[mobglob-discuss] Fwd: Where have all the protesters gone?

[Chris Shaw]

>From: Bob Thomson <bthomson at web.ca>
>To: ftaaott at yahoogroups.com
>Subject: Where have all the protesters gone?
>Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 12:13:10 -0400
>
>Outlook / Where have all the protesters gone? / ??
>
>The Guardian Weekly 1-8-2002, page 21
>
>'Third world debt is the device to keep the poor in line'
>
>Anti-globalisation activists no longer make headlines, but they haven't 
>disappeared, writes Mike Bygrave
>
>About a year ago, at the Siege of Genoa, 250,000 protesters surrounded the 
>annual meeting of G8 political leaders and many fought running battles with 
>the Italian police. It was the peak of the anti-globalisation movement. 
>Anti-globalisation seemed unstoppable, as the defining agenda of the new 
>century and "the most sweeping rebellion since the 60s". Where is it now? 
>What changed after September 11? Now the movement has all but vanished from 
>the bulletins and the headlines. Has it been dumped in the dustbin of 
>history?
>
>Globalisation is still with us, after all. From the state of Africa to 
>world food supplies, trade disputes to asylum seekers, privatisation to the 
>environment, globalisation roars ahead. But what's happened to the 
>anti-globalisers?
>
>Writer-activist George Monbiot was surprisingly cheerful about the state of 
>the movement: "To the extent we had an effective dynamic before September 
>11, we've had one since. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that we're 
>less visible in the media, and we've been caused to think about both our 
>tactics and strategy. The big set-piece protests were very effective at 
>drawing attention to the issues, but they're not a good way to precipitate 
>change."
>
>There was a moment in our conversation when both of us fumbled for words 
>and fell into a brief, awkward silence. The same moment recurred with 
>everyone I interviewed, and it was over what name to use in talking about 
>anti-globalisers. "Anti-globalisation movement" turns out to be a name 
>invented by journalists that has stuck. All the activists reject it, not 
>least because it offers ammunition to opponents. But no one can agree on a 
>replacement.
>
>Mirroring the confusion over the name is the confusion many feel about the 
>nature of the protest itself. What is the central core linking its 
>assortment of fashionable causes? Amsterdam-based activist Susan George 
>calls the Global Justice Movement (I'm going to take the plunge and choose 
>a better name than anti-globalisation) "a movement of popular education 
>directed towards action". Education about what? Well, globalisation for a 
>start. Globalisation in its classic sense means the historical process by 
>which the world moves ever closer together. That process began in the 16th 
>century with the voyages of discovery and has gone on accelerating ever 
>since. Some scholars argue that in its most recent phase, say since the 
>early 70s, globalisation has moved so fast and on such a scale that its 
>quantitative leap has produced a qualitatively different world, one world 
>at last, be it a global village or a global empire. It is meaningless to 
>oppose globalisation in this sense, as it would be meaningless to oppose 
>such great historical trends as the development of the nation state or the 
>rise of science.
>
>The activists do not reject the underlying process: they attack the current 
>form that process takes. As the American Centre for Economic and Policy 
>Research puts it, these forms "are not an inevitable outcome of 
>technological change in communications, transportation and other 
>industries" but due to "deliberate decisions by policy makers", which have 
>"shaped the process of globalisation in a certain way".
>
>The way is economic globalisation led by multinational corporations 
>chanting their mantra of free trade, freedom of investment and free 
>movement of capital. All those "frees" should make you suspicious, say the 
>protesters. Someone has to pay. While the corporations present themselves 
>as heralds of a gleaming global future for all, with a Nike sweatshirt on 
>every back, a Starbucks mocha frappuccino in every hand and a Nissan Sentra 
>in every garage, to the movement they are a modern Mongol horde, Genghis 
>Khans in Armani suits, ravaging the world in general, and the third world 
>in particular, in pursuit of power and profit.
>
>"I think the great majority of people who have joined this movement started 
>off with a vague sense that something was wrong and not necessarily being 
>able to put their finger on what it was," Monbiot said. "Having a sense 
>that power was being removed from their hands, then gradually becoming more 
>informed, often in very specific areas because what you find in our 
>community of activism is some people who are very concerned about farming, 
>those who are very interested in the environment, or labour standards, or 
>privatisation of public services, or third world debt. These interests tie 
>together, and the place they all meet is this issue of corporate power."
>
>To Susan George the aim of contemporary capitalism is "all power to big 
>business", a "pure 19th-century agenda, an attempt to turn the clock back a 
>hundred years". "When I'm asked why people join our group," she told a 
>recent forum at the London School of Economics, "I say it's because of a 
>feeling that, 'the bastards have gone too far'."
>
>The statistics involved in globalisation are staggering. World trade rose 
>50% over the past six years and is now worth more than $17bn a day. Of the 
>100 largest economic entities in the world 51 are corporations.
>
>Meanwhile non-oil primary commodity prices (the basic foods and raw 
>materials produced by the third world) fell 50% in real terms over the past 
>20 years.
>The total external debt of developing countries rose from $90bn in 1970 to 
>almost $2,000bn in 1998; 2.8 billion of the world's 6 billion people live 
>on less than $2 a day, 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day.
>
>Up to 35,000 children under five die every day of preventable diseases. The 
>gap between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of the world's population 
>has doubled over the past 40 years, with the assets of the world's top 
>three billionaires exceeding the GNP of all the 48 least developed 
>countries (population: 600 million).
>
>The interaction of corporate globalisation with the majority of the world's 
>people (those in the third world) is mediated by three international 
>institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World 
>Trade Organisation. The IMF and the World Bank are dominated by the United 
>States, the WTO by the US and the rest of the G8 countries, mainly Europe 
>plus Japan.
>
>In the 80s these organisations began to pursue the three "freedoms" - of 
>trade, investment and capital flow, though not the fourth freedom that goes 
>with them, namely the free movement of labour, or migration. This programme 
>is known as the "Washington consensus" or neo-liberalism in its 
>international form. As a result, say the critics, when the disadvantages of 
>globalisation started to become visible in the 90s, the first place they 
>appeared was in the poor countries in the third world, forced to follow the 
>policies of the IMF, the Bank and the WTO.
>
>In 1994 the WTO massively expanded its influence with the Uruguay round of 
>trade negotiations, transforming the organisation, in Naomi Klein's phrase, 
>"from an
>  international chamber of commerce into a quasi-world government". In 1999 
>trade ministers met in Seattle intending to launch a new negotiating round. 
>Instead, they were met by the mass protest that launched the Global Justice 
>Movement (GJM) on the world stage. The coalition includes a strong element 
>from the third world or "the South". The plight of the South is the 
>movement's moral heart, and the focus of much of its campaigning energy.
>
>Tony Juniper is director-designate of Friends of the Earth UK. Before the 
>GJM came into being, the environmentalists were the best-known and most 
>broadly popular among its elements. Juniper explains the evolution in their 
>thinking. "For the past 10 years we've been locating ourselves more in the 
>bigger economic debate and less in the 'save the whales' type debate. 
>Talking about rainforests led us into talking about third world debt. 
>Talking about climate change led us to talk about transnational 
>corporations.
>
>"The more you talk about these things, the more you realise the subject 
>isn't the environment any more, it's the economy and the pressures on 
>countries to do things that undercut any efforts they make to deal with 
>environmental issues. By the time we got to Seattle, we were all 
>campaigning on the same basic trend that was undermining everybody's 
>efforts to achieve any progressive goals. That trend is the free market and 
>privileges for big corporations and rich people at the expense of 
>everything else."
>
>The presence of the big environmental groups and other mainstream NGOs, 
>such as Oxfam or Christian Aid, in the ranks of the activists is what makes 
>it impossible for Western governments and business leaders to dismiss the 
>movement as a bunch of disaffected youth and window-smashing anarchists. To 
>the Western elite, globalisation is good for you. To the anti-globalisers, 
>it is the villain of the piece. Is there any way to judge between these two 
>positions? One way is to look at a slightly different question - is global 
>inequality increasing? Or has globalisation's advance over the past 20 
>years decreased global inequality as its supporters suggest?
>
>Small armies of economists study these questions. In pursuit of the 
>answers, I attended a lecture by Professor Robert Wade at the London School 
>of Economics. He began with the usual depressing figures: 80% of world 
>income goes to the top 20% of people while 60% of the world's population 
>have to make do with 6% of the income. Then he moved on to "the thunder and 
>lightning of current debate": whether the situation has been getting better 
>or worse over the past 20 years. His answer was twofold: we don't know for 
>sure, but the balance of the evidence is that it's getting worse and that 
>inequality is increasing.
>
>It turns out the statistics relied on by the pro-globalisers, led by the 
>World Bank, are suspect. There are different methods for determining global 
>poverty and inequality, and the answers you get depend on the techniques 
>you use. The World Bank, Wade implied, may have chosen the one that 
>supports its own neo liberal agenda. "The bank is a very political 
>institution," he said.
>
>Wade dealt equally briskly with the other part of the problem, moving on 
>from poverty and inequality to whether economic globalisation is the best 
>way to address them. The issue here is when, and on what terms, poor 
>countries should open their markets. The World Bank's current poster boys 
>are India and China, supposed to prove that globalising countries, ie those 
>with liberal trade regimes, have grown richer while the non-globalisers 
>have fallen behind. But "the causal sequence in India and China was the 
>opposite [of the one the bank claims]", Wade said. "These countries started 
>growing fast before they liberalised. And they still have highly protective 
>trade regimes, just as Taiwan and South Korea did before them. Trade 
>liberalisation is not the motor of growth."
>
>Most activists would go further than Wade. They claim "free trade" and 
>third world debt are scams. Advertised as being the outcome of natural and 
>benign economic laws that will eventually lift everyone out of poverty, 
>they're actually tools of a system devised by the North to keep the 
>southern countries in their place, as honey pots from which the rich 
>countries buy raw materials and assembly-line labour on the cheap and to 
>which they can sell manufactured goods, subsidised agricultural products 
>and high-interest loans and privatising packages for huge profits. Trade 
>agreements force the South to open its markets, dismantling tariffs and 
>eliminating domestic subsidies. But the rich countries massively subsidise 
>their own agriculture and maintain tariff barriers to things such as 
>textiles. Any country threatening to resist gets a tug on its leash. The 
>leash is third world debt and the refusal by the North to "forgive" it. 
>Debt is the device to keep the poor in line.
>
>One developing country after another has toppled under the impact of 
>rampant speculation and/or the IMF's "structural adjustment policies" 
>(slash public spending, cut and privatise services, service your debt): 
>Mexico in 1994-95, Southeast Asia in 1997-98, Russia in 1998-99. Argentina, 
>the recipient of no less than nine IMF "stabilisations", is the latest. As 
>the gap between rich and poor widens, so the space between crises shortens. 
>Far from being a permanent model of economic efficiency, the world economic 
>order is seen by activists as a form of political blackmail.
>
>Listening to Wade, I was listening to a moderate, mainstream voice, far 
>from the wilder shores of anti-globalisation. The IMF itself has confessed 
>that "in recent decades nearly one-fifth of the world population has 
>regressed - arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th 
>century". A World Bank economist, Branco Milanovic, recently pondered "how 
>long such inequalities [of income] may persist in the face of ever closer 
>contacts . . . ultimately the rich may have to live in gated enclaves while 
>the poor roam the world outside those few enclaves".
>
>This theme was part of the liberal response to September 11 - the 
>connection between poverty and terrorism, and the need to address the two 
>together. But there was also a conservative response, led by the US, whose 
>trade representative, Robert Zoellick, spoke of "wiping out the stain of 
>Seattle" and of free trade as "promoting the values that lie at the heart 
>of this protracted struggle", meaning the war on terror. The conservative 
>agenda was: more neoliberalism, more corporate globalisation, more 
>"structural adjustment".
>
>The GJM came under attack from both sides. In fact, the GJM has too many 
>policies, often worked out by the various pressure groups and NGOs. What 
>everyone I spoke to in the movement did agree on was that the era of big 
>street protests was over. Until an estimated 250,000-plus protesters turned 
>up in Barcelona in March for the European Union summit. As many as rallied 
>at Genoa last year, only this time the (peaceful) protest was almost 
>totally ignored by the media. Within the movement, last year's debate about 
>demos - what should be done about the violence associated with them? - has 
>moved on to a debate about what "positive alternatives" to the status quo 
>should be put forward. Many realise that a lot of individual policies don't 
>make up for the lack of one overriding idea.
>
>Naomi Klein, author of the bestseller No Logo, is a movement star. In a 
>recent article on her website she writes , "our task, never more pressing, 
>is to point out that there are more than two worlds available, to expose 
>all the invisible worlds between the economic fundamentalism of 'McWorld' 
>and the religious fundamentalism of jihad."
>
>If the dark side of globalisation first showed itself in the condition of 
>the South, by the late 90s there were splinters of discontent in the rich 
>North. GM crops; private jails; political favours for campaign 
>contributors; planning laws eviscerated by big developers; privatisations 
>of public services; economic migrants qua asylum seekers; multinational 
>corporations opening and closing factories, creating and destroying 
>thousands of jobs. The global protesters had chanted "The world is not for 
>sale". Now it was the turn of people in Europe and the US to feel as if 
>their hometowns, and everyone in them, was for sale.
>
>While no one argues that economic globalisation is the direct cause of all 
>these phenomena, globalisation provides a way to understand them, a 
>structure that links them one to another and to the plight of the third 
>world, and traces their roots in overweening corporate power.
>
>So far I have described the GJM from its more moderate end, but it has a 
>radical end too, as anyone who followed Seattle and Genoa well knows. The 
>central tension in the movement reproduces the traditional tension in left 
>politics between reformists and revolutionaries - are we looking to reform 
>and regulate capitalism or to overthrow and replace it? Nevertheless 
>supporters are right to claim the movement is something new. The absence of 
>leaders or hierarchical organisation; the emphasis on networks, modelled on 
>the internet; the interest in participatory democracy rather than state 
>socialism; even the willingness to experiment may not be new ideas per se, 
>but together they make a genuinely new package.
>
>On the other side - among the globalists, the capitalists, or more simply, 
>the Americans - following the Clinton formula of "trade, not aid" abroad 
>and the Republican programme of tax cuts and welfare reduction at home, the 
>US seems to have developed a system in which governments exist principally 
>to promote and reward business.
>
>People show their moral worth by working hard and getting rich, and 
>countries show it via their economic growth. Those who fail do so because 
>they are lazy or immoral. This New American Order erects economic 
>neoliberalism into a moral and political philosophy via a kind of revived 
>social Darwinism.
>
>Here lie two fundamentally opposed visions of the future.
>
>Some activists say that capitalism needs to reform itself. Others in the 
>movement argue that capitalism is beyond reform. The radicals have a strong 
>voice and a good argument. Historically, change has happened only in the 
>aftermath of a major crisis. Is economic globalisation destined to end in 
>global crisis? Argentina has gone. Japan is looking very rocky, as are 
>Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has 
>been written off. The stock markets are sinking. Islamic fundamentalism 
>won't vanish any time soon. There are fears of a wider war. Hold on to your 
>hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride. The Observer
>
>The Guardian Weekly 1-8-2002, page 21




Christopher A. Shaw, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Research Pavilion
828 W. 10th Ave.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada, V5Z 1L8
tel: 604-875-4111 (ext. 68375)
Fax: 604-875-4376
e-mail: csshawlab at hotmail.com


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