Global Labor Strategies

Is Another World Possible?

[This article originally appeared in The Nation, available here.]

The recently concluded World Social Forum is a good gauge for assessing the state of the world's alternative social, economic and political movements. Organized in 2001 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of global and corporate elites held in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF brings social movement organizations and activists from around the world together around the idea that "another world is possible." If Davos represents a failed globalization from above, the WSF represents an emerging globalization from below. It's a massive affair--this year more than 100,000 people gathered here for the five-day event. Part political convention, part carnival, part countercultural happening, the WSF serves as the center of gravity for the global justice movement that emerged in the late 1990s to contest corporate globalization.

The question on the minds of many was how to respond to what some call the "crisis of crises"--the economic, climate, political and cultural catastrophes that have engulfed the planet--and whether social movements can provide a unifying alternative vision for a better world. Economist Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South summed it up: "There is a sense of urgency and seriousness combining both pragmatism and principle. There is much less rhetoric. Things are taking place very fast outstripping what many predicted. There is a clear collapse of neo-liberalism. We have been triumphant over Davos.... Now we need alternatives and must get down to the hard work of creating them."

“GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW” TACKLES THE “GREAT RECESSION”

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:

“I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet.”

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe.  The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit.  It’s hard to imagine that its success didn’t have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression. 

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending. 

But what’s now being dubbed the “Great Recession” is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable.  On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time “freed” by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.     

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty.  In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor. 

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization.  People all over the world fought back against this “globalization from above” with their own “globalization from below.”  They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization.  They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, “globalization from below” -- that some in the media even characterized as “the world’s other superpower.”

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism.  Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city.  Current leaders of the world’s nations have utterly failed to develop a solution.   The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable. 

The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.

The times they are a-changing.  US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets. 

The Clintonite “moderates” who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits.  The IMF, scourge of “irresponsible” countries that didn’t balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced “structural adjustment conditionalities” with condition-free loans.      

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy.  But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy.  That’s one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is.  The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.   

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar “solution” would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form.  Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal.   They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy.  But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals.  “Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent.”  Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo.  But what can we do if the status quo can’t be saved?  Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession? 

New GLS Discussion Paper: Global Warming and the Great Recession

Today GLS is releasing a new discussion paper Globalization From Below Tackles the Great Recession. 

Its purpose is to stimulate discussion about ways that the global conjunction of forces variously known as the “global justice movement,” the “anti-globalization movement,” and “globalization from below” can respond effectively to the new situation created by today’s historic crisis of the global economy.  That crisis is now widely acknowledged to be more severe than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Indeed, it has now been dubbed, “The Great Recession.” 

As we head off the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil we're eager for feedback, so post comments or email us directly at info@laborstrategies.org.

Read the full paper here

.

Next Steps for Globalization from Below

[Previous posts have described the vision laid out in the "Beijing Declaration" on "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation" and the specific proposals that make up its" transitional program" to move toward a "radically different kind of political and economic order." This post looks at next steps toward realizing such a vision and program.]

The convergence of social forces we call "globalization from below" has a lot of experience in how to challenge globalization from above.  Its various overlapping organizations and networks have played critical and globally visible roles in challenging the formation and further empowerment of the WTO; demanding debt relief for poor countries; opposing IMF structural adjustment policies; providing high-quality, high-profile critiques of the World Economic Forum, the G-7, and the international financial institutions;  fighting for affordable AIDS drugs for the world's poor; demanding protection of the world's climate; contesting imperial adventures like the US attack on Iraq; and challenging the myth that "there is no alternative" to neo-liberal capitalism.

Globalization from below has become a kind of global social bloc, drawing together a diversity of forces around common interests and joint action.  It has depended less on formal organizations than on new forms of social networking that have allowed rapid coordination of thinking and campaigns worldwide.  It has utilized asymmetrical methods to counter the centralized power of globalization from above with the linkage of thousands of grassroots movements, constituencies, and organizations around the globe.

The dense set of connections and dialogues that constitutes globalization from below provides a vehicle for responding to the emerging economic crisis.  As the "Beijing Declaration", "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation" indicates, the upcoming World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil at the end of January 2009 provides an opportunity to jumpstart the process.  Here are some thoughts about objectives the Forum – and the wider nexus of social networks that interact with it – might pursue.

Globalization From Below in Hard Times

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty.  In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor. 

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization.  People all over the world fought back against this “globalization from above” with their own “globalization from below.”  They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization.  They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, “globalization from below” -- that some in the media even characterized as “the world’s other superpower.”

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism.  Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city.  Current leaders of the world’s nations have utterly failed to develop a solution.   The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world will be incalculable. 

A Vision for Hard Times

The crisis of the global economy provides new challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities for the diverse social, labor, environmental, and other movements that have constituted globalization from below.  It also raises the question of what the role of globalization from below should be in the new situation. 

In October, a group of activists, social movements, and NGOs who were in Beijing for the Asia-Europe People’s Forum met nightly to discuss the crisis.  Their “Beijing Declaration”  provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above. 

The G-20 vs. the G-6 Billion

The message from last weekend’s G-20 summit meeting on the global economy must be a parody of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:  The game can’t go on.  The game must go on.

In the face of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, European leaders had flirted with the idea of actually trying to change something.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "Laissez-faire, it's finished.  The all-powerful market that is always right, it's finished."  As a result, it is necessary to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, “the way it was done at Bretton Woods.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pointed out a deep contradiction of capitalist globalization:  “We now have global financial markets, global corporations, global financial flows.  But what we do not have is anything other than national and regional regulation and supervision.”  We need “a global way of supervising our financial system.”  He called for “very large and very radical changes,” including turning the IMF into a “global central bank.”

But the Bush administration soon put an end to such wild talk.  “This meeting is not about discarding market principles or about moving to a single global market regulator,” a White House official said.  “There is very little support for that.” 

Indeed, as the leaders of the G-20 countries were winging their way to Washington, Bush announced, “The crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.”  It would be a “terrible mistake” to allow “a few months of crisis” to undermine faith in free market capitalism.

Astonishingly, no one seemed to disagree.  In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the leaders of 20 countries gathered in Washington and produced not an agreement to act, but a declaration of principles.

The declaration itself is extraordinarily vacuous, even by the standards of international summits, given that their system (not to mention the livelihoods of billions of people) are at risk.  Their “common principles for reform” are things like “Strengthening Transparency and Accountability,” “Enhancing Sound Regulation,” and “Promoting Integrity in Financial Markets.”  No corporation or investor need lose much sleep over “commitments” like:  “We pledge to strengthen our regulatory regimes, prudential oversight, and risk management, and ensure that all financial markets, products and participants are regulated or subject to oversight, as appropriate to their circumstances.” 

It was eerily reminiscent of another such international gathering, the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933.  Sixty nations sent high-level representatives to London to forge a solution to the Great Depression.  Each came with proposals, some of them potentially effective, for halting the downward spiral in which they were all engulfed.  But each was deeply suspicious of the others’ proposals, seeing them as primarily means to advance their proponents’ national interests at the expense of others.  Finally, US President Franklin Roosevelt rejected the agreement his own representatives had negotiated and the conference broke up in shambles.  Trade wars and competitive devaluations followed apace. 

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
The G-20’s failure to accomplish anything is being attributed to the Bush administration’s lame duck status – everything must grind to a halt until Obama’s inauguration ends the “interregnum.”  But the real problem is deeper than that.

In a whirlpool of “deleveraging” and deflation, many fortunes are going to be lost – through bankruptcy, insolvency, plunging stock values, and the like.  Every national and international policy can affect whose capital is to be gored.  If the Big Three US auto companies can persuade the government to give $25 billion from the bank bailout to them, the auto companies will be $25 billion richer -- and the banks $25 billion poorer.

Things Fall Apart

The bill has finally come due for decades of reckless economic policies and utter disregard for the planet. We are now confronted with two intertwined crises of historic proportions—one economic and one environmental.

The economic crisis, which has been smoldering for more than a year, caught fire when the US housing bubble burst nearly taking the entire global financial system down with it. The financial crisis quickly morphed into a general global economic meltdown. The OECD reports that taken as a whole, its 30 country membership—representing the leading economies in the world—is in recession. China’s growth rate is at a 7 year low. Middle income and developing countries are being swept up in the chaos as commodity prices fall and capital flees to safer havens. 

Efforts to avert a climate catastrophe—already fraught with difficulty-- have been made even more difficult by the economic crisis. The immediate steps to achieve the needed reductions in greenhouse gasses will likely cause economic disruptions in parts of the economy, precisely at a time when political will may be flagging. Public money is scarce, private funding is drying up. The only silver lining: as the crisis worsens and unemployment rises, refitting the built environment and shifting to low carbon energy could be a source of employment and an engine of economic growth for decades.

A central problem in dealing with the crises is that markets are global while regulatory regimes and the politics that shape them are national. But no nation—not even the US which remains the richest and most powerful in the world—can address either the economic or the climate change crises on its own.

Averting disaster will require an unprecedented degree of international cooperation to deal with the tangle of vested national economic and political interests. That is why this week’s pledge of coordinated global action by the G-20, which we will analyze in a later post, is short on substance and long on rhetoric.

Traditional national Keynesian stimulus programs, currently proposed by many politicians across the political spectrum, can provide much needed employment for those out of work, but will not work as planned to revive economic growth. These policies were devised during a period of national capitalism very different from today’s global economy.  Keynesian job creation projects are intended to provide the jobs and spending power to increase the consumption of what are assumed to be nationally produced goods and services thus priming the economic pump.  But in globalized economy consumers are just as likely to purchase goods produced abroad, reducing the impact of any stimulus package on national employment.

There is an additional problem with traditional Keynesian programs. Historically, these programs were indifferent to the types of jobs created as long as they created spending power. But today, strict attention must be paid by any job creation programs to the kinds of jobs created to insure that they do not contribute to global warming or they risk dealing with one crisis by intensifying another. What is needed is global stimulus program that focuses on sustainable economic growth if we are to mitigate the effects of the current crises.