The WTO and Mumia Abu Jamal
The World Trade Organization treats working people in countries throughout the world as assets to manipulate in pursuit of private corporate profit. From Guatemala to South Africa and from Thailand to the South Bronx, this causes impoverishment, illness, and even mass starvation. When resistance to exploitation follows, the flip side of exploitative trade and aid policies is coercive repression. We need change, yet we cannot civilly persuade people who regard us as a target for exploitation, manipulation, and repression that they ought to curtail the pain their policies cause because of humanitarian concern. They don't care about our humanity or that of a 15 year-old earning $1.50 a day in Jakarta or dying of starvation in Malaysia. Instead, to get change from economic elites, we need to raise social costs until the elites see that maintaining their policies will cost them so much that they must relent.
Movements to the raise social costs of maintaining abhorred policies, however, come in two broad types. (1) They can fight for immediate reforms, such as reversing WTO policies, as ends in themselves with no further aspirations, taking as given the underlying relations of the economy. (2) They can fight for the same immediate reforms, but seeking to empower constituencies to create lasting infrastructure and organization and to raise consciousness and commitment, all leading to winning further gains and ultimately transforming underlying relations.
There are many differences between these broad approaches, each of which, however may use letters and lobbies, teach-ins and leaflets and rallies, speeches and marches, civil disobedience and even massive strikes and more militant disruptions to convey to elites that they have to change course or suffer unacceptable losses of legitimacy and stability. But, differences aside, I want to make a single, simple proposal that I hope both wings of anti-WTO activists will find congenial: WTO activists should reject WTO policies and economic hardship and oppression, of course - but also Mumia Abu Jamal's incarceration and pending execution as well as coercive repression more broadly.
The U.S. is hell-bent on killing Mumia in large part to make a powerful statement about the efficacy of state repression. This death penalty, like lynching in the past, is in considerable part meant to send a message about the futility of opposition. Mumia does not deserve to die. Moreover, activists should not sit idly by while repression is legitimated by lethal injection. Sincere advocates of social justice seek liberty for the oppressed and resist efforts to destroy opposition to injustice. They thus work to save Mumia Abu Jamal just as they fight exploitative globalisation. The only way to save Mumia, however, is to raise social costs sufficiently to force a new trial. But to raise social costs requires activism of many shapes and forms and and diverse activism is what Seattle is about. The anti-globalisation movement is big, visible, and recently relatively rich in assets. What an opportunity it has to reverse one of the most damaging attributes of contemporary movements - their parochialism and single-issue narrowness.
It isn't that every movement needs to enunciate all demands of every other movement all the time. Of course not. But it should be obvious to all, it seems to me, that prospects for winning major gains on a grand scale - and turning back international trade agendas or U.S. domestic repressive agendas are, in fact, major gains on a grand scale -- are enhanced rather than reduced by building solidarity among movements and especially by bridging long-standing gaps and even chasms. At this moment Mumia and the WTO are arguably the two most pressing focuses of political activism in the U.S. The trade agreements are in process. Mumia's date of execution is currently set for December 2. Neither struggle is peripheral in any sense. To have many members of each of these movements openly support the aspirations of the other would go a long way to creating trust and broadening consciousness in both cases, and to communicating to elites that their policies are having still another effect they can't afford - uniting opponents of injustice. More, all indications so far are that in the U.S. WTO organizing is being done, overwhelmingly, by white activists. So in addition to the general benefits of mutual support, we have the possibility of a largely white-led movement taking the initiative in expressing solidarity with the Black community over preventing the execution of a very prominent black political figure. Imagine that Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky was awaiting execution. Would their plight enter the consciousness and visible manifestations of the folks going to Seattle? Then so should Mumia's.
The anti-WTO forces can in one simple act of inclusion communicate that struggles for justice are necessarily interconnected and mutually worthy. They can teach that winning valuable gains in any venue requires raising social costs so high that it cannot be accomplished without diverse constituencies from many venues joining the effort. To either overcome WTO plans or to free Mumia it is necessary to unite and fight so let's do both. What an opportunity for a largely white-organized project, at least in the U.S., to evince solidarity with a Black activist and a Black-led movement.
What we have in Seattle is an opportunity for better communication and better activism. We need to seize the opportunity. We need to recognize that social change legitimately and understandably bubbles up in many forms and with many agendas, but that ultimately it's all about the same damn thing: winning justice, creating a better world.
Go to Seattle or bring the spirit of Seattle to your locale. Add to Seattle Mumia, and add to Mumia Seattle. As Mumia writes: "Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit."
If Mumia can practice solidarity and mutuality from death row, surely we can do as much from outside.