A specter haunts the world of free trade, globalization and the ubiquitous free-market brotherhood. It is the specter of having to face another bearded, reclusive, recalcitrant, German expatriate laboring away in the entrails of the cavernous British Museum Library.
It is the haunting specter of the Moses-like one, who will emerge out of Highgate cemetery in London and provide the facts and figures to undermine the hollowness that accompanies this arrogant project known as “globalization.” This sage-like character may, in his fears, emerge with a voluminous work that will unleash sheer terror and mayhem and re-galvanize the forces of rebellion all over the world again. He may once again expose the cronyism, malevolence, dubious accounting, and goonery of the Enron variety that has come to epitomize the workings of large American corporations in the era of globalization. This fear has caused genuine consternation in the minds of the followers of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and the likes of Ayn Rand. They are worried that the much-heralded triumph over the so-called Evil Empire may be short-lived. What if the specter raises its ugly head, as it did in the early twentieth century, and shatters their peace? What if...?
Close on the heels of the dot.com collapse (another case of free market chest thumping baboonery that went nowhere) the Enron bankruptcy declaration (in India, its thuggery and political meddling has been known for years with the Dabhol Power Project) has reason to send some chills down the spine of the Davos/Bilderberg/Kissinger posse of war criminals. This gang of pseudo statesmen-like shadow warriors, who have been quietly working for many years in conjunction with the IMF and the World Bank to create their New World Order, is concerned. Despite the criminality of the act that occurred on September 11, they know that their activities over the years have not endeared America to the rest of the world -- an iota. America stands astride the world in a gesture that can only be seen as that of a urinating giant that can barely stand up steadily after a binge at the bar of power.
While George Bush, the method-deprived actor who as chieftain, has finally developed a reason for remaining President of the United States of America (with his latest axes of evil agenda), the “globalizing world” has not found much reason to feel particularly successful about its own agenda. This corporatized notion of the world economy has not made a single favorable dent on the lives of ordinary working people all over the world, since its much-trumpeted inception. Furthermore, it is proving that it is also going nowhere with the repeated collapse of various economies, be they the “tiger economies” in Asia, or in Mexico and Argentina. Therefore, they have found it expedient to raise various bogeys and distractions: fighting global terrorism, fundamentalism, biological warfare, chemical weaponry and the latest discovery of the “axes of evil.” America itself has spawned, schooled, trained, laboratorized and sponsored these very same terrible projects over the years and continues to maintain the largest arsenal. (Readers will note the quiet disappearance of the Anthrax scare story, once it was discovered that the spore was actually traceable to an US Army research variety.) Globalization and “free” trade cannot even solve the minor irritations/contradictions caused by benign issues like Canadian softwood lumber exports and cheap film production possibilities north of the border! How will it solve the havoc caused by energy shortage, privatization of power, speculative currency markets, rampant industrialization, third world debt, environmental degradation, land-mine related maiming and crippling, the legislation supported criminality of the pharmaceutical conglomerates, the AIDs epidemic and bureaucratic corruption from Italy to India, and from Congo to Argentina? Globalization has not solved a single longstanding problem in the world. Instead it has multiplied the existing ones with a vicious nonchalance. Who has benefited from the process of deregulation and privatization in Third World countries? Those who already had the financial clout to buy out those assets. The financial elites of those countries. Kleptocrats, mafia apparatchiks, family-owned former latifundia conglomerates and the traditional business elites. According to Canadian Feed the Children, the richest 358 people in the world have developed a net worth equal to the combined annual income of the poorest 2.3 billion people of the world since the nineties.
But fear not, oh captains of globalization! Karl Marx is not your problem. There will be no need for a new Marx to expose you. The world has changed considerably. The forces of opposition to your agenda will not be shouldered by entities like the erstwhile Soviet Union (themselves with a self-corrupting history), but ordinary independent women, men and children the world over in Chiapas, in Colombia, amongst the Moro people in the Philippines, in Nepal, in the entire Indian subcontinent, in the valley of Kashmir, in Quebec, in Nigeria and in the Congo, in Kandahar, in the aspirations of the Palestinian people, in Chicago, Philadelphia and of course out of the rubble that is the WTC. They will communicate, read of each other's victories, launch new battles, publish new books, write new plays, wrap themselves around trees, stand in the way of gorges, chat on line, attend seminars in colleges and universities, set-up websites, make new documentaries, march wherever they must, dismantle offensive fences, support each other and oppose your policies with a never ending energy. Never in the history of the world has such a monolithic view of the world been left unchallenged for such an extended period of time, until now. Never in the history of the world has a self-absorbed parochial power like the United States, stewing in its own narcissistic image of itself, contemplated world domination with such obscene gesticulation. Even a tom like Colin Powell found reason to protest his boss’ flagrant violation of the Geneva Code on the treatment of prisoners of war. Never in its history has the United Nations been so reduced to an impotent, rubber-stamping hubris, despite the fact that the United States has not paid millions of dollars in arrears. The flagrancy of the New Dis-order is so rampant that it will cause its own downfall. As did Rome, so will the New World Order. Capital is faced with its own inner dialectic of expanding mercilessly, only to collapse. This is why the specter haunts those who know enough to understand that not only have 'they' alienated the world’s poor but they disgust even their own allies.
The alternate to globalization does not have to come from a single sage-like personality. The alternate to globalization is everywhere in the streets, academic institutions, community organizations, political groups, independent media on the web, theatre groups, webzines and in guerilla groups in the mountains of Colombia, Mexico, Philippines, Ecuador, Nepal and elsewhere. Whether it is in the words of John Pilger, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, Michael Chossudovsky, Alexander Cockburn, Judy Rebbick, Sunera Thobani, Jaggi Singh, Robert Fisk, Indymedia, Montreal Serai, Naomi Klein and a zillion other sources of information, there is a new dynamic that stands united the world over that does not require discovering a new ism to galvanize itself. The facts are there. The ism was always intact. Karl can relax.
For those who may have noticed, one common face has been seen all over the world, in all the recent confrontations, be it in Seattle, Quebec City, Montreal, Windsor, Genoa, Washington and in Argentina: the silhouetted face of a familiar, bearded, beret-wearing guerilla hero. On t-shirts, on banners, on badges, on berets, thirty-five years after his assassination in Boliva by the CIA, people who were born after his death have upheld the ism that he always believed in. And that ism is the ism of truth and justice for the poor and the impoverished all over the world. A specter haunts the “globalizer”. For sure.