Re: globalization from below

Social Movements Respond to Globalization

The making of people-centred economics through people power is a right 
actions to  make change to the sobbering of the disaffected majority in the 
globalization process. Walden Bello suggests that globalization of people 
instead of the currently
prevailing globalization of capital. he and others also strongly argue that
civil society should focus on the welfare of the global population than
profiteering nature of the new world order. According to their argument, the 
engine of
the new world order is the capital profitability
doctrine and does not consider the people at large, and in fact marginalise 
the poor.

They also advocate Keynes's notion of "minimising economic entanglement
among nations", which in nutshell is meant to boost entitlement capability 
and fringe
benefits to the people, and hence improve the income distribution. By and
large, the argument is the people should benefit from growth, and the
investment pattern should focus on improving the welfare of the public than
simply biased towards profit-orientation. A real economy, according to the
social movement advocates, is the economy that is reaching to the people,
improve income distribution, create jobs, and environmentally sound.

For doing so, they uphold the development of democratic processes and
national governments rights and responsibilities to draw public welfare
favoring economic policies and programs, primarily based on national
finance. But the current national policies and programs are mailny derived
by the attempt to attract capital, get recognition from the IMF. Finance is
not at all national in nature, rather foreign dependent in most countries.
The reliance on the responsibilities of the government in public welfare
improvement is not itself convincing. The public welfare advocates blame
the IMF and its policies for perpetuating poverty than contributing solving
it, and according to them IMF even worsen the situation of the poor. Call
for the cancellation of debt to the poor countries. They oppose WTO since
it favors the economically powerful countries at the expense of the poor
nations.

But the main issue is that: are the social movements condemnations of the
current globalisation of capital in favor of globalisation of people
actionable?  At the outset, the simple answer is no. To explore a bit
further, the social movement group are in the process of drawing "strategic
gameplane" to counteract the present reality. Will those strategies be
implemented and by-whom? Will the current beneficiaries give in for the
world welfare improvement and environmental sustainability? There are
difficult questions that need answers for their plane to succeed.

The globalisation of capital has a very strong foundation and profound
support from the powerful groups, both within politics and outside. Capital
export, capital profitability, and hence globalisation of capital is an
ideology with a very deep and strong root that cannot easily be removed by
the social and public welfare improvement advocates, accompanied by
environmentalists and naturalists support. In the economically powerful
west, capital (money) and its power is not only an economic ideology but
also developed it to a system and "money culture." No notion of humanity
and morality of public welfare advocates had strong place in it. It is
even difficult to deal the widening income gap and unemployment in the
west, let alone addressing the world wide public welfare situation through 
globalisation of people.
No capital investing giant cares to analysis or understand the 'economic
Achilles Heel' of globalisation of capital. Over accumulation of capital
breeds over production of goods and declining profitability inducing
further expansion of capital theming for profiteering to the areas it has
never reached before. This will not increase the welfare and the income
distribution of the newly explored areas, rather worsen inequality.

The "people power" should not be underestimated does not sink in the minds
of the greedy profit seekers, nor the economic and political pains of the
poor as long as they can make profit. In all these, we learn why the world
wags and what wags it in the globalisation process: money/capital and the
greedy drive for profiteering. Humanism and morality advocates have no
strong base, let alone radically transforming the system.

The solution attempt of the people-welfare activists needs dealing with
unprecedented problems, and asking unshakable (unaskable) questions under
the present world economic order. A powerful impetus also lies with the
capital globalisation advocates, not with that of people globalisation. The
social movement group's call exhort to undertake profound reforms, changes,
and bold measures to undermine the current globalisation of capital that
took "titanic activities" nature, and replace it with welfare-and
environment-oriented globalisation of people. Care for each other as a
world community? It requires inexhaustible fount of vital forces and
existing systems to change, and will face tremendous challenges in
different spheres. It does not dint a capacity to build confidence in the
morrow to face the shackles-all difficulties and trial to be in 'store' for
poineers.  Seems a positive hope and out look for the world, any way.


Temesgen muleta-erena,
Thames valley University, London



>From: christopher chase-dunn <chriscd@jhu.edu>
>Reply-To: chriscd@jhu.edu
>To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
>Subject: globalization from below
>Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 09:17:16 -0400
>
>  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
>


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