Magazine Issue 10 - Spring 2000
If capitalism is pants, what are you wearing under your trousers?

It seems that the main event in London on June 18th (J18) became known as the Carnival against Capitalism almost by accident. Happily though, this accident may have done more for the rehabilitation of anti-capitalism as the centrepiece of a vibrant, hopeful movement than a heap of May Day rallies.

Whatever you feel about that day – that it was too lily-livered when it hit the City; that over 50,000 people on the streets of Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta was a sadly unreported triumph; that it allowed the media to further peddle its confused stereotypes of the
a) day of chaos fiendishly plotted by shadowy besuited blokes that was b) hijacked by a loutish rentamob – it certainly shone a bloody great spotlight on enemy strongholds all over the world.
     
It also radically redrew the map of global resistance at a stroke. In an extraordinary cyclical motion, radical direct action groups in the West that kickstarted the J18 process did so having been fired up by the inspirational example of movements from developing countries like the landless peasants (MST) of Brazil, Mexico’s Zapatistas and the farmers of India’s Karnataka state. Now that circle has been completed with reports that stories of J18 in London were snapped up enthusiastically by delegates at this years’ Encuentro in Brazil, (a gathering of Latin American resistance groups), as were copies of the agitprop from London called Evading Standards. So ‘globalisation’ becomes a word packed with positive, revolutionary meaning as well as a more traditional tale of gloom and a race to the bottom.
     
Events around the WTO meeting in Seattle on November 30th last year were directly linked to J18, as well as the grandmother of them both, the Global Street Party of May 1998. Capitalists have certainly been forced onto the back foot by this worldwide outbreak of opposition to their once unquestionable creed. The pages of three of its most hallowed organs, The Economist, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal have been buzzing over recent months with some of the limpest arguments in favour of the free market and unending economic growth that this correspondent has ever had the pleasure of reading. Pleasure because, just barely visible at the edges of pages, in the choices of headlines and photos, there are the first signs of panic, the panic of those who got on the wrong train, who somewhere deep down already know it but haven’t yet got the guts to admit it. Allied with the ever-more impending crash in the markets, those publications are sounding more and more edgy. The question is, when that crash finally blows in, will the many positive alternatives spoken of at J18 be strong enough not to be washed away, or will people take refuge behind even higher walls of xenophobia and self-interest, as they have already done in Austria?
     
November 30th saw the most visible recent attempt to build on the current mood of dissatisfaction and possibility around the world. Bits of it were unashamedly anti-capitalistic, although the broad church whose congregation shut down Seattle did harbour some disturbing (even avowedly right-wing) members. To Colin Hines, writer and Green Party advocate, the word ‘capitalism’ alienates the people we should be linking with and is cursed with too many definitions to be of much practical use. To Nigerian activist Isaac Osuoka: "The struggle against the WTO gave us the opportunity to target the capitalist system in a more coherent way. And to unite victims of the system at a more global scale". Medha Patkar, active in the movement against the Narmada Dam in India, says "We’re against the whole capitalist system."
     
Anti-capitalism should be synonymous with the dissolving of power of all kinds, of a passionate defence of our ecology and an absence of rigid ideologies. This will take all our desire and imagination, not to mention an undentable sense of humour.
There is a hope that the radical global network of grassroots direct action groups that is Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) will be able to assist in the crucial but daunting task of strengthening North-South resistance. At the moment some still need convincing that such a network has relevance to their local struggles. It also needs to reassure people that it isn’t a movement where a few attempt to represent the many; certainly its guiding principles set the PGA up to be a network with no permanent centre and absolutely no leaders. "In our mediatised world," says activist Bert Hampton, "it just might be the inspirational activity of global networks that encourages our local ‘like-minded neighbours’ to open their doors and step into the streets. We have to make links, globally because the system is global, and locally because its practical abolition requires the sweat and tears - in both despair and joy - of our physically organising together."
     
In the UK, the state has reacted with frightening speed to 'terrorise' those who use direct action with its Prevention of Terrorism Bill. If it is the fear of what anti-capitalism might do to the UK’s standing as the planet’s premiere financial centre that has triggered this clampdown, then perhaps we should continue to pressurise finance. Or would that merely cause London-based transnational capital to flee into the arms of the City’s major rival, Frankfurt, where taxes are low and the long baton of the law is even longer? Maybe a ‘stereo’ campaign in both these cities would be doubly effective.
     
On the other hand, many critiques of J18 have taken it to task for ‘fetishising’ finance while neglecting the real basis of capitalism - the social relationship between buyer and seller, which is to be found in the workplace - but few have articulated a gameplan for ways to move forward in that knowledge. Certainly it’s crucial to remember that we all help capitalism reproduce itself through our actions, maybe even in the direct actions we put together. Some have a desire to ‘out-spectacularise our already spectacular spectaculars’ (if you’ll excuse the phrase) in a way that apes the capitalist obsession with economic growth. Maybe that wish can also be seen in the need for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to build membership and feed their corporate bureaucracies. And always, balanced against a need to reflect and avoid growth for its own sake, there is the steady ticking of the time bomb that is planetary destruction.
     
Of course we have to work to increase resistance, but let’s not let numbers at a street party or the size of the subsequent lurid front page headline be the only guides in deciding whether we’re making real progress. It is just possible that events this year as part of MayDay 2000 could benefit from a diversity of challenging events rather than one massive rally where the movement feels the force of its numbers but finds itself unable to express its dreams and visions.

J18 in the UK was a day that saw a grand variety of actions binding together a heap of diverse issues with the cement of finance. Inspiration poured into the movement. Now I fear that if people spend all their time thinking strategically about which part of the beast to aim at first, then the brilliance, the chaos, the creativity of the movement could be sacrificed for the sake of a dull and centralised, if tactically brilliant, campaign. This last question becomes vital to address as elements of the more traditional left seek to make alliances with proponents of direct action who have injected some long lost inspiration into the struggle. The influx of dry male-dominated theorising presents a need to strive harder to hang onto an ecological awareness, creativity and femininity if this inspiration is to flourish.
     
There is much talk of networking and alliance building, and where the fences, if any, should be. Links with NGOs still spark some of the most heated debates.
     
Campaigners placing a critique of capitalism at the centre of their activities are faced with a real dilemma here: the need to reach out and build alliances right across the board, against the danger that their radical agenda will become
submerged by calls for reform. Thilo Bode, Greenpeace International's Executive Director says that corporations should help "show capitalism the path to sustainable development". So can direct action people dance with Greenpeace if all they want to do is spruce up Monsanto or BP, in effect boosting their share price by providing some free PR? The NGO approach may be fundamentally flawed but other activists should relish any opportunity to explain why that is the case, and do so without retreating into a castle of self-righteousness.
     
What’s really at stake is the degree to which the two factions for change can co-operate, or if not that then at least co-exist, without recrimination. On the one hand, NGOs and Green Party stalwarts are terrified of the negative publicity that might rub off on them if they are seen to be dancing with the anarchists. On the other, there are the anti-capitalists who are concerned not to see the radical edge smoothed over by the great grey bird of reform. I don’t suppose to be able to reconcile those differences with a couple of flip sentences. But it does seem that an atmosphere of mistrust and even antipathy can be dispelled at least to some extent by more human contact. After all, human crossover between the two areas has taken place; loads of direct activists cut their teeth in, say, a Friends of the Earth local group. Direct activists should sometimes disregard the intransigence and fear of the top brass of these organisations - just as they would that of union bosses and corporate leaders. There’s a load of work to be done at the local level, and many meetings of minds waiting to happen.
     
Maybe a consciously anti-capitalist movement should turn from the world of reform and seek alliances in other more grassrooted areas, such as in black and Asian communities, where groups like Southall Black Sisters and the Hillingdon Strikers continue to be strong and radical. While the international movement of resistance has seen great advances in the number and diversity of groups acting simultaneously on a roughly similar platform, where are the local links between direct action people and the rest of their communities? The real solution to this creeping feeling of the agenda crawling away from a currently quite tiny movement is to widen, strengthen and enlarge it, so there’ll be enough energy to see campaigns against the City as well as smaller, more local initiatives that target capitalism in our own backyards. Of course this will mean that we will no longer be the unsung heroes, the outsiders, the martyrs, but surely becoming less glamorous would be a small price to pay for actually winning.
‘
Rob the Rich – Jailhouse Writings’ is a short booklet of pieces written by J18 prisoner Robert Thaxton. All proceeds go to his legal defence fund.
     
Available for a small donation from Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous: PO Box 11331, Eugene, Oregon 97440 USA.