Manifesto and National Sustainable Development Plan
1. The Green Party of India is a nexus formal political party to unite workers whose livelihoods are being destroyed by land grabbing and other corporate incursion into knowledge and culture, water, soil, food, textile, construction materials, health, welfare, transport and social sectors, as well as timber extraction and resulting exclusion from traditionally used subsistence landscapes.
This majority constituency does not have the considerable resources required to launch the Green Party of India by themselves to replace the current members of Parliament whose interests especially in relation to the manner of extraction of profit from land and the distribution of its benefits, diverge greatly from theirs.
All Indians however can jointly mobilise on this agenda which is not only the agenda of the poor but the agenda of the country as a whole. This is the politics of the Green Party of India.
All of us except the financial elite are dispossessed from the commons. And yet equitable use of common land and common property resources underpins our only feasible development path.
The Green Party of India stands for regaining our social commons to make India endure. The loss of land - usually due to inability to pay for the cost of money - is the single most tragic humiliation that can befall a family. It not only destroys our livelihood but is also now seen to destroy all of humanity along with the life-support systems of the planet itself. It is all the clearer that in fact the interests of the poor, and therefore the interests of the Green Party of India, are ultimately the interests of humanity as a whole.
Our aim is to assert a new paradigm of development and field our candidates in all electable posts up and down the country, mobilising towards victory in the 16th Lok Sabha elections in 2014 or earlier.
2. The Green Party of India believes that living on this planet is the central fact of politics. In order to have a future, we must recognise that we live within a finite global commons, and that our existence is within the metabolic exchange with our shared environment.
Our politics is about regulating this commons, recognising that equity is the correct basis of government. We must answer the question “Who is India?” We believe that India is the relationship between its people and their environment, their livelihood. So we believe that people who extract from this relationship, from India, should pay back to support the life of the people in their relation to their environment, with the perspective that these relationships with the environment should support life on the scale of decades, centuries and millennia, rather then merely to the next financial quarter or the next election. This is what we mean by justice, and this is how we begin to understand the commons as the basis of a sustainable nation.
Equity is seen as inefficient within dominant economic approaches, however we have travelled so far to the other extreme that this threatens the very viability of the biosphere and thus the global economy, and so India’s ecology and economy within that.
When looked at in terms of natural resources, justice and equity have become empty terms in the face of enormous inequality of access, especially to land, and to natural resources as a whole and the benefits of their usage. We see that the only substantive method of redressing this imbalance is to found the political economy on substantive equity rights to land and the environment. Dispossession without agreement and compensation should become a marginal component of the political economy.
Only in this way can the usage of natural resources become optimised towards the general benefit, and unnecessary and now life-threatening over-consumption by economic elites reduced or eliminated. An equitable principle of access to the universe of resources could be termed the Justice of the Commons.
3. What follows is the National Sustainable Development Plan to implement our Green Party of India manifesto.
4. We believe that a political economy founded in Justice of the Commons, an Environmentalism of the Poor, is the only viable basis for modernisation. A Nation develops in the long-term through the increasing capabilities of its people. A natural resource intensive model undercuts this in two main ways: Firstly it directs investment away from people and towards extraction, and secondly that extraction undermines the livelihoods of the people and thus their capacity to develop. It is impossible for the current imbalanced development model to bring all out of poverty within the constraints of the planetary resource base. Given that regulation at the Global scale is currently very weak, it makes sense to address this issue from a National perspective. However, the current development model of the Indian Nation State presents natural resource constraints multiplying whilst inequality increases. Therefore an environmentalism of the poor is not a return to the past, but the only viable basis for the future.
5. We support all local sets of rights to and governance over the environment, so that all may engage in genuine and thoroughly understood sustainable development. We advocate a positive set of equity and ecological rights, and believe that this chalks out the best pathway to building India’s universal framework of environmental justice, necessary to complete the work of the constitution.
6. It is not enough to merely manage resources on behalf of the people, rather democracy requires that the people are engaged in the process of managing resources. Current approaches to the commons, and tragedies thereof, tend to neglect that justice is a necessary component of political participation. Resource conservation, sustainable systems and equal rights are the sensible ideas that any country needs to adopt in a careful house to house and street to street dialogue with citizens to set up democratic processes for managing their economy and ecology equitably and sustainably. This is the core political and social and cultural freedom that the Green Party of India thinks Indian citizens should have and which we believe government must assure the people. For this reason we believe a level of local resource autonomy is crucial to giving local government, particularly at the Panchayat level, substantive powers.
7. Green political economy is the only way to manage inclusive growth. Thus far from being a path towards agrarian regression, it is the only means to sustainable employment creation within the planetary means available. In other words it defines the possibility of ongoing modernity under current conditions and constraints. In this sense the environmental constraints we face, if acknowledged and accommodated, are the only basis for a route to genuine progress.
8. The greatest obstructions to progress, in both the Indian and global setting, are related to the over-extraction of value by rent seekers, via enclosure, from both the productive economic commons, meaning that section of the economy based in adding value through the application of labour and capital as opposed to rent-seeking, and the environment.
9. This simple idea of a just allocation of value derived from the commons, and the prevention or redressing of rent-seeking activities through enclosure lays the foundation for a new monetary, taxation and industrial policy model. This model can accommodate private ownership, framed within a model of taxation as based in paying for the scarcity created by enclosure, thus encouraging the productive use of enclosed resources. This is a model actually able to provide the correct incentives and investment patterns to provide welfare and employment to the general population from the current resource base, in stark contrast to the current model.
10. The major problem with current discussions of “inclusive growth” are that they suggest that it is possible to make growth inclusive without modifying the overall pattern of capital circulation in the economy. All that is required is a small percentile diversion from the high rate of return on investment capital, extracted through a resource intensive growth model. This diversion is to be via a combination of mild taxation and philanthropy. However it is flatly impossible to make growth inclusive on this basis, because the natural resources do not exist to raise general prosperity via a grossly unjust and thus resource-inefficient model.
11. The current unequal model of global growth is totally inefficient at lifting the poor out of poverty. As the New Economics Foundation report “Growth isn’t working” puts it “Of every $100 of growth in income per person in the world as a whole between 1981 and 2001, just $1.30 contributed to reducing poverty as measured by the $1-a-day line, and a further $2.80 to reducing poverty between $1-a-day and $2-a-day lines. The remaining $95.90 went to the rest of the world population above the $2-a-day line.”
12. In India it would be far more efficient to look at income redistribution. A 1% income redistribution in India from the richest 20% to the poorest 20% is equivalent to 4.7% GDP growth, in terms of moving people put of poverty. So just a mild Justice of the Commons will lead to major progress. A 3% redistribution of income from the top 20% to the bottom 20% is more effective than an ongoing 10% growth rate! The richest 20% control 41.63% of income and the poorest 20% only 8.89 %, so this would be a tiny loss for the rich whilst a huge gain for the poor. Now whilst escalating income redistribution cannot carry on indefinitely, it is clearly the best place to start under such extreme conditions of inequality, since changes in income distribution have lasting effects of a far greater scale than those achievable through growth.
13. Growth cannot carry on long enough to lift the poor out of poverty. At current levels of inequality, as Andrew Simms puts it in the New Scientist “To get the poorest onto an income of just $3 a day would require an impossible 15 planets worth of bio-capacity.” It is simply impossible to solve poverty via the current unequal growth model. This means that the majority in India are currently being sold down the river.
14. Whilst lifting people out of poverty is a moral imperative, strengthening the situation of the poorest is also a matter of collective survival. Recent coupled models of climate change have taken into account both the slow-rate changes in energy flow associated with changes in the albedo of the earth’s surface due to ice-loss, as well as longer term shifts in the status of carbon sinks, some turning to sources in the case of forests burning, some losing large parts of the absorptive capacity in the case of the southern oceans. From these up-to-date models it becomes clear that we have already overshot the level of CO2 to stay below the risk threshold of 1.5C - 2C of warming (for further references and material see the NEF report “Growth is Impossible”). We are entering a time of crisis.
If you combine that with the risks of price shock from impending peaks in Oil, Gas and Coal, it becomes clear that energy markets are going to destabilise even as the weather does. This is likely to bear down heavily on food markets, which rely on the weather and oil prices to a large degree. Food price spikes are known to lead to social unrest, as the situation in the Middle East has recently shown. It is clear, therefore, that in order to get prolonged social stability in a period when massive technical and social progress is required to recover from climate overshoot, there needs to be a radical shift of the position of the poor in the political economy. It makes sense to redistribute resources to them, and to do so in a way that reduces their dependence on both energy markets and rainfall.
15. If the current unequal and resource intensive model cannot work, obviously the solution is to remake the economic system along more equal and less resource intensive lines, based on a politics that is able to recognise social and environmental distribution issues, namely a politics of the commons.
16. “The Spirit Level” and a plethora of other recent policy publications have illustrated how more equal societies have better social outcomes in almost every area. This suggests that Justice and Equity is the correct basis for sound government.
17. The notion of limits to natural resources and thus the framing of a commons is complicated by natural resource usage being defined by human social practices. A resource only becomes a resource in relation to its usage to some human end. A commons only becomes a commons in relation to the collective demand on that resource moving it to a situation of shortage, otherwise it is a merely a freely available resource. Thus a commons is a social object defined from social practices and the resource limitations that the demands of such practices define. This is not to say that these limits are totally redefinable: For instance the human social practices of drinking freshwater and eating food are stable in relation to human existence, and food and water sources are not infinitely substitutable. There is no substitute for clean water, and only a finite number of ways of obtaining it economically, so the social nature of these limits and commons make them no less “real”.
However, for a more or less stable usage scenario of a basic resource that is not substitutable within the near term, a commons emerges, and sites within that commons can be defined. The notion of a site within the social commons is important because it creates a distinction between value derived from private investment into a site, and the value derived from taking that site out of common and into private circulation, and thus creating scarcity as a basis for rent-seeking. It is this value, derived from the site within the social commons, that is liable for taxation as compensation for removing a resource from a socially-defined commons, an approach that avoids excluding the possibility of private ownership, whilst giving a theoretical basis for justly regulating it for the common good.
18. This allows an overall approach to Government’s relationship with the rest of society to be worked out, firstly in economic terms. The government has a presence in the economy in 3 main ways, taxation, its own spending and various forms of subsidy, as well as its regulation of the financial and economic system legally. The “financial footprint” of the government should be co-ordinated in a way to gives and overall direction to development, and Justice of the Commons is the correct principle for organising that co-ordination. At the same time the government’s overall regulation of finance and the economy should also follow these principles.
19. The tax base rests on inputs to the economic process. This is taxes on various sites in the commons (land, water, radio-spectrum, issuing the national currency etc..) as well as capital accumulated and labour.
20. Centering your taxation system on taxing accumulated capital directly would trigger a crisis of profitability, so the biggest substantive choice in taxation is the balance between taxing labour and taxing extraction from the material commons through the enclosure of sites.This implies that if your economic system is set up to expand economic activity through increased natural resource extraction, as is rational in the early stages of development, then it is a sensible social choice to focus on taxing income. If you are in a situation where the development of heavy industry and infrastructure is less of a priority, and more employment creation per quantum of natural resource is the goal, then it is sensible to tip the balance in the other direction, away from taxing labour and towards taxing resource enclosure. In India today, there is a combination of high population density, high unemployment, and severe emergent natural resource constraint, so the case for such a taxation transition is overwhelming.
21. However this transition in taxation is linked to a general transition away from a rapid return on investment. Returns on investment in labour are generational in character (education and the build-up of work-force capacities) whereas investments in natural resource intensive activities bring far more rapid returns on investment. However these shorter-term gains are not a sustainable basis for economic activity. So it is important to address the forces that shape the rate of investment cycles, particularly the mechanisms by which money is issued into the economy, in order to arrive at more sustainable investment patterns that create an ongoing basis for the economy.
Justice in Finance
22. The issuing of money at interest by private banks locks us into unending growth and an obsession with inflation-management and status quo marginal tinkering, which displaces the supply-side work required for an economic transition to Sustainability. It is also a huge rent-seeking manoeuvre on the productive economy by privatised finance, through enclosure of the sites of the financial infrastructure commons. So it is amenable to being corrected through a Justice of the Commons approach.
The problem is that if money is issued at interest by private banks, and this is the primary mechanism of creating money, then this implies 1 or both of 2 things as having to happen.
a) The money supply must expand, so that more money can come back than was issued at interest. This means yet more money issued at interest so this is a positive feedback.
b) That money must return out of the economy faster than it goes in, to give a rate of return in line with the interest payments demanded. This leads to the speeding up and flattening of social life into the tyranny of the present as described by David Harvey in “The condition of Post-Modernity” with an accompanying discounting of the future, since returns now are more valuable by a factor determined by the rate of interest. In other words this means a shortening of the overall social time-horizon, the antithesis of long-term thinking.
22. a) Point a) means that the money supply must expand. In order to deal with that you need to have expanded productive capacity to match the extra money available with goods. As such the management of the economy becomes about finding ways of dealing with this inflationary dynamic, so that the value of these huge systemic returns on capital is protected. This also implies that the amount that the economy extracts from the environment must go up in order to supply the productive capacity required to manage inflation (by matching goods to money attempting to buy them) during this rapid expansion of the money supply.
One can see the incorporation of cheap Chinese and Indian natural resources and labour into the global economy as part of this strategy to manage inflation. It becomes clear from this that natural resource limits leading to inflation in basic commodity prices is a logical limit that arises in relation to this kind of approach, and that recent price spikes in oil and food exhibit this, with speculation an epi-phenomenon of the quick-return dynamic set up by the current money system, and the political interest groups and expectations that accompany this.
22. b) Point b) means that the future is heavily discounted under the current money system, meaning that it is increasingly difficult to plan for a transition to a sustainable economy. Alternative energy sources are suppressed from the market as investment in them is predicated on immediate returns rather than the longer-term value that sustained investment in such technologies are bound to yield. This works heavily against a transition towards a sustainable economy, so a system of money issue predicated on immediate gain seems to set us on a course of long-term ruin. If restructuring the money supply seems utopian, the current monetary “realism” seems suicidal.
22. c) As if this was not enough, it is clearly economically irrational to have the banking system tax resources out of the productive economy through rent-seeking on the commons of the financial infrastructure. Whilst bank branches and ATMs are forms of private capital investment, the “site” of monetary infrastructure. i.e. the social system of monetary exchange, is a public infrastructure created through a social agreement to reciprocate in transactions. This is a commons, and so extracting excess profit (over and above a basic rate of return on capital investment) from this system is a form of rent seeking through enclosure.
This kind of centralisation of financial resources out of the general productive economy may have made sense in the early stages of economic development, where building up the economy and infrastructure to support emerging states was imperative, and huge pools of centralised investment capital were required for this. This was at the same time as natural resources were relatively abundant in relation to the size of and demand from these emerging economies.
However in an age of maturing state and economic structures and emerging natural resource scarcity (where supply falls behind ever-expanding debt-driven demand) the need is rather to direct resources to the productive parts of the economy, and to creating possibilities of employment in that, as the productivity and job creation per unit of natural resource emerges as a critical limiting economic and social factor. A system of centralising resources through the issue of money as debt with interest attached becomes very pernicious in this scenario.
Its congruence with taxing labour rather than taxing natural resource extraction might have been helpful when expanding natural resource extraction was part and parcel of growing the economy and the state. However now what it does is tip the balance towards a low rate of job-creation per unit of natural resource used, part of an emerging syndrome of “jobless growth”, which is accompanied by energy and natural resource intensity as the untaxed alternative input.
Secondly by placing the emphasis on natural resource extraction, and centralisation of those natural resources in order to create the rapid returns required to pay the interest on the debt that all money represents, natural resources are systematically under-priced and over-extracted, and the benefits of that extraction accrue in the urban centers where capital is transacted. This leads to a dangerous undermining of the rural economies that this extraction impacts.
The combination of these two factors leads to a recognisable scenario. Rural economies are impoverished, through extractive capital and energy intensive processes which undermine employment rates and lead to indebtedness and dispossession from natural resources. At the same time there is little job creation in urban areas, leading to large pools of un- or under-employed labour in urban slums. Development becomes about managing these populations, as the prospect of them being usefully employed in either urban or rural settings recedes in the face of high rates of capital and natural resource intensity and extraction.
Clearly the answer to this is not further risk transfer and extraction from the poor through financialised approaches such as micro-credit, but a restructuring of the monetary, taxation and economic supply management or sectoral policy approaches along lines more congruent with a Justice of the Commons. The first step to this is to make currency issue a public sector function, the proceeds of which can be used as a basis for further public investment into the productive commons, with an emphasis on investing long term in people to build up a sustainable economy.
Justice in Taxation
23. Taxation should be based on a generalisation of the concept in Land taxation of a site tax, approached along the lines of a site within the social commons as outlined earlier. This is not taxation on the labour or capital invested into the social site, but taxation of rent-seeking from a site enclosed out of the commons - a site tax, following the work of James Robertson and Richard Douthwaite on land.
The same principles could apply across all taxation, taxation of the site rather than the investment. The rise in subsistence costs that this would bring to the poor is offset by a basic entitlement to the commons on aper capita basis. This is their right to life expressed as a right to livelihood expressed as a right to a resource footprint within the socially-sited commons as a whole.
The policy of making currency issue a public sector function, will not only cause a rise in subsistence cost, which is addressed by making a basic entitlement available to everyone, but also inflation. In the fiscal approach we propose here, inflation is addressed through taxation. Taxation will take the surplus money out of circulation again. Though taxes may have to be high, this does not matter as basic entitlement is not affected. The taxes can be spent back into the economy once inflation comes down. This system for managing inflation is reliable, incidentally, unlike the one we have currently.
Just as taxation is based on the price of the resource extracted from the commons and the rents accruable on the scarcity that creates, so a citizen’s income would be an economic expression of their entitlement to their share, their per capita footprint site in the commons. This would mean that the taxation of enclosure would be directed to fund this basic entitlement to a livelihood. Thus there is a reconciliation set up between the requirements of private property for economic efficiency and a requirement for justice in the commons as a basis for life.
Sectoral Analysis of Justice in the Commons
24. These themes of how Justice in the Commons operates in terms of financial flows, taxation, subsidy and regulatory regimes, as well as the sorts of technical approaches congruent with this, will be explored on a sector by sector basis in order to flesh out the form of our proposals.
Anandi Sharon
DEBATE - DISCUSS - AND INDICATE AVAILABILITY FOR THE FOUNDING MEETING OF THE PARTY IN BANGALORE OR OOTY IN MAY 2011
Comments