Surprisingly, that need not be true. Protest at the fag end of the Twentieth Century is led not by politicians or trade unions, but by groups of activists coming together spontaneously to combat powerful foes. These are truly mass movements, with all affected groups realising that they have to pull together to be effective. And these groups have already tasted success, effectively scuttling the corporate-sponsored MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) proposed within the OECD last year.

This is what the Financial Times had to say on the occasion, "Fear andbewilderment have seized governments of industrialised countries" as the negotiations to impose MAI "have been ambushed by a horde of vigilantes whose motives and methods are only dimly understood in most national capitals". These hordes included "trade unions, environmental and human rights lobbyists and pressure groups opposed to globalisation". The same tactics which scuttled MAI are now being used to try and wreck the WTO.

Anti-WTO groups see globalisation as one pillar of an economic system which uses people and communities merely as resources to be exploited by commercial interests. They point out that the main beneficiaries of what they term "corporate-sponsored globalisation" have been the multinational companies, which have spent billions of dollars in winning friends and influencing people in order to create a world economic order beneficial to themselves.

The trouble is, the term globalisation carries with it the connotation of one united prosperous world, and anyone opposing that visionbecomes Public Enemy Number One. The question rarely asked is- globalisation for whom? Till date, the people who have benefited the most from globalisation have been the multinational corporations, global banks, rich investors and those who work for them.

The poor and disadvantaged have fared the worst. One clear indication of that is that we shall be entering the Twenty-first Century with a top and bottom income quintile difference of 150 to 1. Another result of globalisation has been, according to Unctad, that for many developing countries, the average trade deficit in the 1990s was higher than in the 1970s by almost 3 per cent of GDP, while the average growth rate was lower by 2 per cent per annum.

The argument is that it's all right for investors and TNCs to get richer, as their riches will ultimately trickle down to all sections of the population. Unfortunately, trickle down is not working.

In pre-Thatcher Britain, about one person in 10 was classed as living below the poverty line. Now one personin four, and one child in three is officially poor, according to the 1996 report of the British Child Poverty Action Group. Over the 1980s, the top 1 per cent of American families increased their income by 50 per cent, while the bottom 10 per cent of Americans lost 15 per cent of their already meagre incomes. In 1977, the top 1 per cent of American families had average incomes 65 times as great as those of the bottom 10 per cent. A decade later, the top 1 per cent was 115 times as well off as the bottom decile. The same policies which led to those outcomes in the UK and the US are now being imposed on the rest of the world.

The protest stems in part from the refusal of millions around the world to treat themselves and what they hold dear as commodities. Their argument is that trade, markets and the economy should be at the service of people, rather than the other way round. But apart from this general rejection of present-day economic theology, there are more specific complaints against the WTO.

Onecriticism is that it is anti-democratic. Many of the decisions are taken behind closed doors by the developed nations. Corporate interests are well represented, while community, labour and mass organisations are not heard.

Dispute-settlement is done by a board of three members picked up without any consideration of democratic norms. These unelected, unrepresentative panelists are in a position to nullify democratically passed national laws, holding them to be against WTO norms.

The criticism against MNC influence on the WTO carries weight. The entire TRIPS agreement, for instance, was the handiwork of extensive lobbying by MNCs such as Monsanto, Pfizer, IBM et al, whose success crowned long years of strident advocacy, of building up a coalition of like-minded interests and of pulling the right strings. Corporate interests have disproportionate voice in the advisory process, and proceedings are held in secret. The essentially anti-competitive patent laws, especially in medicines, have long been targeted byactivists.

Opposition also comes from groups who see the WTO whittling away at environmental regulations. The trade dispute body has ruled against US domestic laws on protecting turtles by using a turtle-excluding device for shrimp fishing, and against clean air laws which required environmentally-friendly gasoline.

Labour groups are up in arms against the ignoring of the interests of the working class, while Third World lobbyists protest against denying their countries the same levels of protection which enabled countries like Germany and Japan to create their domestic industrial base. And lastly, they argue that the WTO has become a supranational body, denying sovereignty to countries, and thereby to the people. The government of the people, howsoever flawed, is being replaced by a government of the MNCs and their lawyers.

One dispute which recently blew up between the USA and the EU underlines the approach of the WTO. The EU, under the Lome Convention, granted preferential terms for the import ofbananas from Caribbean ex-colonies, where the hilly terrain made bananas the sole crop for a large peasant population. US banana MNCs in Latin America objected to these rules. The WTO ruled that a banana is a banana, regardless of how it is produced.

In other words, so far as the WTO is concerned, the peasant farmers and the fruit multinational are on an equal footing and deserve to be treated equally. It doesn't matter that better access to the European market would mean the difference between life and death for the peasants, and a few dollars more profit for the MNCs. It is attitudes like this which the protesters at Seattle are protesting against. Man does not live by trade alone.