Peace and Environment News* February 2002
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Peace and Environment News * February 2002 |
by George Caffentzis
The events of September 11 and their consequences have dealt a tremendous blow to the anti-globalization movement. In order to regain the initiative, we must understand our situation: the anti-globalization movement is in a struggle against both the supranational agencies of globalization, which are now draping themselves in U.S. flags, and the dissident groups of the Middle East, who drape themselves in Islamic flags and want a better deal for themselves and their "followers." To begin to move again, we must free ourselves to re-see our own past in order to understand our future in this context.
The horror of the September 11 events has frozen many minds—as it was meant to do. A first step in liberating ourselves mentally is to ask questions and to imagine an alternative reality. Could it have been different? Was there another historical possibility that did not lead to the slaughter of more than 6,000 people in New York and Washington? [Editor's note: The figure of 6,000 killed is based on earlier estimates. The number of people killed in the September 11 attacks is currently estimated at just over 3,000.]
Taking to the streets
By the late 1990s, the anti-globalization movement which had started in the mid-1980s in the structurally adjusted countries of the Third World had finally surfaced in the streets of the First. From Seattle in November 1999 to Genoa in July 2001, the anti-globalization movement expressed the recognition that the supranational agencies (the IMF, World Bank, WTO, G-8) which claimed to deal with the economic and political problems of humanity are illegitimate on two counts: 1) they have failed to solve these problems (for instance, the Third World debt has increased dramatically since the debt crisis of the early 1980s); and 2) they have no democratic responsibility to humanity—the IMF and World Bank are mainly controlled by their largest shareholders: the U.S., Japan, and the European Union countries.
The anti-globalization movement challenged these supranational agencies in a non-violent manner to change their course and to democratize themselves before it was too late. It asked them to make a dramatic gesture, such as cancelling the whole Third World debt.
The Seattle demonstrations in 1999 and those that followed were important because they brought the demands of the Third World into the streets of the First. They showed that the interests of the poor and dispossessed of Asia, Africa, and the Americas were taken seriously enough in Europe and North America that hundreds of thousands of people were willing to risk arrest, beatings, and torture to project these interests as well as their own into the precincts of the powerful.
But although the anti-globalization movement was able to block or disrupt their meetings, they in turn were able to stonewall the anti-globalization movement's positive demands. Neither massive debt cancellation, nor fairer trade provisions, nor a "Marshall Plan for the World," nor the abolition of the World Bank and IMF were initiated in response to the movement's efforts. On the contrary, the economic and political crises caused by globalization have intensified in the last two years.
Moreover, the official response to the movement has become increasingly violent and repressive. This violence reached a peak in Genoa in July with the police's shooting of Carlo Guiliani, their maiming and torture of hundreds of protesters, and their beating of thousands of others.
Between two forces
There were, however, not only two forces in confrontation in 2001—the cabal of globalizing free-traders and the anti-globalization movement's thousands of peasant, worker, feminist, environmental and human rights groups across the planet—there was a third: the Islamic fundamentalists and dissidents. This group was (and is) committed to mortal violence, patriarchy, and the re-assertion of Islamic control of the energy resources of the region, from Algeria to Indonesia. It stepped into the vacuum of despair that the stalemate between the anti-globalization movement and the supranational agencies of globalization inevitably generated.
Looking back carefully, we can only conclude that we in the anti-globalization movement must not be caught between the huge bombs of Bush and the smaller bombs of Islamic fundamentalists, or be the grass trampled by the struggle between them. For at the moment, at least, our movement is the only one capable of leading an escape from the hellish inferno of homicide and suicide that the forces of global capital and the perpetrators of the September 11 massacres have ignited.
Offering an alternative
Not only have thousands of people in New York and Washington been killed as pawns in a power struggle in the ongoing "oil wars" of the Middle East, but the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon has also brought us back to the political situation that prevailed during the Cold War—a situation where we in the anti-globalization movement have to confront BOTH sides, since neither side represents the interests of the masses of people in any part of the world.
The Islamic fundamentalists' brutally misogynous treatment of women, culminating with the open enslavement embraced by the Taliban; the autocratic way in which Sharia Law has been imposed on many unwilling citizens; the atrocity of the punishments inflicted on those who break it; and the chauvinistic brand of Islam imposed at all social levels by self-proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist governments like Sudan's and Afghanistan's—all speak unequivocally on this point.
In this context, the priority of the anti-globalization movement is to offer an anti-war, anti-patriarchal alternative to the deadly politics of the fundamentalists and their globalizing adversaries by showing that we can address the issues that have led to this situation:
Building a just world
It is crucial that the anti-globalization movement begin to build a connection with the Middle East, by addressing its more urgent demands. It is plausible that, had this process been more advanced, it would have been far more difficult for the perpetrators of the September 11 massacre to portray all the people in the U.S. as enemies of Islam, and by the same token it would be more difficult now for the U.S. government to contemplate indiscriminate attacks on nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia. A starting point is to make a connection with the immigrant Middle Eastern and West Asian communities in our own countries.
The power of the anti-globalization movement is in its potential to build a real—not simply ideological—political struggle of the world's working people against corporate globalization. Farmers from India, trade unionists from Canada, students from Europe marched, talked, and organized together in the great anti-globalization events of the last two years.
This increasing unification of people across barriers of all kinds—geographical, religious, gender, political—has challenged the agendas of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the corporate globalizers.
Both the suicidal attacks on Washington and New York and the Bush administration's response, therefore, are also attacks on the anti-globalization movement, because they both are calculated to foment increasing divisiveness and despair within a planetary working class that was beginning to see an alternative non-violent, non-chauvinist, non-racist, and non-sexist reality taking shape.
It is crucial that we do not let the war drums and increasing restrictions on civil liberties and the freedom to move across borders succeed in erasing the movement's organizing achievements of the last few years.
(George Caffentzis is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He can be contacted at caffentz@usm.maine.edu.)
(Reprinted with permission from The CCPA Monitor, December 2001-January 2002.)
Converted February 17, 2002 - Lg
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