Although certain recent incidents -- such as Aboriginals' unauthorized occupation of state-owned land, local residents' protests against the construction of incinerators and prosecutors' search of National Cheng Kung University's dormitories for downloaded MP3 music files -- appear to be unrelated, they could in fact be connected. What is it that links them together? Perhaps we can find the answer by examining the recent anti-globalization movement.
The movement opposes globalization for making the rich richer and the poor poorer. But the deepening disparities in wealth are only a surface problem. The real problem with globalization is the formation of a new colonial structure in which virtually all the advanced countries in the world are participants. At the center of this colonialization are organizations with control over production, wealth, resources, security, protection and comfort, a chain of factors that facilitate labor exploitation. Such an exploitation of labor could lead to massive confrontations, or even a war in this century.
While anti-globalization sentiment is gaining ground, the situation remains very complicated, as the distinction between the "propertied" and the "proletariat" is blurred. Take MP3 files for example, with downloaders copying tools and downloading software, people can easily spread the cultural resources they have obtained. The issues surrounding the copying and downloading of files from the Internet can never be solved by personal morality or Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) law. Rather, the imbalance in the global distribution of culture is at issue here, as today's cultural resources carry a commercial value and are traded in exchange for cash. The capitalist logic behind this, however, is not an absolute truth. Although commercial benefits are considered a driving force behind the production of today's cultural resources, monopolization should not be promoted, and it is not a foregone conclusion that human beings should rely exclusively on capitalism. If we are led by capitalist logic, the issue of copyrights will be narrowed to a legal issue of "embezzlement," or even to a moral issue, and be condemned. Thus, to over-simplify the issue is obviously to end up deceiving oneself.
Indeed, over-simplifying the issue, the Taiwan government recently expelled poor Aboriginals from state-owned land in accordance with domestic law and demolished their illegal houses by the very simple logic of treating the Aboriginals' action as illegal. In fact, from the perspective of international law, the state's claim to national land is usually unclear, and therefore government efforts to acquire land may frequently be drawn into question. It is therefore appropriate for us to say that the government's expulsion of Aboriginals amounts to an evil form of bullying.
This seems only to be making matters worse. Even making certain adjustments (for example by legal regulation or moral restriction) to solve the problems temporarily would not help future stability. Since the problems are structural ones caused by highly developed capitalism, such as the huge global economic chain, the future reaction to the problem will be enormous. When anti-capitalists launch a worldwide movement against globalization, or even up the ante by producing fake stocks and shares in order to damage the capitalist world, the conflicts that that will cause will not be eased by law or morality.
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