Manning Marable

It

was immensely significant for black America that the last major public

demonstration in the U.S. in the 20th century was a protest over global

economics and trade. More than forty thousand people came to Seattle to oppose

the policies of the World Trade Organization, which since 1995 has functioned

like an international cabal in league with powerful corporate and financial

interests. Labor activists went to Seattle to force the WTO to enact trade

sanctions against nations that use child labor, prohibit labor unions and that

pay slave wages to their workers. Environmental activists came to Seattle to

pressure the WTO to ensure environmental safeguards would be part of any global

trade agreements.

What

motivated both labor and environmentalists is the political recognition that

issues like human rights, employment and healthcare cannot be addressed

individually as separate issues. Nor can they be effectively discussed only in

the context of a single nation-state. Capital is now truly global, and any

analysis of specific socioeconomic problems that may exist in our country must

be viewed from an international perspective.

The

WTO was set up to be the global headquarters for drafting and enforcing trading

rules. When one member country challenges another’s trading practices, disputes

are settled secretly by panels of trade experts. Elaine Bernard, director of

Harvard’s Trade Union Program, explains that the WTO’s rules are based on

privatization, free trade and few regulations on the environment. Bernard states

the WTO’s rules "value corporate power and commercial interests over labor

and human rights, environmental and health concerns, and diversity. They

increase inequality and stunt democracy. The WTO version of globalization is not

a rising tide lifting all boats, as free traders insist, but a dangerous race to

the bottom."

What

kinds of "dangerous" priorities are we talking about? Consider that

the WTO’s rules that deny Third World nations the right to have automatic

licensing on patented but absolutely essential medicines. So for example, even

when African nations currently ravaged by diseases such as AIDS acquire the

scientific and technical means to manufacture drugs to save millions of lives,

the WTO’s first concern is the protection of the patents and profits of powerful

drug companies.

The

WTO defines itself as a "trade" organization, which is incapable of

pursuing social goals, such as extending the rights to freedom of collective

bargaining to Third World and poor workers. Thus when an authoritarian regime

markets clothing and athletic shoes that were produced by child labor under

sweatshop conditions, the WTO claims that there is nothing it can do.

The

demonstrations in Seattle, however, showed that growing numbers of Americans are

recognizing that all of these issues-Third World sweatshops, the destruction of

unions, deteriorating living standards, the dismantling of social programs

inside the U.S.-are actually interconnected. "Globalization" is not

some abstraction, but a destructive social force that has practical consequences

on how we live, work and eat. There is a direct connection between the

elimination of millions of jobs that can sustain families here in the U.S., and

the exportation of jobs into countries without unions, environmental and safety

standards. As real jobs disappear for millions of U.S. workers, and as welfare

programs are eliminated, the only alternative is to use the prisons as the chief

means of regulating mass unemployment. Thus in the 1990s in the U.S., a period

of so-called unprecedented capitalist expansion, the number of prisoners in

federal, state and local correctional facilities roughly doubled. Between 1995

and 1997, according to the National Jobs for All Coalition, the average incomes

of the poorest 20 percent of female-headed families fell. In 1998, 163 cities

and 670 counties had unemployment rates that were more than 50 percent higher

than the national average. These deep pockets of joblessness and hunger are not

accidental: they represent the logical economic consequences of a nation that

builds one hundred new prison cells a day and sanctions the exportation of

millions of jobs.

Black

Americans therefore should be in the forefront of the debates about

international trade, but we must do so by recalling the activist slogan of the

sixties: "Think Globally, Act Locally." There is an inescapable

connection between Seattle and Sing Sing Prison, between global inequality and

the brutalization of Third World labor and what’s happening to black, brown and

working people here in the U.S. As globalized capitalism destroys democracy,

unions and the environment abroad, it is carrying out a similar agenda in our

own backyards. For these reasons, we must create new organizations and a new

political language that can unify international groups into collective protest

action. We are challenged to build new political networks and information

sharing across the boundaries of race, gender, class and nation. We must make

the connections in the fight for democracy in the 21st century.

Dr.

Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the

Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia

University. "Along the Color Line" is distributed free of charge to

over 325 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s

column is also available on the internet at www.manningmarable.net.