One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘Peace,’ said Arnoldo in Maranhão. ‘Dignity,’ said Sebastian in Itapeva. ‘Heaven,’ said Ilda, his neighbour. ‘Contentment,’ said Natalino. Every time, the words were in their eyes as well as their mouths. And every time, they were expressing something that no economist could measure, and which no activist could campaign for – something impossible to quantify, which can never be turned into statistics, but something which must be at least half the point of everything we all do.

  In all the settlements I visited, and among all the people I talked to, that real, unfakeable contentment – that happiness, that new chance, that security, that human dignity – was clear to see. The contentment of people whose lives had clearly improved, and whose independence and pride had been rediscovered. And the contentment, too, of those who live on the land.

  People who are even prepared to discuss this are often accused of romanticising rural life. The debate about globalisation, after all, should be about poverty statistics, growth rates, economies of scale, hidden paragraphs in international treaties. It should be measurable, hard, statistical. Romantic sentimentality has no place in the modern world. Living on, and from, the land is hard; hard in a way that urbanites are usually unable to grasp. It must, then, surely be the case that what rural people want to do is get off that land as fast as possible; get into the cities, wash the mud out from under their fingernails, grab a latte, get a job, buy a suit, be like us.

  This is how the globalisation debate is so often played out. And, applied to the land, it is a debate which is strung with ironies and contradictions. It is certainly true that, all over the world, kids in poor countries dream of leaving the land and living like the TV tells them that everybody in the West does; a lifestyle that approximates to that lived by the cast of Friends. Meanwhile, in the West, hypertense city-dwellers dream of exchanging their soul-destroying nine-to-fives for a place in the country with roses round the door.

  But there are darker ironies too. Crusaders for the global market have long accused those who even discuss rural alternatives to city life as being middle-class dreamers lulled by a bucolic fantasy, condemning ‘the poor’ to scratch a living on the land while they kick back in their centrally heated homes. ‘We’ would deny ‘them’ ‘choice’ – the right to choose to be like us. And yet, this ‘romanticism’, as I discovered in Brazil, and as I had seen in Chiapas, Papua, and elsewhere before, is expressed most often of all by those who live on the land – those whose rural lives are despised or misunderstood by the city-based advocates of the global market dream. Those whose voices, as ever, are ignored.

  In reality, it is globalisation which denies rural people choice. It is the missionaries of the market who support an economic system which destroys rural lifestyles and gives people like the MST settlers I met in Brazil no choice but to leave the land they feel at home on and break their backs in the cities, keeping the machine turning. It is globalisation, with its false consumer paradise dangled before all the world’s people like a carrot on a string, that is the unattainable dream. And it is globalisation that prevents choice; prevents millions from choosing to stay on the land, providing for their families, living securely on the soil. If you don’t believe me, ask the people of the MST; they know where they want to be, and they know who is preventing them from being there.

  This is not a debate that is confined to Brazil. Every country on Earth is undergoing vast rural upheavals as a result of globalisation, and all over the world, rural people are fighting back. Across the Americas, landless people, farmers and rural inhabitants, undergoing the same pressures with the same results as in Brazil, are linking up through the Latin American Congress of Rural Organizations (CLOC), in which the MST is a key player. Like the MST, CLOC, which represents millions, is campaigning against the neoliberal policies that are destroying farmers everywhere. In Bolivia, which recently set up its own version of the MST, the indigenous leader of the coca farmers, Evo Morales, came within a whisker of the country’s presidency in 2002, riding a tide of anti-neoliberal resentment.

  In India, the National Alliance of People’s Movements, the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association and other groups, representing tens of millions of farmers, are marching against free trade, blockading World Bank meetings, demolishing fast-food outlets and burning Monsanto crops. The Peasant Movement of the Philippines represents 800,000 peasants, landless people and fisherfolk campaigning against the free-trade model. South Africa set up its own Landless People’s Movement in 2001, a few months before I visited the country. Farmers in Korea, Japan and Bangladesh are linking up their struggles, and such links are being made all over the world. The tide of rural resistance is increasingly global.

  If globalisation is looked at in its historical context, it could be said that what is currently being experienced all over the world is the final act of something that began in the West hundreds of years ago: enclosure. In Britain, and then in other industrialising countries, acts of parliament, economic change and landlord pressure enclosed common land, forced peasants into the new cities, destroyed small farms and consolidated land ownership – a process that made the free-trade project of the nineteenth century possible. The same is now happening all over the world.

  So, though, is the struggle against it – for in the rich countries too, farmers fight back. The French Confédération Paysanne, led by the new folk hero José Bové, attacks McDonald’s and ‘mal bouffe’ (junk food). Canada’s National Farmers’ Union campaigns against genetically modified crops. Small farmers in the USA protest against NAFTA and the WTO. And increasingly, these currents of rural resistance from north and south link up through the world’s first international small farmers’ union, Vía Campesina, of which the MST was a founder, to campaign against, and develop alternatives to, the economic model that is destroying the last of the free farmers.

  The MST, in other words, is far from alone; in fact, it is part of what is increasingly becoming a global peasants’ revolt – a rural uprising against the free-trade economy. As in Brazil, this struggle is throwing up alternative systems, ideas and values: a model of grounded, small-farm agriculture, local traditions, ecological farming, food sovereignty and broad-based social progress that is anathema to everything that globalisation stands for.

  It remains to be seen whether Brazil’s new president – the Workers’ Party leader ‘Lula’ da Silva, elected in November 2002 – will be willing to make the kind of great leaps that the MST is calling for; or whether the markets will let him. What I have seen in Brazil, though, has convinced me of one thing: these people – the farmers, the landless, the rural classes, here and everywhere – will not go away. Why would they? It is not just wages, jobs and money that are at risk as the global market destroys farming as we know it – it is a way of life that has always been with us; the culture of the land and the people who work it.

  This new peasants’ revolt can only get bigger, for these people – millions upon millions of them – have no place at all in globalisation’s Brave New World. Free trade wants them dead. They have other ideas.

  8

  california dreaming

  ‘I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.’

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1816

  ‘There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.’

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1910

  November 1864. Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States of America, is writing a letter to Colonel William Elkins, one of the millions of Federal soldiers who are helping to win the American Civil War for Lincoln’s United States. In five months’ time their victory will be officially confirmed with the Confederate surrender. Six days later, Lincoln will be dead. An assassin’s bullet will deprive America of the man who abolished slavery,
and deprive Lincoln of the grim satisfaction of seeing the fears he outlined in his letter to Elkins – fears about the shape and structure of the post-war nation – begin to become reality.

  ‘We may congratulate ourselves,’ he had written, ‘that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood . . . it has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.’1

  January 2001. George W. Bush, forty-third president of the United States of America, has just taken office, despite losing the popular vote. At over $193 million, his election campaign has been the most expensive in American history. It has also been a heavy, but potentially lucrative, corporate investment. Most of the money Bush has spent on campaigning has been handed to him by giant corporations and industrial interests: nearly $2 million from oil and gas companies; half a million from electrical utilities; $4 million from real estate; $1.3 million from the car lobby; $1.3 million from the banks; $1.6 million from the insurers; $5 million from lawyers; almost half a million from drugs companies; almost $3 million from securities and investments, $1.1 million from the computing sector . . . the list goes on and on.2 Now, in the newly spring-cleaned corridors of power, it’s payback time.

  In Washington, Bush, a millionaire oilman, has gathered together some of the richest and most influential corporate movers and shakers in America. There is the former chief executive of the Halliburton Energy corporation, the world’s largest oilfield services company. A supporter of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and an opponent of international measures to prevent global warming, his personal wealth lies somewhere between $22 million and $104 million. There is the former Chief Executive of the drugs company GD Searle, another millionaire (worth between $62 million and $115 million) who has also served on the boards of several other companies, from Kellogg’s to Tribune newspapers. There is the former board member of Gulfstream Aerospace and America Online (worth between $10 million and $50 million). There is the former Chairman and Chief Executive of oil and gas company Tom Brown, Inc. (between $10 million and $47 million); the former board member of Calgene, Inc., producers of genetically modified foods; the former lawyer for Delta Petroleum; the former board member of Chevron oil and the Transamerica Corporation . . .3

  These people are the progenies of some of the biggest business interests in America. It would be regarded as a coup for any corporation to get such close access to the president of the world’s most powerful nation, so their presence in Washington now must be regarded as the coup to end them all. Their names are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Donald Evans, Ann Veneman, Gale Norton and Condoleezza Rice, and Bush has just appointed them Vice-President, Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, Commerce Secretary, Agriculture Secretary, Interior Secretary and National Security Advisor respectively. For the next four years, the safety of Lincoln’s Republic will be in their hands.

  February 2002. I am sitting on a cliff top in Humboldt County, northern California, watching wild, white waves break over the jagged black headlands that stretch away for miles on each side of me. Redwood trees stud the coast. Down on the rocks, a hundred feet below, groups of sea lions bask in the salt spray.

  ‘It’s about legitimacy,’ says Paul Cienfuegos, blinking in the wind. Cienfuegos is in his forties, with a large, unruly black beard, milk-bottle glasses, thick cords and a woolly hat perched on top of a mass of black hair. He has driven me to one of his favourite spots in his rattling car to talk to me about corporate authority in modern America, and what he’s doing to challenge it.

  ‘In this county, for example, there has been massive civil disobedience against clearcut logging for years. Beautiful old growth forests being chopped down by logging corporations. I spent four years campaigning against that. I campaigned against the nuclear industry, the weapons industry, chemical farming. And it took me a long time to understand, slowly, that I was actually fighting the symptoms of something, not the root cause.’ A huge wave crashes on to the rocks below with a roar.

  ‘I realised,’ he goes on, ‘that the real problem was that somehow these logging corporations had ended up with the authority to decide what would happen to our forests. Well, where did they get that? Who gave it them? And I saw that this was a fundamentally different issue – it was about governance rather than trees. And all these light bulbs began going on in my head.’ He looks at me, to check that I’m getting the point.

  ‘We had a revolution in this country,’ he goes on. ‘For all its flaws, and despite the fact that it was a revolution by and for white, male property-owners, it threw up some radical ideas that became the founding principles of the United States. And the most important one was that sovereign power lies with the people, and that our governing institutions are given permission by We, the People, to govern on our behalf. That is the absolutely fundamental basis of our democracy.’ It’s an idea, he says, that all Americans today pay lip service to – but one that isn’t functioning.

  ‘This was an extraordinary revolutionary idea,’ he emphasises, ‘but what happened to it? Today, we find ourselves in a situation where corporations have utterly usurped that authority, to the extent that people in this country almost do not question it any more. Wealth has enabled corporate leaders, through lobbying and buying elections and all the rest of it, to change fundamental laws that give them actual rights. Rights which fundamentally change the relationship between human beings and these institutions called corporations. And that’s all they are – legally subordinate institutions, legal fictions. That’s what corporations were supposed to be, in the intentions of the Founding Fathers of the United States; institutions, created to perform certain functions on behalf of the people. They were never intended to be as powerful as they are today. Now, these legal fictions have broken out of the bonds that democracy set for them, and they are challenging our authority to govern.’ He looks out to sea, squinting in the light.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘we don’t just try and stop one clearcut at a time, one toxic waste spill, one downsizing – we try and challenge the very authority of corporations to do any of those things. The anti-globalisation movement talks a lot about the problems of corporate power: this argument, though, is not just about corporate power. It’s about corporate authority – it’s an important distinction. By what authority do they buy up our political system, pollute our rivers, rewrite our laws, dominate our culture? In a supposed democracy, the people are the authority; now we are expected to ask corporations nicely to behave themselves; to persuade them to be “responsible” and “sustainable”; to negotiate with them. These are all the wrong questions, the wrong approaches. Why should we negotiate with these things? Where did they get the power to represent themselves as equals, or even masters, of the people? The real, crucial question is by what authority do these corporations wield any of this power, do any of these things? By what authority do they even exist?’ The waves are still battering against the rocks. Paul is on a roll.

  ‘We are challenging that authority,’ he says. ‘And we are going to take it back.’

  A few miles up the coast, in the clapboard-and-whitewash town of Eureka, is Paul Cienfuegos’s office; a generous word for what is, in fact, a small corner of a small flat owned by Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, co-director with Paul of the organisation he founded in 1996: Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County. I came to Humboldt seeking answers to some of the questions posed by the dominance of private corporations in modern life. Back at the World Social Forum
, I’d heard some ideas for regulating the power and influence of multinational corporations at international level. Now I wanted to see how people could impose such limits on the ground, in their own communities, and what difference it would make. I’d heard it was starting to happen, perhaps ironically, in the US – the birthplace of the modern corporation. But how, and could it provide a model for other people in other places? Paul Cienfuegos is first on my list of people to ask.

  Right now, he’s rummaging through boxes, folders and teetering piles of papers stacked up in Kaitlin’s lounge, searching for documents he thinks I should read. He doesn’t seem to be quite sure where to look.

  ‘We’re kind of between offices right now,’ he explains, still rummaging. I console myself with the thought that past revolutions have begun in less auspicious circumstances. Probably.

  ‘Hopefully not for too long,’ says Kaitlin, sighing. She is in her early twenties, and has only been working with Paul for eight months. I get the impression that she’s the organised one.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she says. ‘I think I have tea.’

  Despite the temporary chaos, it’s possible that operations like Democracy Unlimited could represent the future of anti-corporate activism in America. Cienfuegos won’t use those words: they are not anti-corporate, he says; they are pro-democracy. Corporations have their place, but it’s subservient to the people’s will, it’s a long way from the public realm, and it’s nowhere near the political arena. Whatever you call it, the sort of work that Democracy Unlimited is carrying out may yet come to connect with a large and potentially powerful section of the American people; a people who, like most others in ‘developed’ countries all over the world, are becoming keenly aware of the sickness inside their body politic.