FREE ESSAY ON DEMOCRATIC ECO-HUMANISM, MARKET CIVILIZATION

DEMOCRATIC ECO-HUMANISM, MARKET CIVILIZATION

In an effort to dramatize his neo-Polanyian critique of neo-liberal global capitalism,
Stephen Gill questions the tenability of his own term market civilization, proposing it
as oxymoronic in that a market civilization qua the neo-liberal order contradicts Gill's
view of civilization qua democratic eco-humanism (i.e. representation, civility, social
well-being and inclusion). In this formation, Gill's argument is essentially circular in
its reliance on his own subjective standard of civilization, (democratic eco-humanism),
to prove the uncivilized nature of the neo-liberal order. By adopting a more objective,
(and necessarily more general), definition of civilization, we can disband with Gill's
tautology, allowing us to embrace the term market civilization as a precise definition of
neo-liberal global capitalism. In doing so, however, we merely adjust Gill's propensity
for grandiose formulations; what remains is his well-reasoned explication of the inherent
contradictions of neo-liberalism, an explication that underscores the ways in which
Anglo-American neo-liberalism departs from a certain aesthetic of civilization as
democratic eco-humanism. Though he fails to prove the system uncivilized in the broad
sense, Gill's arguments make a strong case for the rise of a Polanyian double movement
that would address the critical excesses of the neo-liberal order. 
To understand Gill's claim about the oxymoronic nature of market civilization, one must
understand the differences between the two relevant definitions of civilization. In
Gill's words: civilization implies not only a pattern of society (def. 1) but also an
active historical process that fosters a more humanized, literate and civil way of life,
involving social well-being on a broad and inclusive basis (def. 2). (Gill, 422) Gill's
claim regards only the second definition, a version of which the American Heritage
Dictionary pictures as: An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material
development, progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of writing, and the
appearance of complex political and social institutions.(American Heritage) Though Gill's
version of civilization mirrors closely the story told by the dictionary, both claims
about the parameters of civilization are so problematically subjective as to add little
or nothing to Gill's analysis of neo-liberalism.
The fallacy of both definitions of civilization is rooted in a subjective set of truth
claims masked in an ethos of democratic eco-humanism that is as guilty of attempting to
proclaim the end of history as neo-liberalism itself. The embedded nature of these claims
makes them initially hard to penetrate; broader political participation, literacy,
civility and wealth distribution all function in a sort of Hegelian determinism where
humanity appears to be progressing towards ever-deeper understanding of civilization qua
democratic eco-humanism. And yet this very determinism, though perhaps satisfying in that
it situates Gill's rejection of neo-liberalism within a certain sociopolitical
philosophical system, dissolves when outside Gill's limited context. In other words, what
does Gill's definition allow us to make of past civilizations like the Romans, where a
slave class existed, the Hebrews, where religious tolerance was subsumed under a telos of
religiopolitical election, or the Mayans, where the state sanctioned human sacrifice? To
claim that these civilizations were mere stepping-stones to our more enlightened version
of civilization is to refuse to treat their participants as self-conscious agents and to
lapse into cultural chauvinism.
Gill's subjective aesthetic of civilization is equally problematic if we turn our eyes in
the other direction. What effect will artificial intelligence and the creation of cyborgs
have on Gill's definition of democratic eco-humanism? Will these new beings be included
in the franchise? Will the depletion of natural resources create a future civilization
where it is more humane to denude the earth in order to save humans? Even with the
neo-liberal straw man as a foil, Gill's idea of civilization rings hollow; after all,
while one ideological pole would have us include plants as neo-sentient beings deserving
representation in society, another would proclaim human dominion of the earth (a la
Genesis 2) as the paradigm for rational human interaction with the planet. Where Thoreau
might call a cabin in the wood civilized, Donald Trump sees a new apartment building.
Though we can prefer one model to the other on a subjectively aesthetic basis, it seems
artificial and indeed impossible to create a salient line of progress that could possibly
reconcile drastically different worldviews and material realities.
To replace Gill's self-congratulatory historical determinism, we must be far more careful
about our definition of a civilization. At the risk of being overly vague, I would posit
the following: Civilization is characterized by the self-conscious actualization of a
systematic ethos defining the relation between self and community. In other words, all
that is truly required of civilization is a certain self-consciousness, (as a
civilization), and a certain level of complexity characterized by the desire for progress
towards a goal or set of goals other than survival. By distilling the most general aspect
of the dictionary definition, namely social or political complexity, this new definition
allows us to avoid the sort of subjective aesthetic of civilization that underlies Gill's
democratic eco-humanism. Though the result may be less satisfying, the more cautious,
general nature of this new approach allows us to avoid confusing the ought of
civilization, (that which we think it should be), with a useful objective claim about the
is of civilization, (a common standard on which to judge all civilizations).
The fact that Gill's claim that market civilization is oxymoronic is essentially a
stylistic excess renders the above inquiry academic; even without assuming his version of
civilization as democratic eco-humanism, Gill's neo-Polanyian critique of neo-liberal
capitalism exposes the inherent tensions and contradictions of the neo-liberal model. To
summarize Gill's analysis in his own words: The structure and language of social
relations is now more conditioned by the long term commodity logic of capital. Capitalist
norms and practices pervade the gestes repetes of everyday life. . . so that it may be
apposite to speak of the emergence of what I call a 'market civilization'.(Gill 399)
Gill's debt to Polanyi is quite evident. Ultimately, that is why the control of the
economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of
society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market.
(Polanyi, 57) But though he draws off of Polanyi's schematic, Gill contributes a subtle
understanding of the current state of neo-liberal capitalism as could only be possible
from an author publishing during the ascendancy of the neo-liberal order. To understand
his analysis, we can work from Gill's perspective of democratic eco-humanism, not as a
synonym for civilization as such, but as a benchmark that crystallizes the most
problematic tensions of the neo-liberal system. Therefore, we now look to understand
Gill's claim about the uncivilized nature of neo-liberalism within his own framework of
democratic eco-humanism.
Gill locates the essential basis for declaiming the neo-liberal order as uncivilized in
the system's miserable record on the egalitarian distribution of resources, its history
of environmental degradation and its general willingness to subjugate the needs of the
many to the needs of the few.  For the 800 million or so affluent consumers in the OECD,
there is a counterpart number starving in the Third World, with one billion more that
have no clean drinking water or sufficient food. Or later:  Any significant attempt to
widen this pattern of motivation [of fear and greed]. . . .would tend to deplete or to
destroy the eco-structures of the planet. (Gill, 419) These neo-Polanyian observations
are in fact so patently obvious to Gill that he spends little time exploring them in his
paper, though they nevertheless form the backbone of his materialist critique. Looking to
other authors helps fill in the rather bleak picture: from Vandana Shiva we learn of the
impact of industrial agriculture As a result of these non-sustainable activities, an
estimated 70 percent of the world's marine fish stocks are over fished or fully exploited
(Shiva, 38), while Kim Moody gives us a more humanistic perspective, looking at the
inevitable effects of the neo-liberal order on the workplace. [Conversations with workers
from dozens of plants] reveal an identical tale of what happened when lean methods were
introduced: substantial job elimination, faster and harder work pace and increased
difficulty in handling grievances related to production or working conditions (Moody, p.
92) It behooves us in the end to return to Shiva to help us abandon the environmental/
humanistic dichotomy in order to realize the essential interconnectedness of these two
arenas, so that when Shiva describes the over fishing of the shrimp beds off of the coast
of India, we are reminded that the costs are equally felt in the environment and the
dissolution of local fishing cultures. (Shiva, 37-54) 
Because the priorities of the market, (namely continuous development and wealth
generation for the small minority which sits atop the neo-liberal hierarchy), are
radically opposed to eco-humanistic ideal which we can assume are basically shared by the
resource-poor majority of the world, the neo-liberal system is forced to manufacture
consent in a manner that Gill finds equally uncivilized. Put another way, if the
non-egalitarian result of the neo-liberal order defies Gill's eco-humanism, the
non-democratic mechanism for maintaining this order contradicts his ideal of democratic
political participation. In Gill's words, neo-liberal capitalism results in a system of
political supremacy. By a situation of supremacy, I mean rule by a non-hegemonic bloc of
forces that exercises dominance for a period over apparently fragmented populations. .
.(Gill, 400) This crisis, as Gill calls it, arising from what Gramsci calls  a rift
between popular masses and ruling ideologies (Gill, 400) results in a system that
necessarily circumvents popular support, not because the populous is too ignorant to
understand its best interests, but rather because the interests of the system inherently
contradict the interests of the populous. This lack of real participation is inherently
uncivilized according to Gill's democratic/ egalitarian principles, but before we can
even examine this idea, we must understand Gill's analysis of how such non-participation
is engendered through the two complimentary procedures of [manufactured] consent and
coercion. 
We begin this examination with a look at the neo-liberal ethos, (what Gill calls its
mythology), which Gill implicates as uncivilized due to its role in engendering a
politics of supremacy. The ideological fallacies that Gill points out seem to fall into
two categories: the first being the fallacy of the self-regulating market, the second
being the fallacy of the inevitability of neo-liberalism. On the first point, Block best
supports Gill: When the growth of the money supply is either too rapid or too slow, the
result can be disastrous. Hence, there is a continuous need for a political practice of
money supply management to make market societies work. . .But the very existence of this
political practice. . .in turn creates a new set of problems, since there is a conflict
between the system's need for political management and its basic ideology that markets
should be left alone to run themselves. (Block) On the second point, Gill is supported by
the varieties of capitalism literature, where writers like Boyer and Kitschlett outline
the fact that the Liberal Market Economy (LME) model of the Anglo-American system, (which
here is synonymous with neo-liberalism), is at least partially challenged by European
Coordinated Market Economies and Japanese-style Group Coordination, both of which include
some version of stakeholder capitalism designed to mitigate the negative impact of the
market. (Boyer 29-58) (Kitschlett 427-459) Gill links the role of propaganda to the
uncivilized nature of neo-liberalism in a tertiary manner as a facilitator of the wealth
gap and the politics of supremacy that are themselves directly uncivilized. It is unclear
whether Gill is also arguing, as one might, that any civilization whose rhetoric stood in
such contrast to its reality exhibits a level of contradiction and hypocrisy (i.e a lack
of self-knowledge) that, according to Gill's own standards, is inherently uncivilized. In
either case, Gill's treatment of neo-liberal mythologies helps us confront Friedman's
vague assertions that, in truth, the world actually wants the neo-liberal order (e.g. the
story of Heng Dao) (Friedman, chapter 2)), in that, because the propaganda is itself
divorced from reality, the consent manufactured through it has no basis in fact, and thus
no factual or moral ground on which to stand. 
Following the consent and coercion model, Gill reminds us that when consent cannot be
manufactured then it must be secured, a practice that seems more directly uncivilized
than the role of neo-liberal mythology. Gill sees the coercive model operating on both
the macroscopic and microscopic scales. In the macroscopic view, the G7 nexus, as Gill
calls it, uses its control of capital to demand compliance from Third World nations in
the form of, among other items, open borders, tax breaks, and the protection of specious
property rights including international patents. (Gill 412-415) Actualized through
international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, international treaties like GATT
and NAFTA and individual participants like the bond rating departments of the Western
financial conglomerates, the coercive nature of these macroscopic techniques are, by
Gill's standards, uncivilized in and of themselves (for being undemocratic), as well as
being directly linked to the visitation of economic degradation on the Third World
states: The rule and the burdens of market forces are most frequently imposed
hierarchically on the weaker states and social actors (Gill, 421). On the microscopic
level Gill sees a pernicious move towards a sort of Benthiam pan-opticism, where
surveillance is used to further the needs of the neo-liberal order. (Gill 416-17) For
Gill, such a movement is inherently dehumanizing and therefore flies in the face of his
democratic eco-humanism, which here seems loosely based on a sort of Kantian kingdom of
ends, where as many individuals as possible have the opportunity for self-actualization.
As stated above, the combination of consent and coercion result in a system that is
inherently non-participatory; either participation occurs under false pretense (consent)
or participation that defies the order is rooted out and destroyed (coercion). One hardly
needs to revisit Gill or the other authors to find evidence of this practice, as
examples, from the brutal repression of protests in Seattle to the orchestration of
business friendly regimes in countless Third World countries (e.g. Mexico, Indonesia) to
the on-the-record policies of structural adjustment (shrinking government, export driven
economies) of the IMF, surround us everywhere. On a thematic note we can merely reiterate
that a system that does not serve the populous must avoid real political participation
(or perish), therefore justifying Gill's claim as to the uncivilized nature of the
neo-liberal order on both counts, (that it is not humanistic and that it is not
democratic). 
Working within Gill's own framework therefore proves useful, despite its circularity. By
applying Gill's democratic eco-humanism as a litmus test, the Polanyian tensions between
society and the market and the resulting approaches to maintaining the system become
evident. Outside of Gill's subjective aesthetic of civilization as democratic
eco-humanism, however, we can see how the term market civilization is absolutely ideal
for defining the neo-liberal order. Far more drastically than the stakeholder models of
Europe or Japan, the Anglo-American style of neo-liberalism approaches the Polanyian
asymptote of full submersion of the social within the economic. Utilizing the more
general definition of civilization provided in this paper, we can envision neo-liberal
market civilization as a civilization that aggressively embraces an ethos of
technological growth, development in the purely material (and not sustainable sense) and
wealth generation for the oligarchs. In this sense the neo-liberal market civilization
seems to be approaching its apotheosis, even as its inherent contradictions encourage the
Polanyian double movement that, for writers like Gill, Moody, Shiva, Escobar, Gray and
Block, might provide salvation, either through outright revolution or substantial reforms
of the current order. 
Bibliography
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