A series of UN conferences from 1992-2002
on issues of Environment, Social Development, Human Rights, Women, Racism,
Population and Development, Habitat, and Development Financing became the focus of organizing
for activists around the world. UN conferences on women since 1975 have helped not only to
shape a common set of demands on States regarding women's equality,
but also to galvanize women's activism at all levels-with some 40,000
women present at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China
(1995). Women also emerged as strong voices in the other UN conferences.
This series of UN conferences provided the focus, momentum and
funding resources that enabled the creation of networks and infrastructure
for global women's movements on multiple issues. They particularly strengthened
NGOs, which are the formal vehicles for civil society representation
at the UN.
Activities at these global conferences
have largely been coordinated through national and international NGOs
and trade union leadership, with limited participation from grassroots
women and a limited impact on grassroots women's lives. Vanessa Griffen
of the Gender & Development Programme, Asian and Pacific Development
Centre, Malaysia argues that women's successes at the international
level, for example in addressing violence against women, have not begun
to change the deep patterns of patriarchal oppression for women at the
local level.18 I would not minimize gains at the global level.
Nonetheless, I concur with Griffen's assessment that the power to demand implementation
must be grounded in strengthened mobilization of women with a feminist
and class consciousness at the local level, not limited to NGOs or to
global work. This is what makes the perspective of Comandante
Esther so interesting-such mobilization is happening, often unbeknownst
to global feminists.
MADRE,
a US-based women's human rights organization, notes that there is no
longer a possibility of choosing between local and global work:
Women
from the global South.argue that when local conditions are so heavily
impacted by global trends, community-based activists must be equipped
to understand and impact developments in the international arena.Community-based
projects must include components that provide training to enable women
to influence macro policies. Otherwise local work remains a limited
and, ultimately, exhausting venture for women. That's why MADRE brings
the voices of community-based women into international processes.and
insists that the women's movement devote resources.to guarantee that
the international arena is not dominated by elites. We also believe
that . international work that is not rooted in community priorities risks becoming abstract and irrelevant
to most women. Ultimately, policies at the local, national and international levels must function
together to protect women's human rights.19
The
emergence of a "global justice" movement, particularly since the Seattle
WTO ministerial in 1999, brings together progressive NGOs, trade unions,
peasant and other mass-based social movements (such as landless workers),
and left political parties. This is what's occurring in the World Social
Forum, (as well as the WTO, G-8, IMF and World Bank meetings). These
world forums are fraught with political tensions. For many social movement
groups, NGOs are too dependent on government and private funding, are
not accountable to a base, do not utilize democratic decision-making
structures, do not represent poor masses, are elitist and too reformist.
For many NGOs, some trade unions and certain Left parties are seen as
dinosaurs that have democracy and representation in name only, are rigidly
hierarchical, dogmatic and manipulative. This divide involves class
and other power dynamics, different political agendas, as well as views
on "insider" vs. "outsider" strategies.
However, the divisions can also be a source of strength. As was evidenced
at the Fifth Ministerial of the WTO in Cancún, Mexico in September 2003,
many NGOs and "social movements" played both roles to great effect-putting
mass pressure through street demon- strations on the outside, while
presenting specific demands to negotiators on the inside. Despite the
military barricades separating these two groups, the divide is not as
vast as it appears. The victory that people's movements celebrated in
Cancún, when several southern countries walked out of negotiations,
derailing US-EU attempts to impose more unbalanced rules, was in no
small part due to the strength of these inside and outside voices (both
NGOs and social movements), including over 10,000 peasant farmers, and months of
intense pressure at the national level.
Feminists
bring their own critique to the role of NGOs and political parties in
today's movements for social change-particularly the general lack of
a feminist analysis by players in both spaces. Much current feminist
organizing is also done through NGOs. Some leaders of women's NGOs emerged
from left political parties in the 1970s, fed up with the double standards
and sexism within those parties. This created a group of women leaders
who have radical politics, but are dubious of left parties. While many
women are organized through trade unions, peasant and indigenous
groups, these women are woefully under-represented in international
women's events. They often don't embrace feminism and may see feminist
issues as alien to their struggles. At the World Social Forum, women
trade unionists, women peasants, and "feminists" have each attended
their own events with little dialogue across sectors. However, in Cancún,
some women valiantly maneuvered around security blocks to maintain contact
between "women's caucuses" on both sides of this physical, class and
political divide, involving indigenous Mexican women from Via Campesina
in the conversations with NGO women trade experts.20
In
a time of strengthened global capitalism and a weakened Left, there
are fewer groups that directly cite the seizing of state power as their
political goal. Some, like the Workers' Party (PT) of Brazil or the
Movement towards Socialism (MAS) of Bolivia, have linked union and mass-mobilization
to an electoral agenda. Others, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, appear
to be mobilizing to seek concrete gains for indigenous peasants faced
with the onslaught of trade liberalization, but not seeking to gain
control of the State. Many of the players in the "global justice movement"
represent social movements focused on specific demands regarding land,
markets, environmental degradation, privatization of basic services,
jobs and livelihoods-in efforts to push back the onslaught of capital-without
a broader political project. In an age when considerable power is concentrated
in transnational capital, whose interests are represented by the IMF,
World Bank and World Trade Organization, it is increasingly difficult
to contemplate national alternatives (via either elections or revolution) apart from broader regional
or global challenges to capital. Some theorists ask whether there
is
an "outside" to global capitalism at this point.21 This poses
the question of what it would take to get "outside" this dominant global
system, or indeed, whether that is possible. Brazil seeks to assuage
the fears of investors and creditors, while mobilizing a Southern bloc
in an attempt to shift North/South power relations. Cuba, Vietnam and
China, to different degrees, are integrating into the global capitalist
economy. Nicaragua, with the highest per capita debt in the world, is
fully back in the neo-liberal fold.
The
political goal may not be clear to many of us at this time, while it
is perhaps too adamantly clear to some political groups. This makes
gatherings such as the World Social Forum, or broad feminist coalitions,
very complex arenas, where the electoral left, revolutionaries, anarchists,
issue-based NGOs, social movements seeking short-term demands, and identity-based
groups (as well as mainstream development agencies and even the Vatican)
all converge to propose alternatives.
In
dialogues I recently had with three observers of Latin American struggles,
I got very different responses regarding our political goals. Commented
one US observer who has been closely involved in both Cuba and Nicaragua,
"If we're not ultimately dealing with taking state power, what are we
doing?" Yet from the perspective of an Indian colleague who lived in
Nicaragua during the revolution, many leftists in small, poor nations
of the South do not see taking state power as a goal at this time. In
recent years this approach has resulted in imperialist "contra wars"
and the violent undermining of the project, where thousands of people
are massacred. Said a third person, active in the Coca and Water-privatization
battles in Cochabamba that just culminated in ejecting the president
of Bolivia (October 2003): "despite the sacrifices, if we don't struggle
we don't survive-we have no choice." For her, it's not a question of
whether or not to challenge state power, but when and at what relative
cost.
Feminists
struggle with this question through the additional lens of patriarchy.
They simultaneously criticize the state as enforcer of patriarchal relations,
and make claims upon the state to deliver women's rights and broader
societal demands. Feminists have bitter experience with so-called socialist
states (or left political parties) which replicated patriarchal relations,
but they continue to see the role of a transformed, egalitarian State
as a vital arbiter of societal needs and rights.
The
short-term task, in many styles and approaches, is building mass power
to contest the imposition of terms by capital (at national, regional and international levels), through
organizations that can negotiate alternatives with the State that go
beyond the rejectionist positions taken by some street activists. Be
they political parties or social movements, these groups must have mass
accountability and clear alternatives for progressive social change.
They must also address patriarchal relations within their ranks as well as in State and society. Without
this leadership, the lurch towards religious fundamentalisms may only
intensify.
Both
the Zapatistas and the Workers' Party are interesting examples in this
regard. In Mexico, the Zapatistas, an indigenous peasant movement, are
challenging the state's ability to impose a particular political and
economic agenda; they are organizing and educating masses of peasants,
negotiating with the government, and even, among a few leaders, bringing
in a feminist agenda! And despite the limitations global capital imposes
on Brazil, Lula's Workers' Party played a leading role in organizing
Southern nations to challenge the US and EU at the Cancún WTO meeting,
and seeks to build a Latin American trade bloc to challenge US dominance
of regional trade negotiations (Free Trade of the Americas Agreement).