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Workers' Liberty'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'Workers' Liberty Australia |
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The workers' answer to capitalist globalisationby Martin Thomas The G8 summit on the Japanese island of Okinawa at the end of July cost $500 million to stage, enough to pay for 12 million children to go to school. 22,000 police, eight warships, and $400-a-night hotel rooms made up the outlay for Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and six other presidents or prime ministers to meet and decide not very much. At least by holding their meeting in a remote place, the G8 leaders avoided a demonstration on the model of Seattle. They also avoided doing anything about their promises to slack their squeeze on the world's poorest countries. At Cologne last year, the G7 (G8 minus Russia) promised to cancel debts worth $100 billion for at least 24 out of 41 poor and highly-indebted countries. The gesture was not as generous as it seems, since the debts are largely unrecoverable anyway, but it would help. So far, however, only nine countries have begun to receive debt relief, and to the tune of less than $12 billion, all of that under schemes already in operation before Cologne. The chief cause of delay is that the indebted countries are required to write detailed plans on how they will use the debt-relief money, and get them approved by the IMF and the World Bank. For Honduras, for example, the IMF demanded a speedier privatisation of electricity supply before the plan could be agreed. The famine-relief group Oxfam has proposed that immediate debt-relief be paid to poor countries willing only to set up a special "poverty fund" for the money, to be used only for health, education, and similar spending, and to be externally audited. In fact debt is only one part of the picture. The process of debt relief, by tightening the IMF's control over countries' economic policies, may sharpen inequality with one hand while it eases it with another. Conversely, the problem which the IMF monitoring is supposed to address - debt relief cash going the same way as the money originally borrowed, often into government prestige projects, bureaucratic corruption, crony-capitalism, and military spending - is a real one. The world's poorest countries do need massive aid, or rather reparations for the destruction caused by imperialism, colonialism, and the slave trade. But the underlying problem is the rule of profit. It is more profitable to build a luxury hotel in a poor country's capital, or to set up a "free trade zone" there employing a few thousand young women workers in hellish conditions to sew clothes for export, or to clear land for luxury export cash-crops tended by a small workforce, than to invest the same amount in services, infrastructure, agricultural aid, and light industry for the villages. The capitalist world market offers only the choice between being integrated into it and exploited by global capital - all the more cruelly, the poorer the hinterland within which world-market production takes place - or being left aside by it, which is even worse. The US-based Campaign for Labor Rights, in a recent pamphlet, offers definitions. "Globalisation is the process of making interactions and exchanges across borders easier. 'Corporate globalisation' is profit-driven. 'Globalisation from below' involves mutual support by people around the world who are resisting corporate control". Add only that the key force within "the people" is the working class - organised, concentrated, educated, and potentially powerful and creative in a way that other exploited groups are not - and the definitions tell us the answer. In some countries, like Korea, Brazil, and Indonesia, workers have begun to construct a "globalisation-from-below" response to poverty by organising in unions, with support from unions in other countries, and fighting to win back a greater proportion of the value that they produce. Thirty million people each year still die for lack of food. One child in every five, across the world, eats not enough of the right balance of foods to keep healthy. Workers' globalisation, or "globalisation from below", is the answer. |
Against globalisation? No! Against capital, for workers' globalisation!By Chris Reynolds According to H-P Martin and H Schumann, in the widely-read book The Global Trap, what we should do if we want to put right the exploitation, inequality, injustice, and short-sighted environmental destruction of today's global capitalism is fight "to restore the State". "The right balance... a social market economy... is being lost... the engineers of the new global economy throw overboard the insights gained by those who first made it a success". Other widely read writers on globalisation also argue that the problem with it is that it destroys an old state and society, which we should cherish and restore. David Korten: It is "becoming increasingly difficult for corporate managers to manage in the public interest, no matter how strong their moral values and commitment". Globalisation is destroying governance based on the theme that "rich and poor alike shared a sense of national and community interest". Philip Golub: states are "withdrawing from their main responsibility, the regulation of the violence of social relations to ensure the common good". A Sivanandan: "The bourgeoisie of the Third World is no longer a national bourgeoisie working in the interests of its people but an international bourgeoisie working in the interests of international capital". Ignacio Ramonet: "Faced with the powerful rise of global firms, the traditional countervailing powers (State, parties, unions) seem more and more powerless... Can citizens tolerate this new-type global coup d'etat?" Vandana Shiva, a featured speaker in Melbourne, views technology as a male disruption of the sacred woman-nature dyad, and advocates a "subsistence" economic model. Shiva, it should be noted, is more popular in the West than in India! As sociologist Shasti Mitter wrote in New Left Review 205, the Bangladeshi women workers she's studied in both their native country and London want jobs, training, and good wages, and do not want to return to their villages. The American writer Doug Henwood reported from a conference in New York a few years ago that: "Shiva opened her talk... by noting that one of the 'positive externalities' of globalization was that she'd made so many good friends around the world... It's ironic that people should rack up the frequent flier miles while touting the virtues of localism - writing books and running institutes while telling the masses that they should stay home and tend to their lentils. This recalls T.S. Eliot's remark that 'on the whole it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born.' At least Eliot, who was born in St. Louis but moved to London at age 26, was an avowed snob". Henwood notes that "globalisation" makes a strangely amorphous enemy, "one at odds with the usual progressive celebration of diversity, and an interesting shift for a [left] tradition that was once deeply cosmopolitan". "When", asks Henwood, "was this Golden Age?" When was the time when state and society were free from the outrages of global interconnection? "The 1960s, when GE was filling the Hudson with PCBs? The 1930s, when Chase was banking with Nazis? Or the 1890s, when Carnegie's Pinkertons shot strikers? "Was it the 1850s, when British industrialists kidnapped children to work in their factories, and when the locally owned bakeries of London worked their staffs up to 20 hours a day to produce bread fortified with, in the words of a contemporary, 'a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand and other agreeable mineral ingredients'?" The enemy is not technology, and not globalisation. Simply to oppose globalisation is to give comfort to nationalism, parochialism, and the most reactionary strands of capital. Against global capital, we need global solidarity, and workers' globalisation. |