Current international market trading benefits overwhelmingly those who enter todays exchanges already possessing the most assets. When trade occurs between a U.S. multinational and a local entity in Mexico, Guatemala, or Thailand, the benefits do not go more to the weaker party with fewer assets, nor are they divided equally, but they go disproportionately to the stronger traders who thereby increase their relative dominance. Opportunist rhetoric aside, capitalist globalizers try to disempower the poor and already weak and to further empower the rich and already strong. The result: of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are not countries; they are corporations.  Similarly, market competition for resources, revenues, and audience is most often a zero sum game. To advance, each actor preys off the defeat of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested me-first attitude that generates hostility and destroys solidarity between individuals, industries, and states. Public and social goods are downplayed, private ones elevated. Businesses and nations augment their own profits while imposing losses on others. Human well being and development for everyone is not a guiding precept. Solidarity fights a rearguard battle against capitalist globalization.

   What do anti-globalization activists propose to replace the institutions of capitalist globalization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization? The International Monetary Fund or IMF and World Bank were established after World War II. The IMF was meant to provide means to combat financial disruptions adversely impacting countries and people around the world. It employed negotiations and pressures to stabilize currencies and to help countries avoid economy disrupting financial machinations and confusions. The World Bank was meant to facilitate long-term investment in underdeveloped countries, to expand and strengthen their economies. It was to lend major project investment money at low interest to correct for the lack of local capacity. Within existing market relations, these limited goals were positive. Over time, however, and accelerating dramatically in the 1980s, the agenda of these institutions changed. Instead of facilitating stable exchange rates and helping countries protect themselves against financial fluctuations, the IMF began bashing any and all obstacles to capital flow and unfettered profit seeking, virtually the opposite of its mandate. Instead of facilitating investment on behalf of the local poor economics, the World Bank became a tool of the IMF, providing and withholding loans as carrot or stick to compel open corporate access, and financing projects not with an eye to benefits for the recipient country, but with far more attention to benefits going to major multinationals.

   In addition, the World Trade Organization or WTO that was desired in the early post war period actually came into being only decades later, in the mid 1990s. Its agenda became to regulate trade on behalf of the already rich and powerful. Instead of only imposing on third world countries low wages and high pollution due to being able to easily coerce their weak or bought-off governments, as IMF and World Bank policies accomplish, why not also weaken all governments and agencies that might defend workers, consumers, or the environment, not only in the third world, but everywhere? Why not remove any efforts to limit trade due to its labor implications, its ecology implications, its social or cultural implications, or its development implications, leaving as the only legal criteria whether there are immediate, short-term profits to be made? If national or local laws impede tradesay an environmental, a health, or a labor law  the WTO adjudicates, and its entirely predictable pro-corporate verdict is binding.

   The WTO trumps governments and populations on behalf of corporate profits. The full story about these three centrally important global institutions is longer, of course, but improvements are not hard to conceive. First, why not have, instead of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, an International Asset Agency, a Global Investment Assistance Agency, and a World Trade Agency. These three new (not merely reformed) institutions would work to attain equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance in international financial exchange, investment and development, trade, and cultural exchange. The new institutions would not limit governments ability to use their purchasing dollars for human rights, environmental, worker rights, and other non-commercial purposes, but would advise and facilitate doing just that. They would not disallow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced irrespective of whether they were made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxins, or with no regard for species protection but would facilitate just such differentiations. Instead of bankers and bureaucrats carrying out policies of presidents to affect the life situations of the very many without even a pretense at participation by those impacted, these new institutions would be open and democratic, transparent, participatory, and bottom up, with local, popular, and democratic accountability.

   These new institutions would promote and organize international cooperation to restrain out-of-control global corporations, capital, and markets by regulating them to make it possible for people in local communities to control their own economic lives. These new institutions would also work to get wealthy countries to write off the debts of impoverished countries and to create a permanent insolvency mechanism for adjusting debts of highly indebted nations. They would use regulatory institutions to help establish public control and citizen sovereignty over global corporations and to curtail corporate evasion of local, state, and national law, such as establishing a binding Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations that includes regulation of labor, environmental, investment, and social behavior.

   So when people ask activists what are you for? they actually are not asking only what are you for internationally. They also mean what are you for in place of capitalism? If we have capitalism, they reason, there will inevitably be tremendous pressures for capitalist globalization and against anti-capitalist innovations. IAA, GIAA, and GTA sound nice, but even if you got them put in place, the domestic economies of countries around the world would push to undo them. Capitalist globalization is, after all, markets, corporations, and class structure writ large. To really replace capitalist globalization and not just mitigate its effects, you would have to begin to replace capitalism too. Efforts to improve global relations couldnt be an end in itself, but would have to be part of a larger project to transform the underlying root capitalist structures. If you have no alternative to markets and corporations, many feel, your gains would be at best temporary. This assessment is widely held and fuels and is fueled by the reactionary slogan that there is no alternative. To combat this we need an alternative regarding international agencies and global economics, but also an alternative regarding markets, corporations, and domestic economies.

   The main point of all this, however, is that while in the long term the ultimate answer to the cynical, reactionary slogan that there is no alternative is to actually enact an alternative, in the near-term the answer is to offer a coherent, consistent, and viable model of preferable institutions and their dynamics. We need domestic and international economic vision that everyone can understand and refine and make their own. We need it to generate hope, to provide inspiration, to reveal what is possible and valuable, and to orient and also democratize our strategies so that they might take us where we desire rather than in circles or even toward something worse than what we now endure.