BY PETER BOYLE
Since the anti-World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle last November, a growing popular movement against corporate globalisation has taken to the streets several times around the world: Washington in April, Philadelphia and Los Angeles in August, Melbourne on September 11 and Prague on September 26.
This movement has already forced powerful capitalist institutions to adjust their plans, as a worried editorial in the British Economist magazine bemoaned recently:
"The mighty forces driving globalisation are surely, you might think, impervious to the petty aggravation of street protesters wearing silly costumes. Certainly, one would have hoped so, but it is proving otherwise.
"Street protests did in fact succeed in shutting down the Seattle trade talks last year. More generally, governments and their international agencies — which means the IMF and the World Bank, among others — are these days mindful that public opinion is anything but squarely behind them. They are not merely listening to the activists but increasingly are pandering to them, adjusting both their policies and the way these policies are presented to the public at large.
"Companies too are bending to the pressure, modest as it might seem, and are conceding to the anti-capitalists not just specific changes in corporate policy but also large parts of the dissenters' specious argument."
There is truly the smell of ruling class panic in this special issue of the Economist on "globalisation". Should small concessions be offered to the movement, as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank officials have opted for? Will this succeed in giving the capitalist neo-liberal offensive a "human face", or will it backfire?
Will people be tricked by the renaming of the IMF's structural adjustment programs as "poverty reduction strategies", or should the ruling class take the hard line and, as the Economist's editors suggest, stop "apologising for globalisation and promising to civilise it" and instead accelerate it, celebrate it, exult in it?
A fortnight ago, all the major newspapers in Australia ran an article by a Professor Anne Krueger of Stanford University entitled "Why our global phobia hurts poor nations the most". In this article, Krueger sought to justify child labour in the Third World because it is a better option than child prostitution or begging! In most industrial countries, child labour was used until people could afford to let children attend school.
Krueger is being toured around the world on a public relations trip for the corporate globalisers, but if that's her case for global trickle down, you can see why some sections of the ruling class are nervous about taking the hard line.
Mighty forces
It takes a powerful movement to cause the capitalist ruling class — the most wealthy and technologically advanced ruling class ever — to divide on tactics just months after it began. What is its secret?
The strength of this movement is the fact that mighty class forces — the working class in the imperialist countries (the "North") and the oppressed classes in the semi-colonial countries (the "South") — are increasingly moving into dissent against actually existing capitalism. These classes have yet to move in full force onto the streets, but already the new movement commands their attention and receives its passive support. That's why the capitalist ruling class, which lives parasitically off the labour of these great working masses, is already worried.The Seattle victory encapsulated the present relationship between the movement and the broader class forces moving against capitalist globalisation. The abandonment of the new round of neo-liberal trade negotiations was a result of two pressures: the people in the streets of Seattle and the first significant rebellion by governments of the South against more "reforms" that serve mainly the imperialist countries.
The votes against the new trade round were cast by officials of the governments of the South, most of which are pro-capitalist neo-colonial regimes. The Seattle street protests probably gave courage to these officials, who had been beaten back for two decades by the imperialists in "negotiations" on trade rules and debt.
However, part of the reason why the capitalist regimes of the South voted against a new trade round was that they face public pressure in their own countries: the mass unrest in Ecuador, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, South Korea, and so on have made these governments nervous about further neo-liberal reform.
There is a tension between the two major class forces behind the Seattle victory. It is summed up in antagonistic responses to corporate globalisation: first, to try to turn back and preserve the relative privileges of the working class in the imperialist countries through protectionist measures against imports from the South and second, to replace neo-liberal globalisation with globalisation for all people and for environmental sustainability, and to fight it with a movement that seeks to "globalise solidarity", as the S26 activists in Prague put it.
If the movement takes its name from Seattle, its ideological heart is solidarity with the oppressed and exploited masses in the South, where the 80% of the world's population that does not share any of the benefits of neo-liberal globalisation live. This is the great moral issue at the heart of this movement.
The issue was summed up by Cuban President Fidel Castro in his message to the September 1999 G77 ministerial meeting: "Globalisation is an irreversible reality characterised by the growing interaction of all countries in the world, their economies and peoples. The major scientific and technical advances have shortened distances and allowed for direct communication and transmission of information among countries located anywhere on the planet.
"With its impressive technological achievements, globalisation holds tremendous potential for development, the eradication of poverty and fostering well-being in conditions of social equality for all humanity. Never before has the world commanded today's technological resources.
"However the world is still very far from materialising the potential of globalisation. It develops today under the aegis of neo-liberal policies that impose unregulated markets and unbridled privatisation.
"Far from promoting the expansion of development throughout an increasingly interdependent world badly in need of sharing the progresses achieved, neo-liberal globalisation has aggravated existing inequalities and raised to inordinate heights social inequities and the most disturbing contrasts between extreme wealth and extreme poverty."
Anti-capitalist
If this new movement is one for global solidarity, how is it that it can tap the mass "backlash" against globalisation in the imperialist countries, especially since the official leaderships of the trade unions in these countries are pushing protectionist "solutions"?
First, the trade union leaders and social democratic politicians pushing protectionism in the imperialist countries have been seen by the masses to have done little to resist the capitalist neo-liberalism offensive. They have had two decades to start resisting, but they've done zilch. Now, some militant young people take to the streets with a startling audacity and that makes an impact, even if — for now — its mostly via the TV set.
Secondly, many workers in the imperialist countries have seen their greedy bosses take the protectionist handouts and run or use them to buy new machines that make workers' jobs redundant.
Polls show that most workers in the United States and Australia still support protectionist measures. However, the post-Seattle movement has begun to force the conservative union leaders into ideological defensiveness.
The post-Seattle movement is fundamentally against capitalism, as the editors of the Economist concede. Ideologically, it may be a rag-tag army whose leading detachments comprise communists, anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, anti-racists, neo-hippies, alternate lifestylists and so on. But these diverse political currents are united in opposition to corporate tyranny.
Today, the movement is still politically well in advance of the mass class forces that give it its power. It is a militant minority movement.
But the mass of people are looking on with growing interest, applauding even. Small detachments from the working class are joining the mobilisations and bigger detachments will follow. That is a truly scary prospect for the corporate chiefs.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the DSP national executive.]