http://www.sunday-times.co.uk (News Review) Sunday Times (UK) April 30 2000 NEWS REVIEW William Finnegan of The New Yorker on the rising tide of anarchy centred on US campuses Hi guys, let's destroy capitalism For Juliette Beck, it began with the story of the Ittu Oromo, Ethiopian nomads whose lives were destroyed, in vast numbers, by a dam - a hydroelectric project sponsored by the World Bank. Beck was a second-year student at Berkeley, taking a class in international rural development. The daughter of an orthopaedic surgeon, she had gone to college planning to study medicine, but environmental science caught her interest, and the story of the Ittu Oromo precipitated a change of subject. She was a brilliant student - "one of these new Renaissance people so smart they could be almost anything" - was intellectually insatiable and her eagerness to understand economic development propelled her into several academic fields, notably the dry, dizzying politics of international finance and trade. By her junior year, Beck was teaching a class on the North American Free Trade Agreement. "It was one of the most popular student-led classes we've had," her professor says. "I understand it's been cloned on other campuses." Beck had found her strange grand passion - international trade rules - at an auspicious time. Besides the popularity of her class, there were the events last November in Seattle, where 50,000 demonstrators shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organisation. Beck, who is 27, was a key organiser of the Seattle protests. "The spirit of Seattle," she says, crinkling her eyes and grinning blissfully. "Your body just tingled with hope, to be around so many people so committed to making a better world." Beck says "tingled with hope" and "making a better world" with no hint of self-consciousness, and in the next breath will launch into a critique of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a set of international trade rules that she and other activists have fought against for the past several years. (The MAI would limit the rights of national governments to regulate currency speculation or set policies regarding investment.) This odd fusion of hard-headed policy analysis and utopian idealism has an exhilarating edge, which may account for some of Beck's habitual high spirits. Almost 6ft tall, she retains to a striking degree both the coltishness of adolescence and the open-faced, all-American social style of the Girl Scout and high-school athlete (volleyball, tennis, basketball) she was. Zooming around the scruffy, loft-style offices of Global Exchange, the human rights organisation in San Francisco where she works, she seems conspicuously lacking in the self-decoration of the other young activists around the place - piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks. It may be that she's simply been too busy to get herself properly tatted up. While we were talking in her office, she tried to deal simultaneously with me and with a significant fraction of the 700 e-mail messages that had piled up in her in-box - reading, forwarding, filing, trashing, replying, sighing, grumbling, erupting in laughter. After college, Beck went to work as an environmental engineer for a small Bay Area firm. The pay was good, and the work was interesting, but she found herself spending most of her time competing with other firms for contracts. "It made me realise I didn't want to be doing work that was all about money." So she made the downward financial leap into the non-profit sector (and was recently forced to move from chic, expensive San Francisco to cheaper, inconvenient Oakland, where she lives in a group house with no living room). It's a step she has never regretted. "I think a lot of people in my generation - not a majority, maybe, but a lot - feel this void," she told me. "We feel like capitalism and buying things are just not fulfilling. Period." Beck likes to call the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank "the iron triangle of corporate rule". In her view, these institutions - their leaders, clients, political allies, and, above all, true bosses, multinational corporations - are frogmarching humanity, and the rest of the planet, into a toxic, money-maddened, repressive future. And she intends to persuade the rest of us not to go quietly. In her office at Global Exchange, still crashing through the undergrowth of her in-box, she suddenly pulled up short. "Oh, check this out," she said, and pointed to her computer screen. It was a report prepared by Burson-Marsteller, the Washington publicity firm. It was called Guide to the Seattle Meltdown: A Compendium of Activities at the WTO Ministerial. Burson-Marsteller's cover letter began, "Dear [corporate client]," and characterised the report "not so much as a retrospective on the past, but as an alarming window on the future". The leaked report offered profiles of dozens of groups that had participated in the Seattle protests - from the Anarchist Action Collective, to Consumers International, to the AFL-CIO, American's biggest trade-union organisation - naming leaders, giving website addresses and including brief descriptions, usually lifted from the groups' literature. These are the "movement activists" - I call them that because nobody has yet worked out how to label them. In the United States, the movement is dramatically - even deliberately - lacking in national leaders. It is largely co-ordinated online. I picked Juliette Beck almost at random as a bright thread to follow through this cloudy fabric of rising, mostly youthful American resistance to corporate-led globalisation. Global free trade promotes global economic growth. It creates jobs, makes companies more competitive and lowers prices for consumers. It also provides poor countries, through infusions of foreign capital and technology, with the chance to develop economically and, by spreading prosperity, creates the conditions in which democracy and respect for human rights may flourish. This is the animating vision of the Clinton administration, and it is a view widely shared by political leaders, economic decision-makers and opinion-makers throughout the West. It is also accepted, at least in its outlines, by many important figures in business and government in Third Wor ld countries, where it is known as "the Washington consensus". Critics of this consensus dispute most, if not all, of its claims. Growth, they argue, can be wasteful, destructive, unjust. The jobs created by globalisation are often less sustaining and secure than the livelihoods abolished by it. Weak economies abruptly integrated into the global system do not become stronger, or develop a sustainable base; they just become more dependent, more vulnerable to the ructions of ultra-volatile, deregulated international capital. Nearly everyone, though, on both sides of the globalisation debate, accepts that the process creates winners and losers. And it is globalisation's losers and potential losers - and all those with doubts about the wisdom of unchecked, unequal growth - who propel the backlash that found such vivid expression in Seattle. The booming popularity of the movement on college campuses is an odd aspect of its make-up, since American college graduates are unlikely to find themselves on the losing side of the great globalisation ledger. And yet students, whether fired up by their coursework, like Beck, or simply ensuring that this is where the subcultural action is now, have been turning out in surprising numbers for mass "teach-ins" on the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation. The World Bank lends money to the governments of poor countries. It was founded, along with the IMF, after the second world war to help finance the reconstruction of Europe. When the Marshall Plan usurped its original purpose, the bank had to reinvent itself, shifting its focus to Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the elimination of poverty was its mission. Today, the bank, which is headquartered in Washington DC, has more than 10,000 employees, 180 member states, and offices in 67 of those countries, and lends nearly $30 billion a year. It ventures into fields far beyond its original mandate, including conflict resolution: demobilising troops in Uganda, clearing landmines in Bosnia. The IMF, whose founding purpose was to make short-term loans to stabilise currencies, has similarly had to shape-shift with the times. Also based in Washington, it now makes long-term loans as well and tries to manage the economies of its poorer member states. Both institutions have always been dominated by the world's rich countries, particularly the United States. In 1995, Lawrence Summers, then an undersecretary at the United States Treasury Department - he is now its secretary - told Congress that for each dollar the American government contributed to the World Bank, American corporations received $1.35 in procurement contracts. Debt for the people of the global south now totals more than $2 trillion, and servicing it - simply paying the interest - has become the single largest budget item for scores of poor countries. About 20 years ago, the World Bank and the IMF began attaching stricter conditions to the loans they made to debtor countries to help them avoid outright default. More than 90 countries have now been subjected to IMF-imposed austerity schemes. This is where the World Trade Organisation comes in - or, rather, where its agenda dovetails with the work of the World Bank and the IMF. All three institutions have always sought to increase world trade. But the WTO is the spearhead of the present surge towards economic globalisation. It is a huge bureaucracy that makes binding rules intended to remove obstacles to the expansion of commercial activity among the 135 countries that constitute its membership. Speaking anonymously, a former WTO official recently told the Financial Times: "This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups." There is, in other words, little mystery about why the WTO and its partners in free-trade promotion, the World Bank and the IMF, have become the protest targets of choice for environmentalists, labour unions, economic nationalists, small farmers and small-business people, and their allies. Trade rules among countries are obviously needed. The question is whom those rules will benefit, whose rights they will protect. The 50,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle chanting "no new round - turn around" had clearly decided the WTO was not on their side when it came to steering the direction of global trade. The Direct Action Network (Dan) is deeply anti-capitalist. But the group is less than a year old and ex-tremely loosely structured, so its ideology isn't easy to get a fix on. What does seem certain is that the shutdown of the Seattle Ministerial would never have happened without the emergence and efforts of the Direct Action Network. Juliette Beck was present at Dan's creation. Late last spring, a young organiser named David Solnit, who was well known in the movement for his dedication and ingenuity, and for his giant homemade puppets, approached Beck with a plan to shut down the Seattle meeting. Dozens of groups, including the AFL-CIO and Global Trade Watch, were already planning for Seattle. But nobody was talking shutdown. Solnit thought it could be done, and he thought that Global Exchange could help. Beck and Kevin Danaher, the co-founder of Global Exchange, called in the Rainforest Action Network and a Berkeley-based group called the Ruckus Society, which specialises in non-violent guerrilla action, and Dan was hatched. Solnit was the dynamo but not the leader. "Dan is lots of lieutenants, no generals," Danaher says. The word went out, largely over the internet, about Dan's plans, and dozens of groups expressed interest. The Dan coalition developed along what is known as the "affinity-group model". Affinity groups are small, semi-independent units, pledged to coalition goals, tactics and principles - including, in Dan's case, nonviolent action - but free to make their own plans. Members look out for one another during protests, and some have designated roles: medic, legal support (avoids arrest), "spoke" (confers with other affinity groups through affinity "clusters"), "action elf" (looks after food, water, and people's spirits). In Seattle, the affinity-group model proved flexible, and tactically powerful, and the police, trying to clear the streets, resorted to increasingly brutal methods. There were hundreds of arrests. Beck, who was tear-gassed on a line blocking the entrance to the convention centre, had credentials, through Global Exchange, to enter the theatre where the WTO was supposed to be having its opening session. She went inside, found a few delegates milling, and an open microphone. She and Danaher and Medea Benjamin - another co-founder of Global Exchange - took the stage, uninvited, and suggested that delegates join them in a discussion. The interlopers were hustled off the stage. Beck elected not to go quietly. Marshals put her in a pain hold - her arm twisted behind her back - and dragged her through the theatre. A news camera recorded the event. "Then CNN kept showing it, over and over, them carrying me off, whenever they talked about the arrests," she says. "My claim to fame. Except I wasn't arrested! They just threw me out." The political spectrum represented in the protests was improbably wide, ranging from, on the right, James Hoffa's Teamsters and the AFL-CIO (which fielded tens of thousands of members for a march) to, on the left, a dozen or more anarchist factions, including the ancient Industrial Workers of the World. "Coalition-building is hard," Beck said. "There's no doubt about it. But it's what we do." We were sitting in a deserted cafe in some sort of Latino community centre one Sunday night in Berkeley, sipping beers. "At Global Exchange, we try to think of campaigns that will appeal to the average Joe on the street. We're really not interested in just organising other leftists. Big corporations are a great target, because they do things that hurt virtually everybody." Across the street was a cafe/bookshop/community centre, this one run by an anarchist collective called Long Haul Infoshop, which distributes a radical journal called Slingshot. In a special WTO edition, Slingshot had derided Global Exchange and "other despicable examples of the corporate left". I asked Beck about the attacks from the left. She sighed. "There's always going to be disagreement. When it comes to these institutions - the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank - we have reformists and abolitionists. If we're talking about the World Bank, I, for instance am an abolitionist." I asked Beck if she considered herself an anarchist. She shrugged, as if the question were obtuse. Dan seemed, at a glance, to be an anarchist organisation, or at least organised on anarchist principles, I said. "Sure," Beck said, still looking nonplussed. Finally, she said: "Well, I definitely respect anarchist ways of organising. I guess I'm still learning what it means to be an anarchist. But the real question is: can this anarchist model that's working so well now for organising protests be applied on an international scale to create the democratic decision-making structures that we need to eliminate poverty?" Did Beck know that the term "direct action" was used by anarcho-syndicalists in France at the turn of the last century? She did. She also knew, it seemed, that anarchism has become wildly popular among Latin American students who are fed up with what they call neoliberalismo (their term for corporate-led globalisation) but disenchanted, also, with the traditional left. Beck drained her beer. Dan, whatever its historical analogues, had been thriving since its triumph in Seattle, she said. She was going to Washington in a couple of days, and then joining a road show, which would start making its way up the East Coast, beating the drums for the next big event. =A9 The New Yorker 2000 --Topica-Boundary-Marker-878581845.362306842.957135459-- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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