DEVELOPMENT: Popular Movements Fight Against Globalisation

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Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Sep 18 1998 (IPS) - Forget the Asian Tigers — the Global Vampires are upon us.

“They are dead. They work in a system of death. They live in castles, they’re very rich. They have long teeth, and they feed on other people’s blood. But vampires have one fatal weakness: if you hold them up to the light and they are exposed to the sun, they shrivel up and die.”

Therefore, says author, analyst and activist Susan George, the answer to the vampire-like global market system is exposure.

“If people constantly hold the globalising institutions, such as the recent Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), under scrutiny they will die,” she told a recent conference organised in Finland by the International Group for Grassroot Initiatives (IGGRI).

Only a 20 per cent minority benefited from free markets and free trade, said George, who works for the Holland-based Transnational Institute and is associate director of the Institute for Policy Studies in the United States.

And as well as increasing the divide between rich and poor, she said, globalisation undermined democracy as governments relinquished power to transnational corporations and multilateral institutions.

But resistance was possible because so many people stand to lose from the present system. “We can win this one”, she told participants from nearly 50 countries.

She urged popular organisations to mobilise across national boundaries, just as the transnationals did. Forecasts of collapse and change were also outlined by U.S. homelessness activist Cheri Honkala in an even more apocalyptic vision of economic meltdown in the world’s richest country.

“In the coming years the situation in the country is going to make the Great Depression look like a picnic,” she said. “There will be increasing crime and deaths and this will lead to a major social response in the country.

“There are over two million homeless people in the U.S. and the growing housing plan for them is the prison industry. We have more prisons now in the U.S. than South Africa at the height of apartheid.”

As the situation grew more desperate, she believed, a large social movement would be formed.

Another U.S. participant, Susan Williams of the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network, argued out that in the popular fight against the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which grouped the United States, Canada and Mexico, was an incipient social movement that sought to organise international solidarity against globalisation.

Similarly, Martha Ojeda of the Coalition of Justice in the Maquilladoras (foreign-owned companies operating in a stretch of Mexico along the U.S. border), said that the companies’ activities were generating widespread resentment and giving rise to resistance movements.

Workers were fighting against appalling working conditions as well as against massive human rights violations.

“Some companies provide free meals but… without the knowledge of the workers, put pills in the food in order that the women do not become pregnant.” The aim was to avoid payment of maternity benefits.

NAFTA’s only benefit, said Ojeda, was that it had brought people together to devise alternatives.

But poverty researcher Rahnema Majid turned the argument of the global critics on its head, arguing that it was peoples’ consumption needs that fuelled globalisation.

Majid, professor of development studies at Pitzer College in Clairmont, California, told the conference: “The moment I want absolutely to have a car, the moment I absolutely want to have certain things that I consider the minimum but that minimum is much higher than what society can produce, I have created globalisation.”

But the drive to globalisation, he said, was a mirage, because people constantly extended their needs, which could never be met.

The answer was for people to learn to curtail their needs, most which were frivolous and unnecessary.

“If people refuse to buy cars, that whole system of producing cars will collapse because there will be no demand,” he counselled. We should not start by attacking big companies. Globalisation starts with us.”

Poverty and power are related, he said. When power did not go with virtue and a sense of social justice then it was poverty- inducing: “Power should therefore belong to the people who will say, “These are the resources that we can put together, let us adapt our needs to what we have.”