On Bello

[Steve Diamond <sdiamond@xxxxxxx>]

To restate my previous response to the Bello essay, I suggested a simple
thought experiment:  what would the world look like if what Bello asks for
were to come true?

If we were to "shrink" the WTO or end the push for enforceable international
labor rights we would be encouraging the idea that the developing world
should build its own capitalism to compete with that of the developed world.

We do not have to put more than half the globe through the same misery that
Europe and the Americas went through to establish modern industrial
capitalism. But Bello implies that the third world must repeat those
horrors - an argument one hears from the apologists for global capital (as
in the suggestion that "we" endured child labor for many decades, so why not
in Pakistan?).

Unless, of course, he thinks there is something magical about a "small is
beautiful" worldview that would allow the Indias, the Egypts, the Sudans,
the Guatemalas of the world to build modern economies on their own without
the kind of tragedies inflicted upon the millions of European, African,
Asian and American workers who built the United States and western Europe?

In my view, the only way to avoid that tragic history is to restructure the
global economy from below, not break away from it.  The push for enforceable
labor rights is a step in that direction.

Bello, however, opts to put forward a worldview that he explicitly links to
that of right wing British philosopher John Gray.  Thus, Bello quotes Gray
in defense of the idea that the goal of his politics is "to express and
protect local and national cultures by embodying and sheltering their
distinctive practices."  This is a form of relativism that undermines the
universal quality of concepts like the rule of law, human rights and labor
standards. Thus, it offers hope to those in the developing world elite that
the anti-globalization movement is really all about attacking U.S. power or
the power of competing U.S.-based multinationals.  It is not a surprise, to
me, at least, that Bello has suggested in another essay that the current
global slowdown is an "opportunity."  For whom?  Not for the third world
working class, but for nationalist figures like Malaysia's Mahathir and
Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra.

Bello's affinity with the right is not limited to academics, as his optimism
about the election of George Bush indicated:  "The motivation of the
incoming Republicans in criticizing the IMF and the World Bank lies in their
belief in free-market solutions to development and growth. This may not
coincide with that of progressives, who see the IMF and World Bank as a tool
of US hegemony. But the two sides can unite behind one agenda at this point:
the radical downsizing, if not dismantling, of the Bretton Woods twins." Is
Bush Bad News for the World Bank, Focus on the Global South,
http://www.focusweb.org, January 2001.

Despite the efforts of Bello and others of his persuasion in the
anti-globalization movement (like Martin Khor, based in Malaysia) the global
labor movement is developing - haltingly, even bureaucratically - a movement
for a "new internationalism" built around basic universally recognized human
rights.  The AFL-CIO started the process, for all sorts of reasons and
subject to all sorts of limitations. But to condemn it as "verbal
play-acting" is to ignore the complex fault lines in the American, and
international, trade union movement that have opened up since the end of the
Cold War.

To make this movement a success requires that it move well beyond the AFL,
as it has done to a certain extent in Quebec and Genoa.  But in Bello's
worldview, this kind of campaign "is a remnant of a techno-optimist variant
of Marxism that infuses both the Social Democratic and Leninist visions of
the world, producing what Indian author Arundathi Roy calls the predilection
for 'gigantism.'"  As anyone who has tried to exercise a "right" in the face
of opposition knows, a right that is not enforceable through a credible
institution is not a "right" at all.  And that is why any international
movement for human rights, must and will demand that new international
institutions include mechanisms for enforcing basic rights - enforcing them
against the Mahathirs of the world as much as against the Monsantos and
Microsofts.  This is not "gigantism" but the beginnings of genuine
internationalism.

Stephen F. Diamond
School of Law
Santa Clara University
sdiamond@xxxxxxx