Fences and Windows (25 page)

For instance, when the United States launched a trade war against France for daring to ban hormone-laced beef, José Bové and the French Farmers’ Confederation didn’t get the world’s attention by screaming about import duties on Roquefort cheese. They did it by “strategically dismantling” a McDonald’s.

Many activists have learned over the past decade that the blind spot many Westerners have concerning international affairs can be overcome by linking campaigns to famous brands—an effective, if often problematic, weapon against parochialism. These corporate campaigns have, in turn, opened back doors into the arcane world of international trade and finance, to the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and, for some, to a questioning of capitalism itself.

These tactics have also proven to be an easy target in turn. After September 11, politicians and pundits around the world instantly began spinning the terrorist attacks as part of a continuum of anti-American and anti-corporate violence: first the Starbucks window, then, presumably, the World Trade Center.
New Republic
editor Peter Beinart seized on a single post to an anti-corporate Internet chat room that asked if the attacks were committed by “one of us.” Beinart concluded that “the anti-globalization movement & is, in part, a movement motivated by hatred of the United States”—immoral with the U.S. under attack. Reginald Dale, writing in
The International Herald Tribune
, went furthest in the protester as terrorist equation. “While they are not deliberately setting out to slaughter thousands of innocent people, the protesters who want to prevent the holding of meetings like those of the IMF or the WTO are seeking to advance their political agenda through intimidation, which is a classic goal of terrorism.”

In a sane world, rather than fuelling such a backlash, the terrorist attacks would raise questions about why U.S.
intelligence agencies were spending so much time spying on Reclaim the Streets and Independent Media Centres instead of on the terrorist networks plotting mass murder. Unfortunately, it seems clear that the crackdown on activism that predated September 11 will only intensify, with heightened surveillance, infiltration and police violence. The attacks could well, I fear, also cost this movement some of its political victories. Funds committed to the AIDS crisis in Africa are disappearing, and commitments to expand debt cancellation will likely follow. Now aid is being used as payola for countries that sign up for America’s war.

And free trade, long facing a public relations crisis, is fast being rebranded, like shopping and baseball, as a patriotic duty. According to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, the world needs a new campaign to “fight terror with trade.” In an essay in
The New York Times Magazine
, business author 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 practitioners of liberty. … They work hard, if unintentionally, to free others from constraints. This makes them, almost by default, the spiritual antithesis of the religious fundamentalist, whose business depends on a denial of personal liberty in the name of some putatively higher power.”

The battle lines have been drawn: trade equals freedom, anti-trade equals fascism.

As a movement, our civil liberties, our advances, our usual strategies—all are now in question. But this crisis also opens up new possibilities. As many have pointed out, the challenge
for social justice movements is to demonstrate that justice and equality are the most sustainable strategies against violence and fundamentalism. What does that mean in practice? Well, Americans are finding out fast what it means to have a public health care system so overburdened that it cannot handle the flu season, let alone an anthrax outbreak. Despite a decade of pledges to safeguard the U.S. water supply from bioterrorist attack, almost nothing has been done by its overburdened Environmental Protection Agency. The food supply is even more vulnerable, with inspectors managing to check about 1 percent of food imports—hardly a safeguard against rising fears of “agroterrorism.”

In this “new kind of war,” terrorists are finding their weapons in our tattered public infrastructures. This is true not only in rich countries such as the U.S. but also in poor countries, where fundamentalism has been spreading rapidly. Where debt and war have ravaged infrastructure, fanatical sugar daddies like bin Laden are able to swoop in and start providing basic services that should be the job of government: roads, schools, health clinics, even basic sanitation. In Sudan, it was bin Laden who built the road that enabled the construction of the Talisman oil pipeline, pumping resources to the government for its brutal ethnic war. 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
madrassas
offer not only free classrooms but also food and shelter for poor children.

In understanding the spread of terrorism—north and south—questions of infrastructure and public funding are unavoidable. And yet what is the response from politicians so far? More of the same: tax breaks for businesses and further privatized services. On the same day that
The International Herald Tribune
ran the front-page headline “New Terrorism Front Line: The Mailroom,” it was announced that European Union governments had agreed to open their postal delivery markets to private competition.

The debate about what kind of globalization we want is not “so yesterday;” it has never been more urgent. Many campaign groups are now framing their arguments in terms of “common security” —a welcome antidote to the narrow security mentality of fortress borders and B-52s that are so far doing such a spectacularly poor job of protecting anyone. Yet we cannot be naive, as if the very real threat of more slaughtering of innocents will disappear through political reform alone. There needs to be social justice, but there also needs to be justice for the victims of these attacks and practical prevention of future ones. Terrorism is indeed an international threat, and it did not begin with the attacks in the U.S. Many who support the bombing of Afghanistan do so grudgingly: for some, the bombs seem to be the only weapons available, however brutal and imprecise. But this paucity of options is partly a result of U.S. resistance to a range of more precise and potentially effective international instruments.

Like a standing international criminal court, which the U.S. opposes, fearing that its own war heroes might face
prosecution. Like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on nuclear weapons, also a no-go. And all the other treaties the U.S. has refused to ratify, on land mines, small arms and so much else that would have helped us cope with a heavily militarized state such as Afghanistan. As Bush invites the world to join America’s war, sidelining the UN and the international courts, we in this movement need to become passionate defenders of true multilateralism, rejecting once and for all the label “anti-globalization.” Bush’s “coalition” does not represent a genuinely global response to terrorism but the internationalization of one country’s foreign policy objectives—the trademark of U.S. international relations, from the WTO negotiating table to Kyoto. We can make these connections not as anti-Americans but as true internationalists.

Is the outpouring of mutual aid and support that the tragedies of September 11 have elicited so different from the humanitarian goals to which this movement aspires? The street slogans—People before Profit, The World Is Not for Sale—have become self-evident and viscerally felt truths for many in the wake of the attacks. There are questions about why the bailouts for airlines aren’t going to the workers losing their jobs. There is growing concern about the volatilities of deregulated trade. There is a groundswell of appreciation for public sector workers of all kinds. In short, “the commons” —the public sphere, the public good, the noncorporate—is undergoing something of a rediscovery in the U.S., of all places.

Those concerned with changing minds (and not simply
winning arguments) should seize this moment to connect these humane reactions to the many other arenas in which human needs must take precedence over corporate profits, from AIDS treatment to homelessness.

This would require a dramatic change in activist strategy, one based much more on substance than on symbols. Fortunately, it is already happening. For more than a year, the largely symbolic activism outside summits and against individual corporations has faced challenges within movement circles. There is much that is unsatisfying about fighting a war of symbols: the glass shatters in the McDonald’s window, the meetings are driven to ever more remote locations—but so what? It’s still only symbols, facades, representations.

Before September 11, 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 to slavery reparations to participatory democracy.

After September 11, the task is even more clear: the challenge is to shift a discourse around the vague notion of globalization into a specific debate about democracy. In a period of “unprecedented prosperity,” countries around the world were told they had no choice but to slash public spending, revoke labour laws, rescind environmental protections—deemed illegal trade barriers—and defund schools. All this was apparently necessary to make them trade ready, investment friendly, world competitive.

The task now is to measure the euphoric promises of globalization—that it would bring general prosperity,
greater development and more democracy—against the reality of these policies. We need to prove that globalization—this version of globalization—has been built on the back of local human and ecological welfare.

Too often, these connections between global and local are not made. Instead, we sometimes seem to have two activist solitudes. On the one hand, there are the international globalization activists who seem to be fighting faraway issues, unconnected to people’s day-to-day struggles. Because they don’t represent the local realities of globalization, they are too easily dismissed as misguided university students or professional activists. On the other hand, there are thousands of community-based organizations fighting daily struggles for survival, or for the preservation of the most elementary public services. Their campaigns are often dismissed as purely local, even insignificant, which is why most grassroots activists understandably feel burnt out and demoralized.

The only clear way forward is for these two forces to merge. What is now the anti-globalization movement must turn into thousands of local movements, fighting the way neo-liberal politics are playing out on the ground: homelessness, wage stagnation, rent escalation, police violence, prison explosion, criminalization of immigrants and refugees, the erosion of public schools and imperilling of the water supply. At the same time, the local movements fighting privatization and deregulation on the ground need to link their campaigns into a large global movement, one capable of showing where their particular issues fit into an
international economic agenda being enforced around the world. What is needed is a political framework that can both take on corporate power and control internationally, and empower local organizing and self-determination.

Key to this process is developing a political discourse that is not afraid of diversity, that does not try to cram every political movement into a single model. Neo-liberal economics is biased at every level toward centralization, consolidation, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity. Against it, we need a movement that encourages and fiercely protects the right to diversity: cultural diversity, ecological diversity, agricultural diversity—and yes, political diversity as well: different ways of doing politics. The goal is not better faraway rules and rulers but close-up democracy on the ground.

To get to this place, we need to make room for the voices—coming from Chiapas, Porto Alegre, Kerala—showing that it is possible to challenge imperialism while embracing plurality, progress and deep democracy. In 1998, Benjamin Barber described a pending global battle in his book
Jihad vs. McWorld
. Our task, never more pressing, is to point out that there are more than two worlds available, to expose all the invisible worlds between the economic fundamentalism of “McWorld” and the religious fundamentalism of “Jihad.”

The strength of this movement of movements has been that it offers a real alternative to the homogenization and centralization represented by globalization. No one sector or country can claim it, no one intellectual elite can control it, and that is its secret weapon. A truly diverse global
movement, one that is rooted everywhere that abstract economic theory becomes a local reality, doesn’t have to be outside of every summit, slamming head-on into vastly more powerful institutions of military and economic might. Instead, it can surround them from all directions. Because, as we have seen, the police can wage war on a protest, they can learn to contain it, they can build higher fences. But there is no fence big enough to contain a true social movement, because it is everywhere.

Maybe the image wars are coming to a close. A year ago, 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 of movements 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 windows. It’s time to move through them.