Strategies against neoliberalism –
for another world

Asbjørn Wahl

We live in a time of redistribution of wealth and resources! The social and economic inequalities between people are increasing dramatically. We live in a time of market liberalism, in which multinational companies are taking over a rapidly increasing part of the world economy. We live in a time when more than 80 per cent of all international economic transactions are about buying and selling the currency of other countries – in other words currency speculation. We live in an economy of madness – created and developed through deliberate political decisions. However, we do also live in a time in which resistance is growing, people are organising and are hitting back. Power breeds counter-power, and the struggle is already well under way.

Let me first, with a concrete example, illustrate some of the dramatic consequences of the change in the balance of forces which follows in the wake of neo-liberalism.

A couple of months ago, the German Volkswagen company threatened to set up a new factory, involving 5000 workers, in an East European country rather than in Germany under current conditions. The German metal workers' union, IG Metall, which is considered to be one of the strongest trade unions in the world, then negotiated an agreement which gave Volkswagen the right to employ the 5000 new workers at wages below the rates in the existing contract, with more flexible working hours, with a six day working week and a number of other exceptions from the current regulations in force. With that Volkswagen had achieved what it wanted and decided to build the factory in Germany. You can probably imagine what effect this will have on workers in other car manufacturing companies in Germany and next, when this leads to ever more increased competition in European car markets, on workers at the Renault factories in France or the Fiat factories in Italy.

This is how multinational companies today are using blackmailing strategies – against politicians and against workers. Through the abolition of capital control, the cancellation of fixed currency exchange rates, privatisation and market orientation of an ever increasing part the economy, our politicians in national as well as at international bodies have awarded capital forces enormous advantages in terms of power in society. It is not the capital forces which have thrown off their fetters, but politicians who, through systematic and conscious decisions, have released capital forces from their chains and regulations.

Politicians have given market forces ever more scope, but they refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of this policy. What politician in this country has stood for election over the last years, with promises of increased social and economic differences in society? Who has promised us more poverty and housing famine? Who has stood up and defended the current brutalisation of work that until now has expelled 10-15 per cent of the work force out of the labour market? Who has run campaigns for the necessity of an unrestrained global economy of speculation? No, of course, nobody has done so. In spite of that, those are exactly the dominating trends in today’s society – and the results of political decisions.

What made a social democratic reform policy possible during the first 30 years after WW2 was precisely the existence of capital control, fixed exchange rates and a number of other regulatory mechanisms in the markets. This was what made it possible for a country to introduce stronger labour health and safety standards that made it possible for the trade union movement to fight for and achieve welfare reforms – without having to fear the flight of capital overnight. Through systematic deregulation of the economy, politicians have awarded the capital forces the upper hand – increased power served on a gold plate. This is what has led to, and is still leading to, a world increasingly subject to corporate government and a massive redistribution of power from democratically elected bodies to multinational companies, finance institutions and speculators.

This has led the labour movement into a deep political and ideological crisis. In the social democratic movement there is a struggle going on all over the world between the so-called ”traditionalists” and ”modernisers." The modernisers have declared the ideologies dead, the class struggle historical and have developed a form of depoliticised economics, in which economic growth and competitiveness are the goals and the market, to an increasing degree, the means. All conflicts of interests are being interpreted as sectional interests which hamper the market from working for the public benefit. They have given up the ambition of influencing the long lines in the development of society and have in stead become centred on the individual, focused on competence and flexibility within the frames of the existing system. They let themselves be deluded into the neo-liberal system-criticism with an aim of modernising, but the modernisation has mainly been reduced to an adaptation to the new balance of forces.

Without going into details regarding the reasons for this development, my contention is that to a high degree this backlash has been caused by the depolitisation and deradicalisation of the labour movement which followed as results of the post-war class compromise and consensus policy. It is nothing but tragic that great parts of the trade union and labour movement are now considering ”globalisation” not primarily as a question of power, but as a question of technology and geography.

I have become more and more fed up at hearing this meaningless mantra that ”globalisation has come to be”, that I have set up a list of control questions which I ask those who reel off this kind of nonsense;

What is it that has come to be, I ask;
Is it the extensive economy of speculation?
Is it the enormous redistribution of wealth between poor and rich in the world?
Is it the concentration of power in the hands of multinational companies?
Is it the considerable redistribution of society’s resources from public to private?
Is it the massive attacks on trade union and workers’ rights?
Is it the undermining of democracy?

If people still think that this has come to be, well, then we are not on the same team, then we do not work on the same project. Then we stand on opposite sides in the social struggle which is about to develop.

It is all about power, and power is first and foremost constituted in the production, not in the of distribution of goods and services in society. Unequal distribution of consumption or increased social differences in society arise out of the power and ownership structures in the production sphere of society. The fundamentally wrong thesis of right wing politicians that individual freedom increases when the state reduces its role, totally neglects the power of capital in society and the power structure in the sphere of production. The market is being described as the free choice of consumers. This represents an idyllisation of the market, a denial of the economic power and an individualisation of social problems.

The struggle for alternative social systems is in other words a struggle for power, and there are currently no complete alternatives available. If anybody had pretended to have one, I would probably have considered it with deep scepticism. This is not a time for the presentation of package solutions of alternative social systems, but a time for alternative thinking and for the encouragement to come forward with more or less well developed ideas for the road forward.

Firstly, it is a question of the right to develop, and of the possibility of developing alternative social systems. We have to remember that through our membership and links to the World Trade organisation (WTO), the EU and the EEA (European Economic Area), most alternative social structures would actually be in defiance of existing agreements and regulations in these supranational institutions. Alternative social structures would today be a barrier to trade and thus be judged in the Dispute Settlement Mechanism of the WTO and consequently met by massive trade sanctions. If another world is possible, it will in other words have to be struggled for in confrontation with the World Trade Organisation and through international co-ordination of the fight.

Secondly, we shall not accept the pressure from our opponents when they call for our alternatives as soon as we raise criticism of existing social structures. I am tempted to use Susan George’s well aimed remark at a meeting in Seattle in the autumn of 1999: ”sometimes it is as simple that the alternative to cancer is not to have cancer.” The alternative to the corporate annexation of ever greater parts of out societies and our lives is actually to stop them. The alternative to privatisation is not to privatise, etc.

The struggle against neo-liberalism will have to be carried out at many levels and in many arenas. I will in the following focus on three areas with great strategic importance. The first is the struggle about our interpretation of reality, in other words the analysis of the existing order. This part of the struggle must not be underestimated – particularly in the current phase of the struggle. Without a clear and correct analysis of the power structure of the new economic world order, it will be impossible to develop anything sensible with regard to strategies and tactics. We have seen that clearly in this country over the last couple of years. The political waves of discontent have splashed to and fro – soon to one, soon to the other political party. This, in a rational context, meaningless movements of voters arises precisely out of how people understand the world around them. The struggle for our interpretation of reality is therefore decisive. It is this which in the last resort will decide whether the well-founded dissatisfaction with the existing order will end up in reactionary right wing populism or in a radical alternative based on democratic governance, justice, solidarity, redistribution of wealth and communal solutions to social problems. Then we will need an analysis which explains to people why social and economic inequalities in society are increasing, why working life is becoming more brutal, why the welfare state is being put under increased pressure, why economic growth no longer leads to increased well-being.

An understanding of entirety and coherence, of causes and driving forces, are in other words more important than ever. The era of single-issue movements is over. This is the reason why one after the other of non-governmental organisations, almost irrespective of how narrow their platform was, are joining the ever broader and stronger coalition of resistance against corporate globalisation which has developed in the wake of the struggle against the Multilateral Agreement of Investment (MAI) and the struggle during the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999. This is also the reason why it did not make any sense when it was proposed, during the creation of ATTAC in this country last spring, to make it a narrow issue-focused organisation – a so-called broad campaign for four single-issues. Such movements no longer have any future. Without analyses of connections, causes and driving forces we will lose track in today’s struggle at the global level. More than ever we will have to search for the connections between wealth and poverty, between power and powerlessness, between oppression and terror, between social and economic interests and war. If we win the struggle about the analysis of the existing order, we are halfway to the goal.

The second area is about the content and the aim of our struggle. When our analyses and studies, our concept of the existing world order, have proved that it is not evil individuals that are creating the current power structures of society, but the built-in logic of our economic system, in other words the systemic force of the capitalist economy, it becomes self-evident that our project will have to be a relentless struggle against this system.

National isolation is of course no meaningful answer to the global offensive of capital, even though the nation-state will still play a central role as a regulating instrument in the economy. It is the economic system that will have to be changed. It is a question of curbing the capital forces – not of closing national borders. In the long term I can see no other solution to these problems than the abolition of the systemic force of the capitalist economy. This means that the economic life must be subject to democratic control and governance – something that can be realised only through social struggle. The concrete demands which will have to be raised in this struggle, have to be based on an analysis of the actual balance of forces.

Tobin tax is one method that can represent a start of the struggle to curb the economic forces, but it is far from sufficient. The important thing with the Tobin tax is that it has given us a unifying symbolic cause and, if we succeed, it will represent a turning point in social and economic development – a beginning of the hard and long road towards developing an economic order in which human needs and not profit should form the basis of the social organisation of the economy.

The next step, and I think the time is ripe to launch it now, will be to demand the reintroduction of capital control. We have to deprive the capital interests of the upper hand they have been granted through the free movement of capital, which gives them the opportunity to use their strategy of blackmailing governments as well as workers with threats of flight of capital and registration abroad. We did indeed have capital control in the entire industrialised world from WW2 till well into the 1980s. It was initially introduced as a reaction to the economic crisis of the 1930s. How many financial crises we are going to face before the demand of capital control is again raised with strength, I do not know, but I have no doubt that it will happen. Let us make the demand now! It is certainly not in line with current ruling thoughts, but those are exactly the sort of ideas that we will have to challenge, and we do actually have the UN organisation for trade and development, UNCTAD, on our side. Already in its ”Trade and Development Report 1998” it dissociated itself from the free movement of capital and claimed that capital control ”plays a key role if you want to avoid economic crises."

The third area is about how to realise the alternatives. This is a question of how to raise and strengthen the resistance necessary to push the alternatives forward. In this regard our insight into and knowledge of the driving forces and effects of the so-called ”globalisation” will be decisive. We will have to analyse current developments and discuss thoroughly how to confront the offensive of the capital forces, how to curb them, which alliances we will have to build, what kind of mobilisation of popular forces which will be necessary, etc.

To this end we will need strong organisations that are ready to take action at the national level, at the same time as the international co-ordination will have to be strengthened. More than ever broad alliances are necessary to confront the massive forces that are today attacking and undermining our positions all over the world. Lobbying is a waste of resources, and pretty frustrating, if it does not rest on strong social forces and movements that, in certain situations, are able to put power behind their demands.

The same goes for all the well-meant proposals that are currently being presented by a number of individuals and NGOs to replace the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank with other international institutions, even to have them abolished. It is not these institutions per se which are the causes of all the evil in the world. These institutions mainly reflect the fundamental balance of power in today’s world, first and foremost the balance of forces between labour and capital, between the market forces and civil society. Any new international institution of this kind will in the current situation be imprinted by the same balance of forces. Demanding new institutions before we have laid the foundations of a change of the balance of forces through massive mobilisation of popular forces from below, will represent a dead end. This is not where our main efforts should be today.

Our strategy must be based on the fact that it is the capital forces that have to be confronted. In the last resort this is a question of power – economic and political power. The struggle must be rooted in the social groups that are being hit by the offensive of the capital forces. Most important among these is the trade union movement, since it organises those who, through their work, produce the capital values in society. This gives it the most important strategic position in society with an immense potential for power. All proposals of alternative social structures must be based on this kind of consideration. Proposals and strategies that are not rooted in the social contradictions that are produced by the current economic system, will end up as nothing but idealism, voluntarism and a policy of illusions. We have got enough and to spare of this kind of alternatives these days. Armchair policies with little or no connection with the predominant conflict lines or conflicting interests in society, are of no interest in these circumstances.

At the international level we have experienced over the last years that the ravaging of neo-liberalism provokes resistance in country after country. The political elite has tied itself to the mast – obviously without any ability to correct the course. The organisation of a popular movement from below therefore remains the only power that can contribute to recapturing democratic governance of our societies. And we are the ones to organise the counter-power!

This comprehensive social struggle is already in progress. Internationally we are witnessing different groups, movements and organisations that are developing an ever higher degree of unity in their struggle against free-capitalism and speculative economy – against the economy of madness. We are not only witnessing growing resistance against corporate globalisation, but also a growing globalisation of the resistance. In addition to that, more and more people are realising that the current form of globalisation not only illustrates the aggressiveness of capital, but also its weaknesses, its vulnerability and internal contradictions. The struggle against the international politburo of neo-liberalism, in the shape of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, has released forces with a strength which hardly anybody dared to hope for just a couple of years ago. Only some few months ago, we witnessed the biggest and most comprehensive mobilisation so far, when more than 200,000 peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets of Genoa in a protest against the G8-meeting and the social and economic development which this world political elite represents.

Resistance is growing also in our country – in the form of the campaign For the Welfare State, in the Network against Market Power, in ATTAC Norway, in regional revolts in the north of Norway, in tendencies to municipal uproars against public under-funding, etc. Increasing numbers of people react against the economy of speculation, against market orientation, privatisation, new poverty and social distress. It is the counter-forces that are now representing decency in the world – against money-grubbers and the culture of greed.

Moreover, in order to keep up our spirits, we should frequently ask ourselves the following questions: why do we not today have a multilateral agreement of investment, which should further transfer power, scope and rights to multinational companies? Why has not the WTO over the last couple of years been working on its huge project of further liberalising the world economy through a new round of negotiations, which it intended to start in Seattle in 1999? Well, firstly because there are internal conflicts in the world power elite – mainly between the US and the EU. Secondly, because a number of developing countries, in spite of their economic misery, were able to stand up and say No! Thirdly, because popular resistance is growing.

Last spring this popular resistance was, through a massive international mobilisation, able to stop the attack from the pharmaceutical industry on the right of poor countries to produce cheap medicines for their own populations, when the pharmaceutical industry was forced to withdraw their lawsuit against South Africa. The perverse attitude of these companies, that human rights should be subordinated to intellectual property rights, suffered a defeat. There are, in other words, both edifying and encouraging signs in a situation which is otherwise characterised by corporate forces on the offensive. Through a number of confrontations we have actually been able to pressure the international power elite out into open landscape – a landscape that they are extremely bad at managing.

It is not late in the world, my friends, it is early!

(Speech given at the 2001 Conference on Globalisation, Oslo, 13 October 2001.)