Naomi Klein and Systemic Change

In the October 29, 2013 issue of the New Statesmen, Naomi Klein published the article “How science is telling us all to revolt”. She writes that more and more scientists are recognizing that continual growth and profit maximization, innate to capitalism, are encouraging climate destruction. They see civil disobedience as a powerful tool to fight for a system change.
I agree but at the same time I long for more positive alternatives and I see serious limits in the potential of civil disobedience and public protest.
Civil disobedience is extremely important and protest has been and will remain a vital form for people to express their grievances and formulate their demands. In order to create and test the alternatives and to build support at all levels of society, however, we need to look for additional channels, additional tools.
What could these tools look like? One way is to create a mechanism to measure to what extent corporations, non-profits and even government agencies work towards the common good. Let us citizens create a manifest of demands, a set of best practice against which companies and other organizations are measured. In an international, democratic process we can formulate this list of standards based on universal values found in the Geneva Convention and constitutions around the world. These include human dignity, cooperation, sustainability, social justice and democracy.
A company can then be put to the test. How do they measure up? Make the results public and understandable. Make it easy to compare the results of Costco and Whole Foods or Sacramento and Albany. By creating this clear set of standards companies know what is expected of them. They don’t have to fear that each year another set of standards will appear out of nowhere, forcing them to go through another expensive and time-consuming reorganization of internal processes.
With this kind of scorecard in their hands consumers can choose the more ethical product and further stakeholders can better judge the impact of a particular company.
Certainly this is a wildly different approach than civil disobedience. They both, however, share the goal of systemic change.
An international movement called the Economy for the Common Good has begun the journey of creating the value-based standards and has created a tool to measure companies and to hold them accountable to ethic, environmental and human rights principles.
Learn more at www.economy-for-the-common-good.org