By: Gerald Greenfield
Posted on: December
2000 by Aditi
In the neoliberal ice-age of the early 1980s through to the end of the 90s,
global capitalists and their supporters expressed supreme confidence in
their victory over us. This confidence is symbolised in the posters and
billboards launched by The Financial Times in the mid-90s, declaring:
"Capitalists of the world unite!" By taking our slogan ("Workers of the
world unite!") and turning it upside-down, they were – in a sense –
ridiculing our own internationalism. They forcefully claimed that the
internationalism of the post-Cold War era was an internationalism built and
defended by capitalists, for capitalists.
Lately, however, this confidence has been shaken, if not shattered. The lead
editorial in a recent issue of The Economist views anti-capitalist protests
as "angry and effective." More importantly, the editorial warns that
globalisation is not inevitable and irreversible as the neoliberal
ideologues have insisted for the past two decades. Rather, the very fact
that globalisation can be reversed is what makes anti-globalisation
movements so dangerous:
"The protesters are right that the most pressing moral, political and
economic issue of our time is third-world poverty. And they are right that
the tide of 'globalisation', powerful as the engines driving it may be, can
be turned back. The fact that both these things are true is what makes the
protesters – and, crucially, the strand of popular opinion that sympathises
with them – so terribly dangerous." (The Economist, September 23, 2000)
The Economist makes it very clear that open declarations of capitalist
confidence are harmful at the present time. Instead, the legitimacy of
globalisation – and, crucially, of capitalism – must be restored. The tactic
for achieving this is to focus on Third World poverty. That's why The
Economist then goes on to argue that the greatest beneficiaries of
globalisation are the Third World poor, and it's the anti-globalisation
protesters who are condemning them to continued poverty.
The post-Seattle WTO has also recast itself as the ally of the poor and
marginalised. As Mike Moore, the Director-General of the WTO, declared:
"It is poor people in poor countries who are grasping the opportunities
provided by trade and technology to try to better their lives. Mexican farm
hands who pick fruit in California, Bangladeshi seamstresses who make
clothes for Europeans, and South African phone-shop owners who hawk time on
mobile phones to their fellow township dwellers. They and countless other
real people everywhere are the human face of globalisation."
So it seems that restoring the legitimacy of the WTO, after what they called
"the setback in Seattle", involves greater emphasis on world poverty as the
main issue. At the same time, some of the world's largest TNCs – with the
worst records of labour repression, cultural and ecological destruction and
genocide (of which Nike and Shell are just two examples) have founded a new
partnership with the United Nations to save the world's poor. Helping the
world's poor under the UN corporate partnership makes it a commercial
activity – a commodity like everything else. Without having any effect
whatsoever on what these TNCs actually do to the planet and the mass of the
people on it, this tactic serves to restore the legitimacy of corporate rule
and regain the confidence of previous years.But Mike Moore has gone a step
further in these troubled times. In sharp contrast to the days of ridiculing
our internationalism by misusing our slogans, we now find Comrade Mike
talking about our internationalism as the shared tradition of the WTO:
"We on the Left have a lot to be proud of. We built the Welfare State that
looks after people when they are sick, poor, or old. We fought for the
equality of women and minorities. We argued passionately for
internationalism, for solidarity between workers in Sweden and those in
Africa." (Mike Moore, WTO Director General, July 26, 2000)
At one level this is just a change in rhetoric. It's a tactical manoeuvre,
not a change in strategy. It's certainly not a fundamental shift in the
nature of the globalisation project. This tactic seeks to restore a degree
of legitimacy and limit the damage done by the anti-globalisation movements.
In other words, it's a way of making us less dangerous.
However, it's important to recognise that the protests in Seattle also
produced its share of rhetoric. The slogan "Shutdown the WTO" may have meant
"abolish the WTO" for many progressive labour and social activists, but for
more conservative unions and social groups it meant "shutdown this
particular WTO meeting." In this sense it was merely symbolic. Dozens of
WTO-related meetings among technocrats preceded the Seattle meeting, and as
many have taken place since.
The rhetoric was even more apparent when the president of the AFL-CIO, John
Sweeney, declared at the start of the protests, "Today we are making
history!" Even before the protests had ended he announced, "We have made
history!" It was less a first step than the last. The WTO was shaken, but
not broken, and it was time for the AFL-CIO to get back to the negotiating
table to insist on a reformed WTO – with a social clause and without China.
The tactics behind the slogans were not only lacking a strategy, but lacked
a common goal.
It no longer makes sense to simply accuse the WTO and other agencies of
global capitalism of neglecting the poor, failing to recognise the
importance of ... (insert any social or environmental issue here), or
lacking democracy. Since Seattle there have been numerous speeches and
publications churned out by the WTO technocracy which assert the importance
of democracy, human rights, environmental protection, social needs, the
primacy of "the social market" over the "the free market", and the need to
eradicate poverty. Meanwhile, since Seattle, five more countries have joined
the WTO (another 25 will join in the next couple of years). Key agreements
have been expanded, and the number and intensity of trade talks and backroom
deals has increased – not decreased. So where does that leaves us?
As an oppositional strategy, pointing out what is missing in the WTO doesn't
really tell us very much about what it is we're up against. Those unions,
NGOs and social coalitions which want to reform agencies like the WTO employ
tactics of lobbying, alternative policy input, and social clauses. The
tactic of including those things they believe are missing from the WTO
agenda is based on certain key assumptions about what the WTO is and what it
does. For a start, they assume the WTO and agencies like it are institutions
or organisations. They also assume that the main function of institutions
like the WTO is to make and implement policies or trade agreements. Based on
this, the problem becomes narrowly defined: in running these institutions
and making policies and agreements there is too much corporate control and
not enough control by social, labour and environmental groups (collectively
called 'civil society'). This then means that globalisation itself is not
seen as a problem. It's the kind of globalisation that is in question. This
then becomes a contest between corporate globalisation and a people-centred
or more humane kind of globalisation.
By accepting globalisation and focusing on the rhetoric of poverty,
democracy and social inclusion, these civil society groups are in fact
helping the WTO out of its crisis of legitimacy. This occurs at a time when
the very thing we should be doing is deepening the crisis. More importantly,
these civil society and social groups are creating conditions that would
render the anti-globalisation movements less dangerous both for themselves
and for the political and economic elite. They've clearly missed the point.
We can only be effective if we continue doing whatever it is that makes us
dangerous – and do it better. It's in being uncivil society that we find we
can challenge the WTO and what really lies behind it.
To launch such a challenge it's important to understand that the WTO is not
about institutions and agreements. It's not even about trade. The following
is an example of the changes under globalisation which suggest that trade is
not the primary issue. In 1999 the value of global exports totalled US$7
trillion. In the same year the value of sales by the 690,000 foreign
affiliates of the world's 63,000 TNCs was nearly double, at US$13.5
trillion. It's also significant that while worldwide exports tripled in the
period from 1982 to 1999, the sales by TNCs' foreign affiliates increased
six times – at twice the rate (UN World Investment Report 2000). What this
suggests is that free trade is not really about increasing the flow of goods
and services across borders, but in increasing the dominance and control of
local markets by TNCs. More fundamentally, it increases our dependence on
these TNCs.
This dependency reflects a critical dimension of what the WTO, NAFTA and
other free trade agreements really are. They are not just institutions and
agreements, but are regimes. Basically, a regime is an arrangement of
political power. In this case free trade and investment regimes refer to an
arrangement of political power between countries and between corporations
and governments. For example, under the WTO regime the arrangement of power
between countries freezes the members of the WTO into a hierarchy of
'developed', 'developing' and 'least-developed.' By banning certain kinds of
industrial and development policies in the 'developing' and
'least-developed' countries and increasing overall dependency on TNCs, the
WTO regime ensures that only those countries which are already 'developed'
stay at the top of this hierarchy.
Free trade and investment regimes also establish an arrangement of political
power between corporations and governments. It's already well understood
that the free trade agenda is about increasing the power and freedom of
corporations, especially TNCs. This kind of freedom is what defines
globalisation:
"I would define globalisation as the freedom for my group of companies to
invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and
sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible coming
from labour laws and social conventions."(Percy Barnevik, President of the
ABB Industrial Group)
Getting rid of these restrictions has meant redefining domestic regulation
in ways that protect the interests of TNCs while placing new restrictions on
the ability of governments to regulate them. For example, between 1991 and
1999 there were 1,035 changes worldwide in laws on foreign investment. Of
those changes, 94 per cent increased the freedom of foreign investors and
reduced government regulation (UN World Investment Report 2000). The effect
of such changes is not only to force policy-making and the judicial process
to become more like the US, but to restrict the future possible actions of
governments and isolate them from the pressure of labour and social
movements.
As we saw in the NAFTA challenge by Ethyl Corp against the Canadian
government in 1997, and in the recent NAFTA ruling in favour of Metalclad
Corp against the Mexican government, it's not just an assault on
environmental regulation that we should be concerned about. It's an assault
on the original local struggles that brought this legislation into being in
the first place. In this sense, rolling back social and environmental
legislation under free trade means rolling back the past victories of labour
and social movements.
What the NAFTA challenges also showed was that federal governments are often
willing to lose these cases so that they discipline provincial, state or
municipal governments which have adopted progressive social and
environmental policies. Where federal governments do not have the legal or
political power to reverse such legislation, it can allow the external
intervention of NAFTA and the WTO to act on its behalf.
The WTO is often accused of secrecy and a lack of democracy. This easily
leads to proposals for greater transparency and openness. Yet such an
approach ignores the fact that we need to have the ability to do something
about what we see, otherwise we'll just be spectators in a transparent
process. It's not just the absence of democracy in the WTO and NAFTA that is
the problem, but the outright hostility towards democracy. Aggressively
cutting back our ability to impose democratic priorities on capital is not
an afterthought – it lies at the very heart of the globalisation project. It
also reminds us that the entire WTO process of becoming a member and obeying
the rules rests on threats and coercion. It's the threat of trade sanctions
that drives it, not human needs or common sense.
The continued spread of international and local protests against
globalisation in recent months has deepened the WTO's crisis of legitimacy –
a crisis which was most apparent in Seattle in November 1999. This is not
only an external crisis. There are serious disagreements between the
governments of developing and developed countries over the WTO rules,
deadlines and procedures which have stalled several negotiations. Despite
this, key governments (especially the US, EU, Japanese and Canadian
governments) are attempting to expand the scope of WTO agreements and to
strengthen its powers. To effectively challenge this we must not help the
WTO out of its crisis of legitimacy by calling for its reform. Instead we
need to deepen the crisis and create the political conditions necessary to
abolish the WTO and the free trade and investment regimes which lie behind
it.
Deepening the crisis of legitimacy in the WTO, NAFTA and other free trade
and investment regimes requires ongoing mass mobilisations and protests.
However, we should not forget that the official trade talks we're protesting
against are essentially symbolic. Shutting down a WTO meeting is important,
but technocrats are meeting in a dozen other places both before and after
the official event. In combination with (not instead of) these mass
protests, we should organise sustained, widespread popular education
activities – activities which move beyond the symbolic events of official
meetings and become events in themselves. This popular education should not
only raise a critical awareness of the impact of the WTO regime on working
people, but must explore the necessity of democratic controls over capital
and the ways this can be achieved. Whether it's a Tobin tax on speculative
currency transactions, the nationalisation of banks, or the participatory
budget experience in Brazil, a greater popular awareness of the absolute
necessity of such measures is an important step towards abolishing the WTO,
NAFTA, the IMF, etc. To achieve this popular education activities should
encourage a creative sense of urgency about collective action and collective
solutions. A 'creative' sense of urgency means a sense of urgency that does
not generate fear and uncertainty, but compels people to imagine democratic
alternatives and struggle for their immediate implementation. Through this
we can deepen the WTO's crisis of legitimacy while creating legitimacy for a
wide range of radical solutions.
We should be clear that a world without the WTO and NAFTA would not be a
world without rules on international trade. Rules already exist at the local
and national level in most countries, providing much needed social and
environmental protection and regulating the trade in goods and services in
ways that are less harmful (and sometimes even beneficial) to working
people. What is needed now is that these rules are strengthened and expanded
to manage trade more effectively in the interests of working people on both
sides of any trading relationship. But this isn't simply a matter of
replacing free trade with fair trade. Having fair trade makes no sense if a
country has been forced for the last hundred years to grow and export
coffee, or if people are starving and exporting rice at the same time. What
this suggests is that we need a fundamental rethinking about why we trade,
what we trade and the need for local alternatives.
However, for the countries in the South such alternatives can't even be
considered as long as they are burdened by international debt. The pressure
of debt repayment is a driving force behind exports, locking these countries
into the free trade and investment regime of the WTO and the structural
adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF. The total and immediate
cancellation of Third World debt and increased, unconditional international
social assistance is necessary before any system of fair trade can be truly
effective.
The claim that a world without the WTO would be a world without rules is
untrue because at the international level we already have a wide range of
rules: treaties and conventions on human rights, labour and trade union
rights, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as rules which
restrict harmful forms of international trade such as toxic waste and
military arms. These international rules were the result of a long history
of popular struggles worldwide, and it's necessary now more than ever before
to reassert the priority of these conventions and principles. We should do
so not by including them in the WTO or NAFTA so that our principles and
rights are absorbed, distorted and commercialised under free trade and
investment regimes, but by reasserting the importance of fundamental rights
and freedoms over and above trade and investment, and regaining ground
against the globalisation project.
This makes it necessary to abolish those free trade and investment regimes
which lock the state 'upwards' into the global interests of TNCs and 'away'
from popular pressure from below. However, it also means that pressure from
below must be transformed into something more structured or systematic so
that the state (at all levels) is not simply 'pressured' by the shift in
popular opinion against globalisation, but is controlled by it.
In other words, we don't need a responsive state, we need a democratic
state. Clearly that is a massive project. But the abolition of free trade
and investment regimes like the WTO, the subordination of TNCs to democratic
controls, and the reversal of the globalisation project, require the
democratisation of the state at national and sub-national levels. Restoring
and expanding the rights of governments over capital, especially the right
to regulate the activities of TNCs, is only a first step. This would involve
immediate measures such as increased corporate taxes, restrictions on
capital outflows, and stricter ecological protection, as well as more
fundamental changes like the democratic (not bureaucratic) nationalisation
of the banks and other public utilities, and the reversal of the past two
decades of privatisation. At the same time progressive localisation
strategies must be strengthened. This may include self-organised
cooperatives, community-based resource management, the social conversion of
industries, and directly-elected local jobs councils. Whatever the range of
initiatives involved, these localisation strategies not only require
government support, but also need effective protection from aggressive
attacks by TNCs.
The combined effect of democratisation and localisation is a radical
re-ordering of the domestic arrangement of political power in ways which
fundamentally contradict – and therefore weaken – the global arrangement of
political power under free trade and investment regimes. This in turn
creates the political conditions in which an effective, popular
counter-project can be launched to reverse the globalisation project. Only
through such a project would we then be dangerous enough for the
capitalists' worst fears to come true.