4. The ideology of "Globalisation"
5. WTO - Why Totemise Oppression
Oh what a lovely day for smashing up the city. June 18th; Well yes I came along too and found myself pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Several thousand carried off a big loud aggressive "carnival against capital" in the city of london. Buildings invaded, roads blocked, stock exchange temporarily besieged, cars munched, big swanky bank plate glass windows crunched, police van looted!... such excitement and entertainment we haven’t seen for a long time. Plenty of running around with cops at various points, quite a few injuries, but no instant mass arrest on the day. What with this being the end of the nineties inside the city’s ring of security this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen any more under the post riotous consensus end of politics and history and such. It brought back fond memories of stop the city, or the days of the poll tax. And it was all simultaneously coordinated with demos in a whole load of cities around the world. With a score like that at the end of the day it was easy to get quite distracted by the adrenalin rush and the euphoria of the occasion and lose all perspective of what the politics was supposed to be about and what had really been achieved. The riot was a case of "enjoy" (SPGB leaflet) and it made us feel big and powerful for the day. But unfortunately let’s face it, we are not big and powerful, we are still small and weak, and if we are honest about it the "success" of the riot was more of a fluke than anything else. We got away with making the demo/carnival/riot happen because in effect the authorities allowed it to happen that day. Tube managers had already shut down the circle line all of a sudden that morning creating commuter chaos while other parts of the tube were disrupted as well. Also charing cross station had been shut. The police operation was bungled with police commanders losing control, while police on the ground, part of the time, were just standing aside either for fear of obstructing city workers or through laziness. I witnessed several occasions when seriously naughty things were committed in full view of nearby tooled up police who had the strength to intervene but just stood there watching and did nothing. The rest of the time the police whipped up chaos with their usual viciousness, clubbing people, injuring people, running people over etc. If you lived in a part of the world where street fighting was a daily occurrence you’d soon find that the novelty wears off. It becomes a routine, a daily listing of arrests, injuries,... not so thrilling or glamorous, it bogs down your community in a rut, saps its energy and ability to do much else. It has always been a mistake to fetishise street rioting and streetfighting and constantly try to read something social revolutionary into it. A mistake I’ve been guilty of myself over the years.
But nowadays, in this part of the world "riots", when they still occur, are often either the product of bureaucratic screw ups or sometimes pre-arranged police and journalist set-ups. Increasingly rare events here, street riots, like prison riots, tend to happen because the authorities have wilfully or negligently allowed them to happen. This could be because of simple bureaucratic and managerial inefficiency and wrangles (maybe they’re deliberately dragging their feet because they want to be paid more, or they’re just bored with their jobs, or they’re arguing with eachother and their communications have broken down), maybe it’s sinister machiavellian intrigue by the secret police to create more work for unemployed glaziers.
Usually it is the first kind of reason. Smashing windows is smashing windows, piling up rubbish in the street is piling up rubbish in the street, throwing things at police is throwing things at police, a buzz yes, but none of these things automatically imply the refusal of capitalist wage labour and commodities, the creation of common wealth and the building of world human community. The social revolutionary process we desire will sometimes involve a riot or two on its periphery, but a street riot does not a social revolution make. Nor does proletarian bargaining power come primarily from streetfighting. Proletarian bargaining power comes from collective withdrawal of labour, organising solidarity, sharing free goods in the community,...
It is not as if on june 18th some group of workers in the city like secretaries or cleaners were in dispute and called on other workers and unemployed to join in with them in picketing out the city. Nor is it a question of some big industrial struggle or social struggle elsewhere giving rise to a flying picket going to the city to create a diversion and open up some sort of a "second front". There is certainly an element of proles and lumpenproles who are struggling informally or in diffuse small groups around work/dole/housing/community who express their alienation and frustration by turning up and coalescing at events like june 18th and this is a positive development. At the moment they cross over with these events but they don’t lead them. It is still a professional/semi-professional protest activist sub-culture which leads them. it is the predominantly white, majority middle-class, protest fashion scene putting on the style. Some of them are seriously bourgeois, megarich, or in high powered professional career paths.
So the class composition of an event like june 18th is heavily confused and contradictory, leading to confusion and contradictions in the politics and tactics. It is funny how politicians are expected to declare their personal economic and financial interests but political activists can conceal theirs. Not even Class War would introduce the means test for membership, it might be too embarrassing for them in what it would reveal. R.T.S.; a good way of getting laid, shame about the class composition. Meanwhile the city folk have a clever line of argument they use half seriously half jokingly: Why if it wasn’t for the city hustling and dealing generating money and bringing in revenue from around the world there would be much less money for the nation to spend on social security and welfare handouts. The government wouldn’t be able to pay giros to dole scrounging squatters and anarchists and scruffy anti-roads protesters and the like. Indeed if it wasn’t for the city generating the money to subsidise it there wouldn’t be hordes of drongo greens and anarchists blocking the streets and grumbling about the trees and GM crops. The stereotypical (in their view) grungy doleite anarchist who every few years gathers in the city to breathe bad breath on poor office workers and moan and whinge about world capitalism is in fact protesting against the very thing that pays for them to exist. The protesters are just the dropout sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie while it is they, the ordinary boys and girls turned city whizzkids who are the real rebellious working class, so they love to tease. There is a danger of just turning some of this upside down and taking the reverse line of argument in order to reply to them. Why if it wasn’t for anarchists and half the population cashing their giros or getting their pay out of the bank and spending it as good individual consumers in the off license then there wouldn’t be so much money for big companies. It is the money we spend as consumers, buying products produced by the multinational corporations, that gives rise to their profits and helps make the mean and nasty city institutions rich and powerful so they can rule the world like Dr. Evil. Better then that we spend our money on alternative products in the wholefood shop. Of course both lines of argument are silly, neither explains what is really going on in the capitalist economy or where the wealth really comes from, but there are plenty of people who would take one or other argument quite seriously.
The city of london and other financial districts around the world are just one particular part of a much wider global financial system. The global financial system is itself just one part of capitalism as a whole, it is a reflection of the whole capitalist industrial production process, everywhere built upon wage labour. This includes the local flower shop on the corner as well as the big corporation and the chemical plant. Big global capital is not more nasty than little local capital. Today one is an expression of the other and vice-versa. Big horrible banks in the city are simply an expression of all the big and small businesses that put their money in them. Small capitalists will grow into big capitalists. The financial districts are not the real "centres" of capital. If it means anything at all to talk about "centres" of capital then from our point of view as dispossessed proletarians ("The proletariat is the industrialisation of the third estate, a class now amounting to almost half the population of the world", Two Hundred Pharoes... Manifesto, Box 100, 178 Whitechapel Rd, E1 1BJ) the real "centres" of capital are not the financial districts but....
1. Working in a job in order to live (wage labour)
2. Housework, washing the dishes, changing baby’s nappies, queuing in the supermarket, running for the bus, when one has no real choice (reproductive labour).
These are the real "centres" of capital for us. These are the two points where we come up against capital as a social relation that exploits us in our own lives. And it is these two points where we as proletarians might have any direct or indirect bargaining power to pull the plug on the system and start collectively transforming things. "Capitalism" is not an external "thing" to protest against. It is an exploitative social relationship which has come only in recent history to dominate virtually everything and in this part of the globe everyone is involved or trapped in it to a greater or lesser extent. None of us, not even nutters like Green Anarchist shouting "direct action" while holding a loaf of bread impaled on a stick, are outside capitalism. The June 18th carnival was certainly not devoid of proletarian subjectivity but this tended to be contained and something you had to feel apologetic about, or again something external to be "linked up" with as a separated thing in a cringy way("support the such and such workers"). Despite the day’s spontaneous happenings (and many of the crowd also missed the more hardcore stuff as they were in other parts of the city), the event remained in part a somewhat alienated exercise protesting against the evil corporations and the immoral things they do. It wasn’t based primarily on confronting one’s own role within the system and as a result it continued to obscure our potential subjective bargaining power as proletarians against capital, whether revolting at the point of wage labour or reproductive labour. Some individuals managed to successfully sneak off work to get to the demo but to what extent might this have influenced or involved their colleagues? Attacking capitalism means revolting against one’s own life not just going for a day out in the city to have a go at other people about their lives. That is too easy and safe. Not everything bad in the world can be blamed on "yuppies" and anyway there are thousands who work in the city who are neither yuppies nor bosses. Many of those present on the day were conscious of this but at the same time there is still a big lazy minded element who just want to "bash the thing", whatever the "thing" to blame everything on happens to be that day; the car, the office window, the police officer’s hat, the person wearing a suit.
This is far too often an excuse for a cover-up: a refusal to talk about oneself, one’s history, one’s own daily life, and the power one might have within the class struggle to revolt against that. This cover up and the refusal to talk about themselves and their own interests and desires is a recurrent theme amongst the "protest against the thing" protest activist scene. This sometimes leads to a kamikaze-martyr small group mindless direct actionism as a substitute for a self-critique locating one’s own struggle in the wider society of which one is a part. This in turn can lead to an elitist activist meritocracy, sneering at the majority of working class who "don’t do anything", i.e. don’t spend all their waking hours engaged in alienated activist "protest against the thing" kind of petty guerrilla actionism.
We are living in a part of the world , particularly britain, where capitalism is very strong and the state very entrenched. The infrastructure and machinery is very much developed and working well. Much of the traditional industrial bargaining power that once existed has been defeated and shifted to other parts of the world since the seventies. Reproductive labour has become a lot more atomised and individualised. So for the time being class struggle here is bound to be sluggish, weak, only partially visible, but it does go on (electricians’ strike, waterloo building wildcat strike, council worker grumbles, still some successful domestic squatting,...). The déclassé protest activist scene appears hot and lively and glamorous in comparison. But this is a bit of a seductive illusion. The problem we face isn’t just the media or consumerism, it is the successful redevelopment of fixed capital. Nowadays the architecture changes shape a lot faster than it used to. town centres, roads, housing estates, prisons, transport systems, leisure complexes, warehouses and industrial areas, all these can be completely redesigned and rebuilt in a matter of months. They keep building and rebuilding everything at a faster rate. Add computer technology and it gets more awesome by the day. As the infrastructure has been redeveloped since the seventies and early eighties on such a vast scale and at such a dizzying speed it has left proletarians feeling trapped and unable to move. In the face of a formidable infrastructure, constantly changing shape, they feel physically powerless.
This feeling of physical powerlessness expresses itself as a conspicuous proletarian silence. A lot of politicos and activists usually mistake this silence as "apathy", full of notions of their own specialised importance it suits them to do so. But this silence is not apathy at all. They may not speak it out loud but in the back of their minds millions of proletarians are deeply aware and anxious about their own situation. They have also learnt the hard way over two decades not to get dragged into every limited partial struggle, particularly in cases where there is no chance of winning. Their refusal to get dragged into this issue or that issue is often a sign of collective intelligence rather than indifference. Like a submarine gone to ground at the bottom of the sea maintaining radio silence while the battleship capitalist restructuring circles above we face a difficult waiting game, waiting for that window of opportunity to finally move and attack. There is no easy solution to this.
But back to the surface, sunshine and june 18th: One comrade did point out to me that despite its shortcomings it was de facto the most revolutionary demo that had happened in london in many years, in the sense that it was a loud aggressive manifestation of several thousand in the city, simultaneous to demos coordinated by internet worldwide, demanding nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of global commonwealth amongst its leading slogans. How many other demos in london have that as slogans! And as we said above proletarian subjectivity was not lacking, nor will it be next time.
paulp. 1999
In order to be able to resist more effectively it would be useful to have as clear a picture as possible of the lines of advance taken by capitalism and conversely its weakpoints. A number of the terms most often used to describe the present situation don’t meet this need and possibly even go so far as to actively obscure the most essential aspects of capitalist society, thereby only making it harder to understand how it lives and dies. 'Globalisation' and the perceived dual need to oppose it and provide alternatives is rapidly becoming one of the most dominant themes across a wide range of oppositional groupings and milieus (as well as within other mainstream political groups and parties). Virtually every group involved in left/green or direct-action politics has at the very least stated their opposition to 'globalisation' or gone a step further and declared it to be the most serious problem facing us today - "The final act of enclosure" (RTS ‘global street party’ agitprop). Yet despite this wave of 'enthusiasm' any analysis of the content of this supposed devastating change seems to have been largely confined to the repetition of a limited range of ideological positions which are at best superficial and at worst reactionary. The mere fact that the terms like 'Globalisation' and ‘Neo-Liberalism’ are applied uncritically to describe any and every change taking place within the global economy suggests a lack of thought and analysis.
Over the past twenty years globalisation has moved from being a term utilised by academia (1) into everyday usage - it has become common currency amongst politicians, commentators and theorists across the political spectrum. Words are not neutral abstractions, they signify real material content or potentiality. The most fundamentally antagonistic and corrosive concepts (such as ‘freedom’ or ‘community’) are twisted and turned upside down, emptied of their content and put into hard labour by the ruling order to maintain our present misery. Globalisation, on the other hand is universally accepted on the same basis by virtually the whole of the political spectrum. The point in the instance is not whether it is considered to be a positive or negative phenomenon but the acceptance of the world view upon which it is based. Both its advocates and the majority of its critics utilise the dominant ideological categories and assumptions within capitalist society; meaning that they are limited to repeating the banalities of conventional wisdom as propagated in a variety of forms by academics, leaders and self-proclaimed 'experts'. Amongst western activists at least, works by left/liberal authors such as David Korten (When Corporations rule the World) and Gerry Mander (The Case Against the Global Economy) provide the (mostly unacknowledged) theoretical basis for much of their propaganda and in a less direct way for the forms and focuses of activity and direct -action campaigns. Theoretical understanding and criticism is not 'just a matter of words' or in this case producing ideas which aren’t connected to a particular situation or movement; discussion and attempts to mutually understand new lines of attack taken by capitalism are important and useful because global resistance and perhaps solidarity is growing after years of relative stagnation and retreat. Every form of activity has to find its theory and vice versa, theory and practice have to be interdependent; inadequacies in either area lead to weaknesses in the whole project - the gaps through which ideology and recuperation are able to immediately penetrate. Globalisation and Neo-Liberalism are not simply descriptive terms which have objective meanings. Like all ideologies on one level they do refer to actual processes of change, but obscure far more about both the form and content of the capitalist system than they actually reveal. They don’t exist as things in themselves but rather as theories, strategies and tendencies within the overall context of capitalism. To situate both your activities and theories in opposition to them implies that we should be attempting to force those in positions of power to simply adopt different and hopefully nicer ways of exploiting us - for example a global ‘neo-Keynesianism’ or perhaps an end to ‘corporate rule’ and a return to some grossly idealised pre-globalisation democratic nation state. This is unlikely to happen, although even it did ‘victory’ would hardly be the word that would immediately spring to mind. Focusing on opposing the most recent manifestations of capitalism (e.g. restructuring, the global market, free trade organisations, the power wielded by multinational corporations) means that an attack on the real heart of the capitalist system has been either forgotten or ignored. Capitalism is not a place (‘financial centres’) or a thing (‘multinational corporations’), it is a social relationship dependent upon wage-labour and commodity exchange where profit is derived from capital’s theft of unpaid labour. Being "against Globalisation" suggests that we would be better off under some form of national capitalism. Such an outlook is an open invitation to local activists in each country to join ranks with nationalistic and protectionist elements among the middle and (in some cases) ruling classes who are also opposed to ‘free trade’ and the penetration of ‘international capital’. This is evidenced in this country by repeated references in activist publications which by their lack of critical qualification appear to bemoan ‘loss of national sovereignty’ or ‘democracy’ and governments’ inability to restrict foreign investment under the terms of the MAI.
In other countries the process appears to have gone much further; two of the most vigorous opponents of globalisation in France and the US are respectively Le Pen and Pat Buchanan. Le Pen is the leader of the National Front in France and Pat Buchanan is on the right of the Republican Party. It can only be a matter of time before globalisation arouses ‘little Englander’ sentiments amongst right wingers in Britain. This is not to say that all of those who oppose globalisation are right-wing or ultra-nationalists or even in danger of becoming so, the point is that defending the nation state and national or local capital even in terms of the loss of ‘democratic accountability’ or ‘local culture’ is possibly more insidious than outright nationalism, it also allows for points of commonality with those who would normally be beyond the political pale, e.g. the late and mostly unlamented James Goldsmith erstwhile financier, founder of the Referendum Party and "mad, fascist crook" has a piece in the book The Case Against The Global Economy.
By limiting ourselves to being "against Globalisation/Neo-Liberalism" local exploiters be they land owners, factory owners managers of state enterprises or for that matter any ‘local business’ may be considered to be on our side! It can only be a mark of capitalism’s present strength that even to talk about it is seen as outmoded and passé. Globalisation/Neo-Liberalism are no less problematic than capitalism is perceived to be by some. The Zapatistas for example seem to studiously avoid using the word capitalism, preferring ‘Neo-Liberalism’. Whilst some have interpreted this as a tactically astute refusal to be burdened by the past; the end result is merely confusion as to whether the struggle or in Marcos’ words the "Fourth World War" is between the rich and the poor or between globalising Neo-Liberalism and ‘national sovereignty’.
S
(1) Since the beginning of 'the capitalist crisis of accumulation' in the late 1960s, a range of terms such as post-modernism, post-industrialism, risk society, post-Fordism and of course globalisation have been introduced ostensibly in an attempt to provide an adequate understanding of contemporary changes in the global economy. (Bonefeld 1997) Whilst some of these have remained largely confined to academia, others such as Globalisation and post-modernism have entered into common usage.
After identifying capitalism or the "global capitalist system" as "the root of our common social and ecological problems", many of those who took action on June 18th are now running headlong into the next "big day", November the 30th -N30 - for action against the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and free trade.
Is this the same enemy? Many would argue that the WTO is just another incarnation of the global capitalist system and therefore a worthy target. But this thinking reproduces some of the flaws of the thinking behind J18, in that it fetishes the institutions which manage global capital (J18 fetishised the abstract side of capital - finance capital - as opposed to the material side - production or industrial capital). The institutions of capital are targetted instead of capitalist social relations, with the added problem that the majority of opposition to the WTO invokes that lofty bourgeois ideal - democracy - in complaining about the lack of democratic accountability in these institutions. The system of wage labour (the basis of capitalist social relations) is not attacked, instead darts are thrown at fetishes. PGA (full name: Peoples’ Global Action Against Free Trade and the World Trade Organisation) calls for the abolition of the WTO because it is inherently "undemocratic" and incapable of reform, implying that what is needed is some type of genuinely democratic institution (presumably like the World Peoples’ Parliament that someone on the J18 discussion list keeps on proposing).
Worse still, opposition to free trade is effectively an appeal to protectionism on the part of ("democratically elected governments" of) nation-states. Undoubtedly the strategy of global capital has been to attempt to guarantee continued accumulation by imposing further attacks on the international proletariat by what has been described as the "race to the bottom" ie competition between sections of the working class in different nation-states (the threat of relocation etc), and the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) and its WTO-sponsored successor represents an attempt to remove the regulations which stand in the way of this competition (by enabling corporations to sue governments for labour and environmental law etc)
While resistance to these attacks is to be encouraged, it would be foolhardy to see the question as one of defending the nation-state against the power of the transnational corporations - as the Do or Die (No. 8) article "Globalisation: Origins-History-Analysis-Resistance" points out, these are false opposites (capital and state are not in opposition, rather the state is a tool in the hands of capital). Surely the challenge is for the international proletariat to defend its common class interests against both the nation-state and global capital...
To target the WTO rather than, say, the system of wage labour upon which capital depends, is to blur the question, and inevitably leads to the formation of dodgy or even reactionary alliances (many Far Right groups, such as the Front National in France and One Nation in Australia, as well as parts of the Left have opposed globalisation and free trade from a nationalist perspective). Some activists have taken sides in the WTO bananas dispute, defending Caribbean producers against North American interests, often arguing in favour of "local economies threatened by free trade". So small, "local" capitalists are good, and big, global corporations are bad (especially if they are American)... This naive kind of thinking enables the battle lines to be drawn between nation-states (or even between "North and South", as if there were no Northern proletariat and no Southern capitalists) rather than between classes (international proletariat vs global capital).
Undoubtedly some people are opposing the WTO on an anti-capitalist basis, but is this the best strategy for consciousness-raising struggle?
Rudolf The Red
The Dutch antiracist organisation "De Fabel van de illegaal" (The myth of illegality) and other left-wing organisations involved in the international campaigns against free-trade agreements like the MAI, regularly get compliments from the extreme right. Although unwanted, these compliments are not accidental. The critique of free trade has long been a speciality of the extreme right, and has proven to easily turn anti-Semitic. We will all become "slaves" to the "international capitalists living on the Riviera", the Dutch National-Socialist Party (NSB) ideologist Hylkema said in 1934. Free trade would bring the Dutch factories and farms down. Dutch goods would be pushed off the domestic market by cheap imports, he feared.
The only chance for survival was a fascist economy, he wrote. "We should control our national household in such a way that our people will not perish, when this group of people without a fatherland starts flooding us with imports. We don't want our factories to close down because Eastern coolies work for a few dimes a day." Hylkema called for resistance against "the trade and bank world, which still speaks of the principle of the open door. But the farmers feel that if things go on like this, the end is near."
"But don't think that the import trade capital and trust capital will save us then. They are extremely mobile. In one aeroplane they can bring billions in paper money across the border in just a few hours. Holland can then be bought by international speculators for a couple of guilders and we will become a poor and dependent people", the angry fascist wrote. If Hylkema, half a century later, had been able to surf the Internet, he probably would have been pleasantly surprised looking at some of the anti-MAI homepages. Hylkema's present-day successor Rüter certainly is very enthusiastic about them. Rüter is the main ideologist of the Dutch new-right think tank Voorpost. He advised his readers to check the Internet pages of "MAI niet gezien?!" (MAI, didn't see it / MAI, don't want it), the Dutch anti-MAI campaign. The new-right Dutch Student Organisation even linked their homepage to that of the anti-MAI campaign. The Dutch fascists are not the only ones interested. The German Republicans and the French Front National also turned against the MAI. In some countries the New Right even popped up at left-wing campaign meetings. The state against globalisation? For some time now extreme-right intellectuals have been working on renewing fascist thinking. The ideas and concepts of the current campaigns against free trade seem to be of good use. These are not specifically left-wing and even seem to be easily integrated into the traditional extreme-right worldview. For instance, take a look at the very fashionable concept of "globalisation of the economy", which is very central to the international campaigns against the MAI. This concept implies that capitalism is originally a local system, and has only recently begun to spread its tentacles around the world. But in fact capitalism has from the start been a global system, and has been able to evolve only because of the plunder of the southern parts of the globe.
By pointing to this so-called globalisation as our main problem, the anti-MAI activists prepare our thinking for the corresponding logical consequence - the struggle for "our own" local economy, and as a consequence also for "our own" state and culture. Some movements in the South that also fight against free trade draw exactly that conclusion. Taking their situation into account, it may be understandable, but it is certainly not emancipatory. In the rich countries, promoting a struggle against globalisation could create a fertile ground for the extreme right to grow. Fascists have always valued a self-sufficient economy. "No imports of things that our own people can produce, are happy to produce, are able to produce very well. Because there is no better worker than the Dutch worker", Hylkema thought already. Sixty years later, new-right Voorpost ideologists write about the "globalisation of American capitalism" and call for "a large-scale people's capitalism and small-scale worker participation", because that would offer the best "guarantees for the safeguard of our own industries." In it's first pamphlets "MAI niet gezien?!" wrote that the agreement "would put up enormous barriers" for states to "direct their own economies". But according to new-right ideologist Rüter, "the political elite doesn't even want to guide or decide any more - they gave up their power, only to serve an economic system that, because of its hegemony, doesn't need the specification 'capitalism' anymore".
Notice that both the anti-MAI activists and the new-right ideologists think the state and the capitalist economy are separate entities. In reality they are completely interconnected. The modern state and capitalism developed at the same time and pre-suppose each other. They are symbiotic twins. States create the social and physical circumstances for the continually changing capitalism and that is precisely why they are working on agreements like the MAI, together with the companies. The anti-MAI activists with their resistance against the "globalisation of the economy" run the risk of ending up calling for a strong state. Already, some of them are speaking in positive terms of the Malaysian state, which is supposedly curbing the free circulation of capital. But Malaysia is close to being the prime example of a modern fascist state. Productive versus speculative capital? Traditionally, left-wing thinkers have pointed out the dividing line between capital and workers as the main political economic conflict. However, when activists start using concepts like globalisation, they tend to start thinking in terms of a conflict between "local capital" and "international capital", in terms of good "productive capital" and bad "trading and speculative capital". But production and trade are inseparable parts of capitalism. And both parts of capital grow by stealing from the labourers (both paid and unpaid) and by plundering nature. Regularly, the international anti-MAI campaigns have used the image of the small local company being destroyed by a large foreign, if possible American, multinational. Many activists call for investment in regional companies or in social projects that would bring jobs and positive prospects. Such investment is also believed to bring more economic stability than the "casino capitalism" that is held responsible for the recent large economic crises.
This way of thinking perfectly resembles traditional extreme-right thought. To Hylkema only one real economic duality existed, the one between the "national, creative and productive capital" and "reprehensible international big capital". The extreme right never principally opposed capitalism and even denies any difference in interest between the "national capital" and the workers. "The owner, the staff and the workers together share only one central goal - a flourishing company", Hylkema explained. For him the main thing was to reduce "class hatred" and to strengthen the unity of "the people" as a whole. For that reason it is very convenient for the extreme right to have a common enemy, one that can be held responsible for the economic problems, crises and insecurities that will always accompany capitalism. "International capital" can fulfil that role perfectly. Modern nazi-ideologists also understand this principle very well. "Solidarity within the nation gets replaced by some sort of universal solidarity between the rich, the managers, the industrials: on many an international congress they secretly decide on their strategies", according to new-right Voorpost.
Once ideologically separated from the rest of capitalism, the "reprehensible international capital" can easily be associated with "the enemy" - some other state or a certain well-defined group of people. Following this line of thought, a critique of the system as such can gradually turn into the crazy idea that a small group of hostile people completely controls our lives. Such thinking is historically very closely linked to anti-Semitism. In the deeply rooted and mostly European anti-Semitic tradition there's always this connection made between "the international capital", America and "the Jews". This tradition holds that the "international speculative capital" is in the hands of Jews who conspire to rule the world. This "Jewish capital" supposedly operates from New York. For centuries right-extremist and nationalist movements have repeatedly revived this anti-Semitic way of thinking. Usually by saying that "the fatherland" or "Europe" is being threatened by - and this depends on the audience - "international capital", American multinationals or "the Jews". It's all the same to the ideology behind it. Of course, criticising free trade doesn't have to lead to anti-Semitism, but the two combine surprisingly easily. Hylkema's fascist party NSB, for instance, was not anti-Semitic in the beginning of the thirties. But, by its constant propaganda against "international capital" it did lay a strong foundation for its later turn to anti-Semitism. In the beginning of the forties it was just a small step for the party to start inserting the word "Jewish" in front of the phrase "international capital" in their propaganda pamphlets. Anti-MAI activists putting "international capital" apart ideologically, are not by definition anti-Semites, but the analysis behind their reasoning surely is potentially anti-Semitic. History shows how easily the one can lead to the other.
The New Right also loves this type of anti-Semitism. In a recent article on globalisation, Rüter for instance wrote that "whoever arranges and controls the loans, also controls the economic cycle and economic development." It is most certainly no coincidence that he throws in a quote of Amschel Meyer van Rothschild, a Jew who, according to Rüter, once said: "Give me control over the currencies, and I don't care anymore who makes the laws."
At the start of the international campaigns, autumn 1997, the anti-MAI activists strongly emphasised that the talks on the agreement were secret, and their attention swiftly turned to the individual decision-makers. "MAI niet gezien?!" wrote about a "multinational coup" and a "silent taking over of power". Actually, the talks were partly secret, but not as totally as the activists suggested. Forced by an assistant leaking official documents, the talks quickly became more open. Many contemporary "conspiracy fans" were drawn towards the anti-MAI campaign. The campaign office received frequent calls from these nuts, probably alerted by the long article on the MAI published in their favourite magazine Nexus. This article was written by a left-wing organisation that is central to the international anti-MAI campaigns. Until the beginning of the nineties the Australian-based Nexus was openly anti-Semitic, but after that it backed down a bit. However, the stories remained essentially the same. In recent issues, articles on the political power of "Jewish capital" popped up again.
Conspiracy fans also visited anti-MAI meetings. On such a meeting in Geneva in August 1998, titled "Globalisation and Resistance", one participant wanted to publicly read excerpts from the books written by Jan van Helping, a hideous German anti-Semite. Around about the same time, "conspiracy expert" Kohl’s came into contact with the Dutch campaign. For several weeks he was able to spread his anti-Semitic poison in anarchist circles before being unmasked.
The central concept of globalisation has recently filled the analytical gap that was left when some 10 years ago the critique of capitalism went out of fashion. In the middle of the nineties left-wing circles first turned to the concept of "neoliberalism". Especially the popular Zapatista uprising in Mexico stimulated its use. But neoliberalism is not the same as capitalism. It is rather the ideology that gets delivered together with the changes of capitalism that have been imposed from above since the mid-seventies. Among these changes are the flexibilisation of the workforce, the privatisation of government services and the development of new computer and biotechnology industries. Also part of these developments is the trend towards an increased international division of labour. By the end of the nineties this latest trend became central to left-wing analysis, especially when activists started campaigning against the MAI and WTO. This change in analysis and focus of attention undoubtedly is a result of the overall political swing to the right that we have all witnessed this last decade. This raises the question of what might still constitute a left-wing analysis, and what makes a political line right wing. Political discussions are getting scarce, especially in the Netherlands, which poses great problems to campaigns like those against the MAI. Knowledge of the history of left-wing politics is also scarce.
Earlier campaigns and discussions on international solidarity seem to have been almost completely and collectively forgotten. Most left-wing groups joined the anti-MAI campaigns without giving it much thought, upset as they were by apocalyptic stories about a new secret "world constitution". And they kept on going without a thorough discussion that could have lead them to a radical change in their political direction. This last decade has seen non-governmental organisations (NGOs) taking on a more central role in campaigns, unhindered by the rapidly shrinking left-wing movement. Especially in the realm of international campaigns this can be clearly seen. For the left it is problematic that the NGOs' criticism usually does not see beyond neo-liberalism and free trade. They do not consider capitalism as such as a problem. That is of course not in their interest. They are too much a part of the system themselves, and have a lot of jobs to lose as well. Too much leftist talk doesn't pay. NGOs therefore don't like political discussions. The professional NGO campaigners rather spend most of their time flooding their fellow activists with details on free trade from every corner of the world. The activist who does not have access to Internet or e-mail will easily get the impression that he or she is not able to seriously participate in the campaigns. An extra problem with this NGO-provided information is that it usually has a top-down focus. Information from a grassroots point of view is getting very rare. And because of the information overload, even the most experienced activist in the end starts to overlook the difference between the two.
Nowadays left-wing groups are most often not powerful enough to get an international campaign off the ground without the help of NGOs. The choice of limiting criticism to free trade so as not to endanger the help of the NGOs is apparently easily made. With the result that left-wing groups are spreading an ideology that offers the New Right, rather than the left, bright opportunities for future growth.
Eric Krebbers
Merijn Schoenmaker
De Fabel van de illegaal, July 1999
<On to Part 3> <Back to Part 1>
<Back to Reflections index> <Back to Online Page> <Back to AF Home Page>