[pf] Globalization From Below

by Tom Wheeler

20 December 2000 22:45 UTC

http://www.alternet.org/
Globalization From Below

Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, The Nation
December 14, 2000

In the year since the "Battle of Seattle," international demonstrations from
Washington, DC, to Okinawa and from Bangkok to Prague have confronted and
sometimes halted meetings of the WTO, IMF, World Bank and other instruments
of globalization. They have had successes that could not have been imagined
just a year ago. They have reframed the debate on globalization, put its
advocates on the defensive and forced change in the rhetoric if not the
actions of world leaders and global institutions.

Such confrontations will no doubt continue to play an important role, but
the limits to simply rallying for the next Seattle are becoming increasingly
clear. Is this just a movement of "meeting-stalkers," as Naomi Klein has put
it, or can it develop the grassroots power and broad social vision that
might make real change? To answer that question, one must look beyond
dramatic confrontations at international conferences, which are only a
media-grabbing extension of a far broader movement that international law
scholar Richard Falk has called "globalization from below."

Globalization from below has emerged from diverse concerns and experiences.
Environmentalists identified globalization as a source of acid rain and
global warming and saw global corporations and the World Bank sponsoring the
destruction of local environments around the world. Poor people's movements
in the Third World and their supporters around the globe saw neoliberalism,
international financial capital and structural adjustment as key causes of
global poverty. Advocates for small farmers in both the First and Third
Worlds identified new trade agreements as a means to destroy family farming
in the interest of agribusiness. Labor movements realized that international
capital mobility was leading not to mutual benefit for workers but to
competitive wage-cutting. Women's movements identified workers exploited in
the global sweatshop as predominantly women and structural adjustment as an
attack on public programs that women particularly need. Consumer movements
identified neoliberalism and new trade agreements as attacks on high
national standards for food and product safety. College students became
outraged that products bearing their schools' logos were being made by
children and women forced to work sixty or more hours per week for less than
a living wage.

These disparate developments are all responses to what Falk has called
"globalization from above," an epochal change that involves far more than
international organizations like the WTO, IMF and World Bank. It represents
the globalization of production, markets and finance; the global
restructuring of corporations and work; the development of new technologies
like the Internet; a radically changed role for the state; the dominance of
neoliberal ideology; large-scale tourism and poverty-induced immigration;
worldwide media domination by the culture of corporate globalism; and a
neo-imperialism that has concentrated control of poor countries in the hands
of First World investors.

At its heart lies the ability of capital to move freely around the world,
resulting in the dynamic often referred to as the race to the bottom, a
destructive competition in which workers, communities and entire countries
are forced to gut social, labor and environmental protections to attract
mobile capital. Despite the media's focus on the flight of jobs from First
to Third World countries, just as devastating is the competition among Third
World countries desperately seeking jobs and investment at any cost.

Those affected by globalization from above have begun to converge, brought
together by common interests, goals and a number of specific campaigns. This
emerging movement ˜this network of networks˜ is the iceberg of which the
street demonstrations form the most visible tip. It is the potential power
of this confluence of forces and the still-larger forces that share its
interests, not the threat of a few thousand demonstrators, that troubles the
sleep of finance ministers and international bureaucrats.

Participants in the movement for globalization from below have varied
agendas, but the movement's unifying mission is to bring about sufficient
democratic control over states, markets and corporations to insure a viable
future for people and the planet. Beyond just saying no to the WTO, World
Bank and IMF, achieving that goal requires that people organize themselves
and force change at every level, from local to global, in both government
and civil society. It requires that they define these struggles as responses
to a common problem, as part of a common movement and as sharing common
goals. It requires linking together in the manner of the Lilliputians in
Jonathan Swift's fable Gulliver's Travels, who were able to capture
Gulliver, many times their size, by tying him up with hundreds of threads.

While attention has been focused on big international demonstrations, in
fact the movement for globalization from below has been acting and linking
up in an enormous range of ways that may be less visible than
meeting-stalking but that transcend its limitations.

Many actions are linking local concerns to globalization: During the
September/October Prague demonstrations, coordinated protests were held in
Denver, Indianapolis, Boston and dozens of other US cities. In Hartford,
Connecticut, 300 unionized janitors and student activists held a joint
protest "to make the connections between global corporate greed and the
fight for a living wage by Hartford working people." Twenty-five people were
arrested for blocking downtown traffic in front of the global headquarters
of United Technology Corporation, which recently fired unionized janitors
and replaced them with lower paid, nonunion workers. UTC has also been
accused by the Machinists union of shipping jobs abroad in violation of a
union agreement.

Other recent actions have brought new groups into the movement, relating
their concerns to the dynamics of the global economy. A coalition in
Massachusetts, for example, drew attention to the effects of globalization
on the contingent work force. At a recent march through downtown Boston,
protesters demanded that temp agencies sign a Temp Worker Bill of Rights. A
flier headlined "Join a Global Fight for Justice" explained, "Temp work is
the face of globalization. But workers all over the world are fighting back
for economic security." It linked demands for city policies, state
legislation and corporate responsibility to the domination of the industry
by a few global giants.

Around the world, mass worker movements have contested globalization from
above through resistance to privatization, social-services cuts and
structural adjustment. May and June 2000 saw six general strikes against the
effects of globalization and neoliberalism. In India 20 million workers and
farmers paralyzed much of the country with a general strike "aimed against
the surrender of the country's economic sovereignty before the World Trade
Organization and the International Monetary Fund," according to one leader.
As many as 12 million Argentine workers struck against IMF-inspired
austerity measures. In Nigeria a general strike protesting IMF-promoted
fuel-price increases closed much of the country. In South Korea a partial
general strike demanded a shorter workweek and labor-law protections for
contingent workers to counter the impact of IMF restructuring plans. In
South Africa 4 million workers struck to protest the loss of 500,000 jobs as
a result of the government's neoliberal austerity policies. A general strike
in Uruguay protested high unemployment rates that workers blamed on
IMF-inspired spending cuts. These actions indicate that resistance to
globalization from above is at least as strong among Third World as among
First World workers.

Some campaigns have targeted global corporations directly. The well-known
campaign against Nike, for example, has forced the company to promise
significant changes in its employment practices, though few have yet been
realized. When a recent cross-country "Nike Truth Tour" organized by
students protested the firing of a worker at a Nike subcontractor in
Honduras, the employer was forced to rehire her.

Corporate campaign targets are now being expanded to include the crucial but
often hidden players in globalization from above˜private financial
institutions. The Rainforest Action Network has launched a campaign against
"the financiers of ecological destruction and human suffering," focusing on
Citigroup, the largest private financial institution in North America. It
highlights Citigroup's role as chief financial adviser in the Chad/Cameroon
Oil and Pipeline Project in Africa, which will pollute pristine rainforest
and disrupt indigenous forest communities; its role in financing redwood
logging operations in California; its firing of unionized janitors; its
financing of Monsanto and other genetic engineering companies; its role in
predatory lending and denial of loans to African-Americans; and its profits
from prison construction and privatization.

The campaign to restrict genetically modified organisms forced Monsanto and
US negotiators earlier this year to accept the Cartagena Protocol to the
Convention on Biological Diversity, allowing GMOs to be regulated.
Greenpeace called the protocol "a historic step toward protecting the
environment and consumers from the dangers of genetic engineering." Monsanto
not only accepted the protocol, it announced a decision to withdraw from the
business of selling sterile seeds and to participate in a dialogue with
Greenpeace.

This example shows the multilevel strategies that globalization from below
is using to parlay its power. While asserting authority superior to the WTO,
the protocol also illustrates the crucial positive role that international
institutions can play in limiting the depredations of global corporations
and markets. And it empowered national governments to regulate GMOs and the
corporations that purvey them. The campaign put pressure both on governments
and directly on corporations like Monsanto, while other governments put
pressure on the US government, a leading force against regulation of GMOs.
It may well have been the pressure on Monsanto and its resultant change of
heart that changed the position of the US government.

Globalization-from-below activists are also intervening in sophisticated
ways in national politics. When South Africa tried to pass a law allowing it
to ignore drug patents during health emergencies, the Clinton Administration
lobbied hard against it and put South Africa on a watch list that is the
first step toward trade sanctions. But then Philadelphia ACT UP began
hounding presidential candidate Al Gore on the issue. According to the New
York Times, "The banners saying that Mr. Gore was letting Africans die to
please American pharmaceutical companies left his campaign chagrined. After
media and campaign staff looked into the matter, the Administration did an
about-face" and, while certainly not doing enough to make AIDS drugs
available, accepted African governments' circumvention of AIDS drug patents.

No doubt The Economist exaggerated when it wrote that the new wave of
protest around globalization is "more than a mere nuisance: it is getting
its way." But globalization from below is having a concrete impact on
policies and conditions in scores of instances all over the world. Each such
campaign is a partial representation of the movement's vision, goals and
program, reflecting fundamental values of human dignity, self-government,
environmental sustainability and human solidarity.

Trevor Manuel, finance minister of South Africa and co-chairman of the
Prague IMF/World Bank meetings, recently complained, "I understand what
[protesters] are against, but I am not sure what they are for." In fact, as
even Newsweek had to concede after the Battle of Seattle, "One of the most
important lessons of Seattle is that there are now two visions of
globalization on offer, one led by commerce, one by social activism."

The movement for globalization from below is now developing positive
programs that integrate the needs and objectives of its diverse
constituents. More than 1,000 civil-society organizations in seventy-seven
countries˜essentially the "Seattle coalition"˜have launched a new global
campaign to demand "an alternative, humane, democratically accountable and
sustainable system of commerce that benefits us all." They have agreed to an
eleven-point program for transformation of the WTO and the global trading
system, focused not on eliminating trade or returning to some lost past of
national economic isolation but on promoting "internationalism˜where
different cultures, countries, and people trade and exchange goods and ideas
and work together toward common goals."

Globalization from below's vision has been articulated in scores of
international statements and above all in the movement's own actions. Many
of its guiding principles are elaborated in the Global Sustainable
Development Resolution, co-sponsored by a group of progressive members of
the US Congress. They include leveling labor, environmental, social and
human rights conditions upward; democratizing institutions at every level
from local to global; making decisions as close as possible to those they
affect; equalizing global wealth and power; converting the global economy to
environmental sustainability; creating prosperity by meeting human and
environmental needs; and protecting against global boom and bust.

The advocates of globalization from above often portray its critics as
backward-looking economic nationalists who want to hide from the realities
of globalization˜and its opportunities˜in order to protect narrow special
interests. And indeed, all over the world, Patrick Buchanan, Jean-Marie Le
Pen and their ilk are exploiting the antiglobalization backlash to recruit
followers for ethnocentric, anti-immigrant, antigay, racist, sexist and
nationalist bigotry. Globalization from below, in contrast, is rooted in
solidarity among people and groups who recognize their diversity but who
nonetheless grasp their common interests. It can only succeed to the extent
that the diverse elements that make it up are able to incorporate one
another's needs and concerns while holding their own more xenophobic
impulses in check.

Some within the movement advocate centralized global government as the
solution to corporate globalization; others seek a reassertion of national
or even local sovereignty. But the problems of globalization are unlikely to
be solved either by some central global authority or by national or local
autarky. The real choice today is between a globalization from above that
disempowers people at every level and a globalization from below that
expands self-government not only at a global level but at regional, national
and local levels as well.

The movement faces many potential pitfalls, and given the power of those it
opposes, there is no guarantee that it can actually modify globalization
enough to preserve people and environment, let alone to build a decent world
order. But that is more likely to be achieved by means of a movement that is
unified across the boundaries of countries, issues and constituencies than
by any other approach. Globalization from above made ordinary people around
the world seem powerless; globalization from below has the potential to
change the power equation. Rarely in human history have ordinary people had
such an opportunity to transform the world for the better.

Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith are the authors of the new
book "Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity" (South End Press),
from which this article was adapted, and the documentary "Global Village or
Global Pillage?" (www.villageorpillage.org).

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