on the "anti-globalization" movement

The debates on the Fair Trade list over China and Global Exchange reflect an
even deeper debate over the anti-globalization movement: should it be
anti-capitalist or liberal reformist? The following article attempts to
dissect and articulate this debate from an anti-capitalist perspective. It
is based on an earlier article which appeared in the Feb. 2000 issue of From
the Left, the newsletter of the Marxist Section of the American Sociological
Association. As long as credits are retained, there are no restrictions on
the article's reproduction or redistribution.

UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLES OF SEATTLE AND WASHINGTON
By Dick Platkin and Chuck O'Connell*


In November 1999, when the "Battle of Seattle" grabbed headlines around the
world, it also excited grizzled activists from the civil rights and
anti-Vietnam war movements. They had renewed hopes that politically
energized students and workers would form new left-wing movements.

Several months have now passed, and it is time to carefully examine the
anti-globalization movement which organized most of the anti-WTO events in
Seattle and anti-IMF and World Bank actions in Washington, D.C. The profound
contradictions of this movement are reflected by the basic facts. Tens of
thousands of demonstrators, with sophisticated messages and media outreach,
drawn from dozens of countries, appeared at hundreds of venues within a
period of several days. On one hand, anti-globalization forces roused tens of
thousands of students and workers into political activism over questions of
economic justice, and many may eventually develop into revolutionary
anti-capitalist activists.

On the other hand, as carefully documented by University of Ottawa economics
professor, Michael Chossudovsky, in Seattle and Beyond: Disarming the New
World Order (posted on the Internet, November 25, 1999, at
www.emperors-clothes.com) the leadership of much of the anti-WTO movement is
not only discreetly linked to the WTO, but enjoys political and financial
connections to well-funded corporate, AFL-CIO, and foundation-based
organizations emphasizing "Fair Trade."   This is a slogan whose humane
appearance and demands for corporate responsibility cloaks calls for
protectionism, patriotism, and the production and exchange of consumer goods
for profit (i.e, capitalism).

The anti-globalization movement, not surprisingly, presents arguments which
are questionable and politically suspect. A careful look at them reveals the
movement's class outlook and shows why as demonstrated by Chossudovsky it has
received careful nurturing from ruling class think tanks, corporate-funded
foundations, and management- oriented unions, such as the Steelworkers
(USWA).

FAIR TRADE ARGUMENT 1:   STUDENTS AND WORKERS SHOULD OPPOSE THE WTO BECAUSE
IT WILL DRAG DOWN THE STELLAR CONDITIONS OF WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES.
As articulated by such labor leaders as USWA President George Becker at
anti-WTO rallies in Seattle and Washington, this argument is amazingly
unpersuasive. The sad truth is that workers in all other industrialized
countries fear being dragged down to the second-rate working conditions of
the American companies with whom Becker is allied. If he looked around, he
would see that tens of millions of US workers are paid the minimum wage or
even below, and hundreds of thousands have been forced to accept the
compulsory sub-minimum wages of the workfare program. Only 11 percent of the
U.S. working class are represented by unions, and most of these unions are
lead by pro-management officers and staff. Over 40 million U.S. workers do
not have health insurance, and most of the rest are stuck with mediocre
HMO's. US workers have no guaranteed vacation, and those who do get
vacations usually get two weeks, unlike Germany's six weeks and France's five
weeks.   American workers also have no paid maternity or paternity leave, and
must endure a legal 40-hour workweek unchanged since 1939, while reality is
much worse. According to Harvard economist Juliet Schore, the U.S. workweek
has been rising continuously over the past two decades, while that of
Europeans has been declining, along with their additional holidays and
vacations. The result is that, on average, Americans now work approximately
two months more per year than Europeans.

Moreover, while anti-globalization/Fair Trade leaders in Seattle and
Washington criticized sweatshops and other deplorable working conditions in
Third World countries, especially China, they conveniently skimmed over their
increasing prevalence in the United States.   For example, Seattle's Boeing
company, whose union leadership has vigorously denounced China's use of
prison labor, contracts out work to the Washington State prison system
without any protests from Boeing's union leadership!   The effect of this
strategy is to draw unionized U.S. workers and other anti-WTO protesters into
an alliance with U.S. imperialists against their capitalist rivals in Asia,
Europe, and the Third World. In effect, the Fair Trade movement mimics
another program of the Steel Workers union, "Stand up for Steel." This is a
lobbying effort which openly joins the USWA's officers and the steel
companies' executives together in proposals for protectionist legislation
against Russian, Chinese, and Brazilian steel imports.

FAIR TRADE ARGUMENT 2:   GLOBALIZATION IS A NEW STAGE OF CAPITALISM IN WHICH
CONFLICT AMONG CAPITALIST NATIONS IS SUBSUMED UNDER THE DOMINATION OF A NEW
GLOBAL CAPITALIST ELITE.
For example, in "A Citizen's Guide to the World Trade Organization,"
published in July 1999 by the Working Group on the WTO/MAI, the WTO is
described as the main mechanism of corporate globalization. They further
describe it as powerful new commerce agency which has set up a comprehensive
system of corporate managed trade to benefit corporations and investors from
134 member countries.

Although it is surely true that global capitalist economic activity has
grown immensely in recent decades, this argument, too, is unpersuasive.
Capitalism has been a worldwide system for several centuries. It arose
through global conquest, slavery, genocide, and plunder, as Marx demonstrated
in his analysis of "primitive accumulation" in Capital. It divided up the
world among the leading imperialist powers during the late 19th century. And
early in the 20th century, a decade before World War I, Marxists, led by
Lenin and Kautsky, engaged in an important debate over the nature of
imperialism. Kautsky argued that imperialists could and would unite in one
globalized elite to prevent future world wars and workers' revolutions, while
Lenin argued that inter-imperialist contradictions would manifest themselves
through war. World Wars I and II settled this important debate for most of
the 20th century. Yet, that debate has been rekindled by many
anti-globalization groups. They are (unknowingly) recycling Kautsky's
argument when they claim that the WTO, IMF, and World Bank represent a new
capitalist consensus to override national sovereignty and democracy when they
impinge upon profitability.

FAIR TRADE ARGUMENT 3: THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DEMONSTRATORS ON THE
STREETS OF SEATTLE CAUSED THE FAILURE OF THE WTO MEETING.   The Battle of
Seattle was moving, it was exciting, it was headline grabbing, it was
revealing of fascist police violence, but it did not sink the WTO. As
pointed out by Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School of
Business in the Feb. 7, 2000, Business Week:

      "The failure of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle has
been interpreted by the opponents of globalization as a David-and-Goliath
battle, with small non-governmental organizations as the victorious David and
huge multinational corporations and their governmental champions as the
vanquished Goliath. This interpretation is wrong. The meetings broke down
not because the opponents of globalization protested outside on the streets.
The proponents themselves were unable to reach a compromise on a negotiating
agenda within the allotted time."

      Walter Russell Mead in the December 5, 1999, Los Angeles Times, was
even more poignant. In "Skewered in Seattle" he argued, "Without one
demonstrator, the WTO meeting would have failed because of serious
disagreements over trade between the three emerging trading blocks: Asia,
North and South America, and Europe."

Furthermore, a second cleavage, between advanced industrialized countries
and third world countries, also significantly contributed to the failure of
the WTO to even agree on meeting agendas. Therefore, in our view, the main
danger posed by global capitalism in coming decades will not come from
capitalist unity through the corporate managed trade of the WTO. The real
danger is the sharpening competition and conflict among capitalists, as
acknowledged by Tyson and Mead.   It cannot be overcome by either the Free
Traders of the WTO or the reformed trade rules and "high road development
standards" as advocated in Davos, Switzerland by Fair Trade spokesperson and
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (International Herald Tribune, January 29,
2000).

This summer the considerable resources of the anti-globalization movement
will be devoted to organizing demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in
Los Angeles.   For these Fair Trade demonstrations and movements to go beyond
the protectionism and patriotism of their corporate and foundation sponsors,
they must break with the patriotic and reformist ideology of their leadership
and adopt an internationalist and anti-capitalist outlook based on the
following points:

First, over the past 100 years the world has been under the thumb of global
capitalism.   It has reached into every nook and cranny of social life,
leaving the world's entire population engaged in commodity production.
Nearly all goods are now produced to maximize profit through market exchanges
(i.e. trade), and this economic system logically and historically produces
exploitation, environmental degradation, and wars.

Second, as long as capitalism is maintained, the humane goals of the
anti-globalization movement related to the environment and working conditions
cannot be met. The members of this movement must soon make a profound moral
choice: Will they maintain their commitment to reforming capitalism, in
which case their goals can never be obtained?   Or, will they abandon their
commitment to capitalism in order to achieve their objectives?

Third, put more urgently, the anti-globalization movement is already on a
slippery slope. When today's trade disputes inevitably turn into trade wars,
and these trade wars inevitably turn into shooting wars, the base of the
movement will be at a moral cross roads. If the anti-globalization
protesters remain in the grip of the Fair Trade movement's patriotic outlook
(i.e., focusing on symptoms of class exploitation when they appear out of the
United States), they will eventually become cannon fodder in an
inter-imperialist war.

But if they adopt an internationalist and anti-capitalist position, they may
achieve what previous generations of Marxists have thus far only partially
and temporarily achieved.   They may become the grave diggers of global
capitalism.

This is no easy choice, but it is an essential one, and it is incumbent on
Marxist scholars to fully articulate the real choice open to the thousands of
honest young people who have been and will be drawn into the major
anti-globalization actions in the spring, summer, and beyond.

Furthermore, we need to ask this new generation of activists a basic
question: Suppose your anti-globalization actions succeeded in producing
corporate accountability, an open WTO, and truly fair trade?   How much of a
difference would these reforms actually make? Corporations would still exist
to extract surplus value from workers and transfer it to investors-owners.
Corporations would still produce for profit rather than to meet human need.
Corporations would still plunge the economy into periodic crises of
overproduction. Corporations would still maintain a reserve army of labor as
a whip over the working class.

An open WTO which allowed "progressives" on its boards would still be like a
university regents committee with its student representatives. The student
is allowed a voice and a vote, but the regents still hold predominate power.

No matter how "fair" trade becomes, it will not solve the crises of
overproduction and the competition among capitalists which regularly escalate
into conflicts. Therefore, we propose that progressive intellectuals present
the honest activists of the anti-globalization movement with several
contrasting viewpoints on the nature of trade, such as the following:

         The issue is not an undemocratic WTO, IMF, or World Bank, but the
absence of democratic processes in all aspects of production, distribution,
and consumption.

         The issue is not fair trade, but the crisis of overproduction.

         The issue is not globalization per se, but the irrational,
unnecessary production of goods for global trade which do not address
fundamental human needs for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education,
and cultural development.

         The issue is not corporate accountability, but the private ownership
of the means of production.

         The issue is not the hyper-exploitation of Third World workers, but
the exploitation of all workers.

         The issue is not fair trade, but the irreconcilable contradictions
between trading blocks.

         The issue is not globalization, but the inter-imperialist wars which
will emerge to militarily "resolve" competition among capitalists.

We must remember that when trade wars turn into shooting wars, efforts to
produce "fair trade" and "corporate accountability" will matter very little.
And these wars will come. The 20th century was the century of war, not
peace. The crises of overproduction and inter-imperialist competition which
gave rise to these wars still haunt global capitalism. When new wars erupt,
what are we to do?   Do we make demands for a "fair war" and "military
accountability?" While this might mitigate some of the destruction, it will
neither prevent it or end it.

Have we been reduced to such a pathetic state that we can only dream of
softening up wage-slavery, rather than overthrowing it? Most workers know
that if their bosses and supervisors failed to show up for work that they the
workers know enough about the production process that they could order the
raw materials, make the product, track the inventory, and supply the product
to those who need it. If we know how to produce without the bosses telling
us what to do, then why do we need the bosses and owners?

But, as long as we dwell on making trade a bit more "fair" and corporations
a bit more "accountable", we will never devise a way to live free from the
yoke of capitalism with its perpetual wars, workplace exploitation, and
environmental degradation.

* Dick Platkin (rplatkin@aol.com) is an urban planner in Southern
California. Chuck O'Connell teaches sociology at UC Irvine.    Comments and
questions are most welcome.

on the "anti-globalization" movement

by Spectors

26 April 2000 13:18 UTC