Global Revolt

A Guide to the Movements Against Globalization

By Amory Starr

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Amory Starr
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-483-0

Contents

1 Introduction: another world is possible – how do we know?, 1,
I History, 15,
2 It didn’t start in Seattle and it didn’t stop on 9/11, 19,
II Manifestos, 43,
3 Participatory democracy: the World Social Forum:, 47,
4 Don’t owe! won’t pay! Drop the debt, 53,
5 Food sovereignty: farmers need access to local, not global, markets, 57,
6 Reclaim the commons: no patents on life!, 61,
7 No borders! No nations! Stop deportations!, 67,
8 Get rid of them all! The importance of Argentina and anti-elitism, 77,
9 Solidarité and specifismo: we are going to work together, 87,
10 Anti-imperialism: anti-globalization since 9/11, 101,
III Controversies, 107,
11 Ya basta! We are not only for, we are also against, 109,
12 Back in black: anarchism and autonomy, 115,
13 Violence: spikey vs. fluffy, 127,
14 Consumption politics, 139,
15 Reformism, 151,
16 Village life: the subsistence perspective, 161,
IV Tactics, 173,
17 Criminal reconnections: decommodification, 177,
18 The streets belong to the people, 185,
19 Culture jamming, 191,
20 Be the media: Independent Media Centers, 197,
21 Spokes only: reinventing direct democracy, 205,
22 Property crime: breaking the spell, 211,
23 Diversity of tactics, 219,
24 Black Bloc, 227,
25 Tute Bianche: citizenship of the absurd, 233,
26 Tactical frivolity: why we dance, 239,
27 Suicide: like a lamp, 247,
28 Conclusion: Globalize this! We are winning, 253,
Index, 259,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: another world is possible – how do we know?

Global elites, their political henchmen and media sycophants insist that economic growth, international trade, the elimination of subsidies and privatization will alleviate poverty. Activists’ blossoming confidence that another world is possible is well-rooted. Analysis of the effects of structural adjustment and free trade policies reveal that their promises are unfulfilled. Indeed, their impact has been perverse. Apparently, globalization works only for the rich. Even high-profile administrators of neoliberalism have deserted. Their insider revelations are hardly news to the non-governmental organizations which had been carefully collecting data for decades. Inequality has increased in nearly every country; internationally, the conditions of life for the poor and indigenous peoples have steadily deteriorated; and the environment on which we all depend has been irrevocably damaged.

In what ought to be the invitation to its formal suicide, the World Bank admits that its structural adjustment programmes undermine its core economic shibboleth: economic growth. Damning also is the collapse of the obedient ‘developing nations’ of South-East Asia and Latin America, as well as the failure of the command-capitalist South Korean regime (the only country ever to graduate from ‘Third’ to ‘First World’ status). The evidence has accumulated to the point that, for those familiar with it, there is little further to be discussed. The holy trinity of export/trade/growth is exposed as a manipulative fraud and each new invocation of the dead and absurd promises of development – that it will bring peace, heal the environment or end poverty – is more transparent than the previous. The economic and political system promoted by globalization is not only morally bankrupt, it is no longer credible as economics.

This book is intended to familiarize interested parties with the anti-globalization movement and to provide direction for further research and exploration of the ‘movement of movements’. Because many exhaustive analyses of the machinations of globalization have already been written (you have probably read several of them) and because this book focuses on the resistance to globalization, this introduction will provide only a rudimentary review of the basis for opposition. Herewith, globalization’s most egregious deceptions.

Globalization’s thirteen biggest lies

1 Globalization is old Globalization’s marketing strategy steals the images of family, multiculturalism, communication, women’s liberation, travel and trade and offers them back to us, glamorized and at a price. All of these things existed before colonialism and contested it at every stage of its development. These images obscure the structure of globalization, its macroeconomic policies, and the corporate projects it promotes – all of which damage families, communication and culture. Describing itself as a ‘constitution for a new global economy’, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is designed to subvert existing international human rights and labour law, national sovereignty and parliamentary regulation. The highest international law (and the only enforceable one) is now ‘free trade’, a highly specified set of principles sometimes described as a ‘bill of rights’ for multinational corporations, multinational corporations, to which the laws of signatory countries are now secondary.

2 Globalization is new Globalization pretends to bring a new, ‘rules-based’, fairness and structure to the global trading system, but activists in the Global South call it ‘recolonization’. Not only does it force Third World nations to implement policies remarkably similar to those imposed by colonial administrations, it also reverses the gains of postcolonial governance in areas such as land reform, the nationalization of industries and cultural protections. Moreover, the ‘free trade agreements’, so ‘new’ that they have not yet been fully implemented, can already be evaluated by their predecessors of nearly two decades, the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The results of SAPs have been a steady increase in inequality and the ruthless liquidation of economies to service the debt.

3 Globalization may be exploitative or dislocating at the margins, but it’s ‘better than nothing’ for the majority of the poor Today’s poor, and their regions, were self-sufficient for millennia. They were colonized for their mineral, timber, soil, human, animal and climatic wealth. The idea of a poor or hungry Africa or Asia or Latin America is absurd. Northerners who point to a line of people hoping for a job in a sweatshop and praise the Global North for generously providing jobs are peddling ahistoricism and paternalism.

Twenty years ago the people now queueing were independent small-scale producers, farmers, processors, craftspeople or artisans producing for local markets. Visitors depicted these sustainable livelihoods as backward and dirty, and leaders of Global South countries (already pummelled by centuries of their colonists’ ethnocentric definitions of civilization) were seduced by visions of modernity.

Those appalled by pious arguments that slavery, despite its brutality, did a big favour to Africans (who at least were given the chance to become Christians and learn discipline) may soon find ourselves ashamed to have countenanced sweatshops, let alone congratulated the sweat-traders for ‘providing jobs’. Neoliberal forms of development are never going to solve poverty, protect the environment or bring peace – these are dead promises. Instead, so-called ‘development policies’ primarily benefit global elites, at the cost of traditional, sustainable livelihoods, the local economies they support and the resources on which they depend.

4 Globalization frees the market to satisfy important human needs Human needs such as hunger are not a ‘market demand’ – that is a privilege reserved for those whose needs and desires are backed by buying power. Since hungry people lack exactly that, a market-based food system will easily pass them by. Instead of meeting human needs, neoliberalism invokes them as a façade while steadily undermining local provisioning.

Multinational corporations are able to profit from and intervene in local production through agricultural technology schemes which create dependency on expensive inputs. As postcolonial countries are pressured to export more to earn foreign exchange to pay their debts and to open their markets to imports, farmers simultaneously become dependent on volatile world prices while losing access to formerly protected, stable national markets. The same international trade system that promises ‘cheap food’ for the hungry and whose major players advertise their technologies and practices as absolutely essential to the task of ‘feeding the world’, in fact undermines national food production. The companies who make those promises undercut local producers with subsidized imports. As a result, nations lose food security and control over domestic food policy. Simultaneously, the WTO’s SPS (Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary) agreements undermine local value-added production by imposing sterilization and packaging standards which only multinational food corporations can afford. Meanwhile, artisans and craftspeople are undercut by low-quality mass-produced baubles whose only cultural value is a desperate scrap of Western style.

Aggressive marketing campaigns mobilize colonial ideology to manipulate food preferences and endanger local food cultures. Images of the Global South (particularly Africa) as ‘hungry’ are used to force biotechnology (a technology which has been rejected by farmers and consumers in the North) on Global South countries where farmers and consumers have made it clear they also do not want it.

5 Globalization is about deregulation to ‘free’ the market from burdensome government regulations Interestingly, globalization policies do not follow any classic economic orthodoxy. They force deregulation when environmental protections, labour law or land reform are in the way of business operations. They force regulation to ensure patent payments or to create requirements that are cost-effective only for large-scale producers (handily disposing of competition from small, local competitors). These convoluted rules are designed to commodify life and then enable corporations to control and profit from trading the commodity.

6 Globalization increases consumer choice Citizens of most countries are demanding the right to choose whether or not they will eat biotech foods (genetically modified organisms, GMOs, or living modified organisms, LMOs). Most countries have some kind of label or restrictive scheme and the Biosafety Protocol recognizes countries’ right to regulate their imports. But ‘free trade’ rules are rapidly overriding any legal invocation of the ‘precautionary principle’ which was, until recently, the basis of most law governing the marketing of new technologies. Consumers receive the illusion of choice between brands and artificial flavours while choice over the more serious fundamentals, such as conditions of production, health risks and environmental impacts of products, are eliminated. In the end, the global market offers force not choice.

Even the most superficial consumer choices do not make it to the majority of the world, 2.8 billion of whom live on less than two dollars a day, which is the United Nations Development Programme’s definition of absolute poverty and are losing control over the most basic choices as they are forced to migrate far from home and family to sell their love in the nanny market and their bodies in the sex trade. Multinational corporations are exercising power not only to shape global, national and local economies, the concentration of wealth, the treatment of labour and political sovereignty, but also more qualitative aspects of life – defining science, shaping culture, standardizing and controlling our desires and definitions of dignity, delimiting public space and having no respect for the sacred.

7 Globalization is democratic The World Bank and IMF evade mechanisms of international democracy by operating as ‘proxy governments’ of the USA, which controls the crucial proportion of votes. WTO ministerials are collapsing not because elites of the Global South are unwilling to exploit their own people, but because these meetings are so undemocratic that they insult these elites and are politically untenable in sovereign postcolonial nations. The WTO claims to work by consensus, but what that really means is simply that it will never allow voting, as the G8 (Group of Eight: the most powerful industrialized nations: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the USA, Canada and Russia) would be outnumbered. The ‘consensus process’ – described as ‘bullying’ by Global South participants – is one in which documents are written by a small group dominated by G8 interests and then presented to the membership in a ‘take it or leave it’ manner.

‘Free trade’ policies violate (while trumping) a raft of putatively more democratic pieces of international law such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights, various conventions of the International Labor Organization, World Health Organization codes, and assorted environmental treaties.

Further undermining the very concept of democratic process, globalization labels as terrorism any refusal of its advances while subtly working to replace the values of citizenship with the values and ‘rights’ of consumerism.

8 Farmers and other small producers need access to global markets so they can ‘compete’ Structural Adjustment Programmes and Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) mandate the elimination of tariffs on imports and any other supports to domestic producers in the Global South. Combined with the dumping of mass-produced and surreptitiously subsidized Global North exports, this results in the flooding of local markets with underpriced goods with which no small producer, however efficient and sustainable her operation, can compete (see point 4, above). Northern development experts patiently explain that this dumping will actually stimulate local producers to awake from their stupor of backwardness and to become ‘more competitive’. (In reality it wipes them out.)

9 G8 countries and their institutions are trying to ‘help’ the poor nations and their peoples International financial institutions (IFIs), such as the World Bank and the IMF, do not exist to make a monetary profit, but a profit of control over the economies of the Global South, facilitating G8 access to natural resources, land, labour and markets, just as in the colonial era. Meanwhile, foreign aid actually flows in reverse; there is a net outflow from South to North due to debt-servicing.

Uprisings in the Global South have constantly been suppressed by regimes given extensive military backing by their former colonizers, and by newer imperial powers that feel entitled to sabotage sovereign democratic processes. Meanwhile, authentic grassroots development efforts are purposely derailed by incessant cooptation (even the World Bank now uses the language of ‘participation’).

10 Privatization is more efficient Decades of ostensibly neutral policy analysts have relentlessly berated public ownership and administration for ‘corruption’ and ‘inefficiency’. Maligning government as hopeless, this assault pre-empted opposition to the lucrative privatization of public resources and services. Privatization conveniently terminates civic scrutiny and accountability. From the perspective of Bolivians, South Africans and others on whom the deadly experiment of privatization of energy and water is being enacted, it is outright theft of their water, energy, national wealth and unionized industries.

11 Global culture brings us all closer ‘Ancient blood feuds’, ‘tribal strife’ and ‘ethnic warfare’, purportedly the inevitable result of an excess of heterogeneity, often turn out to be caused instead by the distortions of colonial land grabs, postcolonial borders and ‘economic restructuring’. The solutions offered by neoliberalism – homogenized corporate culture and expensive technology – benefit only their salesmen.

Corporate globalization tries to impose a standardized monoculture, a brittle system. In contrast, the anti-globalization movement understands diversity to be the basis of security. In discovering and defending one another, the ‘movement of movements’ asserts Zapatista principles of ‘un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos’ (a world where many worlds fit) and ‘one no, many yeses’.

12 There is no alternative (TINA) This is the trump card of corporate power. Globalization is portrayed as natural, inevitable and the only form of progress. In fact, there are thousands of alternatives (TATA); and there must be an alternative (THEMBA). The World Social Forum is one of many events at which people’s movements confirm their collective wisdom, technology, skills, courage and ability to run things much better.

13 Opponents of globalization are romantic Luddites, alienated punk rock kids ‘hopping’ from summit to summit on ‘protest tours’ These distorted images trivialize the suffering and rage of the working classes and youth of the North, where resistance movements are still marginal, but growing. The Global South is the real point of impact.

For decades, Global South farmers, small producers, students, consumers, workers, fisherfolk, urban dwellers, indigenous peoples, and the unemployed have been fighting back against neoliberal economic policies and generating alternatives. Since movements have discovered that formal political systems are collaborating with or being used by elites, new forms of power and spaces of democracy are being developed as bases for confrontation and to build ‘another world’.

If any of these points were new to you, please see the Resources list and Notes at the end of this and every chapter.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Global Revolt by Amory Starr. Copyright © 2005 Amory Starr. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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