New York Times - December 4, 2001
THE BIG CITY
Better Leave the Marching to Marxists By JOHN TIERNEY
A NEWS release last week announced that a group of New Yorkers would be marching up Fifth Avenue on Sunday to celebrate the first Capitalism Day, part of a global rally in more than 100 cities. In the wake of Sept. 11, the organizers explained, "we need to defend the values and economic systems that have produced untold wealth for the Western world and are now under attack."
So here at the home of the World Trade Center, here at the capital of capitalism, how many defenders would be massing on Fifth Avenue?
"At least 50," the organizers promised.
Fifty people! Clearly a historic event. Even if it wasn't the smallest "global rally" on record, it had to be the first in which the organizers gave out honest crowd estimates ahead of time.
Sure enough, all of five dozen people (and no television cameras) showed up Sunday afternoon at 42nd Street. In the global Walk for Capitalism, organized by an Australian group, New York ranked well below Stockholm (400 marchers) and Pôrto Alegre, Brazil (300), although the city did manage to beat out Bath, England (6). The local leader was Sheryl Ann Jackson, a New Zealander who has worked as a nanny since immigrating to Queens 12 years ago. She smiled when asked if there were any out-of-town groups marching.
"Does two qualify as a group?" she said, referring to two men from the Greater Lehigh Valley Objectivist Club, in Pennsylvania. One had a sign saying "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of MY OWN Happiness."
As the marchers headed up the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue with a police escort, another man tried leading a cheer - "Give me a C!" - but the crowd barely had enough energy to spell "capitalism." The rest of the march was pretty quiet.
"We don't have any chants," Miss Jackson said. "We're really not protest people." The closest the marchers came to an act of civil disobedience was to tape blue ribbons and certificates of appreciation to the walls and windows of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch, Barnes & Noble, Rockefeller Center (the statue of Atlas was reverently noted), Trump Tower, Tiffany's and F. A. O. Schwarz.
It was not what you would call an angry crowd, but several marchers seemed to be jointly indignant. They were holding signs like "Privatize the Public Library," "Profits Before People"` and "Get-A-Job" (next to a picture of a man lying in the street). One of them, a bearded college student named Joshua Boydstun, said they were all devout capitalists, but he turned vague when asked about his intellectual background.
"Oh, I've read John Locke, Adam Smith, Keynes, Ayn Rand," he said.
Which of her books?
"Uh, `The Fountainhead.' "
What's the plot of that one?
"Gee, it's been so long." Mr. Boydstun paused and confessed. He was a member of the Vassar College Student Activist Union and a veteran of protests against globalization. Six members of the Vassar group had come to New York to infiltrate the Walk for Capitalism, he said. That made them the largest group at the march.
"We're trying to represent a hyper-capitalist stance that would give the whole march a bad name," he said, pointing to the nasty signs and to two of his allies who were photographing and videotaping the event.
AFTER the march, the capitalists were dumbfounded to hear of the infiltrators. They hadn't even videotaped their own march. They couldn't imagine wasting a minute at someone's else march. A few wondered how the activists would feel if a corporation had sent infiltrators to an antiglobalization rally with a sign like "Keep Those Colorful Natives in Their Quaint Villages!"
In fact, though, the activists would probably be delighted at the corporate infiltration - another injustice to protest! They could devote another Sunday to a rally at the company's headquarters, complete with television cameras, angry speeches, and a crowd of a lot more than 50.
Whatever the powers of capitalists, they can't compete with moralists and politicians when it comes to public protests. Two months ago, it looked on television as if the masses in the streets of Afghanistan and Pakistan embraced the Taliban and its extreme antiglobalization policies. There weren't daily violent protests for the right to buy televisions, CD's and cosmetics.
The supporters of free trade didn't hit the streets of Kabul until later, and all they did was shop, just as thousands of people were doing on Fifth Avenue on Sunday afternoon. They were too busy doing their own walk for capitalism to notice the little group walking behind a banner