The World Economic Forum, (WEF) is no longer the only voice with a framework of how the world might get out of the global crisis spawned by the coronavirus pandemic and compounded by the cultural revolt in the United States. The Fight Inequality Alliance, (FAI) is also stepping forward with a narrative of what the problem is and what is to be done.
Luckily, the FAI’s most important power resource is neither money, territory nor the repressive state apparatus but the language game or what scholars of global civil society have called “the management of meaning”. Built as a cross-cutting ensemble over and across social classes, race, gender, generation and territory and good in innovative mobilisation of popular culture to striking political performances, a clash between the two narratives could see a Goliath flat on the ground before anyone says David. In that case, the world might as well be heading towards a repeat of the situation in which a similar coalition beat even great powers and arms manufacturers to get the UN to ban personnel landmines, leading Jody Williams, the leader of the campaign to declare in her speech at her receipt of a Nobel Prize in 1997 that they had calibrated diplomacy?
The narrative is not quite formed yet in the way of ‘The Great Reset’ which the WEF is canvassing but when it is formed, it is almost certain to be a manifesto for resetting the world in favour of those almost totally excluded from the benefits of progress by the subsisting global order – the millions reeling in poverty as informal workers, women, children and all such disadvantaged elements. The Alliance is still synthesising views as in a webinar conversation which took place earlier today and during which experiences across the world showed that COVID 19 presents exacting challenges but also tremendous opportunities.
Salvos all the way!
Thus while speakers recognised how the pandemic has worsened the global crisis by catching most governments totally unprepared and by exacerbating systemic inequality, it has also brought about a situation whereby state power is doing what it had been under IFI pressure from doing for decades. Similarly, while indebtedness in the name of fighting COVID is increasing, with huge amount of such loans being spent on simply unimportant things in many countries, it has also brought about a situation whereby people are organizing at community, national and global levels to assert themselves in terms of basic rights. This is irrespective of whether one is talking about Philippines or Indonesia in Asia, Mexico or Bolivia in Latin America, Kenya or South Africa on the African continent. Creativity and innovation in sustained voice against brutality such as the #BlackLivesMatter campaign against police excesses in the United States has also become central.
Speakers equally noted the alarming rise in rate of infection in many places, a lot of instances of quick resort to use of the military and the police to discipline the people and the severity of the problem of hunger, especially for those the system has pushed to the informal sector. Not only is this segment the hardest hit, it is as well the group most difficult to access in terms of systematic distribution of palliatives, either by governments or NGOs. In fact, the percentage of the rise in actual hunger has been put at 30, from 10% before the pandemic. What is thus underscored is the precariousness of life for people who earn their keep on a day to day basis and who are most vulnerable to the hardest dimensions of prolonged lockdown.
It is against the background of some of these details that the idea of a Global Moment is emerging and by which the FAI will make its voice heard and, by implication, what the voice prescribes. There is no such document yet but the snippet might have started falling into place.
The central message coming up seems to be that this is the moment to seize the high ground from the very interests and forces whose policy frameworks and practices brought about the current tension which the pandemic is exacerbating, come up with a broader vision or agenda, compel the state to return to its role of social provisioning, more forcefully argue the case for debt relief and expand the insistence on debt relief as well as push for the most progressive tax regime.
Above all, the middle class will receive a message, asking it to get out of the illusion that its members across the world are part of the upper class and can so smoothly move up into the upper echelon. No, a few of them might be able to accomplish that in a few countries in the world but majority will be demoted to fate worse than the working class. They will be told how impossible it has become for most of them to even sustain the education of their children in dream schools and hence the need to know that this system cannot protect their layer unless they align with the lower classes to make the case for equality and equity.
Converting popular culture into power
Another scene of deploying artistry into a discursive contest
A clear fight for free access to Covid 19 vaccine will be on the card in the Global Moment, a fight in which prominent citizens, leaders at various layers of society and other allies will be mobilised to join.
Although the pandemic makes gathering most difficult by way of public health restrictions as well as lack of public transport, that might not stop popular pressure on governments for what governments should be doing while at the same time stressing and resisting what governments shouldn’t be doing. Not when there is excitement about the dialectics of COVID 19. The dialectics is how the fear and paralysis it imposed on the populace is now acting as trigger for rising in resistance against contradictions in the handling of the pandemic.
It is beginning to look like the battle lines might have been drawn on which framework for managing the current global crisis will win. The WEF could be a party to the discursive clash, then the IMF/World Bank and certainly alliances such as the FAI. Interestingly, the IMF is meeting later in September 2020 while the WEF meets in another seven months from now. When the FAI meets will depend on what it comes up with in ‘The Global Moment’ or whatever its framework is called and what such framework asks it to do to win the coming contest of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives of the crisis.
