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Make the G8 leaders history

Millions of people, including some of the world's most famous musicians, are taking part in protests at the appalling conditions in which large numbers of their fellow human beings live. They want the leaders of the world's richest countries meeting at the G8 summit in Edinburgh in July to act to "make poverty history". As even Bob Geldof - the founder of Live Aid - has acknowledged, in the end charity can't solve global poverty - there has to be a political solution.

Geldof, the Make Poverty History campaign and charitable organisations believe that putting political leaders like Blair, Bush, Berlusconi and Chirac under mass pressure is the way forward. If enough political will is generated, these leaders would be compelled to tell the real masters of the universe - the global corporations - to mend their ways and tackle poverty in Africa as well as climate change. Or so the argument goes. Unfortunately, the harsh realities of existing political and economic power suggest that this is an unrealistic strategy.

As the campaigning group Corporate Watch explains in a special report on Edinburgh: "The G8 is intended as a forum to build consensus amongst the world's most powerful nations. Whatever their differences on a raft of different policy issues, all the G8 leaders embrace without question the Washington Consensus, the political position that favours the breaking down of all barriers to corporate trade and investment, based on the belief that private companies and market systems always find the most efficient way to share out resources."

Corporate Watch's report adds: "With the G8 governments controlling over half of the votes at World Bank and IMF [International Monetary Fund] meetings, the Gleneagles summit will be just one part of a continual process by which trade and business agreements are thrashed out between powerful Western governments and corporations."

In other words, today indissoluble connections and virtually seamless links exist between economic and political power. It is difficult to tell where one stops and the other begins. There is a neat division of labour. Bush, Blair and the others are essentially the political wing of giant corporations whose ruthless economic activities dominate all of our lives. These leaders in turn command national and international state institutions that constantly reinforce the values, structures and control mechanisms that protect capitalism as a social system.

The corporations cannot change their spots. In their world, they have no choice but to seek out the cheapest resources, including labour, in order to maximise profits. Even as the Make Poverty History protests are gearing up, the corporations go unchallenged by G8 leaders as they continue to pillage Africa of its natural resources, making only corrupt politicians and businessmen rich. Meanwhile, in America whole areas of environmentally-crucial wilderness, protected everyone thought by the tightest laws, are now being opened up for oil and gas drilling as a result of influence on the Bush government. In Brazil, the "left" Lula government has just arrested a group including top civil servants in its own environmental protection agency who have helped wipe out large areas of the Amazon rain forest in the name of profit. In Britain, whole areas of the country have been written off by New Labour to destitution and unemployment. When asset-stripped corporations like Rover fold, the government washes its hands and blames mysterious "market forces".

Can such leaders and states, whether in the rich or the poor countries, tied as they are to the fortunes of global capital, make poverty history, even allowing for whatever cosmetic debt "initiatives" Blair and Brown might announce to show that they are "listening"? Absolutely no chance. They are making democracy history though, turning the political process into a farce and riding roughshod over basic human rights. Yet the tide is turning. Wherever they rule the G8 leaders enjoy no real support or authority. In France and the Netherlands, people voted decisively against their political élites when it came to extending the reach of free-market capitalism deeper inside the European Union. More and more people are focusing on the corporations as the real source of poverty and are prepared to take to the streets to make their point. Meanwhile, the G8 is meeting at Gleneagles behind barbed wire, protected by British and American soldiers. So popular are these leaders!

Politics is the answer - but not the politics of protest and pressure, which can make absolutely no impression on an increasingly isolated and authoritarian political system. Making poverty history demands a massive change - nothing less than a comprehensive democratic political and economic revolution. The aim has to be the transfer of power into the hands of ordinary people based on a not-for-profit economy and democratic political alternatives. Instead of "Make Poverty History", the slogan for Edinburgh should be: "Make the G8 leaders history".

A World to Win is a new kind of political organisation and movement that will put the issues of economic and political power at the top of the agenda. Let's focus the potential of the anti-capitalist movement on the central heart of power. Come to our launch conference on July 23 and help shape the new organisation. Your action will have real meaning by helping to create the conditions in which people can make their own history and determine the kind of world they want to live in.

6 June 2005