With the “Seattle Declaration,” the WTO under the leadership of the imperialist countries will have launched the “Millennium Round” of multilateral negotiations for the further liberalization of the world economy. This has resurrected once again the false promises of prosperity and progress through the worldwide unfettering of capitalism in the guise of “globalization.”
It was not too long ago that such fantastic promises were made to the Filipino people and the other peoples of the world. In 1994, the Philippine Senate justified the country’s ratification of the GATT-Uruguay Round agreements on the promise that it would create 500,000 new jobs a year in agriculture, 587,000 new jobs a year in industry, and an additional annual gross value added of P60 billion. They said that under the WTO, the Philippines and other developing countries would reap the benefits of greater market access and volume of trade, higher technology and limitless amounts of foreign investments.
Today we are witness to the betrayal of that promise.
Four years after GATT-UR, the state of Philippine industry and agriculture have worsened. The period 1994-1997 was characterized by jobless, inequitable and speculative growth. Even before the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, local industries like tobacco, textile, apparel, wood, furniture and fixtures, chemicals, rubber, non-metallic products, basic metal and mining were already on the decline. In 1998 alone, some 250 workplaces were reported closed, resulting in 155,198 lost jobs. At least 755,684 Filipinos had to find work abroad last year, bringing to at least 6 million the number of migrant Filipino workers abroad. Official unemployment rate hovers at 11.8%, but independent estimates peg it at a much higher but realistic 40%.
Philippine agriculture suffered the most from globalization. Total agricultural imports surged since 1994, resulting in huge trade deficits. From $42.24 million in 1994, the agricuture-based trade deficit quadrupled to $149.59 million in 1995, reaching $789.21 million in 1996, $764.23 million in 1997 and $669.89 million last year. From a relatively self-sufficient agricultural economy, the GATT-UR has transformed the Philippines into a net agricultural importer.
The effect has been harshest on the country’s workers and peasants, who have suffered massive dislocation and loss of incomes. As farmgate prices dive and production costs rise, peasants are forced to abandon their farms and join the ever-increasing army of unemployed workers. Those fortunate enough to find jobs, mostly on a contractual or part-time basis, see their wages continually plunging. The minimum daily wage of P223.5 (US$5.6) in the country’s premier city is around half of the required daily cost of living worth P441 (US$11).
The decreasing purchasing power of the basic sectors wreak havoc on the local economy, which now survives mainly on foreign loans (totalling $56.89B), remittances from overseas contract workers ($5-$7B a year) and speculative investments (reaching as high as 80% of all foreign investments).
Globalization: false antidote to the moribund state of global capitalism
The global capitalist system has been wracked by a general crisis since the 1970s and, more than ever, the imperialist powers need to pry open the markets of the neocolonies like the Philippines. The neocolonies have always served as sources of cheap labour and raw materials, captive markets for surplus goods, and outlets for recycling surplus capital.
“Globalization” since the start of the 1980s has meant the neoliberal re-engineering of the world economy towards this end. Liberalization, privatization and deregulation programs were pushed through the IMF-WB, regional trade blocs and multilateral institutions like the GATT. Instead of resolving the crisis, globalization has resulted in graver social turmoil for the imperialist countries and their neocolonies.
The moribund state of global capitalism is clearly reflected in the ills plaguing the Philippine’s neocolonial and semifeudal society. It is the same burden as that borne by the working people of the neocolonies of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, where living and working conditions have been pressed to intolerably low levels.
There is a generalized economic slowdown on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. There is massive unemployment and underemployment. There are debilitating cutbacks in spending on health and education. There is increasing decadence, criminality and corruption and an upsurge in racism and neofascism. Civil wars and ethnic conflicts are raging.
Globalization has only aggravated the worst features of capitalism: unrestrained profit-taking, sinking wage levels, unemployment, loss of livelihoods, breakdowns in production, neglect of social services and the devastation of the environment. Despite this, imperialism persists in pushing for globalization for want of any other means to avert its crisis of overproduction and to combat the tendency of profits to decline.
For a century now, in fact, imperialism has been shaping the economic and social policies of the countries it dominates. An international division of production has been crafted aimed at ensuring superprofits. Thus, the handful of rich and powerful imperialist countries — the US, Japan, Germany and the rest of the G7 — monopolise finance and productive capital as well as high-technology and high value-added production. The score of underdeveloped neocolonies, on the other hand, are consigned to raw material production and low value-added manufacturing for export.
This arrangement is the result of a constant process of coercion and suasion, often with the treasonous collaboration of neocolonial ruling elites. From direct colonial rule and subjection by brute force, neocolonialism now employs various mechanisms of dominance and control, like bilateral economic “agreements,” structural adjustment programs and, of course, GATT-WTO rules. Moder imperialism has also formed regional trade blocs such as the EU, NAFTA, AFTA, and APEC to consolidate their respective backyards.
But even as the monopoly bourgeoisie are united in striving for complete control over the labour, natural resources, and markets of the globe, they are divided in their competition with each other. Inter-imperialist economic conflicts, for instance, have sharpened in recent years. But through all this, the imperialist states protect and advance the interests of their respective MNCs, the main vehicles by which monopoly capital exerts its power over the marketplace. Domestically, they are coddled with repressed wages, tax breaks, contracts, and free rein to profit from selling social services. Abroad, the neocolonial economies have been opened up for the MNC’s plundering.
A world dominated by monopoly capital is a world caught in the chronic crisis of moribund capitalism. The “globalists” try to argue that globalization is the only path to development. Yet after having “globalized” for four centuries, the problems of capitalism remain intractable. Misery and exploitation are as widespread as ever. The soaring achievements of capitalism that are so loudly proclaimed have only benefited a few.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s population are mired in hunger, disease, and ignorance. The ILO estimates that over a billion people, one-third of the world’s working age population, are unemployed or underemployed. The UNDP estimates that 4.3 billion people struggle to subsist on US$2 a day or less, and that 1.1 billion people will not live beyond 40. Indeed from 1980 to 1997, at the height of globalization, the ratio of the incomes of the top and bottom 20% of the world’s population worsened from 45:1 to 74:1. The world’s natural resources have been recklessly ravaged and destroyed.
Poverty is most acute in the countries dominated by imperialism but millions in the imperialist countries themselves are living in conditions no better than their counterparts in the neocolonies. Conversely, elites in the neocolonies live lavish lifestyles far surpassing that of the working peoples in the imperialist centers.
These are the unavoidable outcomes of the anarchy and inequity intrinsic to capitalism and to the private appropriation of a socially-produced surplus.
Furthermore, we find the imperialist powers doing everything to retain their privileged position. The US, for instance, is taking full advantage of its unchallenged dominance and is arrogantly asserting itself at the forefront of global aggression and militarism. It has recently flexed its imperial might to secure mineral and natural resources, as well as strategic footholds, in the Middle East, Yugoslavia, and East Timor. In its pursuit of “American core values,” the self-proclaimed global policeman has instigated local armed conflicts as pretexts for intervention, takeover, and occupation.
The WTO: a wolf dressed in the nines
The completion of the GATT-UR and the creation of its successor WTO gave birth to an unprecedented multilateral superbody for re-engineering the world economy encompassing 135 countries. The vast scope of the GATT-WTO covers trade in agricultural products, industrial goods and services as well as non-trade areas like intellectual property rights, investments, government procurement and competition policy. Moreover, there is a wide range of measures for disciplining “recalcitrant” economies.
But these only means that monopoly capital and their multinational corporations will, in their quest for superprofits, be able to extract unprecedented advantages and benefits for themselves at the expense of the neocolonies and its working people. Neocolonial labour power and raw materials can now be bought at the cheapest possible prices and domestic production has been devastated in the imperialist drive for market domination.
The ultimate result is greater misery and deprivation for the broad masses of the people. For the WTO is not about development. It is about maldevelopment.
The scourge of the “Millenium Round”
The WTO is one of imperialism’s latest and most important instruments for economic dominance. The WTO Ministerial in Seattle will be critical in defining to what extent and at what pace trade, finance, and investment liberalization will proceed.
On one hand, the neocolonies will be pressed to further liberalize their economies even as the imperialist countries themselves zealously guard against any threat to their own protectionist barriers. The tarnished myth of globalization will still be pushed despite the overwhelming evidence against it. On the other hand, the imperialist countries will try to outmaneuver each other in capturing more of each others’ markets.
There are two significant items for the neocolonies on the agenda for the upcoming Millennium round: the review of the GATT-UR Agreement on Agriculture and the possible railroading of a Multilateral Investment Agreement (MAI) aimed at maximum investment liberalization. Their impact on the great majority of countries dominated by imperialism is conditioned by how these countries remain mired in semifeudal, agrarian and pre-industrial backwardness.
The liberalization of agriculture is brazenly in the interests of imperialism. Domestic production of staple foods for local consumption will be displaced to give way to the production of “high-value” export crops and to pave the way for the dumping of the surplus grains and cereals of imperialist agri-businesses. Under the previous GATT-UR, for example, the Philippine government planned to reduce rice lands from 5 million hectares to just 1.9 million hectares to provide land for cutflowers, expensive vegetable varieties and other export crops. In the four years that the Philippines has joined the WTO, rice imports increased tenfold from 201,000 MT to 2.2 million MT. Corn imports swelled by 500 times, pork by 164 times and beef by four times.
Moreover, the AOA effectively bars the neocolonies from developing domestic agriculture even as the imperialist countries hypocritically retain support for their own agriculture sectors (which have themselves been made strong by a long history of protection).
There is a special urgency regarding the AOA. Mass poverty is a feature of neocolonial agriculture which remains small-scale and at the subsistence level. In this context, agricultural liberalization further immiserizes the peasantry and erodes a country’s sovereign right to food security.
The proposal to negotiate an agreement on investments is likewise one-sided. Investment liberalization opens the way for the unhampered operations of foreign monopoly capital, later if not sooner. Monopoly capital will be allowed to enter into any profitable area of the domestic economy, operate at the least cost, be free from local requirements or restrictions, and free in repatriating their superprofits. At present, the Philippine government is hellbent in granting foreign capital special rights and privileges even surpassing those granted to Filipino businesses. Despite popular opposition, the Estrada Administration wants the Philippine Constitution revised just to attract foreign investments.
The people’s resistance is our only hope
While the MAI highlights the rapaciousness of monopoly capital, it’s defeat in the OECD highlights the effectiveness of the people’s resistance to the grand lie that is globalization.
Indeed, the worsening crisis has resulted in mounting mass protests and resistance, with more and more joining the ranks of those long engaged in the anti-imperialist struggle. There are wide swathes of increasing militance across the globe: general strikes and mass protests in South Korea and Russia; workers’ strikes in the US, Germany, and France as well as Spain, Portugal, and Greece; peasant uprisings in Brazil, Mexico, and China; mass protests in Indonesia. There are also the people’s wars such as those in India, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, and Turkey as well in Columbia, Mexico, and Kurdistan.
This resistance has been met with brutal repression. In the cities, strikes and mass actions are violently dispersed. Just last week in the Philippines, riot police violently dispersed a Bayan-led rally protesting a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). (That meeting, which was in preparation for the WTO Minsterial in Seattle, included ten Southeast Asian nations plus China, Japan and South Korea.) In the countryside, there is increased militarization. In the neocolonies, where there is intense crisis and resistance, authoritarian and military rule is always a certainty.
Nonetheless, the people’s defiance continues to surge and we have brought our struggles here to Seattle, to the very shores of the empire, as it were. International solidarity against imperialist globalization has gone from strength to strength since the PCAIG and People’s Caravan Against APEC in 1996. And we are here not only to protest the WTO but imperialism itself and its brazen efforts at extending and deepening this scourge called globalization.
The intrinsic brutality of the global capitalist system warns us not to be cowed or bullied into the narrow and ultimately self-defeating confines of reformism. People’s organizations, citizen’s movements and NGOs from around the world have continued to raise the level of struggle and now directly challenge the bankrupt framework of globalization.
The moribund capitalist system has taken centuries to build. Its undoing, and the rise of a humane and democratic society, will not happen overnight. The very act of struggle and resistance means that we are already engaged in building an alternative to imperialist globalization. In both the imperialist and neocolonial countries, there is the people’s struggle for genuine democracy, national liberation and socialism.
There is much to do in the coming millennium. There are great victories to look forward to.
Take agriculture out of the WTO!
No to the Millenium Round! Junk the WTO!
Strengthen international solidarity and advanceme the peoples’ struggle against imperialism!