http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0714-05.htm

Published on Sunday, July 14, 2002 in the Observer of London
Where Did All the Protesters Go?

After 11 September, the anti-globalization 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.

by Mike Bygrave

QUOTE:

"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 harbor 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."


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-globalization movement. Anti-globalization 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 Center attacks and wars
on terror? Globalization is still with us, after all. From the
state of Africa to world food supplies, trade disputes to
asylum-seekers, privatization to the environment, Globalization
roars ahead. But what's happened to the anti-globalizers?

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
favor.'

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-globalizers
Anti-globalization 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 Globalization?
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-globalization)
'a movement of popular education directed towards action'.
Education about what? Well, Globalization for a start.
Globalization 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,
Globalization 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 Globalization 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 Center 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 Globalization in a certain way'.

The way is economic Globalization 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 labor standards, or privatization 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 Globalization 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 Globalization 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 Organization. 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 organizations 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 labor, or migration. This program is
known as the 'Washington consensus' or neo-liberalism in
its international form. As a result, say the critics, when
the disadvantages of Globalization 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
Organization., 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 realize 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 organizations), 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-globalizers as a
'traveling circus' of anarchists and a recent EU attempt
to equate the protesters with terrorists. To the Western
elite, Globalization is good for you. To the anti-globalizers,
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 Globalization'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-globalizers,
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
Globalization 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 globalizing countries,
i.e. those with liberal trade regimes, have grown richer
while the non-globalizers 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 liberalized. And they still have
highly protective trade regimes, just as Taiwan and
South Korea did before them. Trade liberalization 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
labor on the cheap and to which they can sell manufactured
goods, subsidized agricultural products and high-interest
loans and privatizing packages for huge profits. Trade
agreements force the South to open its markets, dismantling
tariffs and eliminating domestic subsidies. But the rich
countries massively subsidize 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 privatize
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 'stabilizations', 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-globalization 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 Globalization, more 'structural adjustment'.
This was the approach that prevailed with the Financial
Times commenting 'no one has done more recently to favor.'
the cause of trade liberalization 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 realize 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 Globalization 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 favors for campaign contributors; planning laws
eviscerated by big developers; privatizations 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 Globalization is the
direct cause of all these phenomena, Globalization 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 Women's 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 endeavor 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-globalization,
performing the impossible trick of uniting everybody.
So is 'Global Justice' the socialism that dare not
speak its name?

Globalize Resistance, the British-based, formidably
efficient organizers 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 Organization.;
the emphasis on networks, modeled 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 Globalize 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 labor 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 decentralized 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 mobilizations and communal values, into the
basis of a new society. Tony Blair's 'traveling 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
program 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 (i.e. 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
Globalization 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 harbor 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 Globalization 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; privatization; 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 Globalization
- 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] liberalization 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
Globalization 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 Globalization 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.

©Mike Bygrave 2002

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