Regrettably yes, there is a diametric opposition between North and South strategies (though to pose it in these terms, rather than class terms, is terribly misleading). It's mainly between those who want to shut down embryonic forms of the global state (not just WTO, but IMF/WB etc), and those who want to reform the embryonic global state institutions and make them slightly nicer. Aristocratic Federation of Labour leader John Sweeney testified to Congress last week that he thinks closing the IMF "would be a mistake." Most of the rest of the South movements would disagree. Sweeney will be flying business class to Seattle and will sleep well in a luxury suite before going hat in hand to Summers, Barshefsky and Moore, to beg for a seat at the table so as to impose labour/social/eco clauses, about which he has done no real consultation with the people affected in the South. In contrast, Peoples Global Action and allies will be doing a bus tour with radical Third World and other international folk, arriving in Seattle, camping on friends' floors, and hitting the streets to call for No New WTO Round, and in fact to network amongst themselves about what pressure points can be applied to forcibly withdraw their national elites' support for the WTO more generally. The week before in Johannesburg, I am reliably told, a similar group to PGA--Jubilee South--will gather the best forces from the Third and Second and Fourth Worlds to discuss how to take forward the fantastic momentum on debt relief and remove the vicious conditionalities, the half-hearted reforms and the right-wing allies (Sachs), and replace them with a genuine development strategy. I believe this will ultimately have to entail an amplification of the Focus on the Global South campaign against the IMF, and the World Bank Bond Boycott campaign to defund the Bank. That'll further open up the key lines of debate between CoOpted NGOs (CONGOs) and AFL-CIO opportunists inside the Beltway on the one hand, and radical social, environmental and labour movements of the South on the other. The WTO meeting is another chapter in the same story, I would guess. My rhetoric aside, does this sound like a reasonable analysis of the way the array of social forces is developing? How does this look from the Northwest? On 20 Oct 99, at 10:09, Anthony D'Costa wrote: > So Patrick is there a diametrically opposite position between "organized" > workers in the North and South and those that are not organized in > the "South"? The AFL-CIO types want labor clauses (a protectionist > posture) against cheap imports. The unions in the South are anti > WTO because of its "free market" implications. The exporters from > the South (capitalists) see the leftist anti-WTO of the North position > tantamount to non-tariff barriers. And unorganized "export" sector workers from the > South see WTO as an avenue for economic survival. What kind of > configurations are we talking about around WTO this time?
