Focus on the Global South - FOCUS ON TRADE: Number 147, November, 2009

FOCUS ON TRADE: Number 147, November, 2009

We are happy to announce the return of Focus on Trade. Over the next weeks we will bring you up-to-date reports and analysis from the WTO ministerial in Geneva, the Copenhagen climate talks, and places in-between and beyond. To kick things off, this issue marks the tenth anniversary of the “Battle of Seattle” with a series of reflections on where we are, what we have achieved, and the meaning and lessons of Seattle for the global justice movement and for Copenhagen.

IN THIS ISSUE
The Meaning of Seattle: Truth Only Becomes True Through Action
Walden Bello

From climate denialism to activist alliances in memory of Seattle November, 30 2009
Patrick Bond

Learning How to Count to 350: Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
Rebecca Solnit

Ten Years After Seattle, One Strategy, Better Two, For the Movement Against War and Capitalism
Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Get thee to Copenhagen! (because there is no redemption in a monastery)
Nicola Bullard

The Meaning of Seattle:
Truth Only Becomes True Through Action
By Walden Bello*

Before 1999, the momentum of globalisation seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. But in Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action.

It is now generally accepted that globalisation has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The current deep global downturn, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalisation and financial liberalisation and the ideology of neoliberalism that legitimised them, has driven the last nail into the coffin of globalisation.

But things were very different over a decade ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalisation was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more "coherent" in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy.

Indeed, the momentum of globalisation seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including UN reports, that questioned the claim that globalisation and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalisation and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained "factoids" rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policy makers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalisation promoted growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles was that the critics of globalisation were modern-day incarnations of Luddites, the people who smashed machines during the Industrial Revolution, or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

Then came Seattle. After those tumultuous days, the press began to talk about the "dark side of globalisation," about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalisation. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalisation, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the star economist Jeffery Sachs. The intellectual retreat from globalisation probably reached its high point over two years ago in a comprehensive report by a panel of neoclassical economists headed by Princeton's Angus Deaton and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff, which sternly asserted that the World Bank Research Department—the source of most assertions that globalisation and trade liberalisation were leading to lower rates of poverty, sustained economic growth, and less inequality—had been deliberately distorting the data and/or making unwarranted claims.

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among many economists and technocrats. But even before the recent global financial collapse, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy.

What made the difference? Not so much research or debate but action. It took the anti-globalisation actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle, which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives in the Sheraton Convention Centre and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting to translate factoids into facts, into truth. And the intellectual debacle inflicted on globalisation by Seattle had very real consequences. Today, the Economist, the prime avatar of neoliberal globalisation, admits that the "integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front," and a process of "deglobalisation" that it once considered unthinkable is actually unfolding.

Seattle was what the philosopher Hegel called a "world-historic event." Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that smashed an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

* Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and a senior analyst with Focus on the Global South. He was among the protesters in the streets of Seattle during the WTO's third ministerial meeting and has participated in parallel civil society events at all the other ministerial meetings. He is the author of 15 books, including Deglobalisation: Ideas for a New World Economy. This article first appeared in YES! magazine.

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From climate denialism to activist alliances
Patrick Bond*

Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit are going as expected, including a rare sighting of African elites' stiffened spines. That's a great development (maybe decisive), more about which below.

While activists help raise the temperature on the streets outside the Bella Centre on December 12, 13 and 16, inside we will see Northern elites defensively armed with pathetic non-binding emissions cuts (Obama at merely 4% below 1990 levels), with carbon trading, and without the money to repay their ecological debt to the South.

The first and third are lamentable enough, but the second is the most serious diversion from the crucial work of cutting emissions. A nine-minute film launched on the internet on Tuesday, December 1 - 'The Story of Cap and Trade' (www.storyofstuff.org/capandtrade) - gives all the ammunition you need to understand and critique emissions trading, and to seek genuine solutions.

Another important diversion emerged on November 20, when hackers published embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's (UEA's) Climate Research Unit. What I've understood from link is roughly as follows:

* the UEA researchers were silly egocentric ultracompetitive academics who were at times sloppy - an occupational hazard true of most of us, only in this case there is a huge amount at stake so their silliness is massively amplified,

* but a few academics who are silly about their work ethos do not reverse the universal understanding that scientists have regarding climate change, and

* people who want to distract the world from getting to the root of the climate crisis may well be empowered and have a field day with the UEA emails scandal, which should in turn compel the rest of us to redouble our efforts.

The unapologetic UEA researcher Phil Jones seems to think that because climate denialists have been a pain in the ass (since 2001), it was ok to hide scientific data (paid for by taxpayers), and to avoid wasting valuable time addressing the loonies' arguments: "Initially at the beginning I did try to respond to them in the hope I might convince them but I soon realised it was a forlorn hope and broke off communication."

Look, where I live, in Durban, we've had dreadful experiences with two kinds of life-threatening denialisms: apartheid and AIDS:

* dating back many decades, apartheid-denialists insisted that black South Africans had it better than anywhere else in Africa, that anti-apartheid sanctions would only hurt blacks and not foster change, and that if blacks took over the government it would be the ruination of SA, with whites having all their wealth expropriated; and

* from around 1999-2003, AIDS denialists very vocally insisted that HIV and AIDS were not related, that AIDS medicines were toxic and would do no good, and that the activists' lobby for the medicines was merely a front for the CIA and Big Pharma (denialist-in-chief Thabo Mbeki is now being widely cited for genocide involving 350 000 unnecessary deaths due to his presidency's withholding of AIDS medicines).

In both cases, as with the climate, the denialists' role was to entrench the status quo forces of state and capital. They were, simply, hucksters for vested interests. In both cases they were defeated, thanks to vigorous social activism:

* fighting against apartheid-denialism, during the 1980s, the United Democratic Front, African National Congress and other liberation forces found that the denialists' main damage was opposing sanctions/disinvestment pressure. So we intensified our efforts and by August 1985 won the necessary breakthrough when NY banks withdrew lines of credit to Pretoria, thus forcing a split between Afrikaner state rulers and white english-speaking capitalists. Within a few days, the latter traveled to Lusaka to meet the exiled ANC leadership, and then over the next eight years helped shake loose Afrikaner nationalism's hold on the state, and indeed today in SA you will search long and hard to find a white person who admits they ever defended apartheid;

* as for AIDS, the Treatment Action Campaign found that a mix of local and internationalist activism was sufficiently strong to pry open Big Pharma's monopoly on intellectual property rights and also overthrow opposition by the US and South African governments, a story worth revisiting in more detail in below. In short, by 2003, the coterie of AIDS denialists surrounding Mbeki lost to street heat, ridicule and legal critique, so today nearly 800,000 South Africans and millions more elsewhere have access to the medicines.

I hope we'll look back at the climate denialists and judge them as merely a momentary quirk in human rationality, ultimately not in the least influential. The real danger comes from fossil fuel firms which, like Big Tobacco decades ago, know full well the lethal potential of their product. Their objective is to place a grain of doubt in our minds, and climate denialists are rather useful.

The fossil fuel firms - especially BP, Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil - not only fund denialist thinktanks and astroturf advocacy (such as the Global Climate Coalition). They support members of the US Congress - such as Rick Boucher from Virginia - who energetically sabotage legislation aimed at capping emissions (Congress' offsets, carbon trading and other distraction gimmicks mean there will be no net US cuts after all until the late 2030s). They also work with mainstream 'green' groups - WWF comes to mind - to halt environmental progress.

These corporations are far more insidious than the email hackers. I hope we aren't further distracted by the UEA affair and that this is a quickly-forgotten little episode of dirty academic laundry meant for the dustbin of our sloppy movement where it belongs, so we can make the movement stronger, more transparent, more rigourous, more democratic and much more militant in trying to defeat the fossil fuel industry.

One way to do so is to flash back to Seattle exactly a decade ago, when the World Trade Organisation (WTO) fiasco on November 30, 1999 taught civil society activists and African leaders two powerful lessons. Turning 85 years old on Saturday, our comrade Dennis Brutus reminded us of two lessons from one of the most eventful weeks in his amazing life.

First, working together, African leaders and activists have the power to disrupt a system of global governance that meets the Global North's short-term interests against both the Global South and the longer-term interests of the world's people and the planet. Second, in the very act of disrupting global malgovernance, major concessions can be won.

Spectacular protest against the WTO summit's opening ceremony is what most recall about Seattle: activists 'locking down' to prevent entrance to the conference centre, a barrage of tear gas and pepper spray, a sea of broken windows and a municipal police force later prosecuted for violating US citizens' most basic civil liberties. (See David and Rebecca Solnit's excellent new book The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle - link - for the spin on the spin.)

That was outside. Inside the convention centre, negotiations belatedly got underway, and African leaders quickly grew worried that further trade liberalisation would damage their tiny industrial sectors.

The damage was well recognised, as even establishment research revealed Africa would be the continent to suffer the worst net losses from corporate-dominated free trade. The US trade representative, Charlene Barshevsky, repeatedly insulted African elites who raised this point.

With the exception of South African trade minister Alec Erwin, who enjoyed an insider 'Green Room' role to promote SA's self-interest, delegations from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU, since renamed the African Union) were soon furious.

As OAU deputy director general V.J.McKeen recalled: "They went out to a dinner in a bus, and then were left out in the cold to walk back. To tell you to the extent that when we went into the room for our African group meeting, I mean, there was no interpretation provided... so one had to improvise. And then even the microphone facilities were switched off."

Tetteh Hormeku, from the African Trade Network of progressive civil society groups, picks up the story: "By the second day of the formal negotiations, the African and other developing-country delegates had found themselves totally marginalised... [and threatened] to withdraw the consensus required to reach a conclusion of the conference. By this time, even the Americans and their supporters in the WTO secretariat must have woken up to the futility of their 'rough tactics'."

By walking out, the Africans' strong willpower earned major concessions in the next WTO summit, in Doha, in November 2001. At the same time as the global justice movement began widening into an anti-imperialist movement in the wake of the USA's post-9/11 remilitarization, African activists delved deeper into extreme local challenges, such as combating AIDS. In Doha, African elites joined forces with activists again.

On this occasion, the positive catalyst was a South African government law - the 1997 Medicines Act - which permitted the state's compulsory licensing of patented drugs. In 1998, the Treatment Action Campaign (http://www.tac.org.za) was launched to lobby for AIDS drugs, which a decade ago were prohibitively expensive - $15,000 per person per year - for nearly all South Africa's HIV-positive people (roughly 10% of the population).

That campaign was immediately confronted by the US State Department's attack on the SA Medicines Act, a "full court press", as bureaucrats testified to the US Congress. The US elites' aim was to protect intellectual property rights and halt the emergence of a parallel inexpensive supply of AIDS medicines that would undermine lucrative Western markets.

US vice president Al Gore directly intervened with SA government leaders in 1998-99, aiming to revoke the Medicines Act. Then in mid-1999, Gore launched his presidential election bid, a campaign generously funded by big pharmaceutical corporations, which that year provided $2.3 million to the Democratic Party.

In solidarity with the South Africans, the US AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power began protesting at Gore's campaign events, in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The demos soon threatened to cost Gore far more in adverse publicity than he was raising in Big Pharma contributions, so he changed sides.

As pressure built, even during the reign of president George W. Bush and his repressive trade representative Robert Zoellick (now World Bank president), the WTO's Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights system was amended at Doha in late 2001 to permit generic drugs to be used in medical emergencies.

This was a huge victory for Africa, removing any rationale to continue to deny life-saving medicines to the world's poorest people.

In 2003, with another dreadful WTO deal on the table in Cancun and 30,000 protesters outside, once again the African leadership withdrew consensus, wrecking the plans of the US and Europe for further liberalisation. The WTO has still not recovered.

These are the precedents required to overcome the three huge challenges the North faces in Copenhagen: 2020 emissions cuts of at least 45% (from 1990 levels) through a binding international agreement; the decommissioning of carbon markets and offset gimmicks; and payment on the vast ecological debt owed to victims of climate change.

Realistically, the adverse balance of forces currently prevailing will not permit victories on even one, much less all three. What response is logical?

In Barcelona, in early November, African negotiators boycotted the pre-Copenhagen talks, making good on AU leader Meles Zenawi's September threat, given that the North put so little on the negotiating table.

Indeed, that is the main lesson from Seattle: by walking out - alongside civil society protesters - and halting a bad deal in Copenhagen on December 18, we can together pave the way for subsequent progress.

Two years after Seattle's failure, progress was won through African access to life-saving medicines. We must ensure it doesn't take two years after Copenhagen's failure for Africa to get access to life-saving emissions cuts and to climate debt repayment, alongside the demise of carbon trading - but those are surely the battles just ahead.

* Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

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Learning How to Count to 350:
Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
By Rebecca Solnit*

This December, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit. There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first. Activists -- farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers -- around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.

A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they'd execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO's road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.

Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable -- and then, suddenly, it wasn't. Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.

The mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier: November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation. The fall of the Wall now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about. It was not so.

"I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible" said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season. Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.

There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter. From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed. As it happened, those weren't the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn't the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn't look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out. Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn't that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism's triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come. Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico's jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico's majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.

The Sucking Sound and the Turning Tide
Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas." He was ridiculed for describing the "giant sucking sound" of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial "race to the bottom," while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico's small farmers.

Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It's a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year's presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times. After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.

Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment -- which went from 80% of its loans to about 1% -- that it's been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.

That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix." He charged, "What's crazy is that the protesters want the WTO to become precisely what
they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labour and environmental standards on everyone else."

Nice though our labour and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn't want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organising leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO's "overall goal is to eliminate 'trade barriers,' frequently including labour laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures."

That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed "Democracy," pointed one way; the second, labelled "WTO," pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organised resistance, and it's important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren't just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil. While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategising, outreach, and all the usual labours.

Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era
In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled.
Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico's 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.

Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated US-based Bechtel Corporation's privatisation of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history -- $27 billion.

Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations. It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico -- in scale and impact another Seattle -- and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on November 30th, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier. Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.

In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone's life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase "socialism for the rich" truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism's triumph in 1999 were proclaiming "the end of American capitalism as we knew it" and the "collapse of finance."

It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk. Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine's cover story was: "Why Main Street Hates Wall Street" and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious. The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.

Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:

"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the IMF) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."

Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalisation had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:

"Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalisation far more complex."

The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.

Futures that Work
There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what's the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn't, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like: small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a levelling that might also eliminate dire poverty.

Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.

To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn't mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what's actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren't going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what's poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.

Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle. The "revolution" that got us into this era of climate change, however, can't be dated that way. It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanisation made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can't, and shouldn't, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification.

We need a post-industrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.

There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion's share of resources and emitting the lion's share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, "We are winning," had a point.

The "we" that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn't the United States itself. As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, "The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States." The citizens of the US need to revolt, again, against their nation's failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it. That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.

Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe. We're already at 390 parts per million. Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.

Remembering how dramatically -- and unexpectedly -- things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.

* Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and co-author with her brother David of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing some of the original documents.

This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, and editor of The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.

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Ten Years After Seattle, One Strategy, Better Two, For the Movement Against War and Capitalism 
By Franco “Bifo” Berardi*

A moral rebellion began in Seattle in November 1999: after the act of disruption of the WTO summit millions of people all over the world declared that capitalist globalisation causes social and environmental devastation. For two years the global movement produced an effective process of critique of neoliberal policies, giving way to the hope of a radical change.

Then, after the G8 summit in Genoa, the global narrative changed, and war took centre stage. The movement did cease its actions, but its efficacy was reduced to zero. It failed to spread in the daily life of world society. It failed to give birth to a process of self organisation of techno-scientific labour.

Ten years after Seattle we have to invent a new strategy for the movement, starting from the consciousness that the prevailing form of the global power today is war, and that a military dictatorship is taking shape in the world.

Neoliberal policy destroyed the very idea of a public sphere in the field of the economy and in the field of the media. It has privatised every single fragment of production, communication, language and affection. Competition has taken the place of solidarity in every aspect of life, and crime has become the prevailing form of economic relationships.
Global war is the natural completion of this criminal mutation of the capitalist mode of production.

And the systematic devastation of the physical and psychic environment is the natural effect of this mutation.

The victory of Barack Obama has opened a window. But you see the paradox of the present situation. The United States of America has lost its military hegemony because religious fanaticism, Islamic fundamentalism, resurgent Russian nationalism and terror are strategically prevailing in the Euro-Asian mainland. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iraq to Iran and Libya, from the Caucasus to Ukraine, Western hegemony is definitely losing ground.

In addition, the financial crisis has given way to a breakdown of the American power and the spreading recession and inflation are carrying turmoil and distrust in the Western societies.

In the decade of the Clinton presidency it was possible to speak (although never really convincingly) of an American Empire. After the beginning of the infinite war those thinkers who believed in the existence of an American Empire argued that the Bush politics was a coup d’état inside the Empire. If so, we must say that the coup d’état has obtained its goal. Bush and the warmongers have lost their wars (the Iraq war is a complete failure, the Afghanistan is a never ending defeat, and a war in Iran will never be won). Nevertheless, they won their war for more oil profits and for more military expenses, and worse, they won their war against peace and humanity.

Nowadays, when the White House is occupied by a president of a more genuinely democratic culture, the American Empire is falling apart, and chaos is the only emperor of the world.

What can be done in such a landscape? What strategy can be elaborated by the movement of women and men who are looking for peace and for justice?
No hope is in sight as the criminal turn of capitalism is producing irreversible effects in the culture and in the behaviour of the planetary society.

One third of mankind is in danger of death: famine is spreading as never before. The energy crisis is fuelling aggression and inflation.

One third of mankind is working in conditions bordering on slavery and people are doomed to accept the blackmail of precarity and exploitation.

One third of mankind is armed to the teeth in order to defend their life standard against the army of migrants who are pushing at the borders.

We have to prepare to a long phase of barbarization and of violence.

We have to create a safe haven for the small minority of the world population that wants to save the heritage of humanist civilisation and the potentialities of the General Intellect, that are in serious danger of unredeemable militarisation.

The age that we have entered during the first decade of the century is quite similar to the so-called European Middle Age. While the territory was ravaged by invasions, and the legacy of ancient civilisation was being destroyed, groups of monks saved the memory of the past, and the seeds of a possible future.

We cannot know if the present barbarian age is going to last for decades or for centuries, nor we can say if the physical environment of the planet will survive the present criminal-capitalist devastation.

But we certainly know that we have not the weapons to face the destroyers, so we have to save ourselves, and the possibility of the future.

Just one strategy is not enough, when things are so unpredictable as they are in the present times.

We cannot say what the consequences will be of the American loss of hegemony, nor the developments of the war from Pakistan to Gaza strip. And we cannot imagine what kind of effects will produce the low intensity ethnic civil war which is been waged in Europe, and which kind of explosions may follow the inflationary recession which is ravaging the economy of the western workers.

We have to be prepared to the prospect of a long period of monastic withdrawal, but also to the prospect of a sudden reversal of the global political landscape. Imagine the revolt of the Chinese workers against national-communist capitalism, the explosion of open ethnic warfare in the European society, the breakdown of the US military unable to face a fresh wave of terrorism fuelled by Afghan and Pakistanis wars, the apocalyptic collapse of the ecosystems in some important areas of the planet. These scenarios are perfectly realistic in the near future, and they could produce a dramatic change in the political mood of the majority of the world population. We have to be prepared for this, we have to prepare the narration for such a reversal, and we have to create the happy example of an other style of life, one that is not based on consumerism, growth, and competition.

Our central task in the next future should be in my opinion the redefinition of the very idea of well being, of wealth and of happiness.

Our task will be the creation of monasteries where frugal well-being is experimented. Critique of the naturalisation of the paradigm of growth, cultural elaboration of a new paradigm based on the abandonment of the obsession of growth, aimed to frugality, culture-intensive production, solidarity, and laziness, and refusal of competition.

Capitalism has identified well-being and accumulation, happiness with consumerism and richness with the destruction of natural and psychic resources.

We have to become the example of a life style where well-being is joined with frugality, happiness is joined with generosity, and production is joined with laziness.

Richness has nothing to do with compulsive consumption and obsessive accumulation. Richness is the pleasure of being, and the enjoyment of time.

* Franco Berardi, aka "Bifo," founder of the famous "Radio Alice" in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.

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GET THEE TO COPENHAGEN! (BECAUSE There’s no redemption in a monastery)
By Nicola Bullard*

It is so interesting to look back at the issue of Focus on Trade that we published just after the collapse of the WTO talks in Seattle in early December 1999. (In case you are interested, it’s number 42.) In the lead article by Walden Bello, what is striking is not the triumphant heralding of the arrival of the anti-globalisation movement, but a rather tame recounting of the collapse of the talks over issues of transparency, attempts to introduce environment and labour standards, and a disgruntled African delegation. Of course, the big outside demonstrations are mentioned, as is the march of 1,000 to the county gaol to demand the release of the more than 400 arrested activists. But in the recounting, there is no hint of the folklore -- indeed the myth -- that has now become the “Battle of Seattle”.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know the facts from the fiction. But I do know that the WTO has never recovered and probably never will. Once we got a hint of the essential vulnerability of the organisation, and the amazing potential of well thought through “inside/outside” strategies, there was no looking back.

The Cancun and Hong Kong WTO ministerials have their own mythology. The tragic protest-suicide of Lee Hyung-kae and the heroic campesinas in their gorgeous bright shawls at the fallen fence – choosing to go no further having proved that it was possible to enter the fortress. In Hong Kong, the image is of Korean farmers silently paying homage to the Earth at they ceremoniously walked ten steps and bowed, for miles, or jumped off boats in the cold waters of Hong Kong Harbour, swimming towards the convention centre where the trade ministers were meeting. I wasn’t in Hong Kong or Cancun either, but these moments are part of my story. As are Prague, Genoa and Quito, where I experienced the heady combination of tear gas and black bloc, which, one has to admit, creates a certain adrenalin rush. Genoa, most of all, left its mark: we went through fire together that Friday and came out glorious. The extraordinary solidarity as we marched together that bright Saturday, refusing to bow to the violence of the police and paying respect to Carlo Giuliani. This is what I remember.

Re-reading stories written from that time gives me goose-bumps: there is something moving about what everyone tried to do, against the odds and with humour and creativity and conviction. We experimented with new ways of doing politics, we built grand projects like the World Social Forum, and we did have an impact, in large and small ways. On the last day of the Hong Kong ministerial a “thank-you letter to our international friends” was distributed by a “group of Hong Kong people”. They said

“Thank you for your patience in explaining to us and our media the devastating effects of the WTO, although your voices have been distorted and submerged in the local media; Thank you for showing us, through the uniform footsteps the significance of solidarity; only through people’s mutual solidarity, mutual support and long term struggle, can democracy be attained.”

Is it really only ten years since Seattle? So much has happened and so much has changed (myself included). For sure, we were not able to “seize the historical moment” of the 2008 financial crisis to bring capitalism to its knees, nor did we stop the war in Iraq. But we are constructing a (non-sectarian) global movement with certain shared values and goals, bringing together South and North, with new ways of working together that go beyond a single demonstration or campaign. Now we are preparing for December’s climate summit in Copenhagen and I can feel – everywhere -- the same energy and enthusiasm that we poured into derailing the WTO and building the World Social Forum. The burgeoning climate justice movement is something real, and its provenance is in Seattle and Porto Alegre.

That’s why reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi is such a downer. Just when there is so much work to be done, he tells us to go to the monastery. He sounds like a survivalist rather than a life-affirming liberationist when he writes:

“We have to create a safe haven for the small minority of the world population that wants to save the heritage of humanist civilisation and the potentialities of the General Intellect, that are in serious danger of unredeemable militarisation.”

What exactly does Bifo want to save? And who is this elite that is so worthy of salvation? The people living with AIDS who campaigned to get rid of patents? The landless women of Brazil who, in the early hours of the morning, macheted hectares of plantation Eucalyptus? The indigenous peoples of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador who have lost hundreds of their brothers and sisters defending blood, land and water? Or maybe just the ones who voted for Evo Morales? The shack-dwellers of Durban fighting eviction and toxic pollution? The abandoned people of New Orleans? The “desocupados” of Argentina? The villagers of Thailand creating new exchange systems to guard against financial mayhem? Or maybe the climate campers who shut down Kingsnorth?

The other challenge that Bifo puts before us – to redefine “the very idea of well being, of wealth and of happiness” -- is narrowly Euro-centric, and rather sad. In other parts of the world, perhaps far away from where Bifo lives, families, communities, men and women, are daily living their version of happiness and well-being, against the odds, and in the face of militarism, capitalism, patriarchy and racism.

Rather than searching for meaning in a monastery or preparing to write (yet another) Western narration on history, Comrade Bifo should get down and get dirty. Join us in Copenhagen. It may not be Seattle, but at least it will take you out of your gloomy introspection.

* Nicola Bullard is a senior associate with Focus on the Global South, and has edited Focus on Trade since before Seattle.

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Focus on Trade is a regular electronic bulletin providing updates and analysis of trends in regional and world trade and finance, the political economy of globalisation and peoples resistance, and alternatives to global capitalism. Nicola Bullard edits Focus on Trade. Your contributions and comments are welcome. Write to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Focus on Trade is translated into Spanish. If you would like to receive the Spanish edition, contact n.bullard(at)focusweb.org.