WHY I HATE CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION
Capitalist globalization kills. The police murder on June 20, 2001
of a young Italian protestor named Carlo Guliani made this only too clear.
Unfortunately, Guliani's was but the latest in a round of killings of
anti-capitalists by law enforcement types: four people were killed in Papua
New Guinea and over thirty died in Brazil during anti-globalization
protests in the past couple of months.
These numbers do nothing to approach the less publicized yet
more common deaths that occur daily around the world due to the effects of
this latest stage of capitalism. Children die of hunger and lack of medical
care while the G7 leaders wine and dine in luxury. Civilians die in wars
whose causes relate directly back to the ravages of colonialism,
imperialism, and its current successor-that which the capitalists and their
media call globalization. AIDS and other diseases ravage the world's
impoverished populations because the medical and pharmaceutical players on
the global capitalist game board want healthy profits and poor people can't
help them there. People die of waterborne diseases because they can't
afford the price of water after their water systems have been privatized.
The world's primary offender, the most felonious nation of
them all-the United States-attacks countries and popular movements at will
with its missiles, bombs, and chemical sprays when those countries and
movements refuse to abide by the rules the US sets. Rules which are
designed to benefit the world's wealthiest citizens and the businesses they
own.
According to the self-described leaders of the capitalist
world, global capitalism is the only structure that the poor can ever hope
to benefit from. They tell us with a straight face that the wealth created
for the wealthy will trickle down to the rest of the world's citizens if
the multinational corporations and their client governments were just left
alone to do what they wanted. If this were so, why hasn't it happened? I'll
tell you why. Because capitalism doesn't work that way. Under capitalism,
wealth accumulates at the top and the more wealth those at the top
accumulate, the more wealth heads upward. The system of capitalism is not
designed to create equality, it is designed to create very rich people and
their opposite-very poor people.
The only time workers and the impoverished ever get a piece of
the pie that they can live off of (much less their fair share) is when they
fight for it. If one looks at world history since the capitalist
globalization project began after World War Two they will see that this is
the case. If one divides this postwar period into before and after 1973,
they will notice something else, too. Before 1973 the rich nations
encouraged state intervention in the economy to make people's lives a bit
easier. Wages were reasonable for most northern white male workers and jobs
were secure. Thanks to popular movements against racism and the ruling
elites' need to prevent unrest, laws designed to end discrimination against
people of color and women were passed, opening up more opportunities for
members of these groups. In addition, social welfare systems were
established to protect the poor and disenfranchised from the worst ravages
of capitalism.
Since 1973, however, such intervention became less common,
which has led us to the reality of today where even the richest nations
have substantial populations of citizens without medical care, decent
education or even an income they can count on. In short, the third world is
now globalized. If true globalization were to occur-where the poorest of
the poor were as powerful as the richest of the rich, there would be no
anti-globalization movement. Of course, that's not going to happen.
Capitalists never want to give up any of their gold. They
would rather kill. Even more graphically than Carlo Guliani's death, the
wars of the past century prove this. If there was one common thread that
held them all together, it was the drive for profits and control of
resources and markets. If there is one common thread that holds the current
phase of imperial capitalism together, it is the drive for profits and
control of resources and markets. The G7 and their cronies as represented
by the WTO and other organizations are not going to let us in. Indeed,
their system demands that they keep the world's working and poor people
out. They need us to do their work for them, whether it's slaving in a
sweatshop in Asia or serving a McDonald's burger in suburban America. And
they need us to buy their ridiculous brands, whether that be
sneakers or the latest Hollywood cinematic nonsense.
The movement against global capitalism is about telling the
capitalists that the people of the world don't need them. Indeed, the
capitalists are discovering they need us much more. That is why they
pretend to care. They don't understand that we don't want our so-called
leaders invited to their meetings, nor do we want their money thrown at the
problems their system has created. We want their system to end, so we can
replace it with one that puts the needs of humans before the needs of the
bankers. Just as the Stalinist state capitalist regimes of theformer Soviet
bloc collapsed (with a few good shoves from their peoples), so can the
capitalist states of the western world. El pueblo unido, hermas sera vencido!
-ron jacobs
http://www.neravt.com/left/jacobs36.html
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