GLOBALISING RESISTANCE/259whole. The French strikes oflate 1995 sparked a political sea-change
whose first upshot, however inadequate, was the defeat of the Right
in the 1997 parliamentary elections.
The organised labour movement is struggling for the generalised
reduction of working time, and for the protection of hard-won social
welfare programmes in industrialised countries and in those
countries of the periphery (in the South and East) where such
programmes were fought for and won.
Instead of staying clandestine, the sanspapiers in France have come
out openly to demand that the government legalise their situation
with the proper documents.
Elsewhere on the planet, the 1994 Zapatista uprising in a
peripheral part of Mexico had a huge impact in the rest of the country.
No clear victory was secured as a result, but the level of conscious
ness throughout the country grew by leaps and bounds, restricting
the ability of the Mexican government to intervene and put down by
force a (reluctantly) armed rebellion. Almost simultaneously, the El
Barzon debtors movement of hundreds of thousands of middle-class
Mexican victims of globalisation, mobilised against the government.
Ever since, there has been an ongoing friendly exchange between the
Zapatistas and El Barzon.
South Korea has been portrayed as a model for emerging from
underdevelopment. Yet in January-February 1997 masses of South
Korean workers took to the streets against the government's neo-
liberal designs. In the US, the working class has faced a series of
crippling defeats since the Reagan era. Yet workers at the multina
tional company UPS (300,000 employees) organised a partially
victorious strike movement that earned the sympathy of a majority
of Americans.
In December 1997 and January 1998, French unemployed
workers shattered their docile image by occupying unemployment
offices across the country. Large numbers of the German unemployed
followed their example soon after, in February 1998. In January
1998, the World March Against Child Labour got under way in the
Philippines, South Africa and Brazil. It travelled throughout the three
respective continents and converged on Geneva in June 1998. In
May 1998, students backed by the Indonesian masses rose up against
Suharto and IMF dictates, forcing the dictator to resign. An
encouraging beginning. The future will reveal whether equally
promising results will follow.