William K. Tabb :
(©Monthly Review,
March 2000)
After Seattle: Understanding the Politics of Globalization
by William K. Tabb
The "Seattle Shock"—as Business Week called it in an editorial that
warned of a popular backlash against "our very economic
system"—reflects heartfelt indignation by the financial press at the
intrusion of mass democracy into an elite discourse. In the New York
Times, columnist Thomas Friedman raged at anti-World Trade
Organization (WTO) protesters, whom he presents as "flat-earth
advocates" duped by knaves like Pat Buchanan. Friedman, perhaps the
most obtuse of the big-time columnists, complains that "What's crazy is
that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they
accuse it of already being—a global government. They want it to set
more rules—their rules, which would impose our labor and
environmental standards on everyone else."1
It is beyond Friedman's understanding that the demonstrators want to
democratize what has been an elite decision-making process, to
challenge the global dominance of capital and capital's state institutions.
The demonstrators know, and Friedman is outraged that others seem to
agree, that there are choices other than the global governance by
corporate capital. Most of the demonstrators, as the establishment press
well understood, had the sort of class analysis which working people
intuitively, if inchoately, often have. They have had enough of being told
that globalization is good and that they should just shut up. Friedman
was
also clueless concerning the predominant politics. Few of the
demonstrators supported the sort of negative nationalism Buchanan
symbolizes, with its xenophobic and racist overtones. Rather what the
Friedmans of the world are afraid of is the solidarity and internationalism
of the movement, which prefigures a global movement from
below—threatening, asBusiness Week points out, to rock the system.
And if self-interest is not absent from the demands of trade unionists
and
others, it rarely is or should be. The proposals for confronting
transnational capital are in class terms and, for the most part, inclusive.
What is to be done after Seattle is a question many people, including but
not only activists, now confront. It is the one we take up here, in the
context of an analysis of both the corporate media's response to the
demonstrations in Seattle and the real issues of class power relations.
It
is an analysis which focuses on corporate control of policy making,
addressing policies which weaken unions and diminish the lives and
agency of working people, reduce the sphere of public service provision,
and pit one community of workers against another. To this basic class
analysis, environmentalists have added a powerful critique of corporate
greed and of the single-minded pursuit of accumulation which threatens
the planet and all living things. A potentially powerful antisystemic
movement is at an important point in its development.
It is to be expected that the "irrationality" of the demonstrators is woven
through much of the commentary of the financial press. Typically, it
appears with a tone of offended outrage by the transnational ruling class
and its ideological flacks. Hot-tempered acting-out has suddenly
replaced the usual temperate condescension to which we have grown
accustomed in this dismal era of corporate triumphalism. Thus George
Melloan, in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, writes: "Given
the virulence of their protests against the achievements of private
capitalism, one can only assume that finally we have assembled in one
place a representative collection of people who `can't stand
prosperity.'"2 This theme—"you have never had it so good, and that it is
private capitalism which has done all this for you"—is a view of
globalization which is rejected by most Americans.
In a Pew Research Center nationwide survey conducted in April 1999,
43 percent of respondents said that in the future a global economy would
help average Americans; 52 percent said it would hurt them. Support for
globalization was strong only in high-income brackets. Among the
majority of American families (those with incomes under fifty thousand
dollars a year), a positive view of globalization was held by just 37
percent. Such differences are based on life experience. Kate
Bronfenbrenner has done careful studies of the impact of the threat of
runaway plants on unionization efforts and workers' ability to make
demands for better wages and working conditions, and has shown that
globalization in the form of plant closing threats and actual plant closings
are extremely pervasive and effective components of U.S. employers'
antilabor strategy. From 1993 to 1995, employers threatened to close
plants in half of all certification elections. They have made good on such
threats. The 15 percent shutdown rate within two years of certification
election victories is triple the rate in the late 1980s, before the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect.
In the week following the Seattle WTO Ministerial meetings, Business
Week ran a story about how General Electric (GE) suppliers are being
pushed—indeed, forced on pain of losing their contracts—to close
plants in the United States and set up in Mexico. GE even puts on
"supplier migration" conferences to press the point. Their message is
clearly presented in a quote the magazine offers from a corporate internal
report: "Migrate or be out of business; not a matter of if, just when.
This
is not a seminar just to provide information. We expect you to move and
move quickly."3 GE is one of the world's largest corporations. It is highly
profitable. But that is hardly the issue. What it wants is more and it
will
"squeeze lemons"—in one of the favorite phrases of its Chief Executive
Officer— because it has the power to do so. The lemons are its workers
and suppliers. That's capitalism. That's the way the system works and,
as
Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, points out in a column
entitled "WTO: In defense of global capitalism," that's why protesters
don't like transnational corporations or the WTO, which does their
bidding. "What the protestors against globalism share," he writes, "is
dislike of the market economy. This passion brought the cranks, bullies
and hypocrites to Seattle."4 Leaving aside who the bullies and hypocrites
are, we may note again the high crankiness quotient.
All this screaming like a stuck pig, to borrow a phrase from the British
imperial legacy, is understandable. Trade used to be an issue quietly
negotiated by the powerful behind closed doors. Forced to discuss the
issues, the near universal response is, "But we did it all for you! We
especially help the poor. How can you possibly be against free trade? It
brings freedom, that's why we call it 'free' trade." The Economist puts
an Indian child on its cover and features the theme: how dare these
demonstrators try to take away her right to work? She is poor. She
wants to be exploited. She needs to be exploited. Needless to say, there
is no mention of the anti-WTO demonstrations in India that coincided
with the ones in Seattle.
Because of the Internet and the numerous Web sites activists have
established, it is possible for people to know that the Seattle protests
were truly global and substantial in scope. Activists can both spread the
word and bring diverse constituencies together. While working people in
India may fear the way trade sanctions could be used by a
self-interested, moralizing United States, they also understand how the
WTO and other global governance institutions are used by an imperial
ruling class. At the same time, this hardly obviates the need for labor
rights. The beginnings of a new level of international solidarity are evident
in the way groups from the base have made connections and are
working together across national and cultural borders.
Indeed, fear is growing of mass rebellion and of what a Rand
Corporation study has called a "[non-governmental organization] NGO
swarm." The Internet has allowed new coalitions to be built online, and
for tens of thousands of people to be mobilized in the streets of Geneva
or Seattle and, at the same time, in Paris, London, and New Delhi. As
the Rand researchers explain, an NGO swarm has no "central leadership
or command structure; it is multiheaded, impossible to decapitate." The
WTO was badly stung by just such a swarm of angry worker bees.
The financial press has also set out on a belated campaign to educate the
troops with the kind of handouts such campaigns typically provide. In a
post-Seattle editorial, Business Week offers a full page of questions and
answers: "Is globalization about U.S. hegemony?" "Is globalization about
exploitation?" "Is globalization about environmental destruction?" "Is
globalization about the triumph of markets over governments?" It is less
important that their answer in each instance is "no," than that the
protestors' issues now structure the larger debate to a significant extent.
The establishment is forced to respond on terms it has not had to before.
Can Treasury Department Truth Squad visits to college campuses of the
sort attempted during the Vietnam War be far behind?
It is clear that the demonstrators have the support of mainstream,
working-class Americans. Perhaps the most interesting post-Seattle
commentary is the Harris Poll, which confirms what other surveys have
shown: that a majority of Americans (52 percent in the poll) were
sympathetic to the concerns of the demonstrators. "Echoing the
anti-business themes that ran through the sound bites and across the
banners there, the BW-Harris poll also found that most Americans
believe that business now has too much power." While Business Week
claimed it "a puzzling anomaly" that, in the greatest period of wealth
creation in U.S. history, so many people could be "living in another era,"
it also quoted a Princeton economist who pointed out that "[i]n the real
world, people are still living from paycheck to paycheck" and "[t]he
tremendous wealth creation has by and large gone to the people at the
top."5 Most Americans, according to another recent survey (by Opinion
Research Corp. International), say they feel cheated by their employers.
In asking "After Seattle, what?" critics of the WTO need first to deepen
the critique of the WTO and, second, to confront the limits of the
reformist demands which the mainstream critics of the WTO have put
forward. These tasks involve confronting class relations both with regard
to North-South tensions and within the core.
Renato Ruggiero, when he was director-general of the WTO famously
explained "We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among
separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single
world economy." Critics point out that the WTO was not elected to run
the world economy or to act as a global government. It operates in
secret and seems to see its mandate, critics say, as undermining the rights
of sovereign states. This issue of democracy is, however, more complex.
WTO partisans point out that the WTO is a forum in which trade
policies for an interdependent world can be ironed out. In response to
the question, "Why shouldn't elected national leaders choose trade
representatives?" we need to take a closer look at the nature of existing
democracies. In the United States or the United Kingdom, two countries
generally presented as paragons of democracy, it is widely understood
that trade representatives represent business elites (as they do in most
other countries, whatever the level of democracy, by whatever measure).
The problem is deeply imbedded in the nature of capitalist democracy.
The objection then is not only a lack of democracy in how the WTO
does business but also a lack of transparency to outside scrutiny. NGOs
and other non-governmental interested parties cannot offer testimony
before mysteriously selected panels. And the larger issue remains: rules
which place profit (so-called market efficiency) above all other human
and environmental considerations. In all of this, the WTO is a worse
version of business-as-usual in those powerful countries whose
governments are dominated by capital. The key point is that President
Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, and the rest choose representatives who
work for and closely with the leading capitalist sectors to craft policies
favorable to corporate interests. As much as possible, they exclude
people whose income is derived from the sale of their labor power and
those marginalized by the corporate system.
Discussion of the democratic deficit is a way of talking about how
decisions are made which affect the whole of societies. This is not,
however, to say that democratic rights which have been won (even in
their limited form) are unimportant, though they are insufficient. Where
democracy is most lacking, the conditions of working people are
generally the worst. In a study of ninety-three countries, Harvard
economist Dani Rodrik found that at each level of manufacturing
productivity, democracies pay higher wages. This is to say that wages
are not set by some marginal product of labor but that, where the
bargaining power of labor is weakened by lack of basic labor rights,
workers get a lower share of the value they produce. Class struggle at
the point of production is far harder where basic democratic rights are
most absent. This may account for Rodrik's finding that workers in those
states he labels "free countries" earn 30 percent more on average than
those in "partly free countries," and 60 percent more than in "unfree"
ones.
Such results, while they may be overly simplistic, suggest that wider
enforcement of basic labor rights (the right to free association, collective
bargaining, and bans on forced and child labor) could have a profound
effect on workers' ability to earn higher wages by rebalancing the power
between capital and labor. Such standards would not mean the end of
international trade, as some prominent economists assert, but could
narrow income differentials between rich and poor. The enforcement of
such modest standards could make a significant difference. But this takes
militancy on the part of popular organizations of the base.
It should be pointed out that rhetorical acceptance of such standards
hardly means they will be respected in practice. In the United States and
the United Kingdom, among other places, recent decades have seen
state power systematically used to weaken trade unions and undermine
the rights free world leaders claim they want others to adopt. Why
should more "agreements in principle"—toothless side deals to the
binding corporate agenda—pushed by the WTO-International Monetary
Fund (IMF)-Treasury Department-Wall Street governance regime be
seen as a victory for the critics? In this regard, organized labor was
far
too timid in Seattle, even if its very presence in the streets represented
a
significant shift from the practices of the old leadership. Without the
"street heat" generated by those involved in direct actions, the civil
disobedience of blocking delegates, and the sand thrown in the wheels of
the machine, organized labor's largely symbolic protest and relatively
mild demands would have had far less impact. The disruptions—far from
detracting from the AFL-CIO presence—gave their demands greater
immediacy, even if it took the focus off of the organization's leadership.
The fault line which separates more moderate from more radical WTO
critics is that the former are asking that labor standards and
environmental concerns be considered by the WTO as part of its
decision-making processes. The WTO remit in this view has been too
narrowly drawn and needs to be broadened. It is likely that massive
popular resistance (while it will force such a tactical repositioning and
a
retreat to a token openness) will hardly achieve the goals protestors have
in mind. Radical critics point out that given the massive movement, the
WTO has little choice but to give at least rhetorical lip service to such
demands. It may even propose institutional changes in procedures, which
will appear to address widespread concerns. But this is unlikely to mean
substantial change. As Lori Wallach reminds us:
When the WTO was established, many environmentalists
pushed for an environmental working group in the WTO.
They got one, and after five years, many of its most
energetic proponents are now saying that this working
group has turned into a trade-dominated entity where
environmental laws are studied not to safeguard them but
rather to figure out how to get rid of them. We don't want
to put the environment in the hands of an organization
whose charge and world view is commercial .... Global
labor movements now have all the enthusiasm the
environmentalists did five years ago about putting standards
into the WTO. I personally am very skeptical.6
The problem is a very real one and goes to the heart of how
governments under capitalism divide responsibilities among governmental
entities. In the United States, for example, it is the Treasury Department
that deals with the major issues of concern to transnational corporations.
When foreign governments have serious economic issues to negotiate,
they often go to the Treasury Secretary first, before approaching the
WTO or the IMF. Other constituencies are simply frozen out. Smaller
U.S. companies find a sympathetic ear at the less powerful Commerce
Department. Labor and environmental interests have access to neither.
The Labor Department is not usually consulted on trade and finance
matters, even if these areas are of prime concern to working Americans.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is further down the power
pole. Decisions on labor and environmental matters can, and often are,
trumped by the Treasury.
Similarly, it is the executive branch which oversees the details of such
matters—often without consultation, except in rare instances, with
corporate lobbyists whose companies have direct interest in particular
issues. As in the case of the aborted Multilateral Agreement on
Investment (MAI), the WTO aims to set ceilings on democratic
initiatives by preventing, for example, those levels of government closer
to the people (state and local governments, or even the Congress) from
introducing legislation which would interfere with "free" trade. As has
been widely noted, the boycotts against the Apartheid regime that helped
bring down the whites-only South African state would not be permitted
under WTO rules. Efforts to make environmental laws more stringent or
protect labor rights will also be major targets of "WTO-illegal" practice
suits. Thus, the WTO sets a low bar and prevents any innovations which
would raise standards above those that already exist because such
measures would have a deleterious effect on freedom to trade. The
WTO would put people and the environment before profit only if
progressive forces were to show such strength that no other alternative
remained. The WTO doesn't leave these concerns aside out of ignorance
or oversight, but by design. Like capitalist governance more broadly, it
is
structured to do so. The radical protest of the demonstrators
underscored this. The call for greater democracy is, in this context, a
demand that capital not dominate societal decision-making.
The demonstrations also seemed to give courage to some third-world
delegates inside the conference, in support of another challenge to WTO
thinking that has been steadily building. While press attention was given
mostly to their opposition to labor and environmental standards as a ruse
for protectionism, less attention was given to third-world efforts to claw
back much of what had been surrendered in the Uruguay Round, and to
their opposition to additional U.S. demands (to be pursued in the
aborted Clinton Round) for an end to nationalist development strategies.
Developing countries in the past have used a combination of subsidies
and measures to protect local markets as a development strategy. The
success of Japan, Korea, and other countries was based on just such
practices. The WTO rules, which the core countries have pushed,
prevent such development trajectories. Even local food self-sufficiency
is
a target of the WTO. As countries are forced to open their markets to
foreign grains and other basic foods, local farmers are driven off the
land
and into cities hardly ready for such an influx. They also face shortfalls
and mass starvation if the price of imported foods rises as a result of
poor weather and unexpected demands elsewhere.
The demands made by the WTO, which is to say the demands of the
United States and the European Union (EU), are straightforwardly in the
interests of core capitals at the expense of peripheral capital (and, in
the
case of the demands of agricultural exporters, at the expense of
third-world farmers and rural communities). They should be seen in the
context of core nations' continued protection of industries which
compete with third-world exports. While the United States claims to
have the best interests of the world's poor at heart in forcing them to
liberalize (exercising tough love and withholding aid in the absence of
reforms), what the United States and the other rich countries actually
give is revealing. Thomas Hertel of Perdue University and Will Martin of
the World Bank have shown that rich countries' average tariffs on
manufacturing imports from poor countries are four times higher than
those on imports from other rich countries. Rather than receiving favored
treatment, the developing countries are treated far more harshly.
This is mostly a matter of bargaining power, but there is also the matter
of technical costs and expertise. The lawyerly approach the United
States has imposed on trade requires all sorts of certification of cost
and
other "openness" requirements, which many governments are simply not
in a position to comply with because their record-keeping is not up to
it.
The minutia of the legalisms (which are consequential and potentially
costly for noncompliant governments) has placed an inordinate burden
on many smaller and poorer nations. It is even hard for these countries
to
keep up with and attempt to master the massive and ever-expanding
trade rules. As of late 1999 in Geneva, the site of most of the
international bargaining on trade, one man (an overextended Iftekhar
Chowdhury) acts as coordinator for forty-eight of the poorest countries
in the world. Only fourteen of these countries can afford to post envoys
in Geneva. They are not so different from Chowdhury's own country,
Bangladesh, where approximately a third of the labor force is
unemployed and poor people earn less in a year than it costs a visiting
envoy to stay in one of Geneva's international hotels. This basic
inequality is not unrelated to the acceptance of measures which prove
unexpectedly costly to the developing countries. For example, a study by
two Washington economists estimates that implementing trade
procedures and establishing technical and intellectual property standards
(adopted at the suggestion of the United States) costs more than a year's
development budget for the poorest countries.
The nonindustrialized countries did caucus and submit a detailed list of
priorities for the Seattle meeting agenda, which focused on rectifying
things they had given away in earlier trade negotiations without
understanding their impact. "But," as the New York Times reported,
"their two-page list was mysteriously deleted from the first formal draft
of
the agenda that circulated at the organization's Geneva headquarters ...."7
The United States was accused of bullying tactics but, as U.S. Trade
Representative Charlene Barshefsky made clear, existing agreements
couldn't be reopened. (It would undermine the credibility of future
negotiations, she said.) The United States continues to punish unilaterally
nations that it finds dumping goods into U.S. markets—in a fairly clear
violation of WTO rules—and has insisted that while other countries
make concessions, the United States be able to keep tariffs in place in
such politically sensitive industries as the garment industry until 2005.
Human Rights, China, and the WTO
The discussion is complicated by Clinton-Blair Third Way expressions of
concern over human rights, democracy, and the need for
host-government honesty—by which they mean not allowing third-world
officials (whom, they presume, are corrupt) to rip off foreign banks,
investors, and corporations. More far-sighted capitalists also worry that
real social chaos is developing, and spreading from failed states and
states in which uneven development (in an age of instant communication)
creates problems for core capital. Having the trains run on time has
always had appeal for the corporate class. The local elites which, it
should be underlined, imperialism put in place in the first instance, are
now no longer its best local representatives. Now that the national
liberation alternative has faded and the possibility of nonalignment in
a
unipolar new capitalist world order is less realistic, the corruption of
these anticommunist regimes is costly and from a profit-for-
transnational-capital perspective, undesirable. A modern two-party
competition bidding for foreign capital, rather than a dictator and friends
and family regime taking ten percent of everything, is (in the present
global conjuncture) a better alternative. This does not mean the end of
repression or the calculated use of torture and imprisonment when
needed, and of course the sort of capitalist modernization the
Clinton-Blair departure suggests is not aimed at strengthening
working-class and popular movements; indeed, it is the opposite.
Similarly, an analysis is needed concerning the politics inherent in
progressive forces gearing up to stop China from being admitted to the
WTO. This can be criticized as contributing to displacement of class
rage—rightly directed at transnational capital—onto the repressive
Chinese ruling class. Without at all absolving Chinese market-Dengist
cadre ("to get rich by exploiting the people is glorious") and their
opportunist progeny, it is the unregulated power of western capital, the
anti-working-class policies of the American government most
particularly, which should be the focus of our efforts. China had little
to
do with the fact that real wages have been stagnant for U.S. workers for
the last two decades or that, while the stock market has increased
wealth by trillions of dollars for the richest 10 percent of the population
who own 85 percent of the stock, most Americans own no stock at all
but fuel these gains through downsizing and givebacks.
On the other hand, Chinese policies and the impact of their huge trade
surplus with the United States brings some issues into better focus as
it
obscures others. It clarifies the way national leaders—in collusion with
transnational capital—organize the super-exploitation of their own
citizens and calls attention to the uneven development such export
competitiveness at all costs brings in its wake. It also highlights the
race
toward the bottom that occurs as other competitors gain greater
incentive to copy these policies. It focuses on the need to support other
workers who are imprisoned for union organizing or attempting to speak
freely to their comrades. It is a demand for a basic level of democratic
rights for everyone and, in these demands, one witnesses an emergent
internationalist solidarity. At the same time, the fact that China is hardly
the main enemy of U.S. working people needs to be part of any such
discussion.
For reasons which have everything to do with U.S. domestic
politics—specifically the need not to offend the labor movement, which
has endorsed Vice President Gore's run to succeed his boss—President
Clinton, in a comment to a newspaper in Seattle, suggested he wanted to
go beyond the usual empty rhetoric and mandate enforceable labor
standards. The reaction was immediate from third-world delegates. A
trade minister from Pakistan was quoted the next day as saying, "We will
block consensus on every issue if the United States proposal goes
ahead." The ruling elites of Pakistan and other third-world authoritarian
(and even formally democratic) governments have never had an interest
in labor standards which could reduce their ability to exploit the workers
of their countries. This does not mean that they are wrong in suggesting
that the United States would use labor standards as a pretext to impose
sanctions when if might suit U.S. political interests. The United States,
abusing its great power, has always used sanctions selectively and to
advance other agendas, and there is little reason to think labor standards
would be used differently.
The use of trade sanctions to enforce labor standards is also opposed by
most third-world unionists, who see job loss resulting without necessary
impact on their wages and working conditions. What they need is help
organizing. International solidarity, exposure of local abuses, financial
assistance to strikers, and pressure on governments who use police-state
tactics against workers would be welcome. But the fact is that, in the
past, the United States has supported the most repressive third-world
regimes. People are rightly skeptical about Clinton's motives. The
solidarity which needs to be extended is to the workers, oppressed and
exploited not simply by transnationals, but by their own capitalists.
Rather than counting on the kindness of passing imperialists, a class
struggle perspective is in order. The same is true in making common
cause with reactionary Republicans who wish to weaken China for their
own reasons.
Similarly, we need to think more about China as related to a host of
issues which arise from the reality that 95 percent of the world's
population growth is taking place in what is euphemistically called the
developing world (from which westerners fear immigration, job loss, the
spread of epidemics, terrorism, and crime). There is a desire to build
defenses, whether new versions of Star War missile defenses or
economic protectionism. The cost of the left's inability to offer a coherent
counter-interpretation of globalization's dangers and damage, and their
sources and solutions, is great.
Increasingly, as we try to develop a more mature politics of
internationalism, we will be faced with racist fears, class divisions,
and
gender issues. Western supporters of labor rights will have to examine
their stand on patriarchy's impacts, the domestic and workplace violence
aimed at women, educational discrimination, and employment gender
discrimination in countries other than our own. These are issues which
are being raised by third-world feminists, who confront not only the
resistance of their governments and the capitalists but often male
workers as well. How western supporters can be effective without being
chauvinistic is be a challenge for the labor and human-rights groups in
the
West.
Radical Agendas
What fuels more fundamental social change is a radical vision. Change
does not come about from the mere fact of oppression. In the absence
of hope for meaningful change, a sense that a better alternative exists
and
is possible, pessimism and cynicism prevail. A radical vision consists
first
of anger at the way things are, the feeling that conditions are intolerable,
but if this is to lead beyond thoughtless and futile rebellion, it must
be
accompanied by a belief that a better alternative is not only desirable
but
possible; not necessarily tomorrow, but when the momentum can be
turned around. Resistance can have a strong element of moral witness
(speaking truth to power), of rebellion (I'm mad and I won't take it any
more), of reformist goals (our mutual ideals are violated, let us live
up to
our agreed upon principles), and of revolutionary transformation (the
institutions of structured inequality and destruction are necessary to
preserve their power, the system must be overthrown, and a
fundamentally different one put in its place). Each of these stances was
visible in Seattle.
Whenever capital is seen to overreach and, in its greed, endanger even
the sustainability and the reproduction of the system, two impulses come
to the fore in terms of redress. From reformers both inside and outside
the system comes a desire to solve the immediately pressing problem by
making changes which allow the system to work better: fuller disclosure
and more open access (with the implicit promise that sunshine is the best
disinfectant). Whether financial market allocation or democratic
policy-making, better information allows for better decisions. The
second impulse is to transform existing social relations of hierarchical
power, to take away power which has been abused, to penalize
usurpers, seize what has been illegitimately appropriated, and break the
authority relation of coercive domination which allows and encourages
the intolerable outcomes.
In the first approach, structures of power are left in place so that, as
soon as the crisis is perceived to have passed or diminished in intensity,
the tentacles reach out once more, with renewed confidence—once the
high tide of movement outrage and vigilance is passed. Business as usual
resumes, perhaps with greater care to observe, for public consumption,
the niceties of verbal allegiance to the key words of the movement. It
is
in just such a fashion that the very word democracy, at first an insulting
word to describe the rule of the unwashed mob, became a revered ideal
of state elites. Over time, there is erosion of social regulation and the
philosophy of reform gives way to the necessities of realism, the drive
to
accumulate. Beyond that, as memory of the crisis—the moment of
popular empowerment and systemic challenge—fades, the reign of
capitalist logic resumes—hegemonic to the extent that it can once again
be said, "there is no alternative." Reforms do not last unless a mobilized,
powerful movement keeps the pressure on and the momentum going.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the New Deal structural reforms had been
vitiated: reforms that protected capital from itself and, to an important
extent, the protected the rest of us from the worst excesses of a
capitalism without social regulation, and which opened space for a
somewhat more inclusive distribution of society's product. They had
been defunded, deregulated, and neoliberalized. The reformist regulatory
agencies came to be headed by individuals whose goals were to
sabotage their originally stated purposes. At a structural level, the forces
of production, never divorced in any event from social relations,
developed in new directions—empowering new fractions of capital and
encouraging shifts within the historic bloc of capitalist domination both
domestically and internationally. In many ways and in many places, they
have created intolerable conditions for people and the planet. In
response, to contest capital's version of globalization, we may be seeing
the birth of the broadest based movement for social, economic, and
political change of recent times. These are hard times for the left and
one
would not want to overstate the case. On the other hand, it is difficult
to
read turning points. Seattle may prove just such an event.
WTO and Seattle authorities, in their attempts to squash dissent, created
lifetime activists. Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest
Action Network, described her time in Seattle in a Web posting, saying
that she experienced:
a real-life glimpse of what corporate-controlled reality
looks like. Police in the streets, no civil rights, martial law,
jail brutality—we saw that which we jump-started the
week with: an action warning about the loss of
democracy—is not just activist rhetoric, not just some
advertisement, but real. We saw, all week long, as did the
rest of the world, what they will do to get their way. But
this is only the glimpse of a future, not the future. All week
long we also saw us. In the streets, counting on each other,
trusting each other, loving each other. Determined, utterly
determined, to create a world where reverence is what we
practice, with work that fulfills us; building communities
based on interdependence and cooperation and nurturing
relationships that breathe passion into our lives.
The announcement of a commitment to make it so came through loud
and clear.
We cannot know yet what difference the battle in Seattle will make. We
can say that many of the demands raised there were and are
"non-reformist reforms" in the Andre Gorz sense: reforms which do not
base their validity and right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, or
rationales. Some are critiques (which so enraged the ideologues of the
system cited at the start of this essay) of the productivism of the drive
to
accumulate for the sake of expansion of capital regardless of cost to
workers, the environment, the community. They are also driven by a
positive counter-vision of sustainability and social justice. In a number
of
the protesting themes is a rejection of capitalism's economic reasoning.
It
was the victories in the streets of Seattle, the resistance of other nations
to the domination of the United States in the negotiations, the gains in
public awareness concerning the functions of the WTO in the global
capitalist system, and an underlying change in perception that prompted
so pained an outrage on the part of elite opinion-molders.
In making an overall assessment, we should perhaps take to heart the
quintessentially American framing of the situation offered by John Sellers
of the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society (one of the groups which
coordinated the Seattle protest). He said, "We just hit the big hoop at
the halftime buzzer. But dude, this game is not over."
NOTES
1.Thomas l. Friedman, "Senseless Battle in Seattle," Business
Week, December 2, 1999.
2.George Melloan, "Welcome to the Seattle World's Fare, Cerca
1999,"Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1999.
3."Welch's March to the South," Business Week, December 6,
1999.
4.Martin Wolf, "WTO: In defense of global capitalism," Financial
Times, December 8, 1999.
5.Michelle Conlin, "Hey, What About Us?" Business Week,
December 27, 1999.
6.Lori Wallach, "Higher Standards?" The Nation, December 6,
1999.
7.Elizabeth Olson, "Anger on Agenda for World Trade Meeting,"
New York Times, October 14, 1999.
(*)WILLIAM K. TABB is professor of
economics and political science at Queens College and the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York. He is the author of Restructuring
Political Economy (Routledge, 1999) and The Amoral Elephant
(Monthly Review Press, 2001).