March 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Articulating the Vision

Naomi Klein is a journalist, media commentator, and author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. This account of her February 3, 2000 talk was prepared by Peacework staff writer Jim Phillips.

To many activists, as Naomi Klein noted in a recent speech, the WTO protests in Seattle signified "a kind of coming out party for a global resistance movement."

But if Seattle truly crystallized a worldwide movement, Klein wondered, what is its core nature? What aims can possibly be shared by all the huge variety of people and organizations who make up this "slippery beast?"

Speaking in February at the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, at a conference whose theme was "Change the World: Building a Post-Seattle Coalition for Global Justice," Klein tried to give some definition to the elusive entity called "the Movement," whose birth might be dated to 500 years ago, or to Jan. 1, 1994, "when the Zapatistas said 'Ya Basta' on the night NAFTA became law."

Banner hung by Rainforest Action flies over Seattle, Dec. 1999 © Dang Ngo dngo@envirolink.org

Whenever it started, Klein said, "we now have a pretty good idea of what this movement is against. It is a response to the privatization of every aspect of life, to everything being turned into a commodity"--a trend that can be seen in the invasion of public schools by ads, the patenting of genes, and the transformation of public streets into private malls. And the trend is gaining momentum, she pointed out, with the next round of WTO negotiations scheduled to be "all about extending the reach of privatization and commodification still further."

Harder than defining what the movement is against, said Klein, is defining what it's for, "since by its nature it is extraordinarily diverse--a web of miniature movements, not a single pyramid. And that means no one person can speak for this movement, and no document can define it. Try to do it, to gather it up in one place and draw a few parameters around it, and you have open revolt."

As evidence, Klein cited her experience at the recent World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. During that gathering "some groups wrote a movement manifesto," she recalled. "Pretty soon, other groups responded with a counter-manifesto and counter-counter manifestos." There were protests, and breakaway factions. The final result, she said, was "chaos, but in the end, a happy kind of chaos," which captured the diversity of the movement better than any document could have.

Taking her own shot at defining the movement, Klein suggested that "maybe it's not an anti-globalization movement at all. Maybe it's not even really about trade. Fundamentally, I think it's about democracy."

Governments around the world, she pointed out, have adopted a neo-liberal economic model that has led them into "a set of transformative policies designed to make themselves hospitable to investment: Cut taxes, privatize, liberalize, bust unions, get out of the way of the market. This isn't about trade, it's about using trade to enforce turbo capitalism. It's these preconditions of successful trade, not trade itself, that threaten our most basic democratic right: to plan and manage our own economies."

The question, Klein argued, "is not, are you for or against trade. The question is, do we have the right to negotiate the terms of our relationship for foreign capital and investment, and decide how we want to protect ourselves from the dangers inherent in the free market--or do we contract out those decisions?"

For example, she asked, should Canada have the right to ban a harmful gasoline additive, without being sued by a foreign chemical company? "Not according to the WTO's ruling on the Ethyl corporation."

Most people involved in the "movement," she suggested, are not opposed to trade or industrial development, "but are fighting for the right of local communities to have a say in how their resources are used... This movement is a response not to trade but to an unacceptable trade-off: Democratic control in exchange for investment and the panacea of economic growth."

Such a formulation "is not abstract, and it's not theoretical," according to Klein, "but it is a challenge to shift the discourse around globalization into a discourse about democracy. To prove that globalization--this version of globalization--was built on the backs of the unemployment programs we were told we had no choice but to slash, the labor protections we revoked, the environmental protections deemed illegal trade barriers, the schools we didn't fund, the affordable housing we did not build. All in the name of making ourselves trade-ready, investment friendly, globally competitive."

Klein contended that when the issue of globalization isn't linked to such local issues, the result is the creation of two "activist solitudes." On the one hand are "the anti-globalization activists who are enjoying a sort of triumphant mood, but seem to be fighting faraway issues, unconnected to day-to-day struggles." On the other are "local activists fighting day-to-day struggles for survival and preservation of meager public services, and feeling burned out and demoralized."

These two forces must come together, Klein urged. "What is now the anti-globalization movement must turn into thousands of local movements, about how neo-liberal politics are playing out on the ground: homelessness, wage stagnation, rent escalation, police violence, prison explosion, criminalization of migrant workers. It needs to be about the right to decide where the local garbage goes, and to have good public schools, and clean water."

At the same time, these myriad local movements "must link their issue into one large global movement," she said. "We need to develop the analysis about where these local issues fit into a global economic agenda being enforced around the world."

Klein emphasized that she's not proposing that either group try to absorb the other. "It's not an outreach problem. It's about completely rethinking what this movement is."

Instead of working toward some "single movement with a cabal of leaders...flogging a one-size-fits-all economic orthodoxy," Klein envisioned "a political framework that takes on corporate power and control on the one hand, and empowers local organizing and self-determination on the other, a framework that encourages, celebrates, and fiercely protects the right to diversity. Cultural diversity, ecological diversity, agricultural diversity--and yes, Marxist-Leninists, political diversity, different ways of doing politics. The Zapatistas call it 'one world with many worlds in it.'"

Why is participatory democracy so crucial a principle for the budding movement? "Well, in many ways, the current crisis of democracy is about the failure of representative democracy," Klein explained. "Power is delegated to points ever further away, from local, to state, to national, to the international institutions that lack all transparency and accountability."

The challenge for the developing movement is to reverse this trend, whose impact is seen most graphically in the cities, according to Klein, "in the mass migrations of of the landless peasants who have lost their small farms to industrial agriculture... in failed privatization experiments, underfunded schools, overstretched shelters and food banks."

And in a world being given over to neo-liberal economic theory, grassroots democracy badly needs a good shot in the arm, Klein suggested. "Unfortunately, in too many communities, democracy is so impoverished that globalization just means one far-off, out-of-touch decision-making body (the federal or state government) being replaced by another far-off, out-of-touch decision-making body (the WTO or NAFTA)," she said. "You have to have a democracy to know what you are losing. You have to actually feel that decision-making power being restricted to notice when it is no longer there."

Addressing the role of national governments, Klein acknowledged that a viable fight against globalization in local communities can only occur "within a context of national and international standards on public education, fossil fuel emissions, and so on." She insisted, however, that the movement can't only be about "having better far-away rules and rulers."

Though the left must continue its efforts to use the regulatory powers of the state, she said, it must realize that "too often it has ceded the territory of community empowerment to the right," failing to tap into a growing populist anger at the repressive role government plays in the life of the poor.

"We have to know that in poor communities in this country, the government means the police, insensitive bureaucracies, and increase surveillance," she said. "And it is the state--not our ideal state, but the one we actually have--that voluntarily traded away so much of our sovereignty in poorly negotiated trade agreements. We need to stop dealing with imaginary states and start engaging with actual ones."

Klein noted that there's already a swelling grassroots movement to reclaim "communal spaces"--US students throwing ads out of their classrooms, landless Thai peasants planting vegetables on golf courses, and youth trading art and music over the internet. "People clearly aren't waiting for the revolution to act," she said. "They are acting right now, where they live, where they study, where they farm." Some deride this approach as "wishy-washy, new age nonsense," Klein admitted. "They want a plan. We know what the market wants to do with those spaces. What do you want to do? Where's your central plan?"

But to this question, Klein said, "we shouldn't be afraid to say, 'It's not up to us.' To have some trust in people to rule themselves, to make decisions, to organize. Because that is what democracy looks like."

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