The Battle of Seattle: Welcome to the 21st Century ( Stony Brook Press, Winter 1999)

By S. Jovian Radheshwar

 

                Many critics of industrialization came to argue that its effects would essentially widen the gap in income between classes, while at the same time suggesting a cosmetic increase in the standard of living experienced by most people. The truth of the matter, and certainly verifiable in statistical data from various legitimate international sources, suggests that on the average, middle class people worldwide are working longer hours and taking up secondary employment to maintain the humble middle class existence. At the same time, those who are fabulously wealthy are working less and less, and those who are dismally poor are working more, but are restricted in seeking secondary employment as needs of sustenance take a priority in working class households worldwide. Why are any of these commonly known, highly negative facts in need of restating? The ferment of capitalism has manifested a heady, intoxicating mix, and the world’s leaders are all quite ready to become drunk on the potion of neo-Liberalism. The brew, of course, is the World Trade Organization, and this week has been a landmark of that particular organization’s history and development. Similarly, the implications of the Big Showdown in Little Seattle will set the global policy agenda into a debate between neo-Liberal economic policy and neo-Protectionism. The arguments are strong, and impassioned. The potential harm of a misstep by the globe’s elite will have broad ramifications on not only economics, but for international security, individual rights and conceptions thereof and the progress of the civilization in general.

 

                The tale of the Battle of Seattle is not yet determined, and can result in two possible recollections of the event. The news media has been covering it, but has largely played it down. While reading the New York Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and my personal daily favorite, the BBC news webpage, I was astounded by the manner of the coverage. The slant of the world’s neo-Liberal elite and their compradore compatriots in the third world has had a pronounced effect, as the message of the various demonstrator groups was disfigured and slandered as “divided, immature, violent”[1]. Certainly, there exists a basis for these delineations, however there also exists a hidden rationale in these actions. One protester was quoted as having responded to the accusation of violence as having said that “Capitalism is violence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Making people starve for the further wealth of a small elite is violence”[2]. Now, as those of you who have laboriously troddled through my jabber are busy suggesting that I am just another Marxist loon, I must at least attempt to defend myself by suggesting that my position is not to entirely believe the protester’s contentious remarks. Rather, I shall simply suggest to those who find themselves swayed by the Reaganites and Thatcherites, that as policy-nerds and government-geeks, we ought to complete a more thorough analysis of neo-Liberalist policies.

 

The structure of the global economy and the foundations of the World Trade Organization are located temporally at the inception of the post-war economic system in the Bretton Woods system. This gave birth to the more famous International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. These two organizations dominated the financial realm of the global economy during the cold war, taking the pivotal role of broker of power through an informal relation structure of core and periphery states. The extractive roles discussed so widely neo-Marxist scholarly literature, effectively implicating the west in a neo-Colonialist plot, of these institutions is well documented. The theorizations of the leftists, in the contextualization implicit in the structure of the global economy as dominated by core-periphery relations, lends itself logically to a similar castigation of the new, infantile, trading regime. The Bretton Woods system becomes relevant here again, as the agreements which gave birth to that schema similarly conceived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT henceforth), as an organization whose purpose was to facilitate coordination of economic policy and tariff regimes. This purpose, while determinedly directed in a diluted manner to the growth of market economics, should not be misconstrued as a capitalist bastion of wealth accumulation. The GATT was indeed partially formulated by everyone’s most lovable Marshal of Marshals, Joseph Stalin. The conference which sparked the Bretton Woods system was indeed similar to the Yalta conference or the Tehran conference, and thus included the Soviet Union in the mediations of the creation of post-war balance of power.

 

Then the query of the analyst should focus on why the GATT, in transformation to the WTO, has been transformed into the corporatist Goliath it now represents. The WTO is not a member-state only organization, you see, as it has corporate representation included in the discussions. Can this be indicative of the ushering in of the post-nation state, corporate world order? Microsoft States of America, William Gates III President for Life? These may sound utterly off the wall, but how complex is it to really arrive at these conclusions? The purpose of the WTO does not seem to be prepared structurally to grapple with problems concerning international labor wages, the environmental implications of industrial production and the process of technological diffusion in general and the effects on the various regions of the world that are the endpoints of that spread. The most important consideration of the week’s events in Seattle ought to focus on the activity of labor unions protesting the export of their jobs potentially under the WTO program of trade liberalization. With regard to labor movements, there is a de facto global consensus that neo-Liberal economics not only is detrimental to the livelihoods of workers in the western world, but that it reinforces the core-periphery dependency already present in the global system of world politics. The issues that concern the overwhelming majority of humanity, the poor in the third world, that are most widely perceived as a major flaw in the Bretton Woods capitalist system are the debt crisis and the recurring famines of these states when forced to enact fiscal austerity measures as a requirement for the extension of good credit and loans. The debt crisis; and its factors and effects, which include political cronyism as well as chronic economic catastrophe; is an area of particular interest here. The debt crisis has been largely a result of high inflation, so-called fast development programs and the shifts required from this developmental paradigm when crisis occurs (famine, coup de-etat, etc.), and the inability of economies producing raw materials to compete with finished goods exporting economies. For these reasons, and others that can be arrived at by extrapolation, the debt crisis will not pass for some time without considerable debt relief from the lending institutions. As it is, the neo-Liberal investment policies now being enacted in many third world countries will import only low wage, foreigner controlled employment, often locking the home state into a cycle of economic dependency. In the context of political cronyism, where appointments to oversee joint ventures with multinational corporation (and hence become rich), the investment becomes a government’s drug, feeding its enemies into pacification and its allies into compliance. Without aid and investment, the state loses its effective control. Insidious, yes? Workers can never truly move beyond dependency in the developing world, laborers in the north and south, east and west, are adversely effected.

 

The Soviets provided a counterbalance to the interests of the multi-national corporations, and the reasoning behind the WTO can now be relatively uncontested, as the west can now remove support from the feisty Yeltsin and his aid-addicted cronies. China and other proponents, formerly, of a closed economy, have been successfully co-opted. The formerly closed economic structure of Nehru-style development in India has been liberalised by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister. That move was not anticipated even by the media, as the BJP was more often than depicted as isolationist, chauvinistic nationalists. Essentially, the whole of the armada is on the same level, the leaders of states, but the dissidents are not members of the political elite and are in a state of uproar globally. Certainly, these groups are fragmented along many lines, but that failed to prevent the demonstrators from preventing the occurrence of the opening ceremonies of the talks in Seattle on Monday this week. President Clinton’s half-assed efforts at pre-empting the protesters in post-haste was short-sighted, at the least, and might perhaps feed the alienation complex that so many Marxists, environmentalists and third world nationalists already feel. The media’s efforts to draw away attention from the issue has been very successful, and I am personally at a loss to see the lack of awareness of these issues and others in Stonybrook. I am yet to this day to have a truly intelligent conversation on globalization in general or the WTO conference specifically at this school. As relatively elite members of society ourselves, shouldn’t we examine the roots of our wealth, the neck’s of those whose blood we’ve feasted on our entire lives? Most people want to live in a posh paradise and think not about these issues. A weak world we live in, indeed.


[1] These words appear in different articles, and are certainly being quoted in accurate paraphrasing here. The sources for these characterizations of the protests and other similar ones can be found by reading any major western media portrayal of the week’s events.

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk. Page accessed on December 1, 1999