Socialist Action /September 2001
Washington Demonstration to Protest
Capitalist Globalization
By JEFF MACKLER
Some 14,000 participants-including heads of state,
finance ministers, and journalists-are expected to attend the Sept. 29-30
Washington, D.C., annual joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and World Bank (WB). Estimates for the number of protesters range
up to 100,000.
The city of Washington has requested an additional
$30 million in funds to police the protests, while District of Columbia
Police Chief Charles Ramsey has violence-baited protest organizers for the
purpose of frightening away potential participants. A $3 million, 2.5-mile-long,
9-foot-high, steel and concrete fence is planned to ring the White House
and the D.C., WB, and IMF buildings.
The last anti-WB-IMF protest in this city, in April
2000, witnessed an army of state and local police descending on peaceful
demonstrators in actions that were carefully calculated to intimidate and
even eliminate protesters from the scene. A total of 1200 were arrested,
though not a single demonstrator was convicted of any illegal act.
The IMF and WB, largely controlled by the leading
imperialist nations and dominated by the United States, serve as the leading
lending institutions for world capitalism. Their loans, especially to poor
nations, are linked to a spurious assortment of capitalist economic nostrums
that are touted as representing the road to economic progress.
In fact, the loans are tied to agreements that
compel debtor nations to initiate structural adjustment programs and austerity
measures aimed at the forced privatization of public industries and lands
and to open themselves completely to the world capitalist market. The result
is massive layoffs, the ruination of non-competitive industries of poor
countries, and the further degradation of their economies, social services,
and physical environments.
WB and IMF policies, coupled with other neo-colonial
imperialist measures in the present period of world capitalist globalization,
have reduced much of the underdeveloped world to states of poverty, disease,
unemployment, and war rarely seen before in modern history.
In virtually all cases the debt amassed by the
poor nations has grown to such a huge proportion of their national budgets
that it is unpayable. The annual interest on WB and IMF loans often exceeds
the entire yearly gross national product of an oppressed nation.
A statement by one of the main coalitions organizing
the Washington, D.C., protests, the Mobilization for Global Justice, captures
the sentiment of the protesters challenging the IMF and WB's policies:
"The voices demanding change have grown stronger
and stronger. The finance ministers and international bureaucrats who shape
the world economy to make the rich richer and the poor poorer need to know
that these past two years have not just been a bump on their road to global
domination.
"The peoples' movements of the world will
not stand idly by while those holding power continue to impoverish and oppress
the majority of the world's peoples and ravage the earth's environment and
resources while enriching themselves and corporations."
In addition to the Mobilization for Global Justice,
two other broad coalitions are central to the protest: 50 Years is Enough!
and the Anti-Capitalist Convergence are mobilizing the hundreds of groups
that constitute their networks.
The Global Justice coalition has urged the IMF
and World Bank to open their meetings to the public, "cancel all debt
for the world's poorest nations, help make education and health care more
available in these countries, and stop funding oil, gas, and mining projects
that harm the environment." Global Justice has aptly pointed out: "We're
not asking for the cancellation of the debt; we're saying that it has it's
already been paid."
IMF Director Thomas Dawson, apparently stung by
the sharpness and clarity of protester demands, has taken on the job of
damage control. Dawson states, "Our two organizations have forgiven
billions of dollars of debt owed by poor nations but none of their 183-member
countries had proposed the total debt forgiveness many protesters have called
for."
Contrary to the WB's own reports that the quality
of health care and education have generally declined in underdeveloped nations,
Dawson argues that "poor countries with IMF and World Bank lending
programs have increased rather than decreased spending on health, education,
and other social programs." Dawson says (with a straight face) that
although he cannot speak for the World Bank, he believes its policy is "to
avoid projects that damage the environment and to learn lessons from those
that had."
The capitalist spin doctors have made a point of
meeting with leading protest groups with the aim of dividing and/or wooing
those who might be lulled into a "partnership" with offers of
observer or "consultant" status in IMF/WB proceedings.
AFL-CIO's left-sounding rhetoric
The national AFL-CIO has announced plans to mobilize
tens of thousands of trade unionists for the Sept. 30 anti-globalization
protest. An AFL-CIO statement reads:
"This fall, America's unions will unite with
a broad range of activists from around the world to insist on transforming
the rules and institutions of the global economy to ensure that they work
for working people....
"The fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank
will be among the most significant gatherings of the proponents and decision
makers of corporate-led globalization in 2001. We cannot stand by as these
institutions continue to structure global economic rules for the benefit
of corporations and the wealthy and deny basic justice to the majority of
the world's people.
"The IMF/World Bank are forcing national "structural
adjustments" that include privatizing, downsizing and slashing spending
by governments; recklessly opening trade doors to exploitative foreign investment;
and promotion of so-called "labor flexibility" moves, such as
reducing the minimum wage and weakening workers' protections. Some countries
are spending more each year trying to repay loan debts to these institutions
than they are able to spend to meet the basic health, sanitation, and education
needs of their people."
Left-sounding AFL-CIO rhetoric has been commonplace
in recent years as labor's top bureaucrats seek to use the genuine mass
sentiment against the destructive effects of capitalist globalization to
advance reactionary protectionist legislation schemes in Congress, which
are designed to keep foreign and competing products out of the United States.
The AFL-CIO misleaders' answer to the mounting
attacks on U.S. workers is to counterpose U.S. jobs to the jobs performed
by workers of other countries-including supporting legislation that bans
Mexican truckers from entering the United States.
Rather than organizing a united struggle of U.S.
workers against the ever-increasing attacks on unionized and no-union workers,
AFL-CIO labor fakers restrict their activities to lobbying and pressuring
Congress to adopt trade agreements that protect U.S. industry.
In this regard, the three major AFL-CIO demands
are:
· Opposition to the granting by Congress
of "Fast Track" trade negotiating authority to President Bush.
Fast Track would bar Congress from more than a minimal review of trade agreements
Bush negotiates, and would not require protections for workers' rights and
the environment in the core provisions of the trade agreements-despite extensive
protections for business interests.
· Support for the call to unconditionally
cancel the debts owed by the poorest countries to the IMF and the World
Bank, using the institutions' own resources.
· Opposition to the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) agreement aimed at extending the terms of the disastrous
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Instead of taking on the bosses at the point of
production and joining in mass coordinated international actions, including
strikes, to defend the interest of all the world's workers, the AFL-CIO
sees its future in pressuring its Democratic Party "allies" to
prevent the Bush administration from engineering trade agreements with minimal
congressional input.
Relying on the twin parties of U.S. capitalism
as opposed to the power of working people has brought U.S. labor to its
lowest point in modern history with the smallest number and percentage of
workers organized in unions and lowest number of strikes since statistics
were first gathered some 44 years ago.
IAC flirts with the Democrats
The main Washington, D.C., anti-globalization protest
is set for Sunday, Sept. 30. The vast bulk of the participants will be there
to protest the rapacious effects of U.S. and world capitalism on working
people and the oppressed everywhere.
The just anger that workers will express can only
threaten to rock the unstable boat of the labor tops who pretend to fight
the bosses with reactionary protectionist mirrors while refusing to exercise
labor's real power at the workplace.
On Saturday, Sept. 29, the International Action
Center, a group closely associated with the Workers World Party, has organized
a Washington, D.C., mass protest with several other groups at the White
House.
The IAC presents a long list of issues in which
Bush administration policies run counter to the interests of the vast majority
of American workers. But virtually absent from the IAC's protest is mention
of the simple fact that the Democratic Party has been equally responsible,
if not more so, for the past decade's assaults on working people and democratic
and human rights.
In past years the IAC has organized similar "fight
the right" protests that feature the endorsement and participation
of liberal Democrats. The resort to lesser evilism has long hindered the
development of mass independent working-class political and economic action.
This is the case with the IAC's muted protests
as well as with a number of the anti-globalization groups who falsely saw
in Ralph Nader's campaign, which sometimes included causes in common with
right-wing protectionist bureaucrats, a viable alternative for working people.
Indeed, the critical fight over capitalist globalization
requires a clean break with capitalist economic and political institutions.
The anti-globalization protests can only give impetus to this struggle.
Socialist Action /September 2001 |