Moving the World Ecoconomic Forum to New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel has succeeded in keeping at bay the thousands of often-violent protesters, whose behavior has disfigured so many recent international economic gatherings.
In this unexpected calm, it is perhaps worth reviewing what it is that these people stand for. All the hugely varied issues that they represent, ranging from saving the spotted owl to banning nuclear weapons, meet together at a single point, which is deep distrust of the capitalist system. Inherent in that system is the concept of economy of scale. This has seen corporations buying up weaker competitors or merging with each other. Thus have been formed massive organizations whose budgets rival, if they do not actually dwarf, those of many poor countries. The protesters argue that these hugely powerful businesses are, in effect, answerable to no one. They are only interested in profits, not in how that money is earned.
Though defenders of the system dismiss such charges, the fact is that many multinationals now go out of their way to advance their social and environmental credentials. Meanwhile, ethical investment funds have established a small, but not insignificant, market sector supporting companies that balance business plans with social and environmental responsibility. Would big companies have bothered to work so hard on their images, if it had not been for the groundswell of doubt and unease about their behavior? Probably not.
On that basis, it seems plausible that if ever the protest pressure eased, some multinationals would quietly bin their socially responsible policies as being a waste of shareholders’ funds. Therefore, the noisy behavior of the anti-capitalist demonstrators does serve some useful purpose. Third World debt forgiveness would probably have come about without protesters focusing worldwide concerns at the strict and inflexible policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But forgiveness has almost certainly come about more quickly. And now there is another issue that affects small countries forced to open their economies, in return for debt forgiveness and new loans. Tanzania is a classic case where privatization has been imposed upon the government by the World Bank. But as a Tanzanian minister said this week, is it really privatization or "foreignization"? Are countries like Tanzania now being exposed to economic, rather than political, colonization? Once the big multinationals move in and buy up their key service and productive industries, what chance has local capital of ever reacquiring them?
Bankers smoking their big cigars in the corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria would argue that a well-run economy with flourishing businesses, even if they are foreign-owned, will bring prosperity and economic stability to everyone and open up undreamed of opportunities for the local citizens. This is all right as far as it goes, but multinationals still need to have checks upon them, control which First World governments often seem reluctant to exercise. And if a mammoth company, like Enron is prepared to bribe and cheat within the establishment, maybe we need the yelling anti-capitalist outsiders, to keep on crying foul, even if they are wrong some of the time.
