BY ROHAN PEARCE
No-one predicted the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. However, it was predictable that the wealthy elite in the First World would attempt to use those drastic events to find a way to derail the growing revolt against corporate globalisation. They are convinced they have found it with Bush's "war on terror".
Almost before the World Trade Center had finished collapsing, professional apologists for capitalism were talking of the death of the "anti-globalisation" movement. An example is Edward Gresser's "Anti-globalisation movement grinds to a halt" in the January 18 Singapore Straits Times.
Gresser writes: "As recently as last spring, [the anti-corporate movement] could bring tens of thousands of marchers into the streets, winning press interest and some public sympathy for its flair for political theatre. Today, lacking an agenda and splintered by the war on terrorism, it seems destined for irrelevance."
Gresser's analysis of the "death" of the movement against corporate globalisation is based on the division between the craven support for Bush's war offered by the US trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, and "leftist groups" opposition to the war.
Gresser's article cites as evidence AFL-CIO president John Sweeney's statement the day after September 11: "We stand fully behind the president and the leadership of our nation in this time of national crisis ... America is a democratic and open society built upon universal values of freedom and human dignity ... No sacrifice is too great for Americans to defend those values."
According to Gresser, this was the end of a left/right, anti-corporate/anti-globalisation alliance upon which the movement was based.
This diagnosis of collapse, based on the retreat of conservative trade union bureaucracies which had participated in the anti-corporate protests prior to the September 11 attacks, is wrong.
It indicates a misunderstanding of the contradictory role of the trade union bureaucracy in the movement. The union bureaucrats have mobilised their members for a number of important demonstrations, for example the September 11-13, 2000, protests in Melbourne. However, they have not determined the political agenda of the movement.
The AFL-CIO mobilised for the Seattle 1999 protests, but in contrast to the overwhelming internationalist demands and sentiment of the demonstrators, the union leaders pushed a nationalist, protectionist and anti-China message.
The movement against corporate globalisation provided an opening for the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracies. It allowed them to take a nominally internationalist stance, giving them left cover for narrow-minded nationalism, and at the same time, as long as the stakes didn't get too high, avoiding having to name the real enemy of labour: the capitalist system.
However, once the prospect of conflict with their national ruling classes arose — a conflict that would require the active education of their membership if they were to prevail (not to mention the semblance of having a backbone) — the always tenuous participation of the AFL-CIO in the US movement ended.
Gresser and other right-wing commentators' misunderstand what the anti-corporate globalisation movement is. They believe the "anti-globalisation" label which they give the movement. They do not see the politics of solidarity that motivate the movement, instead depicting it as purely a movement against an abstract "globalised" economy. They try to equate the politics of the protesters and the politics of right-wing populists such as Pauline Hanson in Australia or Pat Buchanan in the US, believing the movement to be a "marriage of convenience" between the left and the right.
While the "war on terror" throws up new challenges for radical activists and the retreat of the forces such as the AFL-CIO weakens the movement, it is far from ready to die. The evidence provided by post-September 11 protests in Brussels and the mass mobilisations in Argentina prove this.
The factors which have given rise to this movement — the outrageous proportions reached by the First World's pillage of the Third World, the world's young people's growing alienation and disenfranchisement and their growing solidarity with the Third World — continue to exist.
(World Bank economist Branko Milanovic published a study in the January Economic Journal that revealed that the income of the richest 1% of the world's population is equivalent to that of the poorest 57%.)
Corporate propaganda about a mythical globalisation which will solve the Third World's underdevelopment, and the claim that struggle against this "inevitable" process is futile/harmful/irrational is being replaced with increasingly open calls for a "new imperialism".
If anything, the bogus "war on terrorism" has meant that the political division between those who are struggling against the corporate rulers' agenda and those who are interested merely in winning some crumbs from their table, is becoming clearer.
The retreat of the conservative trade union leaderships challenges the movement to find new ways to mobilise rank-and-file unionists. We also have to combat the wave of racism which has re-emerged in the wake of Bush's "crusade".
We need to convince working people that Washington's "war on terror" is just a new phase of the imperialist First World's war on the Third World. Understanding how the imperialists are attempting to use the "war on terrorism" to destroy solidarity with the peoples of the Third World makes our duty clear: to globalise solidarity.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 30, 2002.
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