Statement of the Organizing Committee for an International Council
Drafted by Ray Stevenson
The WTO's savage state-sponsored assault on the hundred thousand or more dissenters in Seattle, representing the very broad spectrum of democratic opposition, can be termed only as a re-declaration and intensification of class war on the workers and peoples of the world. It is a clear indicator of continuing plans by monopoly-capitalism (now better described as Transnational Corporate Power - the TNC's) to continue the savage, internecine and bloody war on those who stand opposed to TNC schemes for a world dominant position, backed by whatever means necessary to subdue their opponents. Years in the making, the Seattle savagery of Fascist thuggery carried on by State power can lead to no other conclusion.
In essence the TNC-monopoly "hidden agenda" we were treated to is the ongoing program of TNC powers to establish world wide, a complete CORPORATE economic, political and military brand of fascist control. This "agenda will be persisted in regardless of the Seattle failures to reach "agreement."
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On the basis of "agreement" reached by governments universally already under the economic control of TNC financial monopolists (who now control credits, thus maintaining a "choke-hold" on the throats of all Governments) the proposals put forward by WTO in Seattle would to all intents and purposes totally destroy the last fading vestiges of every national sovereignty... whether it is "democratically" exercised or not. It may be difficult for citizens anywhere to recognize the brutal fact that "Credit Managers" - Standard & Poors or Moodys, acting on behalf of the financial giants of Wall St., the Bank of England, or Deutschebank et al., exert a larger measure of control over their standards of life than do their "democratically elected" Governments. The record however, verifies that to be true, for the simple reason that no Government can operate today without the blessings of these masters and manipulators of credits, debt, loans and investments. Policies and programs of all elected Governments conform to their demands on pain of withholding credits. The finance capital masters wield a hidden, but irresistibly effective whip hand in these matters. Governments must conform!!
At stake are all manner of often indefinite human, labour, ecological and/or democratic rights won in battles during years of struggle by workers and people everywhere. As the century ends, national sovereignty and other rights are already severely curtailed by TNC dominance. Equally, the teeming majorities of the world where such rights never existed in reality suffer and groan under military, often corrupt rule (controlled in turn by the TNC's) and super-exploitation of all resources, both human and natural. Theirs is a new form of economic colonization at the hands of the TNC (mostly foreign) masters.
National sovereignty and self-rule now teeter on the brink of destruction and elimination, whether in Malaysia, Europe, South America... or yes in Canada and the United States, the "home" of TNC "Free Trade" predatory actions. The TNC's in this world are everywhere, dominant and threatening, without mercy as the 20th century grinds to its poverty ridden and disease plagued end... the creature of monopoly capitalism.
Future promise by TNC mob was made crystal clear on the streets of Seattle as has been shown in cities and countries around the world during the 1990's. Ahead lies more savage, unremitting class war, brought by the TNC master on the backs and heads of humanity. Included, according to that menu, will be war... corruption, drug running, poverty and division of the people, all enhanced and multiplied by the total control of new technology, as well as the TNC control of public information and research, news and cultural activity.
Only organized resistance nationally and internationally can, or will curb the insatiable appetites of the TNC's for dominance and total political control. There is no other recipe or strategy that can reverse or halt their mindless march to doom.
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But if Seattle was a TNC redeclaration of class war, the heroic dissenters, including a refreshing "first-in-years" official presence of the U.S.-Canadian Trade Unions who joined hands with dissent and opposition to the TNC program around the world and encompassed literally tens of millions of people. Noteworthy was the West-coast shipping stoppage carried out by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. This is the same Union that during the U.S. war in Vietnam called for shipping embargoes on all war materials in order to end the war. They were then ignored by all and sundry in that TNC backed slaughter. They are not now ignored or sidelined for obvious reasons.
If we were so bold as to prognosticate, we believe the internal contradictions of TNC "globalized neo-fascism" will explode in their faces early in the 21st century, opening immense possibilities ahead for a new line of march by the people for the end of the decaying monopoly capitalist system with all its bestialities, inequities and horrors. TNC political and economic "globalization" cannot do other than create a new "working class and people's globalization," in spite of contradictory-difficult problems of the moment, which will blossom and flourish in undreamed forms of working class, peoples and international solidarity. That stands as the only real and possible road to survival of the species. The TNC alternatives have even now created a "late-in-the-day" scenario for humanity in terms of environmental and ecological survival. The fact of the internationally burgeoning concern and action by diverse groups worldwide brought to Seattle humanities demands to reverse the current monopoly created rape and jeopardizing of the only Mother Earth and home we have from suicidal capitalist activity. All this points us in the right direction. There are other massive multi- and transnational issues that in time will become focused and strengthen all struggles of the people everywhere. Seattle demonstrated that this "process" has already begun as have many other incidents in past years and months. Of particular note have been the massive demonstrations of European, Canadian and other people in farming industries. For the vast majority of humanity, an exploration lies just ahead, (if it has not already come on the agenda) for development of a system of Socialism as the means of wiping from the world, (over whatever protracted time is needed and whatever means are required) the monstrously bankrupt, cynically violent "system" that dominated the past century... most often to agonizing pain and sacrifices by an overly patient world-wide citizenry. The watershed dividing humanity from TNC doom to Socialist survival stands just off-stage. To the fore in this should stand a united working class and people of the Soviet land.
The WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, established in post World War II under the aegis of the historic victory over Nazism and the Axis powers. It was erected in those less fevered times of monopoly predatory actions, owing to the paramount role of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in that victory, and the progressive, forward-looking presence of the United Nations Organization to which the peoples of the world looked with profound hope. The purpose was to oversee, and where necessary regulate and influence or curb, predatory trade expansion and practice that was not beneficial to the member states. In fact for quite a long time it played something of a positive and constructive role, even under Cold War conditions and increasing international tensions.
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But the 1980's and 90's brought a reversal and diminishment of GATT's role and it was replaced by the WTO. By the 1990's, and following the treacherous sell-out and downfall of the Soviet Union, the key factor is the insane TNC aggressive program of today. No longer is their fear of socialism based on the existence of a world powerful Socialist state. That curb, they believe is gone.
Instead, in the capitalist world, attention has now turned to the central problem produced by their own immutable laws of development. The so-called "free trade" era was ushered in with trumpets heralding "monetarism" and "supply-side economics", "free market economics" etc. etc. in what has to be the "smokiest and murkiest smokescreening" barrage in all of history. Hidden behind the "smoke & mirrors" was the simple fact that capital accumulation had reached the level where new arenas of investment and exploitation had to be "found" and/or created. Failure meant capitalist crisis of unprecedented severity with resulting chaos and breakdown. Thus "free trade" had much less to do with trade and commerce than it had to do with opening up New "Free Markets" for Capital Investment by war or any other means. A broken Soviet Union or dismembered German Democratic Republic provided good possibilities for such investment, while the so-called "developing world" added a dimension for capital investment rarely, if ever, seen before.
The basic essential and immutable law of development for Capitalism even in its monopoly, TNC stage is that it constantly, without fail must accumulate more capital. Without non-stop capital investment expansion, dollars or gold bars, or even credits, become mere pieces of paper or metallic dross. Continuing, never-ending investment is the name of the game. Otherwise Capitalism ceases to be capitalism and economic anarchy reigns supreme.
The resulting added impetus to capital accumulation through cheap labour and lower "unit labour costs" found in the former colonial world, the castration of the organized labour movements in the industrialized world, falling incomes, plant closures, homelessness leading to job loss, falling, reversion of such countries as Canada to an under-developed status goes with this new false and misnamed "free market economy" and free trade" era, the exact and irremediable results of the necessity of Capitalism (as a thirst-dying man needs water) to ensure expansion of investment opportunities. It is a matter of business necessity and a virtual religious faith, that such "rights" are proclaimed. "Invested dollars" carry the "sacred" if phony inalienable "right" (according to the gospel of the Bilderberg Club and Trilateral Commission) to the highest possible return available... regardless of the carnage and destruction of lives, health, societies, democratic rights... or anything else that can be named. It is (according to the pundits, hidden financiers, politicians owned by them, and even religious teaching, media moguls etc) a matter of "faith in "Our way of life". That too is part and parcel of the TNC class war on all peoples, everywhere - stupid as it sounds!!!
The working class and the people are not the creators of Capitalism. Truly, from the day that those who owned industry realized and created a relationship wherein workers and families produced "commodities for exchange and profit... (their labour power given in exchange for the sole right to receive subsistence level wages to live and produce more workers) they (the owning class) developed necessary means to subjugate and rule their restless work force. Truly, from the massacres of Lucknow, Peterloo, to the wars of famine and pestilence brought down on peoples world-wide, who sought the paths of resistance, that subjugation has been largely successful. But it was not a matter of wars, guns and whips alone.
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The revolutionary insights and theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and other great masters of working-class leadership have from their inception been subjected to sometimes innocently set forth counter-theories or theories designed to rob and also to smokescreen the revolutionary edge and meaning contained in such phrases as "Working class is the grave digger of Capitalism" or the famous "Workers of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have a world to win." It would be very naive in the extreme to conclude that aberrations and sidetracking of the revolutionary role of the working class and the people has been "innocent". Most often it has been done with deadly intent to divide, split and corrupt the revolutionary thrust of the working class and people. We could revert to the 1860's and the polemic of Marx and Engels against the revisionist theories of Lasalle and the Gotha Program. We could also pursue time and again the same struggles at the theoretical and practical levels... in country after country.
But most significant of all is the counter and anti-revolutionary theory and practice that sundered the historic drive of the Soviet people... the noxious weed of "social reformism" that held out prospects of "reforming" the capitalist system to become its opposite... Socialism. That was the road of Britain's Ramsay MacDonald, France's Blum, Germany's Schiedeman, Noske, Lewis and Bob Rae of Canada and on and on in an almost endless line of "reformists", all of whom hid right behind "Socialist" masks and in the end were all bound to fail. Most important it was the road of Gorbachev, Schevernadze, Yakovlev, following in the footsteps of Kautsky, Bukharin, Trotsky, in the USSR drove the final nail into the Soviet State in 1989-91. Just as importantly this mantle of "reformism" descended upon and penetrated Communist Parties world-wide, creating splits, division and confusion. The essence in each case was the alienation and rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class. That is not a condemnation of honest, if sometimes confused elements in the Communist movement, (whether in the land of Soviets or elsewhere) who tried mightily to find correction to the blunders and disunity that has led us to the TNC onslaught.
But there were warnings of immense importance that went unheeded or were discarded. In the last years of his life, Stalin, speaking to the leadership of foreign Communist parties called upon them to "pick up the banner of the nation in your home countries". Today, we witness the result of failure to do that effectively. In those days he was fighting within his own Politburo (Central Committee or Executive) against the intrusion of anti-Socialist economic theories that moved in the direction of commodity production and exchange for profit, and the alienation of the working class. With his death and the advent of reformist Khrushchev and his cohorts, the slippery road to the total abandonment of the revolutionary role of the working class and the CPSU(B) was entered. It ended with the treachery of Gorbachev-Yeltsin et al and the re-introduction of both domestic and foreign capital investment and debauching of the Soviet lives. We cannot leave this without once again, as we have so many times in Northstar Compass, called for the re-uniting of the working class, the people and the widely differing Parties now operating there in a Marxist-Leninist movement to forever destroy the results of the TNC and Monopoly Capitalist interventionist counter-revolution and Restore Socialism.
We are also reminded that as many as thirty years ago the "strategy chiefs" of the TNC world announced their intent to effect the present TNC program. George Ball, then Under-Secretary of State for U.S.A. President Nixon, and not so incidentally the President of TNC Lehman Brothers International, stated (for all to hear) "Working through great corporations that straddle the earth, men are now able for the first time to utilize world resources with an efficiency dictated by the objective logic of profit..."
"For business purposes the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the equator. The world... is (but) an extension of a single market" said IBM President Maisonrouge at about the same time.
Why the Communist Parties of the world, including the Soviet Party, ignored such very clear warnings but chose not to alert the working class is a matter for debate. Our inclination would be to believe that a growing influence of these "reformist" theories, that somehow the working class could live comfortably with capitalism, blocked a correct analyses of the situation. We suggest that such errors today are impermissible and must be avoided at all costs.
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By Wm. Pfaff - Journalist
(The following is excerpted from the Friday, Dec 2, 1999 edition of the prestigious "International Herald Tribune" and the column of the above internationally known writer. We reprint them to give the reader materials on the WTO from a writer and journal normally light-miles away from the viewpoints expressed by Northstar Compass. The breadth of the opposition to the programs expressed in Seattle, and that caused the tycoons to temporarily fail, we believe is to be found in Pfaff's column.) - Editor
The (TNC's) treaty's intent was to do away with those national laws and practices that restrict corporate business practices... In the case of OECD's investment agreement each state signing the treaty would be obliged to grant corporations all of the privileges allowed any other treaty nation. This claim was to be legally enforceable against governments. This would have been a major transfer of sovereignty from governments to the international business corporations. [Emphasis added.] ...Today, rebellion against the new Seattle negotiations... is against the peculiarly ugly mutation of capitalism that has occurred during the past two decades... This combines indifference toward employee welfare and community interest, with Executive compensation totally disproportionate... (except to) high quarterly stock valuations...
[Note: The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - a TNC Paris-based think tank) drew up the treaty terms to be signed in Seattle under the WTO auspices. As we know, they failed.]
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