The essay below, "Millennial Cracks", discusses the rise of this global insurgent movement. It is the epilogue of a soon-to-be-released book, Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High Tech Robber Barons.**

September 2000 is proving to be a particularly propitious month for this new protest movement against corporate-driven globalization. It began with the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York City called by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to advance globalization and to give the stamp of approval to collaborationist efforts between the United Nations and multinational corporations. The UN meetings drew protesters from organizations as diverse as the Direct Action Network, ACT-UP, Food Not Bombs, the International Forum on Globalization and the Jubilee 2000 Campaign. Even many world leaders who spoke at the summit were critical of the maldistribution of wealth that has come with globalization.

The global expanse of the new protest movement was illustrated the following week when militant demonstrators disrupted the meetings of corporate executives, central bankers and their political allies at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, Australia. Described as "Seattle without the tear gas", the demonstrators were beaten and run over by Australian police as they tried to block the access routes to the meetings. The prime minister of Australia had to arrive at the WEF assembly by boat as the street routes were obstructed, while Bill Gates, the icon of high tech globalization, could not get to special meetings set up to hawk his wares.

These are tumultuous times. It is impossible to predict the future of the new worldwide movement against globalization. Clearly, in the 10 months since Seattle the monied interests and the dominant powers that are driving the globalization process are facing an intense challenge from the grassroots that is even causing dissension within the ranks of the elites.

Fearful of the Prague protests and the anti-corporate global movement, World Bank and IMF officials are already proclaiming that they will double the number of poorest countries receiving debt relief by the end of the year, from 10 to 20! Like all "reforms" endorsed by the dominant economic interests, however, these changes will do little to foster any real improvement in the lives of the vast majority of the world's population. Fundamental change, as the essay below makes clear, requires the reordering and restructuring of the economic interests that run our world today.***
The Millennial Cracks

With the advent of the new millennium, popular resistance to globalization has intensified as the global elites scurry to prop up the institutions that sustain their prerogatives. The massive demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. in April 2000 marked yet another milestone in the rebellion against global neo-liberalism that began with the Zapatista uprising in 1994. The protests of French workers and farmers in the mid- to-late 1990s, the strikes and uprisings in Indonesia and South Korea in 1997 and 1998 due to the Asian financial crisis, and the more recent revolts in early 2000 of Ecuadorian Indians and Bolivians against neo-liberal austerity policies - these very diverse protests and uprisings make it clear that a vibrant global movement is determined to reverse the plundering of the planet by the world's dominant financial and corporate interests.

The protests in Washington D.C. showed conclusively that the demonstrations four and a half months earlier in Seattle against the World Trade Organization were no fluke. The international movement against corporate-driven globalization has put down deep roots, even in the world's most dominant nation. A commentary in Business Week on the Washington demonstrations declared: "this cause won't easily disappear ... this radical but committed movement could really have an impact..."(1)

Particularly noteworthy in Washington was the participation of youth. If the "Battle of Seattle" introduced a new politics of protest to the United States, the demonstrations in Washington marked the unequivocal appearance of a new generation of activists dedicated to challenging globalization and the powerful financial and corporate institutions that stand behind it. As the Washington Post noted, "most of the demonstrators were young".(2) They came in chartered buses, cars, planes and trains, predominantly from east coast cities, but also from California, Oregon, Washington State and many points in between.

The anti-sweat-shop campaign, which is particularly strong on US university campuses, fed into this insurgent youth movement. At many universities across the US, workshops and meetings were held to prepare for the new battle in Washington. Just a week before the protests, a conference was organized at New York University called: "Labor's Next Century: Alliances, Sweatshops and the Global South." Hundreds of students attended two days of workshops, discussing issues such as the political economy of globalization and campaigns against corporations such as Nike for their Third World labour policies. Direct Action, one of the main organizations involved in civil disobedience in Seattle and Washington, was also present at the conference discussing tactics and strategies.

The young anarchists, who created such a stir in Seattle, swelled their ranks from about 50 in Seattle to upwards of 300 in Washington. They called themselves the "Black Bloc", referring to their black garb and flags as well as their official name, the Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc. They were the more combative contingent of the youth movement. While they paraded through Washington chanting "Whose streets? Our streets", the anarchists focused their more strident actions on trying to breach the metal and armed police barriers preventing access to the World Bank and the IMF. They also threw up their own barricades comprised of newspaper boxes, chain-link fencing and whatever else they could scavenge from the streets to block the police from attacking them and other protesters.

In Seattle, the demonstrators were successful in disrupting the meetings of the World Trade Organization on its first day. In Washington, the demonstrators could claim no such victory as the two days of scheduled meetings of the World Bank and the IMF on 16 and 17 April went off punctually. The Japanese delegation arrived at four in the morning on the first day to avoid the demonstrators, while many other delegations assembled at designated hotels to be taken to the meetings in vans and buses with armed police escorts that pierced the lines of protesters blocking World Bank and IMF entrances.

But the punctual meetings of the world's leading lending institutions were a Pyrrhic victory. Like the WTO meetings in Seattle, the "whole world was watching" due to the demonstrators. As the Business Week commentary noted: "The protesters don't want respect - they want attention and they got it. They scored a big win ... dominating the news, holding down page one of every major newspaper."(3) In scenes reminiscent of the anti-war protests of the 1960s, newspapers from New York to London to New Delhi carried front page photos of police clubbing demonstrators as they marched and chanted slogans like "dump the fund", "break the bank", and "more world, less bank", referring to the IMF and the World Bank.
Cracks among the elites

Even before the demonstrations in Washington, members of the global elite were questioning the role and mission of the world's top financial institutions. Joseph Stiglitz, the chief economist of the World Bank until November 1999, wrote a scathing critique of the policies of the IMF in The New Republic. He declared that the protesters coming to Washington were essentially right in their charges that "the IMF is arrogant", that it "doesn't really listen to the developing countries", that it "is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability" and, finally, that "the IMF's economic remedies often make things worse". Perhaps his most poignant statement was: "The older men who staff the fund - and they are overwhelmingly older men - act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling's white man's burden."(4)

Stiglitz, however, like most members of the elite, supports the existing global order, believing that if only a few executives at the top are changed and adjustments made in the IMF's policies, the process of globalization will proceed unimpeded. He, for example, argued that in Latin America, unlike Asia, the IMF has generally got it right with "fiscal austerity (balanced budgets) and tighter monetary policies". Stiglitz said nothing about the forced privatization of public sector enterprises that has enabled private capital, particularly transnational corporations, to rip off enormous profits by taking over water, electric and telephone utilities while gobbling up lucrative state-owned petroleum and mining enterprises.

Stiglitz's critique was in effect a post mortem assessment. The chief "old man" he criticized at the IMF, Michel Camdessus, had already resigned as head of the IMF in December 1999. The new director, Horst Kohler, appointed after much bickering among the G7 nations, made it clear that he would assemble a new staff and strive to avoid the policy failures of southeast Asia and Russia.

These token changes at the top were little more than feeble attempts to temper the growing storm from below against corporate-driven globalization. While the demonstrators marched on the streets of Washington in mid-April, the Group of 77, an organization representing the governments of 80 per cent of the world's population, met in Havana, Cuba. Attended by over 40 heads of state, the prime minister of Belize, Said Musa, reflected the prevailing sentiment at the conference, declaring that economic policies dictated by the dominant countries had not stabilized economies, but had instead "stabilized poverty". Added South African President Thabo Mbeki: "We believe consciousness is rising, including in the North, about the inequality and insecurity globalization has brought."(5)

Stiglitz was part of an emergent new consensus, or "Third Way", that called for reshaping the mandate of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization so they can better serve the needs of the dominant interests that stand behind globalization. The strict neo-liberal agenda that drove the policies of these institutions and the globalization process in the 1980s and 1990s was no longer appropriate to the needs of the 21st century. By the beginning of 2000 it was widely accepted that the global financial institutions had failed miserably in their effort to manage the crisis in southeast Asia in 1997-98, making a bad situation even worse by imposing austerity policies that restricted mass consumption at a time when the economies of the region needed to be reinflated.

Bill Clinton headed up the call for the Third Way. In his address in Seattle to the WTO, Clinton tried to build a stronger social base for globalization by promoting the inclusion of labour and environmental clauses in any new WTO accords. The Third Way was also endorsed by Clinton's principal cohorts, Tony Blair and Gerhard Shroeder of Great Britain and Germany.

The Third Way is not a return to Keynesian economics. Rather, it upholds the basic neo-liberal tenets of an open global economy and the complete mobility of transnational capital. The state will not usurp the role of private capital, but instead limit itself to providing stable market conditions and the development of "human capital". Orthodox neo-liberalism is modified only to the extent that institutions such as the World Bank are to invest more in education and even health care so that a new workforce is better prepared to become part of the "flexible" labour market.

James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, is in the forefront of those adopting the rhetoric of the Third Way. President of the bank since 1994, Wolfensohn, in a major public address in Thailand in February 2000, acknowledged that the bank had done little to lower global impoverishment. From 1987 to 1998 the number of people living in dire poverty - defined as less than a dollar a day - "remained roughly constant, at about 1.2 billion. Excluding China, the number has actually risen from just under 880 million to over 980 million. In addition, the total number of people living on under $2 a day is now estimated at nearly 3 billion, approaching half the world's population."(6)

Wolfensohn's statistics, while appalling, did not begin to reflect the real impoverishment that has struck the world's population with globalization. Time magazine, hardly noted for its anti-globalization leanings, wrote that while the IMF and the World Bank insisted that "their policies will boost living standards over the long term ... people in the Global South have lost patience with such talk". Time looked at Tanzania as an example, a country labelled a success story by the IMF and the World Bank as they forced the Tanzanian government to abandon state socialist policies, privatize large sectors of the economy and expand exports to the world market.

James Adams, the World Bank director for Tanzania, declared: "Tanzania has made great progress in getting its macroeconomic situation in order." Adams also claimed that while 65 per cent of Tanzania's population lived in dire poverty in the mid-1980s - defined as less than $1 a day - that figure had been reduced to 51 per cent. Time, however, pointed out that "Tanzanian analysts laugh bitterly" at these statistics. Most of those who live at or near poverty levels are "men and women, almost all subsistence or small-plot cash-crop farmers [who] have been structurally adjusted half to death". Adams omitted "the fact that everything in a farmer's life costs more today", thanks to imposed currency devaluations and the doubling and even quadrupling of prices paid for agricultural inputs such as fertilizers.(7)

Wolfensohn, in his February address, called for "rethinking development" and pointed with apparent pride to the bank's "work with selected countries on what we have called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers". He then proceeded to ramble on about how "globalization is here to stay", and that the "rules of the game" need to be improved. He concluded by calling for a "united endeavour in the development enterprise that we all serve".

It should not be surprising that Wolfensohn, a former senior partner in Wall Street's Salomon Brothers, would view the alleviation of poverty as a "development enterprise". Analogous to Kipling's musings on the "white man's burden", the logic of modernity in the 21st century leads inevitably to the belief that highly paid international bureaucrats are destined to fly around the globe dispensing their wisdom on how to uplift the world's poor.

The future lies not with these imperial agents of modernization, but with those in rebellion against the process of globalization, be they Zapatistas, Ecuadorian Indians, French peasants, Asian trade unionists or US environmentalists and anarchists. They are intent on taking control of their own destinies, becoming the new stewards of the planet by creating "one world with room for many worlds".

Notes
1. Business Week, "They Say They Want A Revolution," 20 April 2000.
2. Washington Post, 16 April 2000.
3. Business Week, "They Say They Want A Revolution."
4. Joseph Stiglitz, "What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis: The Insider," The New Republic, 17 April 2000.
5. Washington Post, 16 April 2000.
6. James D. Wolfensohn, remarks at the 10th ministerial meeting of UNCTAD, "Rethinking Development - Challenges and Opportunities," Bangkok, Thailand, 16 February 2000.
7. Time Magazine, "The IMF: Dr Death? A Case Study of How the Global Banker's Shock Therapy Helps Economies but Hammers the Poor," 24 April 2000.

*Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (Censa), Berkeley, USA

**Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High Tech Robber Barons by Roger Burbach will be published by Pluto Press in January 2001. To order a copy, email Pluto Press or place the order through their website.

***Thanks to Paul Cantor for his help with the introductory comments.

 http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/prague.htm