<nettime> "Millenium Round" of the WTO under fire ... from both left and right

[<nettime's_roving_reporter@bbs.thing.net> nettime@bbs.thing.net]

24 november 1999
Jungle World 51

"Millenium Round" of the WTO under fire ...
... from both left and right

When in May last year the World Trade Organization organized its second
Ministerial Conference in Geneva eight thousand people took to the
streets in Geneva, and tens of thousands world-wide in decentralized
actions in order to protest against the power relations that the WTO
helps imposing.[1] Some of the strategists of deregulation seem to be
shaking with the shock. When on 23 September of the same year UN
representatives and top managers of corporations met at the Geneva
Business Dialogue, Helmut Maucher - President of the ICC-WBO
(International Chamber of Commerce / World Business Organization) and
Chairman of the Board of Nestl� -, who had called the meeting, felt
obliged to castigate the protests - whose organizers "would do well to
seek legitimacy" - and call on the state governments to fulfil their
policing duties.

Now it seems like things might get even better in Seattle where from 30
November to 3 December the third Ministerial Conference is going to take
place. Already in the preparation phase the WTO is struggling with
problems of legitimacy. "All you have to do is read the newspaper to
know that the anti-WTO forces have been more effective, thus far, than
we have," laments Scot Montrey, spokesman for the U.S. Alliance for
Trade Expansion, a US coordination of large corporations.[2] Michael
Dolan, who is coorganizing the protests and is a deputy director of
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a group founded by Ralph Nader,
rejoices: "I was thrilled when Seattle was selected," said. "It's almost
like they're giving us home-field advantage."[3]

A whole range of activities are planned around the Ministerial
Conference by radical left and progressive grassroots groups, NGOs and
trade unions: from street theater and actions of civil disobedience all
the way to large demonstrations. Kept at a distance by the
aforementioned organizers, but nevertheless quite present in the weeks
leading up to the protests are extreme-right Republicans as well as
conservative environmental organizations with essentialist lines of
argument like the Sierra Club. While the Republicans demand - just like
the radical left - that the US government leave the WTO, the Sierra Club
wants - like the established leftist NGOs - that "civil society",
meaning themselves, be given a place in the decision-making process of
the WTO.

The blurring of the difference between left-wing and right-wing
approaches is especially visible in Seattle. The city council has
declared a MAI-free zone (MAI - Multilateral Agreement on Investment) on
the
city territory. The symbolic anti-globalization measure was proposed by
Brian Derdowski, Republican member of the King County council, where
another
such zone has been implemented.[4]

On a US-wide level John Talbott, spokesperson for the Reform Party, does
not
see much difference between Ralph Nader on the left and Pat Buchanan on
the
right when they talk about globalization, and proposes that a new party be
created that is neither right nor left, but created to represent the
hard-working average American. In this he closes his eyes on Pat
Buchanan's
racist, sexist and homophobic attitude. The latter's right-wing
"producerist"[5] populism refers to a hard-working productive middle class
and working class being squeezed from above and below by "lazy social
parasites".[6]

What has gone awry, if one of the greatest leftist mobilizations of the
past years - the one against "free" trade, against "globalization",
against "transnational corporations" and especially against the MAI - is
so
attractive for right-wing conservative groups?

In June 1999 the Dutch antiracist group De Fabel van de illegaal, whose
work had greatly contributed to building a strong movement against the
MAI, decided to leave the campaigns against "free trade". "After taking
a closer look we concluded that to take 'free trade' as a primary target
is
not a logical choice based on a radical Left analysis, but instead comes
more from a New Right analysis," the group explained in an open letter in
September 1999. A year before that already, in October 1998, they had
published a first discussion paper: "With 'New Right' against
Globalization?"[7] They followed it up with a series of articles dealing
with the weaknesses of the discourse on "globalization" and "free trade"
as
well as with people serving as intermediaries between left-wing and
right-wing activists and groups.

In his analysis of the crisis of antiracism, Pierre-Andr� Taguieff
describes the appropriation of leftist discourses by the neoracists as
retorsion (not in the sense of revenge, but in a slightly less common
French meaning of the use of an argument against its author)[8] This
raises the question of when a leftist discourse is open to retorsion. Or
the
other way around: How would a discourse have to be structured so
that it would not serve right-wing propaganda. I would like to take a
look at five characteristics which make discourses suitable for
retorsion: a simplistic analysis of capitalism linked to an uncritical
attitude towards the national (social) state, emotionalizing, a
conspiracy theorist approach, and speaking of modernity destroying
"nature".

The discourse on globalization fits so well into right-wing racist
rhetoric because it blames an international capital not tied to a
geographical location, for the economic and social difficulties. The
simplistic analysis overlooks the role of the local capital in the
process of accumulation and exploitation and thus allows the demand to
protect the latter against the international financial capital, which is
artificially separated from the "productive capital". Karl A.
Schachtschneider, who together with others has filed a court action
against the Monetary Union with the Federal Constitutional Court of
Germany in Karlsruhe, warns in the far-right newspaper Junge Freiheit:
"We will be pushed further into globalization. This will serve as the
big excuse for the social tensions. We have to compete with slave
labor."[9]

Those who, like parts of the anti-MAI campaign, or like those Trotskyist
and
other old leftist theoreticians writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, defend
the
social state are especially prone to national-chauvinist retorsion. Since
they describe the object of their desire as outside history and
independent
from colonialism and the conditions of the Keynesian era, they do not seem
to notice that the nation-state by no means withers away with
deregulation.
They also close their eyes to the fact that it is national state
governments
who drive the deregulation ahead - and hope thereby to create an advantage
for their respective nation-state.[10]

The imperialist nation-state serves as a door-opener for corporations as
governments exert diplomatic and military pressure on dependent
governments. Representatives of the large US corporations and the US
diplomacy for instance work hand in hand in developing and securing the
access to new investment zones. In this field of interconnections the
efforts of some US corporations serve other US corporations as well. In
order to do justice to this interconnectedness between corporation and
"their" government, critical observers have in the past few years come
to replace the delocalized term of multinational corporation by the
transnational corporation which is rooted in one country and extends its
activities from there beyond the state boundaries (transnationally).

The discourse on globalization easily fits in conspiracy theories. These
already appear in the clich� of the disinterest in politics on the level
of
the nation-state - "Those guys in Berne/Berlin/Vienna do what they want
anyway." Beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, as the distance to the
relevant decision-making bodies becomes greater, the propensity to see
conspiracies really breaks out.

It is not any longer the processes of production and of capital
accumulation that are at the center of the attention, but clubs of
influential men (and some women) who negotiate among themselves the
future of the world behind closed doors. The outrage about the initially
secret negotiations at the OECD played an essential role in the
mobilization against the MAI. Since in this reading the actors of
"globalization" are so powerful and their business so mysterious, it is
hardly possible to oppose any resistance to them. Thus the work of the
conspiracy theorists limits itself to the missionary "enlightment" about
the dangers of the "New World Order" (a term that finds itself reified
in the abbreviation NWO used on web sites drawn to conspiracy
theories[11]), the Bilderberg meetings[12] or the World Economic
Forum[13].

A substantial part of even the leftist variants of the discourse on
"globalization" work through emotionalizing, calling upon fears about
the threat on one's livelihood represented by "multinational
corporations". This is very pronounced in the struggles against Monsanto
and
other gene technological corporations, for instance. Such
emotionalizing distracts from societal analyses and makes people
receptive for other emotionalized discourses - including those from the
right-wing.

In parts of the ecological left the perceived threat on their
livelihoods is not seen so much as a power relation between social
groups, but as the destruction of "Mother Earth" by a "modern world"
gone astray. Traditionally leftist ideas about self-management and
autonomy get mixed with discourses on regionalism which tend towards
racism, and leftist criticism of technology receives support from
essentialist and fascistoid discourses about living in harmony with
"nature", "according to the natural social laws of Gaia" (to quote
Edward Goldsmith[14], the founder and chief editor of "The Ecologist", a
newspaper that is widely read internationally, also by leftists).

Retorsion can, if we take those criteria into account, be made much more
difficult. In the preparations for the Innercity Action Week in Germany in
June 1997, many activists acquired the requisite know-how for analyses of
the world market, of the competition between economic
locations and the myths of globalization which would not so easily yield
to
retorsion. The close look at local consequences of global processes, the
analysis well rooted in the material, and especially the connection made
with a critical assessment of "public space" including the mechanisms of
its
racist regulation, are hard to integrate into a
right-wing discourse.

During the preparations for the protests in Seattle, right-left overlaps
were repeatedly brought up. One of the grassroots networks involved, the
PGA
(Peoples' Global Action against "free" trade and the WTO[15]), decided at
its second conference in Bangalore, India, in August to direct its
struggle
no longer against "free" trade, but against capitalism. But the
preparations
for Seattle also made it clear that for a massive mobilization, a broad
alliance was possible and desirable. The more radical groups and activists
seem to have succeeded in the time before the actions to set forth their
criticism of attitudes prone to retorsion to a wider audience. Especially
the caravans inspired by the PGA[16], with their numerous stops, actions
and
events on the way to Seattle offer plenty of opportunities to approach
people who have not so far been internationally networked, and to build up
a
reliable network in the USA also.

Footnotes:

1 Reports can be found in the PGA Bulletin No. 2,
<http://www.agp.org/agp/en/PGAInfos/bulletin2/bulletin2b.html>.

2 Michael Paulson: Business Leaders Fight Back Against Anti-WTO Forces.
In: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 24 September 1999.
<http://www.seattle-pi.com/business/wto24.shtml>.

3 Sam Howe Verhovek: For Seattle, Triumph and Protest. In: New York
Times, 13 October 1999. <http://www.corpwatch.org/5-seattle.html>.

4 Geov Parrish: Shutting down Seattle. In: Seattle Weekly, 19-25 August 1999.
<http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9933/features-parrish.shtml>.

5 For a critical description, cf.
<http://www.publiceye.org/pra/tooclose/producerism.html>.

6 Chip Berlet: Beware Right Wing Anti-Globalism. Political Research
Associates, October 1999. <http://www.corpwatch.com/5-antiglobal.html>.

7 This and other articles about right-wing influences on leftist
campaigns can be found on <http://www.savanne.ch/right-left.html>.

8 Taguieff, Pierre-Andr�: Die ideologischen Metamorphosen des Rassismus
und die Krise des Antirassismus (The Ideological Metamorphoses of Racism
and the Crisis of Antiracism). In: Bielefeld, Uli (Hg.): Das Eigene und
das Fremde. Neuer Rassismus in der alten Welt? Hamburg 1991. pp. 221-268
(The Self and the Other. New Racism in the Old World?). Cf. also
Sch�nberger, Klaus: �berlegungen zur Retorsion der Sozialen Frage,
AZ-Seminar in Pesina (6.9.-13.9.1997) (Reflections on the Retorsion of
the Social Question); as well as Terkessidis, Mark: Kulturkampf. Volk,
Nation, der Westen und die Neue Rechte. K�ln 1995, pp. 67 ff
(Kulturkampf. People, Nation, the West and the New Right).

9 Stein, Dieter: Es geht um die Freiheit der V�lker. Die Euro-Klage:
Karl A. Schachtschneider zum juristischen Kampf gegen die W�hrungsunion, in:
Junge Freiheit 4/98 (This Is About the Freedom of the Peoples. The Euro
Court Action: Karl A. Schachtschneider About the Juridical Struggle Against
the Monetary Union). Cf. also Jungle World 98, Issues 04, 05 und 14.

10 For a rebuttal of the myth of the state that abolishes itself through the
MAI negotiations, cf. Peter Decker: Verkehrte Aufregung �ber das MAI - Die
Staaten versch�rfen ihre Standortkonkurrenz ... und Linke sorgen sich um das
�berleben des Nationalstaates, Junge Welt, 29. April 1998,
<http://www.jungewelt.de/1998/04-29/014.htm> (False Exasperation About the
MAI - The States Increase Their Competition Between Economic Locations ...
and the Left Are Worried About the Survival of the Nation-State). More
generally on the changed role of a still strong nation-state, Joachim
Hirsch: Vom Sicherheitsstaat zum nationalen Wettbewerbsstaat, ID-Verlag,
Berlin 1998 (From the Security State to the National Competition State).

11 Examples abound, cf. for instance <http://www.truthinmedia.org/>.

12 A potpourri containing partly probably historical descriptions,
partly imaginative conspiracy theories can be found on
<http://www.bilderberg.org>. The entire world elite is said to meet
annually in the Bilderberg group in order to decide on the future of
humanity.

13 See the official web pages of the World Economic Forum on
<http://www.weforum.org/>. Besides the annual meetings in Davos, a
number of regional meetings take place, like the one about Eastern
Europe (in Salzburg, Austria) or about South-East Asia (Beijing and
Shanghai).

14 Krebbers, Eric (De Fabel van de illegaal): Goldsmith and his Gaian hier-
archy, <http://www.savanne.ch/right-left-materials/gaian-hierarchy.html>. Gaia
is the personified Earth in the Greek mythology (Theogony according to
Hesiodos) and serves as a symbol to conservative environmental
movements.

15 Cf. <http://www.agp.org>.

16 Cf. for the trans-US caravan <http://www.agp.org/agp/UScaravan>, for
the Canadian caravan <http://www.wtocaravan.org/>.


This text was originally written in German for the weekly newspaper
Jungle World and was published in slightly abridged form and without the
footnotes in Issue 51, 24 November 1999 <http://www.jungle-world.com>.

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