Fences and Windows (6 page)

This reclaiming is already happening on many fronts. The commons is being reclaimed around the world: by media activists, by landless peasants occupying unused land, by farmers rejecting the patenting of plants and life forms.

And democracy is being reclaimed as well, by the people in this room and in the street outside. It doesn’t want to be enclosed in the Staples Center, or penned in by the bankrupt logic of the two corporate parties. And here in Los Angeles, the activism that came to world attention in Seattle is bursting out of its own confines, transforming itself from a movement opposed to corporate power to one fighting for the liberation of democracy itself.

September 2000

What seems to most enrage the delegates to the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague this week is the idea that they even have to discuss the basic benefits of free-market globalization. That discussion was supposed to have stopped in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and history ended. Only here we all are—old people, young people, thousands of us—literally storming the barricades of their extremely important summit.

And as the delegates peer over the side of their ill-protected fortress at the crowds below, scanning signs that say “Capitalism Kills,” they look terribly confused. Didn’t these strange people get the memo? Don’t they understand that we all already decided that free-market capitalism was the last, best system? Sure, it’s not perfect, and everyone inside the meeting is awfully concerned about all those poor people and the environmental mess, but it’s not as if there’s a choice—is there?

For the longest time, it seemed as if there were only two political models: Western capitalism and Soviet communism. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, that left only one alternative, or so it seemed. Institutions like the World Bank and IMF have
been busily “adjusting” economies in Eastern Europe and Asia to help them get with the program: privatizing services, relaxing regulation of foreign corporations, weakening unions, building huge export industries.

All this is why it is so significant that yesterday’s head-on attack against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF happened here, in the Czech Republic. This is a country that has lived through both economic orthodoxies, where the Lenin busts have been replaced by Pepsi logos and McDonald’s arches.

Many of the young Czechs I met this week say that their direct experience with communism and capitalism has taught them that the two systems have something in common: they both centralize power in the hands of a few, and they both treat people as if they are less than fully human. Where communism saw them only as potential producers, capitalism sees them only as potential consumers; where communism starved their beautiful capital, capitalism has overfed it, turning Prague into a Velvet Revolution theme park.

The experience of growing up disillusioned with both systems explains why so many of the activists behind this week’s event call themselves anarchists, and why they feel an intuitive connection with peasant farmers or the urban poor in developing countries, fighting huge institutions and faceless bureaucracies like the IMF and World Bank.

What connects these issues is a critique not of who is in power—the state versus the multinationals—but of how power is distributed, and a belief that decision making is always more accountable when it’s closer to the people who must
live with the decisions. At its root is a rejection of “trust us” culture, no matter who is the expert of the moment. During the Velvet Revolution, the parents of many young activists in Prague successfully fought to change who was in power in their country. Their children, sensing that it still isn’t the Czech people, are now part of a global movement challenging the mechanisms of power centralization itself.

At a globalization conference in the lead-up to the Prague meeting, Indian physicist Vandana Shiva explained mass rejection of World Bank projects as less a dispute over a particular dam or social program and more a fight for local democracy and self-government. “The history of the World Bank,” she said, has been “to take power away from communities, give it to a central government, then give it to the corporations through privatization.”

The young anarchists in the crowd nodded. She sounded just like them.

June 2000

How do you organize a riot? That is an important question right now for John Clarke, the most visible member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Last week OCAP held a rally to protest the spiralling homelessness that has led to twenty-two street deaths in seven months. After it turned into a pitched battle with charging horses and riot police confronted by bricks and boards, Clarke was instantly singled out as a Machiavellian puppeteer, pulling the strings of a limp, witless rent-a-mob.

Several unions threatened to withdraw their funding from the anti-poverty group, and Clarke himself faces criminal charges for allegedly inciting a riot. [The charges are still pending.] Most commentators took it as a given that the demonstrators could never have decided all on their own to fight back when the police stormed the crowd with clubs and horses. After all, they came armed with swimming goggles and vinegar-soaked bandanas, so clearly they were ready for battle (never mind that this gear was meant as protection against the inevitable tear gas and pepper spray, which even the most peaceful and law-abiding demonstrators have sadly come to expect from the police). Someone must have orchestrated the violence, told them to pick up bricks, held Molotov-cocktail-making workshops. Why
would Clarke do this? Apparently, according to press reports, to seek fame and fortune.

In half a dozen newspaper articles, it was pointed out that John Clarke is not homeless himself, that he—gasp!—lives in a rented bungalow in Scarborough. Even more scandalous: there were other people at the protest who weren’t homeless, either. What is the assumption? That activists are always self-interested, out to protect their property values, lower their tuition fees, or get themselves raises? In this context, putting one’s body on the line for a set of beliefs about how society should function is seen as somehow fraudulent, even sinister. The young and radical are told to shut up and get a job.

I have known several of OCAP’s “professional activists” for years. Some of them first became involved in anti-poverty work in their late teens, through Food Not Bombs, a group that believes food is a basic human right and that you should not need a municipal permit to cook some and share it with people who are hungry.

Some of these young activists could, indeed, get lucrative jobs and move out of their cramped, shared apartments if they wanted to. They are staggeringly resourceful and well educated, and some of them are so wily with a Linux operating system that they could easily be one of those teenage dot-com millionaires.

But they have chosen a different route, one that flatly rejects a value system in which the only acceptable use of our skills and talents is to trade them for money and power. Instead, they are using those highly marketable skills to
work for power dispersal: to convince the least empowered members of Ontario society that they have powers—to organize collectively, to defend themselves against brutality and abuse, to claim shelter; powers that are going unused.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty exists for the sole purpose of empowering the poor and the homeless, which is why it is so very unjust that last week’s protest was presented as the scheming handiwork of a single man who uses the poor as props and pawns. The Coalition is one of the very few anti-poverty groups that emphasizes organizing, as opposed to mere charity or advocacy. Within OCAP, poor people are not simply mouths to feed or bodies that need sleeping bags. They are something else entirely: a constituency that has a right to be heard. Finding a way for the homeless to recognize their political rights and take on their opponents is an extraordinarily difficult task, which is why OCAP is frequently held up as a success story by activists around the world.

How do you organize the homeless, the transient, the poor? We know that workers are organized in factories, homeowners in their neighbourhoods, students in their schools. But OCAP’s constituency is, by definition, dispersed and constantly on the move. And while workers and students can become political lobbies by forming unions and going on strike, the homeless have already been discarded by every institution they could possibly disrupt.

Obstacles such as these have led most anti-poverty groups to conclude that the poor and the homeless need to be spoken for and acted on. Except for OCAP, which is
trying to create a space for the poor to speak, and to act, for themselves. And this is where things gets complicated: most of us don’t really want to hear the anger in their voices, see the rage in their actions.

Which is why so many people are pissed off at John Clarke. His crime isn’t organizing a riot. It is refusing to clean up poverty for the benefit of cameras and politicians. The Coalition doesn’t ask its members to abide by the genteel protocols of polite protest. And it doesn’t tell angry people they shouldn’t be angry, especially when confronted by some of the very same police officers who beat them in back alleys or the politicians who write laws that cost them their homes.

John Clarke didn’t organize a riot and neither did OCAP. They just didn’t stop it.

 

II
FENCING IN DEMOCRACY

 

 

 

TRADE AND TRADE-OFFS

In which citizens discover that the true price of “free trade” is the power to govern themselves

June 2001

During the April 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, U.S. President George W. Bush proclaimed that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would help usher in “a hemisphere of liberty.” Explicitly linking globalization and democracy, Bush argued that “people who operate in open economies eventually demand more open societies.”

Does globalization really foster democracy? It depends on the kind of globalization we create. The current system simply outsources decision making to opaque and non-representative institutions, but there are other choices available. At home and on the world stage, democracy is a choice, one that demands constant vigilance and renewal.

President Bush seems to have a different vision. Like so many defenders of the current global economic model, he argues that democracy is not so much an active choice as a trickle-down effect of economic growth: free markets create free peoples. Would that democracy really were such a laissez-faire matter. Unfortunately, investors have proven themselves all too willing to support oppressive monarchies like Saudi Arabia’s, or Communist authoritarianism in China, as long as these regimes crack open markets to foreign companies. In the race for cheap labour and precious natural resources, pro-democracy movements are often trampled.

Sure, capitalism thrives in representative democracies that embrace pro-market policies such as privatization and deregulation. But what about when citizens make democratic choices that aren’t so popular with foreign investors? What happens when they decide to nationalize the phone company, for instance, or to exert greater control over their oil and mineral wealth? The bodies tell the story.

When Guatemala’s democratically elected government introduced sweeping land ownership reforms in the 1950s, breaking up the monopoly held by the U.S.’s United Fruit Company, the country was bombed and the government ousted. At the time, the U.S. claimed it was an inside job, but nine years later, president Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected that, “We had to get rid of a Communist government that had taken over.” When General Suharto staged his bloody coup in Indonesia in 1965, he did so with co-operation from the United States and Europe. Roland Challis, the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent at the time, maintains that “getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal.” Similarly, it was “free market” forces in the United States that instigated the military overthrow of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, eventually leading to his death. (At the time, Henry Kissinger famously commented that a country shouldn’t be allowed to “go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”)