I think it is important to start out with how militarism, the drive to war, and economics are linked because I think you have to understand why the resistance to both is linked. If you look at it from the point of view of the corporations and particularly the American corporations, since the mid 1960’s the rates of profits that they have been making in industry across the industrialized world have been going down. People argue about how much they have been going down; it depends on many different accounting systems that are in use in many different countries.

Whatever accounting system you use, profits have been going down since the mid 1960’s—particularly in industry. One thing that is produced is all the bubbles. The real estate bubbles, the stock exchange bubbles, all the speculative bubbles that you see all over the world that happen because the money that was going to be invested in industry is not making the profits back in industry. So you put it in some kind or another of bubble speculation and the money just runs after each other until the bubble breaks. That just kind of moves the money around, it doesn’t solve their basic problem with profits.

The corporations of the world, particularly the American corporations have been trying to solve this problem since the late 1970’s by what has come to be known as globalization. How this works is one policy after another—whose purpose is to reduce the share of the national income that is going to ordinary white collar and blue collar working people—increases the share of the income that is going to the corporations and back to the shareholders and profit.

Part of that is cuts in welfare and government expenditure of all sorts. Part of it is privatization of education, of public services, of welfare across the world--privatization that lets the corporations into these areas and lets them make profits. They can make bigger profits at the moment out of education, water, and utilities than they can out of the old industrial corporations. So they are desperately interested in the privatization of everything.

Also the attack on union rights across the world makes it harder for working people to defend themselves and their incomes. The attack on health and safety legislation and regulatory bodies of all kinds; again not having health and safety at work is cheaper for the corporations and more expensive for us.

This is a global policy usually called neo-liberalism and it is attractive to the ruling classes, to the rich and powerful in every country in the world. They have signed up for this because what they like about it is the way it enables them—in India, China, England, Italy, or South Africa—to screw their own working people and try to pull the profits back up.

However, the globalization process is not simply that. It is also an attempt to increase the relative power of American corporations as opposed to corporations and governments in other countries. That is what the WTO, Federal Reserve, IMF, and World Bank are about. It is both raising the rate of profit in each country and increasing the relative power of the United States.

It is usually called free trade. But it is not free trade. It is an attempt to make the world more open to American corporations but not necessarily the other way around.

The most startling example of that is the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is 300 odd pages long, I think 380 pages long. A free trade agreement is one page long; it says that there is free trade. The rest of the 300 odd pages are a whole series of exceptions. Which the most important one in a world wide and all of these trade agreements is that there is not open trade in agricultural products coming back from the third world to the first world.

What that means is that there is ambivalence in the ruling classes of every country outside of the United States; there is ambivalence about the globalization process because they like the part where they get to screw their own working class. They do not like the part where Coca-Cola comes in and takes over the bottling plants. So you can see in France, Italy, China, India, and Britain the ambivalence of the local ruling class towards the project.

However globalization comes to them as a package. It is a package of ideas that we must have free trade, that social welfare is a thing of the past, that social justice is a thing of the past; there is no alternative to the market. So they have to sign up—the ruling class in France, China, or wherever—to the entire package. This produces a kind of a going back and forth. They will complain and wine and argue about how they do not want to do what the United States government wants them to do. Then they buckle and do it because they can not give up the generalized attack on their own working people. Their corporations also have to make the profits come back.

This ties in to what is happening to the drive to war. There are two parts to the drive to war. One part is that behind every system of social control there is the iron fist of violence. Every economic and political system relies partly on people’s consent to having things that way and partly on force.

I think the thing that drove it home to me most was reading about in the early 1970’s in West Bengal, India they elected a communist government and their minister for the police did one very important thing: he said the police would not intervene in any disputes inside factories. Sort them out non-violently and by consensus and the police would not go if called to factories.

After that every time the factory workers in Calcutta had a grievance they would do a thing called a gerow where they surrounded the senior managers non-violently and politely and would not let them go to the toilet until they agreed to the workers’ demands. Some hard really tough managers lasted 24 hours or 36 hours. Most conceded in 2, 4, or 6 hours.

Now that was solving of difficulties in factories by majority consensus in the factory. It was unacceptable. It meant an enormous rise in workers’ power in the factories in Calcutta. It was unacceptable to the Indian government which removed the state government to put in central government rule and so on. So always on a local level even if the police are almost never called to the work place, the fact that they can be called to the work place is crucial.

The United States functions in the same way as the world cop—backing up the economic system when absolutely necessary. There is another aspect to this as well. If you look at it as economic blocks, the United States is not the sole super power. The European Union, the economies of Western Europe together are in economic terms slightly bigger. The United States has something like 24% of world production and Western Europe has about 27% of world production.

As an economic power the United States is not dominant; as a military power the United States is overwhelmingly dominant. The military budget for the United States is larger than the military budgets of the next nine countries combined. So it is dominant, particularly on a high tech level. What they learned, the American government and the American corporations, from the last Gulf war in 1990 and 1991 was that if they went to war (that again was in the middle of a recession like the one we are seeing now) and they changed the subject internationally from economics to military matters then they became the dominant world power. After the Gulf War they came out, the Bush administration and the American government, as the sole world super power.

Now going into a recession and facing a growing anti-capitalist movement in the world they are changing the subject to the military again. The hope there is that it will make them not just the dominant military power but the dominant economic power. The same with the war in Afghanistan--they went into the war in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban regime. They came out with troops in every central Asian country with oil. They came out as the dominant power over central Asian oil as a result of the war.

The second part that is pushing them towards war is to keep control of the world. Not simply the competition between different powers but to keep control of the people of the Middle East and stop them from gaining control of the oil themselves. That is the background. And I think you need to understand that background to see why the movements in Europe are coming together.

Audience member: I think also to expand upon your point is not just any random war to change the subject back to military might where we are the sole super power, but a war not against terrorism and the place where terrorists allegedly come from—which is what the government said was a priority—but switching over to a strategic war which puts the U.S. hand on the valve for oil to the European Union so as to resume control economically as well.

Jonathan: Yes. Yes.

After September 11th in Europe the important point is that we had just had a very big victory for the united capitalist movement in Genoa. What happened in Genoa was that we had a pretty standard anti-capitalist demonstration against the world leaders where we tried to get into the red zone and we tried to get through the fence – about 50,000/60,000 of us.

The police attacked very heavily, they killed one protester. That night after the killing the leaders of the Genoa Social Forum went on national television live. They had one of the talk shows which broadcasts from the convergence center for the demonstration with the equivalent of David Letterman talking to the demonstrators—which is a sign of forwarding the strength of the Italian movement. The spokesperson for our demonstration in Italy went on national television and he spoke live to the Italian people. He said “Whatever you were planning on doing tomorrow or wherever you were planning on going—please drop it. Get in a car, bus, or train and come to Genoa because we need the largest possible demonstration tomorrow to stop what is happening.”

They got 300,000 people which in the light of what has happened since is not a lot in the anti-capitalist movement. However, then it felt like an enormous number. That demonstration was attacked by the police again. When two-thirds of the demonstrators had passed the police attacked, dividing the demonstration in half. There was a lot of tear gas, a lot of beating. They beat 100,000 demonstrators back for 5 kilometers, 3 miles, to their buses. Beating them as they got on the buses.

No one had done this to a demonstration of hundreds of thousands since 1945. No one had done it in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, or in North America. It did not happen to the Million Man March. It did not happen to Martin Luther King’s march. It did not happen to the big anti-Viet Nam marches. This was an enormous upping of the ante.

Then that night the police attacked the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum. They attacked the moderate center of the movement where people were sleeping. People were just asleep. The police went in and they beat people for two hours. The arrested all 93 people they found in the building. They had to take 65-67 people to the emergency room to be sewn up before they could take them away to the detention center where they were affectively tortured.

Now the response to that in the Italian movement, because there had been 300,000 people at the demonstration, is this feeling that this had not happened before. Now we knew with this size that suddenly we had a mass movement. Everybody that had been on the demonstration knew that.

After the mass demonstration and then the attack on the headquarters of the Social Forum people all over Genoa began putting up homemade banners that said one word: assassini. It means assassins—murderers in Italian. They put those banners up in the parks. They put them over the main streets and in the markets. They hung one over the police station in the center of town. The police did not dare take any of these banners down. They knew how people felt in Genoa. The police had to go in and out of work under a banner that said “murderers.” By Sunday night these banners were going up all over Rome, the capital.

By Monday night there were demonstrations in every town and city in Italy to get the people who had been arrested out of jail. 100,000 people in Milan which is the biggest but 50,000 here, 60,000 there. But also in towns of 50,000 demonstrations of 1,000 because the 300,000 people who had been at the demonstration knew 30 million people--more than half the population. They had the confidence from the size of it to bring those people out which meant that all of the people who had been arrested were released and all of the charges against all of them were dropped. This has never happened in my memory for any major demonstration anywhere in the world.

After Genoa we were feeling strong across Europe. We were feeling that we won. And in fact there has not been any policing of any importance of any demonstration since. The police just are not there on demonstrations. They were trying to break the anti-capitalist movement and they decided it just does not work.

I will give different examples for different countries for what happened with September 11th. In Britain—I am in Globalise Resistance which is the biggest anti-capitalist umbrella group in Britain--we had a national steering committee of 18 people the day after September 11th. It was clear there was going to be a war. We rang around everybody on the steering committee and asked do we put everything we have into anti-war work? All 18 people said yes.

What we did in Britain, I mean obviously Globalise Resistance in the anti-capitalist movement as such was not the right vehicle for organizing an anti-war movement, but we wanted to include a lot more and different people. We organized a public meeting with all the major speakers of the movement. Within a week we had two very large terrible meetings in London. It was just awful; shameful meetings of about 3,000 people. People were fighting for the microphone and yelling at each other.

What the argument was about was whether we were going to have a campaign with a program and a set of demands. A lot of people, a minority but a sizable minority, wanted to have an anti-war campaign that was anti-imperialist. A lot of other people did not want that but wanted to have an anti-war campaign that said we are pacifists and we are dedicated to non-violence.

However the majority wanted a campaign that included everything. That said very simply we are against the war and we are going to do everything we can to be against the war. We wanted a campaign that would include Hamas and the Quakers, it would include suicide bombers and lifelong pacifists—a campaign that would include everybody. The other demand was that we were against beating up immigrants, which we all agreed on.

So we got that campaign and on the basis of that we were able to develop a very big movement over the last year. Part of what was important in that movement was going to the mosques. We have an important Muslim minority in Britain, about 3 or 4% of the population. It was very important that the white peace activists went to the mosques for Friday prayers and said “Please support the anti-war movement, please come to the demonstrations.”

The reaction was that the imams of the mosques stood up on Friday prayers and gave sermons about coming on the anti-war movement. Also equally important, the fact that we had gone to the mosques meant that the Muslims who were not very good Muslims were probably the majority—they came on the demonstrations as well. It also meant that the Hindu’s came to the demonstrations because by going to the mosques we had said we are not racist.

We made it very clear that Islam is not the enemy. Islam is on our side for this one. It meant that we got the Hindu’s as well, it meant we got the Afro Caribbean, but it also meant we got a lot more white people who were not Muslims on the demonstrations than we would have if we had not done this. One reason this happened was that we made very concrete the argument that Islam is not the enemy. The argument that Islam is the enemy or Islamic fundamentalism is the enemy was quite a strong argument we were facing. So instead of saying there are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims, we just said we want all the Muslims with us.

We created a united movement and a movement with 50,000 people on the first demonstration against the Afghan war, then 100,000 on the next demonstration. Then we had about 70,000 people on the demonstrations for Palestine. On the one level that was good, but actually a big weakness was 50,000 of them were Asians and only 20,000 were white English people. That was an enormous weakness. Then last September we had a big demonstration against the upcoming war in Iraq of 400,000 people.

That was a wonderful demonstration because we had achieved what we had wanted. On one side of me were the Quakers and the campaign for nuclear disarmament marching with their banner and on the other side were young Muslim girls in black head scarves yelling “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!” We were all marching together and everybody was a bit nervous but also pleased.

Also it was a demonstration of…everybody wanted to shout slogans and nobody knew how. So it did not happen. You could see people trying but it was a movement full of people on their first demonstration. We had a majority of the British union and the union leaders were there on the demonstration with their banners. But it was also much larger than the labor movement; it was infinitely larger than the left. I mean the largest that there has ever been in Britain. That was the British experience.

The experience was different in other countries. In France the anti-capitalist movement ran into a wall because the leadership of the anti-capitalist movement is basically run by liberal economists who decided that they would not campaign on the war. Their line on the war was basically that George Bush and Osama bin Laden are equal enemies of progress and that we can not take sides. This is basically the line of the revolutionary left which is quite important in France.

Since they took this approach there were no demonstrations about the war. I walked through Paris in December and there was only one poster against the war. I walked for seven hours. I saw only one poster and that poster was in German. It also meant that the anti-capitalist movement was much weaker because when they tried to have anti-capitalist protests that were not about the war and were ignoring the war almost nobody turned out for them.

The really astonishing thing is what happened in Italy, Greece and Spain. In all those places this spring and summer was one day general strikes called by the union confederations. All of them were called against particular bits of neo-liberalist economics. You could see that the ideas of the anti-capitalist movement had also become the ideas of the labor movement.

These were very big events. In Italy 13 million people were on strike, 3 million people demonstrated in Rome. In Spain union membership is about like it is in America; it is about 10% of the working population. The Spanish unions called the entire working population out on strike and 85% responded. So where I was in Seville they closed the corner green groceries. They closed the bars and cafes—they closed everything. It was a whole population coming out on a general strike.

The other thing for the general strike in Spain was in Barcelona. Barcelona is a city of 3 million people; they had 700,000 demonstrators in Barcelona for the general strike. The demonstration did not happen. Everybody arrived and it just got bigger and bigger in central Barcelona and nobody could move in any direction.

In Madrid there were 1 million people demonstrating. In Seville, which is a small city, there were 130,000 people but the union leaders from all over Spain came there to talk to that demonstration. It was held early so they could be on the 6 o’clock news saying very clearly the struggle of workers in the global south is the same as the struggle of the workers in the global north. They were also saying to come to the demonstration against the European Union summit leaders in two days in Seville.

So the anti-capitalist demonstration in Seville two days later was also 130,000 people. They were all carrying the same banners and they looked the same and they were the same people and they sounded the same. It sounded like an anti-capitalist demonstration with the exception there were not as many acrobats and people on stilts in the anti-capitalist one as there had been in the trade union demonstration. I think they were tired or something. The important thing was you could see these movements coming together and the same was happening in Greece.

Now I was involved in planning the European Social Forum which we thought would be some sort of gathering--a talk shop, a series of meetings of meetings about anti-capitalism in Florence for November. I was involved all year in different organizing meetings. We had traveling organizing meetings in different capitals in Europe.

You could see after the general strikes in Spain, Italy, and Greece a transformation in the people from those countries. They no longer had the feeling that the anti-capitalist movement was a minority or a vanguard or that they were somehow different. They had themselves all been on strike at their work. So had their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, and children. They were energized and confident as a mass movement.

We had an argument in the European Social Forum. We started arguing that we needed a big demonstration against the war in Florence. For months we were arguing about whether it has to be against the war and whether we would have a demonstration-- whether it was too provocative to have a demonstration. Two months before it happened we won the argument for the demonstration but we were still arguing whether or not it should be against the war.

What swung it was first of all the general strikes in Greece, Spain, and Italy. This was crucial because it was going to be in Italy and the Italian activists were organizing the Social Forum. It was crucial that these people were feeling more and more radical and more and more confident. Also very crucial was that we had the demonstration. I remember I went to an organizing meeting in Spain the week after we had a demonstration of 400,000 people in London and just as important there had been 200,000 people in Washington. All of the Italians of that meeting said basically if the British can do it and the Americans can do it, with all that is wrong with them, then we can do it.

That meant with six weeks to go we had won the argument pushing from the left. Not from the left somewhere outside yelling about how people are going to sell you out but pushing from the left in all the organizing meetings as part of the process, as part of building it. We had won the majority of the people in the Italian movement after the demonstrations. We are still having an argument with the people from France who wanted to have it not centrally about the war because they had not organized against the war and so on. But we won the argument.

At the European Social forum three things distinguished it. First of all it was much bigger than we expected. It was 60,000 people and those people were young. I think the average age was 19. A lot of the high schools in Florence closed on the Friday because none of the kids came—they all went to the Social Forum. That was lovely.

The second thing was the unions were there. The European TUC which is the equivalent of the AFLCIO on the European level was there in strength. They organized six different big seminars. The union general secretaries and presidents and so on came and spoke. They were committed to it and so was the Italian movement.

The third thing was that when we held the demonstration on the war 1 million people came. It seems like an exaggeration to say a demonstration of 1 million but it started moving off just before 12 noon. People were coming in on special trains from all over Italy to the train station which was near the beginning of the demonstration. At 8 o’clock at night, eight hours after it began, there were still special trains coming into the train station and being unloaded and those people could not get out of the train station to the beginning of the march because it was too crowded.

Also the trade union in Italy, the trade movement and the anti-war movement had come together. At the start of the march there were maybe 200 hundred people, a few organizers from each country with a big banner against the war. Immediately behind them were the Auto Workers Union fighting closures in the auto workers plants.

When we came to the final day of the rally the far left spoke about what we were going to do in the trade unions. The full time official from the Auto Workers Union spoke about solidarity in Palestine and what she had done in Palestine and so on. It was an astonishing event.

We had been arguing again from the left but getting more and more support in the organizing meetings for joint demonstrations in every capital in Europe against the war in Iraq on the 15th of February. Through a democratic process of discussion in the European Social Forum we got general agreement for that so we called for it on the last day.

We now have demonstrations planned and organized for eleven different capitals in Europe; also for Cairo in Egypt, for Istanbul in Turkey, and for Ram Allah in Palestine, and for New York.

The Daily Mirror, which is one of the two biggest newspapers in Britain, this week had a headline that said there would be 10 million demonstrators on February 15th in all of the capitals. Across Europe except for Britain, in every country but Britain we have the majority of the population against the war. In Britain it is split almost half and half in public opinion.

I do not know what is going to happen next but I do know that the anti-capitalist movement and the anti-war movement have come together. In parts of Europe, so has the trade union movement. All three are together gives us an enormous power. It does not mean that we are going to win but it means that we have made an enormous step upwards.

The other thing I have learned from this is the importance of having a left wing pole in the anti-capitalist movement that wants to push as much as humanly possible for as much activity as possible that also wants to unite people. We do not get people to sign onto the program but we unite the largest number of people to oppose the war or oppose neo-liberalism. We want people that are radical but people who are inclusive. I will stop there.