Confrontation and Transformation

After that lightning tour of the world economy, you may have the impression that these actors - the industrial and financial transnationals and their assorted lobbies, plus the Bank, the Fund and the WTO, are simply too powerful to confront, much less transform. Perhaps it's true, as they keep telling us, that corporate-led globalisation is inevitable and we may as well learn to live with it. Conservative American foundations and think-thanks have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two decades to convince us that resistance is vain and, in any case, the system is good for us. Eventually, we are assured, everyone will benefit from globalisation, no one will be excluded, so not to worry.

I want to devote the rest of this piece to showing that all of this is nonsense. In the first place, the ideological arguments of the Washington Consensus and the TNCs are false. Second, corporate-led, neo-liberal globalisation is not a force of nature like gravity. What some people have built - and it is construction - others can dismantle and put better and fairer rules in place. Third, and finally, significant victories, partial and they may be fragile, but they are nonetheless signs that times are changing. The Corporate Consensus, however powerful, is running scared and the proof of that is that they are holding one crisis meeting after another and consulting their public relations firms non-stop in an attempt to figure out how they can discredit social movements, how they cut off their funding to co-opt them.

Challenging Neo-liberal Ideology

First the ideology. The Corporate Consensus claims that their kind of globalisation is good for everyone. I've already explained that these companies are not employment-friendly or environment-friendly and are interested only in shareholder value. So it is no surprise that neo-liberal style globalisation is not good for everyone. Since the early 1990s, in the US, average corporate profits have increased by 108 percent, the Standard and Poor stock market index has increased by 224 percent and the compensation packages of corporate chief executives have increased by a whopping 481 percent. During the same period average annual wages for workers have risen only 28 percent, just barely ahead of inflation.

Indeed, if workers had been rewarded like their chief executive officers they would be making an average of $ 110.000 a year, not $ 23.000, and the minimum hourly wage in the US would be $ 22, not $ 5,15. In the US, instead, a person working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year at the minimum wage earns only $ 10.700 a year. This is 40 percent below the official poverty line for a family of four.

Furthermore, studies by both UNCTAD and the United Nations University show that inequalities in most countries are inexorably rising, whether in China, Russia, Latin America or the West; 85 percent of the world's population now live in countries where inequalities are growing, not diminishing. Aggravating this situation is Third World debt which continues to rise and creates and unbearable burden.

As for inequalities at the global level, the difference between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of the world's population stood at about 30 to one at the end of World War Two, about 60 to one in the early 1970s, and is now about 82 to one and increasing. Economics professor Robert Hahnel points out that during the immediate post-war period until the early 1970s - a period that favoured capital controls, restrictions on foreign investment and diverse models of development - growth rates for gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were about twice as high as in the more recent neo-liberal, TNC-dominated era which began at the end of the 1970s. (1)

In any given society globalisation benefits mainly the top 20 percent, and the higher they are on the social scale, the more they benefit. In contrast, the lower they are, the more they lose of the little they have. The TNCs and their allies, the Fund, the Bank and the WTO, cannot build an inclusive world. Their policies are in fact throwing petrol on the fires of inequality.

Social Movements

On the second point, neo-liberal, corporate-driven globalisation is not a force of nature and it is not inevitable, although lobbies plus ideological conditioning plus the Corporate Consensus have often made it seem that way. Globalisation as we know it has been put in place particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, before most people understood what was happening.

The Third World has been largely silenced because it is indebted and dependent on the IMF/World Bank, and on the goodwill of the North and Southern elites have been largely coopted. As for the elites and the governments of the North, with few exceptions, they are delighted with the status quo - the elites becaus they have enriched themselves beyond all historical precedent, the governments because they listen chiefly to the Consensus and seem to have acquiesced to the erosion of their powers. The so-called Third Way is a dead end. So who is left? Who might possibly change the current course of globalisation? Isn't it an illusion to believe it can be done?

The answer - the only answer - lies in the citizens' movement, also known as social movements, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), or civil society, which has a difficult but not impossible task. Here it is important to remember the successes already registered.

Successes so far

You will recall that one of the freedoms I mentioned in the trinity of freedoms the TNCs demand is freedom of investment. Between 1995 and 1998 they attempted to push through a treaty called the Multilateral Agreement on investment, the MAI, which would have given them complete control over this vital domain, including the option to sue governments directly if any government regulation or law might impair their expected profits. In spite of the secrecy - the MAI was being negotiated behind closed doors at the OECD - citizens learned about this scandalous treaty and were able to force governments to abandon it.

Some companies that sought to impose genetically modified organisms on consumers have discovered that people-power is not dead. For example, Monsanto's agricultural division is today worth approximately zero dollars. Shell has received very bad publicity because of oil platforms and its environmental and human rights record in Nigeria. In France, after the devastating oil-spill of the "Erika", Total-Fina declared that it had played by the rules and was not responsible. Only days later, due to public pressure, the company promised to cough up several hundred million francs to help pay for the damage.

And need I remind you of the Battle of Seattle and of the April demonstrations against the Bank and the Fund in Washington? These highly visible events didn't just happen - they were the outcome of years of patient organising by groups throughout the world.

This movement is international and it is broadly based. The different national coalitions that make up the citizens movement are workers and unions, small farmers and their organisations, consumers, environmentalists, students, women, the unemployed, indigenous people, religious believers. There are some scientists, technicians and other intellectual workers as well, but not nearly enough. These people have widely differing backgrounds, they have set out on this journey from very different places, and most of them didn't even know each other five years ago. Nonetheless, and in spite of the cultural and organisational difficulties, they have arrived at a common analysis and are well on the way to common platforms and common strategies. They are the backlash against corporate-led globalisation and they are not going to go away. Here, in telegraphic style, are a few of the demands they are making.

• We need fair trade, not free trade. Like any other system, the world trading system needs rules, but not the rules now in place at the WTO. Education, health, culture and the environment should not be treated as merchandise, and food security should come before trade in agriculture.
• We need to tax international capital. $ 1.5 trillion dollars is traded every day on foreign exchange markets alone, and most of it is purely speculative and has nothing to do with the real economy. A "Tobin Tax" - a very small burden - should be applied to Forex (foreign exchange); one could also tax mergers and acquisitions and TNC sales worldwide. The money should be used for the excluded throughout the world, to abolish poverty and at least begin to reduce the North-South gap.
• We need to close down the tax havens. The criminal economy is flourishing partly because legitimate governments tolerate money-laundering and financial crimes. While we're at it, why not abolish flags of convenience?
• We need rules to protect the environment, starting with the precautionary principle. And poor people must be given material incentives to protect their environment. World Bank lending to ecologically destructive projects must stop.
• We need to make corporations both financially and legally responsible for all their actions, that is, for the actions of all their subsidiaries. No more Bhopals, no more oil-spills.
• And, of course, we need to cancel Third World debt, otherwise we are condemning countless millions to continued misery and death.

This is only for starters. Surely we need more diversity and more responsibility at the local level, more democratic national governments, more control over TNCs, but so far we don't have any blueprints, just some guidelines and, frankly, we have been too busy putting out fires. So I don't know about "global governance", but I'm sure I don't want a single world government. Let's go, rather, for subsidiarity, a complicated name for saying decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people who will be affected by them. Various layers of governance are possible and desirable.

I also speak out for a diversified citizens' movement and I see no reason why we shouldn't win. The Corporate Consensus is not even economically efficient. They may have the money, they may have most of the power for now, but their way is guaranteed to be ecologically unsustainable, culturally homogenised, socially polarising, financially destabilising and democratically unacceptable. On our side, we have the numbers, we have excellent ideas, and we are slowly getting organised nationally and internationally. What's even better is that we are on the right side of the argument because we are fighting for dignity, decency and democracy. I hope you will want to join us.

References

1. Hahnel gives full figures in his commentary of 8 April 2000 for the ZNetwork (a subscriber service). Only Asia grew slightly faster in the second period compared to the first, and that growth fell drastically after the 1997-98 crisis.