BY LISA MACDONALD
The May 2 Sydney Morning Herald editorial ("Globalisation for All") expressed surprise that May Day "should now be transmogrified into an all-purpose protest against a range of ills for which capitalism can, against all the evidence, conveniently be blamed".
The only "evidence" supplied by the SMH editorialist for this claim is the assertion that globalisation, defined as "the progressive integration and interaction of individual economies through trade", is what has produced "a South Korea rather than a North Korea, a Malaysia rather than a Myanmar" (Burma).
As for poverty, disease, environmental destruction, the avoidable deaths of millions of children, Third World debt and the nuclear threat — "globalisation is not the cause of such problems". So capitalism — now more global than ever — remains the fount of all that is good, but is entirely innocent of the bad.
Whether it comes with workplace relations minister Tony Abbott's bullying tone or in a more moderate SMH editorial, this argument does not get more convincing at its trillionth repetition.
Indeed, one of the great virtues of the new movement against neo-liberal globalisation is that it is helping expose this old apologetic sleight-of-hand, one used ever since the 19th century "Manchester Doctrine" was called on to justify British extermination of India's textile industry.
It's to the credit of the movement that millions understand that the social and environmental blights of our planet are organically interconnected with the obscene opulence and privileges of the few. There are "winners" like Bill Gates and George Soros because there are "losers" — like young women in South-East Asian sweatshops, or impoverished Mexican small farmers or 500 million in Sub-Saharan Africa who will not live past the age of 40.
It is no longer a secret that:
* The way the countries of the Third World are specialised in the "world market" requires them to massacre their environments by transforming rainforests and other eco-systems into "product" (like beef for Big Macs), product for which they get increasingly less foreign exchange.
* The First World consumer can enjoy cheap clothing and rapidly falling computer prices because the government of Malaysia, for example, has declared the electronics industry "union-free" and IBM's Filipino workers are paid such low rates that they will never be able to afford the item they produce.
* The US$2.1 trillion debt of the Third World, whose servicing siphons off over 40% of the central government budget of a country like Brazil, exists because the global system has generated a murderous combination of high real interest rates, ever-declining terms of trade for the South and increasing dependence on inflows of volatile (mainly First World) capital. Thus for every South Korea and Malaysia we have an Ecuador, an Indonesia, a Colombia and — the latest in the great chain of economic and social upheavals that began with the 1994-95 Mexico crisis — an Argentina which has had to be put on a US$40 billion IMF drip feed. Such economies have all participated in "the progressive integration and interaction" of globalisation as much as a "success story" like South Korea.
Results of neo-liberal globalisation
Does the SMH seriously contend that all this has nothing to do with globalisation? That these are just a few evil leftovers which globalisation itself, given a little time and understanding, will mop up? The fundamental dynamics all point the other way:
* In 1981, the Third World's foreign debt servicing absorbed US$ 44.2 billion; by 2000 the figure had climbed to US$347.4 billion.
* The number of undernourished people rose from 570 million in 1981 to 800 million in 2000.
* In 1960 the income of the wealthiest 20% was 30 times that of the poorest 20% of the world's population; by 1997 that gap had opened to 74 to 1.
* At the end of the 1990s there were 1.3 billion people, one out of every three, living in poverty in the Third World. The World Bank's latest report on poverty predicts that this figure could climb to 1.5 billion by the end of 2001.
* The global income share of the countries that now constitute the Third World has diminished so much that whereas 150 years ago it stood at 59% of world income, today it has shrunk to 15%.
The bitter and simple truth is that under neo-liberalism globalisation's universal recipe of deregulation, privatisation and casualisation it is impossible for every country (let alone every class or every individual) to be a "winner" (Here we simply leave aside the price paid in a South Korea in terms of industrial accidents, appalling work rhythms and brutal working hours for the Korean working people.) Exclusion and marginalisation is built into the system. And even the "winners" face increased rivalry and competition in a world market saturated in excess capacity.
Today the fittest are surviving by devouring the competition in the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions in the history of capitalism. And those who pay are the workers who have been or will be sacked, the small farmers swamped by agribusiness and the desperate masses of the unemployed and "fringe-dwellers" in the South.
Broad public sympathy
This reality explains why the anti-globalisation movement, despite the efforts of feature writers to paint it as a gaggle of weirdos in dreads, pink hair and Doc Martens, actually enjoys broad sympathy in the community. People sense that this movement is onto something. Even in a wealthy country like ours its message connects with their own experience of heightened insecurity, frenzied workloads, decaying public services, increased inequality and general alienation-all produced by the mad drive to achieve or maintain competitiveness in the "global marketplace".
They share its sense of outrage at a world where millions die of AIDS while pharmaceutical multinationals threaten lawsuits against producers of generic anti-HIV drugs and where billions of dollars are squandered in speculation in paper assets, the luxury expenditure of the super-rich and Star Wars programmes. They wonder at the values of a system where plummeting investment funds (Long Term Capital Management) and collapsing insurance companies (HIH) get their losses socialised.
Nobody who participated in the May Day actions could have helped notice this sympathetic reception — even from some of the smartest-dressed denizens of this country's CBDs.
But sympathy aside, does the movement have an alternative? For the SMH editorialist (and Tony Abbott) "the answer is not too much globalisation, but too little". But more of the present type of globalisation will only take us across more threshholds of unsustainability, and create more social misery and inequality. It threatens planet-wide disaster.
For its part the movement against neo-liberal globalisation also believes in "globalisation for all", but of a completely different sort.
It fights for the globalisation of solidarity. That requires, in the immediate term, relieving the symptoms of the present global disease through immediate cancellation of the Third World debt and the imposition of a tax on international capital flows. That can make some reparation to the looted South through devoting the funds collected to development and environmental repair. It means halting the next World Trade Organisation round, which will only serve to further entrench the interests of multinational capital at the expense of Third World producers.
Yet such measures, though vitally necessary, are not sufficient. If "globalisation for all" is to be more than a nice phrase they must be viewed as steps on the road to the globalisation of democracy. That means economic democracy too, which requires that in our overall interest the majority in society make the decisions that are presently made by the corporate minority. It entails shifting power from the wealthy few to "we, the people".
A glimpse of what is possible comes from the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, which in January this year hosted the 20,000-strong World Social Forum as a counter-meeting to the rich and powerful's World Economic Forum in Davos. In Porto Alegre and the surrounding state of Rio Grande do Sul, it is the ordinary citizens, not unaccountable bureaucrats nor even the government, who democratically decide through their "participatory budget" process what, where and how to spend public income.
Moving ahead
The anti-globalisation movement is moving ahead with giant strides. It helped stopped the next WTO round at Seattle; it made the political price of ongoing litigation against Brazilian and Indian drug companies over generic anti-HIV drugs too high for the pharmaceutical transnationals; it has the IMF and the World Bank on the defensive; it is certain to force further concessions in the area of Third World debt.
The Sydney Morning Herald would do better to focus on these realities rather than the few trivial incidents of "violence" outside the ASX on May 1. They were truly microscopic compared to the anti-human and anti-environmental violence endemic to the system our movement is determined to transform.
[Lisa Macdonald is the Sydney district secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party and an organiser of the Sydney M1 protest action.]