Reflections on Air Travel, Globalization, and 'Another World'

Labor Day weekend, I flew to Toronto for the annual meeting of the
American Political Science Association. Not surprisingly, complexity,
globalization and unpredictability were themes of the conference.
Globalization has become a catchword to celebrate every aspect of
modern capitalism. Yet globalization has more than one source and can
take many forms. Our future may depend on reshaping the reigning
understanding of globalization.

I had an opportunity to reflect on globalization while engaging in
one of its most problematic manifestations - air travel. My return
flight on US Airways from LaGuardia to Bangor was uneventful. I read a
book recommended at the conference, "The Rise of the Global Left: The
World Social Forum and Beyond" by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de
Sousa Santos. Not wanting to lose my place during a snack break, I
inserted an airline napkin in the text. Returning to my book, I noticed
the napkin's headline juxtaposed with my book title, "It is a big
world. We've got it covered."

This accidental encounter between Santos and US Airways' napkin
stimulated further reflections on globalization. Like most global
firms, US Airways is a beneficiary of the Washington consensus. Open
foreign markets to competition, deregulate industries, privatize public
services, allow capital goods and money to cross borders at will. Crush
unions, ignore the environment and trim safety nets. Consumers
everywhere will benefit.

Airline and trucking deregulation,
however, undermined one source of good working-class jobs. Its
advocates respond that at least it made air travel more accessible to
working-class folks. Yet as economic journalist Doug Henwood points
out, when government economists factor in the increasing number of
transfers and reductions in nonstop flights, the real cost of flying
has outpaced increases in the overall consumer price index for the last
two decades.

Airline competition over many routes is limited to one or two
carriers, giving airlines considerable pricing power. Adding
competitors would entail airport expansion, with significant traffic
and noise pollution. "Covering" the globe with more air flights also
increases atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite airlines' ability to
quash labor, displace environmental costs, and increase prices, the
industry has been perpetually in the hole.

US Air's napkin goes on to brag that the airline covers the world
with new nonstop flights to Paris, Birmingham, Oslo and Tel Aviv.
Apparently, the only globe that matters is the materially affluent.

Critics of a consensus that pits workers against each other,
exacerbates inequalities among nations and treats the environment as an
open sewer are often called "anti-global." Yet from its inception
participants in the World Social Forum have been committed to finding
global alternatives to international corporate capitalism. The WSF's
motto, "another world is possible," implies globalization with two big
differences. The emphasis is on initiatives from the bottom up. Just as
basically, the WSF rejects not only the corporate dominated model but
also even the underlying assumption that the world can be united
through one underlying ideology, philosophy or worldview. As one
commentator puts it, the WSF "was constituted as an important
initiative of mobilization and articulation of the global civil
society. From then on it has maintained a central role against 'single
thought' offering a rich space for sharing experiences, drawing up
campaigns and for debates on alternatives to social problems at the
global level."

In order to remain a focus for continuing debate and inspiration,
WSF takes no positions as an organization, Its only membership
requirements are opposition to corporate domination, an international
outlook, nonviolence, and open participation, terms whose meaning it
continually re-examines. Thus WSF participants have generally opposed
the anti-labor thrust of Washington deregulators. But the body does not
serve to foster "socialism" as conventionally defined.

Some labor and left parties have seen as their mission greater
equality in material standards achieved primarily by endless growth in
wages and affluence, including more and more air travel, for poor and
working class citizens. But as an organization that includes first
people's movements and others moved by reverence for the Earth, the WSF
challenges conventional left to explore the limits of their
preconceptions. More broadly, its ongoing dialogue is premised on and
seeks to advance responsiveness to new and emerging injustices. Only a
flexible, self-organized mesh can cover a globe that may be more
volatile and unpredictable than monomaniacal corporate globalizers and
old-time socialists assume.