Michael Albert :
©znetupdates, 5 September 2001
What Are We For?
Anti-globalization activists understand that sympathetic and mutually
beneficial global ties are good. But we want social and global ties
to
advance universal equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management,
not to subjugate ever-wider populations to an elite minority. We want
to
globalize equity not poverty, solidarity not anti-sociality, diversity
not conformity, democracy not subordination, and ecological balance
not
suicidal rapaciousness.
Two questions arise. Why do these aspirations leave us critical of
corporate globalization? And what new institutions do we propose for
meeting these aspirations?
Rejecting Capitalist Globalization
Current international market trading benefits overwhelmingly those who
enter today's exchanges already possessing the most assets. When trade
occurs between a U.S. multinational and a local entity in Mexico,
Guatemala, or Thailand, the benefits do not go more to the weaker party
with fewer assets, nor are they divided equally, but they go
disproportionately to the stronger traders who thereby increase their
relative dominance. Opportunist rhetoric aside, capitalist globalizers
try to disempower the poor and already weak and to further empower
the
rich and already strong. The result: of the 100 largest economies in
the
world, 52 aren't countries; they are corporations.
Similarly, market competition for resources, revenues, and audience
is
most often a zero sum game. To advance, each actor preys off the defeat
of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested
me-first attitude that generates hostility and destroys solidarity
between individuals, industries, and states. Public and social goods
are
downplayed, private ones elevated. Businesses and nations augment their
own profits while imposing losses on others. Human well being and
development for everyone is not a guiding precept. Solidarity fights
a
rearguard battle against capitalist globalization.
Moreover, in current global exchange structures, whether they are
McDonaldsesque or Disneyesque or instead derive from worthy indigenous
roots, cultural communities and values disperse only as widely as their
megaphone permits them too, and worse, are drowned out by other
communities with larger megaphones who impinge on them. Capitalist
globalization swamps quality with quantity and creates cultural
homogenization not diversity. Not only does Starbucks proliferate,
so do
Hollywood images and Madison Avenue styles. What is indigenous and
non-commercial struggles to even survive. Diversity declines.
In the halls of the capitalist globalizers, only political and corporate
elites are welcome. The idea that the broad public of working people,
consumers, farmers, the poor and the disenfranchised should have
proportionate say is actively opposed. Indeed, the point of capitalist
globalization is precisely to reduce the influence of whole populations
and even of state leaderships save for the most powerful elements of
Western corporate and political rule. Capitalist globalization imposes
corporatist hierarchy not only in economics, but also in politics.
Authoritarian and even fascistic state structures proliferate. The
numbers of voices with even marginal say declines.
As the financiers in corporate headquarters extend stockholders'
influence, the earth beneath is dug, drowned, and paved without
attention to species, by-products, ecology, or humanity. Only profit
and
power drive the calculations.
Anti-globalization activists oppose capitalist globalization because
capitalist globalization violates the equity, diversity, solidarity,
self- management, and ecological balance that activists pursue.
Supporting Global Justice
What do anti-globalization activists propose to replace the institutions
of capitalist globalization, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, and the World Trade Organization?
The International Monetary Fund or IMF and World Bank were established
after World War II. The IMF was meant to provide means to combat
financial disruptions adversely impacting countries and people around
the world. It employed negotiations and pressures to stabilize
currencies and to help countries avoid economy disrupting financial
machinations and confusions. The World Bank was meant to facilitate
long-term investment in underdeveloped countries, to expand and
strengthen their economies. It was to lend major project investment
money at low interest to correct for the lack of local capacity. Within
existing market relations, these limited goals were positive. Over
time,
however, and accelerating dramatically in the 1980s, the agenda of
these
institutions changed. Instead of facilitating stable exchange rates
and
helping countries protect themselves against financial fluctuations,
the
IMF began bashing any and all obstacles to capital flow and unfettered
profit seeking, virtually the opposite of its mandate. Instead of
facilitating investment on behalf of the local poor economics, the
World
Bank became a tool of the IMF, providing and withholding loans as carrot
or stick to compel open corporate access, and financing projects not
with an eye to benefits for the recipient country, but with far more
attention to benefits going to major multinationals.
In addition, the World Trade Organization or WTO that was desired in
the
early post war period actually came into being only decades later,
in
the mid 1990s. Its agenda became to regulate trade on behalf of the
already rich and powerful. Instead of only imposing on third world
countries low wages and high pollution due to being able to easily
coerce their weak or bought-off governments, as IMF and World Bank
policies accomplish, why not also weaken all governments and agencies
that might defend workers, consumers, or the environment, not only
in
the third world, but everywhere? Why not remove any efforts to limit
trade due to its labor implications, its ecology implications, its
social or cultural implications, or its development implications,
leaving as the only legal criteria whether there are immediate,
short-term profits to be made? If national or local laws impede
trade-say an environmental, a health, or a labor law-the WTO
adjudicates, and its entirely predictable pro-corporate verdict is
binding.
The WTO trumps governments and populations on behalf of corporate
profits. The full story about these three centrally important global
institutions is longer, of course, but improvements are not hard to
conceive. First, why not have, instead of the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, an International
Asset Agency, a Global Investment Assistance Agency, and a World Trade
Agency. These three new (not merely reformed) institutions would work
to
attain equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological
balance in international financial exchange, investment and development,
trade, and cultural exchange.
. They would try to ensure that the benefits of trade and
investment accrue disproportionately to the weaker and poorer parties
involved, not to the already richer and more powerful.
. They would not prioritize commercial considerations over all
other values, but would prioritize national aims, cultural identity,
and
equitable development.
. They would not require domestic laws, rules, and regulations
designed to further worker, consumer, environmental, health, safety,
human rights, animal protection, or other non-profit centered interests
to be reduced or eliminated, but they would work to enhance all these,
rewarding those who attain such aims most successfully.
. They would not undermine democracy by shrinking the choices
available to democratically controlled governments, but they would
work
to subordinate the desires of multinationals and large economies to
the
survival, growth, and diversification of smaller units.
. They would not promote global trade at the expense of local
economic development and policies, but vice versa.
. They would not force Third World countries to open their markets
to rich multinationals and to abandon efforts to protect infant domestic
industries, but would facilitate the reverse.
. They would not block countries from acting in response to
potential risk to human health or the environment, but would help
identify health, environmental, and other risks, and assist countries
in
guarding against their ill effects.
. Instead of downgrading international health, environmental, and
other standards to a low level through a process called "downward
harmonization," they would work to upgrade standards via a new "upward
equalization."
The new institutions would not limit governments' ability to use their
purchasing dollars for human rights, environmental, worker rights,
and
other non-commercial purposes, but would advise and facilitate doing
just that. They would not disallow countries to treat products
differently based on how they were produced-irrespective of whether
they
were made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxins,
or with no regard for species protection-but would facilitate just
such
differentiations. Instead of bankers and bureaucrats carrying out
policies of presidents to affect the life situations of the very many
without even a pretense at participation by those impacted, these new
institutions would be open and democratic, transparent, participatory,
and bottom up, with local, popular, and democratic accountability.
These new institutions would promote and organize international
cooperation to restrain out-of-control global corporations, capital,
and
markets by regulating them to make it possible for people in local
communities to control their own economic lives.
. They would promote trade that reduces the threat of financial
volatility and meltdown, enlarges democracy at every level from the
local to the global, defends and enriches human rights for all people,
respects and fosters environmental sustainability worldwide, and
facilitates economic advancement of the most oppressed and exploited
groups, and at the request of smaller trade partners would intervene
to
prevent violations of these guiding norms.
. They would encourage domestic economic growth and development,
not domestic austerity in the interest of export-led growth.
. They would encourage the major industrial countries to
coordinate their economic policies, currency exchange rates, and
short-term capital flows in the public interest and not for private
profit.
. They would establish standards for and oversee the regulation of
financial institutions by national and international regulatory
authorities, encouraging the shift of financial resources from
speculation to useful and sustainable development.
. They would establish taxes on foreign currency transactions to
reduce destabilizing short-term cross-border financial flows and to
provide pools of funds for investment in long-term environmentally
and
socially sustainable development in poor communities and countries.
. They would create public international investment funds to meet
human and environmental needs and ensure adequate global demand by
channeling funds into sustainable long-term investment.
. And they would develop international institutions to perform
functions of monetary regulation currently inadequately performed by
national central banks, such as a system of internationally coordinated
minimum reserve requirements on the consolidated global balance sheets
of all financial firms.
These new institutions would also work to get wealthy countries to
write
off the debts of impoverished countries and to create a permanent
insolvency mechanism for adjusting debts of highly indebted nations.
They would use regulatory institutions to help establish public control
and citizen sovereignty over global corporations and to curtail
corporate evasion of local, state, and national law, such as
establishing a binding Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations
that includes regulation of labor, environmental, investment, and social
behavior.
And second, in addition to getting rid of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO
and replacing them with the three dramatically new and different
structures outlined above, anti-globalization activists also advocate
a
recognition that international relations should not derive from
centralized but rather from bottom-up institutions. The new overarching
structures mentioned above should therefore gain their credibility
and
power from an array of arrangements, structures, and ties enacted at
the
level of citizens, neighborhoods, states, nations and groups of nations,
on which they rest. And these more grass-roots structures, alliances,
and bodies defining debate and setting agendas should, like the three
earlier described one, also be transparent, participatory and
democratic, and guided by a mandate that prioritizes equity, solidarity,
diversity, self-management, and ecological sustainability and balance.
The overall idea is simple. The problem isn't international relations
per se. Anti globalization activists are, in fact, internationalist.
The
problem is that capitalist globalization alters international relations
to further benefit the rich and powerful. In contrast, activists want
to
alter relations to weaken the rich and powerful and empower and improve
the conditions of the poor and weak. Anti-globalization activists know
what we want internationally--global justice in place of capitalist
globalization.
But what about domestically? What do we want inside our own countries?