Unknown to most of the official delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last weekend, a caravan of 60 leftist economists, researchers and activists had sneaked through the police cordons to stage an “Alternative Davos”.
It included intellectuals and activists from all five continents, a motley but determined crew who had spent two days in Zurich planning protests and other actions before surreptitiously staging a media conference on Saturday under the noses of the forum’s security phalanxes.
The mood in the bunker-like conference centre where the official Davos was being staged was disconsolate and contrary. Spin doctors failed to hide the undercurrents: the polite but stern tiff between United States and Japanese officials; European leaders’ undisguised disquiet at Washington’s apparent serenity; and deep concern about, as one Latin American central banker phrased it, “a loss of interest in globalisation in emerging markets” and the danger of a “political backlash” against it.
The contours of disagreement seemed stark.
Ranged on one side is the hang-on-for- the-ride camp (captained by the US and transnational corporations). On the other there’s the loose band of “Third Way” politicians in Europe and some countries of the south, keen to stir up an alchemy between dynamic market economies and greater social responsibility.
Pundits will fuss about this divergence, missing the fact, said Egyptian economist Samir Amin, that there remains a fundamental consensus to press ahead for more open markets, especially for financial investments.
“These differences should not be exaggerated. The debate at the official Davos is really only about what, if any, types of self-regulation should accompany this drive.”
Whereas speeches at the official Davos came swaddled in metaphors (“a global village that has caught fire”, “boats tossed on stormy seas” and “plumbing” that had to fixed), at the Alternative Davos the gristle and bones of the world economy held centre stage.
“In 18 months,” said Kang Sang Goo of South Korea’s union-linked Policy and Information Centre, “we’ve gone from almost zero unemployment to 3,65-million people without jobs and tens of thousands of people homeless. The suicide rate among young women is catastrophic.”
In Brazil, some 200 000 peasant farmers have lost their land in the past four years and almost $600-million of state assets have been auctioned off to transnational corporations, said Mario Luis Lill, leader of that country’s Movimento Sem Terra.
“I cannot speak here as a citizen of a rich country when the homeless die on our streets this winter,” said Robert Cremieux of France’s Movement of the Unemployed.
A recently leaked French government study, he added, has pegged the true number of jobless not at the official three million, but at almost seven million.
Many of the group’s demands were pointed. Topping the roster was the need to block a new round of Multilateral Agreement on Investment talks. Scuttled last year in the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development by worldwide protests mounted mainly through the Internet, these negotiations are being shifted to the World Trade Organisation’s “Millennium Round”, due to start in November.
If passed, warned development analyst and activist Susan George, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment would exempt transnational corporations from most national labour laws, environmental regulations and investment codes.
The agreement expressed pure free market ideology applied globally: “Once it’s in place, the south will have little to resist with. This has to be our first line of attack.”
Other demands issued by the Alternative Davos included instituting a tax on capital flows, eliminating tax havens and cancelling the debts of all countries of the south – “not just the 20 or so poorest”. Wistful and unattainable?
In Davos’s conference centre bunker, US officials pounded much more chaste proposals to limit hair-trigger capital movements, fix currency trading zones or design “early warning” systems for troubled economies.
“We’re not here to bend the ears of some masters of the universe,” countered one of the Alternative Davos delegates. “We’re not asking. We’re at the beginning of new struggles across the world around these issues. Often they know nothing of one another. Our aim is to link them.”
The fissures and disquiet coursing through the official Davos meant that sanitised versions of left-wing demands could feature in the surgery being performed on the global economy. It’s not for nothing that Davos’s theme this year was “responsible globality”, or that the words “a new social contract” featured in the official proceedings.
“Their idea of a new social contract is a little wider consultation which legitimises measures that – perhaps – could slightly soften the social and developmental devastation achieved by free market capitalism,” said Amin.
“Ours is different. It will come about only if the kinds of forces at the Alternative Davos grow strong enough to engage and eventually negotiate with dominant political and economic powers.
Out of that new, democratic social contracts can be created.
“I’m talking about ordinary peoples’ struggles – Brazil’s peasants, workers in South Africa, youth in France – not just round tables and conferences.”