Resistance has been globalised
The massive S26 conferences, rallies and blockades in Prague, in opposition to the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, demonstrate that the movement against corporate dominance of the world is now truly global in character.In the North, the rich industrialised countries, there has now been a representative series of such actions. Beginning in Seattle in November, they have since swept through every part of the industrialised world, from protests in April against the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC, to demonstrations outside the G8 summit on the Japanese island of Okinawa in July, to the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne.
This swirl of Northern protest has finally begun to raise the level of anti-capitalist action there towards the level it has long had in the South.
Acknowledging the international character of this movement is vital to understanding it.
The barriers between the radical movements of the poor South and the rich North are breaking down. The insurrectionary wave in the South, which has already rise to great heights in Ecuador and Indonesia, among other countries, is spilling over.
This globalised dynamic to the movement is indicated by its initial targets: crushing debt, unequal terms of trade, structural adjustment and all the international financial, political and corporate institutions which use these things to maintain the subjugation of the Third World.
This movement has become a spectre haunting the minds of capitalist ideologues and the pages of their publications. The September 23 Economist lead editorial finds the anti-capitalist protesters and, crucially, the strand of popular opinion that sympathises with them ... terribly dangerous.
Why? Because the protesters are right on two matters this much the Economist admits through gritted teeth the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is third-world poverty [and] the tide of 'globalisation' ... can be turned back.
The magazine complains that governments and their international agencies fail to mount intellectual resistance to the movement and instead pander to it. The strategy, pioneered by the World Bank among others, to co-opt critics by inviting them to negotiate on solutions is fatally flawed, it argues.
Defend globalisation boldly on its merits as a truly moral cause, it shrilly cries, against a mere rabble of exuberant irrationalists on the streets, and in the face of a mild public scepticism that is open to persuasion.
Against the mere rabble, however, capitalist governments have repeatedly deployed the full weight of baton blows and water cannons, rather than evidence of the system's merits. They obviously know that the evidence is too flimsy to have any confidence in its persuasiveness.
The corporate rulers of the world are on the defensive because this movement, which describes itself as anti-capitalist and aims to change the way things are in the world, is what it says it is.
This gives the movement a certain determination to be political independent from the powers that be, even while it discusses and begins to determine what the lessons are from its own experiences and those of past struggles, what should be fought for and how.
As yet, in the North, this movement mobilises only tens of thousands, not the many millions needed, but there is reason for confidence among those campaigning for social change. The possibilities of resistance, generated by capitalism's exploitation of the environment and humanity, have again become realities.