What?s left now for global Left?

While a historic shift in global economic management grabbed the headlines in coverage of last week?s G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, another equally significant change took place on the streets. The anti-globalisation movement splintered into myriad mini-causes and came out to protest in a weakened avatar compared to its potent former self that was born at the WTO ministerial in Seattle in 1999.

So much water has flowed under Pittsburgh?s ubiquitous bridges in one decade that the contemporary manifestation of the angry Left could not but have morphed from its fiery origins in Seattle, as a single-minded attack against ?corporate globalisation?.

The enemy for organisers of running battles and clashes with the police at key global meets since Seattle was clearly capitalism and its perceived injustices. Opposition to neoliberalism and multinational corporations was the leitmotif at protests that rocked the G-8 summit in Genoa and the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, the G-8 summit in Switzerland in 2003, the Apec summit in Chile in 2004, the G-8 summit in Scotland in 2005, the Heligendamm G-8 summit in 2007 and countless other conclaves of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

Over the last ten years, the dramatic phenomenon of arsonists ravaging McDonald?s and Starbucks outlets in cities where world leaders convened outshone the deliberations of VIPs in stovepiped surroundings. The fury of those outside the decision-making rooms, both literally and figuratively, and their battle cries of ending the ?dictatorship of the rich? conveyed that economic globalisation was a contested reality rather than a fait accompli.

But the composition of the G-20 has confounded the sworn foes of capitalism. In its early years, the G-20?s meetings did not arouse much leftwing antipathy. The only reported demonstrations that occurred at the G-20 finance ministers? meetings in Canada in 2000 and Australia in 2006 were tame affairs that did not enter anarchist halls of fame.

Even after the G-20 devised the concept of a heads of state summit in November 2008 to deal with the metastasizing financial crisis, anti-globalisation activists did not view this forum as a worthwhile target. The first summit in Washington DC last year passed off incident-free, possibly because Americans had just elected Barack Obama as President and the enormity of that event left the Left breathless.

The second G-20 summit in London in April 2009 was an exception due to its critical timing. The planet was in ferment over deteriorating economic indices and grievances were increasing against the way in which the burdens of the crash were being offloaded on the shoulders of the poor. Had any other global meeting of political leaders occurred in such a moment, a mass outpouring of anti-capitalist wrath could not have been prevented.

Mobilisers on the Left sensed during the London summit that what US Vice President Joseph Biden termed a historic ?inflection point? must be seized to overthrow capitalism itself. The summit became a focal opportunity for the Left to amass street power and attempt a tipping of the scales against corporate hegemony when the financial class was on its knees. The obvious cracks among different country delegations to the summit were added spurs to the protesters, who felt that their moment of reorganising the world may be at hand due to intra-capitalist rivalries.

The G-20, however, recovered from the lows of London and narrowed down internal differences in the months that followed. Policy coordination of 20 major economies of the world is still far from perfect, but divisions of members into smaller blocks driven by polarised agendas have stemmed.

The unusual sight of all the attendees at Pittsburgh unanimously projecting consensus on long-debated issues like the appropriate forum for stewarding the world economy, governance of the financial system, and rebalancing spending and saving propensities was one reason why the Left could not mount a raucous challenge.

Anti-globalisation activists are still struggling to develop a logical critique of the expansion of the G-8 into the G-20, a co-optation that admitted populous developing countries like China, India and Brazil into the sanctum sanctorum of capitalist structures. If a forum represents approximately 90% of the global economy, 80% of world trade and two-thirds of humanity, the Left has a harder time questioning its legitimacy as an elite club of special interests.

One of the few protesters in Pittsburgh was quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying, ?The fact that 20 or so individuals right now are determining economic policies for four to five billion people just isn?t right.? But this was not the dominant sentiment of the motley groups that gathered in the city to try and march to the venue of the summit. Instead of harping on the non-representative and pro-capitalist character of the G-20, most protesters latched on to smaller causes.

A rainbow of resentments was on display in Pittsburgh?Burmese dissidents seeking action against their murderous military junta,

Tibetans pillorying China for its rights abuses in Tibet, Palestinians demanding the end of Israeli occupation, and other elements calling for ending wars. Banners declaiming that ?capitalism kills? commingled with this litany but did not occupy centrestage.

It was a diffuse show that lacked the singular anti-capitalist mood one had come to expect since Seattle. The diversity of the G-20?s membership attracted dispersed rather than concentrated ire. President Obama himself remarked that the protests in Pittsburgh were tranquil, thinly numbered and misguided because the G-20 was ?helping workers and the poor?.

For the anti-globalisation Left to rebound from its insipid performance in Pittsburgh, the world economy will have to nosedive further and expose the contradictions of capitalism like never before. But the G-20?s firefighting might avoid just that outcome. Pittsburgh could mark the beginning of the fragmentation of the anti-globalisation movement into narrower avenues.

?The author is associate professor of world politics at the Jindal Global Law School