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"How to say 'no' to the New World Order"

By M. SABEHEDDIN & NEW DAWN RESEARCH TEAM

The existing — still evolving — global system has been unfair and unjust to the vast majority of the human race. Its inequalities and its injustices are evident in almost every facet of international affairs.
— Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Malaysian political scientist & Human Rights activist

Nationalism today is headed for a collision with Capitalism, for the simple reason that the nation per se has been redefined by Capital as a zone of depletion. In other words, the nation can either capitulate to Capitalism or else resist it….
— Hakim Bey

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ruling circles in the rich capitalist nations, led by the United States, proclaimed the dawn of a "New World Order". But it really is not so "new". A more correct term for this post Cold War era is "Corporate World Order".

A global system dominated by a small minority in the North of the globe, with only one superpower, the USA, acting as the new world’s policeman. The crisis of the international capitalist system impels the ruling elites to maintain their death-ridden system by accelerating their robbery, domination and exploitation of the developing nations in the South of the globe. While at home they carry out attacks on the basic rights and living standards of working people. Dr. Ali Mazrui, the renowned African scholar, argues that this "New World Order" is "a kind of global apartheid."

The old Cold War East-West conflict has disappeared, and a frightening, accelerating North-South conflict is under way. Capitalist thinkers herald the "end of history" and the "end of ideology". Now every human being is "free" to enjoy the poison desert of consumerism, of bourgeois sameness, alienation, and exploitation. The earth, we are told, must now be made safe for the free market and the global citizen consumer.

In its drive for greater profit and a unified global market, capitalism respects no national boundaries, no national culture and no national identity. The unifying vision of capitalism’s One World Order is the transformation of the planet into a global shopping centre peopled by uniform consumers.

Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh write that this global shopping mall is:

a planetary supermarket with a dazzling spread of things to eat, drink, wear and enjoy. Dreams of affluent living are communicated to the farthest reaches of the globe, but only a minority of the people in the world can afford to shop at the mall. Of the 5.4 billion people on earth, almost 3.6 billion have neither cash nor credit to buy much of anything. A majority of people on the planet are at most window-shoppers. (Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order)

In 1995 the Zapatistas of Chiapas sent an open letter to the President of the Republic of Mexico. In this communique these heroic revolutionaries exposed the five components of capitalism’s one world order:

1. A world dictatorship

2. A single military power

3. A single economic order

4. A one world currency (the ‘cashless society’)

5. A monolithic, homogeneous global culture
(a human ‘alphabet soup’)

Capitalism demands, in these last days of the 20th century, a one world unhindered by national or cultural boundaries with a free flow of capital, labour and technology. National sovereignty and independence cannot be tolerated. "Erosion of sovereignty", a 1991 Club of Rome report declares, "may be for most countries a positive move towards the new global system in which the nation-state will...have a diminishing significance."

Money is to be the sole unifier, the only thing that brings people together. Everything is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. Notions of community united by language, distinct culture, history, tradition, a common homeland, a shared destiny, must be ‘neutralised’. With the rapid growth of technology, people are more important as consumers, than producers. The free market demands that the ties of history and tradition be broken and replaced by the ideal of a society of selfish consumption. People are ‘atoms’ free of the past and blind to the future. Nothing more than consumer slave-robots with dollars! This is reality in the Corporate One World Order.

Government does not seek to embody the popular will, but is a Big Brother protecting the free market, the interests of money. On the international level, national governments are only accepted into the "civilised world" when they accept the free market, along with the rigid conditions of the International Monetary Fund and Western consumer values. Nations, as well as religious and ethnic unions, who refuse the Corporate World Order, are subject to embargoes, demon-isation by the world media, and splits along all possible fractures (see how the CIA actively promotes separatist groups in target countries).

Consequently, in the late 1990s the priority of all states is full integration into this global system. The few countries who will not acquiesce find themselves branded internationally as ‘pariahs’ and ‘outlaw regimes’!

The Corporate One World Order demands the subjugation of organic social relationships. Everyone on earth is to have the same tastes, requirements and consumer needs. Genuine diversity and uniqueness create ‘marketing problems’. Capitalism dehumanises the Human Personality to an abstract, faceless being without tradition, without roots, i.e. the global citizen consumer, the modern slave.

Ferdinand Toennis in his study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society), published in 1887, contrasted what we may call the natural society and the artificial society. The Gemeinschaft is natural and founded on family and communal ties, the sharing of a common inheritance (ethnic, geographical, cultural and traditional). The Gesellschaft is artificial, founded on transactions, egoism and the laws of contract.

On the one hand, we have a world of traditional, cultural and communal relations, on the other a world of human beings without any distinctive ties or natural loyalties. For Toennis, capitalism leads inevitably to the destruction of the Gemeinschaft by the Gesellschaft. Over a century ago he warned that the "bourgeois mentality wishes to unify the world and turn it into a single market."

Global Nightmare

The United States is today the bastion of global capitalism. In many ways it is not a true nation, but a gigantic commercial-industrial complex. US citizens have very little say in government affairs and are effectively excluded from the decision making process. Policy is formulated and manipulated by the cosmopolitan financial oligarchy, through a powerful network of interlocking think-tanks, lobby groups, and related ‘opinion makers’. This capitalist ruling class uses the political, military, and economic power of America as an instrument to achieve mercenary interests and purposes. Take as an example the ongoing US campaign against Iraq. The American people are told that the murderous 1991 Gulf War was in the ‘national interest’. The national interest requires Iraq to be kept weak and isolated. The facts are America’s capitalist oligarchy — ‘secret government’ — wants to maintain its privileged dominance of Arab oil. Arab nationalist states, like Libya and Iraq, who challenge foreign exploitation of Arab resources, are the evil enemy. The interests of the American oil conglomerates are erroneously and deceptively termed national interests.

Organisations like the Rock-efeller sponsored Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), among others, formulate and shape the policies later implemented by Washington under the cover of national interest. These influential bodies, funded and backed by transnational corporations, are dedicated to the preservation and expansion of global capitalism. Their job is to keep the world safe for big business. The documents of these elitist global planners leave us in no doubt that national sovereignty and economic self-reliance are anathema in their One World Order. All manifestations of communal spirit are to be abolished or taken over by the agents of international capitalism. In the words of that ‘friend of the people’, David Rockefeller, "Broad human interests are being served best in economic terms where free market forces are able to transcend national boundaries."

In capitalist countries like the United States, Britain and Australia, the ruling circles are hidden behind a "democratic" facade of parliaments and elections. As Karl Marx correctly pointed out, parliamentary elections give the people the right every few years to choose which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. The constantly reinforced myth is that the "people" elect the politicians, who thus determine government policy. The plain facts reveal otherwise. The very nature of the capitalist system means Money Rules and the real power centres are often well concealed. The modern state serves capitalism, not the "people". Parliaments are simply talking shops to conceal the truth that the country’s real policies are shaped by decisions taken by transnational corporations and their local big business associates.

The rules of the parliamentary game demand no politician ever question the system or the multitude of myths advanced in the name of liberal democracy and the capitalist free market. Yes, changes to the outward forms and trappings of the system are permitted. But any talk of revolution or dare we say it, overthrowing the system itself, is almost instinctively condemned. The system may be tinkered with, made more responsive, humanised, reformed, even modified, but never challenged! Through numerous subtle messages propagated by the corporate run mass media, we are told there is no alternative to liberal capitalism. Material prosperity and unlimited consumption are the purpose of life itself. And according to this propaganda, only Big Brother capitalism can keep us fat and happy. Without money, say the purveyors of the capitalist nightmare, the individual human being is worthless.

One of the goals of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), in alliance with the secretive European Bilderberg Group, was to weaken, divide, and economically enslave the former Soviet Union. A necessary prelude to the birth of the Corporate One World Order. Today, Russia is reduced to a pauper dependent on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, with its population and natural resources open to exploitation by transnational corporations and banking institutions. The catastrophic social and economic situation in Russia is being repeated in Indonesia and other Asian countries following the recent financial upheaval. These once prospering developing countries are now subject to IMF reforms designed to fully open their economies to global free trade.

What Is To Be Done?

Living in a society saturated with values and ideas serving the rule of money, what can be done? The key to resisting the combined forces of the Corporate One World Order is an alternative worldview. The agents of the global plutocracy are able to successfully promote their agenda because there is so little coherent, organised opposition. People are being purposefully programmed to accept mass consumer culture, the discrediting of genuine diversity, the deprivation of national sovereignty, and attacks on working people in the guise of privatisation. Strategies and ideologies critical of the globalist agenda are ridiculed, devalued in the eyes of the public, and neutralised. In the post-Cold War era, capitalist globalisation is presented as the "natural course of events" and the "only guarantee of freedom".

The real nature of capitalism’s one world is plain to see. On the eve of the 21st century we must admit that there is more unhappiness, instability, insecurity, anxiety, and downright misery, than ever before. This post-Cold War world is a global system of tyrannical oppression. People’s lives distorted, impoverished and imprisoned by a world in which slavish conformity is hailed as freedom and liberation as austerity. The world capitalist system is sick and such sickness can only end in death, death of the system.

We do not need conspiracy theories to explain what is taking place in our world. The Corporate One World Order is simply the inevitable development of capitalism. History clearly shows that capitalism brings misery to the people, unemployment, inflation, crises, war. Capitalism insists on the sacrifice of people’s national interests and security in order to profit multinational corporations. Independence and sovereignty are betrayed so as to increase profits, guarantee the free flow of capital and goods, and maintain the unjust world economy.

To justify this anti-human system the supporters of capitalism rely on the false argument that respect for and protection of the individual extends to the economic sector. Capitalist notions of liberty and freedom really mean the liberty to exploit other people. The freedom to treat everything, including human beings, as a saleable commodity. Slavery is very much alive in the 1990s, it just takes on new — more discreet — forms.

As long as Australia is shackled to the US dominated world capitalist system, Australia’s resources will always be plundered and Australian workers exploited. The capitalist road leads unavoidably to the Corporate One World Order.

We can only say NO to the New World Order when we embrace an outlook in practical opposition to capitalism’s Corporate World Order. Such an ideological position, based on a scientific approach to contemporary developments, is the way to defeat the advocates of global slavery.

While there are voices critiqueing the current crisis and decrying the fast emerging Corporate One World Order, few people are offering a coherent, comprehensive alternative.

What struggling people all over the world are searching for is not some unjust old world order re-packaged in a new aggressive form, but a new vision with cultural, political and economic horizons that embrace the needs and aspirations of all humanity.

In other words, we must set out a realistic alternative capable of filling the vacuum left by decades of sterility and despair generated by free market capitalism and bureaucratic state socialism.

All genuine political action must take the international picture into consideration. Otherwise much energy, time and resources are wasted in egotistical, transitory ventures. Serious contemporary political action must aim at outmanoeuvring all the forces that have a stake in the Corporate World Order. These forces constitute the ‘hegemony of the hour’ determining as they do all the values and thinking of the modern age. We must lift up a banner of total opposition that demands human values over selfish consumerism, international co-operation in place of an unjust global system, national self-reliance as opposed to global free-trade, cultural diversity over bourgeois sameness.

In the great struggle against economic globalisation, the old animosities of Christians against Muslims, one race against another, one nation against another, must be seen for what they are. Part of the divide and rule tactics used by the exploiters. When necessary, racial and national antagonisms are inflamed by the moneyed class to divide people who should rightly be united in opposition to the common foe. Immigrants are not the ‘problem’, neighbouring peoples are not the ‘enemy’. Ethnic and sexual minorities do not constitute a ‘threat’ to national life. False stereotypes have been deliberately embedded in the public consciousness to divert attention from the reality of events. By blaming the homosexual, the immigrant, the non-believer, the communist — in short the other — reactionary politicians and populist commentators try to deflect attention away from the system. We have seen the enemy, the real cause of the problem — it is the very system in which we live. Stereotypes, constantly reinforced by the media, prevent the mass of people from impartially and sensibly comprehending what is occurring all around us. If the liberal free market globalist agenda is to be defeated, many of us will have to abandon our favourite illusions and accept new realities. The capitalist system is the problem, the real enemy of humanity.

Wrecked by crisis, upheavals, and increasingly exposed, the capitalist system can always depend on sham patriots and populists to come to the rescue. These people fear the loss of the capitalist system and therefore try to deflect attention away from the cause to peripheral issues. They often use a myriad of buzz words like "law and order", "family values", "immigration", "parliamentary democracy", "the constitution", "the war on drugs"… They address only the issues, not the cause! Building more prisons and harsher jail terms will not halt crime. Capital punishment will not bring the end of senseless violence or drug abuse. Crime, drug addiction, and other social diseases are a product of the alienation caused by the exploitative capitalist system. Men and women are not born ‘bad’, they are shaped by the society in which they live. What more can we expect from a society built on exploitation, lies and injustice. Only revolution — the replacement of the current economic, political and social system, with a genuine new society — will save Australia.

The great Australian political economist, Ted Wheelwright, over fifteen years ago, wrote:

Unless Australians can capture state power and turn it to the use of the majority of its people rather than that of the compradors, foreign investors and local elites, the country will decline…to that of a Third World country…which will be like Oliver Goldsmith’s deserted village, a place ‘where wealth accumulates, and men decay’, as its people and resources are used to shore up a world economic system which is grinding to a halt. (Australia: A Client State, Greg Crough and Ted Wheelwright, 1982)

It is futile to form yet another political party to engage in the parliamentary circus. Revolution will only be brought about by a mass movement of Australian people united by a clear vision of what tomorrow must be. This remains the only hope for a future worth living.

International People’s Front

In response to the rapid advance of the Corporate One World Order, we must call for national liberation and for a world of cooperation among free peoples. A just world of free, sovereign nations, not a world order dominated by a privileged minority.

The great Irish progressive nationalist and revolutionary, the martyr James Connolly, wrote:

True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals.

Revolutionary nationalism stands for a world of self-reliant, free peoples, diametrically opposed to the Corporate One World of consumerist conformity and bourgeois sameness. National struggles which are both non-hegemonic and anti-capitalist directly threaten the globalist agenda. They must be supported. Progressive national movements in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East are the natural allies of people in Australia, North America and Western Europe who are struggling against globalisation. The few remaining independent countries, like Cuba, North Korea, Libya and Iraq, deserve the active solidarity of anti-One World Order activists in the West. An international grass roots movement for national self-reliance and independence is a real threat to the One World. Only such supranational militancy can oppose the global plutocrats increasingly dominating all nations and peoples.

The interests of the Australian people lay with those of the people of the South. In the global North-South divide, Australia’s only future is to stand with the South. The natural allies of Australian workers are the people of Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For example, the Russian patriotic struggle shares a common cause with all anti-globalist forces. As Gennady Zyuganov, the Russian opposition leader, points out:

In the modern world, an independent Russia is the main obstacle to the creation of a ‘new world order,’ which would entail the formation of supranational bodies of political, economic, and military leadership.

Fighting for Australian national independence means supporting all national revolutionary forces in the world who are fighting for freedom, justice and dignity. For it is one common struggle against a common enemy.

With the old Cold War divide a quickly fading memory, there are now only two camps in the world. The camp of freedom (anti-Corporate One World Order forces) and the camp of oppression (the supporters of the Corporate One World Order). All ideologies, governments and popular movements can be placed into one of these two categories.

This is why New Dawn is constantly working to build fraternal links of communication and cooperation with all peoples, regardless of their religion, race or nationality. Our vision is supra-national in struggling for a worldwide people’s front against the global plutocracy.

Join us!
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This paper is a contribution to the development of an Australia wide network of anti-One World Order activists. If you would like further information or are prepared to become involved in this campaign for world freedom please write to: New Dawn, GPO Box 3126FF, Melbourne, VIC 3001.