A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements.
A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which transnational capital is the only real policy maker.
A call for non-violent civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations.
An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.
A sketch of the 'movement' the anti-capitalist networks and a little on the origin of anti-capitalist ideas.
The anti-capitalist movement
The movement did not start on the streets of Seattle or Davos. Submerged and open networks of anti-capitalism flowered in 1999 but had been mobilising long before (Wall 1999). Anti-capitalist sentiments predate capitalism understood as an advanced industrial or post-industrial system based on profit and investment. Given that centuries before capitalism existed, Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple, one wonders how he would have reacted to contemporary church towers being used as mobile phone masts or the corporate enthusiasms of some American Protestants. Five centuries before Christ entered the temple, the Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, set up a philosophical system in opposition to the notion of economic (wo) man and the desire for ever more consumer goods, before the term economics had been coined by Aristotle. The fact that the Buddha’s holiness was indicated, amongst other signs, by his long ear lobes, a symbol of nobility enjoyed by the then Nepalese ruling class whose lavish jewellery distended their ears, suggests that Zen is only half of the process. Rebellion against empire has a long history too. The Spartacus uprising where the slaves attempted to over throw Roman power deserves a mention, immortalised as it was by Rosa Luxemburg’s brave but failed Spartacist revolution of 1919 and put into celluloid by the Marxist scriptwriter Howard Fast (Bronner 1987; Fast 1990). From the peasant revolutionaries such as John Ball to the Anabaptists who took on and nearly defeated the Saxon Lutheran Princes there is a tradition of struggle against established economic and political power that stretches back centuries (Strayer 1991).
The creation of the capitalist market in Britain, for example, during the eighteenth century was vigorously opposed with direct action by small producers, farmers and workers who insisted instead on the maintenance of a moral economy that placed need before greed (Tilly 1975). Land enclosure was fought with a series of peasant revolts and oppressive landlords were shamed in the seventeenth century by ritual processions known as charivari or skimmingtons (Wall 2004). In Ireland, oppressive landowners were humiliated by hunger strikers who starved themselves to death at their gates in the nineteenth century. The so-called Utopian Socialists continued the habit of resistance to the market, particularly in Britain and France. It is worth mentioning Robert Owen, the factory-owning radical, who attempted to build a socialist commonwealth in the early nineteenth century (Taylor 1982). Karl Marx, who spent his entire adult life attempting to understand capitalism, at the very time it was maturing, sought to create a system to help fight it (Harvey 1990; Wheen 2000). Marx’s attitude to capitalism was akin to that of many of the utopian socialists and anarchists in its complexity; while he attacked capitalism as exploitative, he also saw it as a progressive force, which by developing the means of production would pave the way to a new society. For good and sometimes for ill, the twentieth century saw Marxist inspired revolutions over much of the globe. In turn, Marx’s anarchist detractors created militant movements opposed to capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Woodcock 1963).
The Frankfurt School of Western Marxists based around figures such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse saw capitalism as a totalitarian system that controlled the working class via parliamentary democracy and consumerism (Jay 1973). According to Marcuse, representative democracy seduces the public into thinking that they can participate politically, when in fact being manipulated by a capitalist elite who chose the real rulers of society. The radical New Left, who agreed with Marcuse insight that consumerism, is used to buy obedience, exploded out of the relatively conservative left parties of the 1950s and 1960s. Marcuse helped inspire the student uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s particularly Paris 1968 (Brown 1974).
Feminists have criticised the economic system as one that enslaves women and fails to value their contribution (Peterson and Lewis 1999). Women either work for free in the home or increasingly as low paid, part-time and poorly protected workers in the formal economy (Malos 1980). Drawing upon both the Frankfurt school and feminism, green movements have crystallised during the last quarter of the twentieth century to argue that a society focussed on market economics diminishes human beings and manipulates spiritual and social needs into forms of consumerism (Snyder 1974). Greens have attacked capitalism, above all, because of its emphasis on economic growth, which they have seen as ecologically unsustainable (Douthwaite 1992; Porritt 1984).
Activists have increasingly targeted corporations as a source of ecological and human injustice. The UK based Corporate Watch was established in 1995 by campaigners who had worked to boycott the Shell oil company for its complicity in the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. From the boycott of Nestle over its high pressure selling of powered milk to mothers whose access to dirty water in developing countries raised infant mortality to animal rights campaigns against vivisecting companies anti-corporate protest has grown in the 1980s, 1990s and into to the twenty first century.
The Zapatista uprising of January 1994 is pivotal to any understanding of the recent wave of militant anti-capitalism. This previously obscure guerrilla army occupied five southern Mexican provinces to protest at the introduction of the North American Free Trade Association, which they believed would lead to the loss of their land by multinationals. Their spokesperson Marcos argued, ‘NAFTA is a death sentence because it leads to competition based on your level of skill, and what skill level can illiterate people have? And look at this land. How can we compete with farms in California and Canada?’ (Russell 1995: 6). The Zapatistas were reported as stating: ‘There are those with white skins and a dark sorrow. Our struggle walks with these skins. There are those who have dark skins and a white arrogance; against them is our fire. Our armed path is not against skin colour but against the colour of money’ (Earth First! UpDate 53, November 1994: 3).
In Mexico there is a tradition of hostility to prices, property and other market institutions, that predates Marxism and anarchism. The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata who led the Mexican Revolution. He fought for ‘tierra y libertad’, the demand for communal land ownership and the defence of the peasant producers. A sub plot of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, is right wing opposition to the Mexican state, which even in the 1930s retained some notion of its revolutionary roots (1967). The Zapatista leader Marcos was originally a Maoist and remains influenced by Marxist forms of anti-capitalism however, such Mexican and indigenous roots have shaped the movement. To join NAFTA the Mexican government abolished article 27 of Zapata's 1910 revolutionary constitution, which guaranteed the right to land for those who worked it. The Zapatistas fought to prevent these 'ejidos', or communal landholdings from being sold to private landowners. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation began as a local militia to defend the poorest people of Mexico’s poorest provinces but mutated into a wider campaign against capitalism, motivated by fear that free trade would create even greater suffering in the Chiapas.
The Zapatistas exploited the power of the internet, a product of capitalism and driving force of globalisation, to help kick start the anti-capitalist mobilisation of recent years (Anon 1998; Holloway and Pelaez 1998). They have worked with a variety of groups including anarchists and radical environmentalists such as Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in the UK (Wall 1999). In 1996 they called an international encuentro or encounter to link opponents of neo-liberalism, which brought 6,000 participants to the Chiapas. A second encuentro in Spain in 1997 saw the creation of Peoples Global Action (PGA), who organised the 50th anniversary Davos demonstration against GATT in 1998. The PGA linked together ten grass roots networks including the Brazilian Landless movement and the radical Indian Farmers Union. Do or Die! a journal produced by members of Earth First! and RTS reported back from the first encuentro that four hallmark principles were used to create a measure of unity:
A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements.
A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which transnational capital is the only real policy maker.
A call for non-violent civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations.
An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy. (Do or Die 8, 1999)
PGA used the internet to organise internationally and rejected the participation of formal NGOs and political parties including Greens and Marxists. In February 1998 the first meeting of PGA brought together 300 delegates from 71 countries, including the Uwa peoples of Columbia, Canadian Postal Workers, European Reclaim the Streets activists, anti-nuclear campaigners, French farmers, Maori and Ogoni activists, through to Korean Trade Unionists, the Indigenous Women’s Network of North America, and Ukrainian radical ecologists. ‘All were there to form a global instrument for communication and co-ordination for all those fighting against the destruction of humanity and the planet by the global market’ (Do or Die 8, 1999). A series of rolling protests at international events to promote the free trade hegemony was launched, as noted by the Economist, at the fiftieth anniversary of the GATT, in Switzerland.
A global day of action against capitalism was organised for June 18th 1999 to coincide with that years meeting of the G8. In Britain, the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ was a carefully planned act of chaos. Fifty thousand gold flyers distributed at clubs and pubs, a global e-mail discussion list and vigorous fly posting were used to draw 10,000 partygoers to the meeting point at Liverpool Street Station. Banners proclaimed ‘Kill Capitalism’, ‘Global ecology not global economy’. Coloured masks were distributed and flags green for ecology, red for communism and black for anarchy, were used to lead demonstrators in different directions. The entire financial centre of London was severely disrupted (Wall 2004).
Major protests followed at Seattle that, as noted, derailed the WTO agenda setting talks. September 2000 saw the IMF meeting in the Czech Republic under siege. The World Social Forum met in a conscious parody of the World Economic Forum’s traditional gathering, for the first time in February 2001. The event in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil was also accompanied by direct action;
José Bové, [...] was the star turn at ‘anti-Davos’, especially after he joined leaders of Brazil’s Landless Movement on an excursion to destroy a plantation of genetically modified soya owned by Monsanto, an American company. He was briefly arrested and threatened with deportation, but was later allowed to stay. Protesters trashed a nearby McDonald’s in his honour. (Economist, 3 February 2001)
In April 2001 a Quebec meeting to create a free trade area of the Americas had to be fortified to resist an assault by anti-globalists. The next WTO meeting was in Qatar, a remote police state, chosen to reduce the possibility of protest. Such actions at major international events have continued to occur since 2001, a wave of protest is being planned as this book goes to press against the G8 meeting in Scotland in 2005. Many events have turned to violence with protesters being killed or severely injured. Local networks that undertake grassroots action of a less dramatic but no less important kind accompany such large scale and vivid events (Plows 2004).
No comments:
Post a Comment