Stronger than Ever
Far From Fizzling Out, The Global Justice Movement is Growing in Numbers and Maturity
Mr Bush and Mr
Blair might have a tougher fight than they anticipated. Not from Saddam Hussein
perhaps - although it is still not obvious that they can capture and hold
Iraq's cities without major losses - but from an anti-war movement that is
beginning to look like nothing the world has seen before.
It's not just
that people have begun to gather in great numbers even before a shot has been
fired. It's not just that they are doing so without the inducement of
conscription or any other direct threat to their welfare. It's not just that
there have already been meetings or demonstrations in almost every nation on
Earth. It's also that the campaign is being coordinated globally with an
unprecedented precision. And the people partly responsible for this are the
members of a movement which, even within the past few weeks, the mainstream
media has pronounced extinct.
Last year,
40,000 members of the global justice movement gathered at the World Social
Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This year, more than 100,000, from 150 nations,
have come - for a meeting! The world has seldom seen such political assemblies
since Daniel O'Connell's "monster meetings" in the 1840s.
Far from dying
away, our movement has grown bigger than most of us could have guessed.
September 11 muffled the protests for a while, but since then they have
returned with greater vehemence, everywhere except the US. The last major global
demonstration it convened was the rally at the European summit in Barcelona.
Some 350,000 activists rose from the dead. They came despite the terrifying
response to the marches in June 2001 in Genoa, where the police burst into
protesters' dormitories and beat them with truncheons as they lay in their
sleeping bags, tortured others in the cells and shot one man dead.
But neither the
violent response, nor September 11, nor the indifference of the media have
quelled this rising. Ever ready to believe their own story, the newsrooms have
interpreted the absence of coverage (by the newsrooms) as an absence of
activity. One of our recent discoveries is that we no longer need them. We have
our own channels of communication, our own websites and pamphlets and magazines,
and those who wish to find us can do so without their help. They can pronounce
us dead as often as they like, and we shall, as many times, be resurrected.
The media can be
forgiven for expecting us to disappear. In the past, it was hard to sustain
global movements of this kind. The socialist international, for example, was
famously interrupted by nationalism. When the nations to which the comrades
belonged went to war, they forgot their common struggle and took to arms
against each other. But now, thanks to the globalization some members of the
movement contest, nationalism is a far weaker force. American citizens are
meeting and de bating with Iraqis, even as their countries prepare to go to
war. We can no longer be called to heel. Our loyalty is to the principles we
defend and to those who share them, irrespective of where they come from.
One of the
reasons why the movement appears destined only to grow is that it provides the
only major channel through which we can engage with the most critical issues.
Climate change, international debt, poverty, the hegemony of the G8 nations,
the IMF and the World Bank, the depletion of natural resources, nuclear
proliferation and low-level conflict are major themes in the lives of most of
the world's people, but minor themes in almost all mainstream political
discourse. We are told that the mind-rotting drivel which now fills the pages
of the newspapers is a necessary commercial response to the demands of younger
readers. This may, to some extent, be true. But here are tens of thousands of
young people who have less interest in celebrity culture than George Bush has
in Wittgenstein. They have evolved their own scale of values, and
re-enfranchised themselves by pursuing what they know to be important. For the
great majority of activists - those who live in the poor world - the movement
offers the only effective means of reaching people in the richer nations.
We have often
been told that the reason we're dead is that we have been overtaken by and
subsumed within the anti-war campaign. It would be more accurate to say that
the anti-war campaign has, in large part, grown out of the global justice
movement. This movement has never recognized a distinction between the power of
the rich world's governments and their appointed institutions (the IMF, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization) to wage economic warfare and the
power of the same governments, working through different institutions (the UN
security council, Nato) to send in the bombers. Far from competing with our
concerns, the impending war has reinforced our determination to tackle the
grotesque maldistribution of power which permits a few national governments to
assert a global mandate. When the activists leave Porto Alegre tomorrow, they
will take home to their 150 nations a new resolve to turn the struggle against
the war with Iraq into a contest over the future of the world.
While younger
activists are eager to absorb the experience of people like Noam Chomsky, Tariq
Ali, Lula, Victor Chavez, Michael Albert and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are
speaking in Porto Alegre, our movement is, as yet, more eager than wise, fired
by passions we have yet to master. We have yet to understand, despite the
police response in Genoa, the mechanical determination of our opponents.
We are still
rather too prepared to believe that spectacular marches can change the world.
While the splits between the movement's marxists, anarchists and liberals are
well-rehearsed, our real division - between the diversalists and the
universalists - has, so far, scarcely been explored. Most of the movement
believes that the best means of regaining control over political life is
through local community action. A smaller faction (to which I belong) believes
that this response is insufficient, and that we must seek to create
democratically accountable global institutions. The debates have, so far, been
muted. But when they emerge, they will be fierce.
For all that, I
think most of us have noticed that something has changed, that we are beginning
to move on from the playing of games and the staging of parties, that we are
coming to develop a more mature analysis, a better grasp of tactics, an
understanding of the need for policy. We are, in other words, beginning for the
first time to look like a revolutionary movement. We are finding, too, among
some of the indebted states of the poor world, a new preparedness to engage
with us. In doing so, they speed our maturation: the more we are taken
seriously, the more seriously we take ourselves.
Whether we are
noticed or not is no longer relevant. We know that, with or without the media's
help, we are a gathering force which might one day prove unstoppable.
George Monbiot is Honorary
Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the
Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes
a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His articles and contact
info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com