Global justice movement evolves

Christopher MORAFF

The global justice movement's strength lies in the fact that as a constantly evolving organism, it has the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.

When activists from around the world took to the streets of Pittsburgh in late September to protest against the gathering of the Group of Twenty nations (G-20), they were not only putting the new administration in Washington on notice that "change" is more than a campaign slogan.

They were reaffirming their commitment to a world that represents the interests of the poor and disadvantaged over that of the powered elite.

Collapse

The near collapse of the global economy in 2008 which exposed the failings of neoliberalism has propelled the anti-globalization movement to a level of renewed relevance.

"Positions the movement had in the late 1990s being against deregulation for example are now becoming more popular," Heather Gautney, an expert on global justice, said in an interview with Fordham University magazine In Focus. "Even mainstream politicians are saying 'we didn't regulate corporations and look what happened.'"

That's quite a leap from 2001, when more than a few critics had written off the anti-globalization movement off as a relic of the '90s and a victim of the shift in discourse that followed the terror attacks in New York and Washington.

Writing in 2001, Murray Dobbin, an author and analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, called for a "reassessment of our language and tactics" and the need to transition the movement from "anti-globalization" to "pro-democracy."

Around the same time, Joshua Karliner, in the essay "Where Do We Go From Here?" published in the online magazine CorpWatch, warned that the movement risked becoming marginalized-"a mere footnote to an ongoing narrative of injustice and war"-if it didn't "assert the relevance of our issues in a sophisticated and nuanced way."

In the midst of this movement soul searching, in 2003 the US invaded and occupied Iraq. For the next six years, many domestic activists took a hiatus from confronting corporate globalization and pushed for an end to the killing in the Middle East.

"The focus of progressive attention tends to shift in that period," says Mark Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus. "With the financial collapse you see a return to some of the attention given to these issues [of globalization]. There is definitely a tremendous amount of public outrage around the world about... neoliberal capitalism's failure to support working people."

That outrage was on display in the streets of Pittsburgh, where thousands of youth who cut their teeth protesting against the Iraq war joined thousands more veteran activists in challenging the G-20 on issues ranging from trade to the environment.

Momentum

Whether the larger coalition of groups protesting neoliberalism - which by 2002 had rejected the term anti-globalization in favour of "global justice" - will succeed in fully leveraging this momentum depends on the extent to which it has heeded the calls to evolve following 9/11.

Among the more persistent criticisms has been the movement's emphasis on polemics over positing constructive alternatives to prevailing global policy. "There were so many negative things happening, we didn't really have time to think about how the movement was unfolding," Dobbin says.

Eight years after he called for a movement-wide "reassessment," Dobbin says the global justice movement has begun to articulate its vision and build the foundations necessary for realizing it. The World Social Forum (WSF) is an example of this, he says.

Held annually since 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the WSF was conceived as the antithesis of the World Economic Forum, which is held the same time each year in Davos, Switzerland. For one week each January, WSF brings together a diverse group of individuals and global justice organizations to debate policy and build solidarity.

The forum has emerged as the first global platform for discussing strategies of resistance to neoliberal globalization. The global justice movement's strength lies in its diversity and the fact that as a constantly evolving organism, it has the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances and issues.

"You can't talk about a protest movement as a single thing because there are actually lots of different constituencies involved in this both globally and locally," Engler says. "That's why it's called a 'movement of movements.'" IN THESE TIMES