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Tuesday, 31 October 2006 16:09 |
 | | Mark West |
Margaret Thatcher, in the long-ago 1980s, was fond of responding to questions about various excesses caused by global capitalism by suggesting that her questioner should talk to Tina.
Tina, as the questioner would soon enough discover as Thatcher proceeded with an acerbic lecture, wasnët a person. It was an acronym, standing for "There Is No Alternative." There might be starvation in less-developed countries because of the depredations of gigantic corporate interests, but There Is No Alternative. There might be widespread loss of jobs as industrial work fled to places where wages were low and provisions for safety and health nonexistent, but There Is No Alternative to global neocolonialism. Workers might labor without health care, governments might cut away at the "Great Society" safety net with impunity, but There Is No Alternative.
"Tina"
is implicitly or explicitly enshrined in neoconservative political
thought. When Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history, he was
arguing that the competition between big business as the cornerstone of
civilization and every other form of human societal organization was
over and that global capital had won. If big business had some need,
even if it led to famine or pestilence, big business had to be given
what it needed, because the dialectic of history was at an end, and a
winner declared.
Freedom, we
might have said, was on the march. There were those in some benighted
spots in the world who hadnët heard that the Western way of life had
won; but theyëd find out soon enough and they would welcome us as
liberators from the traditions that held them in bondage. Candy and
flowers would be presented to us, as Donald Rumsfeld put it.
But, at the very
moments that Fukuyama and Thatcher were promoting their twaddle to a
Western world always too happy to hear that they indeed had history on
their side, an alternative movement to one of the most lucrative
franchises in the world was beginning to grow. And, today, that
movement has become a major force in the world of computers.
Iëm speaking, of
course, about the open-source movement. Iëm writing this on a machine
running Linux, an alternative to Windows or Macintosh that is free.
"Free as in beer," as the somewhat odd motto of the open-source gurus
puts it. Free as in available for the downloading.
I will admit,
though, that I paid for my copy; rather than download the particular
version of Linux I use, I paid six bucks to a company that makes DVDs
for easy installation.
For that six
bucks, I got a complete computer system. I got a word processor and
spreadsheet and presentation program that are perfectly compatible with
the standard programs from Microsoft. I got the standard typesetting
program in the scientific world and a statistical program whose
for-profit equivalent costs 1,500 dollars a seat a year. I got the same
web server and database program that run the vast majority of web sites
throughout the world. Plus games, email programs, graphics, and the
like. More software than I could ever use (I think the biology modeling
program, for example, wonët do anything much for me). All for six
bucks, and I can put it on as many computers as I feel inclined.
Something
similar is going on with the co-op movement. In Western North Carolina,
for example, there are several grocery stores which are run on a co-op
model. At the Hendersonville Co-op, members of the co-op own shares in
the organization. The organization doesnët seek to make a profit, and
the governance of the store ultimately lies in the hands of the people
who are members and who vote on issues of importance. Ten Thousand
Villages, in downtown Asheville, is an organization devoted to bringing
crafts from worker cooperatives in less-developed countries, while
paying those workers a fair living wage. Again, such businesses arenët
for-profit enterprises; but they do seek to provide a living wage to
their workers, who in general have substantial if not full control of
the operations of the enterprises.
So, in Western
North Carolina, you can buy clothes and gifts, computer software, and
groceries provided under a cooperative model, rather than the
big-business model that Thatcher and others promote as having no
alternative. In groceries, the prices are not lower, but the products
are often locally produced and almost always grown with appropriate
respect for the environment. Linux is proving to be a very low-cost
alternative to Microsoft products, with Chicago having saved some two
hundred fifty thousand dollars in the first months of its migration to
Linux products. And in the craft products world, itës now possible to
get beautiful products without fearing that the workers who made them
were exploited.
There is,
despite what Margaret Thatcher and others have argued, an alternative
to big business and its model of exploitation of both workers and
environment. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, itës not some
theoretical proposition. Itës here, now, and open for business.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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