There is an alternative to corporate rule

All
over the world, truly democratic approaches are bubbling up from the
grassroots

By
Mark Engler                                                                        Read Spanish Version

This
is the first of a two part series.

One
of the remarkable features of modern political life is how
consistently global elites deny that viable alternatives to the
current global order exist, even as the terrain of international
politics rapidly shifts. The "imperial globalists" that
rose to power in the Bush years contend that without U.S. military
strength decisively projected abroad, the forces of evil will sweep
the globe. Meanwhile, "corporate globalists" of Wall Street
persist in their belief that, in the post-Cold War world, we have no
choice but to embrace the continual advance of the "free"
market.

Neither
idea is credible. The disastrous war in Iraq has firmly contradicted
the neocons’ argument that preemptive war can create security.
Meanwhile, mainstream pundits continue to proclaim neoliberalism —
the radical free market doctrine that has defined the "Washington
Consensus" in international economics in recent decades — to be
inevitable and irreplaceable. Yet as that ideology falls into
disrepute across the globe, their contention is revealed as ever more
deeply disingenuous. Today, there exist scores of books and hundreds
of reports that offer new directions for the global order — plus
innumerable initiatives at local, national, and international levels
to create political and economic systems that uphold human rights and
defend the environment.

In
truth, a lack of viable ideas is hardly the problem for those who
reject both corporate and imperial models of globalization. Whether
they are part of boisterous national uprisings or quiet, persistent
community efforts to fuel a truly democratic globalization — a
globalization from below — members of grassroots networks are now
engaged in a debate about the proper balance of vision, program,
political strategy, and tactics needed to move forward.

Changes
in the global justice movement

Part
of what has fueled public confusion about alternatives was specific
to the political moment when globalization protests captured the
attention of the mainstream media. During the period around the year
2000, global justice organizing was being covered only in contexts
where participants were providing a voice of opposition — at the
summit meetings of institutions like the World Trade Organization
(WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF). These
events became flash points of resistance for a reason: the summit
meetings were remarkably effective at drawing together a tremendously
diverse body of global citizen activists.

Yet
the globalization scene began to shift early in the Bush years, with
the attacks of 9/11 playing an important role in the change. Just as
abruptly as the major news outlets had announced the arrival of a
"new" global movement after the Seattle protests against
the WTO, challenges to the Washington Consensus became virtually
invisible to their reporters once again after 9/11. This only
partially reflected what was happening on the ground. In the months
following the attacks, some protests — notably a major mobilization
against World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington, DC — were
cancelled as the world rose to express sympathy for the victims.
However, the Bush administration’s reckless response wiped out global
good will and ultimately widened the scope of protests.

As
strategies to impose elite visions of globalization continued, global
justice protests throughout the world resumed. Many people,
particularly in Southern countries, combined outrage at U.S.
militarism with a repudiation of corporate globalization. When Bush
traveled abroad, he was met with huge protests, many of which raised
economic issues as well as anti-war concerns. Yet media outlets
mostly reported these demonstrations as incoherent anti-American
riots when they covered them at all. Beltway pundits rushed to
declare the global justice movement dead. Leading the pack was Edward
Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank of the
pro-"free trade" Democratic Leadership Council, who
pronounced the movement "destined for irrelevance" in a
realigned world.

Millions
of people had reason to protest. These activists were about to redraw
the political map of Latin America, preside over the collapse of
neoliberalism’s legitimacy, lead a worldwide rebellion against
preemptive war, and push issues of economic justice to ever more
prominent places in the global development debate. Their efforts for
a democratic globalization, they would assert, were very much alive.

The
view from Porto Alegre

As
it turned out, a most visible manifestation of the next stage of
global justice movement would come from a modest city of 1.5 million
people deep in the south of Brazil, a place whose name has become
synonymous with the pursuit of a more just and democratic global
order. Today, mention of Porto Alegre, the original home of the World
Social Forum, should be sufficient to forever put to rest the
knee-jerk contention that there is no alternative to dominant visions
of globalization.

Even
as progressives within the U.S. turned to resisting Bush
administration policies of preemptive war and its reactionary
assaults on Constitutional rights, international movements have not
waited for regime change in the U.S. to further the decline of the
Washington Consensus. Massive crowds have joined Americans in
rallying against the war in Iraq, as on February 15, 2003, when
upwards of ten million people in over 500 cities took to the streets,
constituting the largest coordinated global day of action in history.
But, at the same time, local communities have waged battles to
reverse privatization of public utilities and transnational campaigns
have fought for reforms like debt cancellation. In countries
throughout Latin America, they have successfully overthrown
neoliberal governments, elected leaders who oppose the Washington
Consensus, and they have pressured those officials to enact social
policies that serve working people.

Reflecting
this sustained torrent of global activity, the World Social Forum has
grown and matured. While the first global forum in 2001 hosted 12,000
participants, subsequent events have grown larger and larger, drawing
crowds of up to 150,000 people. In addition to returning to Porto
Alegre for three additional years after the initial summit, the
global event has also convened in Mumbai, India, and Nairobi, Kenya,
with smaller forums taking place at the regional level. At World
Social Forum, community leaders, nonprofit representatives, scholars,
organizers, and progressive lawmakers have presented, debated, and
refined ideas that collectively represent as comprehensive a set of
policies for the global economy as any wonky campaign office could
ever hope to devise. These spaces have served as physical embodiments
of the proposals for a democratic globalization.

Groups
meeting in tents designated for discussion of energy and the
environment have strategized about ways to break our dependence on
the oil economy. They have proposed investment in mass public
transportation, high mileage standards for cars, and shifting
government subsidies for hydrocarbon exploitation to alternative
energy. Other environmentalists have worked to promote an
international carbon tax to penalize polluters — something
undoubtedly in the public interest, especially given mounting
evidence about the perils of global warming. All these represent
perfectly viable public policies, but have been vehemently opposed by
the oil industry.

In
other tents, family farmers and food safety advocates from throughout
the world have gathered to promote models for redistributive land
reform. Even the international financial institutions acknowledge
that land reform would be beneficial for the poor, but it has been
pushed off the political map by national elites and agribusiness
conglomerates. Other advocates explained how current government
subsidies for exports and for pesticides boost large-scale
"mono-cropping" over organic agriculture; in response, they
argued for a shift in public funds to support sustainable farming.
Indigenous communities further asserted their right to
self-determination, particularly with regard to maintaining
traditional systems of land ownership and food production.

Tents
holding discussions on the need to curb corporate power have advanced
a slate of innovative proposals. These include public financing of
elections to end what U.S. Senator Russ Feingold has called "a
system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion." They
include laws that allow victims of corporate abuses in the developing
world to sue in U.S. or European courts. And they include detailed
proposals for strengthening anti-trust law in order to break up
business monopolies — among them the massive media empires that do
much to set the limits of public debate.

A
group called ATTAC, one of the organizations that founded the World
Social Forum, has set up tents promoting campaigning for the Tobin
Tax. First proposed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin in
the 1970s, the initiative would impose a low percentage tax on the
hundreds of billions of dollars worth of international financial
transactions that take place each day. This would provide a
disincentive for short-term gambling on currencies, and it would
encourage longer-term and more productive investment. Moreover, even
a miniscule levy could create an annual fund of upwards of $100
billion that could be used to stop the spread of disease and
alleviate global poverty.

Warehouse
workspaces hosting labor organizations have offered myriad methods
for protecting workers’ rights and ending sweatshop conditions. Over
seventy cities and localities in the United States have passed Living
Wage laws since the early 1990s. These go beyond paltry minimum wage
requirements and mandate that businesses pay employees at least
enough to keep their families out of poverty. At the social forums,
U.S. advocates discussed how to spread these campaigns. Meanwhile,
representatives from the estimated 180 worker-run factories that
formed after capital fled Argentina’s collapsing neoliberal economy
in 2001 spoke about their experiences in self-management. And groups
like the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice have
stressed that U.N.-backed summits and other international efforts to
advance women’s rights must not be subordinated to multilateral trade
agreements.

Finally,
workshops organized by representatives from the fair trade movement
profiled endeavors to build direct ties between producers in the
global South and Northern consumers. The fair trade model aims to
eliminate exploitative middlemen, ensure that workers get a living
wage for their labor, and give local collectives a greater say in the
determining the conditions under which international economic
exchanges take place. Like organic food, fair trade remains a niche
market, and it cannot substitute for wider structural changes in
global economy. But it provides both a living alternative to
exploitative trade and a hopeful model for future change.

Even
this wide range of activity hardly constitutes an exhaustive survey.
Unlike the corporate and imperial models, a globalization from below
does not take the form of one-size-fits-all prescription for the
global economy. With regard to alternative policies, the model of
participatory democracy produces, in the words of another slogan,
"One No, Many Yeses." It generates a strong challenge to
structures of neoliberalism and empire, but allows for a wider sense
of what might replace them.

Contrary
to individual manifestos that presume that a lack of ideas is the
problem for progressives, the advocates at Porto Alegre have
presented an agenda for change rooted in local struggles and
campaigns that have long been underway. Excellent volumes such as
Alternatives to Economic Globalization, a book compiled by the San
Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization, have profiled
other aspects of this agenda. The Human Development Reports produced
annually by the United Nations Development Program have backed many
of these same initiatives. A number of progressive proposals have
even been introduced as legislation in the U.S. Congress in such
measures as the recent TRADE Act, advanced by fair trade advocates
this summer. Needless to say, the elite beneficiaries of corporate
and imperial rule, still steadfast in their contention that no
alternatives exist, would prefer that the public not take notice of
any of these developments.

Mark
Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author of
How
to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation
Books, 2008),
from which this article is adapted.
He
can be reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com