(Fwd)WTO/IMF/WB Grassroots and the Global Movement ( Znet)

[J. Halász Judit]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 16:46:03 +0100
From: Katharine Ainger <katharinea at newint.org>
To: caravan99 at list.free.de
Subject: [caravan99] Our resistance is as transnational as capital...

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------------- ZNet for 19 October 2000

The African grassroots and the global movement

In a ZNet commentary last month, Noam Chomsky observed South-
South-North
alliances "taking shape at the grassroots level--an impressive
development,
rich in opportunity and promise, and surely causing no little
concern in
high places." I want to firmly endorse this trend and today reflect
upon
some tangible evidence of activism, visible from even my
Johannesburg
armchair. (Last month, I reviewed some key African movements'
statements
and resolutions against neoliberalism and compradorism.)

To set the scene, I just read a fantastic e-account of Prague: "The
People's Battle," by Boris Kagarlitsky. In a September 23 debate organised
by Vaclav Havel, the outstanding Filippino political-economist Walden Bello
was trashing Bank president Jim Wolfensohn and IMF managing director Horst
Kohler. Recounts Kagarlitsky,

"Trevor Manuel, a one-time communist and revolutionary, and now South
African finance minister, objects to Bello: `Without the international
financial institutions, things would be even worse for poor countries.' The
right-wingers applaud. Someone among the leftists mutters: `Traitor!'"

This is one of the most interesting cleavages in global politics today.
Over the coming weekend, Manuel--who is chairperson of the IMF/Bank Board
of Governors--and other finance minister from the "emerging market"
countries will meet in Montreal with G8 leaders, especially the notorious
skinflint Larry Summers, who has spent the past few days lobbying the
Senate against a House of Representatives prohibition on IMF/Bank
imposition of userfees in Third World education and primary healthcare
programmes.

Manuel and his colleagues often allege that anti-neoliberal protests
represent merely the misguided efforts of spoiled, Northern,
petit-bourgeois youth. Manuel's press secretary last week had this to say
about recent university audiences at the film "Two Trevors go to
Washington" (about the A16 protests): "They are the richest students in the
world and would hardly miss the World Bank." (Tonight, the film wraps up
its leg of a N.American tour associated with the excellent World Bank Bonds
Boycott campaign- Hard as it may be for Manuel and co. to appreciate,
Northern leftists, feminists and greens are not the only ones angry with
the Bank and IMF. All too often over the past year, the struggle sites
under media glare--Seattle (N30), Washington (A16), Prague (S26), and to a
lesser extent Davos (January), London (May), Geneva (June), Windsor (July),
Okinawa (July), Philly/LA (August), Melbourne (September) and NY
(September)--have deflected attention from much larger actions in the Third
World, as well as from Here's my ongoing (and merely partial) list of
events that link grassroots and labour struggles in the South to the
higher-profile protests of which the global movement is justifiably proud.

* An indigenous people's uprising against neoliberal policies in Ecuador in
January generated a momentarily-successful alliance with military
coup-makers in January.

* The movement's energy shifted to steamy Bangkok in February, where a
formidable Thai network of unemployed rural and urban activists protested
daily at the semi-decennial meeting of the United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development.

* In early April, grassroots anti-globalization protest intensified in the
main square of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where thousands of residents forced
water-privatiser Bechtel out of the country (and precipitated a national
state of emergency in the process).

* When soon thereafter, Washington came under unprecedented attack from
30,000 militants who paralysed a large area surrounding the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank headquarters, substantial solidarity
protests were held in various Third World settings, including Brazil and
South Africa. Especially notable, under harsh circumstances, were anti-IMF
demonstrations mainly by small groups of women in Lusaka and Nairobi, which
were harshly broken up by police.

* The next month, the small Thai city of Chiang Mai was awoken by 5,000
angry students, unemployed workers, environmentalists and displaced rural
people, who overwhelmed police lines protecting an Asian Development Bank
meeting.

* On May 10, South Africa was the site of a national general strike by half
the country's workforce, furious over job-killing neoliberal policies
adopted at the behest of the World Bank, and protest marches brought
200,000 out into the streets in several cities.

* The next day, twenty million Indian workers went on strike explicitly to
protest the surrender of national sovereignty to the IMF and Bank.

* Smaller but still very sharp anti-IMF demonstrations quickly led to
police crackdowns in Argentina in mid-May, followed by a mass protest of
80,000.

* Turkish police also repressed anti-austerity demonstrations in May.

* In Port-au-Prince, Haiti in June, thousands turned out in June for
anti-debt activities.

* In Paraguay, a two-day general strike was called against IMF-mandated
privatisation.

* Also in June, Nigeria's trade unions allied with Lagos residents in a
mass strike aimed at reversing an IMF-mandated oil price increase, which
also had the effect of cutting short Larry Summers' visit.

* In July, South Korean workers repeatedly demonstrated against
IMF-mandated austerity policies.

* The Brazilian left hosted a plebiscite in August on whether the society
should accept an IMF austerity programme, and more than six million voted,
nearly all against.

* S26 solidarity events occurred all over the world, and in South Africa
(as a leading example) included a march by 1,000 NGO activists in Durban, a
demo at the US consulate in Cape Town, and a march by hundreds into the
lobby of the Johannesburg headquarters of Africa's largest company (Anglo
American Corp), attracting violence and pepperspray by corporate security
guards.

* Tens of thousands of Korean workers, students and social-movement
protesters are preparing for a day of confrontation on October 20, at a
Seoul gathering of European and Asian leaders.

I get a sense, in these discrete examples, of a broader and potentially
universal maturity, in which the most powerful structural forces
responsible for Third World degradation are now being named and forcefully
confronted. Each setting has a different emphasis, but most aim for
decommodified, destratified and even degendered,
environmentally-responsible access to basic goods and services: jobs,
water, electricity, free anti-retroviral drugs to combat AIDS, education,
lower food and petrol prices.

To be sure, some of the ongoing activism in Africa is difficult to
interpret from a distance, since much of it is based on a liberal-sounding
"rights discourse" rather than an explicitly "redistributionist agenda," to
recall an argument presented at a Harare conference last month by
Zimbabwe's leading civil-society scholar-activist, Brian Raftopoulos. In
that setting, Raftopoulos hopes that the official opposition party, the
Movement for Democratic Change, will ultimately encourage its mass-movement
suppor When not nurtured and harnessed, such sentiments have tragically led
to "IMF riots" in Harare on several occasions over the past decade,
including earlier this week, after prices on staple goods were hiked yet
again. Indeed, most Third World social movements have this trouble--i.e.,
they are often unprepared to work with those most prone to socio-economic
rioting, instead relying too much upon traditional "governance" demands.

Worse yet, instead of synthesising with mass-lumpen protest, some local
activities undertaken by grassroots groups too easily fall into the trap of
neoliberal economic policies. Consider a warning by the great Nigerian
intellectual Claude Ake, in a book (The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa)
finished prior to his 1996 death, which has just been published by Codesria
Press in Dakar. Since the 1980s, Ake reports,

"there has been an explosion of associational life in rural Africa. By all
indications, this is a by-product of a general acceptance of the necessity
of self-reliance, yielding a proliferation of institutions such as craft
centres, rural credit unions, farmers' associations, community-run skill
development centres, community banks, cooperatives, community-financed
schools and hospitals and civic centres, local credit unions, even
community vigilante groups for security. Some have welcomed this
development The rise of "Community-Based Organisations" (CBOs) and
associated development NGOs closely corresponds with the desire of the
international agencies to shrink Third World states as part of the overall
effort to lower the social wage. The result is an ongoing conflict between
technicist, apolitical development interventions on the one hand, and the
people-centered strategies (and militant tactics) of mass-oriented social
movements of the oppressed on the other hand.

Thus by the early 1990s, two out of five World Bank projects involved NGOs
(including well over half in Africa), and in projects involving population,
nutrition, primary health care, and small enterprise, the ratio rose to
more than four out of five. In his seminal 1995 study, Paul Nelson found
that NGOs were "primarily implementors of project components designed by
World Bank and government officials." Moreover, especially since an upsurge
in such participation began in 1988, NGOs have often been used to But from
a recent era in which "Co-Opted NGOs"--CoNGOs, as they're termed--happily
picked up crumbs from the neoliberal table, I think we may be on the verge
of a return to dominance by radical, people's-movement NGOs. In South
Africa, the 3,000 member SA NonGovernmental Coalition deserves this
recognition, as do component think-tanks and campaigning groups currently
fighting for free access to anti-retroviral drugs, water, electricity and
the like. (Next month, I'll provide an update on the mixed reaction The
campaigns really do, now, think globally, act locally, and network globally
for support. In his new book, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press), marxist scholar David Harvey seeks out instances of the
"global and universal taken together," which in practical terms means we
must "take globalisation seriously and make universal claims of precisely
the sort that the Zapatistas have advanced from their mountainous retreats
in Southern Mexico. These claims rest firmly on local experience bu The
Zapatistas' international alliances are a model along these lines, but so
too are their distinctly radical-democratic "development" strategies, based
upon short-term demands to their nation-state. Tellingly, when these are
not forthcoming due to neoliberalism, Zapatista self-activity takes forms
such as liberating household electricity supplies from the pylons that
cross Chiapas, invading underutilised ranches and plantations, and
declaring municipal autonomy in dozens of sites of community struggle.

For the rest of us, working in solidarity with such Southern rebellions and
in self-interest, too, the common target appears global and universal taken
together: shutting down the IMF, Bank and WTO. A prerequisite to global
social justice is to fell the agencies which most directly negate our
claims of universal access to decommodified, destratified, degendered and
environmentally-responsible "rights," such as essential drugs and clean
water. It is here that evolving grassroots activity in Africa has lots to
teach the rest of the international movement.