Assault on Paradise: Perspectives on Globalization and Class Struggles

Chapter Eleven: Imperialist World Order: Protests against Misery for Profit

351 Chapter Eleven Imperialist World Order: Protests against Misery for Profit Overview When government officials from more than one hundred countries arrived in Seattle for a World Trade Organization conference in late November 1999, they found more than luxury hotel rooms, gourmet meals, and Courvoisier cognac waiting for them. In the streets of Seattle, more than fifty-thousand people gathered to protest against the loss of decent-paying jobs, proliferation of sweatshop labour, growing poverty and social inequality, mounting environmental devastation, and diminution of national sovereignty resulting from the W.T.O.’s “free trade” policies. Activists from labour, environmental, human rights, and radical organizations joined together for several days of demonstrations that frightened local corporate moguls and politicians more than any event since the Seattle general strike and workers’ uprising of 1919. The massive turnout and militancy of the demonstrators overwhelmed W.T.O. officials and the Seattle police. Many conference delegates found it physically impossible to attend their scheduled meetings. Why such massive protests? Globalization may not be a household word, but it has become a prominent term in the lexicon of transnational corporations, government officials, international financial institutions, academics, and activists during the past two decades. The International Monetary Fund defines globalization as “a historical process” involving “the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows” with attendant exploitation and repression. Introduction The imperialist capitalist system is attacking the working class and the oppressed peoples with the values of neo-liberalism, for the hegemony of the monopolies and the unrestricted circulation of capital. Regulations, under the name of structural adjustment programmes and more often than not accompanied by such concepts as the progress of democracy, the protection of liberties and global justice are being brought into force, as fitting the needs 352 of capital, in developed capitalist countries as well as dependent underdeveloped countries. The imperialist system is imposing these programs of aggression on the people of the world in many ways and using different methods; whether these are military-political, economic-social, ideological-cultural. No methods are abstained from against those countries that refuse to accept this encirclement and imposition or those regions that are regarded as necessary for the establishment of hegemony over the world’s resources including military attacks and occupation, hatching military coups, building puppet governments, creating civil conflicts, etc. The imperialist forces, primarily the US, are seeking to create legitimate grounds for their aggressive conduct by putting forward ‘justifications’ such as human rights, the international community, United Nations (UN) regulations etc. The reappropriation experienced only recently in the Balkans and Kosovo, the occupation and the establishment of a puppet government in Afghanistan on the grounds of national security and struggle with terrorism; the murder of Gadhafi in Libya; the occupation of Iraq now on the pretext of preventing weapons of mass destruction, concocting coups d’état in some of the Latin American countries – such as Venezuela – against ‘unwanted’ presidents and the overthrow of the Georgian president are all examples of the assaults of the imperialists spearheaded by the US. These assaults have not gone unchallenged. What is the argument against globalization? The philosophical debate about the relative merits of central political control of the market versus market forces in the allocation of society’s resources is an old one, and one that will probably never be finally resolved. The new primacy of “market capitalism” as the economic model and the technological ease of sharing the information needed to operate global markets are rapidly changing many people’s lives. Great fortunes have been amassed as world stock markets boom in expectation of new opportunities and falling production costs and as a result many parts of the world have experienced rapid economic growth and the consequent improvements in living standards. Growth has not, however, been uniform: Russia, Brazil and the Southeast Asian states experienced economic contractions in the late 1990s along with reversals in international 353 capital flows and the resulting steep declines in currency values. Some observers think that the benefits of globalization accrue mainly to investors, multinationals and the elites in developing countries, while the working classes suffer relative impoverishment. Further, they feel that the massive inflows of foreign investment in developing countries cannot be effectively absorbed, especially in regard to environmental protection and workers’ rights. This is because developing countries standards and enforcement mechanisms are not as well established. The open-door aspects of...