Globalization - What It Means for Activists

Jean Grossholtz is a political scientist who works with the Women's Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA.

Have you noticed the disappearance of your local hardware store, the locally owned and operated video store, or garage. Have you begun to get more of your products and services from chain stores? NPR recently reported comments by citizens of Northampton MA, noting these things and more. NPR did not connect these disappearances to globalization, but that, in fact, is what is happening. A series of international treaties and agreements jerry-rigged by trade representatives of major industrial states and imposed upon the rest of the world by judicious use of carrots and sticks, has turned over control of our local economies, of what we eat, wear, and watch on television, to an ever smaller number of transnational corporations with economies larger than most states of the world.

Driven by the possibilities of an unbounded stock market, corporations vie for control of investors' dollars, pushing the prices of their stock well beyond the production and sales the stock price presumably reflects. With this capital investment they build transnational empires and control large portions of the global market.

Step by step these international treaties have forced upon governments the basic premise that corporations' search for profits must be unhampered by national boundaries, social or environmental conerns, or sovereignty itself. Privatization and the canceling of public companies has turned much of the world's resources over to transnational corporations. De-regulation-the removal of government control over investment and environment-means that governments are under the direction of world trade bodies made up of nameless bureaucrats who decide disputes on the basis of the effects on profit, not on human welfare.

In late November, the WTO ministers will meet in Seattle and will deliver the final blow to public controls. Now all services will be open to exploitation by whichever company can bid the highest amount. We have watched such disparate places as Brazil, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia forced to open their economies to such exploitation and watched the results for their people. Their economies and resources are for all practical purposes controlled by foreign interests. At Seattle, the ministers will discuss and work out an agreement on the privatization and deregulation of all services-health, water, energy, prisons, insurance, financial, etc. This will open the door to privitization of prisons and insurance companies; even schools will be forced to offer themselves to the highest bidder. Thus all enterprises will now be run for profit, without concern for the public good.

This new idea is driven, in part, by the US insistence that all social services be opened to capitalist penetration. Europe's public health services are ripe targets for American insurance companies and health maintenance organizations. Now Europeans too will have the same failed health care system that we have. And no one can even study the possibility of public health care for all as a right.

At Seattle, corporations will press onward in their pirating of traditional knowledge and their insistence that knowledge is not knowledge unlesss it is patented and worked into the scientific rational thought of the North. The GATT agreement that imposed Western patent law on the world opened the door for the theft of traditional crops, medicinal plants, and pesticides, for example, by Western corporations. The Intellectual Property Rights agreement destroys other ways of knowing, other ways of distributing knowledge, the source of much of what we now know and make use of each day.

At Seattle, the last nails will be driven into the coffin of popular sovereignty. One global market place will swamp the diverse cultures, the diverse ways of knowing and being, of eating, and honoring the spirit. Regardless of the opposition of countries of the South who can clearly see the writing on the wall and see the ways that NATO arms and the International Monetary Fund will be used to force their conformity, the WTO is committed to moving ahead on this. The government and corporate philosophy is that this will be good for all people and in any case it is inevitable, given the new technologies. The so-called "free market" has become the inevitable, natural mechanism for driving human life and development.

It is time for activists on all issues to see the relation between their issues (peace, health, environment, agriculture, etc.) and the emergent global market operating outside the institutions over which we have (albeit imperfectly) exercised some minimal control. The Ministerial meeting in Seattle poses the challenge to all of us to rethink our analysis and our strategies.