the mortgage was clearly oriented towards large investors derivatives such as futures, that is to invest in stocks that can of its value on increasing the prices of raw materials and basic commodities, characterized as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy forced to. All this has triggered a vicious cycle that occurred with no apparent way out. Less than a
year later, just to witness the speed of changes in specific scenarios although located on the long history of the 'time of crisis, "the situation has significantly changed: the references remain the same structural, but the irresistible rise of prices consumption - which however are not returned to pre-crisis levels - just because of the economic downturn triggered by the global financial crisis, has suffered a setback. G.8 The preparatory document of Treviso - revealed for excerpts from the Financial Times 7 April, systematically ignored by the mainstream press, but angrily denied by the Italian Government - speaks to this regard, very clearly what are the nightmares and dreams of former "powerful of the Earth", much more pleasant joke of propaganda minister Zaia. The nightmare that is well represented by the Italian Presidency of the Sherpas call the "global challenge: reducing the emergency-food." And, mind you, do not refer to the fact that between 2007 and 2008, for the first time in human history, has been steadily exceeded the threshold of a billion people, children, women and men, who suffer daily hunger, as well as when they talk about "food security", they are unwilling to take effective measures to eliminate the poisons the food chain than a century of industrialization and not just chemistry, nor to protect consumers from risks associated with the use of genetically modified organisms. On the contrary, the spectra waving their nights are those of the myriad of social conflicts exploded in over thirty countries, as a result of the food crisis of 2007/2008, the reality of hundreds of peasant uprisings and urban insurgencies that have formed in continents of the Southern Hemisphere, the answer to the multitudinous race of the prices of basic commodities in the last biennio.Ma if the nightmare turned out real well, so much so that government experts say that a new food crisis could have "serious consequences not only on business but also on social and international relations, which in turn will have a direct impact on security and stability of world politics, "explained the dream in the" working document "of G.8 is so dangerous as illusory. "The problem of price volatility remains a key to global food security" - the report says - "so there is a need for a rapid increase in agricultural production in developing countries." Once again, that is, the illusion of an indefinite expansion of productive capacity in response to the crisis. But how, with such technologies, and especially for the benefit of whom? And who should pay the costs? In this document the G.8, for what it has been publicly read, says nothing. And perhaps nothing can
dire.Perché on agricultural issues, the property regime and the regime's productive land, the policies of the agro-food industry, perhaps even more than on other issues, the so-called Big Eight are forced to make accounts and with other political parties, national and supra-state, and with transnational companies, which are much more guidance in these global markets and setting of their local effects. Staying at the continental level, we think only about how the fate of Italian are widely condizionate dalle regole, dai meccanismi spesso paradossali delle Politiche Agricole Comunitarie, che sono state ulteriormente sbilanciate dall’allargamento della stessa Unione europea verso est, in territori caratterizzati da un’organizzazione dell’impresa capitalistica intorno alla produzione agro-alimentare molto diversa da quella che i paesi del cuore dell’Europa occidentale si sono dati in questi decenni.E la discussione del G.8 è inefficace rispetto alle politiche comunitarie europee, quindi sulla scala continentale, ma al tempo stesso è del tutto inefficace anche rispetto alla scala globale.Perché su questo livello, i destini delle politiche agricole, di quelle alimentari e di quelle energetiche, si giocano al di fuori the scope of the G.8. We play in the major continental markets in Latin America and in major Asian markets as China and India in particular. Sure, Cison Valmarino, there is an attempt to extend the comparison also to Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Australia, India and China, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and Indonesia, but each of these emerging regional powers will be at the table bearer of well-defined national interests to defend and answer "local" to the crisis in different agricultural and food that each of them is specifically to deal with. Not to mention that the real guest of stone represented by large groups of multinationals in the field of dissemination seeds as well as marketing of products, account for agro-food market much more than any nation state. Therefore, both continental and global scale, we are talking about a dimension of governance G.8 whose struggle to grasp the global contradictions we face.
On the other hand, in these days "zoiosa" Marca are important because they allow an opportunity, just for the theme that is central to the summit of the former Big Eight, to connect the issues relating to land, agricultural production, power, energy production, essentially those fundamental elements of the reproduction of the human race as genere umano, al discorso complessivo sulla crisi. Nel senso che, nella lingua cinese, il termine crisi viene rappresentato con un ideogramma che significa, al tempo stesso, opportunità, occasione. Credo debba essere colta questa ambivalenza della crisi presente, partendo dal suo carattere di crisi sistemica. Siamo di fronte ad un collasso del sistema su scala globale.E, di fronte al carattere strutturale della crisi, vi è anche la necessità di fare i conti con il tema dello sviluppo. Va detto che, se guardiamo alle nostre radici, alla nostra matrice culturale, chi proviene dal marxismo critico, dalla tradizione operista, in qualche misura è sempre stato abituato a leggere e ad interpretare politicamente la realtà secondo uno schema che in many respects remained dialectical, so that the workers' struggles, or at least today, the struggles of the multitude put to work, produce a crisis, the crisis is dealt with before the conflict, resolved by social capital as a relation, in terms of expansion, in terms of recovery on the ground of a new development that leads to a higher capital-labor contradiction, the contradiction that is classically understood in the Marxian sense of development of productive forces (today we call the development of social cooperation, social productivity) and class relations, ie the social relations that bring into form this level reached by the development of productive forces, cooperation sociale.Ma this scheme is still valid? I doubt very strong indeed and I think we should start to put it into discussione.Perché is evident in the babble of national governments, the ineffectiveness of their leadership, reduced to being great spot reassuring the media (who do not reassure anyone right) in the loss of organisms supra, this structural inability to respond to a systemic crisis, I think we read the limits of expansion, that the limits of capitalist development as a field of crisis response are perhaps being met. I speak not only of the physical limits. The world market now coincides with the entire globe, the area of \u200b\u200btrade, the construction of production networks is the planet. But even if we look at other possible enlargement of land, those dimensions which have now fully productive self pervaded the size of the bios, life, just by touching the limits that are not only physical or geographical, the capitalist tendency to a continuous expansion of its capacity enhance any type of human relationship, any aspect of the first, second and third kind, now seems to have finally reached a threshold insuperabile.Allora perhaps some indication can be gained from the debate that's been in recent years, the mid- 70s when they started to discuss "the limits to growth" until more recent times with all the current that is measured with the theme of decline. A debate that has had the habit of being played on a field too often weak, centered on individual behavior and the moral dimension of the choice of the individual, be at the risk of interstitial confined to the margins, compared to the heart of the contradictions, the solution to the problems , just maybe, in some measure put. Without measure, finally, with the thorny issue of breaking the conflict need to jam the mechanism of the destructive and unlimited growth unidirezionale.Dovremo therefore be able to contaminate a positive, productive, creative, these different strands of thought that seek to address a debate true that the crisis-fighting scheme-development-lotte-crisis-development has now probably lost its validity, both in terms of explanation of what is happening, both in terms of guidance for social and political action, and try to confront, however, the consequences of this block to expand the capacity capitalist still internal and external borders of the market. From here to check the construction material and ideal alternative.
Perhaps today we have for the first time, in this global crisis and its systemic features, the ability to move permanently from the land of the struggles fought around the value of trade, the clash around, to put it in Marxist terms, the wages required by the conflict which was and remains basically only played about redistributive mechanisms (and likely to be the sole axis around which the debate is also tightening the responses to the crisis) to regain the land value of 'use of the excess of the commodity-form of human alienation and the way that it entails, to affirm the possibility of cooperation between autonomous "free and equal." Perhaps, for the first time in decades, we can return to face not as an academic exercise, but as a field of theory and practice of political practice, in the conflicts in the crisis, the design and construction material production alternatives and life, real and common. Alternative, which may consist of a mere individual option, but the more collective measure their effectiveness, as they are nourished by his assertion of independence as a vector, a factor of breakdown in social relations domain data, the exercise of a sort of permanent "counter-power" that goes to constitute the defense of social and political space in which life forms can grow up free and happy.
* summary of an interview with Joseph Hunt to Radio Sherwood - April 10, 2009