Nevertheless, I think you make several good points. The WTO is actually an insitituition with quite limited powers. It cannot enforce its own rules or bring charges against those who violate the rules. Those who speak of it as a world government are way off base. A government that cannot charge anyone or enforce its rules or punish those who break them is hardly a government at all. It is national governments, those entities that are supposed to be losing power to the WTO etc. who make the WTO work and they do so in the interests of "blocs" of capital as well as capital in general. Of course blocking the work of the WTO or cutting funding for the IMF is not going to abolish capitalism.You are right that it is important not to confuse a minor victory and a feeling of exhiliration from a successful protest with triumph over capitalism but this could happen regardless of what alliances may have been made. Alliances are tactical and do not imply agreement on basic principles with allies. As has been pointed out by others, leftists comprise a varied set of groups Alliances with other leftists, centrists, and right-wingers who agree with us on specific issues is surely a sound tactic as long as one realizes that on the next issue your allies may be on the other side.
Another point should be made about institutions such as the WTO. Much of the same work is carried out within institutional settings to which the left seems to pay little or no attention. UPOV an organisation that protect property rights in new varieites of plants is a good example. The web site of UPOV is at: http://www.upov.int/eng/index.htm
Cheers, Ken Hanly
John Gulick wrote:
> On Thursday 24 February, D Henwood forwarded a copy of the following
> article:
>
> >Financial Times - February 24, 2000
> >CALL FOR OVERHAUL OF IMF AND WORLD BANK EXPECTED
>
> I'm surprised few LBO-talkers had anything to say about this article.
> Basking in the glow of their symbolic victory in Seattle, segments of the
> anti-WTO coalition (especially the Naderite and the anarchist segments) seem
> to have forgotten that both the libertarian right and the
> nativist/isolationist right have their own critiques of the Bretton Woods
> institutions. Libertarians take issue with IMF bailouts that reward the
> "aberrant behavior" of miscalculating investors and "crony capitalists"
> (sic) in the Third World -- the so-called "moral hazard" problem.
> Nativists/isolationists resent the degree to which U.S. participation in
> multilateral institutions compromises U.S. "sovereignty" (i.e. its
> unilateral imperialism). Although the populist left's critique of the
> Bretton Woods institutions focuses heavily on a) the way in which the
> policies of these institutions aid and abet the power of the transnational
> corporations
> (similar to the populist left's analysis of "corporate welfare") and b) the
> "unelected and unaccountable" status of these institutions, the populist
> left fails to recognize that a) bears a similarity to the libertarian gripe
> and b) bears a similarity to the isolationist gripe, setting the stage for many
> an unholy political alliance.
>
> To vulgarize (at the risk of oversimplification), the Bretton Woods
> institutions are the "superstructure" of global capitalism, and the TNC's
> are the phenomenal
> form of global capital. While it is true that people are rarely roused to
> fight an abstract system, and instead are usually roused to fight the concrete
> effcts of that system, I think the successive mobilizations against the
> WTO/IMF/IBRD (and the TNC's) tend to reify these institutions/organizations
> as the _sources_ of economic inequality/ecological ruin in the world. The
> theoretical confusion that follows makes possible all sorts of unwitting
> alliances with both the libertarian and isolationist right, and will incline
> the "movement" to falsely identify triumphs, and prematurely declare victory.
> What happens if the Congress, feeling pressure from the left and the right,
> sharply curtails funding for the IMF/IBRD ? Does global capitalism/imperialism
> automatically come to an end ?
>
> I found the piece on the WTO declaring that tax breaks for offshore affiliates
> of U.S. TNC's to be unfair "export subsidies" hilariously ironic b/c there
> is no room in the populist left's conceptual toolkit to make sense of this
> event. How could the WTO come out against U.S. TNC's ? Because the WTO is
> simply a mediator between different blocs of global capital, not the system
> itself, something you rarely hear from the populist left. In fact, since the
> populist left is such a
> stauch opponent of "corporate welfare" (which in certain respects puts them in
> the same league as libertarian advocates of the "night watchman state"), in
> this case, using their own standards of judgment, they'd have to celebrate
> the WTO's ruling against "corporate welfare" for U.S. TNC's !!!
>
> On a somewhat related front, I found certain aspects of the article that ChuckO
> sent on the post-N30 activist generation rather amusing. The white middle class
> anarchists bemoan the absence of "people of color" in their loosely affiliated
> anti-global system coalition, and vow to work on their own racism to better
> build a broad coalition. Their repeated usage of the term "people of color"
> is a dead giveaway of their much-despised middle class social background, since
> few "people of color" use the very term to describe themselves, save those
> who are part of the intelligentsia, or at least have spent a few years
> attending a liberal arts university or college reading Bell Hooks and Cornel
> West. Their
> proposals to work on their own racism basically sound like liberal therapy
> techniques (bring in the "anti-racism training" counselor after he/she's done
> w/his "conflict resolution" seminar !!!), another artifact of their
> much-despised middle-classness. They can't even bring themselves to use the
> phrase "working class" -- "people of color" stands in for all those oppressed
> people they want to reach but have failed to reach. Finally, they fundamentally
> fail to recognize that their opposition to everything the WTO et al represents
> comes from a structurally different position from working-class blacks, Mexican
> and Southeast Asian immigrants, etc. Apart from their genuine empathy for the
> oppressed humans/animals of the world (I do not say this facetiously), white
> middle class anarchists hate the WTO (emblematic of global capitalism) because
> they are educated, creative, community-loving folks who hate the fact that the
> system increasingly limits their opportunities to exercise their capacities
> (unless they "sell out" and go to work for Microsoft and live in a gated
> community, which would defeat the purpose). It's not a position I'm
> unsympathetic with (being a disenchanted/alienated white middle class
> 31-year-old radical stuck in grad school and dreading the future), but it's
> light years away from the reasons why your garden variety working class/poor
> white/African-American/Latino/etc. might or does hate the WTO and everything
> it stands for.
>
> John Gulick