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Special Supplement
from Red Pepper/March 2002

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Globalise the left

by Hilary Wainwright
Editor, Red Pepper < March 2002

Everything about the 50,000-strong World Social Forum (WSF) - the range of languages, the outward reaching politics, the flexibility and bold ambition of continental and now global networks, the linking of emotion and reason, politics and culture - were all uncomfortable reminders of the parochial conservatism of the English left.

Our thinking is often too confined to recognise that some of the best deas for feasible alternatives lie in practical innovations by movements and parties in Latin America, Asia and Africa. We lag in building a strong domestic and European arm to the global network of campaigns that seek to halt corporate pressure for a world economy without constraint.

In Asia, Africa and the Americas there are well-organised continental coalitions leading mass movements, sometimes winning precarious victories. These movements see the European Union as a major problem. The EU is energetically pushing the World Trade Organisation to clear the way for corporations to invest without social or economic constraints (the new prohibition of conditions on investment) and to asset-strip the public services of the countries of the South (the new insistence that investment in public services be an open market)....

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Central to any alternative to corporate power are the issues of public regulation, intervention, the law, taxation - and hence, the state. Neoliberalism rode to influence on the back of the state's crisis of legitimacy - after the failures of the command economy, and the increasingly unresponsive character of the welfare state. The World Social Forum addresses this issue directly...

Certainly the corporations are politically organised, continent-wise. Others have shown in Brazil that it can be done.

There's no excuse not to do it better ourselves." End of Editorial

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N.B. I agree with Hilary Wainright. The corporate sector is getting away (quite literally...) with murder, because the international Left has found no common, inspirational agenda. Nor can I imagine any such coherent agenda emerging from the pages of Red Pepper. But the Editor is right to highlight the nature of the political challenge. I plan to address this issue myself, in a speech at the Bridgend Fabians on 15 March. My subject? Taming the Corporations...

As I write, on Saturday 2 March, the full Wainright Leader is not posted to the Red Pepper website, but keep an eye out for it > Red Pepper

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