[Nettime-bold] 'Stay at Home for a While' Guardian article on Genoa

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

(bwo Emmanuel Videcoq/Toni Negri/Multitudes list)
    



        STAY HOME FOR A WHILE

            Katharine Ainger

                    (The Guardian, Monday July 23, 2001)



    Plenty of old hands were saying someone would die at Genoa. The signs
were clear in the escalating militarisation on both sides. But the members
of the Landless Movement of Brazil (MST) could tell you that Carlo Giuliani,
the young man shot dead as he protested at the G8 summit, is not the first
casualty of the movement challenging neoliberal globalisation around the
world.
 
   The MST suffer ongoing persecution for their campaign for land reform in
Brazil, their opposition to the World Bank's programme of market-led land
reform and to the corporate control of agriculture through patents on seed.
Recently three students protesting against World Bank privatisation were
shot in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Young men fighting World
Bank-imposed water privatisation have been tortured and killed in
Cochabamba, Bolivia. George Bush, Tony Blair and Clare Short, who portray
those who protest at the unaccountable institutions of global governance as
ignorant, violent enemies of the poor, do not seem to notice that the poor
are leading the protests.

    Those who run the global economy still seem to think their worst problem
is that they can't find a secure place to meet. Instead of addressing the
root causes of the protests, the World Trade Organisation is fleeing to the
Qatar desert, beyond the reach of even the most determined activist. The
real problem is that its ideological adherence to "free" trade is casting it
not just into the desert, but into the political wilderness. The regime it
is implementing is so destructive that it is sparking off a global uprising
against neo-liberalism.

    Broadly, these uprisings can be described as struggles against the
commodification of every aspect of life - water, genes, atmosphere,
healthcare, culture, public spaces, land. For each locality, the moment when
the people cry "Enough!" is different - but it is usually the moment when
something regarded as central to the culture becomes privatised.

    For the Zapatistas of Mexico it was the signing of the Nafta agreement,
which outlawed the common ownership of land which Emiliano Zapata, folk hero
and revolutionary of 1911, had fought for.

    For much of southeast Asia it was the IMF austerity measures imposed on
their shattered economies after the financial crisis of 1997. In Britain, it
may be the slow sell-off of the NHS to private healthcare multinationals.
Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt, in their seminal work, Empire, call this
grassroots network of struggles "the multitude". It is the opposite of a
concentrated strata of power from above, in which decisions that affect
billions of human lives are made at a transnational level.

    The multitude embodies the real world below: humanity, nature, culture,
diversity - all those factors not reducible to a commodity to be bought and
sold in a global marketplace. In fact, the movement is not
"anti-globalisation" at all. If anything, it embodies "globalisation from
below" - an international multitude which challenges the idea that "the
global surfaces of the world market are interchangeable".

    But the movement, particularly in the wake of the Genoa summit, urgently
needs to build its own, alternative democratic legitimacy. For democratising
the global economy will ultimately not come through increasingly militant
action at summits, but through building a genuine, grassroots legitimacy
from below. Instead of chasing into the desert in Qatar, we should build a
broad-based, pro-democracy movement at home.

    In a million small ways in Britain, that process has already begun. As a
result of campaigning by the World Development Movement, the Scottish
parliament will be holding the first parliamentary debate over WTO's General
Agreement on Trade in Services, which threatens to lock anything deemed a
"service" into privatisation. Unions are beginning to organise against Gats;
the rank and file are already beginning to rebel over public sector
sell-offs.

    Middle England continues to complain about GM crops and the railways,
while Scottish crofters have joined the radical, anti-WTO, international
peasant farmers' union, Via Campesina - whose largest member is the MST.
This is the birth of a genuinely popular global uprising against corporate
control and the hijacking of democracy. The movement against economic
globalisation: coming to a town near you.

. Katharine Ainger is editing an issue of the New Internationalist magazine
on global resistance.

kat@newint.org




M  U  L  T  I  T  U  D  E  S



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