The Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement:
Where Foreign Policy and Organizing Meet

By Alec Dubro

Community organizers need a foreign policy. It sounds absurd, but it's true. Too many of us think we can win our neighborhood fight while losing the world. But you can't fix global warming in one community. As long as there are places with cheaper labor, weaker laws and more corrupt governments, you can't stop falling wages or substandard housing or racism or the growth of rule by police in one community alone.

Anti-Corporate Globalization

The most massive, energizing movement to envelop the progressive community since the Vietnam War, a genuine threat to the corporations and their economists and politicians who are trying to shape the political world.

But where did it come from? Was it a groundswell from the communities? Was it brewed up in a coffeehouse in Seattle? Did the Direct Action Network create it? Was it imported from abroad? Was it a labor strategy? Did it descend from policy think tanks? It was all of these and more. Anti-corporate globalization was the child of policy study and activism, and its roots lie in the 1970s, not the 1990s. And, it is the first broad international progressive movement to arise since socialism.

Although the coalition that brought downtown Seattle to a standstill may have stunned a complacent United States, this was not the first riotous demonstration against the World Bank, IMF or WTO. Those took place in Europe, in South America, in Asia. In fact, for decades the signs had been there-for anyone who wanted to see. But the forces of globalization didn't want to look very hard or didn't believe that anti-corporate globalization deserved to be recognized... until Seattle.

How It Began

The first anti-corporate globalization efforts began in the 1970s in the fight against multinational corporations: ITT in Chile, Nestle around the world, Citibank in South Africa, Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, Coca-Cola in Guatemala, and on and on. International labor organizations and solidarity groups from the developed world aided the fight in the developing world.

The first look that many Americans got into the power of the multinationals was through the pages of Global Reach, the 1974 book by Richard Barnet and Ronald Mueller. Barnet was a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, a group which has remained in the forefront of research and organizing around globalization.

In the 1980s, the first debt crisis hit the developing world. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and religious groups created support and pressure. At the same time, family farms in the U.S. were also hit hard by debt, although few people at the time thought to connect the two events.

Although the coalition that brought downtown Seattle to a standstill may have stunned a complacent United States, this was hardly the first riotous demonstration against the World Bank, IMF or WTO.

Then, Filipino scholar Walden Bello wrote and spoke about the plunder of the global South. He was joined by Susan George of the Transnational Institute, who wrote A Fate Worse Than and How the Other Half Dies.

Among the early groups to tackle the issue in the developing world was the Freedom From Debt Coalition in the Philippines in 1985-86. The issue of debt exploded in Mexico in 1982, and by 1985 there was organizing in the maquiladoras in both the Philippines and Mexico.

In the early 1980s, reports began to accumulate at think tanks about the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). In response to these alarms and their own investigations, environmental and church groups began to battle the Bank and IMF. The target was bank-financed environmental destruction and structural adjustment programs or SAPs.

SAPs are the imposition of extreme free-market rules, a condition for aid from the World Bank. SAPs demand reduction of public health care, education and environmental protection. They insist on privatization and attacks on unions. They push export-driven economies and protection for multinationals. They are, in fact, a formal worldwide policy calculated to take power away from people and give it to business.

Trade and Nafta

In 1986, organizers began to mount challenges to the world's bankers and corporations over the issue of international trade. That year, there were large protests in Montevideo at the beginning of the Uruguay Round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the controlling international body on trade. GATT was later transformed into the now-famous World Trade Organization or WTO.

There were early warnings about trade in the U.S. Mark Ritchie, a notable hybrid researcher-organizer of the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, "took on GATT and international trade when virtually no one knew or really cared what he was talking about," according to the Institute for Alternative Journalism.

But when George Bush, Sr. and Mexican President Carlos Salinas proposed the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, people really began to notice trade. This treaty threatened to speed up the rate of plant closings in the United States by making it easier for industries to relocate to Mexico. At the same time, it also threatened to further turn Mexico from a country of small landowners into a country of agribusiness and very low-wage sweatshops.

A group of researchers at places like the Economic Policy Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies and the AFL-CIO began to pull together facts and analysis of the looming NAFTA fight. The result was two massive coalitions. One was the Citizens Trade Campaign, which linked environmental, labor and groups like the Rainbow Coalition. The other was the smaller cross-border Alliance for Responsible Trade which was linked with the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade and later the Canadian group Common Frontiers.

The battle against NAFTA was lost in Congress in 1993, but the result was a growing awareness of the economic and social controls wielded by the multinationals. At the same time, a new movement of social protest was born, in large part because of political changes within the U.S. labor movement and because of the new, international strain of thought in the environmental and trade movements themselves.

Further Warnings

American citizens were still largely unaware of the truly international character of their predicament. But had they read the international pages of the news in 1994, they might have seen both ominous and inspiring events. For instance:

• On July 20, 1994 one million Turkish workers staged a one-day strike to protest cutbacks ordered by the World Bank and private lending sources. The government threatened arrests, but was overwhelmed by sheer size of the walkout.
• That same summer in Madrid, protesters crashed a lavish celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Demonstrators from Greenpeace climbed up the beams of the hall and rained bogus dollar bills reading ''No dollars for ozone destruction'' on the baffled bankers below.
• At the same time, Bolivian workers fought back against Bank-ordered "reforms" that the country cut wages of public workers and privatize the national phone system. The resulting general strike forced the government to declare a state of siege. Eventually, the government included workers in discussions and backed down from privatization.
• The following year, the massive international coalition, 50 Years Is Enough, began a series of demonstrations against the Bank and IMF. More than 5000 people marched in Washington, DC at the Bank's annual meeting. But still the Bank and IMF refused to make any but the most superficial changes.

Millions of people in the developing world began to suffer from lack of health care, education and jobs. Much of this could be tied to multinationals' demands for greater profits and complete management of workforce and government. The Bank was merely the instrument of that demand.

But corporate globalization could be defeated. In 1997, the NAFTA-born citizens coalitions collected enough votes in Congress to deny Bill Clinton his request for so-called Fast-Track powers to conclude international trade agreements without input from the legislative branch. Using relationships developed in the NAFTA fight, this new effort brought together labor, environmental and justice groups all working organize voters and win over legislators.

To the corporations and their bankers, this was merely a nuisance. They continued to make their plans and were set to formalize their dominance over the world economy through the World Trade Organization, a body that could override local and national labor, environmental, and cultural protections. They set a new round of talks to begin in December 1999. For some reason, they chose Seattle.

Showdown

Enough has been written about the Seattle protests to fill several books, and no description is necessary here. But Seattle was different from previous protests in three important ways: Organized labor gave its full support to the demonstrations and turned out over 30,000 members. The Citizens Trade Campaign organized for more than a year to publicize and recruit demonstrators. And lastly, through civil disobedience the Direct Action Network and like-minded groups produced headlines where no one had before.

There are reasons why Seattle cannot be duplicated. For one, the element of surprise is gone. The confrontations are in some ways routine and will become less attention-grabbing. But the protests are growing, not fading away, and the demonstrations are accompanied by continuing organizing and research.

Criticism

The anti-corporate globalization movement is too big, too vital and too important for anyone to ignore. It makes clear that each of our fights over economy and political power is tied to all the others. But, it's clear that it has a distance to cover before it truly becomes a mass movement.

For one thing, the American sector of the movement is largely white. As Elizabeth Martinez asked in ColorLines, why were the demonstrators overwhelmingly Anglo? "How can that be," she wrote, "when the WTO's main victims around the world are people of color? Understanding the reasons for the low level of color, and what can be learned from it, is absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle's promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true."

At this writing, groups like Jobs with Justice are trying to build just that diverse anti-corporate globalization movement. Members of the National Organizers Alliance have many opportunities to add their talents in their own communities and across organizing sectors.

Where From Here?

Susan George wrote in 1997, "Today, few would deny that we live under the virtually undisputed rule of the market-dominated, ultracompetitive, globalized society with its cortege of manifold iniquities and everyday violence." She also said bluntly that we got what we deserved because we fell far behind the vigor of ideas. The other side won because "of fifty years of intellectual work, now widely reflected in the media, politics, and the programs of international organizations."

As organizers we are working to claim the world for its inhabitants. But work is not enough, we need thought as well and we have to incorporate it into our work. We need to begin the same 50 years of intellectual work. We have to combine thought and action. And we have to stop imagining that we can save our communities all alone or within our own organizations. Policy and organizing need each other but neither can succeed alone.

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