Michael Albert
The
World Trade Organization treats working people in countries throughout the world
as assets to manipulate in pursuit of private corporate profit. From Guatemala
to South Africa and from Thailand to the South Bronx, this causes
impoverishment, illness, and even mass starvation. When resistance to
exploitation follows, the flip side of exploitative trade and aid policies is
coercive repression. We need change, yet we cannot civilly persuade people who
regard us as a target for exploitation, manipulation, and repression that they
ought to curtail the pain their policies cause because of humanitarian concern.
They don’t care about our humanity or that of a 15 year-old earning $1.50 a day
in Jakarta or dying of starvation in Malaysia. Instead, to get change from
economic elites, we need to raise social costs until the elites see that
maintaining their policies will cost them so much that they must relent.
Movements
to the raise social costs of maintaining abhorred policies, however, come in two
broad types. (1) They can fight for immediate reforms, such as reversing WTO
policies, as ends in themselves with no further aspirations, taking as given the
underlying relations of the economy. (2) They can fight for the same immediate
reforms, but seeking to empower constituencies to create lasting infrastructure
and organization and to raise consciousness and commitment, all leading to
winning further gains and ultimately transforming underlying relations.
There
are many differences between these broad approaches, each of which, however may
use letters and lobbies, teach-ins and leaflets and rallies, speeches and
marches, civil disobedience and even massive strikes and more militant
disruptions to convey to elites that they have to change course or suffer
unacceptable losses of legitimacy and stability. But, differences aside, I want
to make a single, simple proposal that I hope both wings of anti-WTO activists
will find congenial: WTO activists should reject WTO policies and economic
hardship and oppression, of course – but also Mumia Abu Jamal’s incarceration
and pending execution as well as coercive repression more broadly.
The
U.S. is hell-bent on killing Mumia in large part to make a powerful statement
about the efficacy of state repression. This death penalty, like lynching in the
past, is in considerable part meant to send a message about the futility of
opposition. Mumia does not deserve to die. Moreover, activists should not sit
idly by while repression is legitimated by lethal injection. Sincere advocates
of social justice seek liberty for the oppressed and resist efforts to destroy
opposition to injustice. They thus work to save Mumia Abu Jamal just as they
fight exploitative globalisation. The only way to save Mumia, however, is to
raise social costs sufficiently to force a new trial. But to raise social costs
requires activism of many shapes and forms and …and diverse activism is what
Seattle is about. The anti-globalisation movement is big, visible, and recently
relatively rich in assets. What an opportunity it has to reverse one of the most
damaging attributes of contemporary movements – their parochialism and
single-issue narrowness.
It
isn’t that every movement needs to enunciate all demands of every other movement
all the time. Of course not. But it should be obvious to all, it seems to me,
that prospects for winning major gains on a grand scale – and turning back
international trade agendas or U.S. domestic repressive agendas are, in fact,
major gains on a grand scale — are enhanced rather than reduced by building
solidarity among movements and especially by bridging long-standing gaps and
even chasms. At this moment Mumia and the WTO are arguably the two most pressing
focuses of political activism in the U.S. The trade agreements are in process.
Mumia’s date of execution is currently set for December 2. Neither struggle is
peripheral in any sense. To have many members of each of these movements openly
support the aspirations of the other would go a long way to creating trust and
broadening consciousness in both cases, and to communicating to elites that
their policies are having still another effect they can’t afford – uniting
opponents of injustice. More, all indications so far are that in the U.S. WTO
organizing is being done, overwhelmingly, by white activists. So in addition to
the general benefits of mutual support, we have the possibility of a largely
white-led movement taking the initiative in expressing solidarity with the Black
community over preventing the execution of a very prominent black political
figure. Imagine that Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky was awaiting execution. Would
their plight enter the consciousness and visible manifestations of the folks
going to Seattle? Then so should Mumia’s.
The
anti-WTO forces can in one simple act of inclusion communicate that struggles
for justice are necessarily interconnected and mutually worthy. They can teach
that winning valuable gains in any venue requires raising social costs so high
that it cannot be accomplished without diverse constituencies from many venues
joining the effort. To either overcome WTO plans or to free Mumia it is
necessary to unite and fight…so let’s do both. What an opportunity for a
largely white-organized project, at least in the U.S., to evince solidarity with
a Black activist and a Black-led movement.
What
we have in Seattle is an opportunity for better communication and better
activism. We need to seize the opportunity. We need to recognize that social
change legitimately and understandably bubbles up in many forms and with many
agendas, but that ultimately it’s all about the same damn thing: winning
justice, creating a better world.
Go
to Seattle or bring the spirit of Seattle to your locale. Add to Seattle Mumia,
and add to Mumia Seattle. As Mumia writes: "Conventional wisdom would have
one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires…. But
what history really shows is that today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes, that
nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own
oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist
that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human
spirit."
If
Mumia can practice solidarity and mutuality from death row, surely we can do as
much from outside.