Jubilee as Social-Movement Model

by Patrick Bond*

The most important accomplishment of the Jubilee 2000 movement to date has not been the series of minor debt relief concessions from G-7 powers since around 1996 (HIPC, the Cologne Initiative, Clinton's Bilateral Debt Cancellation, etc). Nor has it been the resounding success of J2000-North chapters in finding allies such as the Pope, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, and a series of entertainers (Bono from U-2, Mohammed Ali, Netaid) who together make vocal, trendy but ultimately unsatisfying appeals to northerners' sense of charity.

Instead, in this article I insist that the J2000 chapters across the Southern Hemisphere--and similar movements working on trade, investment, labour rights, human rights, environmental protection, the landmine ban and many other issues--have made a much greater contribution to social progress: innovative analysis, ideology and strategy.

They have by and large analysed problems of debt and development from a structural perspective, not stopping with superficial explorations for debt, but looking at the entire development model associated with the discredited "Washington Consensus." This is a term that describes the neoliberal, free-market economic strategy pushed by Washingtonians like Bill Clinton, the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the World Bank and International Monetary fund.

From the early 1980s, World Bank and IMF macroeconomic and social policy advice has overwhelmed organic priorities and strategies in indebted Third World countries. Critics argue that Washington's advice is both immoral -- in that it typically seeks export-led growth at the expense of the poor, workers, women and the environment--and incompetent, in that it rarely is rooted in local realities, it relies too much on unreliable markets, and virtually always promises more than it can deliver.

The World Bank's modeling role in the failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR as it is commonly known in South Africa) strategy is a good example of that incompetence. The values underlying Bank advice were unveiled in an unusually frank sentence in a 1991 memo by then-World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers (now head of the US Treasury Department and one of the world's main economic managers): "The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste on the lowest-wage countries is impeccable and I think we should face up to that."

Who will put out the fire?

Ideologically, as a result, the Jubilee movement has identified Washington's world-view as central to the Third World's problems. The Jubilee South groups therefore refuse to let Washington structure the terms of debt relief. A common analogy is to question whether it is wise to ask the arsonist how to put out the fire!

Strategically, the Jubilee South and many allied forces are also now reconsidering the apparently utopian strategy of reforming the embryonic World State (i.e., the main Washington institutions plus the World Trade Organisation), and instead have pursued two different strategies: weakening the power of Washington, and strengthening the sovereignty of nation-states.

The World Bank, for example, has been subject to ongoing campaigns over the past two decades, resulting in a somewhat more green, more gender-friendly, more transparent, and more participatory- oriented institution. The rise of the reformist "Post-Washington Consensus" ideology associated with the current Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, partially reflects the clout and credibility of this tendency. Likewise in the arena of trade, Northern labour and environmental movements have played a role in amending international agreements to incorporate worker and environmental rights

Today, however, Jubilee and allied activists are fed up with the lack of results. After fifteen years or so of advocacy, the result is the apparent worsening of North-South domination associated with these reforms. The World Bank may have reformed in some ways that are relatively marginal to its operation, but the hard-core commitment to brutal structural adjustment programmes, privatisation, cuts in state spending, high interest rates, free trade and liberalised finance remains intact.

Instead, the more grassroots-oriented social movements who bear the full brunt of Washington's malevolence and incompetence now argue, increasingly, for WB/IMF de-funding and nation-state de- linking from international finance. (This is consistent with opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment or further World Trade Organisation rounds, as well as tough controls on what multinational corporations can do.)

In short, the goal here is to promote the globalisation of people and halt or at minimum radically modify the globalisation of capital. How radical is this? Surprisingly, this was the common-sense argument that elite economist (and capitalist-reformer) John Maynard Keynes advanced in a 1993 article in Yale Review: "I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would maximise, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel -- these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be primarily national."

Step one: restoring national control

Concretely, what might this mean? I think in the first instance it suggests that movements like South Africa's J2000 chapter and its allies in the South Africa NGO coalition, trade unions, rural development organisations and the like, should consider it necessary, if insufficient, to help restore control over national finances.

That means amplifying several campaigns already underway: more J2000 pressure to repudiate the $25 billion South Africa foreign debt inherited in 1994; more pressure from COSATU (the Council of South African Trade Unions) on behalf of capital controls to prevent wealthy white people and big corporations running away with apartheid-era capital; more pressure by unions and community groups against privatisation (especially around municipal services, where foreign water firms are already causing great damage); and more pressure from environmentalists, trade unionists and development activists against free-trade deals which pollute, deindustrialise, and often underdevelop communities.

But these are defensive struggles, which then require amplifying other ongoing campaigns which cut against the grain of Washington's advice: lower interest rates; a clear industrial development policy; specific attention to the development needs of women, disabled people and rural areas; and concrete demands such as cross-subsidies for free, basic supplies of water and electricity, from hedonistic consumers who should pay more, to everyone else.

These are some of the directions that the J2000 movement is pushing logically towards, in part through some of its key cadres' participation in an "Africa Consensus" process, alongside leading African NGOs, churches, women's groups and labour. The Africa Consensus--which is still a process, requiring full elaboration based on a myriad of grassroots and national development experiences and struggles--rejects both the Washington and Post-Washington Consensus, and in particular rejects illegitimate loans that maintain exploitative power relations. As expressed in the May 1999 "Lusaka Declaration,"

"Debt is one of the most important instruments of Northern domination over the South, and the domination of financiers over people, production and nature everywhere. As part of our struggle to liberate ourselves from this bondage, we make demands for the cancellation of debt as part of a broader struggle to fundamentally transform the current world economic order and transfer power from the political leadership of the rich countries and the economic power of transnational corporations and international financiers, and their instruments, notably the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation. Likewise, these forces have instruments in the South, namely some of our own technocratic, political and commercial elites who are in the tiny minority of Africans who continue to promote the Washington Consensus.

"In the same spirit, we will make reasonable, rational demands for reparations to compensate for the economic, social and environmental damage which affect our people. These reparations will not be allowed to trickle into our elites' pockets, but must be directed into rebuilding our societies and environments, and in the process to restoring our human dignity, and especially that of women."

Step two: delinking and diversifying

Africa's leading economist, Samir Amin, has long argued for this kind of strategy, but warns that there are terribly important international implications:

"The response to the challenge of our time imposes what I have suggested naming 'delinking'.. Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal development... Delinking implies a "popular" content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent interests."

The implication is simple: Washington must be weakened, because any single country aiming to delink will come under enormous pressure not to. This largely explains the fear that Trevor Manuel and his Finance Department colleagues regularly express about the J2000 arguments. Demands for repudiation of and reparations for apartheid-era lending might "send the wrong signals to the market," in particular to New York, London, Frankfurt and Zurich banks.

The simple lesson, therefore, is that these banks and their Washington promoters must be weakened. Here again, J2000 and its network of allies from other social movements, are making enormous progress in expanding the scope of their analysis, ideology and strategy. Jubilee South Africa made the following statement to a group of like-minded allies from Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and the US and Europe:

"At our National Executive meeting on September 10, Jubilee 2000 South Africa formally endorsed efforts by our international allies—especially PAPDA in Haiti, and Focus on the Global South in Bangkok--to deny further funding to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. We suggest this tough course of action in view of continuing conditionality on HIPC relief, the growth of austere ESAF programmes, and structural adjustment "Washington Consensus" ideology more generally. Thanks to Bank and Fund programmes in Southern African countries as impoverished as Mozambique and as wealthy as South Africa, poverty and inequality--and social, environmental and economic degradation more broadly--have intensified.

"Hence a much stronger message must now be sent to the Fund and Bank, including denying them funding through either no new recapitalisation, or through requesting of conscientious investors that they sell bonds issued by the World Bank, or through other means still to be developed. We give our endorsement to the existing strategies of defunding, and hope to work with you to develop others that appeal to all people of conscience around the world. As you know, South African liberation movements pioneered the divestment tactic in our struggle for racial equity, and we will look to our solidarity networks to remind them of the continuing need for activism of this sort, aimed at further socio-economic justice."

It is that spirit, and accompanying capacity to globalise powerful tactics, which are making the J2000 South chapters a model for new kinds of social movements that think globally, act locally, and act globally.

* Patrick Bond is Associate Professor at the Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management, and a Research Associate of the Alternative Information and Development Centre. pbond@wn.apc.org

(DRAFT) DECLARATION OF THE TAEGU ROUND

From October 6 to 8, 1999, representatives of civil society organizations and academics from Korea and other parts of the world assembled in Taegu, Korea, to launch a collective effort to meet the major challenges resulting from economic globalization.

It is significant that this meeting has taken place in Taegu, since this historic city gave birth to the Korean National Debt Redemption Movement at the end of the Chosun dynasty. This movement saw ordinary Korean citizens rise up against debt dependency and the threat of colonial rule. Today, Korea is again deeply in debt to international financial institutions--a condition that it shares with most other poor countries around the world.

The Taegu Round saw members of global civil society discuss ways of setting up a new global financial order that promotes social justice and sustainable development including the elimination of the Third World debt burden, controlling the destabilizing financial speculation, and countering the destructive impact of the programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

After three days, we have come to a meeting of minds. We, the representatives to the Taegu Round, have agreed to the following:

1. We demand that all global economic institutions, particularly the IMF, World Bank and WTO be held accountable to internationally agreed human rights standards in conformity with their member governments' UN treaty obligations.

2. We declare our support for the Jubilee 2000 Campaign and related activities such as the November 1999 Johannesburg South-South meeting and the July 2000 Okinawa initiative, with their goal of Third World debt cancellation, and promise to put organizational resources behind this enterprise.

3. We urge the immediate adoption of global, regional, and national controls on short-term speculative capital in order to reduce its destabilizing impact on our economies.

4. We demand that the IMF be brought to account for the destructive impact of its programs on the social and economic rights of the Korean people and the peoples around the world.

5. We support the Korean Federation of Bank and Financial Labor Unions in their effort to take legal action against the IMF for activities injurious to the welfare of the Korean people.

6. We support a moratorium on the Millennium Round of the WTO pending a full evaluation of the impacts of trade liberalization policies on people and the environment.

7. We support the creation of an Asian Social & Economic Institute that with the full participation of civil society would study and try to solve issues of regional trade, investment, short-term capital controls, and foreign debt management with a view to formulating concrete action to promote sustainable regional development.

To meet these goals, we support the creation of the Taegu Round Global Network for Social and Economic Justice which will bring together Korean and global NGOs in a common endeavor. The Taegu Round Network will actively work with other networks focused on related issues, such as Focus on Global South, Jubilee 2000, ATTAC, SAPRIN, WEED, People's Action Group, and FIET, Halifax Initiative, Third World Network and other groups.