#alterglobalization

From corporate critique to finance critique

Tellingly, activist ire today is no longer directed at the Starbucks and Niketowns which famously had their windows smashed in 1999. Rather, OWS has zeroed in on institutions of finance that produce nothing tangible that can be wrapped up in ethical packaging. Perhaps this will be the next frontier for the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism, but for now, housing bubbles and the gentrification that follows, betting on derivative futures and other forms of unbridled speculation are all easy targets for populist rage because they irreducibly exist to do nothing but make ever more money. The Wall Street versus Main Street frame expresses a preference for the ‘real’ economy of hard work and the production of useful things, which is counterpoised to a ‘parasitic’ world of banks and traders who shuffle other people’s money around in a global digital casino. Yet this discourse betrays a ressentiment passed off as anti-capitalism. It ignores the fact that small business owners are not immune to this logic, and must maximize profit by increasing sales, increasing worker productivity or lowering wages, the same as individual workers compete with their fellows for raises and better positions to improve their lot. It is not the competitive logic of capitalism that is challenged, but only its most obvious, odious and ‘abstract’ form, which is in reality inseparable from its ‘good’ manifestations.

Left-neoliberalism: the anarchist as social entrepreneur?

Taken together, many aspects of neoliberalism are mirrored in neoanarchism, but given a left spin. Despite the rhetoric, the emphasis on boycotts, alternative products and consumer activism not only does not threaten capitalism, but in fact reinforces it by creating new markets while promoting the illusion of the powerful consumer operating within the inherently democratic market, with less attention given to detailing structural biases within market economies against ethical concerns like labor rights or ecology. These biases result in sustainable and fair-trade products which are much more expensive than their counterparts, as they must add an ethical surcharge to cover the costs of paying workers more or disposing of waste ecologically, a competitive disadvantage pitting conscience against pocketbook. Consumer-based politics also fuel a favorite right-wing stereotype, what Thomas Frank (2004) calls the ‘latte liberal’: college educated, typically white, wealthy enough to afford expensive specialized foods and products, and out of touch with or dismissive of the concerns of ‘ordinary’ people, in particular material inequality. The result is an aestheticization of politics wherein taste and cultural preference become a cipher and shorthand for politics. In the USA, the political right has deployed this reversed Gramscian strategy to great effect, by opposing a working-class cultural idiom to the French-speaking, Volvo-driving, arugula-eating liberal elitists. Of course, the disastrous impact of Republican economic policy on the working class, and the significant consensus with their Democratic counterparts on such matters, goes unmentioned.

Abstract: Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999 to its recent incarnation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this article argues that neoanarchism’s attempts to “change the world without taking power” pose serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today. The text also examines recuperation as a factor in social movement decline, arguing that the incorporation of social movement themes is constructing a “new spirit of capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for a more ethical world while simultaneously insulating itself from critique — a process facilitated by significant ideological resonance between neoanarchism and neoliberalism.

Between September left activism 30 November 1999 and 11 2001, a surge of radical swept across the USA and many other parts of the globe to contest the institutions of global neoliberalism. Forged against the backdrop of the collapse of communism, the decline of the labor movement, a triumphant neoliberal consensus, and a left landscape shaped largely by feminism, ecology and antiracism, the radicalism at the core of the alterglobalization movement (AGM) that emerged at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial protests in Seattle was characterized by a new political sensibility uniting a diversity of concerns, often under the ideological umbrella of anarchism.[1] Departing significantly from both the Marxism of the New Left and classical anarchism, some have dubbed this emergent politics ‘neoanarchism’ (Castells 2005).

Fast forward a decade. The financial crisis of 2008 belatedly vindicates the AGM as the deregulation, deindustrialization and outsourcing advocated by neoliberalism are widely cited as key factors behind the collapse, Keynesianism is revived and the cover of Newsweek proclaims ‘we are all socialists now’ (16 February 2009). Despite his neoliberal pedigree, the Obama campaign successfully tapped into widespread economic dissatisfaction with the slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’, simultaneously playing up his background as a community organizer and even directly borrowing the motto ‘Yes We Can’ from the United Farm Worker movement once led by Cesar Chavez. For a brief moment before being eclipsed by the Tea Party, his administration held out the solution of a ‘Green New Deal’ that could save the planet and capitalism through renewable energy, eco-retrofitting and other green enterprises. Ideas and practices only recently confined to the margins of the radical environmental movement were suddenly thrust center stage. Spearheaded by exradical turned presidential advisor Van Jones, his fate is instructive. Appointed to be Obama’s green jobs czar and chief architect of the proposed green economy, he was forced to resign when his past involvement with radical left groups of the AGM was uncovered by right-wing media.

Yet ultimately the spectacular implosion of neoliberalism in 2008 resulted in, paradoxically, more neoliberalism — bailouts for banks and large corporations, austerity for the populace. The movement slogan ‘another world is possible’ has been rebuked by a zombie neoliberalism that insists ‘there is no alternative’. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has challenged this narrative by problematizing economic inequality and the neoliberal discourse that legitimated it, and reintroduced the words ‘class’ and ‘capitalism’ back into political debate. Occupy Wall Street represents the convergence of a populism animated by those directly hit by the economic crisis with previously existing neoanarchist activists. Its anarchist-inflected politics draws heavily from the AGM of a decade before; movement calls for leaderless direct democracy, critique of corporate power, commitment to anti-oppression politics, radical pluralism and emphasis on direct action directly build on the neoanarchist politics of the North American AGM. Indeed, many key activists who laid the groundwork for OWS, such as David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, are veterans of the main organization of the AGM, the Direct Action Network (DAN). Will OWS share the AGM’s fate?