Corporations figure largely in his arguments, as you might expect, but Monbiot's analysis of their current and possible future role in a reformed world system is more nuanced than some offered by his anti-globalisation cohorts. He recognises that global trade is a necessity and that global corporations are best placed to carry this out, but only if they are properly policed, their ability to "externalise" (i.e., dump on someone else) hidden costs, such as environmental damage, rigorously controlled. As Monbiot vividly remarks, a corporation is merely a tool. When it starts demanding, or usurping, the rights of a person, it must be destroyed.

This is thought-provoking stuff. So too is his account of the creation of the World Bank and the IMF in 1944. Above all, The Age of Consent is a call to action: all its research and analysis will amount to nothing, says Monbiot, if it doesn't contribute to the process of change for which he sees a vast global will developing. He genuinely believes, and communicates strongly his belief, that the monolithic political and economic forms that constrain the poor world to its subordinate position can be changed, and offers suggestive and practical ways in which this might be achieved by direct and indirect action. Most powerful among weapons to bring about the transformation of the world is the belief in the effectiveness of collective action. This is fighting talk, powerfully delivered. --Robin Davidson

Book Description
Naomi Klein's No Logo told us what was wrong. Now The Age of Consent shows us how to put it right.

Synopsis
Naomi Klein's No Logo told us what was wrong. Now, George Monbiot shows us how to put it right. Provocative, brave and beautifully argued, The Age of Consent is nothing less than a manifesto for a new world order. "Our task is not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity's first global democratic revolution. "All over our planet, the rich get richer while the poor are overtaken by debt and disaster. The world is run not by its people but by a handful of unelected or underelected executives who make the decisions on which everyone else depends: concerning war, peace, debt, development and the balance of trade. Without democracy at the global level, the rest of us are left with no means of influencing these men but to shout abuse and hurl ourselves at the lines of police defending their gatherings and decisions. Does it have to be this way?George Monbiot knows not only that things ought to change, but also that they can change. Drawing on decades of thinking about how the world is organized and administered politically, fiscally and commercially, Monbiot has developed an interlocking set of proposals all his own.

From the Publisher
Monbiot is a very authoritative and persuasive de facto figurehead for the contrarian movements in the UK.
A short, searing call to action – set to be one of the most explosive, much-debated books of the year.
A regular commentator on TV and radio, in the open air and in the press, his previous book, Captive State, a ringing litany of political and corporate abuse in Blair's Britain, has become a benchmark and was a Top Ten paperback bestseller.

About the Author
George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian and author of the best-selling Captive State. He has held visiting professorships or fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, Keele and East London, in subjects ranging from philosophy to environmental science.

In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize and a Sony Award for radio production. His other books include Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land.

In The Age of Consent he puts the current democratic world under scrutiny having also written about this on a more detailed level in his earlier book The Captive State and makes the fact that we can even call it democratic questionable, he suggests new systems to unselected world powers such as. WTO, World Bank with real democratic alternatives, and that power should be changed on a worldwide scale so that the worlds power was more equally distributed in terms of population rather than a countries trade or economic position.

He suggests that globalisation should continue but in a different, more fair way. He sees no need for us to be confined within our national border and asks why our sense of community and common interest should rarely go further than the national border. He asks why we do not forget our geographical differences and recognise that if we began to see our similarities and shared interests it would benefit us all. There are a few revolutionary changes he thinks should be done.

Power should be given to people with the creation of a world parliament whereby the world would be divided up in terms of its population and each part elected a representative. These would then meet and discuss world issues. There power would be immense for the sole fact that they would actually be representative of the worlds people and would therefore have huge lobbying weight influencing global institutional and national decisions, and opposing regimes. He estimated the cost to be almost 1 Billion Dollars, but suggested this could be raised from JM Keynes’s idea of an International Clearing Union (ICU) raised at Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. It was accepted by all members except the States, as Monbiot believes, it would have destroyed their dominant trading and economic position taking away the dollar as the international currency for trade.

The ICU would be a global bank replacing the IMF and World Bank whose purpose would be to equalise the power of international trade, reduce the growing disparity between rich and poor countries, prevent the third world ‘debt trap‘ and at the same time raise money for the world parliament. It would monitor worldwide trade where all trade would be done in its own currency, a bancor. Each nation would have an account with a fixed exchange rate and where exports would add bancors and imports would take them away providing an incentive for each country to end up at the end of a year with an account of zero bancors. If a country had bancors left over it would be confiscated to the ICU reserve fund encouraging the country to use up all the bancors by buying from other countries before the end of the year. Countries with an account deficit would have their currency depreciated, encouraging others to buy the next year.

Overall I think this is a well researched book with good ideas, but it does do something much more powerful than the ideas it proposes. It addresses that there are fundamental problems with the global order and gives us groundwork for change. For example why do we sit back and watch food surpluses grow (beef and butter mountains) in rich countries whilst millions starve in poor. It is naïve for us to think that how the world is run now is how it will be run in, even as soon as, a couple of decades. Without proper global democratic systems in place globalisation will further to benefit the rich over the poor.

The question as to why we should stop using democratic systems past the national scale is a very good one in terms of how to create fairer world regulatory systems, I think the one person, one vote World Parliament is a good start, and little more. The problem with representatives of the World Parliament is that they will always be very distant and I think the belief that democracy becomes less and less democratic the more people it represents is true. The system would be strongly weighted to countries of larger populations such as China and India having over 20 seats at the world parliament whereas the whole of Europe would have less than half of that. It seems this unfair weighting would misrepresent the many contrasting views of those smaller countries. A very interesting book I think the subjects will become of increasing relevance.

An essential work, 2008-04-05
For someone whose only exam failure was a U in Economics at 'A'-Level (no, I don't know why I took it either), I am the least likely advocate of a book that confronts the 'dismal science'. However, Monbiot's towering achievement is one of the very few books of any genre I have read which I would legitimately call 'mind-expanding' or 'life-changing' (or any other overused husk of broadsheet blurbspeak). A passionate polemic on the ways and means of re-ordering the current capitalist system both more equitably AND sustainably, it's elegantly argued and simply structured, with an inbuilt expectation for its proposals to be refuted, refined and/or improved by anyone who can and wishes to do so. Monbiot recognises from the outset that some of his proposals will cause knee-jerk horror in many people who believe themselves to be free-thinking liberals, but his demolition of lazy assumptions and subsequent reasoning is fundamentally logical and seemingly watertight, especially when contrasted with the current or alternative options. Its most damning indictments (mostly of the US and its Western hegemony) can be drawn from the surprising fact that few of his proposals are new ones. He has revised and updated versions of those international economic checks and balances proposed in previous years (John Maynard Keynes' original plans for the functioning of the World Bank is one example) which were agreed in principle by every country except...you guessed it, the US, who were terrified of losing their financial advantage. He overturns the idea that deregulation and free-trade are necessary steps to improve the economies of poorer nations by showing that only those countries in recent years who have IGNORED the IMF's economic advice (Taiwan for example) have seen their standards of living improve across the board. Those countries who have implemented the IMF's strategies have plummeted further into debt and degradation. But this is not Michael Moore agitprop territory. Monbiot merely presents the evidence, suggests sensible alternatives and asks what part YOU will play. We are, on our current trajectory, headed for an unavoidable global economic crash (the rumblings of which are being felt in the UK and US as I write in April 2008), which we have, in many ways, brought upon ourselves by ignorance (whether wilful or imposed) and omission of action. However, we now MUST choose whether the landing will be a soft or a hard one and this book arms us with strategies designed for us to cushion the global blow.

can't praise it enough, 2006-10-01
George Monbiot has given me hope, there are alternatives to the problems facing the world - we just need to summon the will to implement them and to challenge those who say 'it was always ever thus.'

This book is worth reading (in my view) for the following quote alone.

''...almost everything I was brought up to believe is untrue. I don't blame my parents for this - they were brought up with the same self-justificatory myths of the British Middle Classes.

All nations, all classes, all tribes tell themselves stories that validate and centralize their existence. These stories are always false.''

Basically total rubbish, though with a few redeeming qualities, 2008-06-25
The foundations of any argument or discussion are the common knowledge and assumptions of the listener and speaker. For example, it would not be possible to convince somebody that 2+3=5 unless the listener has a firm idea of at least the concepts of "2" and "3." Likewise, if you start a discussion based on the notion that the earth is 6000 years old, some fundamentalist christian might have no trouble building from that to a discussion of the geneology of adam and eve, while a scientist would, at minimum, demand some proof or evidence of the 6000 year old claim before going any further.

What, then, to be made of a book which early on states baldly: "[The WTO and IMF] will pursue only the policies in the developing world which are of benefit to the economy of the United States and the interests of the financial speculators, even when these conflict directly with the needs of the poor."? If not the political equivalent of creationism, this is, at the very least, a highly contentious statement.

To offer such a statement without supporting evidence suggests, basically, that the book is written for those who are already of a certain mindset about how the world works. There's nothing particularly wrong with this - after all, a calculus textbook doesn't need to go back to 1+1 have legitimacy. However if a political book which is attempting to map out a new world order uses at its base assumptions such contentious statements, then certainly it can only appeal to that segment of the population which takes such ideas as a given.

Indeed, in this lie the strengths and weaknesses of the book.

Let's say you're well-meaning but somewhat naive stereotypical anti-globalization protester. For you, this book borders on perfect in that it starts with many of your core assumptions and builds upon them and gives them structure. For example, Monbiot is sharp indeed in recognizing the folly of terms such as "anti-globalization", in pointing out places where "the movement" has picked wrong targets, in pointing out the folly of certain symbolic actions that "the movement" has engaged in, and so forth. He's also very correct in many areas of analysis in showing where such movements have done very well, and in showing some of the organizational problems of such generally commonly-minded organizations and institutions in achieving their goals. Indeed, this sort of analysis of today's left is the best part of the book and it shows the author's deep experience with and thinking about such issues.

In as much as the book may help to improve the structure and rigor of the argumentation of those who already share some of the author's political assumptions, it really is a nice book.

Alas, it falls down badly otherwise.

Now, before you think of me of some right-wing tory dinosaur or what have you, I'd like to state for the record that I consider myself quite progressive - in fact, radically so in many areas. Many of the issues Monbiot attempts to address are near and dear to my own heart. However, I also believe myself to have a basic understanding of economics and political science - something that he, unfortunately, seems to lack. This book is one which delivers screed after screed about debt and international finance organizations, but lacks anything but a comic book understanding about what finance and what such organizations really do. There is basically zero understanding of what sort of systems can contribute to long-term healthy economies and improvements in quality of life. Instead, we get tragically naive wealth redistribution plans and equally naive development plans (he neglects to mention, for example, that the magical seeds which he touts as helping agriculture in previously un-arable areas are the products of those evil corporations he spends much of the book randing about). Typical of such works (and, while I'm not at all sgugesting that this book has much to do with communism, let's face it: the error was huge in communism too), the basic problems of human motivation are totally ignored - in his world, there is basically "greed" (white, bad people) and "poorness" (dark. good people) and all behavior can be inferred from these characteristics.

Ideas such as his 600-member world parliament are fundamentally not bad, but they lack any sort of nuance or workability - basically, that's all that's there; the idea that earth's 6 billion or so people be represented by a 600 member assembly in which each representative represents a roughly equal number of persons. It's the sort of idea that well meaning amd bright 13-year olds have... which doesn't make it a bad, but it really needs development and coherence if it is to belong in an adult book.

It's really odd, too.. because Monbiot is clearly a very bright guy. It comes through in little glimmers here in there. But between the "here and there" is monotonous, poorly evidenced, much ranting, and just not very well thought through navel-gazing. Additionally, the history he cites is often very distorted and clearly, crucially, the trained zoologist has no real unerstanding of macroeconomics whatsoever.

Those looking for something nuanced and intelligent, avoid.


Age of Consent, 2007-08-21
This is a very optimistic book laying forth (as the author puts it) a manifesto for a new world order, and very plausible and inspiring it is as well. It informs you what things are wrong, unjust and a hindrance with globalisation and what stops it from working to the benefit of all, and then goes on to suggest ways to correct these faults and to realign international bodies and organizations so that justice and equality can be achieved. The ideas seem very well thought out and the book overall is very clear and well written. I've come away from similar books feeling very depressed with the state of the world, but with this I feel that change can really be achieved and that everyone will be a beneficiary. A very empowering feeling. If you liked this I highly recommend 'One No, Many Yeses' by Paul Kingsnorth, a brilliant look at small community movements.

• Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain
• Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning
• What Is Politics?: The Activity and Its Study
• The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century
• The New Rulers of the World