Chasing
them into the desert
Genoa
and Onward
By
Katherine Ainger
The
airport at Genoa is named after Christopher Columbus. Five
hundred and nine years after he set sail for the new world,
launching what in today's parlance would be called 'a new
trade round' - centuries of genocide, plunder and
colonialism - Latin American civil society brought its
struggle against globalisation back to the place where it
began. Members of the Landless Movement of Brazil
(Movimiento Sem Terra - MST) spoke of the massacre of
neoliberalism at the Genoa Social .
In
the weeks leading up to the summit, plenty of old hands were
saying someone would die at Genoa. The signs were clear in
the escalating confrontation and militarization of both
sides. But the MST could tell you that Carlo Guiliani, the
young man shot dead as he protested at the G8 summit last
weekend, is not the first casualty of the movement
challenging neoliberal globalization around the world.
The
MST suffer ongoing persecution for their campaign for land
reform in Brazil, their opposition to the World Bank's
programme of market-led land reform; their opposition to the
corporate control of agriculture through patents on seed;
their opposition to the big landowners' farms where cattle
for export graze while the campesinos starve.
Recently
three students protesting against World Bank privatization
were shot in Port Morseby, Papua New Guinea. Young men
fighting World Bank imposed water privatization have been
tortured and killed in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
George
Bush, Tony Blair, and Clare Short, who portray those who
protest the unnaccountable institutions of global governance
as ignorant, violent enemies of the poor, have not seemed to
notice that the poor are leading the protests. A message,
dated last April, sent out by members of the African student
movement says: 'the anti-globalization movement, which had
as one of its sources the persistent anti-structural
adjustment student movement in Africa, has finally leaped
from the streets of Harare, Addis and Algiers into
Washington DC in April and Prague in September last year.
[The World Bankers] have been hounded by a truly
international youth movement which has carried the African
student dead to their door.'
Yet
those who run the global economy still seem to think their
worst problem is that they can't find a secure place to
meet.
Instead
of addressing root causes of the protests which rocked
Seattle in late 1999, the World Trade Organization are
fleeing to the Qatar desert, way beyond the reach of even
the most determined activist. The Chretien administration is
now searching desperately for the highest mountain in Canada
in which to hold the next G8 summit.
Their
real problem is that their ideological adherence to 'free'
trade is casting them not just into the desert, but into the
political wilderness. The regime they are implementing is so
destructive that it is sparking off a global uprising
against neoliberalism. These are the beginnings of a new
force that will shape the global political project in the
new century.
Broadly,
these uprisings can be described as struggles against the
commodification of every aspect of life - water, genes,
atmosphere, healthcare, culture, public spaces, land. For
each locality, the moment when the people cry 'Enough!' is
different - but it is usually the moment when something
regarded as central to the culture becomes privatized. For
the Zapatistas of Mexico it was the signing of the NAFTA
agreement, which outlawed the common ownership of land which
Emiliano Zapata, folk hero and revolutionary of 1911, had
fought for. For much of South East Asia it was the IMF
austerity measures imposed on their shattered economies
after the financial crisis of 1997. For South Africa, it is
seeing the ANC, former rebels against apartheid, making
Faustian pacts with the global economic elite as inequality
grows greater, not lesser, in their country. For France it
was the integrity of their food culture, and the punitive
tarriffs on Roquefort cheese imposed by the World Trade
Organization. In Britain, it may be the slow sell-off of the
National Health Service to private healthcare
multinationals.
Antoni
Negri and Michael Hardt, in their seminal work Empire, call
this grassroots network of struggles, 'the multitude'. It is
the mirror opposite of a concentrated strata of power from
above, in which decisions that affect billions of human
lives get made at a transnational level. The multitude
embodies the real world below - a sphere of humanity,
nature, culture, diversity - all those factors not reducable
to a commodity to be bought and sold in a global
marketplace. In fact, the movement is not
'anti-globalization' at all. If anything, it embodies
'globalization from below' - an international multitude
which challenges the idea that 'the global surfaces of the
world market are interchangable'.
This
is a new force for radical political change, but in a global
economy, it does not have a Winter Palace to storm. This is
why protesters have been targeting international summit
meetings. But if these unnaccountable institutions of global
governance are losing their legitimacy through citizen
action, the movement, particulary in the wake of the Genoa
summit, urgently needs to build its own, alternative
democratic legitimacy. For democratising the global economy
will ultimately not come through increasingly militant
action at summits, but through building an genuine,
grassroots legitimacy from below.
The
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote: 'Sooner or later, a
true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the
people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot
fear the people, their expression, their effective
participation in power. It must be accountable to them, must
speak frankly to them of its achievements, its mistakes, its
miscalculations and its difficulties.'
Instead
of now chasing the world leaders into the desert in Qatar,
then, the task at hand is to work on building a broad based
pro-democracy movement at home. In a million small ways in
Britain, that process has already begun. As a result of
campaigning by the World Development Movement, the Scottish
parliament will be holding the first parliamentary debate in
the world over WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS), which threatens to lock anything deemed a 'service'
into privatisation. Unions are beginning to organise against
GATS; the rank and file are already beginning to rebel over
public sector sell offs. Even the Women's Institute is
alarmed. Middle England continues to complain about GM crops
and the state of the railways, while Scottish crofters have
joined the radical, anti-WTO, international peasant farmers'
union, Via Campesina - whose largest member is the MST.
This
is the birth of a genuinely popular global uprising against
corporate control and the hijacking of democracy. The
movement against economic globalization: coming to a town
near you.
Katharine
Ainger is editing an issue of the New
Internationalist
on global resistance.
Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of
Z/ZNet. To learn more about the project consult
ZNet
or the ZNet
Sustainer Pages
Recommended
Reading:
-
Belen Balanya, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma' anit
& Erik Wesselius, EUROPE INC: Regional & Global
Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power. London,
Pluto Press, 2000
-
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nick Faraclas und Claudia von
Werlhof (Hg), There is an Alternative. Subsistence and
worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization, London,
zed press, 2001
Emanzipation
Humanum,
version 7.2001, Criticism, suggestions as to form and
content, dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/resist.html
|