At the same time, inequality has increased within countries as well as between them. Even in those rich nations, inequality has been increasing sharply since the market really began to bite in the 1980s.10 In Britain, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal experiment succeeded in increasing the percentage of the population living below the poverty line from one in ten to one in four.11
Rising global inequality is not a new trend; it can be traced back to at least the early nineteenth century. But globalisation has accelerated it massively, to the point where, today, the world is more unequal – more unfair – than at any point in human history. This, in a nutshell, is globalisation’s story – the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. This fact alone undermines the empty promises of wealth-for-all held up by its promoters. And this fact alone is probably the single biggest reason – though by no means the only one – for the accelerating international uprising that is the subject of this book.
Private corporations, as any activist will tell you, are among the most obvious beneficiaries of this process. Over the past decade, they have become politically and economically dominant in a way that is unprecedented in human history. Together, the world’s ten biggest corporations control 85 per cent of all pesticides, 60 per cent of all veterinary medicine, 35 per cent of all pharmaceuticals and 32 per cent of all commercial seed.12 Of the world’s 100 biggest economies today, 51 are corporations; only 49 are nation states. General Motors is bigger than Thailand. Mitsubishi is bigger than South Africa. Wal-Mart is bigger than Venezuela.13 It is a stunning accretion of private political and economic power.
And yet the free-market project continues. At the international level, treaties like NAFTA and a host of other less well-known agreements, formal or unofficial, cement the hold that private interests are gaining over every aspect of economies, societies and cultures. Meanwhile, a triumvirate of global institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization – are loathed by activists and praised by neoliberals for driving that project onwards.
The World Bank and IMF, set up in 1944 to rebuild a shattered post-war world, morphed in the 1970s and ‘80s into the attack dogs of advanced capitalism. They loan money to ‘developing’ countries to build infrastructure projects, stabilise their economies or, more recently, promote social programmes. In return, they demand that countries ‘restructure’ their economies according to models drawn up by their in-house economists. Typically, in return for Bank or IMF help, a country will be expected to slash its public spending, begin a process of privatisation, open its borders to trade and investment, focus its economy on export-led production and encourage foreign corporate investment.
This makes more sense when it is understood that it is the world’s most powerful countries which run the Bank and the Fund, both of which apportion votes to government representatives according to how much money they receive from them. Both institutions are thus effectively run by rich countries, but operate only in poor ones. The Washington-based technocrats who devise their policies used to proudly call them ‘shock therapy’. In the name of trade, they have shocked millions across the ‘third world’ into penury, and continue to do so.
Over at the World Trade Organization, meanwhile, the powers of national governments are quietly being given away in the name of trade. The WTO was set up in 1995 to oversee the final creation of the neoliberals’ market utopia. Its vast dossier of international laws is designed to knock away all and any ‘barriers to trade’ by banning countries from subsidising their industries, protecting vulnerable economic sectors, passing laws that inhibit trade flows and corporate freedoms or generally preventing competition from doing its work.
Unfortunately, a corporation’s ‘barrier to trade’ is often a citizen’s environmental protection law, social programme, public health regulation or community support scheme. What NAFTA is doing to the Zapatistas of Chiapas the WTO is doing to the rest of us. Its rules have already been used to force the USA to rewrite its Clean Air Act to allow dirtier imported gasoline and drop import bans on shrimp caught without turtle-friendly nets. The WTO has instructed the European Union to stop favouring banana imports from small Caribbean producers over those of the US-based Chiquita corporation, which operates vast, chemical banana farms in Latin America. It has declared the EU’s ban on potentially cancer-causing hormone-injected beef from the USA illegal. It has instructed Japan to raise the legal level of pesticide residues in its imported foods.14 Every time that the WTO has been faced with a choice between upholding the interests of corporations and upholding environmental or social protection laws, it has ruled in favour of corporations.
As with the Bank and the IMF, it tends to be the rich countries which set the agenda at the WTO. In theory, every country has one vote in its meetings; in practice, many key decisions are made in secret meetings attended by only the world’s most powerful governments. Many poor countries cannot even afford to send representatives to some of its meetings, while rich nations will send along a bevy of ministers backed up with armies of corporate lobbyists to shape the world trading framework, as ever, in their own interests.
This is ‘globalisation’. Not grinning Eskimos downloading screensavers; not cheap flights to eco-tourist lodges in the Amazon; not more cultural understanding or world peace. Instead, a political project, pushed by the powerful and sold to the rest of us as an unavoidable, evolutionary development: as inevitable as the tides and just as difficult to turn back. It is as much about power and control as it is about trade or economic growth: control of resources, control of politics, control of the arguments that shape the values of societies.
If you are ‘anti-globalisation’, this is what you are against. And what you are part of is a worldwide people’s movement that is being built from the ground upwards. At present, it has no name. It has no name because it is diverse, it has no leaders, it has no manifesto and it has no marketing budget. Its two most common epithets are the ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, neither of them all-encompassing and both of them negative. Activists prefer more positive names, like the ‘social justice’ or ‘global democracy’ movement, both of which sound like they have been drawn up by committee. Most people, including me, simply call it ‘the movement’, but its name doesn’t matter.
What matters is what it stands for. What matters is that, if you are part of this, you are part of an uprising against a world in which power is marginalising more people than at any time in history. A world in which the hard-fought-for democratic project is under threat from an inhuman economic experiment. A world in which people are redesigned to fit the economy, rather than the other way round. What you are part of is a gathering force of dissidents who have had enough, and will have no more.
What you are part of is a revolution.
The Bolivian city of Cochabamba sprawls unglamorously across the high Andes, the thin mountain light lending it a curious aura of unreality. Its airport is one of the world’s highest, but has little else to be said for it. This is fortunate, because I don’t get much time to see it. I’m here to attend a global activist conference, which I’m hoping will give me more of an idea of how the movement organises itself. Also here is my girlfriend and fellow-traveller Katharine, who has promised to meet me from my plane.
Meet me she does. As I wander into the arrivals hall she leaps at me and grabs my arm before I can even say hello.
‘Come on, let’s go!’ she says.
‘What? Can I get my luggage first?’
‘No. Yes. OK, but hurry up. And don’t mention the conference.’
‘I wasn’t going to. Why not?’
‘Just don’t. Don’t look suspicious! Quick! I’ve got a taxi.’
‘What are you talking about?’
In the taxi, pulling away from the glass buildings of the airport and heading across the bleak Altiplano to the edge of the city, I find out. Dozens of people arriving in Bolivia for the conference have be
en detained at the airport and threatened with deportation. Katharine only escaped because she got altitude sickness when she arrived and had to run straight for the toilets. When she got out, most of the people she had been travelling with had been detained, and she spent an hour frantically phoning around people she knew in the country, and the conference organisers, trying to do something about it.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she says, relaxing slightly as the taxi takes us away. ‘I hung around in this tourist shop at the airport for ages until the police had left. I was pretending to browse, but the staff were getting suspicious. I almost bought one of those stupid hats just to show I was a tourist, but I thought I’d rather be deported.’
The local government, it turns out, is trying to prevent this conference of troublemakers from getting together in its territory. It has done so by branding the activists ‘terrorists’ and trying to have them all thrown out of the country – most of the attendees, including me, have tourist visas. It wouldn’t normally matter, but when the authorities want an excuse to clamp down on perfectly legal dissent, they can use it. And they have a perfect excuse. The date is 15 September 2001, America’s ‘war on terror’ is four days old, and already, peaceful protesters are in the firing line.
The ‘terrorists’ in question are an international activist network known as People’s Global Action (PGA). PGA was one of the driving forces behind the rise of the global movement that I found myself a part of in Prague and Genoa, and I am hoping that I can learn more from them about how that movement has come to be where it is.
On the lip of a dusty hill in Cochabamba, in an innocuous complex of school buildings, PGA is holding its third international conference. The gardens are planted with jacaranda trees, in full and beautiful bloom and a hot sun is beating down from a thin Andean sky. PGA has been given use of some of the school buildings for a week, even as classes go on. Dark-skinned children mill about buying Coke from snack stands and slouching from class to class as, under trees and in unused classrooms, uprisings are planned.
Katharine and I, having escaped being sent home, arrive the afternoon before the conference begins, sign in and wander around the banner-strung buildings. Agendas are being set, conversations held, workshops planned. Multi-ethnic, multi-national gangs of people are wandering around under the trees or sitting on the blossom-coated lawns smoking and talking, haltingly, in each other’s languages. School bells ring, bees buzz and, in a purple jacaranda between the school hall and the garden, a tiny hummingbird flits between the blossoms. It’s a world away from Genoa, and yet invisible ties bind the two cities together. For the story of PGA mirrors the story of the global movement itself.
The birth of PGA was inspired by the Zapatistas. At the end of the Encuentro in Chiapas in 1996, the Zapatistas issued a call to create an ‘intercontinental network of resistance, recognising differences and acknowledging similarities’ which ‘will strive to find itself in other resistances around the world’. It would be a ‘network of communication among all our struggles and resistances, against neoliberalism, and for humanity’. PGA is that network. Conceived at the Encuentro, PGA was officially born at a meeting in Geneva in 1998, created by 300 people from 71 countries. It is, as its ‘members’ are keen to stress, not really an organisation at all – it is rather a method: a means by which grass-roots groups around the world can link their struggles together, and hopefully strengthen themselves and each other as they do so.
Then, as now, the hallmarks of PGA were simple – and the marks left on them by Zapatismo are clear. Only grass-roots movements are involved – no established NGOs, no political parties, just the chosen representatives of community groups and activist ‘cells’. All oppose globalisation and all the hallmarks of neoliberalism, and all are prepared to use non-violent civil disobedience to challenge it. All are committed, too, to building new systems in a new way – devolving power rather than replacing it, looking for a political order based on ‘decentralisation and autonomy’.
PGA took the new political forms, the new ideas about power and the new methods of making things happen that had come out of Chiapas, and ran with them on a global scale. The result was events like Seattle, Prague, Genoa – and the global movement we have today. For it was PGA – not PGA alone, by any means, but certainly PGA in the role of inspiration and key player – which helped create the kind of ‘take on a big summit’ action that came to define the first stage of the anti-globalisation movement. Its first success was in 1998. As the G8 met in Birmingham, over sixty-five demonstrations against it sprang up in twenty-nine countries. It was an unexpected international co-ordination of dissent and, at the time, nobody knew quite where it had come from. It had come from PGA, and its next destination was to be Seattle.
Like the rest of the movement it helped spawn, PGA has an almost fanatical devotion to the concept of ‘horizontal organising’ – working in networks, not hierarchies, with no appointed leaders. The whole conference, the whole network, is run along these lines – no one representing anyone else, or PGA as a whole. Decisions are taken by consensus, with majority votes, and no person or organisation is obliged to do, or agree to, anything they don’t like. It was the same set of principles I saw in Genoa, and in Chiapas, and understanding them is crucial to understanding the global movement as a whole.
What characterises PGA, I am to discover, is what characterises the global movement: diversity. Diversity of aims, of tactics, of race, of language, of nationality, of ideas. There is no manifesto, no line to follow, no leader to rally behind. This diversity is what leads critics outside the movement to assume that it doesn’t have any ideas. After all, if it did, surely it would write them down, publish them, form a party, get a charismatic leader and march forward to take power? That’s how politics is supposed to work. This, on the other hand, is gloriously anarchic, in the best sense of the word. This is a politics in which means matters as much as ends.
Sometimes it’s hard to come to terms with this, even for activists. You might be standing in the middle of some mass action or conference or spontaneous uprising, thinking, Who started this? Who organised it? Who’s in charge here? Police officers and politicians, imbued instinctively with a ‘take me to your leader’ mentality, have never believed the movement when it answers, ‘Nobody and everybody.’ How can events as stunning as Seattle or Genoa have no centralised organisation, no leader who decides and declaims, whom people follow, and who we can arrest to neuter everybody else?
But they don’t, and this in itself is a revolutionary idea – not a new one, but one that’s rarely been put into practice. So much so, that even as part of it, it’s a leap to give that question – ‘Who’s in charge here?’ – the answer it deserves: Everyone. No one. Oh yeah: Me!
This approach is part of what has made this movement so effective. Broad-based, local and national networks, run by communities and linked internationally, more often than not, by the Internet, have proved themselves capable of bringing together very large groups of people in very short spaces of time. This way of organising has been called ‘swarming’, and has been the subject of many excitable pseudo-academic treatises over the last few years. Like the Zapatista rebellion, networks like PGA have been defined in many ways by the Internet. That was how Genoa was organised (mobile phones help too), that was how the Zapatistas came to the world’s attention, and that is how, to a large extent, PGA runs its shop. The success of Seattle has even been put down by some to one over-riding factor: the police hadn’t discovered the activists’ e-mail lists.
Internet activism, unlike more traditional forms of mobilising, cannot easily be crushed. It is democratic, non-hierarchical and entirely in keeping with the global nature and principles of the movement. It also gives birth to new forms of protest – ‘cyber-squatting’, for example, when hundreds of people log on to a corporate website and crash it in protest at company activities. Or the so-called ‘Dracula strategy’ – using the Internet and e-mail to expose something to the
light which its creators would rather keep hidden.
This was used to its best effect so far in 1998, when the text of a global treaty being quietly drawn up by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) – was leaked to a group of Canadian activists. The agreement, which would have given multinational investors the power to sue national governments and gut democratic control over foreign investment, was sent around the world to websites and e-mail lists in a matter of minutes. A rapid mobilisation began, and before even many government ministers knew what was in the treaty, a worldwide campaign was in progress against it. Exposed to the light, the MAI shrivelled and died, when politicians who would previously have waved it through pulled out of negotiations in the light of public glare. The victory was justly celebrated by the Financial Times, which grumbled, accurately, that the MAI had been ‘ambushed by a horde of vigilantes whose motives and methods are only dimly understood in most national capitals’.15
The ‘swarm’ had its first scalp. Within twelve months, at Seattle, it would have another. Ironically, the Internet, engine of financial and corporate globalisation, had become the engine, too, of the globalisation of resistance; a vital tool for the creation of a global network of dissent that could probably not have been created without it.
PGA could not have been created without it either. Now, here in Cochabamba, on the first full day of the conference, hundreds of people are sitting around in the unused school hall on red plastic chairs discussing where it will go next.
One No, Many Yeses Page 8