Introduction: another world is possible – how do we know?

Global elites, their political henchmen and media sycophants insist that economic growth, international trade, the elimination of subsidies and privatization will alleviate poverty. Activists' blossoming confidence that another world is possible is well-rooted. Analysis of the effects of structural adjustment and free trade policies reveal that their promises are unfulfilled. Indeed, their impact has been perverse. Apparently, globalization works only for the rich. Even high-profile administrators of neoliberalism have deserted. Their insider revelations are hardly news to the non-governmental organizations which had been carefully collecting data for decades. Inequality has increased in nearly every country; internationally, the conditions of life for the poor and indigenous peoples have steadily deteriorated; and the environment on which we all depend has been irrevocably damaged.

In what ought to be the invitation to its formal suicide, the World Bank admits that its structural adjustment programmes undermine its core economic shibboleth: economic growth. Damning also is the collapse of the obedient 'developing nations' of South-East Asia and Latin America, as well as the failure of the command-capitalist South Korean regime (the only country ever to graduate from 'Third' to 'First World' status). The evidence has accumulated to the point that, for those familiar with it, there is little further to be discussed. The holy trinity of export/trade/growth is exposed as a manipulative fraud and each new invocation of the dead and absurd promises of development – that it will bring peace, heal the environment or end poverty – is more transparent than the previous. The economic and political system promoted by globalization is not only morally bankrupt, it is no longer credible as economics.

This book is intended to familiarize interested parties with the anti-globalization movement and to provide direction for further research and exploration of the 'movement of movements'. Because many exhaustive analyses of the machinations of globalization have already been written (you have probably read several of them) and because this book focuses on the resistance to globalization, this introduction will provide only a rudimentary review of the basis for opposition. Herewith, globalization's most egregious deceptions.

Globalization's thirteen biggest lies

1 Globalization is old Globalization's marketing strategy steals the images of family, multiculturalism, communication, women's liberation, travel and trade and offers them back to us, glamorized and at a price. All of these things existed before colonialism and contested it at every stage of its development. These images obscure the structure of globalization, its macroeconomic policies, and the corporate projects it promotes – all of which damage families, communication and culture. Describing itself as a 'constitution for a new global economy', the World Trade Organization (WTO) is designed to subvert existing international human rights and labour law, national sovereignty and parliamentary regulation. The highest international law (and the only enforceable one) is now 'free trade', a highly specified set of principles sometimes described as a 'bill of rights' for multinational corporations, multinational corporations, to which the laws of signatory countries are now secondary.

2 Globalization is new Globalization pretends to bring a new, 'rules-based', fairness and structure to the global trading system, but activists in the Global South call it 'recolonization'. Not only does it force Third World nations to implement policies remarkably similar to those imposed by colonial administrations, it also reverses the gains of postcolonial governance in areas such as land reform, the nationalization of industries and cultural protections. Moreover, the 'free trade agreements', so 'new' that they have not yet been fully implemented, can already be evaluated by their predecessors of nearly two decades, the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The results of SAPs have been a steady increase in inequality and the ruthless liquidation of economies to service the debt.

3 Globalization may be exploitative or dislocating at the margins, but it's 'better than nothing' for the majority of the poor Today's poor, and their regions, were self-sufficient for millennia. They were colonized for their mineral, timber, soil, human, animal and climatic wealth. The idea of a poor or hungry Africa or Asia or Latin America is absurd. Northerners who point to a line of people hoping for a job in a sweatshop and praise the Global North for generously providing jobs are peddling ahistoricism and paternalism.

Twenty years ago the people now queueing were independent small-scale producers, farmers, processors, craftspeople or artisans producing for local markets. Visitors depicted these sustainable livelihoods as backward and dirty, and leaders of Global South countries (already pummelled by centuries of their colonists' ethnocentric definitions of civilization) were seduced by visions of modernity.

Those appalled by pious arguments that slavery, despite its brutality, did a big favour to Africans (who at least were given the chance to become Christians and learn discipline) may soon find ourselves ashamed to have countenanced sweatshops, let alone congratulated the sweat-traders for 'providing jobs'. Neoliberal forms of development are never going to solve poverty, protect the environment or bring peace – these are dead promises. Instead, so-called 'development policies' primarily benefit global elites, at...