One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘Vinegar and water, and lemon. Wait a bit. It works.’

  And it does. It takes a good thirty seconds, but I can see again. Robin’s bottle contains a variant of ‘Seattle solution’, the liquid pepper-spray medicine that was wheeled around the streets of that city in giant dustbins during the anti-WTO protests of 1999. Only this one’s for tear-gas. It’s a different recipe.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We can’t get anywhere that way. We’ll never get past the police lines. Wait till the gas clears and we’ll go and see what’s happening.’

  A few minutes later we venture out into the streets again. Thirty yards away I see three cops carrying an unconscious carabiniero back towards their vans, blood on his face, his eyes closed. Injured protesters are slumped on pavements, bruised and sometimes bloodied. Plumes of smoke and muffled explosions are rising from scattered parts of the city; we can see them beginning to disperse above the rooftops all around us. Wherever we go, running battles are being fought. I see police chasing photographers with truncheons; battering peaceful protesters. And then I begin to see, on the faces of the activists streaming past me, away from the station, towards the sea, a look that doesn’t seem to fit. Not defiance, anger, determination, frustration: something else. Something I don’t like at all.

  Half an hour later, Robin and I have managed to wend our way, somehow, away from the carnage and up to a requisitioned school on a hill overlooking the sea, where non-violent activists have been meeting, training and planning for the past week, and where independent media operations are based. The faces there wear that same look, and when I look at the pictures and reports streaming on to the computer screens in the media centre I know why.

  Down near the station, a few streets away from where Robin and I have come from, an Italian protester, Carlo Giuliani, has been shot through the head by armed carabinieri, then run over by a reversing jeep. Photos are already on the wires, being sent all over the world; a body lifeless on asphalt, gas clouds and blue-helmeted cops on all sides, his blood a river in gutters that were meant for rain. The whole room is deathly quiet. Something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong.

  It doesn’t get better; it gets worse. The next night, the carabinieri raid the media centre itself, and a gym across the road where activists have been sleeping. They attack people with truncheons while they sleep; they beat journalists unconscious in the street outside; they punch, kick, grope and batter defenceless people who offer no resistance, painting the walls and floors with sheets of their blood. People are carried out in body bags, still alive. Others are arrested, taken to the police station and tortured. Some are stripped naked, others forced to sing fascist songs from the days of Mussolini. The next day the police present the media with a cache of ‘weapons’ they claim to have gathered in the raid – petrol bombs, hammers, axes, knives – to justify what they have done.

  Investigating magistrates will later accuse the police of planting the weapons to justify their brutality. In the coming months, questions will be asked in the Italian parliament about what the police did in Genoa. MPs will call for the resignation of the interior minister. Prime Minister Berlusconi will be forced to initiate a parliamentary inquiry, and the head of the Italian police will admit that his officers employed ‘an excess in the use of force’. Three senior policemen will be sacked. The morning after the raid, though, none of this has yet happened, and none of it matters. We have just taken part in the biggest ‘anti-globalisation’ demonstration in history. We have made history. And not one of us feels good about it. Not one of us knows what to think, where to turn or what to do next. Not one of us is intact.

  Later that day, from their chandelier-strung palace deep inside the Red Zone, the G8 leaders issue a statement. ‘The most effective poverty reduction strategy,’ it says, ‘is to maintain a strong, dynamic, open and growing global economy. We pledge to do just that.’

  This, for most people, is the ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement. In just a few years, those terms have become as common as front-page pictures of ‘anarchists’ (a catch-all media term for dissidents of any stripe) in stand-offs with lines of police dressed like something out of Robocop. On the streets of London, Genoa, Prague, Seattle, Melbourne, Barcelona, Durban, Seoul, Washington DC . . . every time there is an international economic summit, there are rings of protesters sworn to close it down.

  Such stand-offs, as this book aims to show, are actually the tip of a much bigger and more significant iceberg. They are not the whole story of this movement; they are not even its most important chapter. Yet they have thrust it very effectively into the limelight all over the world. They have helped swell its numbers. They have forced the issues that it holds dear on to the agendas of politicians, journalists, business leaders and ordinary citizens the world over. And whatever you think of them, they are remarkable, historic, unavoidable and increasingly regular events. They help define our age.

  To really understand confrontations like Genoa, though, you need to take a step back, to the first, and still the most magnificent, of the now commonplace global summit shutdowns. For if this movement was born in Chiapas on that January day in 1994, it was baptised, with tear-gas and pepper spray, on the streets of the American city of Seattle on 30 November 1999.

  That day, as the newly christened World Trade Organization met to set out its first trade round, 50,000 people came out to meet it. Unions, farmers opposed to genetically modified crops, anarchists, environmentalists dressed as sea turtles, priests, militant taxi drivers, a coalition of radical greens and steelworkers, long-shoremen, Zapatista solidarity groups, Colombian tribespeople fighting the destruction of their forests, Ecuadorian anti-dam protesters, Chinese democracy campaigners and thousands more took to the streets. There they clashed with thousands of police dressed like Darth Vader with painfully ironic Nike swooshes on their specially made gloves, who pepper-sprayed pensioners and attacked peaceful protesters en masse. The mayor declared a civil emergency and the WTO’s much-trumpeted trade round collapsed in chaos as tens of thousands of people besieged its compound. ‘This,’ they roared, in a slogan that has since followed their movement to every continent on Earth, ‘is what democracy looks like!’

  The world woke up. Something was happening, and it was something different. This wasn’t just another showing of the disgruntled old left – the slogans, the tactics, the organisational principles showed that. The demands of this new and untested coalition were many and diverse, and sometimes contradictory, but were couched, like those of the Zapatistas, in a new language. The Seattle protests were organised by no single group, had no leaders, no one ideology. They were impolite, they were novel, they were radical, they were determined. And they were spectacularly successful.

  If it hadn’t been for the ‘Battle of Seattle’, none of us would be talking about globalisation in quite the same way; it is not an exaggeration to say that the world would not be quite the same place. If the Zapatista uprising was the first post-modern revolution, Seattle was the first post-modern street protest.

  Seattle crystallised something that hadn’t been in evidence before; something newly, and self-consciously, global. On the day that the protests there began, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in dozens of other countries around the world, in solidarity. Activists rallied around the Australian stock exchange in Brisbane and the presidential palace in Manila, in the Philippines. In Delhi, near the spot where Gandhi was cremated, 500 slum-dwellers, farmers and students set fire to a statue representing the WTO. Thousands marched through Cardiff, Limerick, Prague, Berlin, Rome, London, Halifax, Bangalore, Washington and Tel Aviv. Dockworkers went on strike in California, protesters chained themselves to the railings outside the chamber of commerce in Dijon, and over 1,000 people from sixty villages rallied their bullock carts in India’s Narmada Valley, site of a vast dam-building project. No one, anywhere, was alone.3

  From the launchpad of Seattle, there was no stopping this new surge of
rebellion – whatever it was. In January 2000, the World Economic Forum in Davos, which had been meeting quietly among idyllic Swiss Alps since 1971, was besieged by more than 1,000 protesters, forcing its delegates to undergo horrific deprivations: ‘One Asian minister complained that he was stranded without his chauffeur, and quite unable to move,’ explained an outraged Daily Telegraph.4 The next year they came back in greater numbers, and did it all again.

  In February, activists in Thailand picketed the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Bangkok, burning chillies in frying pans and filling the air with stinging smoke in a traditional Thai ‘cursing ceremony’ aimed at the promoters of globalisation. In April, thousands of Bolivians took to the streets of the city of Cochabamba in a week-long ‘water war’ against privatisation, while Washington DC was brought to a standstill by 30,000 people converging on the World Bank and IMF’s annual meeting.

  On May Day 2000, a day of action against the global economic order rippled across the world. Later in the month, 80,000 people took to the streets of Argentina to reject the International Monetary Fund’s grip on their economy. In Prague, in September 2000, 20,000 members of the same coalition that had frozen Seattle trapped delegates to the World Bank and IMF’s annual meeting inside their conference centre for twelve hours, then rounded off their victory by besieging the city’s opera house and ruining their evening’s entertainment. At the same time, another 20,000 converged on the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, Australia, and solidarity rallies burst on to the streets of 110 cities around the world.

  It went on. Over the next two years it went on in Thailand, India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, the USA, Bangladesh, the Philippines, France, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Ireland, Belgium, Poland . . . the list is too long to print in full. It went on in Genoa, and despite what happened there, it went on afterwards, elsewhere. It went on, bigger than before, after 11 September 2001, when the pundits said it was, or should be, dead. It mutated like a virus and it continued to spread. It is still spreading.

  Who could give a name to this new movement, pin it down, hem it in, control it? If you talked to ten people who considered themselves a part of it you got ten different ideas about what it was. Some called it ‘anti-globalisation’. Some called it ‘anti-capitalist’. Some called it a ‘pro-democracy’ movement, others a ‘social justice’ movement. Tony Blair called it ‘an anarchists’ travelling circus’. The Economist said it was ‘winning the battle of ideas’. The influential American journalist Thomas Friedman said it was ‘a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix’. What Clare Short dismissed as ‘misguided, white middle-class activists’ Noam Chomsky called ‘the first real promise of a genuine International’. Everybody had an opinion. Few of them tallied.

  While the analysts and pundits discuss it, debate it, dissect it or dismiss it, it keeps growing. It is a global network of millions; one that has fused together in a remarkably short time and which has regularly outfoxed the forces of the Establishment. It is the biggest story of the age, the biggest political and social movement for generations; perhaps the biggest ever. And it wants to change the world.

  Where has this come from, and why? The last question is probably the place to start. For it is impossible to understand this movement without appreciating the historical moment it emerged from; a moment we are still living in.

  The world, as most of us have probably noticed, is currently undergoing rapid and all-consuming change – economic, social, political, technological – which is sweeping away traditional political structures, old economic models, social certainties, national divides. Nothing is the same. The great clash of ideologies that defined the twentieth century died with the collapse of the communist bloc. Capitalism won the Cold War, and now it is ramming home its victory by triumphantly raising its flag on the political battlements of every nation on Earth.

  Everything is up for grabs. On a newly interconnected planet, in which corporations, investors and bankers in distant cities can pull the economic rug out from under entire nations, wrecking whole economies in hours if their interests are threatened, ‘politics’ has taken on a whole new meaning. From Brazil to Britain, South Africa to Germany, Russia to Mexico, New Zealand to Japan, politicians from left and right are morphing into a managerial class of hemmed-in technocrats who see no choice but to make their peace with the market. There is nowhere else to go. There is no alternative. We have reached, so many of them say, with either a triumphant smile or a resigned sigh, the end of history.

  There is a fashionable word for this: ‘globalisation’. It is a term that is as widely used as it is loosely defined. The word tends to conjure up vague mental images in people’s heads – pregnant Thai women working twelve hours a day in sweatshops with no toilet breaks; grinning Masai warriors e-mailing each other on laptops in the middle of the Serengeti – which help determine whether you are for it or against it without ever having to explain what it actually is.

  The one thing that people do seem to agree on, though, is that globalisation is something new: an economic and technological revolution that will lead, depending on your view, to either the Elysian Fields or to Hades. Either way, things will change beyond recognition, as humanity enters a new and unique phase in its development.

  One commentator on this new process has well described the social and economic upheaval that globalisation has brought into being: ‘All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and removable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.’

  This is as poetic a description of the social effects of globalisation as has yet been produced. The same writer’s observations of its economic effects are similarly sharp: ‘All old-established national industries have been destroyed, or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged . . . by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands . . .’

  The writer of this dissection of the revolutionary power of globalisation was Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. It demonstrates nicely that while the technology, the circumstance and the speed of what we are undergoing may be new, what underlies ‘globalisation’ is something very much older. What it is, despite all the cant and waffle that has been issued on its behalf, is the latest phase of an economic system known as ‘capitalism’, which has been with us for at least half a millennium.

  Capitalism has gone through many phases since the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth century first made it a force to be reckoned with. When Marx was writing, in the mid-nineteenth century, its very existence seemed threatened by a wave of revolutions that were toppling, or threatening to topple, regimes across Europe. Later, towards the end of the nineteenth century, fed by the markets, mines and sweated labour of Empire, capitalism became as global, rampant and unfettered as it had ever been. This phase was known as liberal capitalism, or simply ‘liberalism’, from whence we get the clunky term ‘neoliberalism’ – a new version of a very old story. Then, as now, it fed the rich by punishing the poor, and raised the industrial nations of the West to dominance by marginalising the lives, cultures, economies and aspirations of the rest of the planet. Then, as now, it led to a worldwide popular uprising which found its most forceful expression in Russia in 1917. The historical comparisons can be uncanny.

  For a while, after the revolutions of the early twentieth century, after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Second World War, it looked like ramp
ant capitalism was a thing of the past. Hemmed in by regulations, welfare states and strong labour unions, limited in its ambitions by the end of Empire and a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the past, it seemed almost as if humanity had bucked the trend and learned from history. Then, in the 1970s, came Milton Friedman, the radical ‘new right’ economist who believed that unregulated markets, left to themselves, could solve every problem worth solving. General Pinochet in Chile, followed swiftly elsewhere by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had a go at proving him right, and the economic winds they unleashed became hurricanes with the decisive collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990.

  The rigid, utopian ideology of international communism was dead. In its place came another ideology: one equally utopian, equally rigid and equally immune to human suffering – the dream of a global free market.

  The pursuit of this dream, we have been assured for years, is the best – the only – way to meet every challenge facing humanity, from abolishing poverty to preventing environmental catastrophe. Sit back, let the market work its magic, watch the cake grow, eat until you’re full. Yummy. And yet almost three decades of chasing this dream have shown it to be a nightmare for much of the world.

  Compare, for instance, the world today with the world as it was before the neoliberal experiment began in the 1970s. Measured in conventional economic terms, we are certainly richer. Gross world product in 1960 was $10 trillion; today it is $43.2 trillion – over four times as high.5 Where that wealth has gone though, is another matter entirely.

  In 1960, the 20 per cent of the world’s population that lived in the rich industrialised countries of the West had thirty times the income of the poorest 20 per cent of humanity. Today, we have seventy-four times as much.6 A stunning 2.8 billion people – almost half the world’s population – live on less than $2 a day, and this figure is 10 per cent higher than it was in the late 1980s.7 The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population receives as much income as the poorest 57 per cent. The richest 10 per cent of the population of just one country – the USA – have a combined income greater than the poorest 2 billion people on Earth.8 The assets of the three richest people on the planet are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries put together.9