[wordup] where did all the protesters go?

Thu Aug 8 03:33:10 EDT 2002

it may sound funny but one of my very favorite things about america is
that there is a history, almost even a culture and expectation, of
activism.  when someone does something that a community doesn't like,
they mobilize, take to the streets and bitch like hell.  they don't
always choose the right issues, they often aren't effective and
sometimes they are just downright stupid, ugly and violent ... but
that's not the point.  it's beautiful that people have the energy, the
freedom and the will to gather and stand up for what they believe in
like this.

our history of activism is a good thing.

From: http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0%2c6903%2c754862%2c00.html

Where did all the protesters go?

After 11 September, the anti-globalisation movement was swept from the
headlines. In a wide-ranging investigation, Mike Bygrave met key players
from across the world and found that while their tactics have changed,
their aims are intact - and the issues they confront haven't gone away

Talk about it here or email letters at observer.co.uk

Observer Worldview: the globalisation debate

Sunday July 14, 2002
The Observer

A year ago at the Siege of Genoa, a quarter of a million 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 Sixties'. Where is it now? What changed after 11 September?
Now the movement has all but vanished from the bulletins and the
headlines, has it been dumped in the dustbin of history along with other
failed slogans such as Solidarity with the Striking Miners or All Power
to the Soviets? Was its brief stretch in the spotlight - two years from
surfacing in Seattle to its apotheosis at Genoa - simply a passing fad,
and its youthful, mainly middle-class army of protesters yesterday's
children?

Or is it all the fault of the media? Have we turned our backs on a
still-vibrant radical movement and a key issue in the modern world -
distracted by the World Trade Centre attacks and wars on terror?
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?

In his tiny Oxford terraced house, writer-activist George Monbiot, a
vigorous, eager man, speaks with the fluency of the university lecturer
he used to be. He was surprisingly cheerful about the state of the
movement: 'To the extent we had an effective dynamic before 11
September, 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.'

'Look,' Monbiot went on. 'It's like the Peasants' Revolt. The peasants
revolt, they meet the king, the king promises them the earth and they
all go home. Whereupon their leaders are hanged and nothing happens. If
we follow that model, we're doomed, so you could say that 11 September,
by putting a roadblock in the way of that model, did us a favour.'

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 ('How can you be against
globalisation? Are you against air travel? The internet? Cheap
international phone calls?'). But no one can agree on a replacement.
Suggestions include the 'Civil Society Movement', the 'Global Justice
Movement', the 'Anti-Capitalist Movement', the 'Citizens Movement for
World Democracy' or simply 'the Alternative Movement'.

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 sixteenth 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 Seventies, 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. Whether or not you agree with their
analysis, 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 policymakers', 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 moccha 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 nineteenth-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 per cent over the past six years and is now worth over $17
billion a day. The volume of air freight flown out of the UK doubled
over the past 10 years and is forecast to double again by 2010.

One third of world trade is goods moved between different parts of the
same corporations. Of the 100 largest economic entities in the world 51
are corporations.

In 1979, 90 per cent of international transactions were trade and 10 per
cent were in capital flow: today the position is the opposite, with $1.5
trillion traded every day in the foreign exchange markets.

Meanwhile, non-oil primary commodity prices (the basic foods and raw
materials produced by the Third World) fell 50 per cent 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; 2.8bn of the world's 6bn people live on less
than $2 a day; 1.2 bn on less than $1 a day.

Between 30-35,000 children under five die every day of preventable
diseases. The gap between the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per
cent 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 US; the WTO by the US and the rest of the G8 countries,
mainly Europe plus Japan. In the Eighties, 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 Nineties, 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 on the world stage. The coalition
includes a strong element from the Third World or 'the South' as it is
now known (since the Second World consisting of middle-income countries,
mainly the old Socialist bloc, has all but disappeared, slid back down
the poverty ladder). 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 Global Justice Movement 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
(non-governmental organisations), 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. Witness Tony Blair's
put-down of the anti-globalisers as a 'travelling circus' of anarchists
and a recent EU attempt to equate the protesters with terrorists. To the
Western elite, globalisation is good for you. To the anti-globalisers,
it's the villain of the piece, a sort of collective Dr No. 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 per
cent of world income goes to the top 20 per cent of people while 60 per
cent of the world's population have to make do with 6 per cent 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, it's getting worse and 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 honeypots 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; South-East Asia in 1997-98; Russia in 1998-99.
Argentina, the recipient of no less than nine IMF 'stabilisations', is
the latest, and Brazil teeters on the brink. As the gap between rich and
poor widens, so the space between crises shortens. Far from being a
permanent model of economic efficiency, guided by Adam Smith's invisible
hand, 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 twentieth century'. 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 11 September - 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 neo-liberalism, more corporate
globalisation, more 'structural adjustment'. This was the approach that
prevailed with the Financial Times commenting 'no one has done more
recently to favour the cause of trade liberalisation than Osama bin
Laden'. The Global Justice Movement came under attack from both sides,
condemned as (in the words of James Harding, a sympathetic FT reporter)
'the last gasp of the Old Left, a bunch of protectionists, a Wizard of
Oz type movement with no substance, nothing behind the curtain'.

In fact, the Global Justice Movement 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 EU 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 (it's
been said the movement does not have leaders; it has celebrities
instead, most of them women). In a recent article on her website, she
writes of how for more than a year before 11 September, 'the largely
symbolic activism outside summits and against individual corporations
[had already been] challenged within movement circles... a new mood of
impatience was already taking hold, an insistence on putting forward
social and economic alternatives that address the roots of injustice as
well as its symptoms ... 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 Nineties 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
America to feel as if their home towns, 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. Seen in
this context, the sudden eruption of the Global Justice Movement in
1999, becomes explicable. After all, the same thing has happened before,
in the Sixties (and also in the early Nineties).

But the Global Justice Movement differs from the Sixties in two crucial
respects. One is that it is a genuinely global affair, involving the
South as well as the North. The other is that it is 're-inventing the
Sixties' the other way around. The Sixties began with the hippies, a
social movement seeking an alternative lifestyle, then fell apart when
it turned political after 1968 into Womens Lib, Gay Lib, and a thousand
mutually hostile factions. The Global Justice Movement started as a
political movement, with people from a great diversity of political
backgrounds. 'Some are anarchists, some are Greens, some Christian, some
old-fashioned liberals and some, like myself, don't know what we are and
are still trying to find out,' says Monbiot. The challenge they face is
to stay united while elaborating their own alternative.

If the movement resembles the Sixties, is the war on terrorism their
Vietnam? Some would say so. One result of 11 September has been for
groups among the activists to form an anti-war movement. The leaders in
this endeavour are the radicals. So far I have described the Global
Justice Movement from its more moderate end, but it has a radical end
too, as anyone who followed Seattle and Genoa well knows (though it is
worth noting, as the Green Party's Chris Keen told me, 'the irony is
that the only way we can get any media coverage is by being violent,
which is sickening but true'). The movement takes its place in the
broader history of the Left. Ever since the rise of conservative
governments in the Seventies and Eighties, followed by the collapse of
communism, the Left has been in disarray. Endless discussions went on
about how, and on what basis, it could be revived. Suddenly, along came
anti-globalisation, performing the impossible trick of uniting
everybody. So is 'Global Justice' the socialism that dare not speak its
name?

Globalise Resistance, the British-based, formidably efficient organisers
of conferences and demonstrations, was created by members of the
Socialist Workers Party. In Europe, Susan George's ATTAC, which
campaigns for the Tobin Tax, a small levy on international financial
transactions, can sound like the Old Left or pragmatic policy wonks,
depending on the day. Veteran rebels such as Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky
have given their blessings to the protesters.

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.

Guy Taylor is a member of Globalise Resistance and therefore on the more
radical wing of the movement. 'Many in the movement aren't consciously
anti-capitalist,' he admits, 'but I take the view this movement is
making demands on the system that the system can't deliver. Therefore
they'll de facto become anti-capitalist in the end.' Taylor sees what he
prefers to call the 'Anti-Capitalist Movement's future as allied with
the trade unions, since 'if you plug our movement and the labour
movement together, you've got political dynamite.'

My own informant among the real radicals requested anonymity, so we
communicated by exchanging emails, in which he declined to answer
questions but forwarded me selected texts that represented his position.
The texts dismiss all attempts 'to give a "human face" to capitalism by
regulating it at the global level... although [such attempts] present
themselves as "pragmatic" or "result-oriented" they have not made any
difference at all in the destructive nature of policies that are
designed to satisfy the needs of global capital'. Instead, the texts
recommend building autonomous and decentralised anti-capitalist
networks' to create 'spaces' that are not capitalist. Stripped of
jargon, this is a recipe for turning the movement itself, with its
rolling mobilisations and communal values, into the basis of a new
society. Tony Blair's 'travelling circus' will come to town, put down
roots and put up the Big Top on the bypass next to Tesco's and B&Q.

If that seems an unlikely scenario, it's no more unlikely than what is
actually happening on the other side - among the globalists, the
capitalists, or more simply, the Americans. Following the Clinton
formula of 'trade, not aid' abroad (it was the Clinton regime that first
slashed US foreign aid budgets to the bone) and the Republican programme
of tax cuts and welfare reduction at home, America 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. Rather than being a problem, economic
inequality is the essential motor of the whole system. Welfare/aid, let
alone redistribution of wealth, are wrong because they interfere with
this ethical and quasi-natural order, rewarding defective individuals
or, on the international scale, defective societies, as in sub-Saharan
Africa. Meanwhile, the success stories form the global elite among
individuals and the global superpower among countries (ie the US),
having proved their right to rule.

This New American Order erects economic neo-liberalism and into a moral
and political philosophy via a kind of revived Social Darwinism. It's
the market as God-image, which claims to bring about the end of history
and of politics, thus establishing itself as the final framework for
human affairs. Between the 'no politics' espoused by people such as
Frances Fukuyama ( The End of History ) and Thomas L. Friedman, the New
York Times columnist and globalisation cheerleader, who argues that
economic growth will abolish the need for political disputes, and my
informant's 'total politics', lie two fundamentally opposed visions of
the future.

As one activist said, 'we're constantly winning the argument and losing
the battle'. Over the past 12 months, the movement has lost most of its
public profile. Barry Coates of the World Development Movement says:
'Obviously, it's much harder to attack the US and they deserve to be
attacked on a lot of their positions. And it's harder to get people out
on the streets when there's a perceived solidarity with government on a
larger aim.' Harding of the Financial Times questions whether the
movement can continue as a global force without the American radicals,
now silenced by 11 September. Meanwhile, Western political and business
leaders move their meetings to ever-more remote and heavily fortified
places, out of reach of protesters. The latest WTO talks took place in
Qatar, an impregnable oil statelet, with a US warship sitting in the
harbour and the Qatar government restricting visas. While last year's G8
meeting was in Genoa, last month's was in Kananaskis, a dot in the
Canadian wilderness.

According to Monbiot, none of this matters because the struggle over
corporate-led globalisation has come home. People can see it in their
own towns. They can feel its effects for themselves. The state of public
services such as the Tube, the NHS, the railways; privatisation;
companies ending 'final salary' pension schemes while pensions for
directors and chief executives soar; the crisis in farming, with small
farmers being forced off the land; manufacturers such as Raleigh, Dyson
and Royal Doulton (which makes those quintessentially British china
figurines), shutting factories in the UK and moving production to the
Third World. All these developments are related to economic
globalisation - or, to call the same thing by a different name, to
triumphant laissez-faire capitalism on the march.

Then there's the General Agreement on Trade in Services, now being
negotiated in Geneva, which will open up public services to the
multinationals to run; any attempt to keep them out could count as
'unnecessary barriers' to trade and be illegal. As David Hartridge,
ex-director of the Services Division at the WTO, has said, 'Gats will
speed up the process of [economic] liberalisation and make it
irreversible'.

To the Global Justice Movement, Gats shows how calls for free trade and
investment, economic growth and universal consumption hide a different
agenda: to advance corporate power while rolling back the state and
democracy. President Bush, playing fast and loose with his 'free trade'
policy, slapping import duties on steel and hugely increasing subsidies
to US agribusiness, while offering the Third World the sop of limited,
conditional increases in the derisory US aid budget, only reveals the
bankruptcy of 'globalisation as usual'.

Instead of pushing ahead with Gats and its sibling acronyms, say the
activists, capitalism needs to reform itself, as it has done before, for
example with the US New Deal and the creation of European welfare
states. Many of those reforms were as pragmatic as the movement's ideas
are today. Big business fought them as bitterly then as now. Others in
the movement argue 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.