The "Shrink or Sink" School anti-globalisation movement on the other hand views the way forward as based on a turnaround and shrinkage of the globalisation agenda. "No new Round-Turnaround" and "W.T.O. - sink or shrink" were the civil society calls for the Seattle and Qatar Ministerials respectively.
Who the hell is "civil society"? Surely it's not Hegel's, which "affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both" - the domain of "capital and class-divisions," a world of "compulsion" and "excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble." But what is it then? Who claims to speak for whom on the basis of what accountability? Do farmers not want to export their crops? Do nonfarmers not want to eat imported food?
As Chris Mooney wrote in The American Prospect <http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2001/06/mooney-c-06-22.html> (commenting on Ronald Bailey's piece in the July Reason <http://www.reason.com/0107/fe.rb.rage.html>):
>The neo-Luddites don't always seem to revel in the authentic
>cultures they purport to celebrate. Take Vandana Shiva, whose
>Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource
>Policy seems -- at least from its URL (<www.vshiva.net>) -- to be
>something of a one-woman show. Lewontin skewered Shiva's recent book
>Stolen Harvest
><http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010621081R>:
>
>"Shiva is what is called a "cult figure" for opponents of GMOs, but
>her book will give a detached observer more the impression of a
>cheerleader. She might have used her knowledge of Indian agriculture
>and her immense prestige among environmentalists to provide a
>credible up-to-date analysis of the effects of agricultural
>technology and market structures on third-world economies. Instead,
>she has produced a conjunction of religious morality, undeveloped
>assertions about the cultural implications of Indian farming,
>unexplained claims about the nature of the farm economy in India and
>how biotechnology destroys it, and unanalyzed or distorted
>scientific findings."
>
>Ronald Bailey reports that at the IFG conference, Shiva focused on
>how corporate technologies are a menace to "our cultures, our
>communities, our rootedness." But Shiva hardly seems very rooted in
>her own indigenous culture if she's running her own website and
>traveling to New York to hobnob with Kirkpatrick Sale and Jeremy
>Rifkin. Indeed, consider this quote from her site:
>
>Diversity is fast moving into the defining metaphor in place of
>monocultures of the mind. Ecofeminism has emerged as a serious
>challenge to Cartesian reductionism and the Baconian "rape of
>nature" as the "masculine mode" of knowing. Globalisation is however
>threatening to the ecological gains of the past few decades. It is
>therefore the defining context of our new engagements.
>
>No doubt that's exactly what's running through the mind of the
>average starving inhabitant of an Indian flood plain. But of course,
>hungry Indians may not be able to see or comprehend all that Shiva
>is doing on their behalf. For one thing, they're not likely to have
>Internet access. And even if they did, they wouldn't get much from
>Shiva's site because it's written entirely in English. Less than 10
>percent of the Indian population can use current information
>technology software, which is overwhelmingly English dominated,
>because of the language gap.
>
>And yet Shiva claims to speak on behalf of traditional Indian
>communities and culture. Such contradictions are strong indicators
>of incomplete thinking, and they abound in neo-Luddite circles, from
>Shiva to Primitivism.com. That's because the anti-technology
>anti-globalization movement is a ball of innuendos and half-baked
>arguments, most of which are at base thinly disguised emotional
>appeals. Sure, "natural" sounds good; the word "traditional" is also
>warm and fuzzy, as are other neo-Luddite nostrums. But if we are to
>truly grapple with -- and critique -- the process of
>corporate-friendly globalization, we will need to be able to think,
>not merely feel.
>