| Why the anti-capitalists are fools from: the Guardian Tuesday April 24, 2001 Every year around this time, I am vaguely troubled by my reaction to a movement which I feel I should support. The forthcoming May Day protests have caused me a lot of soul searching and, even as I'm writing this, I'm not sure whether my suspicion of the "new left", as veteran journalist John Lloyd called them this week, is petty or intellectually sound. On the petty side, I've never been one for street parties as a form of political protest. They're too much fun for the participants, who approach the day with the misconceived notion that they are its primary focus. According to their websites, May Day is about releasing the "imagination and creativity" of the people taking part. No one knows quite what will happen because the shape of things is dictated by the individual's whim - rather than the will of the collective which deferred, in former times, to the demands of clarity and coherence. In those days, the frustrated performance artists who latched on to political protests for their own egotistical ends were rightly consigned to the margins. Jugglers and fire-eaters knew their place. Now, thanks to the peculiar character of the global anti-capitalist movement, they're the people calling the shots. The unicycle brigade are now in charge of everything - from thinking up funny ha-ha acronyms for their activist cells, to mobilising fellow protesters to star in street theatre events. It's the ordinary people - those whose contempt for the system is neither a source of creative inspiration nor an excuse for wearing silly outfits - who are now on the periphery. None of the lefties or trade unionists I know are planning to take part in May Day. While broadly supporting its aims they, like me, are irritated by the movement's propensity to forget that opposition to the market didn't begin in the 90s. I guess this is petty as well, but the curious historical ignorance of the anti-capitalist activists really gets up my nose. Making no reference whatever to any ideological antecedents, they talk for all the world as if they were the first ones to notice that the market's drive to profit is achieved through exploitation. All the way through Naomi Klein's No Logo, I wanted to shout, "I KNOW", as you would if you were sitting in a sauna with someone who tried to warn you that the room was usually hot. Her contention, that the connection between products and the sweated labour that produced them was first made in 1995, makes amusing reading for anyone whose conviction that these links existed predated the Nike swoosh. Whatever the reasons for these omissions, the key to understanding the modern anti-capitalist movement is its belief in its own uniqueness. We are told again and again that it is not a movement so much as a global network of like-minded individuals and groups whose activities are coordinated through the internet. Unlike any previous anti-capitalist organisations, it has no platform or programme beyond the humiliation of "big business" - yet what is this if not a statement of aims? The movement is disingenuous when it pretends that its failure to fully flesh out its ideas is an unavoidable consequence of not having a postal address. In fact, it has a number of shared presumptions which together could be said to comprise a programme if only they would admit it. They don't want to, of course, because to do so would be to accept that a "line" does exist that has not been arrived at democratically. One of these assumptions is the belief that multinational corporations are the root cause of human suffering. For an old style anti-capitalist, this would be a bit like blaming the girl in the call centre for the phone's queuing system. She is an administrator - a symptom of the system rather than the cause of the problem. It's the same with multinationals - they may be bigger than they ever have been, but their function within the system is the same, and that is to generate profit. They can't do anything else. Morality doesn't come into it. To describe them as "wicked", as the modern anti-capitalists do, is to act as if they have any choice. Corporations generate profit through exploitation - this is not contestable ground. If they didn't exploit, they wouldn't exist. It is therefore fanciful to base a campaigning strategy on holding them "accountable" for their actions. It's like holding a cow accountable for shitting - you could make her do it somewhere else but you'd have to kill her before you could make her stop. Far from being a threat to the system, the self-styled anti-capitalist movement has a paltry reformist agenda. Naomi Klein believes that multinationals should be "subject to the same accountability, controls and transparency that we demand of our public institutions". Perhaps they should - but it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. People would still be charged more for a pair of trainers than it cost to produce them, workers would still be paid less than a living wage to make them. No liberal democratic checks and balances can alter the intrinsic nature of these relationships. If Nike moved out of Asia and shifted its production to the US, as all the campaigners want, how would that be a victory? The sweatshop workers who used to produce Air Jordans would be employed by another trainer manufacturer and the shoes would be made in the US by immigrant labour on the minimum wage. All those years of campaigning for that. Somebody should have pointed out that, really, there is no way that multinationals can operate ethically. One might be less awful than the next, but even the "responsive" one is still a machine for extracting value from the sweat of our collective brow. Klein and others avoid these issues. As campaigners in a global arena, they are never in one place long enough to subject themselves to too much debate and their followers are too busy doing flashy new things with their websites to wonder what the whole thing really means. It's easy to take it all at face value - it seems so glamorous from a distance what with all those aliases and nuggets of misinformation - so that it's hard not to get drawn in. If you do this May Day, I'd advise you to treat it as harmless but pointless fun. |
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