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Where next after the battle of Seattle?

Last November, a series of demonstrations took place in Seattle, USA, against the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The Seattle protest not only disrupted the WTO meeting: it shook global capitalism to its foundations.

It set going a multinational popular resistance movement to capitalism that every socialist, trade unionist, single issue campaigner has to be part of.

What shocked the world’s ruling class about Seattle? First the coming together of radical youth protesters and “non-governmental” lobbying organisations (NGOs) with organised labour.

Second, the rapid evolution of protest ideology away from single issues ecology campaigns towards a total hostility to the capitalist system. Third, the international co-ordinated character of the protest.

It shocked them all the more because they have spent the entire decade since the fall of Stalinism in 1989 sounding the death knell of anti-capitalism.

We’ve had the “End of history” theory; we’ve had post-modernism – which insisted concepts like exploitation, oppression and imperialism were dead; we’ve had the emergence of the “third way” in the social democratic parties – based on the theory, as Tony Blair says, that Labour parties should never have been formed separate from the liberal mainstream.

But despite all that, in the words of US radical Michael Moore:

“Mark it down, this last great date of the 20th century – November 30 1999 – The Battle of Seattle, the day people got tired of having to work a second job while fighting off the collection agents and decided it was time the pie was shared with the people who baked it.”

Seattle mobilised youth dressed as endangered sea turtles, Korean sweatshop workers, French farmers, a whole host of environmental groups – and unions from the industrial core of the US working class. But what are the WTO, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and why have international protests started to focus on them?

The WB/IMF and WTO are part of the world financial architecture set up on the orders of US imperialism after World War Two. They really came into their own as economic tools of imperialism when the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s ended, and capitalists turned to an economic policy described as “neo-liberalism”.

In Britain, and rest of developed world, neo-liberalism means attacking all the protective institutions and reforms fought for by working class since 1945. Privatisation, the “marketisation” of state services, reduction of taxes on rich and increasing them on the poor, slashing public spending and welfare rights, mass unemployment as production moved to third world destinations – this is the programme of neo-liberalism, and it is all carried out alongside a relentless downward pressure on workers’ wages.

In the developing world it means all this plus crippling debt.

Debt means that, in Uganda, the main hospital building is a concrete and glass edifice as modern as a city general in Britain. But there is no power, no water, no medicine, few doctors and only basic nursing care. Patients light fires on the concrete floors and drink from dripping pipes.

The loans that paid for the ambitious development schemes of the 1970s now cripple the whole system. This obscenity is put into even sharper focus when we consider that Uganda is seen as the “most successful” country in Africa at managing and alleviating debt.

The effects of the capitalist financial architecture are most acute in the less developed countries. Marxists call them semi-colonies because direct political rule from the G7 countries has been replaced by indirect rule.

The key institutions of indirect rule are the WB, IMF and the WTO.

The World Bank issues long-term loans to indebted countries and ties them to “anti-poverty” programmes that are basically an order to rip up social protection to boost conditions for capital investment.

The IMF issues short term loans tied to “conditionality”: this means the loans will only take place if governments adopt policies ordered by the IMF itself.

The WTO is concerned with trade agreements: for neo-liberalism pulling down barriers to trade used to mean ending import controls and quotas. Now it is intent on removing “invisible” barriers to trade: for example in Britain the National Health Service is seen as a “barrier” to free trade by private health companies.

One example of how the IMF works was in the economic crisis in South East Asia. In the face of the 1997 economic crash it demanded cuts in public spending, denationalisation, removal of import controls and the transfer of corporations to US or European buyers at knock down prices.

This in turn led to layoffs and massive casualisation. Last month’s general strike in South Korea (see p10) was aimed directly at stopping the attacks launched by the IMF. No wonder South Korean workers protested under the banners “IMF= I’M Fired”.

The IMF/WB/WTO are part of a process known as globalisation that neo-liberalism unleashed to remedy its economic crisis. There is a debate on the left about the true extent of globalisation. Some argue that we are up against a whole new kind of capitalism – that has left behind its “national” identities forever. Others say little has changed since Lenin and Bukharin formulated the theory of imperialist monopoly capitalism in the early 1900s.

That debate has been dealt with elsewhere – and the reality lies between these two extremes. However, an understanding of the extreme globalisation theory is needed to understand the Seattle movement. Its proponents say:

a) capitalism has left behind its national boundaries

b) all politics aimed at the nation state are useless – not only things that Marxists oppose (import controls, immigration controls) but all demands on Parliament, for example the demand to nationalise Rover or Dagenham.

Hence the focus of protest turns against international institutions like the IMF and on multinational corporations like Monsanto. Go straight to the capitalist organ-grinder – not the monkey in Parliament – is the theory.

That is what the Seattle-coalition did. And it sparked the idea that there could be a new, multinational popular resistance to capitalism. But to move that from wish to reality we have to subject the ideas and projects of the three main strands involved in Seattle to some critical scrutiny.

What is a Non-Governmental Organisation?

Basically these are campaign and lobby groups that have grown up as charities have become politicised and drawn into the economic and political running of capitalism.

o There are NGOs very close to national governments. Some of these take part in the lobbying around IMF/WB conferences but it is worth noting that the US state has a policy of creating and fostering links with “friendly” lobby groups in order to counter the danger of subversion.

o There are NGOs that are independent but backed by wealthy individual donors and mass subscriptions: Friends of the Earth is probably the most prominent of the mainstream environmentalist charities and Greenpeace the more radical mainstream. They work through a mixture of direct action and lobbying but their general aim is to reform capitalism to develop the economy at a pace suited to protecting the environment.

o Then there is a third tier of NGOs that was most visible in the Seattle context: NGOs formed by other NGOs, and occasionally unions, to campaign against and monitor the activities of individual companies or institutions. Corporate Watch, Bank Watch, Fifty Years is Enough and the Bretton Woods Project (BWP) are examples.

The BWP was formed in 1995 by 30 UK NGOs to monitor the IMF/WB and its key document and proposals for reform [note reform] of the WB are published jointly with Public Services International. Public Services International is a trade union federation with 20 million members including Unison, the FBU, the GMB the TGWU etc.

Leaving aside the overtly pro-imperialist NGOs, most want to reform capitalism. While they operate on a national level, in the context of Seattle they represent the emergence of a new kind of international liberal reformism. They want most of all a seat at the table when the WB/IMF sits down – to represent the interests of the earth, the peasantry, the poor and the working class.

Their emergence reflects the total failure of traditional reformist parties to do anything for these groups – a privatisation of reformist campaigning. They are generally staffed by the ’68 generation in all its political forms: ex Trotskyists, anarchists who have hung up their balaclavas, greens, anti-racists. But they are paid for by the middle class and the liberal capitalists.

As well as the NGOs, there are the trade unions. As socialists steeped in the day to day workplace struggles we think we know the unions inside out. But they are changing at the top. Basically the union bureaucracy in the 1990s has, by and large, given up trying to protect jobs and conditions through militant action and is looking for a new form of social compromise and partnership.

Instead of trying to resist globalisation the bureaucrats accept it but become more professional and determined in their lobbying for reforms at the international level.

A whole cadre of second tier union bureaucrats has used the internet to form horizontal ties with unions internationally to co-ordinate lobbying and occasionally protest action. The “old” internationalism of the union bureaucracy involved a back-slapping solidarity address at conference each year and then maybe a drink-sodden “delegation” to Bulgaria.

The new unionism can involve daily contact with international counterparts and inevitably the bureaucrats involved look to the intellectuals and campaigners within the NGOs for ideas and use their actions as a lever in negotiations.

Let us remember that the “old” reformism was called into being a century ago by the move of unions from the purely economic sphere into the political sphere of national politics: that’s how the Labour party was formed. So again today we can see the re-creation of reformism at an international level.

The third element in the new alliance is young people. If we paint a general picture of class consciousness in the 1990s we could say youth were bombarded with a soft anti-communism that said: social problems are over, socialism is dead, feminism and even gay rights have succeeded, the only war left to fight is the one to save the planet. Individual lifestylism or passive protest were the way forward.

Above all the academics rammed down the throats of students the new capitalist ideology: postmodernism: “All protest leads to oppression; all class struggle is futile; the Gulf War didn’t happen; imperialism is a dead concept”.

But the youth have managed to overcome all this. Much to the annoyance of all kinds of conservative trade union time servers – and quite a few self-styled Marxist revolutionaries – the youth worked out, all by themselves, that it’s not just Monsanto or Microsoft that is the problem but the capitalist system.

That’s why we see, in the USA for example, the emergence of movements on campuses to support workers in sweatshops. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is a campaign that has forced colleges not to take sponsorship from sportswear companies using low-paid and child labour – for example, Nike. They’ve done the job of adding firms like, Gap, Nike and Starbucks to the list of “what shops to its acceptable to trash”, which was formerly a list of one: McDonalds.

Despite the desire to focus on the big problem – capitalism – much of the youth’s activity remains focused on single issues (like sweatshops). It uses a combination of radical Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA) and political lobbying for reforms. It sees the workers often as passive victims of oppression, and sees politics as something to do with the bourgeois parties in Congress.

So, for example, a USAS workshop script for activists encourages students to “imagine what it’s like to be in a sweatshop”.

Some people have compared the present generation of “fluffy” anti-globalisation activists to the Russian narodniks of the 1880s. But many have not even got that far: the narodniks dropped out of their universities and their middle class lifestyle and went “to the people”.

Many within the mainstream of the anti-globalisation movement see the workers, shanty-dwellers and peasants of the third world in the same way as they see whales and rainforests: helpless victims to be protected, their plight to be “imagined”.

The crucial step will come however when the youth positively turn to the workers – not as charitable donors or saviours through individual acts of protest but as allies in the class struggle.

Basically, the youth in this alliance are the “wild card”: the NGOs and unions leaders have a strategy and an agenda that flows from their position within capitalism. The youth are not constrained by a self-imposed limit.

The choice is posed for the youth around and within the NGO-led protests: turn to the working class. Not because its struggles are more glamorous than the individual direct action stunts of the NGOs – for months and years on end they are not. But the working class is the only force in society that can make anti-capitalism a reality. It is the only class that has an interest in overthrowing the system rather than reforming it from within.

When we look at the Seattle movement, and its international character, one danger is to abstract from the different national terrains of struggle. There are probably a majority of youth in the European protest movement whose ideas mirror those of the USAS leaders. However, Europe has a far stronger existing tradition of union, socialist, communist, Trotskyist and anarchist youth organisations.

This is both a strength and a weakness. Its obvious strength is that it allows the radical anti-capitalist youth to take a lead in posing the question – to the workers, or to individualised reform-oriented protest?

Thus youth in Europe were able to stage large militant stand-offs with the state – such as the J18 protest in London in 1999 – and have participated in massive anti-fascist mobilisations (up to 300,000 turned out earlier this year to protest at the Haider coalition government in Austria).

The weakness is that many of the existing leaderships of the pro-worker youth movements are conservative and hostile to the anti-capitalist movement or – in the case of the Anarchist FSA – determined to split it so as to exclude all NGOs, all unions, all socialist and communist parties and quite a few rival anarchist groups as well.

This survey of the forces involved in Seattle is critical because we have to avoid two things: the first is writing off the movement because it doesn’t look like the British miners’ strike of 1984/85 or the student riots and workers’ mass strikes of France in May 1968.

The second is to see the emerging consciousness as spontaneously revolutionary anti-capitalism. To say as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) does, “we agree with them 90 per cent, disagree 10 per cent and only raise the differences where they are posed by the struggle”, is to gloss over the problems with the new movement.

Both approaches are doomed. If we are to take the NGO activists, the youth and the trade union rank and file beyond their existing ideas and strategies we must intervene within the movement with our own, unified strategy.

And history is with us: at Seattle events themselves pushed the militants and even the leaders beyond the boundaries they’d stayed behind before.

The NGOs and union bureaucrats were denied their “place at the table”: so they had to link up with the most radical groups – the youth, the social ecologists, the anarchists – to launch direct action. The massive police repression, where rubber bullets, stun grenades and CS gas were fired point blank into crowds not of anarchos but of peaceful protesters, did what it always does: it changed their understanding of the role of the capitalist state. And because it was televised live across the world the impact of the thousands of

demonstrators changed the minds of millions of others watching.

Events themselves pushed the youth into an alliance with the unions. Sitting in groups of hundreds, the beleaguered youth had just one question according to one eyewitness account: where is the union demo.

The AFL/CIO leaders had mobilised between 20 and 50,000 union members to protest at China’s entry into the WTO and the cheap Chinese steel that would hit US industries. Many of the youth rejected that kind of protectionism out of hand. But once on the streets they realised that turtle costumes and gas masks can only resist the robocops for so long: 50,000 steelworkers and teamsters is a different matter.

The workers too got pushed further than their leaders expected by the Seattle events. The leaders of the AFL/CIO went out of their way to keep the union march separate from the anti-globalisation protest – both physically and politically. They tried to lead it in the other direction. They eventually accepted a private meeting with Clinton, and their formal agenda was dominated by protectionism.

But the rank and file had other ideas. They broke through the police lines – and it was no accident that the breakthrough was led by the steelworkers and teamsters. These are unions where there has been a limited anti-bureaucratic fight. Instead of seeing the youth as the shock troops, like the NGOs see them, the workers saw them as allies. In fact the bitterest fighting took place on 1 December when the workers waded straight into a line of riot cops on the Seattle waterfront.

After Seattle it was clear that the protest movement was not just reformist NGOs, naïve, single-issue middle class youth, and passive workers under the control of the bureaucracy.

It was an alliance of youth and workers to change the world with an internationalist vision and a clear view of the state as the protector of the capitalists: suddenly both were part of a movement that gets results. There have been – before and since – strikes that started to win in the USA. But here was a politicised workers’ movement that made a difference.

The tasks of revolutionary socialists in this movement could not be clearer. We have to pose the question: towards middle class reformism or working class socialism. We have to intervene to stop the movement’s current political weaknesses letting it be used as a stage army by reformism and liberalism: the same Friends of the Earth that mobilises youth into radical direct action puts money and lobbying expertise behind Democrat politicians like Bill Bradley in the USA

We have to focus the movement onto a real anti-capitalist programme – the politics of revolutionary Marxism.

Within the youth movement we say: there is only one force that can overthrow capitalism. The choice is between NGO lobbying and workers’ revolution. Turn to the workers, become socialist revolutionaries.

To the workers we say: stop demonstrating for one capitalist vulture to beat another capitalist vulture, as at Rover. Stop lying back and thinking of England every time Tony Blair launches a new attack on your rights and conditions. Open the doors of the workers’ movement to the youth.

To the best activists within the NGOs we have to say: charity and campaigning are not enough. Turn over the massive resources of the lobby organisations to the needy and dispossessed.

The youth movement must turn to the workers. The workers’ movement must become anti-capitalist. The revolutionary socialists groups must immerse themselves in this struggle or become an irrelevance – but they must fight for revolutionary politics, not just become cheerleaders.

With a radical youth movement and a workers’ movement awakening from years of defeat, history has given us the opportunity to rerun the late 1960s. But this time we must do it with a revolutionary organisation in the lead, instead of a collection of workerist sectarians and middle class poseurs.

What is more, the Stalinist obstacle that was there in 1968 is a decrepit toothless shadow of its former self even if many of its ideas (the cross class alliance, quasi-nationalist economic policies and even the guerrilla strategy) are alive and well within the Seattle movement.

Where next after Seattle? There was April 16 in Washington – which showed the IMF/WB getting clever in trying to co-opt the NGOs and demobilise the unions. There were the Mayday protests. And next there is Prague.

Maybe Prague will top Seattle – or maybe it will be repressed out of existence by the desperate Czech capitalists. But however big our protests get the capitalists will carry on adopting the divide and rule approach, opening up parallel dialogues through shadow conferences and consultation exercises.

Mass strikes – co-ordinated across the globe – and a mass revolutionary movement of workers and youth: that is the way to greet the capitalist get-togethers that carve-up our futures behind closed doors. When the lights go out, the luxury food stops arriving, and the internet connection dies: that’s when they’ll realise we don’t just want to share the pie: we want to take over the bakery.

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