bus
Patrick Bond
Last week, while global bureaucratic financial elites had trouble even pretending they possessed the tools to fix the world economy’s cracked engine, some passengers at the back of the bus debated whether to hijack the stalled vehicle or set out on foot.
Urgent strategic planning for progressive resistance to globalised finance occurred at two meetings of NGOs and social movements that ran parallel to the Commonwealth finance ministers meetings and the annual conference of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), in Ottawa and Washington DC, respectively.
Exuberant spirits characterised the several hundred international social movement representatives who came from high-profile sites of resistance like Chiapas, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Thailand and Indonesia.
Church campaigners in the “Jubilee 2000” campaign against Third World debt also met. A joint demonstration at IMF headquarters at the outset of the conference had a militant flavour, and drew worried looks from money mandarins pulling up in limousines nearby.
The primary strategic question for the movements was how to think globally about economic problems while acting locally, nationally and globally. The question has gained urgency in the face of the current opening provided by the inability of elites to solve the current financial crises. This has been augmented by splits in the elite camp and a series of financial disasters over the past month – all of which suggest that the neoliberal project has overreached.
Amidst the turmoil, do forces in civil society make any difference? Potentially yes, for the possibility of Congress preventing the IMF from expanding was the result of United States consumer and ecological activists joining forces with the populist right wing. The blocking manoeuvre pleased leaders like Ralph Nader of Public Citizen and Brent Blackwelder of Friends of the Earth, the most important left-wing US lobby groups.
Resistance to IMF funding followed similar left-right efforts on two other recent attempts to codify US commercial domination of the world economy: President Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful request that Congress cede him “fast-track” free trade negotiating authority and the now- tabled multilateral agreement on investment which is known as the Multinational Corporate Bill of Rights.
Says Nader’s associate Rob Weissman of Multinational Monitor: “We’re so far away from actually moving from blockage of neoliberal bailouts into proactive mode that the benefits of this temporary alliance far outweigh the risks.”
But at what level to foster renewed activism, and with what alternative visions? Mercia Andrews, vice president of the South African NGO Coalition, was cheered by other social movement representatives when she called for a return to building the local social organisations and trade unions that have tended to wilt during the periodic shake-outs associated with currency crashes and austerity- ridden economic policies. As shown this year, the “IMF riot” may threaten a Robert Mugabe here or even rid a wretched country of a Suharto there, but is no substitute for mass democratic mobilisation.
Whatever degree of organisation is achieved, the social movements must also make more coherent demands, with clarity as to prioritising global or national-level campaigns. Such debate was advanced in Ottawa, led by a Canadian citizens’ coalition which made a pitch to Commonwealth finance ministers to, among other reforms, impose a global “tobin tax” on financial transactions that would both throw sand in the wheels of hot money movements and raise funds for global redistribution of wealth.
In addition, debt cancellation was forcefully promoted by Jubilee 2000, which recently mobilised 70 000 protesters at the Birmingham economic summit.
Again, the elites’ solution – the World Bank/IMF “highly indebted poor country debt initiative” (which this year left Mozambique’s debt repayments at status quo levels) – was ridiculed as a “cruel hoax”.
But growing opposition to global financial bailouts – which necessarily will be paid for by northern hemisphere taxpayers and more vicious cuts in southern living standards, not by the New York bankers which it will benefit the most – did not obscure the thorny strategic problem of what is being called “scale politics”.
Should, in other words, the various popular movements link arms across borders and continents to try democratising the embryonic global economic-management state (the existing IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation), or should their objective be to limit the power of such organisations as a matter of principle (as the key US groups were doing)?
It boils down to the question of whether struggles for economic justice are best carried out in venues like a new Bretton Woods conference of the type South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, suggested at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting, with a potentially token place at the table for civil society. Or whether it might not be better to use the globalisation of social struggles to persuade national political leaders to restore state sovereignty, impose controls on global capital and return to a developmental project at home.
This debate may only ultimately be resolved in practice, and may be determined simply by the balance of forces prevailing at global and at national scales.
Meanwhile, as the IMF/World Bank conference showed, the fate of the world economy cannot be favourably resolved by those – Clinton, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Michel Camdessus, Tony Blair – with their hands at the wheel. Whether civil society should stay aboard the global bus or rather wander off in national directions remains an open question.