Antiglobalization Guerrilla

There are no posters of South American guerrilla leader Che Guevara on the walls of Bernard Cassens Left Bank office. Instead, the book-lined shelves and heaped-up papers point to his earlier incarnation as head of the English faculty at Paris 8 University.

He still loves Mark Twain, but these days Cassen devotes every available minute to combating another Anglo-Saxon cultural heavyweight: free-market economics. And when it comes to anti-imperialism, hes more than capable of some Che-style warfare: “Observing three minutes silence for the victims of Sept. 11 was a political act of allegiance to the U.S. government,” he remarks, coolly lighting a cigar. “In France, the tradition is for one minute.”

Cassen, who turned 64 last week, is the founder and president of attac, an umbrella organization for the antiglobalization movement. In just three years, ATTAC has gone from an idea at the bottom of an editorial in Le Monde Diplomatique — which Cassen manages — to an international mass movement. “We were getting sacks full of letters from readers, and we realized we had to do something,” Cassen recalls. attac has attracted 30,000 paying members in France alone by championing the so-called Tobin Tax — a levy on international capital transactions, with proceeds to fight poverty in developing countries.

But Cassen stresses that attac is about more than the Tobin Tax. On Saturday the organizations 28 branches will be staging demonstrations to protest this weeks WTO meeting in Qatar. “Were against the resumption of negotiations and a new round of gatt, which we consider to be a dangerous threat to public services,” he says. Despite the antiglobalization causes disappearance from the headlines after Sept. 11, ATTACs meetings are as busy as ever. “The movement has deep roots in society, and terrorism wont change that,” says Cassen.

As an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, ATTAC will once again be organizing its World Social Forum in Brazils Porto Alegre in January. There will be a new theme this year: mobilizing for peace.

Q & A

TIME: Has the antiglobalization movement become irrelevant since Sept. 11?
CASSEN: What strikes me is how the entire world has adopted the U.S. position. Every day 30,000 children die of hunger in the world. Why isnt that a subject for discussion? Because the U.S. government has decided that terrorism is the only subject. Weve condemned the terrorist attacks just like everyone else, but we havent forgotten that kids are still dying of hunger.

TIME: In attacking the symbols of U.S. might, werent the hijackers just following your agenda?
CASSEN: Weve never attacked the symbols of U.S. domination. Were fighting globalization on specific areas: Third World debt, tax havens, financial crime and the free circulation of capital. Weve criticized France and Britain as much as we have the U.S. Were not attacking a country, but a system.

TIME: Whats your position on the war in Afghanistan?
CASSEN: Bush acted hastily to satisfy a U.S. public opinion that wanted blood. But any reaction shouldnt be about vengeance or reprisals, it should be about justice. No one is in favor of bin Laden or terrorism, but if this campaign goes beyond highly targeted military action, I think French public opinion will end up against it.

TIME: Whats the future for attac?
CASSEN: We intend to use U.S. policy to show that you can relax budgetary constraints, that you can inject public money into the economy. An election campaign is about to begin in France, and were going to be very present in it. The Tobin Tax isnt our be-all and end-all. Its just a point of access, a symbol of the fact that states can reclaim some of the territory they abandoned to financial markets. This is just the beginning.