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.
