Resistance has been globalised

Resistance has been globalised

In the North, the rich industrialised countries, there has now been
a representative series of such actions. Beginning in Seattle in November,
they have since swept through every part of the industrialised world, from
protests in April against the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC, to
demonstrations outside the G8 summit on the Japanese island of Okinawa
in July, to the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne.

This swirl of Northern protest has finally begun to raise the level
of anti-capitalist action there towards the level it has long had in the
South.

Acknowledging the international character of this movement is vital
to understanding it.

The barriers between the radical movements of the poor South and the
rich North are breaking down. The insurrectionary wave in the South, which
has already rise to great heights in Ecuador and Indonesia, among other
countries, is spilling over.

This globalised dynamic to the movement is indicated by its initial
targets: crushing debt, unequal terms of trade, structural adjustment and
all the international financial, political and corporate institutions which
use these things to maintain the subjugation of the Third World.

This movement has become a spectre haunting the minds of capitalist
ideologues and the pages of their publications. The September 23 Economist
lead editorial finds “the anti-capitalist protesters and, crucially, the
strand of popular opinion that sympathises with them ... terribly dangerous”.

Why? Because the protesters “are right on two matters” — this much the
Economist admits through gritted teeth — “the most pressing moral,
political and economic issue of our time is third-world poverty [and] the
tide of 'globalisation' ... can be turned back.”

The magazine complains that governments and their international agencies
fail to mount “intellectual resistance” to the movement and instead pander
to it. The strategy, pioneered by the World Bank among others, to co-opt
critics by inviting them to negotiate on solutions is fatally flawed, it
argues.

Defend globalisation “boldly on its merits as a truly moral cause”,
it shrilly cries, “against a mere rabble of exuberant irrationalists on
the streets, and in the face of a mild public scepticism that is open to
persuasion”.

Against the “mere rabble”, however, capitalist governments have repeatedly
deployed the full weight of baton blows and water cannons, rather than
evidence of the system's merits. They obviously know that the “evidence”
is too flimsy to have any confidence in its persuasiveness.

The corporate rulers of the world are on the defensive because this
movement, which describes itself as anti-capitalist and aims to change
the way things are in the world, is what it says it is.

This gives the movement a certain determination to be political independent
from the powers that be, even while it discusses and begins to determine
what the lessons are from its own experiences and those of past struggles,
what should be fought for and how.

As yet, in the North, this movement mobilises only tens of thousands,
not the many millions needed, but there is reason for confidence among
those campaigning for social change. The possibilities of resistance, generated
by capitalism's exploitation of the environment and humanity, have again
become realities.

From GLW issue 423