New ways needed to solve global problems

Arun Maira

Former Member, Planning Commission

The Ukraine war reveals the poverty of global leadership. The NATO alliance’s war against Russia and China has set humanity back in its battles against climate change and global hunger. Global energy and financial systems have been disrupted to punish Russia. Global food chains have broken down. Coal plants are back; climate change commitments forgotten. Citizens in the developing world are the most affected. Even before the Ukraine conflict, nations’ leaders were struggling to solve the complex, inter-related, global problems listed in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Ukraine has exposed once again the geopolitical power game that caused the two world wars in the last century: two hot ones and one long cold one which was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the admission of China into the WTO. The Ukraine war has diverted attention from the urgent need to finding better ways to solving complex planetary problems.

World War I was a fight amongst capitalist countries for territory. The second one was a fight of liberal capitalism against fascist capitalism. In World War II, Russia, a communist country, joined the Allies in the fight against fascism. After the war, capitalists declared communists as their existential enemy and a long cold war, which kept the world on the edge of a nuclear holocaust, played out until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia became capitalist too. The doomsday scenario of totalitarianism that George Orwell had predicted in his 1949 book, 1984, was avoided.

Nevertheless, threats to liberalism are back — in Europe, in India, and even within the US, the leader of the alliances against fascism and communism for the last 100 years.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1932, was more prescient than Orwell’s 1984. Huxley foresaw the world that would emerge with methods of mass production that were being developed in the US and that Russia was emulating. He anticipated the depletions of individual freedoms with mass communication technologies and the mass consumption culture that mass production needs to produce its “economies of scale”. Henry Ford introduced mass production and automation to the automobile industry. “You can buy any colour of Model-T so long as it is black,” Ford said. He complained that he got a whole human being when he needed only a pair of hands for mass production.

Organising for efficiency on scale requires standardisation as well as centralised control. The Soviets adopted Ford’s ways, along with Frederick Taylor’s methods of time-motion study, to successfully increase output in large-scale factories and farms.

After fascism was defeated with the extermination of the German and Japanese war machines, Huxley wrote a sequel in 1958, Brave New World Revisited. The impacts on human freedoms of scientific methods of organising mass production and promoting mass consumption —”Fordism”, as he called them, that he had foreseen in 1932 — were visible. In an anticipation of social media, he saw further advances in technologies that would enable central controllers to condition minds without the need for crude methods of torture that Orwell had feared in 1984.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, a political scientist said the last remaining totalitarian states were Western capitalist enterprises. Huxley had already pointed out that political dictators and managers of large-scale economic enterprises use the same ways of organising to produce outcomes on scale; the only difference is who the controllers are. In one system, they are private capitalists and in the other, political leaders.

Wars between “isms” — capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism — scarred the world in the 20th century. The “isms” of the Right — capitalism and fascism — have fought against those of the Left — communism and socialism. The conservative Right wants to keep power at the top; the progressive Left wants power to shift to the masses. Both use the same mass production methods to produce outputs on scale: standardisation and division of the organisation’s parts into verticals coordinated at the top.

The organisation is a machine, whose levers are pulled by controllers at the top. This is the way of modern management — in business, in governments (centralised programmes with one solution for all) and even in large philanthropy programmes.

Good organisation is required to coordinate diverse actors and produce outcomes on scale. Large, industrial-scale organisations destroy diversity and reduce freedoms. The farmlands of Punjab have been destroyed by large-scale mono-crop agriculture. “Stand up and start up” is Punjabis’ entrepreneurial spirit. After the tragic partition of their state in 1947, millions started again in Punjab, in other states, and in other countries too, starting small enterprises to recover their lost wealth (as my father did too.) Small entrepreneurial enterprises, which do not have the tidy form of large industrial enterprises, are looked down upon by economists.

The history of ideological conflict was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final victory of capitalism over all other “isms”, according to Francis Fukuyama. It never did. India must not get dragged into taking sides in this false ideological battle, which, in truth, is a battle between the East and the West for global hegemony.

India must take a lead in showing a new way. All countries must cooperate in finding new solutions to the global problems of inequality, poverty, environmental degradation and climate change. New ways of organising are necessary to solve these problems. They cannot be solved by applying the same methods that have caused them.

Top-down solutions developed by experts in silos, high above the ground realities, harm the sustainability of complex ecological-economic-social systems (as has happened in Punjab and other parts of the world). Complex problems take different shapes in different parts of the world. Therefore, the correct way to solving global systemic problems is local systems solutions cooperatively implemented by communities.

Global solutions, as also the liberty of the people, demand that the government of the people from above — which is the authoritarian way of nations and enterprises — must be changed to governance by the people. Power must shift from the old colonial countries to others. Within countries, it must shift from their centres to local governance in towns and rural communities. Within organisations of the government, business and social work, too, it must shift from chiefs and experts above to people within.

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