Republican News · Thursday 24 January 2002

Monbiot on globalisation

Positive agenda proposed

BY ROISIN DE ROSA (roisinderosa@hotmail.com)

We've admired the Zapatistas, the movement of the indigenous landless people in Brazil or India, which are effective individually, but we didn't have the key component essential to bring real social change: the capacity for sustained mobilisation

If anyone believes that young people don't care, last Saturday afternoon's meeting in Dublin on globalisation proves them wrong.

George Monbiot, author of The Captive State - the Corporate Takeover of Britain, and correspondent for The Guardian, drew a huge crowd of mostly young people. They listened avidly. They packed the seats, the aisles, the sides, the anteroom and down the passage and stairs to the street outside, as he talked about the way forward for what has been called the anti-globalisation movement.

"George Monbiot has already done more to change the world and our perception of it than most of us can hope to achieve in a lifetime," says no less a source than the New Scientist. And no better source, because Monbiot has exposed the takeover in Britain of key ministries, of hospitals, of education in universities and schools. Corporations have taken over scientific research and safety testing for their own ends to corner markets for corporations for food, for utilities, for waste, for consumables, for raw materials and resources, and of course for labour. In a word, they have taken over governments to take over the globe in the insatiable pursuit of profit.

Monbiot shows how corporate control has taken over the means of government as well as its implementation. In his book, he warns: "The struggle between people and corporations will be the defining battle of the 21st century. If the corporations win, liberal democracy will come to an end."

d it is that very 'liberal democracy', so interested in liberalising trade and other nations' markets, that has spurred the corporate takeover in the first place. It has been galloping forward, almost unnoticed, on both sides of the Atlantic, through the EU and the NAFTA 'trade agreements' of this last 30 years. It has been working through international global laws to force deregulation, privatisation, and to impose 'freedom' to sell what they like to where they like, without interference by local or national states.

George Monbiot noticed that corporations had made captive states to achieve this 'neo-liberal' agenda and Britain is one of them. Marxists held the view that they always had, but then Marxism is out of fashion along with dissent.

Weaknesses exposed

"People have said that 9/11 changed everything," Monbiot told his audience on Saturday. "I don't think this is true. Some thought we had the world at our feet on 10 September. We didn't. We lacked the key requisite of day to day mobilisation, a drive towards sustained change, which was in any way commensurate with the anger that we'd touched through the anti-globalisation movement.

"We didn't learn our history properly: from the anti-colonial movement, from the women's suffrage movement, from the movement against slavery in the 19th century. We've admired the Zapatistas, the movement of the indigenous landless people in Brazil or India, which are effective individually, but we didn't have the key component essential to bring real social change: the capacity for sustained mobilisation.

"But we have learned some lessons too. We've learned that we no longer, in our post Thatcher/Reagan world, have got ready-made communities, like the trade union movement, or local communities. We've learned that it is hard to maintain interest in a world that flicks from one channel to the next, as interests and the media shift fleetingly from one issue to another.

"And we've allowed ourselves to be defined by what we are against - anti-capitalist, anti-corporate power, anti-debt, anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-death, anti-destruction of our environment, anti-globalisation and so on - but we've not defined ourselves by what we are for. So we are left just responding to power, which only reinforces the power of those who hold power. It means that we are always bypassed by power.

"All that has happened since 9/11 is that issues have become more urgent. There have been changes. The crisis of global legitimacy is now all the starker. The UN Security Council has its five permanent members, which happen to be the largest arms dealers in the world, who run the show. In these circumstances, the US can make up the rules with impunity, and does. They went to war in Afghanistan and only asked the UN to legitimise this war two days later. They tell us the prisoners of the war they've taken to Cuba are not prisoners of war, so they can do with them what they like.

"And the media since 9/11 have a new whipping boy, the 'terrorists'. This has meant a de-escalation in media interest in us, the anti-globalisation movement. That's a good thing. We were letting this get to the stage of the media leading us. And now suddenly there is a greater interest in the news, and a drawing together of the peace movement and the anti-globalisation movement. There have been huge protests of dissent, like 100,000 people in Trafalgar Square who gathered to protest the war in Afghanistan.

"We have greater opportunities but we need to grab them with both hands. And I want to suggest very tentatively some ideas that we need to discuss together.

What we need to do

"We need to stop calling ourselves anti- but to define ourselves as for something. I suggest the 'Internationalist Movement'. So far we have been a huge number of heterogeneous movements all together, a broad coalition. We didn't deal with the issues. But now we need a positive agenda. We need to be clear what are our objectives.

"I make some proposals simply for debate. Many may be off the wall, but we need to start that debate.

"I'll suggest some:

"We need a directly elected world parliament;

"We need an international clearing union, like Keynes proposed before Bretton Woods to sort out debts; we need an international trade organisation which would control corporate power, which could address proper standards for labour, and ensure the terms of trade did not discriminate against the weaker economies;

"We need a global corporation tax, a global maximum wage, and a global minimum wage, full pricing of things to reflect the impact upon the environment, taxing of emissions.

"These are just ideas, but we need to discuss them or we'll always be a broad front, where power dictates to us."