Part 12 (1/2)
Others have gone even farther, arguing that free-market polices are the economic front of the war on terrorism. In this context, supporting ”free trade” has been rebranded, like shopping and baseball, as a patriotic duty. United States Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has explained that trade ”promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle,” and the United States needs a new campaign to ”fight terror with trade.” In an essay in The New York Times Magazine The New York Times Magazine, Michael Lewis makes a similar conflation between freedom fighting and free trading when he explains that the traders who died were targeted as ”not merely symbols but also pract.i.tioners of liberty...They work hard, if unintentionally, to free others from constraints. This makes them, almost by default, the spiritual ant.i.thesis of the religious fundamentalist, whose business depends on a denial of personal liberty in the name of some putatively higher power.”
The new battle lines have been drawn, crude as they are: to criticize the U.S. government is to be on the side of the terrorists, to stand in the way of market-driven globalization is to further the terrorists' evil goals.
There is, of course, a glaring problem with this logic: the idea that the market can, on its own, supply solutions to all of our social problems has been profoundly discredited by the experience of September 11 itself. From the privatized airport security officers who failed to detect the hijackers' weapons, to the private charities that have so badly bungled aid to the victims, to the corporate bailouts that have failed to stimulate the economy, market-driven policies are not helping to win the war on terrorism. They are liabilities. So while criticizing politicians may be temporarily out of favor, ”People Before Profit,” the street slogan from the globalization protests, has become a self-evident and viscerally felt truth for many more people in the United States since the attacks.
The most dramatic manifestation of this s.h.i.+ft is the American public's changing relations.h.i.+p to its public sector. Many of the inst.i.tutions and services that have been underfunded, vilified, deregulated, and privatized during the past two decades-airports, post offices, hospitals, ma.s.s transit systems, water and food inspection-were forced to take center stage after the attacks, and they weren't ready for their close up. Americans found out fast what it meant to have a public health-care system so overburdened it cannot handle a routine flu season, let alone an anthrax outbreak. There were severe drug shortages, and private labs failed to come up with enough anthrax vaccines for U.S. soldiers, let alone for civilians. Despite a decade of pledges to safeguard the U.S. water supply from bioterrorist attack, scandalously little had been done by the overburdened U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The food supply proved to be even more vulnerable, with inspectors managing to check about I percent of food imports-hardly a safeguard against rising fears of ”agroterrorism.”
And most wrenchingly of all, it was the firefighters who rushed in to save the lives of the bond traders and other employees in the towers, demonstrating that there is indeed still a role for a public sector after all. So it seems fitting that on the streets of New York City the hottest-selling T-s.h.i.+rts and baseball hats are no longer the ones displaying contraband Nike and Prada logos, but the logo of the Fire Department of New York.
The importance of a strong public realm is not only being rediscovered in rich countries like the United States, but also in poor countries, where fundamentalism has been spreading so rapidly. It is in countries where the public infrastructure has been ravaged by debt and war that fanatical sugar daddies like Osama bin Laden are able to swoop in and start providing basic services that are usually in the public domain: roads, schools, health clinics, even basic sanitation. And the extreme Islamic seminaries in Pakistan that indoctrinated so many Taliban leaders thrive precisely because they fill a huge social welfare gap. In a country that spends 90 percent of its budget on its military and debt-and a pittance on education-the madra.s.sas madra.s.sas offer not only free cla.s.srooms but also food and shelter for poor children. offer not only free cla.s.srooms but also food and shelter for poor children.
In understanding the mechanics of terrorism-north and south-one theme is recurring: we pay a high price when we put the short-term demands of business (for lower taxes, less ”red tape,” more investment opportunities) ahead of the needs of people. Post September 11, clinging to laissez faire laissez faire free-market solutions, despite overwhelming evidence of their failings, looks a lot like blind faith, as irrational as any belief system clung to by religious fanatics fighting a suicidal jihad. free-market solutions, despite overwhelming evidence of their failings, looks a lot like blind faith, as irrational as any belief system clung to by religious fanatics fighting a suicidal jihad.
For activists, there are many connections to be made between the September 11 attacks and the many other arenas in which human needs must take precedence over corporate profits, from AIDS treatment in Africa to homelessness in our own cities. There is also an important role to be played in arguing for more reciprocal international relations. Terrorism is indeed an international threat, and it did not begin with the attacks in the United States. As Bush invites the world to join America's war, sidelining the U.N. and the international courts, globalization activists need to become pa.s.sionate defenders of true multilateralism, rejecting once and for all the label ”anti-globalization.” From the start, it was clear that President Bush's coalition did not represent a genuinely global response to terrorism but the internationalization of one country's foreign policy objectives-the trademark of U.S. conduct on the world stage, from the WTO negotiating table to the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. These arguments can be made not in a spirit of anti-Americanism, but in a spirit of true internationalism.
By far the most important role for those concerned with the explosion of corporate power is to act not only as voices of opposition but also as beacons-beacons of other ways to organize a society, ways that exist outside of the raging battles between ”good” and ”evil.” In the current context, this is no small task. The attacks on the U.S. and the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan have ushered in an era of ideological polarization not seen since the Cold War. On the one hand, there is George W. Bush claiming ”You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists” one the other, there is Bin Laden, a.s.serting that ”These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels.” Anti-corporate and pro-democracy activists should demonstrate the absurdity of this duality and insist that there are more than two choices available. We can spread rumors about the existence of routes not taken, choices not made, alternatives not built. As Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy wrote after September 11, ”the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the U.S. government. All the beauty of human civilization-our art, our music, our literature-lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles.” Confronted with a deadly multiple-choice exam, the answer should be ”None of the above.”
Well before September 11, there was a growing awareness in movement circles that attention needed to s.h.i.+ft from ”summit-hopping” to articulating and building these alternatives. For more than a year, the largely symbolic attacks on individual corporations and trade summits were being vocally challenged by many who feared that globalization battles-with their smashed McDonald's windows and running fights with police-were beginning to look like theater, cut off from the economic issues that affect people's day-to-day lives. And there is much that is unsatisfying about fighting a war of symbols: the gla.s.s shatters in the storefront, the meetings are driven to ever more remote locations-but so what? It's still only symbols, facades, representations.
In response, a new mood of impatience was already taking hold, an insistence on putting forward social and economic alternatives that address the roots of injustice, from land reform in the developing world to slavery reparations in the United States, to partic.i.p.atory democracy at the munic.i.p.al level in cities around the world. Rather than summit hopping, the focus was moving to forms of direct action that attempt to meet people's immediate needs for housing, food, water, life-saving drugs, and electricity. This is being expressed in countless unique ways around the world.
In India, it means defiantly producing generic AIDS drugs for the rest of the developing world. In Italy, it means taking over dozens of abandoned buildings and turning them into affordable housing and lively community centers. You can see the same spirit coursing through the actions of the Landless Peasants' Movement of Brazil, which seizes tracts of unused farmland and uses them for sustainable agriculture, markets, and schools under the slogan ”Ocupar, Resistir, Producir” (Occupy, Resist, Produce).
It is in South Africa where this spirit of direct action may be spreading most rapidly. Since a sweeping privatization program was inst.i.tuted in 1993, half a million jobs have been lost, wages for the poorest 40 percent have dropped by 21 percent, poor areas have seen their water costs go up 55 percent, and electricity as much as 400 percent. Many have resorted to drinking polluted water, leading to a cholera outbreak that infected 100,000 people. In Soweto, 20,000 homes have their electricity cut off each month. In the face of this system of ”economic apartheid,” as privatization is called by many South African activists, unemployed workers in Soweto have been reconnecting their neighbors' cut-off water and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee has illegally reconnected power in thousands of homes.
No matter where it takes place, the theory behind this defiant wave of direct action is the same: activism can no longer be about registering symbolic dissent. It must be about taking action to make people's lives better-where they live, right away.
The question now facing this movement is how to transform these small, often fleeting initiatives into broader, more sustainable social structures. There are many attempts to answer this question but by far the most ambitious is the annual World Social Forum, launched in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The WSF's optimistic slogan is ”Another World Is Possible” and it was conceived as an opportunity for an emerging movement to stop screaming about what it is against and start articulating what it is for. In its first year, more than 10,000 people attended a week of more than 60 speeches, dozens of concerts, and 450 workshops. By the second year, 70,000 people attended. The particular site was chosen because Brazil's Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT) is in power in the city of Porto Alegre, as well as in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and has become known worldwide for its innovations in partic.i.p.atory democracy.
But the World Social Forum is not a political convention: there are no policy directives made, no official motions pa.s.sed, no attempts to organize the parts of this movement into a political party, with subordinate cells and locals. And that fact, in a way, is what makes this wave of activism unlike anything that has come before it. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with spa.r.s.e bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and labored manifestos are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured, and sometimes compulsive information swapping. While individual intellectuals and key organizers may help shape the ideas of the people on the streets, they most emphatically do not have the power or even the mechanisms to lead them in any one direction. It isn't even, if truth be told, a movement. It is thousands of movements, intricately linked to one another, much as ”hotlinks” connect their websites on the Internet. And while this network is wildly ambitious in its scope and reach, its goals are anything but imperial. This network unrelentingly challenges the most powerful inst.i.tutions and individuals of our time, but does not seek to seize power for itself. Instead it seeks to disperse power, as widely and evenly as possible.
The best example of this new revolutionary thinking is the Zapatistas uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. When the Zapatistas rose up against the Mexican military in January 1994, their goal was not to win control over the Mexican state but to seize and build autonomous s.p.a.ces where ”democracy, liberty, and justice” could thrive. For the Zapatistas, these free s.p.a.ces, created from reclaimed land, communal agriculture, and resistance to privatization are an attempt to create counter-powers to the state, not a bid to overthrow it and replace it with an alternate, centralized regime.
It's fitting that the figure that comes closest to a bona-fide movement 'leader' is Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista spokesperson who hides his real ident.i.ty and covers his face with a mask. Marcos, the quintessential antileader, insists that his black mask is a mirror, so that ”Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 P.M. P.M., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.” In other words, he says, he is us: we are the leader we've been looking for.
Marcos's own story is of a man who came to his leaders.h.i.+p not through swaggering certainty, but by coming to terms with political doubt, by learning to follow. The most repeated legend that clings to him goes like this: an urban Marxist intellectual and activist, Marcos was wanted by the state and was no longer safe in the cities. He fled to the mountains of Chiapas in southeast Mexico filled with revolutionary rhetoric and certainty, there to convert the poor indigenous ma.s.ses to the cause of armed proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie. He said the workers of the world must unite, and the Mayans just stared at him. They said they weren't workers but people, and, besides, land wasn't property but the heart of their communities. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew.
Out of this process, a new kind of army emerged-the EZLN is not controlled by an elite of guerrilla commanders but by the communities themselves, through clandestine councils and open a.s.semblies. Marcos isn't a commander barking orders, but a subcomandante, a conduit for the will of the councils. His first words in his new persona were: ”Through me speaks the will of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.”
The Zapatista struggle has become a powerful beacon for other movements around the world precisely because it is organized according to principles that are the mirror opposite of the way states, corporations, and religions tend to be organized. It responds to concentration with a maze of fragmentation, to centralization with localization, to power consolidation with radical power dispersal. The question is: Could this be a microcosm for a global strategy to reclaim the commons from the forces of privatization?
Many of today's activists have already concluded that globalization is not simply a good idea that has been grabbed by the wrong hands. Nor do they believe that the situation could be righted if only international inst.i.tutions like the WTO were made democratic and accountable. Rather, they are arguing that alienation from global inst.i.tutions is only the symptom of a much broader crisis in representative democracy, one that has seen power and decision making delegated to points further and further away from the places where the effects of those decisions are felt. As one-size-fits-all logic sets in, it leads at once to a h.o.m.ogenization of political and cultural choices, and to widespread civic paralysis and disengagement.
If centralization of power and distant decision making are emerging as the common enemies, there is also an emerging consensus that partic.i.p.atory democracy at the local level-whether through unions, neighborhoods, city governments, farms, villages, or aboriginal self-government-is the place to start building alternatives to it. The common theme is an overarching commitment to self-determination and diversity: cultural diversity, ecological diversity, even political diversity. The Zapatistas speak of building a movement of ”one 'no' and many 'yeses,'” a description that defies the characterization that this is one movement at all, and challenges the a.s.sumption that it should be. What seems to be emerging organically is not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on reclaimed public s.p.a.ces, and, through partic.i.p.atory forms of democracy, made more accountable than either corporate or state inst.i.tutions. If this movement has an ideology it is democracy, not only at the ballot box but woven into every aspect of our lives.
All of this makes it terribly ironic when critics attempt to make ideological links between anti-corporate protesters and religious fundamentalists like Bin Laden, as British secretary of state for international development Clare Short did in November 2001. ”Since September 11, we haven't heard from the protesters,” she observed. ”I'm sure they are reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden's network.” She couldn't have been more mistaken. Bin Laden and his followers are driven not by a critique of centralized power but by a rage that more power isn't centralized in their own hands. They are furious not at the h.o.m.ogenization of choices, but that the world isn't organized according to their own h.o.m.ogenous and imperialist belief system.
In other words, this is a cla.s.sic power struggle over which a great, all-knowing system will govern the day; where the battle lines were once Communism versus Capitalism, they are now being cast as the G.o.d of the Market against the G.o.d of Islam. For Bin Laden and his followers, much of the allure of this battle is clearly the idea that they are living in mythic times, when men were G.o.dlike, battles were epic and history was spelled with a capital H H. ”Screw you, Francis f.u.kuyama,” they seem to be saying. ”History hasn't ended yet. We are still making it.”
It's an idea we've heard from both sides since September 11, a return of the great narrative: chosen men, evil empires, master plans, and great battles. All are ferociously back in style. This grand redemption narrative is our most persistent myth, and it has a dangerous flip side. When a few men decide to live their myths, to be larger than life, it can't help but have an impact on all the lives that unfold in regular sizes. People suddenly look insignificant by comparison, easy to sacrifice by the thousands in the name of some greater purpose.
Thankfully, anti-corporate and pro-democracy activists are engaged in no such fire and brimstone crusades. They are instead challenging systems of centralized power on principle on principle, as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all state solutions as of right-wing market ones. It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an overarching message, a master plan. This is absolutely true, and we should be extraordinarily thankful. At the moment, the anti-corporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, anxious for the opportunity to enlist them as foot soldiers. It is to this young movement's credit that it has as yet fended off all of these agendas and has rejected everyone's generously donated manifesto, holding out for an acceptably democratic, representative process to take its resistance to the next stage. Will it be a ten-point plan? A new political doctrine?
Perhaps it will be something altogether new. Not another ready-made ideology to do gladiatorial combat with free-market fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism, but a plan to protect the possibility and development of many worlds-a world, as the Zapatistas say, with many worlds in it. Maybe instead of meeting the proponents of neoliberalism head on, this movement of movements will surround them from all directions.
This movement is not, as one newspaper headline recently claimed, ”so yesterday.” It is only changing, moving, yet again, to a deeper stage, one that is less focused on acts of symbolic resistance and theatrical protests and more on ”living our alternatives into being,” to borrow a phrase from a recent direct-action summit in New York City. Shortly after No Logo No Logo was published, I visited the University of Oregon to do a story on anti-sweatshop activism at the campus that is nicknamed Nike U. There I met student activist Sarah Jacobson. Nike, she told me, was not the target of her activism, but a tool, a way to access a vast and often amorphous economic system. ”It's a gateway drug,” she said cheerfully. was published, I visited the University of Oregon to do a story on anti-sweatshop activism at the campus that is nicknamed Nike U. There I met student activist Sarah Jacobson. Nike, she told me, was not the target of her activism, but a tool, a way to access a vast and often amorphous economic system. ”It's a gateway drug,” she said cheerfully.
For years, we in this movement have fed off our opponents' symbols-their brands, their office towers, their photo-opportunity summits. We have used them as rallying cries, as focal points, as popular education tools. But these symbols were never the real targets; they were the levers, the handles. The symbols were only ever doorways. It's time to walk through them.
-Naomi Klein, February 2002
Appendix Table 1.3. Absolut Vodka Ad Spending, 198997 Absolut Vodka Ad Spending, 198997 Source: Annual ”Media Spending Guide” in Food & Beverage Marketing Food & Beverage Marketing (August 1991, August 1993, August 1995, July 1996, August 1998). (August 1991, August 1993, August 1995, July 1996, August 1998).
Table 1.4. Ad Spending Patterns of the Superbrands, 198197 Ad Spending Patterns of the Superbrands, 198197 Source: ”100 Leading National Advertisers,” Advertising Age Advertising Age, 198298.
Table 2.1a. Corporate Tax as a Percentage of Total Federal Revenue in Canada, 1955, 1983 and 1998 Corporate Tax as a Percentage of Total Federal Revenue in Canada, 1955, 1983 and 1998 Source: Department of Finance, Canadian Economic Observer and Statistics Canada.
Table 6.1. Growth of Wal-Mart Stores, 196898 Growth of Wal-Mart Stores, 196898 Source: Wal-Mart provided growth figures.
Table 6.2. Growth of Wal-Mart Supercenters, 198898 Growth of Wal-Mart Supercenters, 198898 Source: Wal-Mart provided growth figures.
Table 6.3. Starbucks Percent Change in Sales per Store, 199398 Starbucks Percent Change in Sales per Store, 199398 Source: Starbucks Annual Reports 1997 and 1998.
Table 6.4. Starbucks Total Net Revenues, 199398 Starbucks Total Net Revenues, 199398 Source: Starbucks Annual Reports 1997 and 1998.
Table 9.1. Adidas Profits, 199397 Adidas Profits, 199397 Sources: AFX News, 11 April 1995; AFX News, 7 March 1996; Reuters Financial Service, 11 March 1997; AFX News, 5 March 1998. As of September 1999, one German mark was worth US$0.53.
Table 9.3. Sweatshop Profiles Sweatshop Profiles Source: ”Company Profiles/Working Conditions: Factories in China Producing Goods for Export to the U.S.,” ”Made in China: Behind the Label,” Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, March 1998. Wages are in U.S. dollars.
Table 9.2. Percentage Changes in Employment in the Textile, Clothing, Leather and Footwear Industries, 198093 Percentage Changes in Employment in the Textile, Clothing, Leather and Footwear Industries, 198093 Source: International Labour Office Table 10.1. 1997 Average Hourly Earnings, Retail Trade vs. Overall Average in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. 1997 Average Hourly Earnings, Retail Trade vs. Overall Average in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
Source for U.S. figures: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Source for Canadian figures: Annual Estimates on Employment, Earnings and Hours, Statistics Canada. Source for U.K. figures: New Earnings Survey, Office for National Statistics.
Table 10.3. Aging Fast-Food Workers in Canada, 198797 Aging Fast-Food Workers in Canada, 198797 Source: Statistics Canada.
Table 10.4. Percentage of Employees Working ”Full-time” versus ”Part-time” in Selected Service-Sector Chains Percentage of Employees Working ”Full-time” versus ”Part-time” in Selected Service-Sector Chains Source: Companies supplied information upon request.
Table 10.5. Part-time Employment as a Percentage of Total Employment in Canada and the U.K. Part-time Employment as a Percentage of Total Employment in Canada and the U.K.