These are confusing political times. For decades, “alter-globalists” resisted dictates from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Under these institutions of US-led global capitalism, states had to lift tariffs on imports and open up their markets for foreign companies. Active industrial policy was out of the question, and externally imposed “structural adjustment programs” spread havoc in the Global South. Millions lost their jobs as local manufacturers were driven out of business by global competition.
The contradiction: now the US government, previously the lead actor in globalization, is itself busily dismantling these institutions. As both American and European leaderships put up new barriers and their supremacy is threatened especially by Asian powers, the idea of capitalist globalization no longer rules the roost in the way it did at the turn of the millennium. So has the Trumpian right stolen the critique of globalization from its former socialist partisans?
In fact, there are essential differences between their criticisms, insists Filipino activist-intellectual Walden Bello. The idea of deglobalization, as conceived by him and his colleagues from the Global South, was about creating economies based on justice, which would reduce inequality and exploitation. It would definitely not protect and benefit the most powerful countries.
Born in 1945 in the Philippines, Bello studied sociology at Princeton University in the late 1960s, and it was there that he obtained his PhD. There he got into contact with the movement against the Vietnam War. Faced with American imperialism in the belly of the beast, Bello became a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), a Maoist force, and fought against the US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos in his homeland.
One of the most important lessons he learned was that institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund…
Auteur: Walden Bello
