The G20 is going to be around for some time. But it will probably be as ineffective as the G8 in stabilizing global capitalism. Probably the main accomplishment of the G8 was to focus attention on itself as some sort of executive committee of global capitalism, the existence of which drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to Genoa in June 2001, an delegitimizing event from which the group never recovered.
The G20, a Clinton era initiative that was rescued from oblivion by Bush II at the beginning of the latest financial crisis and later promoted by Obama to coordinate global capitalism’s response to the crisis is classic cooptation: bring in the big boys from the South like China, India, and Brazil, along with a few others, to give them a strong stake in the current global system. But as they assemble in Toronto, the group is divided, over the extent of financial regulation and over whether or not to continue the stimulus programs that are pushing so many governments to register massive fiscal deficits. Endorsement of minimal financial regulation and an informal agreement to disagree over the stimulus question are likely to be the vapid results of this latest summit of the world’s so-called powerhouse economies. The structural fissures of global capital have become too great to be papered over by this presumptive executive committee.
But hey, the protesters have been given another opportunity to assemble against the ailing system of globalized capitalism, like we were by the London summit in 2008 and the Pittsburgh meeting in September 2009. Nothing beats the G20 meeting as a centralized focus of anti-capitalist protest.
Ironically, this has become the main function of the G8 and G20 meetings: to unite global opinion against an outmoded system of economic organization and advance the process of delegitimizing it. Let’s turn Toronto into another Genoa, but let’s hope this is not the last G20 Summit.