[governance] Parminder's exchange with Bertrand

[Parminder]

Milton

There is no effort to artificially separate the economic aspects of our 
lives from social, political and cultural. They are thoroughly enmeshed.

The point is whether  we agree or not that large scale global share 
capital is structurally organized to be insulated as much as possible 
from human qualities. (Do you deny that global capital and financial 
systems systematically follow  this logic as resulting in higher and 
higher efficiency of capital organization and movement -  and 
increasingly so, of which the recent  financial meltdown was one result, 
making it necessary for the world community to sit up and take notice. 
The corrective measures were in the form of greater 'political' 
controls/ regulations - which denotes real human quality checks on 
increasing disconnection of finance/ capital from human systems.)

If this is so, how would you say that such global share capital should 
have a political say or STAKE, as part of MS political systems, which 
need to be dealing with real human (ok, individual if you want!) issues 
and human situations.

 >But how would you feasibly and productively lock anything or anyone 
associated with _all_ corporations in the ICT >industry from a public 
dialogue of that sort?

One intends to lock no one away from public dialogs, but only from 
exercising political role as parts of proposed MS structures. This back 
and forth and confusion between right to be part of a public dialogue 
and having political legitimacy in an MS structure is one of the most 
important confusions in MS discussions.

 sooner or later the school district is going to purchase some 
 >products. public monies are going to be allocated and spent. Expertise 
which is concentrated in business (for a >good reason - the expertise is 
valuable) will ahve to be tapped.

This is the second most significant confusions in MS discussions (partly 
because this model id often seen to come from a background of technical 
governance) when ' a source of expertise' is confused with a party with 
real/ live political interest/ stake and thus probably political 
legitimacy. I expect you to agree that having expertise on a subject, 
which can and should always be tapped for decision making, does not 
translate in any way to a political stake. I also saw references to this 
confusion in Bertrand's MS formulation - 'anyone who has something to 
contribute should be let in' kind of. Also goes against Ostrom's 
principle 1 of common resources management concerning definition of real 
stakes of a party in a governance issue.

Parminder


Milton L Mueller wrote:
>
> >Parminder:
> >I agree with Milton's doubts whether the MS framework contributes 
> anything new
> >(in a positive sense) for organising our political systems. What does 
> the term
> >stakeholder groups bring in beyond what we already know as 'interest 
> groups',
> >a basic and a widely used concept  of  representative democracy. 
> Unless those
> >arguing for MS-ism as the basic new governance form clearly articulate a
> >response to this question, it is difficult to go any further in this 
> discussion.
>
>  
>
> To repeat myself, I do see a value in the MS concept as a transitional 
> principle that opens up and slightly democratizes inter-governmental 
> organizations. Other than that, you are exactly correct, in a 
> fundamental political science sense, that we are dealing with interest 
> groups. And that raises some very important issues, which i 
> superficially discuss below.
>
>
> >Bertrand (in response to Milton):
> >Do you actually mean a sort of "personal sovereignty" principle, that 
> would enable individuals to gather in >numerous human groupings, 
> including nations, but also business and non-profit entities ?
>
>  
>
> My answer: Yes, exactly, and the quotation from Kofi Annan cited was a 
> good expression of my view, which sparked such a negative reaction, 
> about governance institutions being servants of the individual rather 
> than the other way around.
>
>
> >Parminder:
> >This brings me to the gorilla-in-the-room question of MS-ism - the role
> > and legitimacy of big business in political structures.
>
>  
>
> As I will try to explain below, I don't think this question is 
> restricted to MS-ism advocates. It is a question that permeates 
> discussions about the validity and legitimacy of all democratic, open 
> forms of government.
>
>
> >It is important to discuss how, at a theoretical level, organization
> >into a business unit is very different from political interest based
> >collectives - governments, or non-gov bodies. Again, this is a
> >principal issue that needs to be clarified by Ms-ists. The conflation
> >of 'interests' and structures of business organization - especially of
> >the trans-global share capital based kind - with human organisations
> >and collectives with shared 'lifeworld' (a world that subjects may
> >experience together) based interests  is very problematic, and
> >requires clarification.
>
>  
>
> As a realist and student of historical processes, I cannot accept the 
> implied rigid distinction between economic and political humanity, or 
> between a nice, human collective lifeworld and an impersonal, evil, 
> inherently exploitative economic world. It's all part of humanity. 
> Most obviously, the ability to share, organize and pool wealth to 
> produce the things humans want and need is an inescapable part of 
> society. The corporation is a form of collective organization; share 
> capital is a way of broadening and - yes - democratizing the ownership 
> and benefits of economic production. Labor unions are also a form of 
> collective economic organization. Given too much power, both a corp or 
> a union can become abusive and gain harmful forms of economic 
> restraint on the rest of us. The problem is that once you set up a 
> form of government that is representative of the interests, desires 
> and visions of the people you also allow them to organize in ways that 
> further or defend their economic (as well as social, political, 
> cultural, etc.) interests. I don't see any way to detach the two.
>
>  
>
> Go back to your specific example of Microsoft and its participation in 
> Indian ICT education programs. I don't know the specifics so forgive 
> any factual errors. OK, so sure, it would be relatively easy (well, 
> not easy in practice, but easy in theory) to identify and avoid some 
> simple forms of corruption: Microsoft pays local board of ed 
> administrator a bribe, suddenly the schools all go Windows and lock 
> themselves into a specific vendor's product. Obviously we don't want 
> to allow that. But how would you feasibly and productively lock 
> anything or anyone associated with _all_ corporations in the ICT 
> industry from a public dialogue of that sort? sooner or later the 
> school district is going to purchase some products. public monies are 
> going to be allocated and spent. Expertise which is concentrated in 
> business (for a good reason - the expertise is valuable) will ahve to 
> be tapped. The people - both in the government and outside the 
> government, both in corporations and as final consumers - all have 
> some kind of an "economic" interest in that money, not just 
> corporations. The government bureaucrat may have an "interest" in 
> expanding his share of the public budget; the competitor of Microsoft 
> may have an interest and benefit economically from excluding MS; an 
> individual or end user might have an economic interest in receiving 
> some of that money whether they need it more than someone else or not.  
>
>  
>
> If you could "assume away" economic interest and restrict political 
> dialogue to some Olympian grotto where philosopher-kings considered 
> all options in a disinterested way, well, we wouldn't be talking about 
> this species.
>
>  
>
> Democracy would be all too easy if this problem didn't exist. I guess 
> you have to trust the ability of people to make sense of things in an 
> open environment.
>
>  
>
> There's an interesting book about this problem I read back when I 
> started considering these issues. It's called The People's Lobby: 
> Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in 
> the United States, 1890-1925.  Elisabeth Clemens.
>
>  
>
>
>
>
> Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:
>> Milton,
>>
>> Do you actually mean a sort of "personal sovereignty" principle, that 
>> would enable individuals to gather in numerous human groupings, 
>> including nations, but also business and non-profit entities ? so 
>> that the unifying governance unit becomes stakeholders of various 
>> sizes but with equal status instead of three (or four) separate and 
>> siloed stakeholder groups ?
>>
>> B.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu 
>> <mailto:mueller at syr.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     ________________________________________
>>     From: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond [ocl at gih.com <mailto:ocl at gih.com>]
>>
>>     > - governments: law and order
>>     > - business: economy and money
>>     >- civil society: conscience
>>     >
>>     >Any social ecosystem requires all three to work. Take one out
>>     and either
>>     >the system will fail, tear itself apart, or reach an untenable
>>     extreme.
>>     >That's why I believe in multi-stakeholderism.
>>
>>     Nice formulation, Olivier. But suppose we called it "popular
>>     sovereignty" and "individual rights" instead of
>>     "multistakeholderism" -  would that not allow individuals, in
>>     various aggregations, to produce the appropriate mix of law,
>>     order, economy and conscience? Is not the division into three
>>     estates (with millions of individuals overlapping and
>>     participating in two or more at the same time) artificial?
>>
>>     --MM____________________________________________________________
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>>
>>
>> -- 
>> ____________________
>> Bertrand de La Chapelle
>> Délégué Spécial pour la Société de l'Information / Special Envoy for 
>> the Information Society
>> Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes/ French Ministry of 
>> Foreign and European Affairs
>> Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32
>>
>> "Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de 
>> Saint Exupéry
>> ("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")
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