[CTRL] After Seattle: Understanding the Politics of Globalization

[Dave]

-Caveat Lector-   <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-

Dave Hartley
http://www.asheville-computer.com/dave



======================
Monthly Review
Volume 51, Number 10, March 2000


http://www.monthlyreview.org/300tabb.htm


March 2000

After Seattle: Understanding the Politics of Globalization
        by William K. Tabb

WILLIAM K. TABB is professor of economics and political science at Queens
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is
the author of Restructuring Political Economy (Routledge, 1999) and The
Amoral Elephant (Monthly Review Press, forthcoming in 2000).



The "Seattle Shock" - as Business Week called it in an editorial that
warned of a popular backlash against "our very economic system" - reflects
heartfelt indignation by the financial press at the intrusion of mass
democracy into an elite discourse. In the New York Times, columnist Thomas
Friedman raged at anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protesters, whom he
presents as "flat-earth advocates" duped by knaves like Pat Buchanan.
Friedman, perhaps the most obtuse of the big-time columnists, complains
that "What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become
precisely what they accuse it of already being - a global government. They
want it to set more rules - their rules, which would impose our labor and
environmental standards on everyone else." #1

It is beyond Friedman's understanding that the demonstrators want to
democratize what has been an elite decision-making process, to challenge
the global dominance of capital and capital's state institutions. The
demonstrators know, and Friedman is outraged that others seem to agree,
that there are choices other than the global governance by corporate
capital. Most of the demonstrators, as the establishment press well
understood, had the sort of class analysis which working people
intuitively, if inchoately, often have. They have had enough of being told
that globalization is good and that they should just shut up. Friedman was
also clueless concerning the predominant politics. Few of the
demonstrators supported the sort of negative nationalism Buchanan
symbolizes, with its xenophobic and racist overtones. Rather what the
Friedmans of the world are afraid of is the solidarity and
internationalism of the movement, which prefigures a global movement from
below - threatening, as Business Week points out, to rock the system. And
if self-interest is not absent from the demands of trade unionists and
others, it rarely is or should be. The proposals for confronting
transnational capital are in class terms and, for the most part,
inclusive.

What is to be done after Seattle is a question many people, including but
not only activists, now confront. It is the one we take up here, in the
context of an analysis of both the corporate media's response to the
demonstrations in Seattle and the real issues of class power relations. It
is an analysis which focuses on corporate control of policy making,
addressing policies which weaken unions and diminish the lives and agency
of working people, reduce the sphere of public service provision, and pit
one community of workers against another. To this basic class analysis,
environmentalists have added a powerful critique of corporate greed and of
the single-minded pursuit of accumulation which threatens the planet and
all living things. A potentially powerful antisystemic movement is at an
important point in its development.

It is to be expected that the "irrationality" of the demonstrators is
woven through much of the commentary of the financial press. Typically, it
appears with a tone of offended outrage by the transnational ruling class
and its ideological flacks. Hot-tempered acting-out has suddenly replaced
the usual temperate condescension to which we have grown accustomed in
this dismal era of corporate triumphalism. Thus George Melloan, in an
opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, writes: "Given the virulence of
their protests against the achievements of private capitalism, one can
only assume that finally we have assembled in one place a representative
collection of people who `can't stand prosperity.'"#2 This theme - "you
have never had it so good, and that it is private capitalism which has
done all this for you" - is a view of globalization which is rejected by
most Americans.

In a Pew Research Center nationwide survey conducted in April 1999, 43
percent of respondents said that in the future a global economy would help
average Americans; 52 percent said it would hurt them. Support for
globalization was strong only in high-income brackets. Among the majority
of American families (those with incomes under fifty thousand dollars a
year), a positive view of globalization was held by just 37 percent. Such
differences are based on life experience. Kate Bronfenbrenner has done
careful studies of the impact of the threat of runaway plants on
unionization efforts and workers' ability to make demands for better wages
and working conditions, and has shown that globalization in the form of
plant closing threats and actual plant closings are extremely pervasive
and effective components of U.S. employers' antilabor strategy. From 1993
to 1995, employers threatened to close plants in half of all certification
elections. They have made good on such threats. The 15 percent shutdown
rate within two years of certification election victories is triple the
rate in the late 1980s, before the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) went into effect.

In the week following the Seattle WTO Ministerial meetings, Business Week
ran a story about how General Electric (GE) suppliers are being pushed -
indeed, forced on pain of losing their contracts - to close plants in the
United States and set up in Mexico. GE even puts on "supplier migration"
conferences to press the point. Their message is clearly presented in a
quote the magazine offers from a corporate internal report: "Migrate or be
out of business; not a matter of if, just when. This is not a seminar just
to provide information. We expect you to move and move quickly."#3 GE is
one of the world's largest corporations. It is highly profitable. But that
is hardly the issue. What it wants is more and it will "squeeze lemons" -
in one of the favorite phrases of its Chief Executive Officer -  because
it has the power to do so. The lemons are its workers and suppliers.
That's capitalism. That's the way the system works and, as Martin Wolf,
the Financial Times columnist, points out in a column entitled "WTO: In
defense of global capitalism," that's why protesters don't like
transnational corporations or the WTO, which does their bidding. "What the
protestors against globalism share," he writes, "is dislike of the market
economy. This passion brought the cranks, bullies and hypocrites to
Seattle.#4 Leaving aside who the bullies and hypocrites are, we may note
again the high crankiness quotient.

All this screaming like a stuck pig, to borrow a phrase from the British
imperial legacy, is understandable. Trade used to be an issue quietly
negotiated by the powerful behind closed doors. Forced to discuss the
issues, the near universal response is, "But we did it all for you! We
especially help the poor. How can you possibly be against free trade? It
brings freedom, that's why we call it 'free' trade." The Economist puts an
Indian child on its cover and features the theme: how dare these
demonstrators try to take away her right to work? She is poor. She wants
to be exploited. She needs to be exploited. Needless to say, there is no
mention of the anti-WTO demonstrations in India that coincided with the
ones in Seattle.

Because of the Internet and the numerous Web sites activists have
established, it is possible for people to know that the Seattle protests
were truly global and substantial in scope. Activists can both spread the
word and bring diverse constituencies together. While working people in
India may fear the way trade sanctions could be used by a self-interested,
moralizing United States, they also understand how the WTO and other
global governance institutions are used by an imperial ruling class. At
the same time, this hardly obviates the need for labor rights. The
beginnings of a new level of international solidarity are evident in the
way groups from the base have made connections and are working together
across national and cultural borders.

Indeed, fear is growing of mass rebellion and of what a Rand Corporation
study has called a "[non-governmental organization] NGO swarm." The
Internet has allowed new coalitions to be built online, and for tens of
thousands of people to be mobilized in the streets of Geneva or Seattle
and, at the same time, in Paris, London, and New Delhi. As the Rand
researchers explain, an NGO swarm has no "central leadership or command
structure; it is multiheaded, impossible to decapitate." The WTO was badly
stung by just such a swarm of angry worker bees.

The financial press has also set out on a belated campaign to educate the
troops with the kind of handouts such campaigns typically provide. In a
post-Seattle editorial, Business Week offers a full page of questions and
answers: "Is globalization about U.S. hegemony?" "Is globalization about
exploitation?" "Is globalization about environmental destruction?" "Is
globalization about the triumph of markets over governments?" It is less
important that their answer in each instance is "no," than that the
protestors' issues now structure the larger debate to a significant
extent. The establishment is forced to respond on terms it has not had to
before. Can Treasury Department Truth Squad visits to college campuses of
the sort attempted during the Vietnam War be far behind?

It is clear that the demonstrators have the support of mainstream,
working-class Americans. Perhaps the most interesting post-Seattle
commentary is the Harris Poll, which confirms what other surveys have
shown: that a majority of Americans (52 percent in the poll) were
sympathetic to the concerns of the demonstrators. "Echoing the
anti-business themes that ran through the sound bites and across the
banners there, the BW-Harris poll also found that most Americans believe
that business now has too much power." While Business Week claimed it "a
puzzling anomaly" that, in the greatest period of wealth creation in U.S.
history, so many people could be "living in another era," it also quoted a
Princeton economist who pointed out that "[i]n the real world, people are
still living from paycheck to paycheck" and "[t]he tremendous wealth
creation has by and large gone to the people at the top."#5 Most
Americans, according to another recent survey (by Opinion Research Corp.
International), say they feel cheated by their employers.

In asking "After Seattle, what?" critics of the WTO need first to deepen
the critique of the WTO and, second, to confront the limits of the
reformist demands which the mainstream critics of the WTO have put
forward. These tasks involve confronting class relations both with regard
to North-South tensions and within the core.

Renato Ruggiero, when he was director-general of the WTO famously
explained "We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among
separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single
world economy." Critics point out that the WTO was not elected to run the
world economy or to act as a global government. It operates in secret and
seems to see its mandate, critics say, as undermining the rights of
sovereign states. This issue of democracy is, however, more complex. WTO
partisans point out that the WTO is a forum in which trade policies for an
interdependent world can be ironed out. In response to the question, "Why
shouldn't elected national leaders choose trade representatives?" we need
to take a closer look at the nature of existing democracies. In the United
States or the United Kingdom, two countries generally presented as
paragons of democracy, it is widely understood that trade representatives
represent business elites (as they do in most other countries, whatever
the level of democracy, by whatever measure). The problem is deeply
imbedded in the nature of capitalist democracy.

The objection then is not only a lack of democracy in how the WTO does
business but also a lack of transparency to outside scrutiny. NGOs and
other non-governmental interested parties cannot offer testimony before
mysteriously selected panels. And the larger issue remains: rules which
place profit (so-called market efficiency) above all other human and
environmental considerations. In all of this, the WTO is a worse version
of business-as-usual in those powerful countries whose governments are
dominated by capital. The key point is that President Clinton, Prime
Minister Blair, and the rest choose representatives who work for and
closely with the leading capitalist sectors to craft policies favorable to
corporate interests. As much as possible, they exclude people whose income
is derived from the sale of their labor power and those marginalized by
the corporate system.

Discussion of the democratic deficit is a way of talking about how
decisions are made which affect the whole of societies. This is not,
however, to say that democratic rights which have been won (even in their
limited form) are unimportant, though they are insufficient. Where
democracy is most lacking, the conditions of working people are generally
the worst. In a study of ninety-three countries, Harvard economist Dani
Rodrik found that at each level of manufacturing productivity, democracies
pay higher wages. This is to say that wages are not set by some marginal
product of labor but that, where the bargaining power of labor is weakened
by lack of basic labor rights, workers get a lower share of the value they
produce. Class struggle at the point of production is far harder where
basic democratic rights are most absent. This may account for Rodrik's
finding that workers in those states he labels "free countries" earn 30
percent more on average than those in "partly free countries," and 60
percent more than in "unfree" ones.

Such results, while they may be overly simplistic, suggest that wider
enforcement of basic labor rights (the right to free association,
collective bargaining, and bans on forced and child labor) could have a
profound effect on workers' ability to earn higher wages by rebalancing
the power between capital and labor. Such standards would not mean the end
of international trade, as some prominent economists assert, but could
narrow income differentials between rich and poor. The enforcement of such
modest standards could make a significant difference. But this takes
militancy on the part of popular organizations of the base.

It should be pointed out that rhetorical acceptance of such standards
hardly means they will be respected in practice. In the United States and
the United Kingdom, among other places, recent decades have seen state
power systematically used to weaken trade unions and undermine the rights
free world leaders claim they want others to adopt. Why should more
"agreements in principle" - toothless side deals to the binding corporate
agenda - pushed by the WTO-International Monetary Fund (IMF)-Treasury
Department-Wall Street governance regime be seen as a victory for the
critics? In this regard, organized labor was far too timid in Seattle,
even if its very presence in the streets represented a significant shift
from the practices of the old leadership. Without the "street heat"
generated by those involved in direct actions, the civil disobedience of
blocking delegates, and the sand thrown in the wheels of the machine,
organized labor's largely symbolic protest and relatively mild demands
would have had far less impact. The disruptions - far from detracting from
the AFL-CIO presence - gave their demands greater immediacy, even if it
took the focus off of the organization's leadership.

The fault line which separates more moderate from more radical WTO critics
is that the former are asking that labor standards and environmental
concerns be considered by the WTO as part of its decision-making
processes. The WTO remit in this view has been too narrowly drawn and
needs to be broadened. It is likely that massive popular resistance (while
it will force such a tactical repositioning and a retreat to a token
openness) will hardly achieve the goals protestors have in mind. Radical
critics point out that given the massive movement, the WTO has little
choice but to give at least rhetorical lip service to such demands. It may
even propose institutional changes in procedures, which will appear to
address widespread concerns. But this is unlikely to mean substantial
change. As Lori Wallach reminds us:

When the WTO was established, many environmentalists pushed for an
environmental working group in the WTO. They got one, and after five
years, many of its most energetic proponents are now saying that this
working group has turned into a trade-dominated entity where environmental
laws are studied not to safeguard them but rather to figure out how to get
rid of them. We don't want to put the environment in the hands of an
organization whose charge and world view is commercial .... Global labor
movements now have all the enthusiasm the environmentalists did five years
ago about putting standards into the WTO. I personally am very
skeptical.#6

The problem is a very real one and goes to the heart of how governments
under capitalism divide responsibilities among governmental entities. In
the United States, for example, it is the Treasury Department that deals
with the major issues of concern to transnational corporations. When
foreign governments have serious economic issues to negotiate, they often
go to the Treasury Secretary first, before approaching the WTO or the IMF.
Other constituencies are simply frozen out. Smaller U.S. companies find a
sympathetic ear at the less powerful Commerce Department. Labor and
environmental interests have access to neither. The Labor Department is
not usually consulted on trade and finance matters, even if these areas
are of prime concern to working Americans. The Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) is further down the power pole. Decisions on labor and
environmental matters can, and often are, trumped by the Treasury.

Similarly, it is the executive branch which oversees the details of such
matters - often without consultation, except in rare instances, with
corporate lobbyists whose companies have direct interest in particular
issues. As in the case of the aborted Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI), the WTO aims to set ceilings on democratic initiatives by
preventing, for example, those levels of government closer to the people
(state and local governments, or even the Congress) from introducing
legislation which would interfere with "free" trade. As has been widely
noted, the boycotts against the Apartheid regime that helped bring down
the whites-only South African state would not be permitted under WTO
rules. Efforts to make environmental laws more stringent or protect labor
rights will also be major targets of "WTO-illegal" practice suits. Thus,
the WTO sets a low bar and prevents any innovations which would raise
standards above those that already exist because such measures would have
a deleterious effect on freedom to trade. The WTO would put people and the
environment before profit only if progressive forces were to show such
strength that no other alternative remained. The WTO doesn't leave these
concerns aside out of ignorance or oversight, but by design. Like
capitalist governance more broadly, it is structured to do so. The radical
protest of the demonstrators underscored this. The call for greater
democracy is, in this context, a demand that capital not dominate societal
decision-making.

The demonstrations also seemed to give courage to some third-world
delegates inside the conference, in support of another challenge to WTO
thinking that has been steadily building. While press attention was given
mostly to their opposition to labor and environmental standards as a ruse
for protectionism, less attention was given to third-world efforts to claw
back much of what had been surrendered in the Uruguay Round, and to their
opposition to additional U.S. demands (to be pursued in the aborted
Clinton Round) for an end to nationalist development strategies.
Developing countries in the past have used a combination of subsidies and
measures to protect local markets as a development strategy. The success
of Japan, Korea, and other countries was based on just such practices. The
WTO rules, which the core countries have pushed, prevent such development
trajectories. Even local food self-sufficiency is a target of the WTO. As
countries are forced to open their markets to foreign grains and other
basic foods, local farmers are driven off the land and into cities hardly
ready for such an influx. They also face shortfalls and mass starvation if
the price of imported foods rises as a result of poor weather and
unexpected demands elsewhere.

The demands made by the WTO, which is to say the demands of the United
States and the European Union (EU), are straightforwardly in the interests
of core capitals at the expense of peripheral capital (and, in the case of
the demands of agricultural exporters, at the expense of third-world
farmers and rural communities). They should be seen in the context of core
nations' continued protection of industries which compete with third-world
exports. While the United States claims to have the best interests of the
world's poor at heart in forcing them to liberalize (exercising tough love
and withholding aid in the absence of reforms), what the United States and
the other rich countries actually give is revealing. Thomas Hertel of
Perdue University and Will Martin of the World Bank have shown that rich
countries' average tariffs on manufacturing imports from poor countries
are four times higher than those on imports from other rich countries.
Rather than receiving favored treatment, the developing countries are
treated far more harshly.

This is mostly a matter of bargaining power, but there is also the matter
of technical costs and expertise. The lawyerly approach the United States
has imposed on trade requires all sorts of certification of cost and other
"openness" requirements, which many governments are simply not in a
position to comply with because their record-keeping is not up to it. The
minutia of the legalisms (which are consequential and potentially costly
for noncompliant governments) has placed an inordinate burden on many
smaller and poorer nations. It is even hard for these countries to keep up
with and attempt to master the massive and ever-expanding trade rules. As
of late 1999 in Geneva, the site of most of the international bargaining
on trade, one man (an overextended Iftekhar Chowdhury) acts as coordinator
for forty-eight of the poorest countries in the world. Only fourteen of
these countries can afford to post envoys in Geneva. They are not so
different from Chowdhury's own country, Bangladesh, where approximately a
third of the labor force is unemployed and poor people earn less in a year
than it costs a visiting envoy to stay in one of Geneva's international
hotels. This basic inequality is not unrelated to the acceptance of
measures which prove unexpectedly costly to the developing countries. For
example, a study by two Washington economists estimates that implementing
trade procedures and establishing technical and intellectual property
standards (adopted at the suggestion of the United States) costs more than
a year's development budget for the poorest countries.

The nonindustrialized countries did caucus and submit a detailed list of
priorities for the Seattle meeting agenda, which focused on rectifying
things they had given away in earlier trade negotiations without
understanding their impact. "But," as the New York Times reported, "their
two-page list was mysteriously deleted from the first formal draft of the
agenda that circulated at the organization's Geneva headquarters ...."#7
The United States was accused of bullying tactics but, as U.S. Trade
Representative Charlene Barshefsky made clear, existing agreements
couldn't be reopened. (It would undermine the credibility of future
negotiations, she said.) The United States continues to punish
unilaterally nations that it finds dumping goods into U.S. markets - in a
fairly clear violation of WTO rules - and has insisted that while other
countries make concessions, the United States be able to keep tariffs in
place in such politically sensitive industries as the garment industry
until 2005.

HUMAN RIGHTS, CHINA, AND THE WTO

The discussion is complicated by Clinton-Blair Third Way expressions of
concern over human rights, democracy, and the need for host-government
honesty - by which they mean not allowing third-world officials (whom,
they presume, are corrupt) to rip off foreign banks, investors, and
corporations. More far-sighted capitalists also worry that real social
chaos is developing, and spreading from failed states and states in which
uneven development (in an age of instant communication) creates problems
for core capital. Having the trains run on time has always had appeal for
the corporate class. The local elites which, it should be underlined,
imperialism put in place in the first instance, are now no longer its best
local representatives. Now that the national liberation alternative has
faded and the possibility of nonalignment in a unipolar new capitalist
world order is less realistic, the corruption of these anticommunist
regimes is costly and from a profit-for- transnational-capital
perspective, undesirable. A modern two-party competition bidding for
foreign capital, rather than a dictator and friends and family regime
taking ten percent of everything, is (in the present global conjuncture) a
better alternative. This does not mean the end of repression or the
calculated use of torture and imprisonment when needed, and of course the
sort of capitalist modernization the Clinton-Blair departure suggests is
not aimed at strengthening working-class and popular movements; indeed, it
is the opposite.

Similarly, an analysis is needed concerning the politics inherent in
progressive forces gearing up to stop China from being admitted to the
WTO. This can be criticized as contributing to displacement of class rage
- rightly directed at transnational capital - onto the repressive Chinese
ruling class. Without at all absolving Chinese market-Dengist cadre ("to
get rich by exploiting the people is glorious") and their opportunist
progeny, it is the unregulated power of western capital, the
anti-working-class policies of the American government most particularly,
which should be the focus of our efforts. China had little to do with the
fact that real wages have been stagnant for U.S. workers for the last two
decades or that, while the stock market has increased wealth by trillions
of dollars for the richest 10 percent of the population who own 85 percent
of the stock, most Americans own no stock at all but fuel these gains
through downsizing and givebacks.

On the other hand, Chinese policies and the impact of their huge trade
surplus with the United States brings some issues into better focus as it
obscures others. It clarifies the way national leaders - in collusion with
transnational capital - organize the super-exploitation of their own
citizens and calls attention to the uneven development such export
competitiveness at all costs brings in its wake. It also highlights the
race toward the bottom that occurs as other competitors gain greater
incentive to copy these policies. It focuses on the need to support other
workers who are imprisoned for union organizing or attempting to speak
freely to their comrades. It is a demand for a basic level of democratic
rights for everyone and, in these demands, one witnesses an emergent
internationalist solidarity. At the same time, the fact that China is
hardly the main enemy of U.S. working people needs to be part of any such
discussion.

For reasons which have everything to do with U.S. domestic politics -
specifically the need not to offend the labor movement, which has endorsed
Vice President Gore's run to succeed his boss - President Clinton, in a
comment to a newspaper in Seattle, suggested he wanted to go beyond the
usual empty rhetoric and mandate enforceable labor standards. The reaction
was immediate from third-world delegates. A trade minister from Pakistan
was quoted the next day as saying, "We will block consensus on every issue
if the United States proposal goes ahead." The ruling elites of Pakistan
and other third-world authoritarian (and even formally democratic)
governments have never had an interest in labor standards which could
reduce their ability to exploit the workers of their countries. This does
not mean that they are wrong in suggesting that the United States would
use labor standards as a pretext to impose sanctions when if might suit
U.S. political interests. The United States, abusing its great power, has
always used sanctions selectively and to advance other agendas, and there
is little reason to think labor standards would be used differently.

The use of trade sanctions to enforce labor standards is also opposed by
most third-world unionists, who see job loss resulting without necessary
impact on their wages and working conditions. What they need is help
organizing. International solidarity, exposure of local abuses, financial
assistance to strikers, and pressure on governments who use police-state
tactics against workers would be welcome. But the fact is that, in the
past, the United States has supported the most repressive third-world
regimes. People are rightly skeptical about Clinton's motives. The
solidarity which needs to be extended is to the workers, oppressed and
exploited not simply by transnationals, but by their own capitalists.
Rather than counting on the kindness of passing imperialists, a class
struggle perspective is in order. The same is true in making common cause
with reactionary Republicans who wish to weaken China for their own
reasons.

Similarly, we need to think more about China as related to a host of
issues which arise from the reality that 95 percent of the world's
population growth is taking place in what is euphemistically called the
developing world (from which westerners fear immigration, job loss, the
spread of epidemics, terrorism, and crime). There is a desire to build
defenses, whether new versions of Star War missile defenses or economic
protectionism. The cost of the left's inability to offer a coherent
counter-interpretation of globalization's dangers and damage, and their
sources and solutions, is great.

Increasingly, as we try to develop a more mature politics of
internationalism, we will be faced with racist fears, class divisions, and
gender issues. Western supporters of labor rights will have to examine
their stand on patriarchy's impacts, the domestic and workplace violence
aimed at women, educational discrimination, and employment gender
discrimination in countries other than our own. These are issues which are
being raised by third-world feminists, who confront not only the
resistance of their governments and the capitalists but often male workers
as well. How western supporters can be effective without being
chauvinistic is be a challenge for the labor and human-rights groups in
the West.

RADICAL AGENDAS

What fuels more fundamental social change is a radical vision. Change does
not come about from the mere fact of oppression. In the absence of hope
for meaningful change, a sense that a better alternative exists and is
possible, pessimism and cynicism prevail. A radical vision consists first
of anger at the way things are, the feeling that conditions are
intolerable, but if this is to lead beyond thoughtless and futile
rebellion, it must be accompanied by a belief that a better alternative is
not only desirable but possible; not necessarily tomorrow, but when the
momentum can be turned around. Resistance can have a strong element of
moral witness (speaking truth to power), of rebellion (I'm mad and I won't
take it any more), of reformist goals (our mutual ideals are violated, let
us live up to our agreed upon principles), and of revolutionary
transformation (the institutions of structured inequality and destruction
are necessary to preserve their power, the system must be overthrown, and
a fundamentally different one put in its place). Each of these stances was
visible in Seattle.

Whenever capital is seen to overreach and, in its greed, endanger even the
sustainability and the reproduction of the system, two impulses come to
the fore in terms of redress. From reformers both inside and outside the
system comes a desire to solve the immediately pressing problem by making
changes which allow the system to work better: fuller disclosure and more
open access (with the implicit promise that sunshine is the best
disinfectant). Whether financial market allocation or democratic
policy-making, better information allows for better decisions. The second
impulse is to transform existing social relations of hierarchical power,
to take away power which has been abused, to penalize usurpers, seize what
has been illegitimately appropriated, and break the authority relation of
coercive domination which allows and encourages the intolerable outcomes.

In the first approach, structures of power are left in place so that, as
soon as the crisis is perceived to have passed or diminished in intensity,
the tentacles reach out once more, with renewed confidence - once the high
tide of movement outrage and vigilance is passed. Business as usual
resumes, perhaps with greater care to observe, for public consumption, the
niceties of verbal allegiance to the key words of the movement. It is in
just such a fashion that the very word democracy, at first an insulting
word to describe the rule of the unwashed mob, became a revered ideal of
state elites. Over time, there is erosion of social regulation and the
philosophy of reform gives way to the necessities of realism, the drive to
accumulate. Beyond that, as memory of the crisis - the moment of popular
empowerment and systemic challenge - fades, the reign of capitalist logic
resumes - hegemonic to the extent that it can once again be said, "there
is no alternative." Reforms do not last unless a mobilized, powerful
movement keeps the pressure on and the momentum going.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the New Deal structural reforms had been vitiated:
reforms that protected capital from itself and, to an important extent,
the protected the rest of us from the worst excesses of a capitalism
without social regulation, and which opened space for a somewhat more
inclusive distribution of society's product. They had been defunded,
deregulated, and neoliberalized. The reformist regulatory agencies came to
be headed by individuals whose goals were to sabotage their originally
stated purposes. At a structural level, the forces of production, never
divorced in any event from social relations, developed in new directions -
empowering new fractions of capital and encouraging shifts within the
historic bloc of capitalist domination both domestically and
internationally. In many ways and in many places, they have created
intolerable conditions for people and the planet. In response, to contest
capital's version of globalization, we may be seeing the birth of the
broadest based movement for social, economic, and political change of
recent times. These are hard times for the left and one would not want to
overstate the case. On the other hand, it is difficult to read turning
points. Seattle may prove just such an event.

WTO and Seattle authorities, in their attempts to squash dissent, created
lifetime activists. Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest
Action Network, described her time in Seattle in a Web posting, saying
that she experienced:

a real-life glimpse of what corporate-controlled reality looks like.
Police in the streets, no civil rights, martial law, jail brutality - we
saw that which we jump-started the week with: an action warning about the
loss of democracy - is not just activist rhetoric, not just some
advertisement, but real. We saw, all week long, as did the rest of the
world, what they will do to get their way. But this is only the glimpse of
a future, not the future. All week long we also saw us. In the streets,
counting on each other, trusting each other, loving each other.
Determined, utterly determined, to create a world where reverence is what
we practice, with work that fulfills us; building communities based on
interdependence and cooperation and nurturing relationships that breathe
passion into our lives.

The announcement of a commitment to make it so came through loud and
clear.

We cannot know yet what difference the battle in Seattle will make. We can
say that many of the demands raised there were and are "non-reformist
reforms" in the Andre Gorz sense: reforms which do not base their validity
and right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, or rationales. Some are
critiques (which so enraged the ideologues of the system cited at the
start of this essay) of the productivism of the drive to accumulate for
the sake of expansion of capital regardless of cost to workers, the
environment, the community. They are also driven by a positive
counter-vision of sustainability and social justice. In a number of the
protesting themes is a rejection of capitalism's economic reasoning. It
was the victories in the streets of Seattle, the resistance of other
nations to the domination of the United States in the negotiations, the
gains in public awareness concerning the functions of the WTO in the
global capitalist system, and an underlying change in perception that
prompted so pained an outrage on the part of elite opinion-molders.

In making an overall assessment, we should perhaps take to heart the
quintessentially American framing of the situation offered by John Sellers
of the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society (one of the groups which coordinated
the Seattle protest). He said, "We just hit the big hoop at the halftime
buzzer. But dude, this game is not over."

NOTES
1. Thomas l. Friedman, "Senseless Battle in Seattle, " Business Week,
December 2, 1999.

2. George Melloan, "Welcome to the Seattle World's Fare, Cerca 1999,"Wall
Street Journal, November 30, 1999.

3. "Welch's March to the South," Business Week, December 6, 1999.

4. Martin Wolf, "WTO: In defense of global capitalism," Financial Times,
December 8, 1999.

5. Michelle Conlin, "Hey, What About Us?" Business Week, December 27,
1999.

6. Lori Wallach, "Higher Standards?" The Nation, December 6, 1999.

7. Elizabeth Olson, "Anger on Agenda for World Trade Meeting," New York
Times, October 14, 1999.
_________________________________________________________________

All material copyright 2000 by Monthly Review

--------------------------


Volume 51, Number 8

January 2000

Notes from the Editors

Our Assistant Editor, Vicki Larson, was in Seattle for the demonstrations
against the WTO. We are pleased, indeed proud, to present Vicki's account
of these very important events.

I was in Seattle from Saturday, November 26, until Wednesday, December 1.
Many organizations (including Public Citizen, Global Exchange, and the
International Forum on Globalization) offered workshops and teach-ins to
educate people about "free" trade and fair trade and to prepare
demonstrators for the mass actions and protests on Tuesday, November 30.
The Northwest Labor & Employment Law Office (LELO) helped ensure that
people of color were represented at the big union rally the same day, and
the Independent Media Center (IMC) mobilized journalists and activists to
document and broadcast everything that was taking place. In the streets
and at trainings given by the Direct Action Network (DAN), I joined
thousands of people unwilling to give in to the invisible government of
the WTO. We learned legal support techniques and jail solidarity tactics,
and developed strategies for nonviolent action through role-playing and
discussion. For a few days, in Seattle and in cities in solidarity all
over the world, people finally mattered more than profit.

At seven in the morning on November 30, I went with several friends to the
opening rally at Seattle Central Community College on Capitol Hill. A few
people spoke to the crowd; puppets, banners, drums, and a tuba were
mustered; and we began marching through the rain toward the convention
center, where the ministerial meetings were to be held. My group, which
included three legal support people and two lawyers, decided to stay near
the blue flags that signified people willing to be arrested. (Green flags
were for people who wanted to participate but not end up in jail). A few
minutes after we started walking, a group of about fifty people in hooded
black sweatshirts, black pants, and black boots broke off from the main
march. We joined them, thinking that they were likely to encounter police
and might need legal support. We yelled "wake up!" to the apartments above
storefronts as we walked, and people hung out their windows to watch or
encourage. Police blockades were everywhere. Our route was circuitous and
fluid, decided upon by a few people with walkie-talkies at the front of
the group. As we neared the convention center, we found about thirty
people locked down in front of one of the entrances, facing several squad
cars. The anarchists we'd been with scattered, and my group talked to the
people stretched across the road, arms joined inside lengths of pipe.

The rest of our day was spent on the move. We ran from blockade to
blockade: sometimes as legal support, calling in to the DAN legal office
to ask where help was most needed, writing the legal office phone number
on the insides of demonstrators' arms in case they landed in jail,
gathering information from a man who'd been shot in the face with a rubber
bullet (minutes after we'd heard cops tell reporters they weren't
shooting); sometimes as impromptu medics, washing out the eyes of
teargassed or pepper-sprayed demonstrators; and sometimes as protesters,
getting gassed several times ourselves.

I've heard and read incessant commentary about the violence. By Monday,
December 6, one newspaper was estimating 2.5 million dollars in property
damage and 7 million dollars in lost revenue for downtown stores.
Laid-back Seattle residents at first did seem frustrated with the "hubbub"
but, as they became aware of the police aggression, quickly began siding
with the protesters. But what about violence of the WTO? Windows were
smashed and tagged with graffiti at the Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy,
Nike, Starbucks, and Warner Brothers, all of whom are known for their use
of sweatshop labor. No one screeching about violence seems bothered by
women losing fingers as they sew clothes for the Gap in Saipan. Shouldn't
we show our intolerance of murderous corporate greed in the most direct
way possible? I saw a man yelling "Use your words!" at a black-hooded
teenager kicking in a window at Starbucks. Since when does any giant
corporation or the WTO really use words? If you don't have money, how do
you speak to a multinational corporation? And the policespraying tear gas,
pepper spray, wielding billy clubs, and shooting rubber bullets in defense
of the corporate capitalist statewere much more violent than any of the
protesters.

Because of the heightened sense of struggle (and success) in Seattle,
coming home has been very difficult. As this goes to press, one week after
the convergence, I am back in New York City, with its frenzied consumers,
massive billboards, and vapid holiday fervor. I am profoundly
uncomfortable. I don't want to relax or adjust; I want to keep fighting.
The spirit that makes revolution possible was strong on the streets of
Seattle. I saw courage, strategy, and determination that I am neither
willing nor able to forget. People who were gassed or sprayed moved over
to the sidewalk to clean their eyes and skin and catch their breath, then
went straight back into the street. We fought the WTO with our bodies and
our minds, shut down the opening day of meetings, and helped derail the
piece of the program that extends the power of global capitalism. A clear
and radical goal was articulated and accomplished. I saw solidarity emerge
among labor and environmentalists, liberals and radicals, young and old.
Multiple approaches flourished: a protestor could march with the AFL-CIO
or dress up as a sea turtle, try to block delegates attempting to enter
the convention center, dance to hip-hop and techno coming over a sound
system hidden inside a van blocking an intersection, lock down in front of
a row of riot police, answer phones, dispatch medics, smash windows.

Now the long-term struggle resumes: continuing to spread the word, keeping
people awake, angry, alive. One piece of graffiti was painted all over
Seattle: "Don't Forget. We are Winning."

======================

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acnowledge the
source. ***

<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html

http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Om