#anti-globalization

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.

By ‘an activist mentality’ what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image. The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change.

To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.

Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour — it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education — instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers — experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.

Direct Action An Ethnography by David Graeber | chapter 5 part 2 | readi...

Today marks the 19th anniversary of the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) that took place on the streets of Seattle. These protests were part of much larger anti-globalization and anti-capitalist struggles across the world. They were also one of the first incidents of the use of the black bloc as a tactic in the so-called United States.

Many of us have some kind of story about our relationship to these protests; some of us were there, some of us participated in solidarity actions elsewhere, some of us experienced the protest's coverage as a catalyst for our own radicalization, and for those of us too young to remember, the WTO protests of 1999 hold some sort of mythic status in our minds.

July 20, 2001: Italian youth Carlo Giuliani murdered by cops during the G8 summit in Genoa.

"You've probably seen the photograph. A youth hefts a fire extinguisher, preparing to throw it at an armored police vehicle. From inside, a cop aims his gun at the protester's head.

"Seconds after this picture was snapped, 24-year-old Carlo Giuliani lay dead on the pavement with two bullet holes in his head. The killer backed his vehicle over Giuliani's body and sped away.

"That was the scene in the Plaza Alimonda on July 20, the first full day of the Group of 8 summit meeting in Genoa, Italy.

"Scarcely a mile away, in the Ducal Palace, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and the other heads of the seven most powerful imperialist countries, along with Russia's Vladimir Putin, feasted on a sumptuous lunch and blamed one another for the unfolding capitalist economic crisis. But in Genoa's winding streets, tens of thousands of youths, workers and activists protested global inequality, and some fought pitched battles with police."

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.