Posted
27th July 2001
Where's The Revolution?
by Katharine Ainger A Guardian article titled "Stay at home
for a while", Monday July 23, 2001
Plenty
of old hands were saying someone would die at Genoa. The signs
were clear in the escalating militarisation on both sides. But
the members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (MST) could tell
you that Carlo Giuliani, the young man shot dead as he protested
at the G8 summit, is not the first casualty of the movement
challenging neoliberal globalisation around the world.
The
MST suffer ongoing persecution for their campaign for land reform
in Brazil, their opposition to the World Bank's programme of
market-led land reform and to the corporate control of agriculture
through patents on seed. Recently three students protesting
against World Bank privatisation were shot in Port Moresby,
Papua New Guinea. Young men fighting World Bank-imposed water
privatisation have been tortured and killed in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
George Bush, Tony Blair and Clare Short, who portray those who
protest at the unaccountable institutions of global governance
as ignorant, violent enemies of the poor, do not seem to notice
that the poor are leading the protests.
Those who run the global economy still seem to think their worst
problem is that they can't find a secure place to meet. Instead
of addressing the root causes of the protests, the World Trade
Organisation is fleeing to the Qatar desert, beyond the reach
of even the most determined activist. The real problem is that
its ideological adherence to "free" trade is casting it not
just into the desert, but into the political wilderness. The
regime it is implementing is so destructive that it is sparking
off a global uprising against neo-liberalism.
Broadly, these uprisings can be described as struggles against
the commodification of every aspect of life - water, genes,
atmosphere, healthcare, culture, public spaces, land.
For
each locality, the moment when the people cry "Enough!" is different
- but it is usually the moment when something regarded as central
to the culture becomes privatised.
For
the Zapatistas of Mexico it was the signing of the Nafta agreement,
which outlawed the common ownership of land which Emiliano Zapata,
folk hero and revolutionary of 1911, had fought for. For much
of southeast Asia it was the IMF austerity measures imposed
on their shattered economies after the financial crisis of 1997.
In Britain, it may be the slow sell-off of the NHS to private
healthcare multinationals. Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt, in
their seminal work, Empire, call this grassroots network of
struggles "the multitude". It is the opposite of a concentrated
strata of power from above, in which decisions that affect billions
of human lives are made at a transnational level.
The
multitude embodies the real world below: humanity, nature, culture,
diversity - all those factors not reducible to a commodity to
be bought and sold in a global marketplace. In fact, the movement
is not "anti-globalisation" at all. If anything, it embodies
"globalisation from below" - an international multitude which
challenges the idea that "the global surfaces of the world market
are interchangeable". But the movement, particularly in the
wake of the Genoa summit, urgently needs to build its own, alternative
democratic legitimacy. For democratising the global economy
will ultimately not come through increasingly militant action
at summits, but through building a genuine, grassroots legitimacy
from below. Instead of chasing into the desert in Qatar, we
should build a broad-based, pro-democracy movement at home.
In a million small ways in Britain, that process has already
begun. As a result of campaigning by the World Development Movement,
the Scottish parliament will be holding the first parliamen-tary
debate over WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services, which
threatens to lock anything deemed a "service" into privatisation.
Unions are beginning to organise against Gats; the rank and
file are already beginning to rebel over public sector sell-offs.
Middle England continues to complain about GM crops and the
railways, while Scottish crofters have joined the radical, anti-WTO,
international peasant farmers' union, Via Campesina - whose
largest member is the MST.This
is the birth of a genuinely popular global uprising against
corporate control and the hijacking of democracy. The movement
against economic globalisation: coming to a town near you.
Katharine
Ainger is editing an issue of the New Internationalist magazine
on global resistance. ...
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