Sadly, Yoshie, not into debt-rupudiation alliance with Third World elite rulers, yet, it seems (too many Cayman Islands and Zurich VIP accounts are at stake to make the rulers accountable to the masses). The late Julius Nyerere's daughter Rose led a Jubilee South call for a Third World debtors' cartel in November here in Jo'burg (details at http://www.aidc.org.za). And you know that in Havana, the G-77 endorsed A16-17 protests? But from South Africa, it all looks very hokey, not only because just north of here Robert Mugabe does vitriolic IMF bashing as a last-gasp populist measure (having enacted all demands the IMF has made the last 17 or so years). And more: SA finance minister Trevor Manuel has the honour of serving as chair of the IMF/WB Board of Governors, in contrast to one Trevor Ngwane (Soweto city councillor, fired recently by the ANC for opposing its Jo'burg water privatisation plan) led a militant set of Washington protests last week (a documentary is being completed for airing next week in SA, "The Two Trevors go to Washington," which I gather will be made available internationally).
Anyhow, I'm trying to do a wrap on a Monthly Review article, which I'd love to talk about off-list with those who want to straighten me out... the first few 'grafs are as follows. This tends to be mainly anti-global-state argumentation, but we're also playing with the idea of reconstitutive regional (Southern African) working-class politics, and a paper's just done (for the next Socialist Register) which I can send offlist if anyone's interested...:
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A Case for Shutting the IMF and World Bank
for Monthly Review summer issue: "After Seattle, a New Internationalism?" DRAFT, 22 April 2000 (intro section only) (comments to pbond at wn.apc.org)
A "run on the bank" has just begun. The ordinarily impenetrable International Monetary Fund and World Bank have finally come into activists' focus, in a way that in turn sharpens what are often fuzzy discussions surrounding globalization and popular resistance. Around 30,000 protesters joined the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington on April 16, capping a week that began ominously with a drenched, chilled and poorly-attended Jubilee 2000 USA debt-relief rally on April 9 (controversially addressed by neoliberal Clinton economist Gene Sperling), a protectionist and vaguely xenophobic "No Blank Check for China" AFL-CIO demonstration of 15,000 workers at the Capitol on April 12, and dozens of other related events. Auspiciously, in contrast, the bulk of the A16/17 protesters rallied around a call for the Fund and Bank to be closed down (not reformed), as had most Seattle demonstrators in relation to the World Trade Organisation. God smiled on the 16th, giving the Mobilization the warmth and sunshine denied the Jubilee reformers.
With momentum thus captured by the far more radical Mobilization, enormous ideological progress and political maturity can be claimed and consolidated. A16/17 was built upon a militant, internationalist platform and slogan--"Break the Bank, Defund the Fund, Dump the Debt!"--endorsed by a coalition of forces as strong and diverse as Seattle's. The legal rally/march was joined by initially-nervous trade unionists, NGO developmentalists and environmentalists. Skillfully, the Mobilization's official core of left-leaning Washington thinktank and NGO staff helped to at least temporarily merge the very different agendas of inside-Beltway bureaucrats and grassroots activists. Labor/NGO/green officials have historically wobbled when faced with global political-economy issues, as a result of the disadvantageous balance of forces prior to Seattle, their often debilitating ties to the Democratic Party (and fears of being seen in alliance with Republican Fund/Bank bashers), and a faux professionalism heightened by dependence upon bourgeois funders. The AFL-CIO even supported the $18 billion recapitalization of the Fund in late 1998, after obscure deal-making with the Clinton administration.
The activists, in contrast, were anxious to conduct a joyous symphony of Seattle-like lockdowns and street parties to blockade the Bank/Fund Spring meetings. To do so, they introduced a cultural liberation ambience virtually unknown to Washington, utilizing radical participatory democracy and affinity-group cell structuring in strategy sessions and trainings facilitated by striking young talents from the Direct Action Network. In this milieu, Z's Michael Albert reported,
The various tactical wings of the
movement--whether seeking to get arrested, to
militantly protest, to make a public but
peaceful statement, or just to learn or
teach--worked together marvelously. Diverse
tactics did not trump one another. Tension
was minimal. Intercommunication was
considerable. Coalitions were strengthened
rather than dissolving into tactical
disputes. There was in-the-street mutual aid,
careful planning of venues and events, and
pre-demonstration communication of aims.
Results included abundant forms of civil disobedience and 1,300 arrests (although the first 600 were unwilling, as police used dramatic force during an April 15 Free Mumia protest march and also shut the activists' Convergence space on absurd fire-code charges). Encouragingly, unlike Seattle, the 1,000-strong Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc of black-clad anarchists worked in harmony with those carrying out civil disobedience, and had the honor of attracting a police helicopter devoted solely to trailing their movements across Washington on April 16. Commitments were made to hone tactics for upcoming Philadelphia and Los Angeles political party convention demonstrations.
But most importantly for our purposes here, the Mobilization drew the eco-socio-economic concerns of the Global South far deeper into the fabric of the US movement than ever before. Granted, the protest failed to obstruct the Fund/Bank meetings (the Washington police spread protest-boundary perimeters wide, paralyzing 90 city blocks in the center of town but also gaining the physical space required to sneak several hundred meeting-goers into the Fund at 5AM on the two mornings, while bunches of 100-500 protesters subsequently clogged 18 intersections and turned away numerous late-rising delegates). No matter, the combination of thorough preparation and the large size of the turnout in Washington
_ helped raise public consciousness about the
Fund and Bank to unprecedented levels,
_ brought sympathetic activists from different
constituencies into successful coalition,
_ taught organizers a great deal about Washington
logistics (and how they can really be gummed up
next time),
_ showed South allies the extent of solidarity
possibilities (encouraging them to intensify
their own local critiques of the Fund/Bank), and
also
_ facilitated a long-overdue split amongst
development-NGOs (a group of 22 conservative
organisations under the banner of "Interaction"
sent a bizarre, self-discrediting endorsement
note to the Bank and Fund).
I want to argue that these protests have set an excellent stage for several years of intense grassroots campaigning across the globe aimed at closing the Bretton Woods twins, thus fundamentally reorienting our understanding of development finance, and in the process rejigging power relations in ways that could benefit radical political movements across the South. There remains, however, a standard concern on the Left, namely that activists' focus on the institutional forms of global capitalist (mis)management--the Bank, Fund and WTO--detracts from an understanding of both the capital accumulation process and class-based resistance, and hence leads to partial and imperfect strategic insights about power and social transformation. There are also mixed views emerging about the optimal scale (national, regional and global) at which progressives should resist and perhaps even reconstruct economic "policy." Such debates have inspired this article, which attempts to interrogate the main lines of thinking within the Mobilization and allied groups, and to brainstorm about the different ways forward for the growing movement.
To set the terrain, we establish in rudimentary theoretical and practical terms the merits of a strategic focus on the Fund/Bank, reflecting the rise of financial dominance and global economic interpenetration during a quarter-century of capitalist "crisis." We then move to intellectual and practical dilemmas surrounding the emergence of an embryonic world "state" based in Washington, and consider how these debates relate to street-level consciousness, and to strategies and tactics adopted by leading anti-globalisation campaigners. This allows us to conclude that "bond-boycotting" the Bank and defunding the Fund should be supported as integral, unifying components--and excellent local handles--within the broader mobilization for class, gender, ethnic and environmental justice.
(Another 5,000 words available from pbond at wn.apc.org)