[MAPC-discuss] Fw: Globalization Movement: Points of

[MAPC-discuss] Fw: Globalization Movement: Points of

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2001-11-13

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Subject: Globalization Movement: Points of Clarification


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>
> THE GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT: SOME POINTS OF CLARIFICATION
> By David Graeber
>
> A great deal of nonsense has been written about the so-called
> antiglobalization movementóparticularly the more radical, direct action
> end of itóand very little has been written by anyone who has spent any
> time inside it. As Pierre Bourdieu recently noted, the neglect of the
> movement by North American academics is nothing short of scandalous.
> Academics who for years have published essays that sound like position
> papers for large social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized
> with confusion or worse, highminded contempt, now that real ones are
> everywhere emerging. As an active participant in the movement as well
> as an anthropologist, I want to provide some broad background for those
> intellectuals who might be interested in taking up some of their
> historical responsibilities. This essay is meant to clear away a few
> misconceptions.
>
> The phrase "antiglobalization" movement was coined by the corporate
> media, and people inside the movement, especially in the non-NGO,
> direct action camp, have never felt comfortable with it. Essentially,
> this is a movement against neoliberalism, and for creating new forms of
> global democracy. Unfortunately, that statement is almost meaningless
> in the US, since the media insist on framing such issues only in
> propagandistic terms ("free trade," "free market") and the term
> neoliberalism is not in general use. As a result, in meetings one often
> hears people using the expressions "globalization movement" and
> "antiglobalization movement" interchangeably.
>
>   In fact, if one takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders
> and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it's
> pretty clear that not only is the movement a product of globalization,
> but that most of the groups involved in itó particularly the most
> radical onesóare in fact far more supportive of globalization in
> general than supporters of the International Monetary Fund or World
> Trade Organization. The real origins of the movement, for example, lie
> in an international network called People's Global Action (PGA). PGA
> emerged from a 1998 Zapatista encuentro in Barcelona, and its founding
> members include not only anarchist groups in Spain, Britain and
> Germany, but a Gandhian socialist peasant league in India, the
> Argentinian teachers' union, indigenous groups such as the Maori of New
> Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian landless peasantsí movement
> and a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South
> and Central America. North America was for a long time one of the few
> areas that was hardly represented (except for the Canadian Postal
> Workers Union, which acted as PGA's main communications hub until it
> was largely replaced by the internet). It was PGA that put out the
> first calls for days of action such as J18 and N30óthe latter, the
> original call for direct action against the 1999 WTO meetings in
> Seattle.
>
> Internationalism is also reflected in the movementís demands. Here one
> need look only at the three great planks of the platform of the Italian
> group Ya Basta! (appropriated, without acknowledgment, by Michael Hardt
> and Tony Negri in their book Empire): a universally guaranteed "basic
> income," a principle of global citizenship that would guarantee free
> movement of people across borders, and a principle of free access to
> new technologyówhich in practice would mean extreme limits on patent
> rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism). More and
> more, protesters have been trying to draw attention to the fact that
> the neoliberal vision of "globalization" is pretty much limited to the
> free flow of commodities, and actually increases barriers against the
> flow of people, information and ideas. As we [?] often point out, the
> size of the US border guard has in fact almost tripled since signing of
> NAFTA. This is not really surprising, since if it were not possible to
> effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in
> impoverished enclaves where even existing social guarantees could be
> gradually removed, there would be no incentive for companies like Nike
> or The Gap to move production there to begin with. The protests in
> Genoa, for example, were kicked off by a 50,000-strong march calling
> for free immigration in and out of Europeóa fact that went completely
> unreported by the international press, which the next day headlined
> claims by George Bush and Tony Blair that protesters were calling for a
> "fortress Europe."
>
> In striking contrast with past forms of internationalism, however, this
> movement has not simply advocated exporting Western organizational
> models to the rest of the world; if anything, the flow has been the
> other way around. Most of the movementís techniques (consensus process,
> spokescouncils, even mass nonviolent civil disobedience itself) were
> first developed in the global South. In the long run, this may well
> prove the most radical thing about it.
>
> Ever since Seattle, the international media have endlessly decried the
> supposed violence of direct action. The US media invoke this term most
> insistently, despite the fact that after two years of increasingly
> militant protests in the US, it is still impossible to come up with a
> single example of someone physically injured by a protester. I would
> say that what really disturbs the powers-that-be is that they do not
> know how to deal with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to
> fall into familiar patterns of armed resistance.
>
> Here there is often a very conscious effort to destroy existing
> paradigms. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to marching
> along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience or
> outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network, Reclaim
> the Streets, Black Blocs or Ya Basta! have all, in their own ways, been
> trying to map out a completely new territory in between. Theyíre
> attempting to invent what many call a "new language" of protest
> combining elements of what might otherwise be considered street
> theater, festival and what can only be called nonviolent warfare
> (nonviolent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists, of
> eschewing any direct physical harm to human beings). Ya Basta! for
> example is famous for its tuti bianci or white overalls: elaborate
> forms of padding, ranging from foam armor to inner tubes to
> rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and their signature
> chemical-proof white jumpsuits. As this nonviolent army pushes its way
> through police barricades while protecting each other against injury or
> arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon
> charactersómisshapen, ungainly but almost impossible to damage. (The
> effect is only increased when lines of costumed figures attack police
> with balloons and water pistols or feather dusters.) Even the most
> militantósay, eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation
> Frontóscrupulously avoid anything that would cause harm to human beings
> (or for that matter, animals). It's this scrambling of conventional
> categories that so throws off the forces of order and makes them
> desperate to bring things back to familiar territory (simple violence):
> even to the point, as in Genoa, of encouraging fascist hooligans to run
> riot as an excuse to use overwhelming force.
>
> Actually, the Zapatistas, who inspired so much of the movement, could
> themselves be considered a precedent here as well. They are about the
> least violent "army" one can imagine (it is something of an open secret
> that, for the last five years at least, they have not even been
> carrying real guns). These new tactics are perfectly in accord with the
> general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is less about
> seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling
> mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from
> it. The critical thing, though, is that all this is only possible in a
> general atmosphere of peace. In fact, it seems to me that these are the
> ultimate stakes of struggle at the moment: a moment that may well
> determine the overall direction of the 21st century.
>
> It is hard to remember now that (as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us) during
> the late-19th century, anarchism was the core of the revolutionary left
> óthis was a time when most Marxist parties were rapidly becoming
> reformist social democrats. This stituation only really changed with
> World War I, and of course the Russian revolution. It was the success
> of the latter, we are usually told, that led to the decline of
> anarchism and catapulted Communism everywhere to the fore. But it seems
> to me one could look at this another way. In the late-19th century
> people honestly believed that war had been made obsolete between
> industrialized powers; colonial adventures were a constant, but a war
> between France and England on French or English soil seemed as
> unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was
> considered an antiquated barbarism.
>
> The 20th century (which appears to have begun in 1914 and ended
> sometime around 1989 or '91) was by contrast the most violent in human
> history. It was a century almost entirely preoccupied with either
> waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, as
> the ultimate measure of political effectiveness became the ability to
> create and maintain huge mechanized killing machines, that anarchism
> quickly came to seem irrelevant. This is, after all, the one thing that
> anarchists can never, by definition, be very good at. Neither is it
> surprising that Marxism (whose parties were already organized on a
> command structure, and for whom the organization of huge mechanized
> killing machines often proved the only thing they were particularly
> good at) seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. And
> could it really be a coincidence that the moment the cold war ended and
> war between industrialized powers once again seemed unimaginable,
> anarchism popped right back to where it had been at the end of the 19th
> century, as an international movement at the very center of the
> revolutionary left?
>
> If so, it becomes more clear what the ultimate stakes of the current
> "anti-terrorist" mobilization are. In the short run, things look very
> frightening for a movement that governments were desperately calling
> terrorist even before September 11. There is little doubt that a lot of
> good people are about to suffer terrible repression. But in the long
> run, a return to 20th-century levels of violence is simply impossible.
> The spread of nuclear weapons alone will ensure that larger and larger
> portions of the globe are simply off-limits to conventional warfare.
> And if war is the health of the state, the prospects for
> anarchist-style organizing can only be improving.
>
> I can't remember how many articles I've read in the left press
> asserting that the globalization movement, while tactically brilliant,
> has no central theme or coherent ideology. These complaints seem to be
> the left-wing equivalent of the incessant claims in the corporate media
> that this is a movement made up of dumb kids touting a bundle of
> completely unrelated causes. Even worse are the claimsówhich one sees
> surprisingly frequently in the work of academic social theorists who
> should know better, like Hardt and Negri, or Slavoj Zizekóthat the
> movement is plagued by a generic opposition, rooted in bourgeois
> individualism, to all forms of structure or organization. It's
> distressing that, two years after Seattle, I should even have to write
> this, but someone obviously should: in North America especially, this
> is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to
> organization; it is about creating new forms of organization. It is not
> lacking in ideology; those new forms of organization are its ideology.
> It is a movement about creating and enacting horizontal networks
> instead of top-down (especially, state-like, corporate or party)
> structures, networks based on principles of decentralized,
> nonhierarchical consensus democracy.
>
> Over the past 10 years in particular, activists in North America have
> been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups'
> own internal processes to create a viable model of what functioning
> direct democracy could look like, drawing particularly, as I've noted,
> on examples from outside the Western tradition. The result is a rich
> and growing panoply of organizational forms and instrumentsóaffinity
> groups, spokescouncils, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls,
> blocking concerns, vibes-watchers and so onóall aimed at creating forms
> of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and
> attain maximum effective solidarity without stifling dissenting voices,
> creating leadership positions or compelling people to do anything to
> which they have not freely consented. It is very much a work in
> progress, and creating a culture of democracy among people who have
> little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and uneven
> business, butó as almost any police chief who has faced protestors on
> the streets can attestódirect democracy of this sort can be remarkably
> effective.
>
> Here I want to stress the relation of theory and practice this
> organizational model entails. Perhaps the best way to start thinking
> about groups like the Direct Action Network (which I've been working
> with for the past two years) is to see it as the diametrical opposite
> of the kind of sectarian Marxist group that has so long characterized
> the revolutionary left. Where the latter puts its emphasis on achieving
> a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological
> uniformity and juxtaposes a vision of an egalitarian future with
> extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, DAN
> openly seeks diversity: its motto might as well be, "if you are willing
> to act like an anarchist in the present, your long-term vision is
> pretty much your own business." Its ideology, then, is immanent in the
> antiauthoritarian principles that underlie its practice, and one of its
> more explicit principles is that things should stay that way.
>
> There is indeed something very new here, and something potentially
> extremely important. Consensus processóin which one of the basic rules
> is that one always treats others' arguments as fundamentally reasonable
> and principled, whatever one thinks about the person making itóin
> particular creates an extremely different style of debate and argument
> than the sort encouraged by majority voting, one in which the
> incentives are all towards compromise and creative synthesis rather
> than polarization, reduction and treating minor points of difference
> like philosophical ruptures. I need hardly point out how much our
> accustomed modes of academic discourse resemble the latteróor even
> more, perhaps, the kind of sectarian reasoning that leads to endless
> splits and fragmentation, which the ìnew new leftî (as it is sometimes
> called) has so far managed almost completely to avoid. It seems to me
> that in many ways the activists are way ahead of the theorists here,
> and that the most challenging problem for us will be to create forms of
> intellectual practice more in tune with newly emerging forms of
> democratic practice, rather than with the tiresome sectarian logic
> those groups have finally managed to set aside.
>
>
>
>
> =====
> .                            the
> .                     [|=-=prisoner=-=|]
> . Free Radio Austin 97.1 http://pirateradio.org/fra
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Tuesday, November 13, 2001 12:46 AM

[MAPC-discuss] Fw: Globalization Movement: Points of