Globalization and its Discontents

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Globalization and its Discontents

• Money makes the world go round

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I. Major concern of all organizations are the
SAPs

• Require currency devaluation that reduce the
  price of a countrys exports.
• Massive cutbacks in education, health services
  and public infrastructure.
• Stress on international competitiveness rather
  than social priorities
• Stress building an economic environment that is
  conducive to foreign direct investment.
• Often involves privatization of land and national
  companies, e.g. communications and
  infrastructural companies.
• Debt seen as a lever that compels many countries
  to open their economies to global competition.
• SAPs also seen as taking over the control of
  national policies.

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II. The Effects of these Changes are Diverse and
often Invisible, since they seem to emanate from
Economic Imperatives

• Increasing polarities of wealth and poverty.
• Decreasing government regulation of
  environmental, health and safety issues.
• Increasing privatization of common property in
  small-scale, rural communities.
• Emphases on productivity and growth as major
  criteria of viability of communities.
• Emphasis on the individual as the source of
  autonomy, poverty increasingly defined as
  individual failure.

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III. Responses to the Washington Consensus have
also been diverse

• Student movements
• Jubilee 2000
• Anti-Debt movements
• Peace Movements
• Fair Trade
• Human Rights Movements
• Anti-Dam Movements
• Squatters Movements

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IV. Movements for Land Reform and Against
Privatization of the Commons

• Zapatista Movement in Chiapas, Mexico
• Sem Terra, the Landless Workers Movement in
  Brazil
• Via Campesina, a peasant union covering 37
  countries.
• Confederation Paysanne, from France, also against
  GMCs, and MacDonalds.