FW: ZNet Commentary / Katherine Ainger / Genoa and Onward / July 24

[Doug Millison]

Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 9:32 PM
Subject: Fwd: ZNet Commentary / Katherine Ainger / Genoa and Onward /
July 24
>
>Chasing them into the desert
>By Katherine Ainger
>
>The airport at Genoa is named after Christopher Columbus. Five hundred
>and nine years after he set sail for the new world, launching what in
>today's parlance would be called 'a new trade round' - centuries of
>genocide, plunder and colonialism -  Latin American civil society
>brought its struggle against globalisation back to the place where it
>began. Members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (Movimiento Sem Terra
>- MST) spoke of the massacre of neoliberalism at the Genoa Social Forum.
>
>In the weeks leading up to the summit, plenty of old hands were saying
>someone would die at Genoa. The signs were clear in the escalating
>confrontation and militarization of both sides. But the MST could tell
>you that Carlo Guiliani, the young man shot dead as he protested at the
>G8 summit last weekend, is not the first casualty of the movement
>challenging neoliberal globalization 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; their opposition to the corporate control of agriculture
>through patents on seed; their opposition to the big landowners' farms
>where cattle for export graze while the campesinos starve.
>
>Recently three students protesting  against World Bank privatization
>were shot in Port Morseby, Papua New Guinea. Young men fighting World
>Bank imposed water privatization have been tortured and killed in
>Cochabamba, Bolivia.
>
>George Bush, Tony Blair, and Clare Short, who portray those who protest
>the unnaccountable institutions of global governance as ignorant,
>violent enemies of the poor, have not seemed to notice that the poor are
>leading the protests. A message, dated last April, sent out by members
>of the African student movement says: 'the anti-globalization movement,
>which had as one of its sources the persistent anti-structural
>adjustment student movement in Africa, has finally leaped from the
>streets of Harare, Addis and Algiers into Washington DC in April and
>Prague in September last year. [The World Bankers] have been hounded by
>a truly international youth movement which has carried the African
>student dead to their door.'
>
>Yet 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 root causes of the protests  which rocked Seattle
>in late 1999, the World Trade Organization are fleeing to the Qatar
>desert, way beyond the reach of even the most determined activist. The
>Chretien administration  is now searching desperately for the highest
>mountain in Canada in which to hold the next G8 summit.
>
>Their real problem is that their ideological adherence to 'free' trade
>is casting them not just into the desert, but into the political
>wilderness. The regime they are implementing is so destructive that it
>is sparking off a global uprising against neoliberalism. These are the
>beginnings of a new force that will shape the global political project
>in the new century.
>
>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
>privatized. 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
>South East Asia it was the IMF austerity measures imposed on their
>shattered economies after the financial crisis of 1997. For South
>Africa, it is seeing the ANC, former rebels against apartheid, making
>Faustian pacts with the global economic elite as inequality grows
>greater, not lesser, in their country. For France it was the integrity
>of their food culture, and the punitive tarriffs on Roquefort cheese
>imposed by the World Trade Organization. In Britain, it may be the slow
>sell-off of the National Health Service 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 mirror
>opposite of a concentrated strata of power from above, in which
>decisions that affect billions of human lives get made at a
>transnational level. The multitude embodies the real world below - a
>sphere of humanity, nature, culture, diversity - all those factors not
>reducable to a commodity to be bought and sold in a global marketplace.
>In fact, the movement is not 'anti-globalization' at all. If anything,
>it embodies 'globalization from below' - an international multitude
>which challenges the idea that 'the global surfaces of the world market
>are interchangable'.
>
>This is a new force for radical political change, but in a global
>economy, it does not have a Winter Palace to storm. This is why
>protesters have been targeting international summit meetings. But if
>these unnaccountable institutions of global governance are losing their
>legitimacy through citizen action, the movement, particulary 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 an genuine, grassroots legitimacy from below.
>
>The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote: 'Sooner or later, a true
>revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very
>legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot fear the people, their
>expression, their effective participation in power. It must be
>accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its
>mistakes, its miscalculations and its difficulties.'
>
>Instead of now chasing the world leaders into the desert in Qatar, then,
>the task at hand is to work on building 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
>parliamentary debate in the world over WTO's General Agreement on Trade
>in Services (GATS), 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. Even the Women's Institute is alarmed. Middle England continues to
>complain about GM crops and the state of 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 globalization: coming to a town near you.
>
>
>Katharine Ainger is editing an issue of the New Internationalist
>www.newint.org on global resistance.



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