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| <back | home Interview with David Korten by Brad Johnson The following interview with David Korten took place on June 9th, 2006 at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont where David was a plenary speaker at the national conference of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). HD: In your speech today you said that one of the reasons you got involved in this movement was your disillusionment with international development and the way resources were appropriated. D.K: I spent 30 years in international development in Ethiopia, Central America and Southeast Asia on a mission to end rural poverty by disseminating U.S business methods. And what I came to realize was that every place development seemed to touch, it was excluding more people, deepening poverty, resulting in environmental destruction and breaking down the social fabric. And the more I reflected on that, the more I came to realize that’s actually a consequence of development models driven by corporate interests. One of the most basic aspects of economic development is that every project needs to be evaluated on which design choice will maximize financial return. As I began to look at development project, they usually involved driving poor people off of their land and giving the resources to people who were already better off. HD: Six years after the WTO protest in Seattle, where do you see the global justice movement? DK: We’re not at this moment seeing a lot of big demonstrations. There were big demonstrations around the FTAA, and the single biggest event in recent times was the Feb. 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war. That brought out around ten million people. HD: So would you say there is a new phase to the movement that is heading towards something else? DK: That’s a hard question for me to answer because my attention is increasingly focused on the domestic side. The thing I find exciting about it is we’re seeing the human capacity for self-organization on a global scale which is now facilitated by the communications capability that we’ve never had previously. And so we’re learning about new possibilities for self-organization around deeply shared values. There’s no central organization, or central budget or charismatic leader, but rather millions of people self-organizing. HD: In your book called When Corporations Rule that provided a systemic critique of how corporations do business. Have you seen a lot of changes in how people relate to corporations as a result of the arguments you and others have made? DK: Well, you’re certainly seeing increased resistance to things like Wal-Mart expansion. But the thing that is particularly stunning is a survey which found that 90% of Americans think big business has too much power. So I think there’s growing readiness to deal with that issue. The most telling thing is the energy growing around organizations like BALLE who have an interest in rebuilding local economies. HD: How did you get involved with BALLE? DK: I’m the board chair of Yes! magazine, and we ran a series of retreats for progressive leaders. Judy Wicks (co-founder of BALLE and owner of White Dog Café in Philadelphia) participated in one of those retreats as a business representative. So we had a lot of discussions with Judy, and she of course was interested in responsible business. We talked about the difference between publicly-traded corporations and independent local business. She told the story this morning about how she felt she was just a small business owner and inconsequential, and I told her she was the model for the future economy, and you need to embrace that. We carried the discussion forward into the Social Ventures Network (SVN). There were various people working on related ideas, and it gradually coalesced and gave birth to BALLE. HD: You also wrote an essay in Yes! magazine about the term “local living economy,” and you also used the term “suicide economy” DK: The term suicide economy came from a discussion at SVN where someone threw out that term, and I immediately picked it up. It’s a great term because the economy is driven by the pursuit of short-term profit, which is essentially depleting the social and natural capital of the planet. It has absolutely no capacity to think long-term and recognize that ultimately the real wealth is the living systems of the planet, not money which is a fiction which has no substance, no intrinsic value. HD: Let me ask you about your most recent book The Great Turning. Is the “great turning” essentially a positive response to a crisis we might face in the future? DK: The term “great turning” comes from Johanna Macy. It’s essentially a juxtaposition of the reality of the dominant position which is empire, which uses a model of dominance and hierarchy. That model is crumbling. We have reached the limits of exploitation that the planet will sustain and that societies will sustain. The whole phenomenon of terrorism is a reflection of that social breakdown, the frustrations of people who feel excluded. HD: So if we have a “great unraveling,” another term from the book, that will involve fighting over scarce resources? DK: Yes. And the great turning is saying we can make the choice to pull out of this, to turn in a new direction, to turn away from domination and to partnership. HD: In your book you mentioned the social movements in Argentina as a positive response to economic collapse. DK: I think it’s a very good example of a positive response to crisis. During my presentations, a number of people have raised the point that when we’re in crisis, it leads to more narrow, authoritarian responses. And I’m well aware that that’s what happens in psychological studies or laboratory situations. I’ve come to realize that’s not necessarily true in a larger social situation where you actually have the potential to develop more cooperative structures. And very often, when there’s a crisis like a flood or even an economic collapse, a lot of people actually pull together to form a more cooperative framework of mutual support, which is the more rational response. HD: What has been your experience in Latin America, and how do you view the election of leftist and populist leaders in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela? DK: The way I see it is as a rejection of the neo-liberal economic ideology which is about removing all constraints on the market, and essentially all accountability. And I don’t see that as particularly a leftist thing. I think its basically a very positive development. And I think you’re going to see this more and more around the world as people realize the neo-liberal model is bankrupt. HD: You often talk about “renewing the American experiment.” And in your recent book you spent some time on early American history. Why did you decide to do that? DK: Well I was trying to understand where we are as a nation. And how our experience fits in the larger frame of 5,000 years of empire. Because the idea most of us grew up with was that after the revolution, the founding fathers wrote a constitution to guarantee our liberties. We have an idealized model of the perfect democracy. As I looked at the actual experience, it’s clear we were not founded as a democracy; we were founded as a plutocracy, which means rule by the rich. The constitution was written by white male landowners to secure their power and privilege. And of course, one of the most obvious examples was that once they won the war and were in control, they saw no need for a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. That was added later, only by popular demand. The constitution affirmed slavery; it denied women the vote. It was basically about securing the interests of the landowning class. Even men who did not have property were effectively deprived of the vote. HD: But you obviously see some signs for hope, too, in the way the country was founded. DK: There were positive contributions. It was a defining step away from monarchy, although there were certain members of the founding group who thought we should have a monarchy. The other thing that was very important was the separation of church and state, because the early colonies in the north and the south had been founded as theocracies. But ending slavery, granting women the right to vote, recognizing rights for native Americans – these things came only after very long struggles. HD: So if we’re going to renew the American experiment now, do you see this as happening mainly through organizations like BALLE or is there a way to act through the electoral system as well? DK: Well, I think we need to work at all levels. But real democracy is grounded in the types of processes that BALLE is developing. We also need quite significant reforms of our electoral systems. We need public financing of elections so we get out of this mode of one dollar one vote. I think we need proportional representation, and instant run-off voting, and of course getting rid of the electoral college. HD: You end a lot of your speeches with the phrase: “We’re the people we’ve been waiting for.” I was wondering if you could say something about what that means to you. DK: We’re kind of conditioned to the idea that we need a leader who will come and save us. That to some extent was an organizing idea of the 20th century. What we’re finding in terms of the popular movements of our time is they’re much more decentralized. They have thousands or millions of leaders. And if we’re going to have change, we have to realize it’s not going to come from within the institutions of empire, but is going to come through the initiative of ordinary people. The foundation has to be at the community level, because that’s where were building the new cultures and institutions. We have to recognize that our biggest government, business and religious institutions are all framed on the model of hierarchy and empire, and they all concentrate power and privilege. And we were just beginning to learn how to work in a modern society in a way that is more decentralized. It’s also not just a matter of preserving my rights or interests but recognizing the responsibility that each us of have for the well being of the larger community. HD: Anything you want to add to people reading this in central California DK: I would just say keep up your good work. People living in northern and central California are at the forefront of the great turning. Brad Johnson is a regular contributor to HopeDance. His last interview for HopeDance was with Michael Shuman. See his review of Shuman’s latest book in this issue. <back | top^
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