Book review: Moving towards Change: Some Thoughts on the New International Economic Order (Paris: UNESCO, 1976)

We are now undergoing a period of profound and rapid, though uneven, and not infrequently crisis-ridden change. This change is largely connected with the ever-increasing power available to man, through the development of science and technology. The roots of the crisis phenomena lie, however, in the crucial sphere of social relations, which to a considerable degree are still not sufficiently adapted to cope with the rapidity of change caused by science and technology. Technology is ambivalent. On the one hand, it has brought enormous benefits to mankind. On the other, it has resulted in an incredible accumulation of destructive devices. Furthermore, the contradictions in the transfer of technology from the industrial centres to the developing areas of the world, with their characteristic socio-economic structures, have brought very serious maladjustments and disruptions. Inequalities have been accentuated and an extraordinary demographic growth is taking place. Millions of young people are being led to doubt and protest, and soon perhaps to despair with its accompaniment of violence.

A few remarks from the report of the Panel of Counsellors on Major World Problems and UNESCO’s Contribution to Solving Them, printed as an appendix to this crucially important document. Well, it should be crucially important: nothing should be more essential reading than the ‘thoughts’ of the most intellectual and disinterested agency of that shadow world government, the UN, on the obsolete systems and psychologies now threatening to send the human race in an accelerating spiral of shortages, paranoia, starvation and violence, down the plughole of History to the final war . . . ‘Existing stocks of nuclear weapons are already capable of liquidating several times over the population of the world’, notes the Panel casually.

Furthermore, several hydrogen bombs are manufactured each day, a hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Annual expenditure on the armaments race is very probably around 200 to 250 billions of dollars – a sum equal to the total national income of countries in which the majority of mankind is living. At the same time, twenty-five hundred million men and women largely live a precarious existence at levels of nutrition well below the acceptable minimum.

Food for serious thought, this kind of thing, if you take it seriously. The trouble seems to be, though, that not many people do. This book was published two years ago, but I do not remember seeing it mentioned anywhere.

Part of the reason for this is that there is nothing ‘new’ in Moving towards Change. The danger of nuclear war has been cited before – also starvation in the Third World, raw materials shortages, the growing gap between rich and poor, the unequal terms of exchange between rich and poor nations, etc., etc., etc. If the Algerians and other developing peoples want the world economic ‘system’ to be readjusted in their favour, there’s nothing surprising about that, is there? Just doing what anyone would do in their place. Not everyone is in their place though, fortunately. ‘The United States cannot and does not accept any implication that the world is now embarked on the establishment of something called “the new international economic order”’, said the American representative to the Paris North-South Conference in December 1975 – five months after the Panel finalised the Report quoted at the beginning of this review. In other words: try to stop us by all means, but we’ll screw you for as long as we can.

Not just the US, not just the West, but the big battalions everywhere, are structurally opposed to the changes to our outlook and comportment, to national and international political organisation, which are needed within twenty-five years if the survival of the human race is regarded as any sort of priority. Moving towards Change mentions these things clearly, but in the abstract; it cites the growing tendency of governments to seek ‘authoritarian solutions’, the need for a ‘rational approach to socio-economic matters’, the ambiguous role of ‘capitalism’ in Third World economies. It says nothing about what individual nations and groups must do to bring about the desired freedom and rationality: this is outside its scope. Each country’s contribution to the new international economic order is the responsibility of its own people. And they must move fast, because what is needed – the new order – really amounts to nothing less than a world revolution, in some ways analogous to but in a different dimension from the trumpeted national ‘Revolutions’ embodying, alas, the State’s religious faith more than anything else in a number of countries.

The reason why we need a psychological transformation first and foremost is that we don’t really want to believe that all of this affects us. We are too eager to believe those who tell us that the abolition of waste, the juster division of resources between rich and poor (nationally and internationally) will affect our ‘standard of living’, deprive us of our cars, our steaks, our freedom. We cling desperately to our boring, nasty, insecure £80-a-week jobs because we are threatened with, not starvation, but the dole. We listen like hypnotised rabbits as the government, eager to be returned to power, lops a quid a week off our income tax. Beside this, the starvation of black millions, the threat of fascism and nuclear holocaust, and the UN’s comments on them, pale into insignificance. Perhaps if there was a world government, we’d listen to its comments on our future with about as much attention as we give our own governments. As things are, most of us couldn’t care less: we leave that sort of thing to the ‘experts’ we fondly imagine are paid to take care of them. We are making a mistake: our governments, our industries and experts – not the individuals so much as the organisms themselves – operate in the same way as you or me: keep a good thing going as long as possible. When it looks like collapsing, take the money and run.

The attitude, common to East and West, of any bourgeois, any organisation, or any psychopath.

c. 1976 (publication details unknown)