Affecting Change: Fighting the institutions of innequality

Historically, the most popular party in the United States was not the Republicans or the Democrats. In the early years of the 20th Century, the Socialist Party raised astounding grass-roots support countrywide on a policy of addressing social, economic, and political inequalities. They mobilized the poor farmers in the countryside and the industrial workers in cities on a scale never seen before and presented a major threat to the established political elite. They opposed American involvement in World War I and this sealed their fate. The government used new anti-sedition laws to imprison the leadership of the party, dissolve its structure, and essentially erase the party from history. They used a propaganda campaign to whip up fear of a communist revolution on American soil and the Socialist party lost widespread support. Nonetheless, their legacy lives to this day in the form of the major trade unions that were established with their hard work and strife. Large-scale, institutional change was achieved – at a great cost.

Today, in the West, the forces concerned with facing and affecting national and global inequalities have been relegated to the outside. Every time the leaders of the economic status quo meet to establish policy there is widespread grass-roots opposition – in the streets. Since the famed ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, the anti-globalization movement has grown and maintained its presence at these gatherings. They are a force to be reckoned with judging by sheer numbers but have yet to affect top-level institutional change. The story always ends the same way – with anarchist groups causing damage and riot police violently dispersing thousands of individuals and movements that are presented to the public as dangerous radicals.

The question facing the Left is clear – how to become a united force capable of changing government policy instead of simply a fractured force capable of drawing attention to the inequalities of current policies. The movement is trapped on the outside looking in. In spite of over 10 years of fervent activism, the protestors are just that: protestors. This is not to discount progress that has been made. The World Social Forum is a clear example of successful organization to bring together countless social movements to provide an alternative to the status quo of the World Economic Forum. However, the WSF remains locked out by the Western media and relatively unknown to the general public. Effectively they are screaming in the dark. The Left is facing a brick wall: a right-wing behemoth establishment supported and self-justified by corporate media. The Western institutions have money to build a media structure that can simply exclude the Left from coverage. Without exposure to the general public, the Leftist alternative is invisible. The public see no alternative other than what is presented to them in print and on television and come to believe that they have no choices beyond what is shown to them. Apathy and despair turn to anger and scape-goating begins. The conservative movement relies and thrives on anger and fear and never fail to present a list of enemies on which the socioeconomic problems of the common individual can be blamed. Lose your job to outsourcing? Blame immigrants, homosexuals, a Zionist conspiracy, the United Nations, minorities, whoever, it doesn’t have to conform to reason. Just don’t blame those in power. It’s easier to hate the Other and blame him for your problems than investigate the root causes of the issue. The problem is huge and seemingly intractable.

Take a concrete goal of the anti-globalization movement: the overturning of the Washington Consensus. This consensus, born out of the 1980s of Reaganism and Thatcherism, holds that the pillars of privatization, market deregulation, and fiscal austerity should be enforced on developing countries through the loan-lending auspices of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Developing countries are forced to open their markets to cheap Western imports that undermine their home-grown businesses while the West maintains trade barriers to prevent imports from these countries thus protecting their domestic industry. The consensus has lead to record profits of the formation of multinational corporations whose profits dwarf the GDPs of these countries. It has also led to social unrest, corruption, and widespread poverty throughout the developing World. It is institutionally enforced inequality.

Anti-globalization protestors can draw attention to these inequalities and organize to create grass-roots alternatives (such as ‘Fair Trade’) but can they affect large-scale institutional change? The proponents of the Washington consensus have their economic well-being at stake and endless resources to combat resistance and quash alternatives (such as media blackouts of such alternatives). They have everything to lose and will not go without a fight.

The answer may not lie in the West at all. Explosive economic growth in other regions of the world has brought the fight right to the West’s front door. After nearly 30 years of suffering under the Washington consensus, other countries have organized their domestic markets to compete with the West instead of being enslaved to them. China, India, Brazil and others have shown that regulation, smart investment, and financial saving have lead to economic prosperity. American-based multinationals are now having to compete with pressure from new multinationals based out of the Third World. These countries have organized into powerful trading blocs that are organizing relations with each other instead of with the West. China established trade links with Mercosur (a trade federation including Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uraguay), replacing the Americans – who had been their previous trading partner. China also established major links in Africa and came to an agreement with the powerful economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). India, while exploding in growth, is establishing links with the subcontinent and members of ASEAN. Instead of enjoying total, hegemonic control of trade relations and rules, American multinationals are being forced to compete to survive.

Some of these trading blocs, having suffered previously under the control of the IMF, understand the importance of protecting their workers and their workers’ well-beings. Nowhere is this more true than in the miraculous shift to the Left in Latin America. When Evo Morales, a relatively uneducated, indigenous, cocoa farmer was elected in Bolivia he began sweeping changes in a country overrun with corruption and elitism. Hugo Chavez, though becoming more and more dictatorial in his ruling, has done a great amount for the poor in Venezuela. Lula da Silva’s, of the Worker’s Party, was elected in Brazil, and brought fighting social inequality to the forefront. What is even more impressive is that the people and governments of South America have sent a clear message to the US that they will no longer tolerate interventionism on their part. When American-backed right-wing groups began social unrest in Bolivia, Chavez and da Silva sent a clear message to Washington. When Chavez was ousted in a military coup, the people of Venezuela took to the streets demanding he be reinstated. The coup failed. Now there is talk amongst the leaders of a completely unified South America on economic and trade issues and Lula da Silva has proposed a trans-South American worker’s union.

Morales, Chavez, and da Silva organized grassroots support for their elections and have overturned institutional inequality and initiated a future less dark for the poor, disposessed, and disenfranchised of their nations. The question remains in the West, can we do the same? We may be aided by the fact that the economic shift in which US hegemony has been replaced with competing trade blocs will force compromise and a new consensus that is more representative of social concerns instead of just economic ones; one that reflects the needs of the citizens of the World instead of just the shareholders of American multinationals. This change from the outside, with the slant of corporate right-wing media, will be met with fear and hostility on many fronts. The anti-globalization movement and the Left in general are presented with the question of how to deal with this backlash. At the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit one of the main issues of debate was the establishment or larger educational and lobbying groups that could serve to liaise with the institutions of Western power instead of simply protesting them.

Big changes are coming whether we like it or not. The Third-World power solution has great potential for good but also for corruption and the suspension of human rights in favor of economic cooperation. As we speak, India, Thailand and others are buying huge interest in Burmese oil, bolstering the brutal regime there. Perhaps the challenge for the left can be read in the slogan for the USSF: “Another World is Possible, Another US is necessary”. We have to offer hope and viable alternatives that will keep food on people’s tables in the face of institutions that offer fear and scape-goating. It’s not an easy task but it is essential. The psyche of the West needs to change before its institutions will. It is perhaps changing the psyche and worldviews of the average citizens that the social justice movement will affect large-scale institutional change.