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.
