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CounterPunch
November
25, 2002
Joan of Arc Meets Che's Spirit:
The Miseducation
of Naomi Klein
by ANIS SHIVANI
Fences and Windows:
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate.
By Naomi Klein.
Picador, 2002. 267 pages. $13.00.
Naomi Klein is arguably the most visible face
of the anti-globalization movement. In this collection of essays,
dating from the Revolution in Seattle to the repressive aftereffects
of the war on terror, one would have expected to see some evolution
in her thought to match what should have been the corresponding
maturity of the movement. Instead, just as the anti-globalization
movement seems to be on the ropes--struggling to find a coherent
message to unify the disparate groups constituting it, and to
resolve the inherent paradoxes of the anti-globalization message--so
does Klein's book frustrate for its lack of a sophisticated understanding
of economics and culture. Since these are journalistic pieces,
one doesn't expect the second coming of Immanuel Wallerstein
or Perry Anderson. Allowance must also be made for Klein's lack
of formal economics education (one hopes she is making every
effort to correct that deficiency this semester at the London
School of Economics). However, even if these are in-the-moment
reports from the front lines, there ought to be the suggestion
that behind them is a synthesizing intelligence--and there isn't.
The haphazardness of reflection in this book echoes the anti-globalization
movement's herky-jerky exertion to define itself both to its
most zealous constituents as well as the elites occasionally
willing to lend a sympathetic ear. The anti-globalization movement
can make a virtue of its failings only so long, before the unconverted
catch on.
Many of the fault lines of the anti-globalization
movement are evident in these dispatches, which provide a good
starting point for a protest against this movement's anti-intellectuality.
A central question for the anti-globalizers to ponder is that
the kind of political and cultural globalization that would be
good even on their account is not really possible without economic
globalization, with its pernicious effects. The very idea of
the anti-globalization movement rests on the kinds of international
linkages that were inconceivable before economic globalization.
A clear separation between economic and other kinds of globalization
is not possible. Furthermore, a case can be made that the kind
of development the anti-globalizers wouldn't mind can best be
provided by capitalism itself, rather than some of the atavistic
economic practices the anti-globalizers implicitly seem to support.
Which brings us to another paradox of the movement, which is
that it almost never takes on "capitalism," but limits
its critique to greedy, rapacious multinational corporations.
More than a semantic evasion is involved here: it points to the
foundational confusion hampering the movement. Is it against
capitalism itself or is it against unregulated corporations?
In addition, anti-globalization has much in common with the isolationist,
xenophobic ravings of the protectionist, ultra-nationalist right.
Are nationalism and protectionism really the way to go in the
twenty-first century? There is much in anti-globalization that
would delight the heart of a Pat Buchanan.
Do Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader, Lori Wallach,
and Tom Hayden want to make capitalism only more fair and just,
and if they do, are they really working for its enhanced credibility?
(One fails to see then the attraction of self-declared anarchists
to this essentially reformist trend within capitalism.) The anti-globalizers
get stuck in endless discussion of strategies of resistance.
Anarchists call attention to novel tactics and provocations rather
than intellectually convincing those on the outskirts of the
movement that it might mean something for their own economic
future. At the first hint of intellectual composition, the establishment
should easily be able to co-opt the movement. (It has been allowed
to persist so far only because it is intellectually muddled.)
There are already the first indications of this happening toward
the end of Klein's book. Klein and her fellow anti-globalizers
do not come to terms with the paradox of using the very narratives
of postindustrial globalization to freeze some of the world in
a pre-industrial stage of development.
In her preface, she says that "[t]he
irony of the media-imposed label 'anti-globalization' is that
we in this movement have been turning globalization into a lived
reality, perhaps more so than even the most multinational of
corporate executives or the most restless of jet-setters."
This sort of glib self-denial that doubles as self-congratulation
consistently mars the book--it seems to reflect accurately, however,
the predominant sensibility of activists in the movement. Klein
barely has time to pause and reflect on what she has just said.
She breezily adds that "thousands of people" are "sharing
ideas and telling stories about how abstract economic theories
affect their daily lives," which is what makes globalization
a living reality for its participants. Lurking below the text
is an acceptance of the overall capitalist order as it is. The
idea seems to be only to alleviate some of capitalism's worst
offenses, while raconteurs share intimate stories of injustice:
a consciousness-raising circle--thanks to the internet--expanded
to the instantaneous, global level, or therapy for the downsized
masses, if you will.
What Klein presumes as existent is never
actually proved: If abstract economic theories were being decomposed
successfully at a global level to be humanized and given narrative
shape, then this seems simultaneously too much and too little
to ask of the movement's participants and beneficiaries. Too
much because most of the truly affected will never have the time
or luxury to gather for the global fireside chat; too little
because most of the talkers can't be considered truly brutalized.
The activists' answer to this would be that only a few can be
spokespeople for a mass movement, based on access to resources,
and that grassroots mobilization includes widening numbers of
people. That remains to be seen. Klein assumes breathtaking progress
on this front since the movement took off in the mid-nineties,
but the superiority of the forces aligned against even minimal
consciousness-raising when it comes to settled economic paradigms
is truly awesome. In sheer numbers, the movement may have expanded,
but how finite is the actual core? Are the protesters the same
people in Seattle and Washington, at Nader's Green Party rallies,
and at the present anti-war marches? It would be a mistake to
judge the success of reformists by sheer numbers. Capitalism
is most fearsome just when people come out on the streets in
noticeable strength.
Has protest in the movement become an
end in itself? The attraction of the movement appears to be movement
itself--frantic, disposable, untraceable. Klein's metaphor for
the kinds of obstruction going up around the world to prevent
ordinary people from enjoying the benefits economic globalization
was supposed to have brought is "fences." Her metaphor
for the contradicting process is "windows." But are
windows really the opposite of fences? Fences are durable, visible,
sometimes violable only at the cost of imprisonment or death.
Windows are what allow a peek into the tableau of a better world,
but cultural globalization has already constructed such windows
of resentment in plenty. All the windows in the world won't take
down a fence. (Consider also windows looking out from within
the fenced enclosure into only the rest of the encampment or
war zone.) Moreover, the irony that anti-globalization is itself
one of the largest fences going up seems to escape Klein and
her cohorts for the most part. What they're really looking onto
from the Windows (of the Net, mostly) are fences to capitalism
minus capitalism (content minus form), a contradiction in terms
which offends the anti-globalizers no end if brought to their
notice.
So Klein's opening section, "Windows
of Dissent," celebrates Seattle, Washington, and other well-known
venues of protest. Klein engages in her characteristic move of
quickly acknowledging the obvious criticism, before hastily refuting
it and moving on to the next exciting symbol of protest. She
sums up her anxiety well:
. . .An odd sort of anxiety has begun
to set in after each demonstration: Was that it? When's the next
one? Will it be as good, as big? To keep up the momentum, a culture
of serial protesting is rapidly taking hold. My inbox is cluttered
with entreaties to come to what promises to be "the next
Seattle." There was Windsor and Detroit on June 4, 2000,
for a "shutdown" of the Organization of American States,
and Calgary a week later for the World Petroleum Congress; the
Republican convention in Philadelphia in July and the Democratic
convention in L.A. in August; the World Economic Forum's Asia
Pacific Economic Summit on September 11 in Melbourne, followed
shortly thereafter by anti-IMF demos on September 26 in Prague
and then on to Quebec City for the Summit of the Americas in
April 2001. Someone posted a message on the organizing e-mail
list for the Washington demos: "Wherever they go, we shall
be there! After this, see you in Prague!" But is this really
what we want--a movement of meeting stalkers, following the trade
bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead?
Klein should have reflected more on this
question. The true dilemma for the anti-globalizers is that,
hampered by their own programmatic limitations, they have been
unable to present an alternative economic message that makes
sense to those not already attuned to either the fences or windows
metaphors--or rather, since most of the anti-globalizers seem
to be reformist capitalists in radicals' disguise, they are constitutionally
unable to take the next step to ideological coherence. They make
much of anarchy, in protest methods, and in assembly and discussion.
But so far the movement has drawn notice above all for escalating
protest, not compelling enough substance behind it. Stiglitz
and Soros have already pre-empted them, and in more credible
fashion. The only remaining space is narcissistic marginality,
and surely Klein wants no part of that.
The chosen option is to believe in the
quixotic notion of leadership without leadership, another virtue
fashioned out of necessity:
As I slipped in and out of lecture rooms,
soaking up the vision offered by Arianna Huffington, Michael
Lerner, David Korten, Cornel West and dozens of others, I was
struck by the futility of this entire well-meaning exercise.
Even if we did manage to come up with a ten-point plan--brilliant
in its clarity, elegant in its coherence, unified in its outlook--to
whom, exactly, would we hand down these commandments?
This is to construct, and quickly dismiss,
a false ideal. No one looks to a ten commandments, but ideological
coherence. Klein also admits the possibility that outsiders may
interpret the movement's followers as passive:
This is the flip side of the persistent
criticism that the kids on the street lack clear leadership--they
lack clear followers too. To those searching for copies of efforts
from the sixties, this absence makes the anti-corporate movement
appear infuriatingly impassive: evidently, these people are so
disorganized they can't even get it together to respond to perfectly
well-organized efforts to organize them. These are MTV-weaned
activists, you can practically hear the old guard saying: scattered,
nonlinear, nonfocused.
Again, she constructs a binary opposition
between linearity and nonlinearity, to implicitly approve the
latter--the emphasis must be to reclaim the purity of the sixties
(while denying mere imitation), to outdo the sixties activists
where they failed in sticking to purist organizational strategies.
Whether it is preempting criticism from outsiders or declaring
a fantastic autonomy, the fixation continues to be with methods
of organization. It is here that the movement sees its ultimate
threat of disenchantment. One doesn't detect an apprehension
on their part that capitalism might come up with innovative strategies
to take the steam out of the movement (the war on terror's inevitable
consequence); rather, the threat, apparently, is all from within.
This is to underestimate, to a fatal extent, capitalism's capacity
to adapt and resist.
Klein poses, plaintively, the question:
"Most activists agree that the time has come to sit down
and start discussing a positive agenda--but at whose table, and
who gets to decide?" But she knows that there can be no
answer to this question, because this movement's identity and
appeal have rested so far in attracting disaffected youth to
an agenda beyond agenda, in aiming to reach for an almost metaphysical
assimilation of the stray rebellions that one otherwise practices
in isolation. Once will and manner are imposed--the movement
might not as well be. She says, "When critics say that the
protesters lack vision, they are really objecting to a lack of
an overarching revolutionary philosophy--like Marxism, democratic
socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy--that they all agree
on. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily
thankful." Two hundred-plus years of ideology dismissed
so off-handedly? But then, what are the choices? If activists
were presented with a consequential plan of action, the movement
would disintegrate.
So far the movement's success has consisted
in being all things to all people, but this is a state of being
that cannot last durably. For Klein, process can suffice in place
of agenda: "It is to this young movement's credit that it
has as yet fended off all these agendas and has rejected everyone's
generously donated manifesto, holding out for an acceptably democratic,
representative process to take its resistance to the next stage."
Of course, no one knows what the next stage will be--and that's
the whole point of it, to keep all, including activists, in suspense.
This is not even idealism. It is warm, fuzzy thinking, a mutation
of the New Age movement that can never pinpoint problems for
fear of alienating the spirits: "Before it signs on to anyone's
ten-point plan, it deserves the chance to see if, out of its
chaotic network of hubs and spokes, something new, something
entirely its own, can emerge." So now we must wait for something
entirely unprecedented to emerge, to deal with problems that
are as old as capitalism's entire history? Truly, youth is blissfully
ignorant of wheels that have been invented and reinvented. The
Black Bloc, situationists, street artists, savvy marketers, they
all have a voice in the nostalgic search for a public space that
cannot be reclaimed from the overarching reach of the final stage
of capitalism.
Addressing in September 2001 the European
Union President and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, Klein
lays the movement's claim to internationalism--"only Luddites
and narrow nationalists oppose" internationalism--but let's
see how she tries to fill out this picture. Klein insists that
what the anti-globalizers really cringe about is the privatization
of the commons, the "internationalization of a single economic
model: neo-liberalism." The infrastructure of trade being
promoted by the WTO "swallows everything else--culture,
human rights, the environment, democracy itself." Is there
not a reaction forming in the very mirror of the hegemony it
claims to take on? Klein and the rest of the movement ascribe
to trade as much power to shape societies around the world as
do the internationalists at the WTO. There could be dialectical
trends within social and political cultures around the world
leading to certain kinds of dissolution, or even renewal, that
might at first glance appear to be caused by the pervasive spread
of neoliberal hegemony, but you wouldn't know it from reading
Klein.
It takes a certain kind of generational
arrogance to reduce diverse cultural and political developments
around the world, especially in societies that are in desperate
need of not preservation and conservation but radical dissolution
and decomposition, to the intellectual hegemony of a particular
trade model advocated by the WTO. Does the WTO really have that
much power? We're not that far from the one-world-government
conspiracists on the far right, who could get all the information
they want from the pages of the New York Times but choose
to devote manic attention to secret cabals and plots hatched
behind closed doors. If the problem extends only to setting aside
an unprivatized commons, this doesn't seem to be a sufficiently
threatening challenge to capitalism--it can always give the appearance,
if pushed too far, of doing precisely that. It hasn't responded
that way so far in the neoliberal era because it can get away
with mass illusion that under the rubric of the market it's offering
a broader sphere of autonomy for most people. It's not the WTO
that the anti-globalizers have to convince; it's the aspiring
members to the privileged consumerist club, particularly in the
U.S.
In the end, despite the high-flown rhetoric,
the ambition seems to be no higher than somewhat reformed corporations:
corporations going slightly against their ultimate creed of maximizing
profits. Perhaps the corporations' charter can be modified to
introduce an element of public concern. Perhaps externalities
can be more responsibly accounted for. At the same time, the
breadth of the anti-globalizers' concern for the third world
exceeds what has been accomplished by two centuries of institutionalized
liberalism in the U.S., and in some cases contradicts what some
development experts would say are necessary tradeoffs in periods
of high initial economic growth:
That would mean enforcing basic human
rights that make self-determination possible, like the right
to form independent trade unions, through the International Labour
Organization (ILO). It would mean eliminating the policies that
systematically keep democracies in shackles: debt, structural
adjustment programs, enforced privatization. It would also mean
making good on long-delayed promises of land reform and reparations
for slavery. International rules could be designed to make genuine
democracy and empowerment more than empty phrases.
These desires come at a time when the
current administration has just announced privatization of 850,000
federal government jobs, when the country has regressed so far
and so quickly on matters of race that reparations sound like
a perverse fantasy, and when the most secretive administration
in recent history is shredding the last remnants of checks and
balances. If capitalism on a global scale were a non-zero sum
game--which is what the anti-globalizers seem to presume, and
what the WTO presents as proven ideology--then stressing particular
parts of the global system to make concessions could be more
easily accommodated. Unprecedented fences--in every sense of
the term--have gone up in and around the U.S. since the anti-globalization
movement reached its peak. What is the connection? To claim to
not be anti-globalization just because you engage in discussions
with the elite of the third world--who can afford to travel to
international conferences--is not enough. In a sense, among the
MTV generation of anti-globalizers there is more mystical credence
given to capitalism than even among its most rabid neoliberal
proponents: trade can be reformed, the commons can be reclaimed,
economic gains proceed at an even pace in the center and periphery,
and human rights maintained and even enhanced for all during
this whole process. Not even the WTO is that idealistic.
The ad hoc tendency of the movement--which
often results in a desperate grasp for any method that gives
the illusion of breaking down a fence and opening up a window,
while ending up doing exactly the opposite--is evident in the
incoherent critique of terror that the movement has come up with
in the last fourteen months. Since the complaint is that neoliberalism
has weakened the public sector in the United States, the anti-globalizers--and
liberals--have pounced on the deficiencies of public infrastructure,
particularly health delivery services and emergency response
capabilities, to call for a renewed governmental commitment to
the public sphere. As Klein fully legitimates the basic establishment
narrative about terror, and buys into the fear of even greater
future calamities--a deadlier anthrax attack, a smallpox epidemic--she
seizes the opportunity to validate the role of government in
meeting common needs. There seems to be no apprehension that
this is essentially the Lieberman position--extend government
by fear into private areas that it should have no business intruding
into.
Thus Klein issues the following crisis
alerts: "Half the states in the U.S. don't have federal
experts trained in bioterrorism"; "Many doctors in
the U.S. public health care system have not been trained to identify
symptoms of anthrax, botulism or plague"; "The only
laboratory in the U.S. licensed to produce the anthrax vaccine
has left the country unprepared for its current crisis";
and "As for smallpox, there are not nearly enough vaccines
to cover the population, leading the U.S. National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to experiment with diluting
the existing vaccines at a ratio of 1 to 5 or even 1 to 10."
Dear Naomi, now that the government is set on a plan to have
enough smallpox vaccines for all of us--whether we want them
or not, and whether those who choose not to be vaccinated get
infected with the disease by those who have been vaccinated--are
you satisfied with this extension of the public sector? You seem
to want a homeland security department more efficient, centralized,
and powerful than even what the government has sought. Efficiency
is not necessarily a virtue; much that is good about the U.S.
emanates from programmed chaos, willful anarchy, intentional
unaccountability.
As Klein talks about the crackdown on
civil liberties Western governments have embarked on to get back
at the movement, there are two questions to ponder: One, to what
extent are the strategies of the anti-globalization movement
responsible for the kind of backlash that has led to loss of
civil liberties for all of us, on a scale immeasurably greater
than anything that existed prior to the movement's rise and the
war on terror (and these two can't really be disconnected in
the narrative of what's actually happened)? And two, where is
the sense that civil liberties may not all be about the right
of protesters to act out in certain ways, and that the far more
crucial sense of them is in the day-to-day rights that go unnoticed
and unremarked on until they become an issue--by which time,
it is already too late to do anything about the loss. Immigration
will not be rationalized or liberalized in the wake of the anti-globalization
movement or the war on terror--it will become more irrational,
hurting us all. When Mumia becomes a fetish, conservative governors
shift the execution of minority prisoners into overdrive. Civil
liberties are more meaningful not in the performance arena, but
in the ordinary conduct of business. Both riot police and demonstrators
by now play their expected roles, in the process only weakening
civil liberties for all:
It [London] looked pretty much like every
other mass protest these days: demonstrators penned in by riot
police, smashed windows, boarded-up shops, running fights with
police. And in the pre-protest media wars, there was more déjà
vu. Were protesters planning violence? Would the presence of
six thousand police officers itself provoke violence? Why won't
all the protesters condemn violence? Why does everybody always
talk about violence?
Indeed, the anti-globalizers talk as
much about violence--even if only to forestall it--as the riot
police. They are full participants in the spectacle; they have
fetishized their role as unpaid actors, and it is their greatest
act of glory. Again, Klein is not one to hide the obvious criticisms.
So she remarks how the protests and demonstrations are all beginning
to look alike--McProtests--and that while "It is an article
of faith in most activist circles that mass demonstrations are
always positive: they build morale, display strength, attract
media attention. . .what seems to be getting lost is that demonstrations
themselves aren't a movement." Of course, Klein and the
anti-globalizers would claim that the real work of the movement--grassroots
awareness, step-by-step inculcation of corporate responsibility,
coalition building with responsible elements in the public sector--is
going on behind the scenes, quietly and unobtrusively. But the
fact that capitalism seems to have taken a massive step backward
in the last few years, and that there seems to be unease within
the movement itself about the fetishization of demonstration
(that is really the key topic of this book), suggests that there
is a real problem with spectacularization of protest to the extent
that it has occurred.
All in all, there is a unilinear assumption
of cultural progress, sourced in the West and devolving to the
rest, that the anti-globalizers share with the builders of empire.
Let's give the ordinary people in the third world more credit,
shall we? It's not just that viewing television shows demonstrating
Western opulence and potency somehow inflames the third world
viewer to the extent that the old, stable order gets sickeningly
ruptured and disorganized. And even if it does, perhaps that
disorganization is necessary, even though it might come courtesy
of a silly Hollywood product. The rest get Tiananmen and the
Velvet Revolution reflected back to them via Western screens,
and see something else--or see many things we don't give them
credit for--and perhaps even see themselves as authors of their
own destiny in ways we don't acknowledge. Or at least the anti-globalizers
don't. A certain naïve faith in democracy, and mass equality,
has been lost among this movement; but this suspicion of chaotic
democracy has been a staple of American progressive politics
from its inception at the turn of the last century. The elites--the
CFR and WTO types--are more democratic and egalitarian in certain
respects than their opponents, to the extent that the establishment
must function according to naïve paradigms that sometimes--often
- become self-fulfilling. That has been liberalism's great strength.
In yet another dispatch, this one from
the first annual World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in March,
2001, Klein poses the movement's paradox:
Is this a movement trying to impose its
own, more humane, brand of globalization, with taxation of global
finance and more democracy and transparency in international
governance? [The Tobin and Stiglitz options.] Or is it a movement
against centralization and the delegation of power on principle,
one as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all-ideology as of
the recipe for McGovernment churned out at forums like Davos?
Here we have the fatal infection by a
postmodernism that denies the possibility of a universal ideology,
and moreover matches the rhetorical claims of the free market
fundamentalists who also rail against "one-size-fits-all"
solutions in favor of radical market "choices." Klein
goes on to celebrate the fact that on the above question "there
was no consensus" and leaves it at that. One solution put
on the line for now is the transformation of "the anti-corporate
movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights
of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their
water and their ecology." It is much more difficult to be
for democracy than against corporations (or other easily vilifiable
targets), and that gets us into the enigmas of independence faced
by postcolonial societies. Now we are in familiar territory,
with the whole history of disillusionment and betrayal laid out
for all to see--not a pretty picture at all. But in the end,
this positive construction is beyond the scope of the essentially
negativistic (fence-obsessed) anti-globalization movement. Radical,
local participatory democracy? The U.S. might be a good place
to start such a trend.
No wonder that by the third day of the
Porto Alegre conference "frustrated delegates began to do
what they do best: protest." "The Anti-Capitalist Youth
contingent" and the "PTSU, a breakaway faction of the
Workers Party" got upset about the evasion of class in favor
of mushy talk about radical democracy. Perhaps they were on to
something. For Klein, "there is a serious debate to be had
over strategy and process, but it's difficult to see how it will
unfold without bogging down a movement whose greatest strength
so far has been its agility." The mobile Grateful Dead troops
will become paralyzed into antagonistic spheres once divisive
class issues are brought to the surface. What could be a more
direct admission of ideological defeat before ideology has even
formed? Klein pretty much takes away the thunder of the movement
by speaking like a seventies localist:
Perhaps the real lesson of Porto Alegre
is that democracy and accountability need to be worked out first
on more manageable scales--within local communities and coalitions
and inside individual organizations. Without this foundation,
there's not much hope for a satisfying democratic process when
ten thousand activists from wildly different backgrounds are
thrown on a university campus together.
If there is some naïve optimism
left among movement leaders, it seems to have been directed toward
hopes for mystical third world revolutionaries to show the way
to the blind and dumb in the West. Now we get into the sanctifying
of Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatista National
Liberation Army in Chiapas, Mexico. Again, admit first the obvious
quality of illusion: "Back then [1994], Zapatista mania
looked suspiciously like just another cause for guilty lefties
with a Latin American fetish: another Marxist rebel army, another
macho leader, another chance to go south and buy colourful textiles.
Hadn't we heard this story before? Hadn't it ended badly?"
Yes, Naomi, we have, and it will again. But miraculously, the
fetishes of the twenty-first century that look like those of
the rebellious sixties and seventies are in fact different!
This is the most entertaining part of
the book, where we get a full treatment of Klein's almost school-girlish
crush on Marcos, far more riveting than the repetitious retelling
of the demonic dangers of genetically modified food:
Marcos seems keenly aware of himself
as an irresistible romantic hero. He's an Isabel Allende character
in reverse--not the poor peasant who becomes a Marxist rebel
but a Marxist intellectual who becomes a poor peasant. He plays
with this character, flirts with it, saying that he can't reveal
his real identity for fear of disappointing his female fans.
Perhaps wary that this game was getting a little out of hand,
Marcos chose the eve of Valentine's Day this year to break the
bad news: he is married and deeply in love, and her name is La
Mar ("the Sea"--what else would it be?)
Ah, what can you say about a man like
that! He sends "long meditative letters to Uruguayan writer
Eduardo Galeano about the meaning of silence," and "whimsical
mock telegrams to all of 'civil society.'" He writes to
Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. He is "pen pals with
some of Latin America's best-known novelists" and "writes
letters addressed 'to the people of the world.'" The Zapatistas
declared war on the Mexican Army on the day NAFTA came into force.
No guerilla warfare is possible in these postmodern United States,
so the excitement of the Mexican substitute will have to do.
The Zapatistas are the "theorists of a new movement,"
although Klein goes on to say that Marcos is fond of speaking
in riddles. Marcos is the anti-globalization movement's answer
to Osama bin Laden, with the same elusive quality. Just as bin
Laden T-shirts are hot stuff in the Muslim world, so Marcos has
been fully commodified:
And then there is the Zapatista cottage
industry: black T-shirts with red five-pointed stars, white T-shirts
with EZLN printed in black. There are baseball hats, black EZLN
ski masks, Mayan-made dolls and trucks. There are posters, including
one of Comandante Ramona, the much loved EZLN matriarch, as the
Mona Lisa.
Beats textile shopping down south in
the seventies. But Klein denies it's that. She calls it "genuine,
anachronistic folklore."
Marcos is the masked man, although he
"says that as soon as peace has been negotiated, he will
take off his mask and disappear." I'd like to believe that.
He deals in New Age epigrams, haikus for a synthetic age: "What
does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying to stage
a revolution? This is one of the key Zapatista paradoxes."
Yes, for me too. Marcos says that "it is not necessary to
conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new." What
does that mean? Klein says that "What sets the Zapatistas
apart from your average Marxist guerilla insurgents is that their
goal is not to win control but to seize and build autonomous
spaces where 'democracy, liberty and justice' can thrive."
I'm not sure what that means either. Marcos believes in "a
revolution that makes revolution possible." Actually, that's
possible to understand. It's process, not ideology, again. "Marcos
believes that what he has learned in Chiapas about non-hierarchical
decision making, decentralized organizing and deep community
democracy holds answers for the non-indigenous world as well--if
only it were willing to listen." And lest we mistake all
this for sixties-style "dropping out," that's not it
at all. Rather, "these free spaces . . .will eventually
create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives."
All they'll have to do is exist? If anything, this haphazard
search for spaces that simply are has led to the return of the
state in a major way.
National sovereignty, the biggest fence
of all, is back in business in the U.S. and elsewhere. And as
the state roars back in angry disapproval at the wispy children
of Seattle, Marcos insists that "Zapatismo . . .is not a
doctrine but 'an intuition.'" What he found in the mountains
of Chiapas he wants for all of us: "wonder, a suspension
of disbelief, plus myth and magic." We don't need manifestos,
but "long meditations, flights of fancy, dreaming out loud,"
a form of "intellectual guerilla warfare." That'll
do in a pinch, for American revolutionaries. When she listens
to Marcos speak, Klein thinks that he sounds "like a poet"--remember
what happened to Havel, a real artist-statesman, once he came
to power. We end with a burst of high pomo fireworks: "And
in their place [King, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata]
the world has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than he
speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader
who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror."
Klein notes that the Zapatistas' "most enthusiastic supporters"
in Mexico seem to be "middle-aged women"--perhaps they're
more honest down there about the nature of his appeal.
To truly tear down fences would mean
embracing internationalism of a humanist variety in a way that
the anti-globalization movement seems constitutionally predisposed
not to do. Capitalism needs to be combated with more than "symbols"
that "you hope . . .become metaphors for change." Klein
is even willing to accept the presumptions of the war on terror
as long as it will lead to renewed commitment to "tattered
public infrastructures." This shows the confusions that
can result without ideology. She says that "there needs
to be social justice, but there also needs to be justice for
the victims of these [terror] attacks and practical prevention
of future ones" and that "terrorism is indeed an international
threat." An admirably liberal position. She concludes by
calling for a merger between global and local movements, as the
only way to go forward. In the end there is not much more to
look forward to than defensive neighborhood maneuvers against
the planetary conquest of neoliberal politics.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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November 14,
2002
Edward Said
Europe vs.
America
Todd May
The Ironies of History
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US Aid to Israel
Feeding the Cuckoo
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