A World War Rages All Around Us

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Seven activists were arrested recently in Soweto, South Africa, for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters are a market economy answer to the fact that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water bills. The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested water.

On the same day South Africa's "water warriors" were locked up, Argentina's negotiations with the Washington-based International Monetary Fund bogged down. The sticking point was rate hikes for privatized utility companies. In a country where 50 percent of the population is living in poverty, the IMF is demanding that multinational water and electricity companies be allowed to increase their rates by a staggering 30 percent.

In the media and at international conferences, debates about privatization can seem wonkish and abstract. On the ground, they are as clear and urgent as the right to survive.

After September 11, the mainstream media couldn't bury the global justice/antiglobalization movement fast enough. We were gleefully informed that in times of war, no one would care about frivolous issues like water privatization. Much of the U.S. antiwar movement fell into a similar trap: Now was not the time to focus on divisive economic debates; it was time to come together to call for peace.

But, in reality, the brutal economic model of privatization advanced by the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and wealthy nations is itself a form of war. War because privatization and deregulation kill -- by pushing up prices on necessities like water and medicines and pushing down prices on raw commodities like coffee, impoverishing the small farmers who still make up a large portion of the population in poor nations. War because those who resist and "refuse to disappear" (as Mexico's Zapatista rebels say), are routinely arrested, beaten, and even killed. And, finally, war because when this kind of low-intensity repression in developing nations fails to clear the path to corporate control, the real wars begin.

The global antiwar protests that surprised the world last February 15 grew out of networks built by years of anti-globalization activism, from Indymedia Web sites to the World Social Forum held each year in Brazil or India. And despite attempts to keep the movements separate, their only future lies in the convergence represented by global justice activists in Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa, Cancún, and, most recently last November, at rallies in Miami at a meeting to establish a pro-privatization Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Political movements of the past have tried to stop wars without challenging the economic interests behind them, or to win economic justice without confronting military power. Today's activists, already experts at following the money, aren't making the same mistake.

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