Financial Times - October 10, 2001 12:17GMT
Clamour against capitalism stilled by James Harding
Four weeks ago, Kevin Danaher was one of a group of activists preparing for a march on Wall Street.
Danaher and other anti-globalisation protesters across the US were emailing each other that Monday morning with ideas for a mass demonstration in New York's financial centre.
Using the now well-honed tactics of human blockades, banner hangs and street theatre, while also turning a blind eye to a spot of strategically placed vandalism, they were preparing for a global day of action aimed at the bastions of capitalism to coincide with the World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha, Qatar, on November 9.
The protests, they hoped, would be larger, more ambitious and more widespread than anything anti-globalisation activists had tried before. They would involve people across the world in what Danaher liked to call "a dress rehearsal for the world's first general strike". On the US east coast, the target was to be the New York stock exchange.
Less than a month later, such plans seem to hail from another, more innocent, age. After the deadly events of Tuesday September 11, the new protest movement has gone quiet. It has dropped the language of confrontation, replacing it with condemnation and condolence. Grand plans, such as the Wall Street march, have been abandoned.
Danaher, one of the founders of Global Exchange and a rapid-fire, deep baritone voice of American anti-globalisation, says: "The movement is shifting into educational mode. The activists in New York are going to change their entire tactical approach. There are not going to be militant street protests. There are going to be teach-ins and candlelit vigils."
On the morning the hijackers launched their attack on New York, anti-globalisation activism was riding high.
The demonstrations planned for the last weekend in September were set to attract well over 50,000 people and disrupt, if not derail, the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Organisers were expecting so many people flocking to Washington they confidently predicted that they would encircle the White House, besieging the Bush administration with a ring of human protest.
Immediately after the attacks, such activism was silenced. The World Bank/IMF demonstrations planned for Washington were abandoned. True, a smaller, but still sizeable, number gathered for a global peace march. But Robert Weissman, a tall, gaunt disciple of Ralph Nader, was one of the team at the Mobilisation for Global Justice who had been co-ordinating the protests over the summer and then saw things come to a sudden halt. The frenzy of press briefings and logistics meetings in Washington church basements and suburban Virginia homes gave way to a quiet bewilderment. He explains: "We are all a footnote right now."
The movement has come to a stop. In public, activists say this is just a respectful pause. In private, however, some campaigners are asking whether the anti-globalisation movement itself will prove to be a victim of the attacks on America.
On the morning of the hijackings, the FT had just begun a four-part series, titled The Children of Globalisation Strike Back. The following three instalments were held over. Originally, the FT had concluded that the movement was a Fifth Estate. It was a movement of movements, an unruly, unregulated and unaccountable check on corporations, politicians and the institutions of democracy. It was powerful but, in its existing form, would never be in power.
The movement's momentum disguised a diversity of interests. It covered over cracks in the coalition. And it allowed for the absence of both leadership and a cogent philosophy to inspire followship. Hypothetically, the original series had suggested in a throwaway line that the movement could be derailed by a global recession or a war. But the one certainty, it said, was that anti-globalisation protest was not going away.
Today, nothing is quite so certain. Resuming contact with counter-capitalist protesters in the wake of the hijackings, the FT has sought to answer the simple question: What now for anti-globalisation? Already, parts of the counter-capitalist network are gathering around an anti-war message. Dissent in America and Europe has shown itself, even in these extraordinary times, to be remarkably robust. Counter-capitalism was anyway an international business. America's pain will not silence the critics of global capitalism in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. Activism will survive.
And yet, the movement, like so much else, will never be the same again.
From his small terraced home in Oxford, England, George Monbiot has emerged over the past few years as one of the celebrities of the counter-capitalist circuit in Europe.
Having started out writing about the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea and the environmental degradation of the Amazon, he has developed a wish-list of global change. He would like to see, among other things, the government regain the right to shut down anti-social companies, the creation of a directly elected world parliament and a maximum size limit for corporations.
But, in the last few weeks, Monbiot knows he cannot do very much about it. "Toes are very sensitive right now. We should not be going about treading on them," he says.
"We were massively gaining in influence and now we are having to go into abeyance."
Activists, who used to relish the rhetoric of revolution and confrontation, are now holding their tongues. After the destruction of the Twin Towers, icons of American capitalism, something anti-capitalist can so easily smack of something anti-American. Talk of "mass mobilisations", "besieging the White House" and an "assault on Wall Street" is sooner forgotten now that a real battle has begun.
Campaigners have known over the last month that their critique of corporate-led globalisation - a world in which companies fuelled by the demands of hungry shareholders exploit people, pillage resources and capture democratic institutions - will find little sympathy at a time when reopening the New York Stock Exchange has been seen as an act of national defiance and buying shares an act of patriotism.
Danaher at Global Exchange, who describes himself as a man with "enough anger for 10 men", is one of the few sticking with the kind of analysis that was commonplace at the beginning of last month.
"Money values got us into this mess," he says. "It is the oil profits in the Middle East which meant the US and Russia were prepared to fund these people and train these people."
Many others interviewed in the weeks since the attacks on America, though, were uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed. Linking globalisation with fanatical Islamic terrorism could both cause offence and blur the issues.
Anti-globalisation has essentially been a movement of self-doubt in the globalising, capitalist west. With America on the offensive, the counter-capitalist movement is in retreat.
But the movement, by its nature, cannot tread water for long. It has neither the discipline nor the resources to do nothing and hold itself together.
Unlike a political party or a trade union, the anti-globalisation movement has no membership to fall back on. It does not have monthly meetings or constituency offices to keep its followers on board. It does not have a clear leadership to agree or impose a strategy. Nor does it have a political programme or politicians to follow.
The anti-globalisation network has been sustained by activism itself. Since Seattle in 1999, it has been defined by mass street protests. With each mobilisation, activists have had a greater sense of their own power. The lists of e-mail addresses of sympathisers have lengthened. The web of campaign organisers has spread, gaining more experience and support. The ambitions of the movement have increased. And the appetite within the media, policy-making circles and the public for their message has grown.
The critics of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had secured the right to debate with the leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions over the future of the world's financial architecture. European leaders were saying it was time to give a fair hearing to the Tobin tax, a proposed levy on foreign exchange transactions to help the poor.
Trade negotiators were fretting about the possibility that they would fail to launch a new round of liberalisation, as the World Trade Organisation was increasingly demonised by unions, environmentalists and human rights campaigners. Anti-globalisation activists felt they were winning - or, at least, beginning to win.
Those "wins", which were taken for granted at the beginning of last month, will have to be fought for all over again. With America and Europe looking set for engagement in what could be a lengthy conflict, the mainstream appetite and the state's tolerance for street protest is likely to shrink. Steve Kretzman, one of the so-called scholar activists of the Washington protest scene, says "The attacks will alter the landscape of organising in the foreseeable future."
And without mobilisations, counter-capitalists will struggle to keep their critique of companies, politicians and political institutions at the top of the public agenda.
These days, corporate-led globalisation is not even at the top of the activists' agenda. Anti-war is the priority.
The Mobilization for Global Justice, which had been planning the World Bank demos, morphed quietly into the Mobilization for Global Peace last month. Along the west coast of the US, the well-worn electronic network of anti-globalisation activists centred in Berkeley, Portland and Seattle is being revived for peace and justice rallies. Over the past few weeks, peace rallies in Portland, San Francisco and San Diego alone have drawn thousands of people.
In the UK, counter-capitalists such as Monbiot are in the frontline of a peace movement that is struggling, so far, to gain mass appeal. Globalise Resistance, the group backed by the Socialist Workers party that organised transport for hundreds of protesters travelling to Genoa in the summer, gathered about 1,500 people just over a fortnight ago to the first anti-war rally at Friends Meeting House in London. Since then, plans for peace demonstrations each Tuesday outside the UK prime minister's Downing Street residence in London have attracted small numbers.
Some who count themselves as Wombles - the White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggle - are planning a protest at Menwith Hill, the UK base for US surveillance equipment.
In many parts of the US and Europe, the anti-globalisation movement looks as though it is changing into an anti-war movement.
This is, perhaps, inevitable. Activists need to be active. Critics of the system do not like to be silent. And, for many, it is a matter of conscience: war is against their pacificist principles or their most pragmatic assessment of the situation - a wave of violence in response to the attacks on America can only create a new generation of martyrs and swell the ranks of willing suicide bombers, they say. Being anti-war, they tell you, is not an alternative to anti-globalisation, but a complement to it. It is born of the same compassion that prompted them to care about poverty, degradation and exploitation in the developing world in the first place.
But, as a strategy, anti-war activism is risky. It further distracts public attention from complicated counter-capitalist issues. And it threatens to expose as a weakness the diversity that until now has been the movement's greatest strength.
The rapidly gathering momentum of counter-capitalist protest over the last two years obscured the faultlines within the movement. The coalition of steelworkers and environmentalists, captured by the Teamsters and Turtles in Seattle, always looked odd. The World Bank and the IMF may not seem an obvious target for the AFL-CIO. But organised labour in America was determined to be astride the biggest wave of political activism in a generation and sponsored the planned demonstrations in Washington.
American labour, though, is not likely to sign up for an anti-war movement. As one Green activist puts it: "There will be some of the same people who were into anti-globalisation and are now involved in anti-war. But labour will be nowhere to be seen. Labour will be rallying around the flag."
The proponents of trade liberalisation, free markets and western liberalism have rallied in response to the assault on America. For them, capitalism no longer needs to be explained, it needs to be defended.
Robert Zoellick, the US trade negotiator, has argued that America should combat terror with trade. Those who feared anti-globalisation activism could act as a brake on the WTO's efforts to launch a new trade round now feel the activists can be ignored.
The coalition of counter-capitalists now faces a more energised and determined capitalist establishment than before. Keeping the coalition together while pursuing an anti-war agenda promises to be more difficult.
This is not only true between Greens and Blues, environmentalists and labour. In the past couple of years, some say much like 1968, activists in Europe and America have had a sense that they have been marching side by side. The sense now is that this moment has passed.
Across activist groups in Europe and the US, the message is the same: We are not sure exactly how things will go from here. But we are not going away. Over the months ahead, the calendar is full: the European Union summit in Belgium at the end of the year; the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre in January; the Rio-plus-10 environmental summit in Johannesburg in the middle of next year.
"The spirit is not flagging," says Susan George, intellectual grandmother of the movement in Europe. "It may be harder, but our message is even more necessary now. It is one of greater equality and solidarity between north and south."
Just as Ms George keeps burrowing away at the system, counter-capitalism remains doggedly what it was. It is still the Fifth Estate, a check on the excesses and inadequacies of global capitalism. Much like the media - the Fourth Estate - it is not always a force for good. It is riddled with egotism and petty politics. Its actions are sometimes misinformed, sometimes misjudged. It has an inflated sense of its own importance. Its targets keep changing and growing.
And it has been robbed of its momentum. Counter-capitalism was not just a movement, it was a mood. Its main platform - the street - is not as open as it was. Its message, always complicated, is now much more loaded. Its audience - politicians, the press and the public - are seriously distracted. And its funding base, already tiny, threatens to shrivel as charitable foundations and philanthropists see their fortunes shrink with the stock market.
As it has done before, it is going to have to reinvent itself. "The globalisation movement has been struck a blow, but not a mortal blow," says Danaher, the defiant activist who is still planning for a global day of action to protest against the WTO, even if it is not a march on Wall Street.
"We were damaged, but not irreparably. The movement is getting back on its feet. For a while, we were drowned out, but we are finding our voice."