Theme : Politics
Stronger than Ever
Far From Fizzling Out, The Global Justice Movement is Growing in Numbers
and Maturity
by George Monbiot
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.
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