From: Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky Contribution of MIGUEL URBANO RODRIGUES (PORTUGAL) to the "Resistence against neoliberal globalization" seminar, integrated with the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre, January 26, 2001) We are not only meeting here at the Integrated Seminar of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre just to debate the subject and necessity of resistence against neoliberal globalization, we are also meeting here to critically consider ideas, initiatives and forms of struggle that may be useful in the great battle to which humankind has been called against that scourge that is increasingly configurating a menace to the very continuity of life in the planet that is the homeland of man. The growing amplitude and momentum of this movement of resistence favor, however, because of what it contains of spontaneity, confussions around the process of globalization which harm the development of the ongoing struggle. It will be never repeated enough that globalization, as a phenomenon of reorganization of space, economy and social relations is an ineluctable process which expresses the march of man and the prodigious conquests men have made. It is not this tendency that we struggle against, but the structure and the effects of the so-called neoliberal globalization, the objectives of which antagonize those of solidarity among peoples, the only one that is answering to the aspirations of the human condition. I recall this evidence because the idea of globalization is most ancient. Power systems with very diversified characteristics were, under different menus, forerunners of a world globalized under their hegemony. Alexander of Macedonia dreamt of an Universal state. Rome took the project at its turn and, almost two thousand years later, the British Empire was responsible, during its heyday, of almost a half of industrial production and commerce in the globe. But the word "globalization", the word is truly among the newest ones. One of the first in using it was, in 1983, the American economist Theodore Levitt, as a way to name the convergence of global markets. His fellow countryman Kenichi Ohmae (1) took the word over, and used it to qualify a process whereby transnational firms defined the rules of a game that escaped the control of Nation-States, as well as the recomposition of national economies in the midst of a system of "transagues" (sorry, Mark, this one I don't have) and processes which act on the global economy. Marx and Engels, as early as the second half of the 19th. Century, considered the globalization of capital an ineluctable process, although they did not preview the forms it would assume. Nor was it possible by then. The crisis that came after WWI put a brake on neoliberal globalization. Keynesianism resorted to solutions that strengthened the interventionist role of the State in its attempt to save capitalism of an imminent wreckage, but after the early 70s we are witnessing a breathtaking regression of that tendency. Under the incentive of the Thatcher-Reagan couple, strategies were developed that were signaled by an increasing domination of the market and a weakening of the State. They had the contradictory (and essential to understand the system) fundamental peculiarity that in the USA, the country which heralded and furthered the neoliberal globalization, the State kept becoming ever more immense and its capacities for intervention enlarged over many new fields. Naturally, the implosion of the USSR and the hegemonism of the USA had an immense impact on the acceleration of the new bearing in global economy. By the early 90s, the rupture of the global organization of production, as well as the Mammooth size that the multinationals reached, the galloping expansion of pension funds, and their decissive weight in the financial markets, changed life on the planet. Time became universal and instantaneous thanks to an informatic revolution under the control of a handful of firms. Concentration of power scares. The 200 largest firms in the world, according to the World Bank & Fortune Magazine, represented in 1960 a 17% of the global GDP. In 1983, the proportion reached 24%, and in 1995 it was well above 31%. The 500 largest firms, with assets of 32,000 billion dollars, performed in 1996 operations for 11,400 billions, with a profit of 320 billions. These profits are higher than the GDP of 43 backward countries, which total over a billion people. The volume of yearly sales of those 500 firms is equivalent to the GDP of 107 underdeveloped countries, with over 4.5 billion people (including China and India) (2). Monetary gambling at the stock exchanges has reached colossal proportions. Only the transactions made in the foreign currency market represent 1400 billion dollars _a day_, that is around 50 times the value of the transactions of goods related to production. Today's generations are a public and victims of a complete subversion of the historic triangle labour-production-emplyment. The five first American pension funds manage more than 1200 billion dollars, that is the equivalent of the GDP of France. Up to the end of WWII, crises were cyclical and sparse. Now we are always in a perspective of immediate crisis. Unexpected events in remote countries of the periphery generate lighning-speed capital transfers. The Eastern Asia crisis that begun with Thailand, determined for instance during the first quarter of 1998 a return of over 300 billion dollars into the Central industrialized countries. The Russian and Brazilian crises shook the G-7 countries. It is always the people in dependent countries victimized by these crises -truly a cancer of neoliberal globalization- who pay the ensuing bills. The Korean case is paradigmatic as to the effects of each crisis in the shares of benefits and losses. IMF and World Bank reports satisfactorily register the relative speed in the recovery of economics, as relates to production and GDP, in that country of Eastern Asia. They omit, however, the denationalization factor. An important fraction of the large Korean firms changed hands. Today they belong to the transnationals that purchased them during the crisis at bargain price. A rhetorical and pharisaical discourse, repeated with slight variations, by the leaders of the G-7 and the speakers of the "OCDE" [can't remember English acronym], WTO, IMF and WB, recognizes that there exist social tensions and there result unequities as a result of the mechanisms of the new economy, an euphemism that the neoclassics resort to when they want to give a name to the mashing triturator that current capitalism is. It is a matter of practice to lament hunger, misery, ignorance, epidemics, ecologic devastation, every scourge that tortures the world under the rule of the globalized market economy, to sum up. Promises fall down like rain. But the facts are stubborn. These promises are not fulfilled, this is the actual truth. The percentages of GDP that is assigned to international help to the most backward countries, instead of approximating the compromised levels, is increasingly lower. According to the UNDP (3), unequalities between rich and poor are more intense with every year; social exclusion reaches, even in the industrialized countries, scaresome proportions (there are 35 million people living in poverty in the EU). In 1960, the poorest fifth of humankind controlled 3% of the world rent; in 1994 their share was only of 1,1%, almost one third of the former figure; today it has fallen below 1%. During the last 25 years, however, the rent of the richest ones rose from 69% to 86% (4). An eqully brutal reduction of the social benefits to which the less favoured sectors could formerly accede produces and goes hand in hand with this increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Supression of the social conquests obtained by the workers through historic struggles marched hand in hand with concentration of economic power. The new capitalism implies a challenge to the modalities of domestic national solidarity. In its practice, it demonstrates to be incompatible with the Welfare State. The transnationalization of economies clashes against the redistributive logics of the Nation-State. Industrialized countries give the bad example. Free health and education are not considered to be duties of the State any more, and they are gradually turned into profitable private businesses, the mechanisms of which feed the wheels of the financial markets. It is the contributions made by the workers that fuel the immense power of the pension funds. A TRANSIENT PROCESS Is neoliberal globalization a fatality, or an end? Against what its adepts hold, particularly the proud defenders of a cognitive capitalism which aspires to have the monopoly of a wisdom that is increasingly concentrated in small dehumanized ilites, this kind of globalization divinized by the brains of the new economics will be -and everything is pointing to this conclusion- a transient process, marked by great frailties. Fidel Castro, two years ago, posed the question to economists of every school, coming from the world over. In his opinion, this will not last long. The irrationality of the process makes it particularly vulnerable. To a large extent, it was the cowardice of intellectuals as well as the more or less obvious capitulation of the social democracy that generated the conditions for this galloping development, on the global scale, of the phenomenon of neoliberal globalization, which cannot be separated from a system of power where transnationalization of economies acts as a lever. But the theoretical foundations of the system are false. The tyranny of markets is a fictional image, generated by the ideologists of the new capitalist economy. Globalization, as a process that results from progress of civilization, does not imply the transformation of states into vassals, the hindrances of poverty and unemployment, the destruction of social conquests and national cultures, the agression against Nature. Contrary to what the wheels of the media -controlled by the multinationals of informatics- claim, the disappearance of the State is not a present request of the so called global village. States have a notorious margin to manoeuver against the scourge of globalized neoliberalism. The issue lies in the decission to resist. Samir Amin analyzes in his essay "Stop NATO" the circumstances that made the governments of the European Union, with the support of great capital, accept the price of becoming vassals of the USA, sharing with American the burden of dangerous aggressions which cannot be set apart from their imperial stragegies. Samir Amin wrote then, integrating into the global crisis of capitalism the crises that took place in the peripheries, namely those of Mexico, Russia, Eastern Asia and Brazil, that "In this chaotic conjuncture, the USA put themselves again in the offensive in order to, at the same time, restablishing their global hegemony and, as a consequence, reorganizing the global system in every dimension (economic, political and military). The European involvement in American projects such as the aggression to Irak and Yugoslavia have carried some influent political scientists to claim that dependency of the European Union will keep for a long time. Such an opinion implies a transparent subjectivism. The growing contradictions that confront the USA and the EU on the economic front become manifest at the politico-military level also. It is not a matter of chance that at the precise moment when the long period of expansion in the American economy comes to an end, opening up the perspectives of a recession, the European Union put in practice the ever delayed decission to create a Fast Intervention Force of 100,000 men, with capacities to have autonomous intervention in future regional conflicts. This is not the place where to analyze the negative aspects of an eventual rebirth of European militarism. What I think important, it is to point out the fact that Washington reacted immediately, by identificating the project with a menace to the hegemony in European security that, up to now, had been exerted by NATO. The European reply was, of course, ambiguous. But conciliatory utterings nonwithstanding it is obvious that this new force appears as the embryo of a future European army, a clear demonstration that the EU is not going to accept an American military presence to the end of times. Some analysts in the United Stated pointed out that the end of NATO is a matter of time. The European Union, of course, is a diversity with the peculiarity that the United Kingdom acts many times as the Fifth Column of Washington. But it is precisely the dynamics of globalized neoliberalism at this beginning of the 21st. Century which will turn more, not less, acute the contradictions that exist within the Troika that, by means of the G-7 and international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and others, acts as if it were an almighty global government. Although the divergencies within the fragile alliance of the EU and Japan with the USA are not publicly expressed in an explicit manner, they are increasing as well as their complexity. While Europe expects its currency to recover, Japan keeps patiently and discretely developing efforts to create a "yen area" in Eastern Asia, which generates fears in USA. If these efforts came to completion, they may well mean a fatal coup against the global hegemony of the dollar. The convergence of the Troika around policies that make unequalities in the world larger and make the abyss between developed countries (less than one fifth of humankind) and backward countries deeper does not run against the existence of great contradictions between USA and its allies. They do not appear only through conflictive economic interests. The European social security systems, although weaker, do subsist. If they were suppressed there would take place social outbursts. The mechanisms of redistribution in Europe are still basically linked to class relations inherited of the aftermath of WW2. In the USA, neither unions nor mass organizations of workers had at any time the power to impose conditions that had long been accepted by capital in Europe. This difference in social and cultural situations made a decissive contribution to the high rates of economic growth in the USA, but also to the lower quality of life resulting from the American savage capitalism. Neoliberal globalization is a movement that tends to homogeinize the global economy or a part of it. It has the peculiarity that it has been conceived in the sole benefit of a small number of societies, and against the large majority of humankind. It is appropiate to ask whether we are witnessing a systemic convergence of the world economy towards a single global model where the basis is market economy and the institutional forms are almost similar. There are many, and blurred, answers to this basic question. In the first place, we can't still preview the final result of the already commented antagonism between the American system of power and that of the rest of the world, including the EU-Japan couple. THE IMPERIAL MENACE The American theorizing on a minimal state is ignorant of history. States may disappear. Nations subsist when they are destroyed. Braudel talked to us on the three times of the engine of history: the long time of mentalities, the median time of economy, and the short time of politics. This is a polemic formulation. But the debate that it has aroused poses a doubt in front of us: does globalization speed up the general rythms of history, or it simply reorganizes the determining factors? We are far from a consensus. But suffice it to compare, say, Argentina with the multidiversity of India to confront the distance that separates us from a truly global village. The unification of cultures will take centuries, thousands of years perhaps, Internet nonwithstanding. According to Zbignew Brzezinski, the USA is already the first global society in history, and is creating the conditions to impose a universal culture. This assertion, however, is as irresponsible as it is hurried. In the first place, a synthetic "Mac World" culture, as it is known, would be an anti- culture and thus the anthitesis of the cultural phenomenon. We do not need to travel from America to Asia in order to see the tenacious resistences of cultures to sudden change, even within a single society. Almost everything in the ways of feeling life in an Alsacian village differs from what can be found in a village in Provence. In Brazil, the common nationality does not span the existential abyss between the gazcho in Porto Alegre and the caboclo in the sertco of Bahia. It is the working itself of the American system of power that creates illusions in the brains which help to enlarge it, which give it the ambition and aggressivity that are its current feature. Perhaps the most disquieting trait of this system is its aspiration to universal hegemony over evry people on the planet. Many texts explete this ambition, and, from a military perspective, it is contained in a much quoted secret report of the Pentagon, which has been made public by the March 8th, 1992, edition of the New York Times. Such a megalomaniac ambition it is that it collides frontally with the very logics of neolibaral globalization, since it is not compatible with the supremacy of markets over the Nation-State. I will return to this later. I think that it is useful to call the attention now to the fact that the system of power of the USA, when it develops an autonomous strategy that does not take the markets into accounts in its insistence in an imperial policy becomes a permanent menace against global peace. I do not want to digress and analyze here the meaning of the politics of dstruction of Irak as an independent state after the Gulf War. I will also not analyze the policies which took to the intervention in Bosnia and the imposition of the fake peace of Dayton, policies which were followed by the agression to Yugoslavia by means of NATO as the military tool of a larger project of American control of the Balkans. I will however call your attention to a most important aspect of the politics of expansion towards the East of Europe that is almost never commented in Brazil, even though it is an essential device in the American imperial strategy. Nistor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
