18 - 24 January 2001
Issue No.517
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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A manifesto for resistance
"Five million landless peasants walk around, vagrants between dream and desperation, in the uninhabited immensity of Brazil. They cultivate food on the land they conquer, although the World Bank determined that southern countries should not produce their own food and live off the subisides begged on the international market." Eduardo Galeano
If the December 1999 Ministerial World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle demonstrated the street militancy of the international resistance movement to Northern-imposed terms of globalisation, then the first World Social Summit (WSS) -- scheduled to open on 25 January in Porto Alegre, Brazil -- promises to express militancy of a different kind.
Workers, trade union delegates, representatives of left-wing political parties, NGOs, anti-globalisation activists of all shades and persuasions, and intellectuals such as prominent linguist and writer Noam Chomsky, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and sub-commandante Marcos (leader of the Zapatista guerrilla movement in Chiapas, Mexico) will gather at the five-day summit to lay the theoretical groundwork for a manifesto of resistance to the forces of globalisation as defined by the theoreticians of neo-liberal ideology.
Besides contributing to the development of an ever- growing anti-globalisation coalition, the success of Seattle sent shock waves throughout the corporate establishment. In the wake of the Seattle debacle, the conservative British daily The Financial Times warned financial bigwigs that the prevailing populist, Seattle-inspired, anti-big business mood would not be lost on the politicians come election time.
Taking their cue, big business and the international money lenders were quick to invest in face-saving PR campaigns. The World Bank (WB), for one, vigorously promoted its worldwide poverty-eradication programmes and made noises about scrapping the debt of the world's poorest countries. In a bizarre bid to outdo the competition, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lost all sense of proportion. While still in office, the IMF's former director, Michel Camdessus, declared at a Pax Romana symposium in Washington that the IMF formed one of the elements through which God's work was being done. Short of hallucinating, the former IMF top executive was presumably saying that the money lenders were saving the world from poverty. Camdessus, however, omitted to refer to the high interest returns on his peculiar brand of salvation.
It is against the backdrop of the WB/IMF version of depleting the world's resources and impoverishing the South by imposing draconian interest rates on debt payments that the social summit is convening. Scheduled to coincide with the yearly Davos meeting of the world's richest nations, the formidable G-8, the Porto Alegre summit intends to challenge the Davos platform with an alternative vision of globalisation. Rejecting the current oligarchic and monopolistic concentration of global wealth and power, the resistance movement intends to formulate a counter-programme outlining a democratic and just redistribution of the world's resources. As opposed to the G-8 debates in Davos, where as usual business is contingent on the financiers' dictates, the World Social Summit will centre its debates on the absolute necessity to provide a humane livelihood to the majority of the world's people, who are denied the most essential of human rights.
But why meet in Porto Alegre? Choosing the state capital of Rio Grande do Sul, this most southern of Brazilian towns, as a venue for the summit was by no means a fortuitous choice. For the past 12 years, Porto Alegre has been governed by a leftist coalition led by the Brazilian Workers' Party, which has successfully experimented with a democratic system of grassroots power-sharing. Described by political analyst and summit organiser Ignacio Ramonet as an "emblematic town", Porto Alegre has become a shining model for Orçamento participativo, or participative budget. This entails that people's committees in different districts participate in the decision-making process involving municipal budget allocations. The committees decide to implement infrastructure project according to their particular district's priorities, and supervise the work at all levels -- including contracting and payments. Accordingly, complete transparency is guaranteed and the town's record has effectively proven that corruption, bribery and embezzlement of funds has been eliminated. Moreover, since decision-making is based on the vote of representative neighbourhood committees expressing the will of a majority, the face of Porto Alegre is truly shaped by its people.
By launching Porto Alegre as a successful people's alternative to the urban sprawl of the corporate world's anonymous and dehumanised mega-cities, the anti-globalisation movement is sending the message that there are viable alternatives to the dominant neo-liberal version of corporate globalisation.
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