James Quilligan

Bio

Bio essay:

"I was a student radical at Kent State University (US) in the late 1960's, deeply inspired by Marcuse, Adorno, and Marx. At the age of 19, I was in a crowd of students that were fired upon by the Ohio National Guard. It was May 4, 1970. We were protesting President Nixon's announcement that the United States had invaded Cambodia, as well as the sequestration of our university campus by these Guardsmen at the behest of the Governor of Ohio. While many of my beloved friends were killed and injured in this brutal and unwarranted attack, I was blessed to escape the bullets. But my existential wounds were deep. That evening I vowed to spend the rest of my life fighting the system that produced this tragedy. I studied international economics, international relations and philosophy through graduate and post-graduate work, with the goal of understanding and redressing the injustices suffered by the world's poorest people.

For the record, I have never worked for or supported the policies of the private sector. I am not and never have been a liberal, a libertarian, or a liberist (whatever that is). Nor, during my 40-year career, have I ever represented myself as supporting the free market -- this has never been in my DNA.

In fact, I published many articles deeply critical of the prevailing liberalism of the 1970s and joined the movement for a New International Economic Order at the policy and ambassadorial levels of the United Nations. We were enormously successful. In fact, we became such a threat to the international liberal system that, when the OPEC nations initially pledged to use their soaring oil revenues to promote South-South solidarity and fund our burgeoning movement in 1973-74, the US and the international liberal order went into full crisis mode. (Simultaneously, the liberal system was also reeling from the currency volatility created when the US switched the international monetary system from fixed to floating exchange rates in 1971, which deeply impacted international trade and labor conditions.) In order to bust our fledgling union of developing states, Henry Kissinger and other NATO henchmen orchestrated the creation of the Group of Seven and quickly coerced OPEC to invest its money in Western international banks, not in the counterrevolutionary movement of the global South. (Note to students and writers: this is a little-noted chapter of that pivotal period in history -- there are some explosive books waiting to be written about these events.)

But the G7 didn't stop us. As a countermeasure, we pressed our case for the Common Heritage of Mankind (Humanity) in international fora, including the United Nations. Many people forget (or are unaware of) this now, but the UN at that time was a very vibrant place, full of transformational ideas. I was a liaison between Arvid Pardo (godfather of the Common Heritage movement), a large group of diplomats from the global South, and the global NGO community. We began to negotiate a Law of the Sea Treaty to give all people, and particularly those in poor nations, the right to preserve and/or enjoy the benefits of the international seas and seabeds. We also applied the idea of the commons to outer space, the atmosphere, and the world's transborder forests. We made a lot of progress (at least for a historical era that did not yet have the benefits of the Internet, the Rio Summit, and the concept of sustainable development.) Virtually all of the developing countries supported us. We had strong allies throughout the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77, UNCTAD, in progressive capitols of the West, behind the Iron Curtain, in China, and among hundreds of NGOs across the world. It was an exciting time indeed.

I was asked to do research for a North-South development commission headed by Willy Brandt and later became its press secretary. With the help of our friends and colleagues, Fidel Castro, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme, and Pierre Trudeau, we nearly staged a multilateral coup. Thanks to Trudeau, we were able to introduce a very radical North-South development agenda at the 1981 G7 summit in Canada and at a follow-up meeting of 22 heads of state in Cancun that same year. We actually got the G7 and other international leaders to begin negotiations on the creation of a new international economic system, launching an entirely new and equitable economic framework for the world's developing nations. But after this initial dialogue, the G7 reversed course and pulled out all the stops to thwart our movement. Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl (and to some extent the Japanese government) teamed up and coordinated their policy alliances through a more intensive strategy. To our astonishment, they rewrote the rules of the game, turning the economic system itself against our efforts. Instead of us changing the global economic system, they outflanked us and changed it themselves! Aid, trade, finance, monetary policy all became stridently bottom-line calculations, with nothing left to support authentic development. As Hayek replaced Keynes as the official ideology of the liberal system, we lost our leverage with the political center and developing nations began leaving the movement. Gradually, the Anglo-American initiatives for supply-side economics, deregulation and Friedmanesque monetarism became global policy, and the commons simply disappeared from the official platform.

Most people, particularly on the left, have no idea how close we actually came to changing the international system during the period 1978-1982. I do not exaggerate in saying that it was truly within reach; but, sadly, we lacked genuine support at the grassroots and we trusted too much in the governments of developing nations. As an organizer in the common heritage and international development movements, I was witness to a history that has never been adequately explained or understood. When those efforts collapsed, I was devastated: young as I was, I recognized that an historic opportunity had slipped away. Neo-liberalism, as it was soon to be called, had defeated us roundly and the alternative economics movement has never really recovered its stride (the World Social Forum notwithstanding). Later I joined Julius Nyerere's South-South Commission and Sonny Ramphal's Global Governance Commission, but these initiatives had little spark. I was also a UN delegate at the Rio Earth Summit which took up the Common Heritage principle, but sustainable development was soon emasculated by neo-liberalism. The transformational potential of all the alternative economic movements has been woefully weakened since the early 1980s, and North and South have grown increasingly cynical toward one another, even though virtually all nations are now solemn members of the same market system.

It was during my work on the UN Millennium Development Goals in 1999 that I realized in my bones that the world's development agenda could never work because it was being promoted exclusively from the top-down. I revisited the lessons of the Common Heritage movement: we had failed because we did not have nearly enough grassroots support. We had also relied on developing nations to carry the load, and gradually those governments, along with the ex-communist states, joined the very liberal system that we were fighting to change. Our biggest mistake was in thinking that we could work through governments to make those changes. We had been naive about the power of sovereignty to bind nations together through the international liberal order, often against a nation's own best interests, especially with regard to the sustainability of its own commons. Markets and states were not adversarial after all: what we were up against was the Market State.

For the past dozen years I've been working to build bottom-up support for political and economic change through the commons. As I have always done, I work at both the local and global levels. But alas, unlike the old days, most of the world leaders I talk with now are weak-kneed denizens of the multilateral echo chamber. They love to hear themselves talk about globalism. Many privately support the idea of the commons but have little courage to support it publicly. Yet many of them, at least, really do appreciate the perspectives of internationalism and history, which I still find deeply lacking at the grassroots. My biggest complaint about grassroots movements is that their necessary and legitimate commitment to localism (or regionalism) often precludes big picture thinking -- and in throwing out the hierarchical dualism of the Market State, they adopt a new dualism of local Vs. global. It's an old story, deeply rooted in our illusion-creating capacities: human beings replace one dichotomy with another, which is equally as fractured.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and the Hayekian price system have also deeply conditioned us all through a kind of historical amnesia. This applies equally on the political right and left. We're well aware of the stupid revisionism embraced by the right. At the same time, many people on the left think that anything that's 'global' is bad, and are content to reduce history simply to a series of struggles against some form of globalism (sovereignty, colonialism, imperialism, globalization). For forty years, I have been pleading for sanity: humanity itself is global, folks. Certainly, Kant's transcendental basis for global liberalism has been used to wage war against the global citizenry in countless ways, but that does not mean that we human beings across the world are lacking the capacities to define and express our intersubjective and cooperative relations through our own global sovereignty. And yes, the external forms of production now and in the past have indeed been global, pernicious, violent and deadly, but unless the world's own citizenery joins together globally to throw off this Post-Modern Leviathan, we will continue to be oppressed.

Yet we will not attain this overarching solidarity if, every time we hear the words 'global' or 'international', we immediately associate these terms with neo-liberalism and cast aspersions. After globalization, the next historical stage of political economy could be scale free, from the local to the global, if we were to carry the commons project onto the multilateral level; but if we concede 'the global' to the Market State, we're going to extend the local-global split well into the future precisely because local people reify the existing political hierarchy and economic division of labor through their opposition to anything that looks even remotely global. I'm not certainly not devaluing the significance of tribalism, communities or localism at all. I'm just a grassroots boy from Canton, Ohio. What I'm saying is that, in our parochialism, we are failing to express our global nature as commoners, and our production of intersubjectivity will continue to be repressed until it is the authentic expression of our global humanity. My view has always been that we can't know where we're going unless we can see the big picture, and we can't see the big picture unless we know where we came from. For example, the new commons movement has not even begun to explore its own roots in the Common Heritage and Natural Law. We haven't developed an epistemology, an ontology, or a theory of value for the commons. And we clearly don't have a clue what commoning means at the global level. Let's get real: global does not mean top-down. Global means all of us working together to end our personal dualism, draw our power from the evolutionary forces of surplus commoning, and bust the union of the Market State."