©Monthly Review
(July-Augustl 2000)
History, as if to warn us continuously against any tendency toward
complacency, is full of ironies. As recently as a few months ago, the
close of the twentieth century had come to be associated, in the
prevailing view of the vested interests, with "endism": the end of
class struggle, the end of revolution, the end of imperialism, the end
of dissent—even the end of history. The new century and new
millennium were supposed to symbolize that all of this had been left
behind and that we could look forward to a new era of infinite
progress based on the New Economy of the information age, which
would usher in a gentler, kinder, virtual capitalism. The main worry
was a technical glitch known as Y2K. Would computers across the
world malfunction on January 1, 2000?
Hence, the powers that be could not have been more surprised
when, at the end of November 1999, massive protests involving
seven hundred organizations and upwards of forty thousand
people—workers, environmentalists, students, religious groups,
etc.—suddenly brought the World Trade Organization (WTO)
meetings in Seattle to a halt, grabbing not only the nation’s but the
entire world’s spotlight. There had been large militant protests
against globalization before—against the WTO and its sister
institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank. What was startling this time around, though, was that such
massive, militant protests took place in the United States, the
stronghold of global capitalism. For most people in the world, the
Seattle protests—and, even more, the unleashing of forces of
repression which broadcasted an image of "fortress
America"—demonstrated what had perhaps been long-forgotten:
that there are forces of resistance and international solidarity in the
United States. The protests exposed as a lie the carefully cultivated,
widely projected image of the United States as a hegemonic power
lacking internal social contradictions. Hope suddenly dawned of a
new internationalism—the struggle for an alternative
future—emerging along with the new millennium. Suddenly, the
question heroically raised only a year ago by Daniel Singer’s book,
Whose Millennium?: Theirs or Ours?, seemed to have leaped
from his book to the pages of history itself.
Seattle itself is now old news. But in subsequent months, the rays of
hope that it helped to bring into being have not died away; they have
only increased, along with what appears to be a rapidly growing
movement. The first months of 2000 have seen impressive
demonstrations on university and college campuses across the
country, as students have protested against university licensing
agreements with corporations such as Nike, Reebok, the Gap, and
Disney that rely on sweatshop labor located in the third world to
produce their products. In Washington, DC, in April, mass protests
against the IMF and the World Bank required extraordinary
procedures to keep these global institutions of capital working.
One of the most important developments in this period of growing
rebellion has been the partial revival of the labor movement that is
finally showing signs of attempting to chart a new course. The fact
that the AFL-CIO took a central role in the anti-WTO protests in
Seattle is a concrete indication of this. The focus on organizing
initiated by the New Voices leadership has renewed hope that
organized labor is at last rising phoenix-like from its ashes and that
the long decline in membership will be reversed. The AFL-CIO has
also backed away from continuing a history of Cold-War labor
alliances, opening the way to a broader labor internationalism—a
shift that first appeared as a result of the anti-NAFTA struggle. The
emergence of a labor-popular movement alliance, of a kind and a
scale not seen since the 1930s, now seems possible.
What makes this new era of protest so distinctive is that it is aimed
not so much at the state (as in the sixties) but at global corporations
and international economic institutions, and thus raises fundamental
issues about class power and international solidarity with third-world
workers. It also demonstrates the capacity of labor,
environmentalist, and other left forces to act in tandem when
confronted by the commonly perceived threat of a globalizing
economy. Many—if still far from a majority—of those engaged in
the struggle in the United States have extended their criticisms of
corporate globalization to a critique of global capitalism in general.
But the obstacles to a successful challenge to neoliberal globalization
are enormous. Perhaps the biggest such obstacle is the ideological
hegemony exerted by the capitalist order, which attempts to channel
such mass revolts into largely meaningless efforts to reform
particular institutional arrangements while the underlying structure of
power remains unquestioned. Here we are immediately faced by the
reality that much—in the United States, most—of this new wave of
protest, insofar as it takes an articulated form, is directed at
corporate globalization rather than global capitalism. A great deal of
the confusion surrounding the concept of "globalization"—especially
when regarded as the key concept for understanding contemporary
trends—stems from the fact that it is often seen as a reality that has
displaced capitalism, the nation-state, imperialism, and class
struggle. In this sense, it becomes a grand, all-encompassing,
culturally defined ideal-type. For establishment pundits like New
York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, author of
The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), globalization is a new
technological-economic system based in the microchip and ruled by
an "electronic herd" of financial investors and multinational
corporations, sweeping away everything that came before.
Naturally, critics of globalization reject this narrow, technologically
determined view that declares all resistance futile. Nevertheless,
uncritical acceptance of the notion that globalization as an entity in
itself is somehow the underlying force now transforming the world is
appearing everywhere, even on the left. This idea carries with it
certain built-in assumptions: (1) there is no alternative to the present
world economic order—or, in other words, capitalism itself (as
distinguished from globalization) is no longer in question, and
socialism no longer a possibility; (2) the global economic landscape
is a constellation formed primarily by multinational corporations,
international finance, and a few international economic institutions
such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank; (3) the only real
oppositional force is a collection of nongovernmental organizations
that represent "global civil society;" and (4) the goal is to reverse
neoliberal policy and make corporations and the key international
economic institutions more democratic and responsive to human
rights. Sometimes we also hear, in a radical mirror-image of the
Thomas Friedman argument, that the change that has occurred with
the rise of the microchip and the consequent globalization is the
creation of a new international of capital. In this view, not only is the
nation-state thought to have been displaced economically, but
national struggle is considered largely ineffective.
Confusion about the basic workings of imperialism is a crucial
ideological obstacle to internationalism today. The period of
neoliberal economic restructuring in response to decades of
stagnation has undermined the living conditions of workers
everywhere and has provided the objective basis for a renewal of
internationalism. Workers are faced with a greater necessity and, at
the same time, a greater possibility of building international solidarity
than at any time since the Second World War. Yet the idea of
globalization has often been promoted in such a way that the
suggestion is that what has changed is the fact that third-world
economies and populations are gaining at the expense of workers in
the United States and other rich countries, as U.S. plants are shifted
to the third world. Rather than promoting genuine international
solidarity, this frequently leads to debilitating forms of economic
nationalism. If around half of the U.S. population, as a series of
recent polls have revealed, are currently critical of globalization and
the WTO (suggesting that an antiglobalization politics has a vast
constituency to draw upon), there are reasons to be cautious about
what this means. Many of those who have adopted this position
have done so on the basis of a strong nationalist viewpoint, which
obscures the realities of imperialism—even more so in fact now that
globalization (not capitalism) has become the main area of concern.
Viewed in this context, the AFL-CIO’s decision to hold a rally in
Washington, DC, against most-favored-nation status for China, and
to demand that China not be admitted to the WTO—only a few
days before the April 16th and 17th protests in Washington against
the IMF and the World Bank—symbolized a tendency to exploit
sentiments of economic nationalism, fear of imperialism in reverse,
and even the xenophobia of many workers. To be sure, this stance
is being taken in the name of workers’ rights and human rights
(although outside of any strong alliance with Chinese workers). But
it has also served as a powerful diversion—since labor chose to put
its weight on the side of the anti-China lobby, joining with the
Republican Right in denying most-favored-nation and WTO status
to China, rather than getting solidly behind the anti-IMF and
anti-World Bank protests.
Organized labor in the United States today remains wedded to the
Democratic Party, and hence to one wing of the business party, as
the AFL-CIO’s early support of Gore indicates. Its overall structure
and emphasis is still one of business unionism. It has not yet
attempted to transform itself into a political or social movement.
Nevertheless, objective forces seem to be pushing labor toward a
new radicalism, and radical, rank-and-file labor activists are clearly
in motion. More than any time in the post-Second World War
period, a genuine internationalism is rapidly making gains within
labor’s ranks. It is these internal battles within labor—between
business unionism and democratic unionism, between economic
nationalism and internationalism—that will largely determine the
future of U.S. labor: both the effectiveness of the U.S. workers in
the class struggle nationally and in the larger internationalist struggle
of workers against global capital.
Globalization and Crisis
The prospects for the reemergence of radical struggle depend
ultimately on the larger evolution of the world capitalist economy.
We therefore need to analyze the laws of motion of capitalism in our
time—in ways that neither succumb to the dominant view that
changes in the scale and workings of the system have eliminated the
possibility of fundamental change, nor deny the existence of new
constraints on our action. Above all two issues have to be
addressed: globalization and the prospects for a new
internationalism.
Capitalism has always been a globalizing system. As Marx and
Engels pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, it has a tendency
to penetrate every nook and cranny of the globe. In the opening
decades of the twentieth century, world trade and capital flows as a
proportion of world production and savings, respectively, were on a
scale comparable to today. What intervened to break those
international economic linkages was the Age of Crisis, represented
by the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second
World War. It is only in the last few decades that global trade and
capital flows—as a share of world production and savings,
respectively—have again risen to the scale preceding the First
World War. One thing that this ought to tell us is that there is a
relation of globalization of economic activity to the globalization of
crisis. Increased transnational economic activity does not mean that
the laws of motion of the system have been dispensed with and that
capitalism has transcended its contradictions. Rather, it reveals that
the more globalized the system, the greater the danger of global
waves of crisis.
This was illustrated quite dramatically as recently as July 1997. In
that month, two influential periodicals in the United States raised the
question of the end of the business cycle and the unleashing of a
process of almost infinite economic expansion rooted in the
information technology revolution. One of these periodicals was
Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment, which published an article entitled "The End of the
Business Cycle?" The answer given in the article was that the
question mark needed to be dropped—"globalization of production
and consumption have reduced the volatility of economic activity in
the industrialized world." The other journal was Wired, a periodical
which has come to symbolize the heady optimism of the information
revolution and the so-called "New Economy." Here, in an article
that read like advertising copy, readers were exposed to a wildly
enthusiastic discussion of "The Long Boom: A History of the
Future" that gloried in the "transition to a networked economy and a
global society"—one which would produce steadily rising world
economic growth rates.
Yet, one of history’s numerous ironies intervened at this point. On
July 2, 1997, only two days into the very month in which these
articles declaring the business cycle to be over were published,
Thailand devalued the baht, commencing what came to be known
as the "hot phase" of the Asian economic crisis, which spread
rapidly from country to country and shook the entire capitalist world
economy. Suddenly, globalization seemed to stand not so much for
a new stable world order but for the globalization of capitalist crises
on a world scale not seen since the Great Depression.
Each of the major assumptions of globalization as a process of
rationalization of world capitalism were immediately called into
question—as if a veil had suddenly been stripped away from the
system. The idea that all countries were essentially in the same boat
and that imperialism no longer existed was contradicted by the
speed with which capital based in the core countries proceeded to
take advantage of the "fire sale" in Southeast Asia to grab assets.
The inability of nations to intervene in a globalizing world economy
was called into question by Malaysia’s decision to impose capital
controls—without the predicted disaster following. The end of class
struggle and the weakness of labor in the face of globalization
pressures was refuted by the mass uprising of Korean workers in
defiance of the IMF. The image of a smooth globalizing process that
would end in a rational treatment of global environmental problems
was symbolically undermined as Indonesia’s forests burst into
flames at a speed that matched its economic crisis. The fantasy that
globalization is a process controlled by a handful of corporations,
international institutions and Friedman’s "electronic herd" was
dispelled by the systematic nature of crisis of accumulation and the
vast range of financial speculation, revealed as economic distress
spread around the world—from Southeast Asia to Japan, Russia,
and Brazil. Above all, neoliberalism—the idea that everything should
be left to the self-regulating market—was shown to be not simply a
form of instrumental rationality directed at shared goals, but an
ideology of those in power.
At present, the world economic crisis, centered in Asia, has abated,
"but not before," as Fortune magazine (May 15, 2000) put it,
"millions were reduced to the poverty many of them had so recently
escaped." The world power-structure, so visibly shaken by the
Asian crisis as recently as two years ago, has now by all
appearances largely forgotten it. Yet, even a mainstream
commentator like economist Paul Krugman reminds us in his The
Return of Depression Economics that the underlying problems
generating instability have not gone away, and that we may be
simply waiting for the third act of a three-act play: the first in Mexico
in 1995, the second in Asia in 1997 and 1998, and the third yet to
occur.
Perhaps this third act has already begun. For the real third act in
these events may not be an economic one (which is surely to come)
but a resurgence of social revolt. The tarnished image of
globalization arising from these world outbreaks of crisis and the
militant responses that this has engendered among populations
throughout the globe—from Korean workers to Mexican students
to anti-WTO protesters in the United States—demonstrate that
neither are forces of production all-powerful nor social relations in
complete abeyance. This can be contrasted to the view of Perry
Anderson, writing in the January–February 2000 issue of New Left
Review, who states that "the only revolutionary force at present
capable of disturbing its [capital’s] equilibrium appears to be
scientific progress itself—the forces of production, so unpopular
with Marxists convinced of the primacy of relations of production
when the socialist movement was still alive." For Anderson,
revolutionary social relations are no more. The productive forces of
capital reign supreme. But this is too defeatist. We do not know
what may result from this new, increasingly internationalist phase of
struggle but the fact that such struggles are occurring, and are
increasingly directed at the system itself, tells us that millions of
people worldwide are stirring.
Those on the left who have abandoned all hope in social relations or
who, in desperation, have turned to the idea that only global (no
longer national) struggle is now possible and that we have to think
and act in cosmopolitan terms—as a "global civil society"—are
simply the dialectical twins of those who preach that globalization
has ended all possibility of change. What has really disappeared is
the kind of middle-ground, mixed economy often lauded in the
Cold-War years. Social democratic and Keynesian strategies,
supposedly the result of a class accord, are no longer viable under
today’s global neoliberalism. But all of this merely points to the need
for a much more radical, universal, internationalist strategy, rooted in
national realities and struggles as the only way forward for the
movement.
If this is the case, then a host of organizational and strategic issues
have to be engaged directly—which is the purpose of this special
issue, where we address some of the following topics: Peter
Marcuse questions the term "globalization" itself, pointing to the
ideological baggage associated with the most common conceptions
of the word. Bill Tabb asks, "What is the nature of the present
movement against globalization?" Martin Hart-Landsberg and
Patrick Bond explore what new strategies this movement might
adopt. David Bacon, Khalil Hassan, and Michael Yates pose the
question, "How is the labor movement to break out of its old
Cold-War stagnation and generate a more radical and
internationalist phase of struggle appropriate to the neoliberal era?"
Elizabeth Martinez and Fidel Castro discuss the ways in which we
can cross divides formed by the color line and imperialism, and John
Foster wonders, "What is the historical legacy of internationalism
that we can turn to?"
The greatest danger under these circumstances is to believe that
these organizational and strategic issues are beyond reach, that
nothing will or can happen, that there is no alternative. Here we
encounter another of history’s ironic wake-up calls. In the aftermath
of the anti-WTO protests, and even more so following the protests
against the IMF and the World Bank in April, the mainstream press
sought to mock the efforts of the growing grassroots movement,
which was caricatured as consisting mainly of untutored youth and
"flat-earth advocates" of no particular significance. Such views
could be seen in the New York Times, the Washington Post,
Newsweek, and Time, together with the various network
broadcasting outlets. The antiglobalization movement is portrayed as
a movement without a history or a future, irrelevant to the future
course of events—merely an irritant, or a temporary roadblock at
best.
Yet, the more astute Fortune (May 15, 2000) recognized that
support for these protests is very broad—so broad that even
elements of the establishment are echoing some of the sentiments
expressed, in an attempt to get ahead of the parade and redirect it.
"The movement appears to have legs. The world’s financial and
corporate elites would do well to listen up," the magazine opined.
For Fortune, it is clear that the direction of globalization, if not
capitalist globalization itself, is at stake: "New technologies will
continue to make the world a smaller place no matter what, but
economic integration is still very much driven by discrete political
decisions. ‘The rules are not predetermined,’ says Harvard
economist Dani Rodrik. ‘Globalization is not something that’s just
falling into our laps from another planet.’"
If Fortune has thus articulated the fears of capital when faced with
this growing movement, our role is to articulate the hopes of the
larger population—of all those who seek a more humane,
democratic, and egalitarian future. But more than mere hope is
called for. On the left, much will depend on our analysis and
organization. It is to these ends that this special issue of MR is
dedicated.