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thousands protest ftaa
On Saturday, April 21, approximately 65,000 trade unionists, students, feminists, environmentalists, socialists, and others marched through the streets of this city. The march was the culmination of a week of anti-corporate trade activity and was the final event of the second People's Summit of the Americas.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (FTAA) is a plan by the capitalist governments of the western hemisphere to expand "free trade" corporate rights from the Bering Strait to the Straits of Magellan. This plan is the work of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes every government in the hemisphere except Cuba.
According to the U.S. government, and their Canadian junior partners, Cuba is the only "dictatorship" remaining in the hemisphere. (Perhaps they are counting only dictatorships of the proletariat!)
As usual, this trade agreement is designed by the representatives of capital to serve as a corporate bill of rights. It will extend legal rights for corporations over governmental decision-making power, from originally three to now 34 countries in the hemisphere.
Chapter 11 of the agreement encourages companies to sue any government that maintains or subsidizes a public service in a field where private enterprise could compete and make a profit.
As expected, there will be no protection of social programs, human rights, or environmental conditions. Instead there is a "democracy" clause-not to promote genuine democratic popular control of investment and development, but rather to provide a pretext for expelling from the FTAA any government which puts human needs ahead of private profits.
Workers in the United States and Canada know all too well what these kinds of agreements do. From the inception of the initial Free Trade Agreement, and then the North American Free Trade Agreement, workers and the oppressed have been paying the price while the capitalists strive to overcome the decline in the rates of profit.
While we are inundated with the capitalist media's reports of "booming economies," "increased trade," and even "the new prosperity," the living standard of the average working-class person in North America continues to fall.
Notable in the protests was the attendance of the federal parliamentary caucus of the New Democratic Party (NDP, Canada's mass labor-based political party). In the face of an incredible contradiction-plummeting support during an international working-class radicalization-the NDP leadership has been forced into at least claiming to "renew" itself as an activist party out of fears of being outflanked to the left (or simply out of fears of losing their cushy jobs on Parliament Hill).
The FTAA, like most modern-day trade agreements, is being negotiated in secret. In Quebec, these sessions took place behind an enormous chain link, four-kilometer-long fence, which surrounded a large portion of the old Quebec City citadel. The organizers and their police accomplices actually had the gall to include a residential area inside the "security" perimeter.
During the Friday and Saturday sessions, some protesters (including anarchists, but mainly just working-class youth fed up with the utter contempt shown them by the state apparatus) decided to attempt to take down portions of the fence. They were in fact successful in removing a section of the perimeter. Unfortunately, this set in motion an army of over 6000 riot police who had converged on Quebec City.
According to police, there were over 430 arrests made, but this is just the beginning of the story. Throughout the mainly peaceful protests of Friday and Saturday, police launched an incredible amount of tear gas onto the protesters and nearby residents. The entire old city was absolutely covered in the stench and haze of tear gas for two full days.
In fact, there was so much gas used by the cops that the air conditioning at the convention hall where the blue ribbon negotiations were taking place had to be shut off to avoid gassing the heads of state!
This is just the latest event in a series of mass demonstrations around the world protesting the more glaring injustices of world trade agreements. Starting in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Millau, Prague, and now Quebec, people are finally crawling out their shells of apathy and challenging their capitalist masters.
So far, however, this has not led to a major strengthening of working-class political parties (at least in North America).
But the emergence of organizations like the NDP Socialist Caucus in English Canada, Quebec's Rassemblement pour une Alternative Politique (a new working-class formation in Quebec, which recently won an unprecedented 15 percent in a provincial by-election in Montreal), and the birth of Youth for Socialist Action in both Canada and the United States show the way forward for activists opposed to capitalist globalization.
It is just a matter of time until the worldwide youthful anti-capitalist mobilizations against the international trade and financial institutions of the ruling rich are expressed at the workplace and in independent working-class political action. At that point, a brighter future for working people will be on the agenda.
This article was written by Dan Lovell, the national organizer for Youth for Socialist Action (Canada). It first appeared in the May 2001 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
