The Insecurity Trap. A Short Guide to Transformation. By Paul Rogers, with Judith Large. Hawthorn Press, 2024. 92pp.
The main author of this book, Paul Rogers, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, sees the world as being in a ‘polycrisis’, whose principal features are wars, right-wing populism, poverty and environmental breakdown. He refers to it as an ‘insecurity trap’, in that the disruption caused by these factors makes everyone’s life prone to uncertainty and instability. Viewing the factors in question as planetary and often interdependent, his declared purpose is to suggest ways in which we can set about ‘navigating’ them on that same planetary level. In her Foreword, the book’s co-author sees humanity as having the technology and productive capacity to achieve world-wide security for all as long as these are not perverted in the service of, for example, fomenting hatred between peoples or producing increasingly sophisticated weapons of war.
One of the major obstacles to this, according to this book, is the free market, or ‘neoliberalism’ as it is referred to, which it sees as beginning seriously in the 1980s, in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, and having intensified since (though it is also recognised as a way of running capitalism that dates back to the 19th century). It is a way of organising things, the authors tell us, that focuses on ‘the prioritisation of private enterprise in place of state ownership’. It also, they go on, eschews ‘cooperative intergovernmental action’ and turns its back on the environmental and military drivers of migration, pushing ‘the richer states to close the castle gates and concentrate even more than at present on looking after themselves’. This in turn makes them ‘terribly ill-suited to responding to global challenges’, such as pandemics and climate breakdown and much more suited to encouraging the arms industry to supply weapons for use in the wars easily prone to breaking out. ‘Now thrive the armourers’, as they put it.
So, what is the solution Professor Rogers and his co-author have to offer to these ongoing and interlocking problems which affect the whole of humanity? First and foremost, they see ‘the need for cooperation at every level from neighbourhoods right through to intergovernmental level’, especially in view of increasing climate breakdown which ‘an economic model rooted in competition cannot cope with’. In support of this they provide a long list of ‘small steps’ people could take to ‘cooperate’ with one another on a daily basis (eg, use of cloth or paper bags rather than plastic ones, conserving water, using chemical-free products, car sharing, volunteering to help in food banks). They also suggest involvement in support of production of local food, sustainable energy, ‘ethical’ banking and campaigns such as against the arms trade and against fossil fuels, and in favour of, for example, Amnesty International. They advocate all of this, and much more – and this is where the problems arise – within the framework of the existing system of buying and selling and dependence on money and the market. In addition, they want to skew the system as it currently exists by having a much larger degree of state ownership of industry and services, arguing that, if governments have more control, they can control ‘market fundamentalism’, introduce more regulation and reform that will make things less unequal, and can also, for example, tax the wealthy, bring in carbon reduction programmes, invest in electrification, and adopt ‘green’ policies generally.
But what all of this fails to reckon with is that, with all such change – if it were possible – we would still be left with capitalism with its market and its money system. Nor would anything of what is proposed change the profit imperative that drives it. At best it would amount to a tinkering at the edges of that system and would certainly not have the effect of mending the inequality that characterises it. Above all, it would do nothing to create the more ‘sharing’ system the authors wish for, nor to remove the ‘insecurity trap’ which the authors’ well-meaning aim is to do away with. Above all, whatever individuals or individual governments may do to attempt to ease the burden on the most deprived, what cannot happen in a world of competing national economic interests is the ‘intergovernmental cooperation’ that this book advocates for. That is an illusion, because all governments are an expression of the interests of the owners or controllers of wealth in their country – whether that wealth is state managed or privately owned – and will only cooperate with other governments to the extent that those interests are not unduly affected. They cannot act against the profit motive and they do not possess the power to regulate the profit system as they wish. That is the bleak truth of the world we live in and the kind of ‘small steps’ advocated by these authors are destined to remain just that and not to lead to any larger change or a different kind of society.
It is in fact a failure of the imagination not to look beyond ‘small steps’ and to a completely different kind of world (a moneyless, stateless, leaderless one with free access for all to all goods and services) – one which is eminently realisable once majority consciousness of the need for it spreads and leads to democratic political action to bring it about. It will be a society of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way and in which everyone can develop their interests and abilities with full social support and live without the ever-present threat of the pervasive material insecurity the authors of this book rightly perceive and are so keen to see removed.
Howard Moss
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