Capital dissent

The American movement against rampant global capitalism made itself known in Seattle. Can activists keep the momentum going next month in Washington, DC?

by Ben Geman

After the tear gas had settled last year in Seattle, where protesters turned city streets into a massive coming-out party for the movement against unchecked global capitalism, activists began looking forward.

One question they faced was how to sustain the momentum from the protests, which united unions, environmentalists, and social-justice activists against a global-trade order that puts investors, corporations, and profits ahead of human rights, fair wages, and, yes, sea turtles.

Increasingly, in e-mails and Web postings and meetings, the answer has emerged: go to DC. Next month, groups that put the formerly obscure World Trade Organization (WTO) in front-page headlines will converge in the capital with their sights trained on two other low-profile but important institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

When the two organizations convene their joint spring meetings, they'll be greeted by protesters from groups such as Global Exchange, the Direct Action Network, and others under the banner coalition Mobilization for Global Justice. To many, the DC meetings of the World Bank and IMF will be the natural occasion for a follow-up to the Seattle protests -- a logical place for a week of teach-ins, protests, and street theater, culminating in demonstrations on April 16 and 17.

Activists say the World Bank and IMF, like the WTO, are architects of unsustainable trade and development policies that hurt developing nations. And they want to do to the April meetings what protesters did November 30 to the meetings in Seattle: shut them down. Activists have dubbed the high point in the planned DC protest "A16"; the civil disobedience that temporarily stopped the WTO was called "N30."

"The goal is to build a broad-based movement to dismantle these secretive, unaccountable, and failed institutions that are writing the rules of the global economy and replace them with democratic alternatives," says Juliette Beck of Global Exchange. "I think a lot of people are coming prepared to risk arrest and do civil disobedience to stop more harm from occurring in the global economy."

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The roots of the IMF and World Bank can be traced to New England. In 1944, the heads of industrialized nations gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to map out a course for the capitalist postwar economic order. Out of that meeting came the IMF, designed to regulate international currency flows and help countries with debt, and the World Bank, designed to fund development projects.

Critics say that the IMF and World Bank are tools of wealthy nations and corporations, used to ensure that global trade and development are tilted in favor of corporate gain -- and away from higher living standards and environmentally sound development in poor nations. Perhaps the biggest problem activists have with the World Bank and with the IMF, which loaned more than $40 billion last year, concerns the "structural adjustment" policies for debtor nations. To get loans, critics say, poor nations have been forced to cut spending, lower trade barriers, and increase export-
oriented production, which undercuts social welfare even as it attracts corporate investment. "[Structural adjustment] institutionalizes the corporate agenda of deregulation, privatization, and free trade," says Beck.

Critics also say that the two agencies cause environmental harm in developing nations, although, to be fair, they acknowledge that the World Bank has tried to make greener development part of its mission. This month, the Washington, DC-based Friends of the Earth released a new study claiming that IMF policies encourage raw-material exports that have "major environmental impacts," and that mandating spending cuts in places such as Cameroon weakens a nation's ability to enforce environmental laws and push conservation.

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This critique is not new. But now, with images still fresh of the tear gas and colorful banners and street theater that made Seattle ground zero of the free-trade-versus-fair-trade debate, there's a chance to keep the issues on center stage.

Helping the cause will be the DC rally planned for April 9 by Jubilee 2000, a church-led movement that includes environmental and social-justice advocates, which is calling on the two institutions to cancel large amounts of foreign debt. And although Big Labor hasn't formally endorsed A16, several union locals are on board, and the AFL-CIO will join in an April 12 demonstration with activists who oppose expansion of the WTO to include China. What's more, a slew of other educational forums and actions are planned between April 9 and 16. Although it's impossible to say just how many people will participate, the Internet- and campus-fueled network that helped beef up the Seattle protests is at work here as well, and some believe that East Coast activists who didn't make it to the Northwest now want their shot.

DC will be a different playing field than Seattle was, though. For one thing, organizers predict 5000 to 10,000 participants, compared to the roughly 50,000 in Seattle. A wild card will be the size of the anarchist presence. In Seattle, the relatively small number of anarchists who smashed windows in chain stores dominated much of the coverage. Whether the same tactics are on the table for DC is unclear, though one Web communiqué signed by several anarchist groups calls for demonstrations there.

Still, Mark Laskey, a member of the Boston-area anarchist group Sabate, points out that DC's geography won't put the protesters as close to shopping districts as they were in Seattle. He says, too, that law enforcement will probably be stronger. "In Seattle, it was the equivalent of being on Boylston Street in Boston," he says. "I just don't see it happening again. Maybe people are planning things outside of where the protest is, but I have not heard of anything."

And, for now, few expect the kind of police reaction that contributed to Seattle's tumult. For one thing, protest is not exactly new to the nation's capital. DC police say they have been in touch with the organizers (of course, that was the case in Seattle, too) and have at least some idea of what to expect. "The bottom line is that they have the right to protest, and the IMF and World Bank have the right to have their meeting," says DC police chief Charles Ramsey. "Our job is to make sure they have the ability to do what they are entitled to."

Yet some level of conflict is probably inescapable. Ramsey's stated goal is explicitly at odds with the goal of the A16 organizers, who hope to stall the joint meetings. Whether police will allow them to get close enough to do that remains to be seen.

By tethering themselves to Seattle's success, activists are risking talk that they've lost momentum when the numbers turn out lower than they were at the WTO conference. But that perception wouldn't really be justified: it's only to be expected that this event will be smaller. The Pacific Northwest, after all, is perhaps the country's most fertile breeding ground for environmental activists, and there was significantly more time to organize there. And global-trade architects, pummeled in Seattle, will undoubtedly have better spin ready in Washington.

Indeed, many activists sense that it's possible to build on Seattle's success, even with smaller numbers. "As far as I'm concerned," says Han Shan, program coordinator with the Ruckus Society, a direct-action group that was active in Seattle, "it will be a success if . . . after April 16 and 17, people around the country and around the world are talking about the World Bank and the IMF, and talking about them in terms of what they really do."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.