Patrick Bond
In
a ZNet commentary last month, Noam Chomsky observed South-South-North alliances
"taking shape at the grassroots level–an impressive development, rich in
opportunity and promise, and surely causing no little concern in high
places." I want to firmly endorse this trend and today reflect upon some
tangible evidence of activism, visible from even my Johannesburg armchair. (Last
month, I reviewed some key African movements’ statements and resolutions against
neoliberalism and compradorism.)
To
set the scene, I just read a fantastic e-account of Prague: "The People’s
Battle," by Boris Kagarlitsky. In a September 23 debate organised by Vaclav
Havel, the outstanding Filippino political-economist Walden Bello was trashing
Bank president Jim Wolfensohn and IMF managing director Horst Kohler. Recounts
Kagarlitsky,
"Trevor
Manuel, a one-time communist and revolutionary, and now South African finance
minister, objects to Bello: `Without the international financial institutions,
things would be even worse for poor countries.’ The right-wingers applaud.
Someone among the leftists mutters: `Traitor!’"
This
is one of the most interesting cleavages in global politics today. Over the
coming weekend, Manuel–who is chairperson of the IMF/Bank Board of
Governors–and other finance minister from the "emerging market"
countries will meet in Montreal with G8 leaders, especially the notorious
skinflint Larry Summers, who has spent the past few days lobbying the Senate
against a House of Representatives prohibition on IMF/Bank imposition of
userfees in Third World education and primary healthcare programmes.
Manuel
and his colleagues often allege that anti-neoliberal protests represent merely
the misguided efforts of spoiled, Northern, petit-bourgeois youth. Manuel’s
press secretary last week had this to say about recent university audiences at
the film "Two Trevors go to Washington" (about the A16 protests):
"They are the richest students in the world and would hardly miss the World
Bank." (Tonight, the film wraps up its leg of a N.American tour associated
with the excellent World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign–victorious a few days ago
in San Francisco! www.worldbankboycott.org–at New York’s Monthly Review office,
122 W.27th St, at 6PM, so if you’re in town, don’t miss it; http://go.to/two.trevors).
Hard
as it may be for Manuel and co. to appreciate, Northern leftists, feminists and
greens are not the only ones angry with the Bank and IMF. All too often over the
past year, the struggle sites under media glare–Seattle (N30), Washington
(A16), Prague (S26), and to a lesser extent Davos (January), London (May),
Geneva (June), Windsor (July), Okinawa (July), Philly/LA (August), Melbourne
(September) and NY (September)–have deflected attention from much larger
actions in the Third World, as well as from smaller-scale but even braver anti-neoliberal
campaigns against the Bretton Woods Institutions and the repressive governments
they fund.
Here’s
my ongoing (and merely partial) list of events that link grassroots and labour
struggles in the South to the higher-profile protests of which the global
movement is justifiably proud.
-
An
indigenous people’s uprising against neoliberal policies in Ecuador in
January generated a momentarily-successful alliance with military
coup-makers in January.
-
The
movement’s energy shifted to steamy Bangkok in February, where a formidable
Thai network of unemployed rural and urban activists protested daily at the
semi-decennial meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development.
-
In
early April, grassroots anti-globalization protest intensified in the main
square of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where thousands of residents forced water-privatiser
Bechtel out of the country (and precipitated a national state of emergency
in the process).
-
When
soon thereafter, Washington came under unprecedented attack from 30,000
militants who paralysed a large area surrounding the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and World Bank headquarters, substantial solidarity protests were
held in various Third World settings, including Brazil and South Africa.
Especially notable, under harsh circumstances, were anti-IMF demonstrations
mainly by small groups of women in Lusaka and Nairobi, which were harshly
broken up by police.
-
The
next month, the small Thai city of Chiang Mai was awoken by 5,000 angry
students, unemployed workers, environmentalists and displaced rural people,
who overwhelmed police lines protecting an Asian Development Bank meeting.
-
On
May 10, South Africa was the site of a national general strike by half the
country’s workforce, furious over job-killing neoliberal policies adopted at
the behest of the World Bank, and protest marches brought 200,000 out into
the streets in several cities
-
The
next day, twenty million Indian workers went on strike explicitly to protest
the surrender of national sovereignty to the IMF and Bank.
-
Smaller
but still very sharp anti-IMF demonstrations quickly led to police
crackdowns in Argentina in mid-May, followed by a mass protest of 80,000.
-
Turkish
police also repressed anti-austerity demonstrations in May.
-
In
Port-au-Prince, Haiti in June, thousands turned out in June for anti-debt
activities.
-
In
Paraguay, a two-day general strike was called against IMF-mandated
privatisation.
-
Also
in June, Nigeria’s trade unions allied with Lagos residents in a mass strike
aimed at reversing an IMF-mandated oil price increase, which also had the
effect of cutting short Larry Summers’ visit.
-
In
July, South Korean workers repeatedly demonstrated against IMF-mandated
austerity policies.
-
The
Brazilian left hosted a plebiscite in August on whether the society should
accept an IMF austerity programme, and more than one million voted, nearly
all against.
-
S26
solidarity events occurred all over the world, and in South Africa (as a
leading example) included a march by 1,000 NGO activists in Durban, a demo
at the US consulate in Cape Town, and a march by hundreds into the lobby of
the Johannesburg headquarters of Africa’s largest company (Anglo American
Corp), attracting violence and pepperspray by corporate security guards.
-
Tens
of thousands of Korean workers, students and social-movement protesters are
preparing for a day of confrontation on October 20, at a Seoul gathering of
European and Asian leaders.
I
get a sense, in these discrete examples, of a broader and potentially universal
maturity, in which the most powerful structural forces responsible for Third
World degradation are now being named and forcefully confronted. Each setting
has a different emphasis, but most aim for decommodified, destratified and even
degendered, environmentally-responsible access to basic goods and services:
jobs, water, electricity, free anti-retroviral drugs to combat AIDS, education,
lower food and petrol prices.
To
be sure, some of the ongoing activism in Africa is difficult to interpret from a
distance, since much of it is based on a liberal-sounding "rights
discourse" rather than an explicitly "redistributionist agenda,"
to recall an argument presented at a Harare conference last month by Zimbabwe’s
leading civil-society scholar-activist, Brian Raftopoulos. In that setting,
Raftopoulos hopes that the official opposition party, the Movement for
Democratic Change, will ultimately encourage its mass-movement supporters to
counteract quite damaging internal neoliberal pressure (associated with campaign
fund-raising for the June 2000 parliamentary elections), and thus begin to
harness the potent, anti-neoliberal (and anti-government) sentiments of poor and
working-class people.
When
not nurtured and harnessed, such sentiments have tragically led to "IMF
riots" in Harare on several occasions over the past decade, including
earlier this week, after prices on staple goods were hiked yet again. Indeed,
most Third World social movements have this trouble–i.e., they are often
unprepared to work with those most prone to socio-economic rioting, instead
relying too much upon traditional "governance" demands.
Worse
yet, instead of synthesising with mass-lumpen protest, some local activities
undertaken by grassroots groups too easily fall into the trap of neoliberal
economic policies. Consider a warning by the great Nigerian intellectual Claude
Ake, in a book (The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa) finished prior to his
1996 death, which has just been published by Codesria Press in Dakar. Since the
1980s, Ake reports,
"there has been an explosion of associational life in rural Africa. By all
indications, this is a by-product of a general acceptance of the necessity of
self-reliance, yielding a proliferation of institutions such as craft centres,
rural credit unions, farmers’ associations, community-run skill development
centres, community banks, cooperatives, community-financed schools and hospitals
and civic centres, local credit unions, even community vigilante groups for
security. Some have welcomed this development as a sign of a vibrant civil
society in Africa. It may well be that. However, before we begin to idealise
this phenomenon, it is well to remind ourselves that whatever else it is, it is
first and foremost a child of necessity, of desperation even."
The
rise of "Community-Based Organisations" (CBOs) and associated
development NGOs closely corresponds with the desire of the international
agencies to shrink Third World states as part of the overall effort to lower the
social wage. The result is an ongoing conflict between technicist, apolitical
development interventions on the one hand, and the people-centered strategies
(and militant tactics) of mass-oriented social movements of the oppressed on the
other hand.
Thus
by the early 1990s, two out of five World Bank projects involved NGOs (including
well over half in Africa), and in projects involving population, nutrition,
primary health care, and small enterprise, the ratio rose to more than four out
of five. In his seminal 1995 study, Paul Nelson found that NGOs were
"primarily implementors of project components designed by World Bank and
government officials." Moreover, especially since an upsurge in such
participation began in 1988, NGOs have often been used to "deliver
compensatory services to soften the effects of an adjustment plan"; in some
cases the NGOs were not even pre-existing but were "custom-built for
projects" and hence could "neither sustain themselves nor represent
poor people’s interests effectively."
But
from a recent era in which "Co-Opted NGOs"–CoNGOs, as they’re
termed–happily picked up crumbs from the neoliberal table, I think we may be on
the verge of a return to dominance by radical, people’s-movement NGOs. In South
Africa, the 3,000 member SA NonGovernmental Coalition deserves this recognition,
as do component think-tanks and campaigning groups currently fighting for free
access to anti-retroviral drugs, water, electricity and the like. (Next month,
I’ll provide an update on the mixed reactions from government and the ruling
ANC, as the December 5 municipal elections approach, thereby heightening
populist campaigning promises rather more than I sense from the US election.)
The
campaigns really do, now, think globally, act locally, and network globally for
support. In his new book, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University
Press), marxist scholar David Harvey seeks out instances of the "global and
universal taken together," which in practical terms means we must
"take globalisation seriously and make universal claims of precisely the
sort that the Zapatistas have advanced from their mountainous retreats in
Southern Mexico. These claims rest firmly on local experience but operate more
dialectically in relation to globalisation."
The
Zapatistas’ international alliances are a model along these lines, but so too
are their distinctly radical-democratic "development" strategies,
based upon short-term demands to their nation-state. Tellingly, when these are
not forthcoming due to neoliberalism, Zapatista self-activity takes forms such
as liberating household electricity supplies from the pylons that cross Chiapas,
invading underutilised ranches and plantations, and declaring municipal autonomy
in dozens of sites of community struggle.
For
the rest of us, working in solidarity with such Southern rebellions and in
self-interest, too, the common target appears global and universal taken
together: shutting down the IMF, Bank and WTO. A prerequisite to global social
justice is to fell the agencies which most directly negate our claims of
universal access to decommodified, destratified, degendered and
environmentally-responsible "rights," such as essential drugs and
clean water. It is here that evolving grassroots activity in Africa has lots to
teach the international movement.
(By
the way, I’ll be presenting a longer version of this article in New York, at
Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies at noon on October 19–11th
floor of the International Affairs building–in the event anyone wants to stop
by and check it out.)