Between the two kinds of reforms--`theirs' and `ours'--we must identify, nurture and extend the crucial ingredients: progressive activism and advocacy. The first part of this paper identifies the economic crisis that underlies financial turmoil, and the dangerous forms of amelioration being adopted by global and national elites; the second discusses characteristics of resistance (and crucial debates between radicals and moderates); and the third suggests areas of feasible financial reform that are vital to halting further socio-environmental-economic degradation, and that instead provide space for bottom-up solutions.

Like all features of contemporary political economy, the outcome of the debate over international financial reform is not predetermined. It will instead reflect the outcome of a power struggle. The progressive churches of Europe gathered here are amongst those ideally situated to affect this outcome. The international progressive movement has long celebrated your history of interventions on behalf of social justice (such as in relation to anti-apartheid strategies), your desire to see human and ecological values restored to a higher precedent than profit, and your ability to affect the discourses of ordinary Europeans, and in turn, of elite rulers. The prospect that progressive church-based movements in Europe will unite, strategically, with progressives in the Third World, such as the Jubilee South movement, can only strengthen the forces of social advancement. For this reason, I will lay out a structural analysis of why and how these progressive forces can take advantage of the ongoing international crisis so as to ensure development finance serves peoples and environments, rather than continuing to destroy them.

Yet the problem ran far deeper than the neoliberal ideology or the international economic management techniques adopted to redistribute resources--`excess profits'--from poor to rich, from producers to financiers, from South to North. The underlying global economic problem of the late twentieth century can be traced to enlarging gluts of industrial and consumer goods (`overproduction’), heightened competition across the globe, and a fall in the rate of profit in productive enterprises (as distinct from financial/commercial firms) across the advanced industrial countries, which in turn generated a variety of responses. These crisis tendencies have long been shifted and stalled, so that their worst effects are displaced to those peoples and environments with less capacity to resist. Thus the international financial and trading systems have become more frenetic in reordering our geographical and temporal relations, and in assuring the environment's intensified degradation.

Crisis displacement means, above all, the ability of powerful elements within the global economy to move their problems around, across space and time. Dramatic flows of foreign direct fixed-investments since the 1960s helped to shift production sites to settings more conducive to exploitation and ecological despoilation (particularly East Asia and a few other sites of Third World industrialisation). The 1980s-90s witnessed a shift of capital flows mainly into financial/trade circuits. Rather than leveling global processes, however, the investment and trade patterns generated amplified unevenness and an overall worsening of the tendency to overproduction.

When accompanied by excessive speculation as financiers achieved greater power and mobility during the 1980s-90s, the crisis tendencies were reflected in a wave of partial bubble-bursts. The possibility of a more decisive 1929-33-type global payments crash was always present, though it has been forestalled thanks to economic management techniques coordinated mainly from Washington. Shifting and stalling economic crisis has always, throughout the history of modern boom-bust cycles, been a matter of geopolitical power. From around 1980, a formidable power bloc--the `Wall Street-Treasury Complex' (as the US Republican/Democratic loyalty to NY financiers has been termed by even conservative economist Jagdish Baghwati) and the Bretton Woods Institutions, supported by Britain's City of London and Tory/Labour ruling parties, in conjunction with the Frankfurt banks and the Kohl and post-Lafontein SPD governments--emerged to stall the economic crisis through unprecedented credit creation, and to shift problems elsewhere through a variety of techniques.

Although environmental and social costs have intensified through worsening uneven global development--to the point where the whole system often appears unsustainable and talk of a backlash against globalisation is now common--the limits of the strategy are most obvious when we consider the periodic expansion and contraction of global debt and speculative bubbles, which are not merely a recent phenomenon but that instead appear to have occurred periodically throughout capitalism's last two centuries. In the most recent quarter-century of financial bubbling, high short-term returns from speculative markets and from high interest rates paid on financial assets were based, to some extent, upon the power of private financiers to dictate (allegedly `independent') central banks' policy. Another part of financial profit has come from merely speculative activity, such as in the foreign exchange markets.

No corner of the earth has been exempt from the way in which international economic crisis has been moved, delayed, and in the process amplified. Rather than resolving the underlying contradictions, elite interests centred in Washington have made the deep-seated problems harder to address in a rational, structured way. The global power relations that have emerged in the process make it all the more difficult for us to imagine reforms within a regulatory framework that can be sustained.

In short, the self-interest of those that wield the power to impose reforms on international financial markets is to continue stalling, shifting and ultimately amplifying the crisis. Even if unintentionally so, Washington's reforms are self-destructive, because they make the most harmful characteristics of the system more pervasive, and they weaken barriers to resist global financial flows.

Consider some examples of how the system was `reformed’ at the peak of the crisis two years ago, and in subsequent months. Authorities could claim to have staved off disaster through measures that included:

As we will see below, reforms also included half-hearted attempts by Wolfensohn and his allies to co-opt oppositional movements, until in late 1999 these became overwhelming. Indeed the extremely unsatisfying and partial character of reforms was unveiled by the fact that the establishment itself did not agree on the way forward. Some of the disagreements were petty, but others underlined the Washington institutions' inability to foresee financial crisis and manage it less painfully. A major debate emerged in early 2000 over the future of the IMF and Bank, as the US congressional commission chaired by conservative economist Alan Meltzer began advocating dramatic IMF/Bank downsizing, which was in turn opposed by the extremely powerful US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers. In the wake of allegations of massive corruption associated with IMF loans to Russia and other panic-stricken countries during the late 1990s, a bruising battle then emerged over who would succeed IMF managing director Camdessus, with Summers vetoing one German candidate prior to the acceptance of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development head Horst Koehler.

Whether or not Summers (or his successor if George W. Bush wins the November 2000 presidential election) acted indecently in relation to fellow elites is beside the point. More importantly, his ideological dogmatism in favour of free-market economics was unveiled when Joseph Stiglitz was effectively fired from the job of Bank Chief Economist in late 1999. By that point, the Washington Consensus ideology was discredited thoroughly, and for a brief while it appeared that the Bank's farcical interpretation of the East Asian Miracle, as debunked by Robert Wade, would be reversed by the 1997 arrival of an honest and open-minded chief economist, Stiglitz, from service as frustrated chief of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. But even though Stiglitz offered very little substantive policy change in his `information-theoretic' critique of market imperfections, and even though his `Post-Washington Consensus' did not break from most neoliberal shibboleths, he was roundly despised by IMF and US Treasury staff. Within 30 months, after robust debates over IMF competence, he was pushed overboard. Stiglitz diplomatically claimed to have jumped ship, in order to have more freedom to launch his critiques--such as a scathing New Republic attack in April in which he slated `third-rank economists from first-rate universities.' But according to a reliable Bank insider, US Treasury Secretary `Summers made it clear that if Wolfensohn wanted a second term as World Bank president--to start on June 1, 2000--Stiglitz had to go.' One of Stiglitz's key allies, Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University, resigned angrily in June 2000 when Summers reportedly censored parts of his World Development Report 2000: Poverty because it diverged from the Washington Consensus.

The limits of `their' reforms have been repeatedly unveiled. Though many observers (including George Soros) may argue that international financial volatility was mitigated after East Asia began to recover in 1999, there are plenty of counterexamples that suggest the international financial turmoil remains serious: the Euro (down 25% against the dollar since its 1999 launch); the price of oil (up over 200% against 1999 lows); and the stock market valuation of US high-tech stocks (down 40% over a few months in 2000). These represent cases of dramatic inflows and outflows of capital in search of profit. Amongst the victims were major firms (e.g., Intel and Apple, which lost $100 billion and 50% of their share values, respectively, during two bad days) and rich individuals (Bill Gates' personal wealth went from a high of around $100 billion to less than $60 billion over a few weeks). But the processes we are concerned with have invariably worsened: intensifying oppression of low-income people and particularly vulnerable groups in society, and environmental degradation.

We should learn a strategic lesson from the last quarter century. Central to the success of international banks' power to shift the costs of the crisis back to Southern workers, pensioners, peasants, women and the environment, was the role of the IMF and Bank, which cushioned bankers from their bad loans, politically and financially. In addition, geopolitics evolved over this period, for the US government had reacted to the 1960s-70s Southern uprisings by levying formidable defeats on still vital revolutionary movements during the 1980s (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Southern Africa, Iran), and this included pressure exerted through the IMF and Bank. The defeat of progressive opposition included suppression of hundreds of often anarchic IMF Riots which were the domestic outcome of IMF and Bank structural adjustment programmes from the early 1980s. Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina each witnessed a dozen major anti-austerity urban protests during the 1980s; repeated uprisings were experienced in the cities of Chile, Ecuador, the Philippines, then-Zaire, Zambia, Jamaica, Morocco, Sudan, and the Dominican Republic; in Venezuela in 1989, security forces killed more than 600 people involved in a single IMF Riot; and there were isolated incidents in dozens of other countries. In the early 1990s, these countries were joined by India, Albania, Nepal, Iran, Ivory Coast, Niger and Zimbabwe, where large-scale IMF riots broke out.

Power had shifted so dramatically during the 1980s-90s that the variety of Southern/Eastern leaders who acquired control of states through strong popular mandates (with very different ideologies, to be sure) surprised their supporters when it came to macroeconomic policy, which closely followed the Washington Consensus: amongst others, Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela (South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Musoveni (Uganda), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Nujoma (Namibia), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland) and Yeltsin (Russia).

The defeats of revolutionary nationalists and discouragement of their emulation, the milking of vast Southern resources to repay foreign debt or simply line the offshore bank accounts of Cold-War client compradors via exchange-control liberalisation, and the general surrender of most progressive political parties in the South to Washington's economic ways, set the terrain for the return of private capital to selected middle-income locations. After the 1980s debt crisis had dried up North-South sovereign loan flows, the 1990s global economic recovery was boosted by the forced opening of most countries' capital accounts, again as part of structural adjustment conditions for debt rescheduling. Likewise, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Uruguay Round, followed in 1995 by the inauguration of the WTO, forced down tariff barriers yet further. But this generated another dramatic burst of overproduction, debt and financial overinvestment, which in turn soon stood exposed in an arc of emerging markets crises that ran from Mexico and other Latin countries (early 1995), through South Africa (early 1996 and mid-1998), Southeast Asia (1997-98), South Korea (early 1998), Russia (periodic but especially mid-1998), Brazil and Ecuador (early 1999). In 1997-99 alone, preventing contagion from these latter crises required $200 billion in bailout funds from the IMF, which raised Third World debt over the $2 trillion mark, allowed Northern investors an exit and gave the IMF power to enforce unprecedented austerity measures.

In sum, in their partial reform of the international system, the IMF and Bank, accompanied by the WTO, successfully pushed the costs of crisis onto Southern people and environments. They bailed out Northern investors. And they established a neoliberal utopia of export-led growth via wage restraint and the demise of the social wage. In reducing nation-state sovereignty, they sought the extinction of capital controls, domestic financial regulation, trade protection, proactive industrial development strategies, progressive taxation, social welfare and most social subsidies.

None of this proved successful, however, and ongoing financial volatility demonstrates that the deep structural crisis has not been resolved. Notwithstanding radical changes in technology and more sophisticated labour-control systems, there has appeared no new `post-Fordist' `regime of accumulation' on the horizon to kickstart a new round of global growth, as some argue did US-led `Fordism' after devaluations visited by the Great Depression and World War II. And because displacement of crises does not substitute for more thorough-going restructuring, no fundamental resolution of the ongoing overproduction problem can be expected. Elites have, simply, run out of systemic reform options, and resort instead to bailing each other out.

Enter now, stage left, the radicals accused of fomenting anarchy and chaos: the Seattle, Washington and Prague protesters, and kindred spirits who did not receive the same media attention even if their activism was, in various Third World settings, just as impressive. Their argument is simple: it is the sustained anarchy, chaos and displacement thereof to the vulnerable of the world, that requires our most urgent attention. How appropriate it is, therefore, that progressive activists committed to socio-economic and environmental justice eventually overcame important subjective and objective barriers to battling the IMF, Bank and WTO, and began the new century with a bid to close them down.

The global movement has indeed gained the right to call itself such, not only because masses have turned out at Northern events, but because these now resonate so well with even larger, if often unreported, organic struggles underway across the rest of the world, including Africa. Whether located in obscure Third World cities or the centres of global commerce, the struggles increasingly intersect, because they focus on virtually identical opponents: the agencies and representatives of neoliberal capitalism--global, regional, national or local. Hence the very notion `anti-globalization' to describe the movement is faintly ridiculous, in view of international activist mobility, cultural and technological diffusion, advances in communications and transport, and economic integration which provide activists with pervasive targets. All of these features are vital prerequisites for the present upsurge of dissent.

In order to dissect the politics associated with just one crucial example, consider the circumstances of mid-April 2000 in Washington, when an estimated 30,000 activists honed in on an obscure IMF/Bank spring meeting attended by only a few hundred officials. Although in Berlin (1988) and Madrid (1994), previous IMF/Bank annual meetings attracted huge crowds of demonstrators, the mass of the US population had never cared much about the Bretton Woods Institutions. Likewise, US leftists long suffered an inward-gazing history, broken only occasionally by solidarity struggles against Spanish fascism, the Vietnam War, apartheid and Central American terror. Conditions for activism against global-scale institutions were notoriously lacking in Cold War Washington, until trade unions and the Ralph Nader organisation Public Citizen put the Seattle WTO meeting on the protest map on November 30, 1999.

A closer examination of Washington's opponents is in order. Both the `N30' and `A16' protests broadened and deepened the existing leftwing but technicist critiques of the WTO, IMF and Bank. The WTO attracted domestic dissent partly on the basis of its explicit threat to US environmental and labour standards. Mass consciousness against globalisation was already increasing dramatically, in the wake of specific campaigns against, amongst others, oil companies, textile/clothing sweatshops, fast-food outlets, shoe firms, chemical and biotech companies, advertising agencies, and even coffeehouse chains. Key events that had earlier brought large numbers together in coalition included the North American Free Trade Agreement debate in 1993, the Vancouver protest against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in 1997, successful fights against Clinton's desired Fast-Track Trade Negotiating Authority in 1997 and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998.

Yet these precursors were relatively sporadic and disconnected from the base. And as was often remarked, the ideological diversity of the protesters was sometimes a major obstacle. While there remained scant basis for protest coordination, and while the particular demonstrations were mainly defensive--`against' some or other attack upon basic socio-economic and democratic rights--the exuberance would surely, eventually, cohere in programmatic terms. At some point, the movement would throw up not only its own `for' term--as did the Zapatistas, who served as the main Southern catalyst for many Northerners' rebellious spirit, with their Intergalactic Encounters For Humanity, Against Neoliberalism--but also a rough outline of the strategy and alliances needed to realise more universal ambitions, transcendent of communitarianism.

Nevertheless, even if they were defensive in character, the first round of eruptions enjoyed a clear orientation. Protests came down explicitly against large corporations, commodification of daily life, commercialisation of culture, destruction of indigenous livelihoods, intensification of patriarchy, fouling of the environment, and the construction of undemocratic, world-state institutions in Washington and Geneva. The movement was, simply, against uneven capitalist development, in its purest, most international, hyper-neoliberal stage.

What it was for could be sensed only through exploring the organic demands that arise from myriad concrete struggles: affordable drinking water in Bolivian cities and historic systems of irrigation in the Thai countryside, jobs in a pseudo-liberated Johannesburg and energy in oil-rich Lagos, a softer economic landing in Seoul, transparency in Washington, community in London, national economic sovereignty in New Delhi, and so forth. African experiences were already beginning to mediate this search, so that twenty-first century human values could be translated more effectively into global-scale demands.

Although at the time of writing (November 2000) it is too early to say with certainty, it would appear that the `decommodification' and `destratification' of basic goods/services, respect for ethnic identity and indigenous culture, deracialised and degendered access to resources, and recognition of ecological integrity, would all have to be intertwined threads in whatever programmatic fabric is ultimately woven. It was evident, all things considered, that from an existing patchwork quilt of diverse struggles, a formidable movement for social justice had emerged to engage simultaneously in international relationship-building, `policy advocacy' (concrete socio-economic demands), local empowerment, and militant campaigning for national democratic processes to surmount the barriers erected by both domestic state bureaucrats and Washington's financial bureaucrats.

Here, I want to argue, Africa was not necessarily left behind, `marginalised' from globalisation, but instead was near or at the cutting edge. To these ends, many African groups themselves posited, shutting down the WTO, IMF and Bank was a logical strategy to bring the movement together at the international scale, so that its particular components were more free and powerful to carry through their local projects. Not constrained, at this stage, by a typical party-political fetish of taking state power, the movement's leading cadres would probably have to await more opportune conditions before making either an electoral or insurgent run at their own states (whether at national, provincial or municipal scales). Once having done so, they would also have to remember that top-down radical reforms must always be conjoined with constant pressure from mass-democratic labour, community and related organisations emanating from below. This was the lesson already emanating from possibly the most advanced site of struggle in Africa, Zimbabwe, where oppositional (`Movement for Democratic Change') party-political and civil-society strategies were just as easily diverging as converging, as discourses moved from liberal political rights to socio-economic redistribution.

At the global scale, likewise, there was a turn from NGO jaw-jaw sessions over potential reforms of the Bank and IMF, to radical activism. Until 2000, in fact, the merits of abolishing the IMF and Bank were outside the bounds of acceptable discussion. The Economist captured at least something of Bank president James Wolfensohn's charm, shortly after Seattle:

Yet in the wake of Seattle and a Johannesburg meeting of the progressive Jubilee South movement, slumbering Washington left-technocrats awoke with a start. The 50 Years is Enough coalition took ever tougher positions and injected excellent content into the imagery and slogans of the A16 actions: `Defund the Fund, Bankrupt the Bank and Dump the Debt!' Just as importantly, the mass-popular outpourings in Seattle, Washington and Prague turned the broader relationship between NGO strategists and grassroots campaigners on its head.

The more radical activists from the base increasingly served not just as hands and feet, but also as the movement's eyes, ears and brains. As a result, logistical struggles against the Washington centres of international financial power will transpire again with even more ferocious confrontations likely. After Prague was disrupted, Wolfensohn already began to publicly ask whether it is possible--and safe--to hold such meetings in future, given the persistence of the demonstrators.

But the movement's strategies are not based solely upon convening large numbers of people outside gatherings of important bureaucrats. The maturing political analysis leaves the biggest impression. Thus in April, in Washington, it could not have escaped the notice of mainstream organisations--trade unions, big environmental groups and the development NGOs--that the events which most angrily attacked the IMF and the Bank, attracted by far the most people of any events during the week of protest (even though April 16 had the least institutional backing). The direct action and parallel rally of the Mobilization for Global Justice represented the core sentiments of the growing movement. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the call to `Defund the Fund, Break the Bank and Dump the Debt' trumped the weaker Jubilee 2000 USA call for limited debt relief with strings attached. The same radical sentiments were evident in Prague, where at the famous debate within the Castle on September 23, Wolfensohn, IMF managing director Horst Kohler and the institutions' chairperson from South Africa, finance minister Trevor Manuel, were unable to dissuade key progressive spokespeople from maintaining the call for abolition.

Abolition as a strategy pursued through the `World Bank Bonds Boycott' tactic, as explained below, quickly generated impressive momentum, with three major US West Coast cities (Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco) committing not to buy the bonds within the first six months of the campaign. The challenge was to reflect such militancy within a programmatic vision of `development' beyond what was on offer, i.e., to seek out decommodified, destratified, degendered and environmentally-responsible development strategies.

It is worth dwelling on the fact, however, that a large body of more conservative Washington NGOs, environmental lobbies and development think-tanks--many of which have extensive African operations and partners--continued to provide friction within this progress. To illustrate, the `Interaction 22' grouping of US-based NGOs, all funded by the neoliberal US Agency for International Development, wrote a letter to World Bank president James Wolfensohn on April 14, 2000, expressing `deep concern at the impression created by some of our NGO colleagues in the streets this week that the World Bank and the IMF are at serious loggerheads with the entire not-for-profit community... We have a very different perspective on recent positive directions taken by the Bank.' Inside the Bank, chief NGO liaison John Clark--formerly a leading Bank critic based at Oxfam UK--issued an email memo to colleagues a few days later, ridiculing Interaction for being `much less skeptical about these reforms than most of us inside the Bank!' However, pursuing triage, he also identified what he termed a `dilemma' for a middle-ground group of NGOs:

Reformers and accommodationists could claim a small degree of concrete progress, although they were attacked not only from the left but from the populist right. By early 2000, two controversial Clinton administration trade deals (the US-China agreement and Africa Growth and Opportunity Act) faced stiff opposition, and the corporatist Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations broke apart thanks to a walkout by justifiably-frustrated leaders of the AFL-CIO US trade union centre. Thus Business Week reported that nine out of ten US residents polled labeled themselves either `fair traders' or `protectionist,' with just one in ten self-identifying as a `free trader.' Clinton's trade policy was generally understood, according to the main survey on the topic, to serve the interests of multinational corporations `too much' (according to 54% of respondents) and working Americans `too little' (according to 72%).

In this unusual US context, the core of the movement became radicalised. Seattle protest logistics distinguished stodgy, suited leaders from front-line labour, social and environmental movement activists. Whether the WTO should be a site of `reform'--usually through introducing social, labour and environmental conditions, known as `Social Clauses,' to trade agreements--was itself up for fierce debate. Although some Southern trade unions backed the Social Clause strategy through their (often subordinate) role in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, many influential Southern social-movement leftists condemned it for leaving in place the existing anti-democratic structure of the international trading system. To improve the WTO, they argued, would simply amplify imperialist power relations. The point, instead, should be to attack the power that the WTO has to overrule and undermine international agreements and national laws that protect human rights and the environment (for example, a selective-procurement law in Massachusetts, directed against Burma and ruled WTO-illegal), and to find effective means to defend these rights.

Resolving this debate would not be easy, but as a first principle it was posited that labour internationalism is violated by increasing or preserving the ambit of the WTO. Put most strongly, a working class should never call forth the geopolitical and economic power of an oppressor nation against an oppressed nation, without the consent and indeed request of the people most affected. Thus it is easy to support boycotts against apartheid-era South Africa, Haiti during Aristide's early 1990s exile, and contemporary Burma--for whom sanctions invoked by popular, democratic movements translate into a strategic attack on local oppressors--but impossible to justify a strategy of Social Clauses enforced by the WTO without the direct participation, and on-off control switch in the hands, of those affected.

With or without Bill Clinton's faux support for the Social Clause (announced in the immediate wake of the Seattle protests), his administration's efforts to politically rehabilitate the `free trade' agenda were to some extent blocked by a domestic US coalition led by organised labour and environmentalists. In the run-up to Seattle, progressives gained momentum by preventing rapid investment liberalisation through the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Conservative forces within the AFL-CIO failed to inject Clauses into the Clinton Administration's recent Africa and China trade pacts (the Congress of South African Trade Unions followed a similar logic and strategy, notwithstanding important conflicts with Southern African trade unions). Preferable to tinkering with trade deals and the WTO was be a strategy of attacking either particular corporations consistent with solidarity-campaigning principles, or passing restraining legislation against transnational corporations similar in scope to the 1977 US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Similarly, the international movement for `debt relief' was divided between those in Jubilee 2000's US, British, German and Japanese networks who accepted the framework imposed by the IMF, Bank and G-8 countries and those in `Jubilee South' and allied Northern groups (especially Jubilee Canada) who wished to break open that framework. Leftwing activists viewed campaigns against debt as inextricably linked to fighting structural adjustment--whether at national policy level or in very direct forms such as municipal utilities privatisation--and reducing the power of the IMF and World Bank. The leading African Jubilee proponents tended to be more structuralist and also more militant (especially chapters in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Malawi). When the Jubilee 2000 `South Summit' convened in Johannesburg in November 1999, the best social movement leaders and activists from Africa met partners from around the Third World, and resolved to pressure their respective national leaders to collectively repudiate the debt. The Jubilee Summit also called for the closure of the IMF and World Bank.

The radical critics also discounted most reforms achieved to date. Some changes, like increased transparency and lip-service participation with civil society, were easily ignored or manipulated. After years of criticism about bad projects, for example, a `World Bank Inspection Panel' was established within the Bank. Its meagre oversight power was soon whittled back after it made a few telling criticisms of South governments, and in any case the Panel failed to critically examine key projects in which Bank malfeasance was obvious. Other apparent gains in the environmental and gender-and-development spheres were corrupted immediately by neoliberalism, whether in pushing women's microcredit as a safety-net for defunded social policy, or in commodifying natural ecological processes. Environmental impact assessments might be added to projects at the last minute, but rarely halted the approval of new hydrocarbon power plants which soon made the Bank the world's leading contributor to global warming. Lawrence Summers as Bank chief economist was ironic, perhaps, but spot on when remarking in the infamous internal memo leaked to The Economist prior to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, `I think the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste on the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up that.' Another telling experience was that of Herman Daly, the creative environmental economist who left the Bank's employ greatly disgruntled.

In short, as already argued above, the reforms of the IMF/Bank pushed by the earlier generation of insider NGOs clearly didn't work, as serious reformers (like Stiglitz) were bounced or quit in disgust. The gambit that Wolfensohn hoped would pacify leftist demonstrators--an October 1999 announcement of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as central to future IMF/Bank activity in developing countries--was revealed as a scam in May 2000. In the institution's own main pilot case, according to an NGO report-back, `The IMF resident representative in Bolivia remarked that although the PRSP would take civil society's recommendations into account, the macroeconomic targets previously agreed to by the Bolivian government were by no means open to negotiation... The presenters of this macroeconomic model did not adequately respond to questions from the audience on how their approach differs at all from the past.'

A month earlier, at the height of the Bolivian water privatisation crisis (generated by explicit Bank advice which sent water prices soaring to more than a quarter of a typical household wage packet), Wolfensohn himself unveiled his own lack of comprehension. `The biggest problem with water is the wastage of water through lack of charging,' said Wolfensohn on April 12 at a press conference when asked about the Bank's role in the Cochabamba crisis. `In the riots that you had in Bolivia--which, I'm happy to say, are now quieting down--it was about a new dam, a new power, in which the Bank on this occasion had nothing to do.' All components of his answer were fallacious, and the leader of the Cochabamba protests, trade unionist Oscar Olivera, took the opportunity in October, in the wake of a new round of national protest against Bretton Woods-imposed austerity, to join several South Africans in a North American tour to support the World Bank Bonds Boycott.

But beyond simply closing the main institutions of financial oppression, what hints are emerging about the way progressives--especially those most affected by global crisis, based in Africa--are demanding systemic change? What organic struggles have emerged around international financial issues, and what do they tell us about more radical reforms that would not simply displace problems, but truly resolve them?

After making radical political-economic demands--in favour of inward-oriented, basic-needs development strategies that promote regional integration rather than disintegration (as is happening through free trade under South Africa's domination)--the Network warned,

The main point to make here, is not that these and other important networks (e.g., labour-related, health equity specialists, numerous types of environmentalists, and so on) advanced strong, mature, explicitly `post-nationalist' ideological statements about the debt, trade and related economic oppressions. What is perhaps of greater interest is that instead of working merely through NGO-type circuits, they increasingly tied their work to militant street action.

In the past, in contrast, rather than synthesising with mass protest, some local activities undertaken by grassroots groups too easily fell into the trap of neoliberal economic policies. This was a logical corollary to the rise of `civil society' discourses, and was not unique to Africa by any means. Since the 1980s, Claude Ake warned (in a book completed just prior to his 1996 death),

Thus by the early 1990s, two out of five World Bank projects involved NGOs (including well over half in Africa), and in projects involving population, nutrition, primary health care, and small enterprise, the ratio rose to more than four out of five. In his seminal 1995 study, Paul Nelson found that NGOs were `primarily implementors of project components designed by World Bank and government officials.' Moreover, especially since an upsurge in such participation began in 1988, NGOs were often been used to `deliver compensatory services to soften the effects of an adjustment plan'; in some cases the NGOs were not even pre-existing but were `custom-built for projects' and hence could `neither sustain themselves nor represent poor people's interests effectively.'

But from a recent era in which `Co-Opted NGOs'--CoNGOs, as they were termed--happily picked up crumbs from the neoliberal table, the early twenty-first century heralded a return to dominance by radical, people's-movement NGOs. In South Africa, the SA Non-Governmental Organisation Coalition deserved this recognition, as did allied think-tanks and campaigning groups currently fighting for free access to anti-retroviral drugs, water, electricity and the like.

The greatest potential in all of this, however, was the increasing correlation of issue-development by social, environmental and labour organisations, with mass, lumpen-proletarian protest. The main scholars of the IMF Riot, Walton and Seddon, argued that the shrinkage of the state under conditions of structural adjustment generated, by the 1980s, a `broader trend toward the decline of clientism and, conversely, the growing autonomy of urban low-income groups.' As states lost their patronage capacity to channel social surpluses to supporters, social movements cast off influences of corporatism and corruption associated with urban and rural civil society under populist regimes. Such autonomy contributed to more generalised political processes of self-enlightenment, with the potential for transcending spontaneous and unsustainable reactions to economic crisis, such as the IMF Riot. It is here that `rural-urban,' worker/lumpen, male/female and other vital alliances were finally being built, partly through using a `rights-based discourse' that in South Africa was responsible, as noted at the outset, for a grand upsurge of protest and social policy concessions.

What, then, did these experiences tell us about key targets, strategies, tactics and alliances, insofar as African grassroots inputs helped the international movement develop a more progressive, forward-looking consciousness?

To begin with targets, as the institutional expressions of international financial and commercial capital (led by Wall Street), the IMF, Bank and WTO provided the movement with an opportunity to both confront power in a concentrated form, and to unmask their deeper institutional meanings within world capitalism. Africa demonstrated this in many ways, from macroeconomics, to conditionality associated with debt relief, to local issues such as cost-recovery on basic-needs services. In addition to providing a big, visible focus for protesters working from a myriad of locations and situations, the IMF and Bank also generated feedback mechanisms that amplified the local struggles through their connectivity to the rest of the movement.

The need for solidarity around local IMF/Bank/WTO campaigns grew, the more that South struggles evolved into full-fledged attacks on the international institutions. Calls for the Bank/IMF to quit Seoul, New Delhi, Pretoria, Brasilia, Mexico City and the like were made regularly by local activists, and were rebuffed by the comprador elites holding local power. In somewhat more marginalised capitals, like Kuala Lumpur, Harare and Caracas, late 1990s and early 2000s government leaders echoed the activists' distaste for Northern bankers and Washington economists--although often for reasons that should be carefully and critically considered.

Thus there were two potential lines of solidarity: deepening international (North-South and South-South) popular movement unity, and explorations--using extreme care--of alliances with South states that needed the movement's support so as to achieve their own limited objectives.

To consider this last matter first, the question arose of how to ally with states potentially resisting neoliberalism. Here the answer could only be case-specific, and could only be firmly established once local progressive struggles were clearly understood and terrains of solidarity mapped out. Cuba and Venezuela represented instances where two leaders, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, attacked the IMF and Bank from a position of far greater integrity and popularity than, say, Malaysia and Zimbabwe where an entirely different logic was in play, namely the invocation of opportunistic populism by Mahathir Mohamad and Robert Mugabe so as to shore up local support.

And there were other cases--China, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan, for example--in which the retention of national sovereignty and rejection of Washington-Consensus financial/trade liberalisation advice, during the 1997-99 East Asian crisis, permitted a cushion against external shocks. Here, obviously pursuing reform at the national scale cannot be allowed to degenerate into nationalism and xenophobia: the Buchanan, le Pen and Haider agendas. To this end, preexisting nation-state economic tools serve as a basis for restoration of more thorough-going democratic processes, including a `development' trajectory appropriate to local needs and conditions, rather than one predetermined by Washington financiers. Even if insensitive to the profound environmental problems provoked by industry, Keynes was correct that in the economic realm, financial regulation--especially capital controls--and inward-oriented industrial modernisation were crucial to those processes, at a time that the balance of global forces precluded a serious effort at building an ostensibly progressive world state (based upon the United Nations' less damaging agencies) with substantive financial, trade and other regulatory responsibilities and powers. Instead of aspiring to utopian democratic global government through reform of the WTO, IMF, Bank, UN and other bodies, the movement more logically aimed to smash the embryonic world state.

Within the struggle to expand national democratic sovereignty, the progressive position was thus to fight for the most internationally-solidaristic framing of national concerns. This entailed rejecting a threatening external Other, and redirecting attention against elites at home whose international financial allies and neoliberal export-oriented rhetoric represented the more fundamental erosion of democracy, as well as of ecological balance and balanced economic development. Thus a key ingredient--political solidarity with radical movements--has to be added to Keynes' menu of international goals. The result is a bumper-sticker slogan with which the contemporary movement was quite comfortable: `globalisation of people, not of capital.' Not an `anti-globalisation' movement, then; instead, both anti-corporate-globalisation and anti-nation-statism in cases where compradors in finance ministries and central banks used globalisation as the excuse--`There is No Alternative'--for imposition of the neoliberal agenda.

This deserves a bit more reflection, for in July 2000, SA president Thabo Mbeki lectured the ruling African National Congress' National General Council that globalisation

The possibility for African or international grassroots movement alliances with Mbeki were thus evidently quite limited, in view of his operatives' clear hostility (as witnessed in the opening quotes). Even Nelson Mandela was heard to remark at the July 1998 Mercosur meetings of South American nations, `Globalisation is a phenomenon that we cannot deny. All we can do is accept it.'

There was, at the hard-right end of the ideological spectrum, a less quiescent and more activist nationalism. Allegations emerged within the movement, and outside from neoliberal armchair critics like New Republic magazine, that some of the key groups--Public Citizen and International Forum on Globalisation--drew upon dodgy funding sources (US textile barons and perfume merchants) and constructed indefensible tactical alliances. The US Right, after all, also mulled over abolition/reform. Aside from predictable rabble-rousers, even high-profile establishment conservatives began calling for the Bretton Woods Institutions' closure in the wake of hapless East Asian crisis management. Subsequently, the Republican-dominated Meltzer Commission reported to Congress in early 2000 that the Fund and Bank were so badly warped that they must shrivel, quite dramatically, before being straightened out. On such terrain, it was not unusual to find tactical intersections where Right met Left. These were certainly worth worrying about, although a key Left navigator--Nader advisor Rob Weissman of Multinational Monitor magazine--insisted in early 2000 that there remained merits to tactical collaboration: `For now, we're so relatively powerless compared to [the Fund and Bank], our primary mission is to restrain their power. So it's less important to focus on the day when we run global institutions than on limiting the harm that they do.'

Would the mass movement make a major difference to this pessimistic--but by no means inaccurate--assessment of the balance of forces? Instead of perpetual Capitol Hill battles over often-fruitless, controversial (wedge-issue) trade legislation and equivalent struggles in other parliamentary settings on terrain set by the neoliberals, it was time for a greater redirection of movement resources into both intensified base-building and international alliances. An example--the South Africa-based struggle against discriminatory pharmaceutical pricing by transnational corporations--suggests the scope of radical reforms that could be won, and highlights two features that would have to characterise most future struggles against neoliberalism: first, the principle of exclusion from the market, applied initially to critical `basic-needs' goods, and increasingly to more and more goods, bound up in the global capitalist trading system as a whole; and second, a temporary but critical convergence of interests between progressive-nationalists within a key semi-peripheral state, domestic social movements, and international movement allies.

The case was the campaign to uphold a 1997 South African law that permitted the parallel import and/or generic production of essential medicines, especially anti-retrovirals to combat HIV/AIDS, as a response to the enormous monopolistic markups charged by pharmaceutical firms and the extraordinary inequality in the South African health system. The law was challenged in court by the firms, and during 1998-99 was targeted by the United States for what the State Department termed a `full court press' against `the offending provisions.' A vigorous counter campaign began in mid-1999, combining protests by People with Aids and their supporters in South Africa (Treatment Action Campaign) against US consulates in Johannesburg and Cape Town, as well as in the US (the activist group ACT UP with its greatly-broadened racial and class diversity, supported by the Consumer Project on Technology) against Al Gore during early presidential campaign rallies. These in-your-face protests proved decisive for Gore, costing him more than his share of pharmaceutical corporate campaign contributions (which in the 1998 mid-term elections amounted to $12 million in soft money, Political Action Committee, and individual donations, with far more expected in 2000).

The anti-corporate, anti-US protests were successful. Gore reversed US policy under the pressure, and Clinton announced in May 2000 that the far-reaching Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights provisions of the Uruguay Round would not be enforced in the WTO against countries which manufactured generic substitutes or parallel-imported essential medicines. The case reflects the feasibility of excluding basic-needs goods from the WTO, but likewise the need to construct a tough political alliance to this end, consisting of Third World states (first South Africa, then Thailand) and militant social movements from the South and North. It is true that subsequently, Pretoria snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by deciding that at $13 million per year, it would be too expensive to provide HIV-positive pregnant woman with the zidovudine anti-viral even though approximately 30,000 lives would be saved by decreasing mother-child transmission. `Homegrown' fiscal constraint imposed indirectly through international financial markets and directly endorsed by the World Bank and IMF was the proximate cause. But it also became evident that without an operational AIDS-orphans programme, the newly-saved lives would not necessarily be sustainable, given the country's extremely high under-5 mortality rate. Partly to disguise this vicious policy, president Thabo Mbeki convened an absurd panel of scientists and `dissidents' (largely conservative ideologues) in April 2000 to question whether HIV was even related to AIDS. Life was cheap, even in South Africa's miracle democracy.

The other telling case at the turn of the century, combining local social resistance and international alliances, involved water. Again, the objective was to ensure exclusion from world trading/investment pressures. French and British water/services firms had led the commodification, corporatisation and privatisation of municipal water for many years, in part to cross-subsidise other high-risk ventures. The codification of this process at the March 2000 Hague World Water Forum was all the more important because of the high-profile role of World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin and the endorsement by the United Nations Development Programme. But too, resistance had been bubbling up in the water sector for many years, long before the Cochabamba riots. On the Narmada River, India's social movements became expert at periodically disrupting the Sardar Sarovar dam project, even kicking the World Bank out. But dam protesters were concerned not only with supply-side environmental and displacement problems.

The Bank was evidently not open to pro-poor reform in this area. This was demonstrated when, in Johannesburg's impoverished Alexandra Township, a leap forward was taken in 1998 with protest against a series of Lesotho dams that comprise Africa's largest-ever public works project. The demand-side implications of piping Lesotho water across a mountain range to Johannesburg include further hedonistic consumption by rich (mainly white) suburban users and a disproportionate increase in water tariffs for low-income users. Though the Alexandra protest--taking the form of a legal complaint to the Bank's Inspection Panel--was not immediately successful in its dual goal of curtailing further dam construction and changing Johannesburg water consumption habits (so cross-subsidies would pay for a free `lifeline' supply of 50 litres per day per person and also encourage water conservation), it injected class struggle into public environment and development debates in an unprecedented manner. In doing so, the technicist Alexandra complaint to the World Bank joined an increasing series of mass-popular, anti-privatisation, anti-commodification uprisings in South Africa, where neoliberal Bank policy advice on infrastructure has encouraged African National Congress municipal governments to cut off low-income residents' water supplies in a manner that even the apartheid regime did not dare. As in the case of essential drugs, the cost of supplying basic needs to those who need them was eminently affordable (achievable by raising fees on hedonistic consumers by an average of 5%). But the problem, as noted at the outset of this paper, was the policy to price water increasingly at marginal cost.

In these cases, the alliances have been far stronger between local activists and international allies (including petit-bourgeois technocrats from inside-Beltway NGOs) than they have with local officials. It is because class conflict in national settings suffering neoliberalism is far more likely than a momentary convergence of interests between radical grassroots organisations and local elites that the growing international movement has to reach out even deeper, and to maintain an air of skepticism about Havana statements by G-77 elites.

Getting the prices wrong is not only a morally essential strategy, to assure universal access to water and other basic goods, it also often works in vulgar economic terms if applied intelligently. This was as true in high-growth, authoritarian sites as diverse as Korea (1955-63) and Rhodesia (1965-74), as in the industrialisation era of the East Bloc. Any such development strategy that conflicts with the Washington Consensus will, as Keynes advised, rely far more on resources drawn from domestic sources, including halting capital flight through tough exchange controls, directed credit and perhaps even nationalised banks, interest rate subsidies to promote key branches of production and consumption, and various other forms of financial repression. Beyond such nationally-grounded projects, lies the idea, as Samir Amin advocates, of `regionalisation aiming at the building of a polycentric world,' necessarily based upon emerging `grassroots labour-popular social hegemonies.' How to get from here to there through genuine shopfloor/grassroots empowerment rather than through standard modes of populist regime-building is subject to enormous debate. Nevertheless, the syntheses of so many anti-neoliberal outbursts across the world suggests that the movement is achieving sufficient maturity to no longer become confused or coopted by ineffectual reformism at the global, national or local scales.

What we can establish, in short, is a double challenge for those aiming to advance social progress: the need for critique of the neoliberal Washington Consensus as a pure form of free-market economic doctrine with all that this entails, and for the universal targeting of the multilateral institutions that are the most direct sites of the command/control functions that subordinate so much of the world to neoliberalism. In this spirit, Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein posited in their decade-old book Anti-Systemic Movements that the most serious challenge to neoliberal capitalism (which, after all, lies behind the IMF, Bank, WTO and power politics), occurs when `popular movements join forces across borders (and continents) to have their respective state officials abrogate those relations of the interstate system through which the pressure is conveyed.'

If indeed this strategy has merit, the Seattle and Washington demonstrations--and many other moments in the movement's recent growth--helped break the hammerlock of the greatest tool of repression: the belief that nothing can be done. In coming months, not only will every major meeting and gathering of the major powers become a site of torment for global elites, coordination will also intensify across the globe in support of `abolitionist reforms' that reduce the power and resources of the global institutions (such as blocking the World Bank's role in the privatisation of education, shutting down egregious projects such as the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, delinking `debt relief' from IMF/Bank policies, and separating international aid and credit from compliance with the same policies). Indeed, decommissioning the Bretton Woods institutions through a mass-popular defunding strategy is the culmination of this line of attack. As noted above, such a struggle is already underway, not only by pressing parliaments to reject periodic recapitalisation (bailout) requests from Washington, but more importantly through the World Bank Bonds Boycott which aims to take away the Bank's AAA bond rating through anti-apartheid-style `divestment' campaigns. Municipalities, churches, union pension funds, university endowments and individuals with investments that include an international portfolio component are now costlessly informing their fund managers to avoid buying Bank bonds, whose decline in value once the strategy unfolds will in any case persuade managers to boycott the Bank simply because of their own fiduciary responsibility.

Susan George's mock Lugano Report sums up nicely the necessity of the Bretton Woods Institutions for elite crisis management:

For these reasons, in the context of sustained structural crisis and displacement (not resolution), the necessity--and feasibility--of closing the institutions as a first relatively simultaneous step towards a deeper, international anti-capitalist project is convincing. For here, what David Harvey terms the `global and universal taken together' is being daily devised and controlled by large-scale financial and commercial capitals and their multilateral institutional instruments in Washington and Geneva (albeit mediated by the US Treasury Secretary and US Trade Representative). It is here, too, that the challenge, Harvey argues, lies in transcending two typical dead-end responses by anti-globalisation activists: `to regret the passing of the old order and to call for the restoration of past values (religious, cultural, national solidarities, or whatever)'; and similarly `to pursue the utopian vision of some kind of communitarianism (including movements of national redemption as an answer to the alienations and abstractions of a globalising political economy and culture)... sometimes appealing to some sort of political mythology laced with nostalgia for a golden age of organic community.' These won't do: `The third path is to take globalisation seriously and make universal claims of precisely the sort that the Zapatistas have advanced from their mountainous retreats in Southern Mexico. These claims rest firmly on local experience but operate more dialectically in relation to globalisation.'

The Zapatistas' alliances with international social movements are a model along these lines. But so too, the Zapatistas are distinctly radical-democratic in making short-term demands upon their nation-state to deliver the goods--and tellingly, when this is not forthcoming due to neoliberalism, Zapatista self-activity takes forms such as liberating electricity from the pylons that cross Chiapas, invading underutilised ranches and plantations, and declaring municipal autonomy in dozens of sites of community struggle. For the rest of us, working in solidarity with such Southern rebellions and in self-interest, too, the next common target appears local, global and universal taken together: the IMF, Bank and WTO. A prerequisite to international social justice is to fell the agencies which most directly negate our claims of universal access to decommodified, destratified, degendered and environmentally-responsible `rights' such as essential drugs and clean water.

And what then? What are the necessary follow-up arguments in favour of, as Keynes insisted, letting `finance be primarily national'? The following are three central points for debate:

These points we consider, to conclude.

If these strategies, tactics and institutional vehicles are broadly acceptable to the progressive movements of Southern countries, and if it can be shown that it is feasible to raise sufficient funding through such measures to offset (credit-related) flows of funds (i.e., not overseas development assistance, which could continue to flow), then a broader menu arises for activism associated with international finance, from progressives both South and North:

These measures would provide the space for the kind of domestic financial repression—especially state state interest rate subsidies, directed credit, prescribed asset requirements on institutional investors, community reinvestment mandates and other means of socialising financial capital—that will allow development to occur more equitably and sustainably.

How to get from here to there? Global deconstruction and national reconstruction may be a useful formula. To accomplish development, every nation-state in the world requires space out from under the boot of global financial capitalism, especially the spiked heel represented by Fund/Bank missions that so decisively squeeze and shift power relations at the domestic scale. And there are no shortage of national-scale class and political struggles. During the late 1990s, mass strikes by national workers' movements shook Nigeria, Indonesia, Paraguay, Taiwan (1994); Bolivia, Canada, France (1995); Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Greece, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Venezuela (1996); Belgium, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, South Korea (1997); and many other important sites of East Asian, East European, African and Latin American proletarian suffering when neoliberal economic disaster intensified in 1998-99.

As for national reconstruction, there are many paths. All of you gathered in this conference would prefer bottom-up strategies to the kind of top-down paths represented by authoritarians like Mahathir Mohamad. The combination of top-down and bottom-up chosen by the Venezuelan people may, at present, be amongst the most advanced; but so too are many progressive civil societies across the world asserting the ability to wield power over financial reform agendas even when not formally in power. Those of Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico get much of the attention of the global movement. But others are emerging in the intersticies to contest the character not only of development, but of progressive finance for development.

These are just some of the considerations that may be helpful to take us from an entirely unsatisfactory situation, to one that more closely corresponds to the values and processes associated with the progressive European churches. I look forward to learning from you whether these arguments resonate clearly, and how if they do, they might be merged with our colleagues here today, so they become more than polemical and academic, and instead really translate into action.