BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS
M1, the first May Day of the new century, will be remembered by many of us for a long time. Twenty thousand students, workers, pensioners and mothers chanted, yelled, spoke, sang, danced and linked arms across Australia in a protest against corporate globalisation and corporate greed.
In Canberra, Robin Hood on stilts attended the protest, demanding that we "take from the rich to give to the poor".
On the same day we linked up with the workers of Bolivia, who launched a general strike, with peasants in Pakistan, who defied the dictatorship's ban on protests, and with anti-capitalist protesters in London.
One of the songs we sang was the Vegemite song. It goes like this:
"They're nasty little profiteers,
"As nasty as can be.
"They want us to eat Vegemite
"For breakfast, lunch and tea.
"They're piling up the overtime,
"They're cutting down the trees
"Because our wage is not enough
"Don't they know that times are tough?"
We can't survive on Vegemite! Even three years ago only three people, one dog and a pet rat would have protested. In Australia this time 20,000 did.
What was most significant about the peaceful demonstrations was the huge amount of support we got from people passing by. In Canberra hundreds tooted their car horns as they drove past the protest at Mining Industry House.
Many "mainstream" people sympathise with our ideas that the Third World debt should be cancelled, privatisation does not benefit the vast majority, and the goods-and-services tax should be repealed. Also that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced, big business has too much power and makes too much profit, and that many of us fear we will lose our jobs.
Tom Connors in an article in the May 16 Canberra Times criticised M1 because he says we "hated free trade and hated globalisation", and that "Hanson and the left are united in a protectionist dreaming".
We dislike "free" trade because it is exploitative trade by the First World against the Third World. We are not against globalisation but against corporate globalisation and most of us are not protectionist. The economics we talk of differs greatly from Hanson's economic nationalism. Ours is one of internationalism, of solidarity with the peoples of the South.
M1 does not oppose aspects of globalisation like the Internet or other technological advances. Whereas we believe that corporate globalisation or neo-liberal globalisation is synonymous with privatisation, outsourcing, casualisation and deregulation which benefit the rich at the expense of the majority.
Free trade, defined as the lifting of all trade barriers between the nations of the North and the South, is said to be the solution to the world's poverty. All we need is more and more free trade. But there are a number of fallacies in this argument.
First, there have been five centuries of colonial exploitation of the Third World by rich nations by outright theft and today by structural adjustment packages of the International Monetary Fund. This leaves many Third World countries at a big disadvantage to begin with.
Is it fair for an Indian peasant to compete with US agribusiness? It would be like putting Mike Tyson in the boxing ring with a bantamweight boxer or like the Brisbane Broncos playing the Lidcombe Bulls under-16 rugby league side.
Second, free trade is often a case of rich nations getting access to the markets of poor countries, yet maintaining tariffs in their own countries. For example, when the Uruguay Round agreements are fully implemented, the average tariff on imports from the poorest nations into industrialised countries will be 30% higher than the average tariffs on imports from other industrialised nations.
Wealthier countries rip off poor countries in a number of other ways as well — through high interest rates, by blocking them from developing manufacturing industries, and by a worsening of their terms of trade.
In the past 20 years we have seen deregulation and an opening up of some markets. Yet, according to a World Bank report in 1999, total external debt for Third World countries was a massive US$609 billion in 1980 and in 1998 an astronomical US$2465 billion.
The anti-corporate movement is growing; the recent protest in Quebec included a march of 70,000, the largest to date. It is fuelled by record bank profits, by the fact that taxpayers have to foot the bill for the HIH insurance collapse, and by AIDS drug companies attempting to stop the production of cheap drugs. It is fuelled by the lobotomising of our footy teams, like the Rabbitohs, and by Lachlan Murdoch recently earning an annual wage of $11.8 million.
Big corporations also dominate our politics. In the last federal elections corporations gave about $26 million to the ALP and $22 million to the Coalition. We are offered the choice of a Big Mac or a Whopper. But perhaps we don't want to eat hamburgers, perhaps we like moussaka.
Many of the S11 and M1 activists have decided to form the Socialist Alliance to stir, to be bold, creative and provocative in the upcoming federal elections. Many of us are disillusioned with a system which puts profit above human need.
Currently, an estimated 16 million children die each year from preventable diseases, largely because of the exploitation of the nations of the South. This is equivalent to a World War II (including the deaths at Hiroshima and Auschwitz) against children every four years. What an obscenity!
What can we do? An immediate cancellation of the Third World debt could fund a public health system and develop self-sufficient food production. A 1% tax on speculative capital could raise billions of dollars to alleviate poverty.
This new movement is a hopeful and optimistic one. We believe we have changed the world and that we can make it a better place.
In the future we will see large protests at Genoa, Washington and Brisbane at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
[James Vassilopoulos is the Canberra branch secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party and a member of the Canberra M1 Alliance. This article originally appeared in the May 21 edition of the Canberra Times.]