One year after the protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle, the movement against corporate globalisation is still going strong with 100,000 protesters planning to converge on Nice. In Australia, anti-corporate activists, buoyed by the success of the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Melbourne, are planning to blockade stock exchanges on May 1. PETER BOYLE interviewed JOHN PERCY, the national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), the largest left party in Australia.
How do you think the new movement's fared since Seattle?
The corporate ruling class has never been richer and so well-resourced and yet it has been on the defensive since Seattle. Their plans to give ever more freedom to the giant global corporations to exploit, through a new round of WTO changes, are still being held back. They are trying to restart the talks scuttled at Seattle but they are still meeting resistance. They are even finding it hard to find a city to host the November 2001 WTO summit. But most importantly, all around the world, they are still losing the battle for legitimacy.
Throughout the Third World for decades the workers, peasants, urban poor have been rebelling, protesting on a daily basis. They're directly driven by their poverty and repression, the plunder of the multi-national corporations, the piracy of imperialism.
In Colombia, in Bolivia, in Mexico, in Ecuador, in Argentina, in Brazil and elsewhere there've been massive rebellions. In Africa there are protests and demonstrations, even though in many places the degradation and demoralisation and prospect of death make it hard for the people to raise their heads. In Indonesia, there are protest actions throughout the archipelago every day.
But with this new movement, the First World is now catching up.
Seattle was the most dramatic moment, but it was building up before that. Since then we've had actions that made world news in Washington, Melbourne, Prague and Seoul. The wonderful experience with S11 in Melbourne really brought it home.
In the late 1960s, you were one of the founders of the political tendency that became the DSP. Do you see any similarities between the new anti-corporate movement and the radical movement of the 1960s and 1970s?
The role of young people is one common feature. More and more people, especially young people, are waking up to capitalism's neo-liberal offensive against the workers and poor at home, and to the brutal exploitation of the rest of the world. They're opposed to the corporations, opposed to the sweatshops, opposed to the system. They're opposed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation, and deeply disillusioned with capitalism. They're not sure what to replace it with, and not sure where to next for the movement.
It is interesting that the 1960s radicalisation also developed around an issue of international solidarity — the Vietnamese national liberation struggle. Many other issues, such as feminism and anti-racism were part of that radicalisation but it developed around the anti-Vietnam war movement.
Today we see a new movement of global solidarity against corporate tyranny. The range of issues raised in this movement is sometimes the butt of snide comments in the capitalist media but really it is a sign of a broad radicalisation and the coming together of many different campaigns on a more radical level.
For instance, the new movement has brought the radical environmentalists closer to radical social justice and union activists. We've always said the red and the green struggle are intertwined, that's why we initiated Green Left Weekly 10 years ago. But red and green radicalism came together as a powerful global mass movement over the last year.
But Seattle and sequel mobilisations of the new movement showed that the main union leaderships in the First World have a different agenda to the other activists. So the mass involvement of the working class is not without its problems.
Yes, primarily because the union movement in the First World is dominated by conservatives. But they are under pressure from the new movement.
During the tumultuous 20th century the working class had some tremendous victories, such as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution is still going strong. But it has also suffered many defeats, often because of the misleadership of struggles dominated by Stalinists or social democrats.
In recent decades social democracy has abandoned any charade that it had fundamentally different goals and allegiances than other capitalist parties. In Australia, 13 years of Hawke-Keating government and the disastrous ALP-ACTU accord put paid to that. If anyone had any lingering doubts, the despicable role of Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks praising cop violence at S11 should dispel them.
Also, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the final fruits of Stalinism, the second 20th century betrayer of the workers' movement announced its departure from the scene. Certainly, the Soviet collapse had terrible consequences for workers there, experiencing drastic falls in their standards of living and life expectancy under mafia capitalism. But the capitalist ideologues' gloating about "the end of history" has been shown to be premature and arrogantly short-sighted.
The exposure and discrediting of Stalinism and social democracy is opening the way for a new movement.
The DSP has been pushing the idea of a global strike against corporate tyranny on May 1 combined with a mass blockade of the stock exchanges. What is your broader perspective for the movement?
The movement in Australia needs a focus to organise and mobilise and we cannot wait for another World Economic Forum summit or for the IMF, World Bank or WTO to come to town. That's why we support the M1 plans adopted by the S11 activists in Melbourne and Sydney.
The ALP has been able to control the social movements for many years even though it is now common knowledge that it is the alternate party of government for the corporate rich. But it failed to stop S11.
This gave a tremendous confidence boost to the many activists who have struggled against the bi-partisan corporate-first offensive through the difficult 1990s. S11 put building a radical alternative to the ALP back on the political agenda.
We need more actions, protests, demonstrations, blockades and movements, but the gains won't be guaranteed, and we won't be able to win, until we take that next step, build parties, that build on the lessons of the 20th century, learn from the mistakes of social democracy and Stalinism.
The capitalists are quite comfortable with non-party or anti-party proposals because that leaves their parties dominant. Such proposals allow them to easily divide, disperse and undermine isolated protests and movements. They force us to repeat errors from past struggles and prevent movements going from a perspective of reforms to one of fundamental social change.
New parties are arising from the political and social struggles in the Third World. In our region these include the People's Democratic Party in Indonesia, the Socialist Party of Timor and the Labour Party Pakistan. In India the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) is growing stronger. In the Philippines there's a renewal and recomposition of the left, and in South Korea a new Marxist party, Power of the Working Class, is being established.
In Latin America, the Cuban Communist Party plays a special role. It is holding out against the US attacks and blockade, and giving political inspiration to struggles and parties throughout the world.
The recent international solidarity conference in Havana would have given a boost to the solidarity campaign with Cuba, but it also boosted the struggles against imperialism throughout the world.
Our delegation of five comrades — among 4347 delegates from 118 countries — was given a tremendous honour. At the concluding demonstration of 12,000 people outside the US Special Interests section in the Swiss embassy, two conference delegates from each of the five regions of the world were invited to address the crowd. Pat Brewer from the DSP was one of them!
We know that our solidarity with the people struggling around the world is important in itself, but it also ensures we are internationalists, and not narrow chauvinists in an imperialist country like Australia. This helps us build the revolutionary party that is needed here as well.
The DSP in recent years has emerged as the largest, most effective left party in Australia, since the dissolution of the Communist Party of Australia in 1991. We tried to convince them of a merger, but they preferred dissolution.
Green Left Weekly has emerged as far and away the best, largest, most widely read left paper in Australia (and so many readers around the world assure us it's the best. We haven't seen a better English language one anyway.)
And although throughout our history we've always been involved in all the important political struggles and campaigns, on local and international issues, in recent years we're noticing that what we do matters. Our political intervention can make an impact.
An example was the high school student mobilisations against racism and Pauline Hanson in 1998. Tens of thousands of high school students were mobilised in walkouts by our comrades in Resistance.
Another example was when the people of East Timor last year needed our solidarity against the murderous Indonesian-backed militias. The September demonstrations that our comrades in ASIET (Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor) organised and led made a difference.
At S11 in Melbourne this year, the effective, coordinated intervention of our comrades had a huge impact in ensuring its tremendous success — an organised mass blockade of the WEF, that sealed up Crown Casino for a lot of the time; putting the onus for violence on the police, and on Bracks; preventing the ALP and the Trades Hall Council leadership undercutting the S11 action.
So we can see we can have an impact, are going in the right direction, but we're still far too small! We have many supporters, many admirers who read Green Left and think we're doing a good job. But we need more readers of Green Left, and more supporters. Our admirers need to become active supporters and our supporters need to become active DSP members.