W.T.O. Slaying The Monster Of Mysterious Acronyms

Resistance To The WTO

There has been resistance to the WTO since its inception in 1995, when half a million small farmers rallied against it in India. Last year, during the 2nd ministerial conference in Geneva (where the WTO is based) the city was under siege as thousands opposed the capitalist celebrations taking place behind closed doors. Simultaneously, protest street parties took place in about 30 countries. Later that year, the Director General, Renato Ruggerio, was pied in London.

Now, a year later, lessons have been learnt from June 18th. Global resistance is stronger, inspiring and reaching out to more and more people, who are refusing to be crushed by the all-consuming global economy. Seattle promises to explode with protests and people are talking of shutting down the conference on the 30th. Trade unions from all over the USA and Canada will send thousands of workers to protest and there will be street theatre and several international caravans which will have travelled across North America informing and acting against the conference. A city-wide general strike has also been called for. And in Europe, plans are afoot for a variety of diverse and decentralised protests. All this just in time to spoil the plans of the Globalisers of Misery as they attempt to deepen private control of the world's people and resources and further integration into the global economy.

The History Behind All This

In the last 20 years there has been an acceleration of what is known as 'globalisation'. The processes behind globalisation are deeply tied to the historical development of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, both in the wealthy industrialised world and third world. However, the recent history of the WTO stems from the end of World War Two when certain institutions were created to expand, regulate and control the world economy; the Bretton-Woods institutions.

Initially there were 3 bodies; the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The purpose of these institutions and agreements was to develop a global economic space for capitalist development, integrating people into a global economy in which goods were produced and sold around the world. This, accompanied by a new international currency system linking the value of the US dollar to that of gold, would ensure that the US economy, and its corporations, maintained their position of being the dominant power in the global marketplace, since it would expand markets for its goods around the world. After the traumas of war, these were promoted as progressive measures which, along with the creation of the UN, would promote international co-operation and peaceful development, whilst masking the power structures actually at work.

GATT

The GATT agreements were to gradually remove obstacles to the free flow of goods between countries (free trade) through reduction of tariffs (such as import and export taxes), and were negotiated in a series of 'rounds'. The GATT was mainly a forum for richer industrialised countries to trade in, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union (which had its own trading relations) and of the Third World Non-Aligned Movement the number of countries involved has dramatically increased to around 130. The original scope of GATT was confined to trade in manufactured industrial goods. The last round of GATT negotiations lasted several years and is known as the Uruguay round. This resulted in the creation of the WTO as a formal organisation (rather than just a set of agreements) in 1995. There are over 140 member countries in the WTO, with about 30 more trying to join. In addition to this, the scope of the WTO is far broader than the manufactured goods covered by GATT. The WTO includes trade in agricultural products, intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights), company investments, textiles and services (e.g. communications, banking, tourism, health etc).

The WTO

So, what gives the WTO its immense power, and indicates a substantial victory for private profit, is the fact that so many more people, and so many more areas of life, are brought under the control of market mechanisms and the law of private profit. Finally, with the WTO, the entire globe becomes a reservoir for capitalism. Forests can be sold for tourist development, often displacing indigenous peoples, and plants which have been used traditionally for centuries can be patented by biotech multinationals. Whilst capitalism has always relied on the privatisation of common resources (such as the enclosure laws at the start of British industrialisation), the exploitation of labour and resources for the generation of private wealth, and the use of mechanisms of domination such as imperialism throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia, the WTO and globalisation increase these processes to unprecedented speed.

WTO takes issues of health and the environment further from people's control, so that new products can be sold without regard for such concerns. Because of this Europeans are sold US beef with carcinogenic growth hormones because it is against regulations to exclude it, and the Mexican fishing industry can continue to use destructive tuna nets which kill dolphins.

Free trade places people and workers in competition with one another, all in a race to destroy hard won social protection and the environment in an attempt to attract investment from multinationals. Workers' rights cannot be protected and their jobs are vulnerable to the effects of cheap imports: 250,000 Indian rubber tappers have lost their jobs and as many again plunged into extreme poverty because of cheaper imports from Malaysia and Indonesia, whilst US firms pay Mexican maquiladoras tiny wages to work in cramped conditions, just over the border from where more expensive US workers lose their jobs. Small farmers across the world come under the control of seed multinationals like Monsanto which then introduce GM crops into all our food. All of this combines with existing gender and race power inequalities to ensure that women and ethnic minorities bear some of the more extreme marginalisation and exploitation that globalisation depends upon and creates.

In Seattle there will be a push for a new round of negotiations, the Millennium Round. This will seek to further the corporate control of agriculture and provide for greater patenting rights (the TRIPS agreement) , intensifying industrial agriculture, and expensive, inaccessible technologies. It will also undermine small farmers abilities to produce, as they are unable to compete with influxes of cheap imports from wealthier, more industrialised countries. The issue of services will also be taken much further (GATS Agreement), and there will be an attempt to resurrect the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which collapsed last year. This was to be an international agreement to regulate investment by companies (as opposed to trade). It was more or less entirely written by large multinational industrial lobby groups, such as the International Chamber of Commerce and the European Round Table of Industrialists, and claimed to further increase the private control of resources, and the rights of investors, and to remove ways of public control of resources. The agreement related to both physical investment (factories, mines etc), and financial investment (bonds, stocks etc). Until now, the agreement on services has mainly regulated trade in electronic services, communications services, financial and banking services and tourism. Current negotiations are likely to expand the scope of this agreement to include education and health, which would lead to further privatisations in these areas which could make Thatcher's attacks look tame. Such privatisation, already highly advanced in most parts of the world (through World Bank/ IMF imposed measures known as Structural Adjustment Programmes), will have the potential to rip apart the welfare services of richer countries, simply rolling back generations of struggle which have made such services possible.

Thousands of industry lobbyists will be at Seattle, ensuring the agenda is an aggressive drive to concentrate multinational control of the world's resources into fewer and fewer hands. No doubt this will be portrayed as beneficial to the world's population, and we can be equally sure that the discussions will be clouded by meaningless statements about social and environmental clauses, third world development and "Globalisation with a human face". These are just attempts to manipulate people into accepting unjust structures, and to water down resistance.

Further Contacts:

ASEED Europe - source of a great briefing on the subject - aseedeur@antenna.nl (Postbus 92066, 1090 AB Amsterdam, Netherlands)

People's Global Action against Free Trade and the WTO www.agp.org/agp/ or info@agp.org

The new DO or DIE also has an excellent article about globalisation in the context of capitalism and the international class struggle (p35-54)

If you would like to arrange meetings or speakers about WTO email kolyaab@hotmail.com or phone 0181 995 2747