globalization from below

 Social movements respond to globalisation
(something I wrote for the Sunday paper here (published a couple of days
ago))
by Patrick Bond
University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management

It is up to progressive civil society to speak truth to power, in the
process contesting the globalisation of capital in favour of the
globalisation of people and the reconstruction and development of
national and local economies. True, a few countries and populist (yet
mainly authoritarian) leaders--from Malaysia to Zimbabwe to
Venezuela--are resisting the power of global finance in erratic ways.
But too many governing elites, North and South, remain bought into
the system to challenge the nexus of Washington, Wall Street, the
City of London and Frankfurt.
     This was also true at the height of the last Great Depression,
when in 1933 the economist John Maynard Keynes pleaded, "I
sympathize with those who would minimize, rather than with those
who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas,
knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which
should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun
whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all,
let finance be primarily national." And although Keynes also once
acknowledged, "In the class struggle, you will find me on the side
of the educated bourgeoisie," there is increasing evidence that his
antipathy to globalisation is also the emerging position of educated
radicals.
     In Bangkok in late March, an international conference--
"Economic Sovereignty in a Globalising World: Creating People-
Centred Economics for the 21st Century"--was hosted by an Asian
NGO, Focus on the Global South, headed by the prolific sociologist
Walden Bello. Bello is considered the only intellectual to have
predicted the East Asian meltdown (in his 1991 book, Tigers in
Distress), and his think-tank drew 320 people from 40 countries.
Topics under discussion included foreign debt, financial regulation,
trade policy, capital controls, speculation taxes, investment
agreements and institutional reform at the national and global
scales,
as well as local currencies, community banks and food security.
     As Bello summarised, "Strong consensus was clear on several
key issues: immediate and radical reform of the IMF, debt
cancellation and abolition of the Highly-Indebted Poor Countries
(debt `relief') Initiative, no new round of the World Trade
Organisation, and total opposition to any variation of the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment. In addition, the rights and
responsibilities of national governments to set economic policies
determined through domestic democratic processes was upheld. The
urgent need to quell the power and volatility of finance was repeated
throughout the conference as was the importance of supporting a
job-creating, equitable and environmentally-sustainable real
economy."
     The conference resolved that the Managing Director of
the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, and his executive
and board should resign on the basis that they consistently misread
the needs of "emerging market" countries (East Asia, Russia, South
Africa, Brazil, Mexico); that conditions associated with emergency
IMF bailout loans have actually made matters worse (and did not, in
many cases, stop the rot); and that the pain has been shared terribly
unequally, mainly by the poor and the producers, as against the
financiers and Washington economists.
     But before defining combative short-term responses to
globalisation, it is also important to understand its economic
Achilles Heel, a point made not only in Bangkok but also at the
highest political levels in South Africa from late last year.
Activists like Ko Young-Jee, general secretary of the Korean
Confederation of Trade Unions, and other Asian labour organisers
invoked classical Marxist arguments about the global
"overaccumulation of capital"--the tendency of the system to
overproduce goods given limited consumer buying-power, and then turn
to speculative outlets--and this was largely confirmed by economists
as diverse as Elmar Altvater (a red-green advisor to former German
finance minister Oskar Lafontaine), Jayati Ghosh (a Cambridge-trained
Delhi-based Keynesian) and Susan George (a poverty expert who
codirects Amsterdam's Transnational Institute).
     Likewise, in its October 1998 summit, the ANC-Cosatu-SACP
Alliance also concluded, "The present crisis is, in fact, a global
capitalist crisis, rooted in a classical crisis of overaccumulation
and declining profitability. Declining profitability has been a
general feature of the most developed economies over the last 25
years. It is precisely declining profitability in the most advanced
economies that has spurred the last quarter of a century of
intensified globalisation.These trends have resulted in the greatly
increased dominance (and exponential growth in thesheer quantity) of
speculative finance capital, ranging uncontrolled over the globe in
pursuit of higher returns."
     Opponents of high finance are also in hot pursuit, including a
loose activist coalition known as the People's Global Alliance (who
protest establishment gatherings such as Geneva trade meetings and
the Davos, Switzerland sessions), the Zapatista-inspired
Intercontinental Encounters For Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism, and the Jubilee 2000 debt cancellation initiative. In
Bangkok, former Nicaraguan deputy foreign minister Alejandro
Bendana and Jubilee 2000 South Africa chair Molefe Tsele offered
powerful voices for debt cancellation and reparations in cases of
"odious debt"--loans taken out by dictators whose democratic
successors are being forced to repay.
     Carlos Fortin, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), conceded in
Bangkok that "people power" should not be underestimated.
"Sustained campaigning by NGOs led to the abandonment of the
controversial Multilateral Agreement on Investment. These groups
were also instrumental in the creation of the international
convention banning landmines. They can also play an important role in
reforming global financial systems."
     But a key question remains: how much effort should be put by
civil society forces into reforming global financial institutions,
and how much into compelling national elites to opt out, following
Keynes' advice. "We are seeing the emergence of a coordinated and
organised global movement against speculative capital and the IMF,"
said Bello. But the movement's strategic gameplan is still to be
mapped out.

Patrick Bond teaches at Wits and is author of Uneven Zimbabwe: A
Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment (Trenton,
Africa World Press, 1998).
Patrick Bond
email:  pbond@wn.apc.org * phone:  2711-614-8088
51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
work:  University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
email:  bondp@zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za
phone:  2711-488-5917 * fax:  2711-484-2729