Your Money or Your Life!

GLOBALISING RESISTANCE/261

its approach to the problems at hand succeeded at drawing in the
other social movements.
NGOs, of which a significant number radicalised during the 19 70s,
are also clearly in crisis. Many of them have fallen into line with their
national governments or with the international organisations
(World Bank, UN, UNDP).
This crisis of representation has created deep-seated scepticism
about pro] ects for radical change. S ocialism, to take the most clear-cut
example, has been hugely discredited by the bureaucratic experience
in the so-called socialist camp in the East and by the capitulation of
Western socialists to their own countries' capitalist class.
Nevertheless, social struggle continues and in some cases has
grown more radical. New forms of organisation and consciousness
appear fleetingly, thus far unable to give rise to a new and coherent
programme. Let us not, however, make the mistake of underesti­
mating their radicalism. Belgium, that tiny example of developed
capitalism, went through a ma] or social crisis in the autumn of 19 9 6.
The crisis was provoked by the inability of the political and legal
system to put a stop to the sexual abuse and murder of children.
Belgian trade unions were themselves unable to play a direct role in
the crisis, even though their membership base participated actively
in the strikes and street demonstrations.

There are frequent gatherings of representatives of all the 'lesses':
the landless, the jobless, the homeless and the documentless. They
declare loud and clear that the future of the world does not belong to
markets, companies and capital, but rather to each and every citizen
of the planet 'and everyone else'.
Doubtless, social movements have chalked up a long list of failures
in recent years. But the history of struggles for emancipation is not a
matter of adding and subtracting victories and defeats.
Can the crisis of all the various social movements give way to a new
upward cycle of positive experiences and rising consciousness? The
events of recent years provide cause for cautious optimism. The case
for standing on the sidelines is less convincing than ever.
A tiny minority of decision-makers spare no effort to strip the
individual of his or her fundamental rights, to reduce human beings
to the status of just one 'resource' among others; to replace the idea
of society by that of the market; to reduce the creativity and wealth
of labour to one commodity among many; to destroy social
awareness and leave individualism in its stead; to empty politics of all