It's been a long time since I've gotten to share thoughts on the anti-globalization movement. It's been dormant for quite a while, but it's coming back strong as of late, especially the French ATTAC organization. (No, it isn't attack).My interest was piqued about who ATTAC were after reading that they were one of the largest organizers of the so far attention-grabbing G-8 protests. Unsurprisingly, this search led me to the pages of the New Left Review (NLR), a political science journal that leans, well, left. ATTAC in English stands for the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. Actually, I am sympathetic to the original goal of ATTAC of putting a nominal tax on international financial transactions to fund social objectives. Less than 10% of these transactions are associated with actual trade flows--the rest is mostly speculative trading, such as in foreign exchange. This tax is called the "Tobin tax" after James Tobin, the Nobel Prize winner in Economics who first proposed it. However, the rest of the Euro-bashing ATTAC package I am not keen on. ATTAC claims that it played a prominent role in getting the EU referendum rejected in France in 2005. From the NLR:
Meanwhile, Naomi Klein tried to make sense of the mishmash of interests in the anti-globalization movement way back in 2001. For her, this plurality is a source of strength, not of weakness:‘The rejection of the constitutional treaty in the Dutch and French referenda has put in question the fundamental structures of the European Union. They will need to be razed to the ground in order to build a democratic, social Europe, truly independent of the United States, that will maintain relations of solidarity with the rest of the world and with the generations to come.’ This was the burden of the 5 June 2005 declaration, ‘For the Democratic Refoundation of Europe’, by the Administrative Council of attac.
attac was justly charged by the French media with spearheading the No campaign against the eu constitutional treaty, which turned France into a vast popular-education forum during the spring of 2005. Thousands of citizens followed a crash course on the history of the eu, the workings of its institutions, the content of preceding treaties, especially that of Nice, and the prospects opened by the ‘constitution’. The two hundred-odd local attac committees played a decisive role, both in analysing the terms of the constitutional treaty, explaining its content and the issues at stake, and mobilizing support on the ground. The campaign itself brought a new dynamic into play, unifying activists from anti-globalization movements, trade unions, grass-roots associations, political groups and thousands of unaffiliated citizens. This coming together produced its own elan which was central to the final result.
The collective appropriation of the treaty also had the effect of ‘naturalizing’ the European question, long considered beyond the scope of national politics. For the first time, the link has been made between neoliberal policies formulated at eu level and those pursued ‘at home’. There are very few fields now, especially in the twelve countries that make up the Eurozone, in which national legislation retains any degreee of independence. On the whole, domestic policy is no more than the application in a national context of decisions taken either by the twenty-five member governments, or by autonomous bodies such as the European Commission or the Court of Justice of the eu. The notion that ‘Europe’ is something external is fast losing ground.
What is ‘the anti-globalization movement’? [1] I put the phrase in quote-marks because I immediately have two doubts about it. Is it really a movement? If it is a movement, is it anti-globalization? Let me start with the first issue. We can easily convince ourselves it is a movement by talking it into existence at a forum like this—I spend far too much time at them—acting as if we can see it, hold it in our hands. Of course, we have seen it—and we know it’s come back in Quebec, and on the US–Mexican border during the Summit of the Americas and the discussion for a hemispheric Free Trade Area. But then we leave rooms like this, go home, watch some TV, do a little shopping and any sense that it exists disappears, and we feel like maybe we’re going nuts. Seattle—was that a movement or a collective hallucination? To most of us here, Seattle meant a kind of coming-out party for a global resistance movement, or the ‘globalization of hope’, as someone described it during the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre. But to everyone else Seattle still means limitless frothy coffee, Asian-fusion cuisine, e-commerce billionaires and sappy Meg Ryan movies. Or perhaps it is both, and one Seattle bred the other Seattle—and now they awkwardly coexist...Speaking of the Zapatistas, my last feature from the NLR is an interview of Subcomandante Marcos, the legendary Mexican anti-globalization figure. Here, he articulates how the anti-globalization movement is different from traditional Marxism-Leninism:
This kind of impression is reinforced by the decentralized, non-hierarchical structure of the movement, which always disconcerts the traditional media. Well-organized press conferences are rare, there is no charismatic leadership, protests tend to pile on top of each other. Rather than forming a pyramid, as most movements do, with leaders up on top and followers down below, it looks more like an elaborate web. In part, this web-like structure is the result of internet-based organizing. But it is also a response to the very political realities that sparked the protests in the first place: the utter failure of traditional party politics. All over the world, citizens have worked to elect social democratic and workers’ parties, only to watch them plead impotence in the face of market forces and IMF dictates. In these conditions, modern activists are not so naive as to believe change will come from electoral politics. That’s why they are more interested in challenging the structures that make democracy toothless, like the IMF’s structural adjustment policies, the WTO’s ability to override national sovereignty, corrupt campaign financing, and so on. This is not just making a virtue of necessity. It responds at the ideological level to an understanding that globalization is in essence a crisis in representative democracy. What has caused this crisis? One of the basic reasons for it is the way power and decision-making has been handed along to points ever further away from citizens: from local to provincial, from provincial to national, from national to international institutions, that lack all transparency or accountability. What is the solution? To articulate an alternative, participatory democracy...
The Zapatistas have a phrase for this. They call it ‘one world with many worlds in it’. Some have criticized this as a New Age non-answer. They want a plan. ‘We know what the market wants to do with those spaces, what do you want to do? Where’s your scheme?’ I think we shouldn’t be afraid to say: ‘That’s not up to us’. We need to have some trust in people’s ability to rule themselves, to make the decisions that are best for them. We need to show some humility where now there is so much arrogance and paternalism. To believe in human diversity and local democracy is anything but wishy-washy. Everything in McGovernment conspires against them. Neoliberal economics is biased at every level towards centralization, consolidation, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity. Against it, we need a movement of radical change, committed to a single world with many worlds in it, that stands for ‘the one no and the many yesses’.
Broadly speaking, there were two major gaps in the movement of the revolutionary Left in Latin America. One of them was the indigenous peoples, from whose ranks we come, and the other was the supposed minorities. Even if we all removed our balaclavas we would not be a minority in the same way that homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals are. These sectors were not simply excluded by the discourses of the Latin American Left of those decades—and still current today—but the theoretical framework of what was then Marxism–Leninism disregarded them, indeed took them to be part of the front to be eliminated. Homosexuals, for example, were suspect as potential traitors, elements harmful to the socialist movement and state. While the indigenous peoples were viewed as a backward sector preventing the forces of production . . . blah, blah, blah. So what was required was to clean out these elements, imprisoning or re-educating some, and assimilating others into the process of production, to transform them into skilled labour—proletarians, to put it in those terms.Needless to say, the New Left Review is a good, somewhat academic resource on the contemporary anti-globalization movement. I would encourage you to read it regularly if you're into knowing more about that movement even if you do not necessarily share its views.
