FIFA’s Confederation Cup Reeks of Tear Gas

So it begins. With just under a year to go until the start of Brazil’s FIFA World Cup, and the first real dress rehearsal for that big event now underway, some two million angry Brazilians have taken to streets, and the numbers just seem to be growing by the day. It started, much like it did in Turkey, with a protest over something seemingly as minor as a 20cent increase in the price of a bus ticket. Within a week, hundreds of thousands were on the streets across many Brazilian cities, screaming about a wide range of grievances including corruption, police brutality and inadequate public services. The bus fare increase was simply the spark that started a raging inferno. The fact that billions are being squandered on global sporting jamborees has only made matters worse.

The national government has panicked and backtracked on the bus ticker increases but it may be too little too late. The genie is out of the bottle and the long suffering Brazilians are playing an altogether different game.

Brazil’s predicament is more complex than the headlines might suggest. Brazil, it might be said, is both beneficiary and victim of the latest impulse of globalisation. Along with the other BRIC nations and in similar company to a whole host of developing economies, Brazil has recently witnessed rapid growth rates that make European figures look anaemic by comparison. Even the global financial collapse of the past five years has failed to totally erode the spectacular growth that Brazil has enjoyed. But by definition, capitalist growth is inevitably uneven, and many, many Brazilians have not seen any of the benefits of the increased GDP. If there has been one single feature of the neo liberal economics of the past thirty years, it has been that the gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically in all countries across the planet. Brazil, with its own long history of extremes in wealth and poverty, is seeing that ugly scenario become even more pronounced. Rushing to host the World Cup and the Olympics has merely drawn attention to the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

Nobody believes for one moment that the tens of millions of rural itinerant workers flooding into China’s newly industrialised cities have benefited one iota from the recent Beijing Olympics. And there is not one shred of evidence to suggest that the millions of black South African eking out a subsistence living in the shanty towns surrounding Johannesburg, Cape Town and the other affluent centres of post-apartheid South Africa have gained anything remotely substantial from hosting the last World Cup. As for the high rise slums of London’s Tower Hamlets, it’s grim life as usual despite all the rosy rhetoric about a lasting legacy for all East Londoners. Brazil’s decade of sport has barely got off the ground and already the Brazilian citizenry are increasingly aware of the fairy-tales they are being sold.

Who’s to blame for the growing crisis on the streets of the Brazilian cities? It is probably too easy to simply blame the left-of-centre national government of Dilma Rousseff and her immediate predecessor, or even the entrenched regional administrations. They are all certainly guilty of their fair share of big scale and petty corruption, police thuggery and a neglect of social provision. But they are not the military dictatorship of old and they, collectively over the past ten years, have moved Brazil in a social-democratic direction. No, the real culprits here are the big national and global corporations, the very same culprits that have been bleeding the world dry in every nation and on every continent.

Faced with their corporate diktat, national and regional governments are somewhat powerless. If one particular country does not readily acquiesce to corporate demands those corporations simply relocate to a more compliant base. It’s a race to the bottom and no country is immune, not even the once mighty United States of America. If the Bangladeshi textile workers organise for improved working conditions the entire multinational textile industry threatens to decamp to India or Pakistan. If German or French auto workers refuse to relinquish their hard fought conditions, the car manufacturers simply shift to low wage Turkish or an East European alternative. Similarly, if the Brazilian workers won’t play ball with the corporates, they, the corporates, will simply up sticks to a more ‘friendly’ national base.
This has been the pattern across the globe; from Australasia, across Asia and the Americas and right throughout Europe, east and west.

The malaise affecting workers in South America is the very same economic and political malaise affecting workers in Europe and North America. No amount of corporate sponsored circuses, royal jamborees and sporting extravaganzas will disguise for long the profound imbalances built into the neo-liberal project. It is an economic project all about maximising corporate profits and to hell with the needs of humanity. It is a project to which FIFA and the IOC, despite their pompous, highfaluting rhetoric, are an integral and culpable part of. Europeans and North Americans should not only sympathise with their Brazilian counterparts, they should organise, through international trade unions, with them.

Capital, representing the one percent, has long since gone international; it is long overdue that we, the ninety-nine percent, organises ourselves on a similarly international level. Nothing new here though this was precisely the call made by the International Workers of the World at the start of the twentieth century. Here we are into the second decade of the twenty first century and the need for international organisation is more pressing and more obvious than ever.

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