BY KERRYN WILLIAMS
For decades peasants, workers, urban poor and indigenous people in all the continents of the global South have fought mining companies, the International Monetary Fund, sweatshop operators and other forms of imperialist exploitation. But now their brothers and sisters in the North are joining them.
A new movement against corporate globalisation has firmly taken hold in the rich countries. Born in Seattle in 1999, in massive protests against the World Trade Organisation, this movement is enormously significant to world politics — because so many of its features are truly new.
First, this movement unites in common protests many issues and campaigns, most famously symbolised by Seattle's "teamsters and turtles" — unionist truck drivers and environmental defenders of the giant sea turtles, marching side by side, arm in arm.
Second, it is independent from, and so far untarnished by, the "old" politics, whether of the major parties in the capitalist countries or of the Stalinist politics of the old Communist Party left.
Third, it is profoundly internationalist. The movement's focus on Third World poverty and exploitation, and on the destruction of the world's ecology, has enabled it to break free from the nationalism which imbues Northern societies, whether that be the mainstream nationalism of the establishment media and political parties, or the right-wing racist nationalism of One Nation, or the "left-wing" economic nationalism of some trade union leaders.
Powerful combination
The combination in the anti-corporate globalisation movement of unity in action, political independence and internationalism makes this, potentially, an enormously powerful movement — far more powerful than any social movement that's developed in the belly of the imperialist beast for at least 30 years.
The reason it is so powerful is because it reflects the objective interests of the majority of the world's people — not just the interests of one country, or one ethnic group, or one gender, or one section of society.
The new movement is, in microcosm, a manifestation of the only force that is powerful enough to actually abolish, not just neutralise, corporate tyranny — massed people's power.
That's why our corporate rulers are so scared of the new movement, even though it is still new and relatively small.
It's why they are already scrambling to defuse and derail the movement by giving their rule a more human face, like when the IMF renamed its structural adjustment programs "poverty reduction strategy papers".
They're worried not just about the new movement's present, but also about its future — because the working classes in the First World and the oppressed classes in the semi-colonial countries are increasingly moving into dissent against actually existing capitalism.
These classes have not yet joined the new movement in their majority, but the movement already has their full attention and enjoys their passive support.
It is this potential to bring into play the class forces that can end capitalism altogether, rather than its capacity to disrupt meetings of the World Trade Organisation or the IMF or similar bodies, that gives the new movement its strength.
This doesn't mean that the acts of mass civil disobedience at international forums are unimportant. But their significance lies not in the message the actions send to the ruling class, but in the message they send to the working classes.
That powerful message is: "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. Join us!"
These are the strengths of the movement, the enormous potential of it. But the objective unity of interests between the majority of the world's people and the new movement also make clear the movement's present limitations.
There are certainly limitations of method. So far the movement has focused on "summit hopping", on blockades and mass demonstrations at meetings of the various financial and trade institutions.
This has been an important beginning, allowing activists to gain experience and learn to organise. But there are simply not enough summits to sustain and build the movement in this way.
Onto the offensive
The movement is, however, beginning to go beyond that. The May 1 blockades of Australian Stock Exchange buildings are an important step forward. They show that the movement can do more than just "summit hop", that the movement can go on the offensive, and that it can be internationalised, with people organising in their own cities around the world in united action.
The movement has also begun to gain electoral expression. In Australia, the newly formed Socialist Alliance, involving the key socialist parties and other anti-corporate activists, will use the upcoming federal elections to raise the demands of the movement and present an alternative to the current system.
In the United States, Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign for presidency took that country's anti-corporate movement into the electoral sphere, and into the thoughts of millions of people.
But even that's not enough. Getting a few people elected to the corporate rulers' parliaments is not going to change much. The decisions about how society is run aren't actually made in the parliaments. They're made in the boardrooms of the transnational corporations, on the floors of the stock exchanges and in the military's inner sanctums.
Most of what the mass media and politicians pedal about the inevitability and invulnerablity of corporate globalisation and all its attendant evils is rubbish. But amidst the lies, there is one grain of truth: "If we want to change the world, we really have to change the whole world".
If we want to get rid of Third World debt, it's not going to be enough to force all imperialist governments to cancel monies currently owing; we are going to have to get rid of the economic system which generates that debt, which creates the unequal "free" trade. If we want to abolish the "free market", we're going to have to abolish the system that created it.
Challenge ownership
To defeat corporate globalisation, we have to have a solution that is global and permanent. We have to be able to envisage a complete replacement for the current system.
While the finer details of that vision will be worked out in the process of struggling against the existing system, the bottom line is that we need to get rid of global capitalism. And that means abolishing its basic foundation: private ownership.
The extent of private ownership of the world's resources today is stunning.
Just two figures give an indication of this. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries. The combined sales of the top 200 corporations are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24% of the total world population) living in severe poverty.
As Karl Marx analysed more than a century ago, once capitalism was established its laws made it inevitable that capital would become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands — and it is inevitable that such concentration will continue as long as capitalism does.
The only alternative to private ownership is social ownership and such a system, whatever word you want to use for it, is socialism.
That's why Resistance, Australia's largest socialist youth organisation, doesn't just seek to strengthen and expand the movement against corporate globalisation. Our end goal is for a final solution to the misery and poverty created by capitalism.
The potential for such a solution — a democratic socialist society — may seem like an inconceivable dream to many. But the powerful and increasingly popular basic message of the new movement — people's power versus corporate tyranny — itself points towards the real possibility of democratic working-class power.
At the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne there was a glimpse of the potential of such "people's power" in the three-day mini-democracies built at the various blockade points around Crown Casino, which discussed and voted on all key decisions.
There is also more than enough proof in the most developed capitalist countries of the possibility of complex social organisation and planning. The thousands of employees of various corporate empires and of the largely efficient (if not cut back) public services demonstrate daily the possibilities of complex cooperation, and of socially-planned (rather than boardroom-planned) economies.
If such organisation is directed towards democratically decided ends, and carried out with the energy and creativity that comes from really believing in the work you are doing, the creation of a world which is just, healthy, environmentally sustainable and fulfilling for all of its people will not just be necessary; it will be possible.
And then the unity, independence and internationalism that we see in the new movement today will realise its full potential.
So if you don't want to fight alone — if you want to join with others in actively fighting not just against corporate tyranny but for a truly new society — then join Resistance!
[Kerryn Williams is the national coordinator of Resistance.]