Report
on the Symposium on
ACTS OF RESISTANCE AGAINST GLOBALISATION
FROM THE SOUTH
In the three day meeting that took place in Ankara between the fifth and the seventh of September, there was one consistent theme running across all the lectures and debates: globalisation is the intensified practice of imperialism and, because it is a universal phenomenon, there has to be an internationalist platform of resistance. As the new international accumulation dynamic shifts from a policy of beggar your neighbour to beggar your own working class, a serious contradiction inherent in a growing international division of labour has to be challenged by a globally socialised platform of working people. As the world came closer together in real time, it so
transpired that what the growing economic gap was driving apart, the social and political struggle was bringing together.
From the worker operated factories in Argentina and the anti-privatisation movement in Turkey, to the new phenomenon of housing cooperatives in China, the momentum against the rule of capital was building. Whereas for most of the twentieth century the industrial working class was concentrated in the developed world, between 1980 and 2000, the industrial working class in the third world grew by about two-folds. Sweat-shop labour market conditions in the developing world contributed to sending corporate profits
to their highest levels between 1990 and 2000. Capitals ability to disperse production and distribution around the world became effectively the private appropriation from gains in the development of productive forces and its expansion and exploitation of low-tech processes in the developing world. The means of assault and control of global capital vary in intensity, but invariably aggressive encroachment, including re-colonisation as in the case in Iraq, is supplanting peaceful market expansion through commodity realisation. To rephrase Marx, there is more blood and fire in shifting primitive capitalist accumulation to the developing world. Globally as well, the absolute general law of capitalist development was in evidence once more because, unlike the early phases of industrial development, the new structure of technology was less friendly (labour absorbing) to the
evicted or disposed peasants, meaning that much unemployment and misery were also being created. The worst hit, were states in the Arab Near-East and Africa where the security aspects of the state were frail and where outright manipulation and military aggression provided the means of expropriation.
Globalization is not the simple market extension of capitalism to the third world, because the ugliest forms of capitalist markets already exist in the third world. It is the process by which more advanced capital in the developed countries gears up less productive capital in the developing world to the requirements of its higher pace of capital accumulation by extra-economic and violent means. The pace of uneven development and disparities in incomes and living conditions increases both, nationally and globally, intensifying the principal contradiction of capital, which is now, globally socialised production that is privately appropriated. In the laissez-faire atmosphere of the new world order, the more cut-throat monopolistic competition becomes - the more subservient the state became to the rule of capital. The way
to a new re-division of territory was all but ready. When the tides of hurricane Katrina receded, it was American racism that was caught in the nude. American foreign policy is nothing but the ugly extension of its domestic policy. And, in that regard, the re-colonisation of Iraq represented an utmost prority to a US capital enfeebled by its eroding share in the club of the rich.
For a US empire standing by the trinity of guns, oil and the dollar, dollarising and controlling oil would provide it with a stranglehold on would be competing imperial pundits from the old world and rising powers from the developing world. It allows it to continue to build deficits, borrow in its own currency and build fictitious capital on a global scale- now to the tune of some 33 trillion dollars. The US has once more become a liability to the global financial system and global capital is, once more, looking for a soft landing, now ever in doubt after its impending failure in Iraq. As the monstrous US capital gets bogged down in Iraq and its dreams of multiple theatre warfare get shattered by the formidable resistance of the Iraqi people, the international working class movement can experience a little more breathing space. The unthinkable withdrawal from Gaza under Sharon, Chavez Latin integrationist policy, and Iran breaking nuclear rules are vital signs to note in the conditions for struggle. There cannot be two ways about this: supporting the struggle of the Iraqi
people for national liberation should become the foremost objective of the international working class. The war on terror, a close kin of the war on Iraq, amounts to an assault on the achievements of working people and their civil liberties everywhere.
No effort is being spared by the imperialist to cut their perception as a force of occupation. First there was a failed effort to change the Iraqi flag, after which armed resistance picked up. Then there were elections, after which resistance soared. Now there is a constitution fanfare and resistance escalates. It will be impossible for the US to win in Iraq because the anti-British colonial struggle still permeates the social imagination and the vestigial forms of social bonding and lack anonymity render collaboration with the enemy more like self-delusion. In a scene that will be reminiscent of
Vietnam, those who came on the backs of American tanks will scurry to catch a helicopter in Baghdads US embassy. Reciprocally, the criminality of the US army mounts and now, like Vietnam, the possibility of extending the war to neighbouring states, Syria and Iran, and enlisting the Near Eastern Gendarme, Israel, in the aggression is just a matter of time.
Already, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as an immediate outcome of the first US aggression in 1991, the ensuing embargo, and the all out invasion and colonisation. Life expectancy in Iraq has been cut by ten years and hunger now prevails. Yet, resistance in Iraq will be spewed by the real conditions of occupation and, hence, it is anti-American and not sectarian, mystical or theocratic. Much resistance action in the South of Iraq goes unreported for malign reasons. Standing on the sidelines of the
war in Iraq is, in part, contributing to the crime. Lest one forgets that narrow ideological squabble over the ideological forms of resistance in Iraq delays international support; the prolongation of the war process will leave the whole of humanity in the grip of the barbarism of US capital. And, in the choice between barbarism and humanism, there is every reason to believe that in light of the intersection of a human enlightenment legacy with the growing deplorable social conditions that, when all else is said and done and when the dust settles, it is the demystification of the struggle that is likely to take root.
