Fw:[marxist] Walden Bello in Red Pepper 7/2001

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Ethan Young" <ethanyoung@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 6:52 PM
Subject: [marxist] Walden Bello in Red Pepper 7/2001

All Roads Lead to Genoa
by Walden Bello

The meeting of the G8 in Genoa this month [July 2001] is taking place at a
time when global capitalism has passed from triumph to a crisis of
legitimacy. As the world stands on the brink of a deep recession, it is
useful to reflect on the challenge this poses for the new protest movement.
The last decade of the 20th century began with the collapse of the socialist
economies of Eastern Europe and much triumphalist talk about the genesis of
a new market-driven global economy that rendered borders obsolete and rode
on the advances of information technology. Yet even as the prophets of
globalisation talked about the growing irrelevance of national interests,
the main beneficiaries of the new global order were US transnational
corporations. Supposedly an agent of free trade, the World Trade
Organisation's (WTO) most important agreements promoted monopolies for US
firms: the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement consolidated
the hold of these corporations over high tech innovations, while the
Agreement on Agriculture institutionalised a system of monopolistic
competition for third-country markets by US and EU agribusinesses.
The increasingly brazen employment of the global multilateral system to
serve the interests of the United States has been one of the reasons why the
legitimacy of this system has collapsed. Equally important as a source of
de-legitimisation was the spreading realisation that the system could not
deliver on its promise. In the last five years of the decade, growing
numbers of people began to realise that in signing on to the WTO, they had
signed on to a charter for corporate rule that enshrined the principle of
corporate trade above equity, justice, environment, and almost everything
else. The streams of discontent and opposition converged in the streets to
bring down the Seattle meeting of the WTO and trigger a severe institutional
crisis from which the organisation has yet to recover.
The crisis of the multilateral system was, moreover, translating into a
deepening unease with the prime actor of globalisation: the corporation.
Several factors came together to focus public attention on the corporation
-- the most egregious being the predatory practices of Microsoft, the
environmental depredations of Shell, the irresponsibility of Monsanto and
Novartis in promoting genetically modified organisms, and Nike's systematic
exploitation of dirt-cheap labor. A sense of environmental emergency was
also spreading.
With the growing illegitimacy of corporate-driven globalisation and the
growing divide between a prosperous minority and an increasingly
marginalised majority, military intervention to maintain the global status
will become a constant feature of international relations, whether this is
justified in terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing "rogue
states", opposing "Islamic fundamentalism" or containing China.
It is not, however, corporate power or military power that is the US's
strongest asset but its ideological power as the champion of democracy and
freedom. In the last few years, however, Washington or Westminster-style
democracies, with their focus on formal rights and formal elections and
their bias against economic equality, have degenerated into stagnant and
polarised political systems similar to those of the Philippines, Brazil and
Pakistan. This has been paralleled by the realisation by increasing numbers
of Americans that their liberal democracy has been so thoroughly corrupted
by corporate money politics that it deserves being designated a plutocracy.
The fact that a man who lost the popular vote -- and according to some
studies, the electoral vote as well -- ended up president of the worldÕs
most powerful liberal democracy has not helped. The fact that the UK
government will govern with 24 per cent of the vote points to the same
crisis of legitimacy in the UK.
With such a collapse of legitimacy, it may only be a matter of time before
the structures themselves begin to unravel, but the crisis of the system
does not necessarily result in its replacement by a more benign one. Which
is why the articulation of an alternative is so critical at this point in
time (see ATTAC article in this issue <x-ATTAC.html>). Creating this
alternative vision centred on participatory democratic institutions that
would once again subordinate the market to society, promote genuine
equality, and establish a benign relationship between human communities and
the biosphere remains the great challenge of the opponents of
corporate-driven globalisation.
On the success of this enterprise depends our future.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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