Dominique Peccoud, special advisor to the Director General of the International Labour Organization in Geneva yesterday condemned ‘the God of Money and his servant, the God of the ultra-liberal Market which has forgotten its roots’. He warned that if we do not read the sign of the times, ‘we plunge on towards the death of our system which rejects any controls and becomes a globalized capitalistic plutocracy’. He was speaking at the closing session of the 2003 Caux Conference for Business and Industry, on the theme: ‘Globalization . . . as if people really mattered’...

by Andrew Stallybrass, Christoph Spreng

Dominique Peccoud, special advisor to the Director General of the International Labour Organization in Geneva yesterday condemned ‘the God of Money and his servant, the God of the ultra-liberal Market which has forgotten its roots’. He warned that if we do not read the sign of the times, ‘we plunge on towards the death of our system which rejects any controls and becomes a globalized capitalistic plutocracy’. He was speaking at the closing session of the 2003 Caux Conference for Business and Industry, on the theme: ‘Globalization . . . as if people really mattered’.

The CCBI, which this year marked its 30th meeting, aims to bring a new dimension to the globalization debate, one based on trust and collaboration rather than protest and destruction. Father Peccoud, a Jesuit priest, responsible for external relations and partnerships in the UN body reminded his audience that for Adam Smith, the father of liberal economics, a divorce between criteria of efficiency and moral considerations, and thus between business and a necessary governance, would have been unthinkable. He drew a distinction between a globalization that had been going on for as long as human history, tending always towards ever-larger communities, and a plutocracy, the rule of the rich few, that marked the modern world.

But Peccoud also underlined the positive aspects of globalization: ‘an expansion of human awareness to the dimension of the globe’; the creation of jobs due to the globalization of wealth (even though the demand outstripped the supply); a renaissance of communities and the protection of minorities and cultural diversity; structures of governance that went beyond state borders; and finally inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue and an openness to the diversity of meaning to life. He quoted a UNDP report that backed up his concern about ‘the perversion of democracy through the manipulation of public opinion’. According to this report, in the 2000 US elections, big business had contributed over a billion dollars to political parties – 14 times the Trade Unions’ contributions and 16 times the amount given by other interest groups.

Peccoud expressed concern at the rise of ‘fundamentalist identities’ that could lead to violent madness such as that shown in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. This highly symbolic act was a challenge to bring change, according to him, and to carry out positive symbolic acts – he gave as examples the Pope’s meeting in Assisi with many world spiritual leaders, and a torch-lit march to a prayer meeting organized in Geneva by the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, which drew in other faiths.

He called for ‘an active and reactivated civil society’, to work with the worlds of business and government administrations to ‘end the anarchy of the market’ and to help bring to birth a free market, regulated by the law, like all freedoms, ‘and a sense of the purpose of Man’, inspired by the tripartite model of the ILO. We should ‘become adults who accept the fragility of their existence in the joy of helping each other to serve the growth of humanity, rather than remaining eternal teen-agers, who endlessly reassure themselves with an orgasmic expression of their own power’. He concluded with a challenge to the young – and the not so young – to learn languages, including Greek and Latin, with a view to understanding other cultures.

Conference Report

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