WTO rallies bosses to cause of globalisation
The arrogance of the top leaders of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is undiluted by the collapse of what should have been its landmark Seattle conference last December.
Far from having adapted or retreated in any way in response to public pressure, the WTO is relentlessly pressing ahead as the living global embodiment of the logic and values of the Thatcherite free market.
This is clear from an August speech by WTO Director General Mike Moore to a "business lunch", convened in New Zealand by the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce. In it Moore sets out explicitly to praise and defend globalisation, which he insists is "a process, not a policy".
It seems to have escaped his notice that accelerating this "process" is also one of the key policies of the world's most powerful imperialist country, the USA, and of almost all leading capitalist governments - including that of the Reverend T. Blair.
Moore's starting point is to brush aside any serious consideration of the growing gulf between rich and poor on a global scale, and to assert that:
"Globalisation is generally a force for good. The last 20 years have seen a dramatic rise in living standards for many countries across the world."
Well, maybe not so many. A little later, Moore feels obliged to acknowledge in his own speech that this is a misleading statement. Despite the fact that according to Mr Moore "more has been done to address poverty in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years", the numbers in poverty are growing.
The global machinery for creating and deepening poverty is dramatically more powerful and effective than the feeble attempts of politicians to limit the damage:
"It is true that in general living standards in poor countries are not catching up with rich ones."
His own figures make the point even more dramatically: he cries a few crocodile tears over the "tragedy" that a quarter of the world's population - 1.2 billion people - eke out an existence on less than one dollar a day. Another 1.6 billion receive between $1 and $2 per day. These two groups of desperately poor people represent almost two thirds of the world's population. They are not benefiting from globalisation.
Indeed globalisation could be seen as compounding their problem. It is enriching the wealthiest few in the key capitalist countries - while confining the poorest billions to grinding poverty and at best a subordinate role in supplying cheap labour and even cheaper raw materials for low-cost production elsewhere.
But Mr Moore will have none of it:
"Let us be clear. Trade and openness is not the problem for these poor countries. Rather it is too little trade and not enough openness."
Capitalism, it is true, has largely passed by many of the "developing" countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, injecting little if any investment, and leaving them little if anything to offer in trade other than cash crops and what mineral wealth they may have.
But this doesn't mean capitalism has been prepared to allow these countries any degree of real political autonomy.
IMPERIALIST STRATEGIES - to preserve overall control and ensure the security of any loans or investment that have been forthcoming - have meant that in many cases western "democracies" have installed, sponsored, and armed the most vicious and corrupt dictatorships and squalid stooge regimes to keep control of the poorest countries.
But Mr Moore slides over this. The problem, according to him, is that the population in these countries just doesn't know how to run a proper government:
"Sometimes [the problem] is also a lack of good governance or democratic structures."
This statement sounds odd enough as it is, until we realise that among the governments praised by Mr Moore for living up to the WTO's doctrines is China, notorious for its brutal repression of democratic and trade union rights, and for the massive corruption of its vast bureaucracy.
Mr Moore is careful to avoid mentioning these aspects of China because China is joining the WTO, and in his view:
"The liberalisation that joining the WTO requires will give another big boost to Chinese living standards."
Of course the ‚lite of the Chinese bureaucracy will pick up more millions in kickbacks and share options. But what most pleases Mr Moore's big business backers in the USA and other imperialist countries is the mouthwatering prospect of a big boost to western banks and investors as more Chinese industries and services are privatised and opened up to foreign capital.
US and other manufacturers are also convinced they will increasingly be able to rely upon the guns and dictatorial rule of the Chinese People's Army to crush trade unions and sustain low-wage production of goods in Chinese-based factories at a fraction of the wage bill they would pay in the west.
THE NEGATIVE IMPACT that the liberalisation of the Chinese economy has already had in driving up levels of pollution and environmental degradation in Chinese cities is conveniently forgotten in Mr Moore's enthusiasm for the fact that a few million more Chinese workers will be able to save up their pay to buy Coca Cola, Nike trainers and Big Macs.
Mr Moore sees globalisation and the economy exclusively from the side of the consumer, excluding any real assessment of its impact on workers. He tells the New Zealand fat cats that:
"It is not just Wall Street traders, management gurus and international civil servants who gain from globalisation. ..." [though even Moore doesn't try to deny that all of these gain quite a lot! JL]
"...It is also everyone with a pension who enjoys a more comfortable retirement because their savings are more fruitfully invested abroad, as well as everyone abroad who benefits from that investment."
This is an explicitly imperialist view, presuming that the living standards of people in the most advanced economies can be enhanced at the expense of the increased exploitation of workers and resources overseas.
We have already seen that investment is unevenly distributed, and that while the local bureaucracy and ruling class may benefit from investment, workers are often the victims, losing jobs, facing speed-up or suffering the pollution and hazards of production on the cheap.
But Mr Moore waxes lyrical about the contribution of globalisation to the diet of poor people:
"It is poor people everywhere who can buy cheaper food and clothes produced abroad."
Of course the only way these goods can be made cheaper is by holding down the pay and conditions of workers or by restricting the prices paid to peasant farmers. This system benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Almost every example Mr Moore selects to show how working people "gain" from globalisation appears to confirm the opposite. It becomes increasingly obvious that the whole process is about divide and rule on a grand scale, playing off one section of workers against another to hold down rates of pay for the benefit of transnational capitalist monopolies.
Moore refers to
Indian computer programmers, who have been used to undercut the pay rates of computer professionals in the USA and western countries,
Bangladeshi seamstresses "who make clothes for Europeans" - apparently oblivious of the sweatshop conditions and prevalence of child labour.
And "Mexican farm hands who pick fruit in California" - with no references to the brutal exploitation of these workers or the attempts of the USA to keep out Mexican immigrants.
PREDICTABLY Mr Moore makes no suggestion that the free movement of capital and goods across borders should be linked to a free movement of working people.
As he moves into the final part of his speech he is obliged to admit that
"Of course in the short term some people do lose from globalisation. As trade barriers fall, foreign competition forces domestic firms to specialise in what they do best, rather than making goods which are more efficiently produced elsewhere."
This of course slides round the point that the capital investment for the "most efficient" possible production is in the hands of the bankers and bosses in the advanced capitalist countries.
He grudgingly concedes that the plight of unskilled workers who "lose their jobs and take time to find another one" should not be forgotten. "But their hardship ... should be eased with welfare benefits and job retraining, not by putting a halt to liberalisation."
Here Mr Moore clearly loses touch with reality. His speech has already stressed the links between the aims and objectives of the WTO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
He must know as well as anyone that the "liberalisation" model of the WB and IMF consists in persuading governments everywhere to slash their levels of spending on welfare benefits and education.
In Ecuador, for example, the World Bank this year approved a Country Assistance Strategy which involved a drastic reduction in spending on education, and cutting health spending to half the level of spending in 1995.
The squeeze can even hit advanced economies: a recent IMF report on Canada called for a further reduction in the numbers of unemployed receiving benefits (numbers have already been slashed from 80% of unemployed in 1990 to less than 33% in 2000).
"We uphold the rule of the law," says Mr Moore. "The alternative is the law of the jungle, where might makes right and the little guy doesn't get a look in."
These fine, misleading words come from front man who knows he has the full political and economic clout of the USA behind him, running an outfit which masquerades as impartial while imposing "rules" which benefit the wealthy few and entrench their power.
THE WTO "RULES" so far have only been implemented to the detriment of "little guys", such as the Caribbean banana producers, and a few developing countries which have sought to impose limited environmental controls on major corporations.
The more comprehensive "rules" which Moore and others tried to force through in Seattle would tip the scales even more drastically in favour of the US, handing huge increased powers to the WTO to act "impartially" on behalf of Washington and western capital.
Mr Moore may have wowed his well-fed audience in New Zealand, but within the workers' movement only those who share Tony Blair's cock-eyed notion of a "partnership" between workers and capital are likely to be deceived.
With even the former cold war trade union confederation the ICFTU raising increasingly bitter complaints at the impact of globalisation and the policies of liberalisation [see facing page], it is time for socialists to rally around an alternative policy of international solidarity.