Review of Walden Bello's new book

"Deglobalization"? Sure, but...

by Patrick Bond

My favorite haunt, Zimbabwe, is the delight of aggressive bourgeois
commentators, one of whom wrote a month ago about that country's meltdown in
the Economist (30 November 2002):

"An interesting economic experiment is being conducted in Zimbabwe. To the
foes of globalisation, President Robert Mugabe's views are unexceptional. He
argues that 'runaway market forces' are leading a 'vicious, all-out assault
on the poor'. He decries the modern trend of 'banishing the state from the
public sphere for the benefit of big business.' What sets him apart from
other anti-globalisers, however, is that he has been able to put his ideas
into practice."

Aargh. The Economist wants readers to think that Mugabe is a deglobalizing
anti-capitalist, and that the unfolding meltdown associated with his alleged
rejection of the market is the necessary outcome of the policies those of us
in the movement advocate. The reality is far different, as can be attested
by many Harare and Bulawayo leftwing activists and students subjected to
proto-fascist official brutality for more than a decade.

Perhaps the freshest antidote to Economist logic is Walden Bello's new book
"Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy". I've just added it to the
required reading list for my main political-economic masters seminar at Wits
University this year. Bello's book is part of the worthy Zed Press series
called Global Issues. At 132 pages, it's an easy-reading companion to his
other recent book, "The Future in the Balance"--a collection of 20 eloquent
essays published in 2001 by Food First, the San Francisco advocacy NGO that
he once directed.

Bello probably needs no introduction, but ZNet readers may not be aware that
his hectic schedule includes participation in virtually all confrontations
with the global power structure; a professorship at University of the
Philippines; leadership of a leftwing Filipino political party; and most
importantly from the standpoint of international anti-capitalism,
directorship of Focus on the Global South, a people's movement thinktank
based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (http://www.focusweb.org).

Humble and humorous, Bello--who holds a Princeton doctorate in
sociology--has a long history of social mobilisation. Six months ago, the
New Left Review published an engaging interview that explored his political
trajectory, including an important break with the Communist Party of the
Philippines (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25004.shtml).

What are the main arguments for deglobalization? The book opens by arguing,
tightly and persuasively, that the existing world system is untenable, on
several grounds captured by the first chapter's main subheadings:
multilateralism in disarray; the crisis of the neoliberal order; the
corporation under question; the degeneration of liberal democracy; the
specter of global deflation; the rise of the (anticapitalist) movement;
September 11; and "imperial overstretch". Bello closes the introductory
chapter with a hint that "progressive responses are coming together under
the canopy of the Porto Alegre process"--though here the argument becomes
distressingly vague, particularly in relation to previous traditions of
anticapitalism.

Analytically, Bello is influenced by Robert Brenner's two major marxist
studies of intercapitalist competition, resulting systemic overcapacity and
declining profitability: "The Economics of Global Turbulence" in New Left
Review, May/June 1998 and "The Boom and the Bubble" published by Verso last
year. But Bello hesitates to more forcefully ground his anti-capitalism,
beyond the coy signals and codewords.

Instead, Bello's great strength is the lucidity of a largely institutional
critique. Although the second chapter reviews the half-hearted
anti-imperialism of Third World governments through the 1970s and the
subsequent rightwing reaction that has left most Southern leaders mere
lackeys of Washington, it is a journalistic approach. (In contrast, I had
hoped for something approaching the theoretical clarity that makes, for
example, Robert Biel's book "The New Imperialism", published by Zed in 2000,
so rewarding.)

Bello's third chapter adds analyses of the World Bank, IMF and WTO. The
fourth shows how these organizations--and global capitalism more
generally--came to suffer a late 1990s legitimacy crisis. He demolishes both
the actual "vicissitudes of reform" (Chapter Five) and the main bourgeois
proposals for future restructuring of global economic governance, by
commentators ranging from the UN to the Meltzer Commission to Bretton Woods
System revivalists to the recently-convicted insider trader George Soros
(Chapter Six).

Then comes "The alternative: Deglobalization" in Chapter Seven. Although the
book is short, it is sad that only 11 pages carry the concrete strategic
options for the anticapitalist movement, because they are worthy of
amplification. Bello's description--"I am not talking about withdrawing from
the international economy. I am speaking about reorienting our economies
from production for export to production for the local market"--recalls the
way, more than a decade ago, Samir Amin described his own conception of
deglobalization: "Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with
the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal
development... Delinking implies a 'popular' content, anti-capitalist in the
sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with
the multiplicity of divergent interests."

But this begs the question of whether to conceptualise the problem as one of
deep-seated tendencies towards the commodification of everything under
capitalist relations of production, or simply pernicious globalists and
hostile, excessively powerful institutions. Indeed the weakest possible
conception of deglobalization is Bello's suggestion at the 2002 World Social
Forum that, as one option, we seek to reduce existing neoliberal
institutions to "just another set of actors coexisting with and being
checked by other international organizations, agreements, and regional
groupings. These would include such diverse actors and institutions as
UNCTAD, multilateral environmental agreements, the ILO, the EU, and evolving
trade blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, SAARC in South Asia, SADC in
Southern Africa, and a revitalized ASEAN in Southeast Asia. More space, more
flexibility, more compromise--these should be the goals of the Southern
agenda and the civil society effort to build a new system of global economic
governance."

Most anyone involved in local struggles in which these institutions play a
role know them to be part of the problem, not the solution, as currently
constituted. Thus Bello has come under sharp criticism from the left (e.g.,
Alex Callinicos, Victor Wallis and Ray Kiely), and for good reason in view
of some past and ongoing advocacy gaffes:

* four years ago he promoted a greater role for the existing regional
development banks in resolving the Asian crisis--though he is now no longer
so enthusiastic, in the wake of the subsequent brutal critiques of the Asian
Development Bank by his Focus colleague Shalmali Guttal;

* two years ago he advanced the idea that the international Left could
"unite" (sic) with Republicans against the World Bank and IMF--which may
have been merely a mistake in wording (if he meant simple tactical
convergence), but which says volumes about clarity on alliances;

* in "Deglobalization", he suggests "a demand that has potential to unite a
broad front of people is that of converting [the IMF] into a research
 agency" (this, after Bello has demolished the IMF, in "The Future in the
Balance", for stupidity and blindness when it came to East Asia's crisis);
and

* he also remarks in passing that deglobalization will entail more
"microcredit schemes such as the Grameen Bank"--perhaps unaware that in late
2001 the Wall Street Journal wrote that, "To many, Grameen proves that
capitalism can work for the poor as well as the rich" but then had to
unhappily concede how Grameen's recent "steep losses" and unethical
accounting practices had left the international microcredit industry
"alarmed" (in spite of Grameen's more assertive debt collection method:
removing tin roofs from delinquent women's houses).

These may be picky, outdated and largely semantic points. (On alliances, for
instance, Bello and "Future in the Balance" chapter coauthor Anuradha Mittal
blasted the AFL-CIO and some environmentalists for their "Faustian bargain"
with the xenophobic right at the time of the Chinese accession to permanent
normal trading nation status with the US.)

Indeed, Bello completely convinces me with the more militant components of
the strategy, especially "deconstruction" techniques to defund and
disempower global capitalist institutions. It was, in particular, his shift
towards advocating abolition of the World Bank in April 2000 that helped
most to provide intellectual buttressing for the great militancy witnessed
in that year's Washington and Prague protests.

But for the sake of intra-movement discussions, is there not a more
expansive way to address deglobalization, by departing both from
dual-reformist notions of globalized regulation and utopian localization
strategies which both regularly attract disdain from serious commentators?
Would it be so difficult for intellectual leaders like Bello to mention the
prospect of revolution--namely, defense of a takeover of state power, in the
manner carried out so often historically, but so rarely taken to fruition?

Wouldn't nurturing the economy and society of such a radical Third Worldist
state presume the expropriation of key local/national assets and an
immediate rejigging of the local/national economy towards meeting needs
which had not been met previously? Would this revolutionary state not also
automatically reject the World Bank/IMF and WTO, the French/British water
companies, the international property rights restrictions on medicines, and
most other international capitalist relationships, as a short-medium term
strategy? In turn, would this not require capital controls, default on the
odious debts left by previous regimes, and import/export management (of a
very different type than was practiced under previous bourgeois Third World
nationalist regimes)?

Such a project--which is not, as Amin puts it, synonymous with autarky along
the lines of old Albania, Burma or North Korea--will necessitate breaking
economic linkages to the worst forces of global finance, commerce,
investment and capitalist culture. This could be one half of the future of
the idea of deglobalization.

The other half is the struggle to implement "decommodification" at home by
way of transitional demands flowing directly from organic social and labour
struggles. Some of the most exciting in my hometown of Johannesburg involve
the battles over access to electricity, water, land, housing, food and
anti-retroviral drugs--topics for future updates because with my remaining
words I want to testify to applied deglobalization activities that Bello and
the Thai progressive eco-social movements are engaged in.

When I visited the Focus office in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago, I
witnessed the sort of gathering that should really worry the international
and Thai ruling elites: a seminar in which, as the year drew to a close, 70
invigorated labour, community, radical environmentalists, leading feminists
and Trotskyists came together for strategic debate in two languages, hosted
by a thinktank in the country's most bourgeois university.

The same week, two combative protests unfolded: one was the heightening of
pressure on the ghastly prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, by victims of
the infamous Pak Mool dam project. Protesters had occupied space outside
Government House until this week, when they were finally forced back to the
hills by increasing state brutality, divide-and-conquer strategies, and
paramilitary thugs who have destroyed the Pak Mool peasants' temporary
dwellings on two occasions. But the anti-dam activists certainly seem to
have won hearts and minds across Thailand, and their activism has compelled
Thaksin to consider writing off the hydropower project--though the battle is
far from over.

The second was an amazing demonstration on December 20 during a
Thai-Malaysia cabinet meeting at a luxury hotel in the southern town of Hat
Yai. A thousand activists protested an ecologically-damaging Petronas gas
pipeline between the two countries. As they sat down to eat and pray in an
area that Thaksin's main assistant had approved as a green zone, hundreds
were clubbed by the police. Leaders were jailed and several dozen people
(including police) were hospitalized in the ensuing melee. The Thai Forum of
the Poor and Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development were among groups
offering solidarity.

These activists, amongst whom are the tough young staff at Focus (admirably
connected into a variety of struggles across Southeast and South Asia), look
up to Walden Bello for inspiration. Minor cavils aside, I certainly do too.