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THE COLLECTIVE EYES of the world will be on Seattle, Washington USA on and around Nov. 30 to Dec. 2, 1999. Spurred on by the leadership of the AFL-CIO and its labour colleagues and environmental and other peoples' movements from throughout the world, tens of thousands of people will send a very clear message to international corporate finance capital. It will tell the World Trade Organization and the two main imperialist lending organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that enough is enough. "No New Trade Round" is the rallying cry.
The world's people have had enough of the cruel hoax of privatization and "free markets" that only feed the insatiable profit appetites of world monopoly capital.
Recent reports from the United Nations Development Program and UNICEF have dramatically described how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.
As unemployment and grinding poverty spread throughout the world, the hardest hit are urban and agricultural workers, especially women workers, indigenous peoples, and the world's youth. In the seat of capitalist greed, New York City, the richest city in the world, the poverty and unemployment levels have reached twice the US national average. The story is repeated in every country, region and continent.
The labour movements of Canada, Mexico and the United States warned that there would be devastation if the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed and implemented. Unfortunately, the warnings came true, if not underestimated. The same in Europe where labour warned that the European Union and its EURO would reap havoc and produce record unemployment rates.
Just ten years ago unemployment was around 3%, now it is in the mid to high teens. The African continent is slated to be a continent-wide free market enterprise zone. The Asian crisis was a manifestation of the economic cycles which are intrinsic to the capitalist system; triggered in this case by the role of U.S., Japanese and European multinational corporations and financial institutions.
It took the world's labour and people's movements to reject the heinous MAI agreement. But, MAI was rejected, a defeat that has world monopoly capital still licking its wounds. The stakes are high for these reckless, anti-people financiers. The Uruguay Trade Round, that gave birth to the World Trade Organization, showed that greed and arrogance of capital will not end unless we stop it.
Globalization is a qualitative development of monopoly capitalism on a world scale. It is based on the free flow of capital. The "free market" is the imperialist code word for the free unimpeded flow of capital of the biggest monopolies seeking maximum profits, for their freedom to plunder the natural resources of whole nations and capture the biggest share of the world's production and markets.
Globalization of the world economy and the agencies which enforce it have created a race to the bottom in wages, working conditions, all aspects of working class living standards, environment, culture.
A recent Merrill Lynch financial report said it best: "Obviously, those of us in the investment business believe that globalization will spread capitalism and democracy, and that the world's population will work and enhance their standard of living as opposed to choosing violence as a way to redress any growing inequities. Nevertheless, a new Karl Marx to lead the disenchanted is always a possibility." They then go on to warn the working class, "Our view of inflationary wage agreements is that it will be difficult to pass the wage increases along to consumers given current competitive conditions. As a result, we believe that profit margins could suffer for those companies giving overly generous wage concessions." We are united in Seattle, to derail the World Trade Organization's plans to further build world capitalism and strip us of our national sovereignties. We say "no!" to the WTO's so-called "free market" strategies. We say no to strategies that seek to divide workers on national, racial, ethnic or religious grounds. We say no to strategies that ignore the environmental demands of the people to save the earth for the next generations.
The economic and political goals of the peoples gathering in Seattle are to end, not increase, world debt especially to the developing countries; raise the bar of regulations to protect workers in plants and fields; increase the flow of financial support to those in need.
Seattle is just the beginning of a new international movement to put workers and the community in the driver's seat of our world's destiny as we move into the next millennium. We believe the current phenomenon of globalization is a natural outgrowth of modern capitalism in its insatiable quest for maximum profits. The laws governing this process, originally described by Marx and Lenin, bring capitalist crisis to all corners of the globe, and turn the foreign policies and armed forces of the leading powers into global enforcers for the TNCs.
The pro-globalization policies of the U.S., Canadian and Mexican governments are largely determined by the giant transnational corporations, mostly U.S.-based. These policies are directed against the interests of workers of the world, including the workers of our respective countries.
There should be support and solidarity to countries which repudiate debts, nationalize industries and keep nationalized industries public without threat of privatization, impose controls on flows of capital, take measures to build economies directed for the needs of their people (including production of medicines and other intellectual property), protect their culture, etc. There should be an international struggle for anti-monopoly unity.
Globalization in and of itself is not the enemy - it is production for maximum profits and the exploitation and misery it creates for the peoples of the world. The only solution to the crisis problems of capitalist globalization is socialism. They globalization will be for the benefit of the people - not corporate profits.
It will still take the resolve of the world community of workers, their unions, and political organizations, all of humanity, to turn it around.
That process has begun. Lets keep it rolling.