Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 17:38:40 -0500 From: Chuck Munson <chuck at tao.ca>
As the smoke clears, Britain's organised/liberal left expose themselves as the fad-rebel whip crackers we always knew they were
Flaco Feb 2002
Three weeks ago New York City got to host the World Economic Forum. As a 'tribute to the victims of September 11th', Manhattan taxpayers got to indulge a bunch of tobacco, oil and airline magnates, and a wannabe-planetary-cabinet of shady statesmen. Collectively, these people are responsible for an infinitely greater number of deaths and shattered lives than the combined kill-rate of every Arab who ever strapped on C4 corset.
The WEF - think Bilderberg group with Bono in tow - is yet another (yawn) boys-club of capitalism's shot-callers. Cue Troy McClure: "You may remember us from such classics as Davos, and Melbourne's (later upstaged) own S11 (2000) street fight..." Anyway - it was their antics that sparked the alternative World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil (another nice idea quickly colonised by red flag hierarchies), and twice yearly mass protests from across the anti-capitalist spectrum. But not this time.
Patriot Act and Bush-whack rhetoric aside, it's fairly predictable that the lefty-millionaires Sierra Club should bottle out of confrontation with the power brokers in the post-S11 city of tears. No real surprise either that the AFL-CIO unions and the host of 'Global Justice' NGOs of every shade of red and green balked at the idea of ruffling the feathers of New York's finest. As the city's press, on both the left and the right, cranked up the spectre of an "al Quaeda like black bloc" (Village Voice) massing like "barbarians at the castle gates" (Newsweek). A string of Direct Action Movement 'faces' lined up to distance themselves from anyone whose agenda aimed for anything greater than a moratorium on badger baiting. "Vandalism is inexcusable," lamented John Sellers, the caribina king of the ludicrously-bankrolled Ruckus Society. Needless to say, the reporting (in an almost blanket fashion) concentrated on the differences in tactics between the anarchists and the liberals. No space was given to the gaping ideological chasm between the RaisetheFist militia on Fifth Avenue, and the 'raise the Tobin tax' lobbyists munching vol-au-vents with the delegates in the Waldorf Astoria foyer.
In the event, a few thousand anarchists and assorted revolutionary types took to the streets and, amidst an outpouring of sympathy, the 'poor darlings' of the NYPD dutifully kicked the shit out of them and threw a couple of hundred in jail.
The events in New York merely illustrate how the organised left (in the UK as elsewhere) has used September 11 to re-position itself in an, at best, more compliant, and at worst, more authoritarian stance.
Liberal Britain has been split between the trembling lips and disappearing tails of those who are content to wrap themselves in a tear-stained stars and stripes and vanish up Uncle Sam's arse, and those who have (at last) been freed to brandish their handcuffs and lay down their own blueprints for a capitalist super-state. Either way, Britain's left-wing have finally exposed themselves as the fad-rebel tosspots we always knew they were.
"Standing protesting outside Gap is a strange thing to do when civilians are being killed in Afghanistan," Globalise Resistance's Guy Taylor tells a fawning Andy Beckett (Guardian G2, Jan 17 'Has the Left Lost Its Way'). The implication being that before September 11 - before perceived public support for resistance to world dictatorship evaporated in an explosion of dust, glass and cello music - it was perfectly natural to be protesting outside Gap as civilians endured a blitzkrieg of Allied firepower in Palestine, Indonesia, Columbia and Iraq. Beckett goes on to quote a stream of liberal left-wing tossers who's politics were so well-founded that they'd managed to pull off complete ideological U-turns after a only couple of weeks of heart-tugging ('poor old America') Newsak.
'Formerly hardcore left-wingers' were apparently getting all gooey over Tony Blair's Montgomery makeover. The Ecologist ran a debate titled: 'Is the anti-corporate globalisation movement a finished force in the post-11 September world?' Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore was just one of those, converted by the smell of cordite, giving it the: "I was wrong to oppose the bombing," line as the Taliban fled Kabul - as if the women of city had thrown their oppressors out themselves, and were not about to become the latest subjects of a US-manufactured puppet state.
As a rule, the anti war movement in Britain has been reluctant to confront the illegitimacy of the warring authority. Though opposed to the bombing, most silently-accept a 'first world'/US orchestrated 'solution' to Afghanistan: namely the Western annexation of Central Asia.
To be fair, this reactionary slide had begun well before the World Trade Centre attack. The SWP (perhaps after finally accepting the absence of 'workers' in its ranks) had already switched its' preferred handle to 'Globalise Resistance'. Having left it a little late to fasten their name to the anti-capitalist upsurge of 1999 (as they had done with the Poll Tax, CJA etc), they wasted no time ramming branded anti-war placards into the hands of pacifist old ladies and fearful Muslims as Blair strapped on his flak jacket. No sooner had the first F-16s scrambled and Globalise Resistance was morphing again - this time into the Stop the War Coalition.
Anti-capitalism (a phrase that was itself adopted by liberal left-wingers trying to avoid any pro-revolutionary tags), has been dropped altogether by the left in favour of "movement for globalisation with justice". You may laugh, but the underlying thought processes behind this repositioning are a little more sinister.
One leading voice of the liberal left is the New Internationalist magazine. Their January/February issue was subtitled 'Another World is Possible'. The introduction promised "visions" of "many diverse pathways into a better, fairer world". The reality merely reinforced what Orwell pointed out over sixty years ago; that the organised left's version of 'democracy' is little different from the right's, and despite the tags, they have no intention of doing away with the constraints of capitalism - and would merely replace the domination of private capital with that of state capital. Or to bring that observation up to date 'a (neo)liberally-distributed amalgamation of the two'. Global PPPs anyone?
The 'visions' put forward by the NI's gathered worthies are 'diverse' in the same way the aims of the navy are 'diverse' from those of the air force. Every proposal in the magazine is legislative and authoritarian. According to the writers, elected bodies could be re-jigged, governing institutions formed, legislation passed and treaties re-written. The lack of aspiration is depressing... unless, of course, you're setting yourself up for a seat in 'the world parliament'.
The World Parliament is Lord Monbiot's offering. Another spin on electoral 'representative' democracy peddled with all the fervour of a Republican governor. Completely disregarding the lessons of history, where electoral democracy has failed to either represent or serve the people (other than those 'elected' and their chums), Monbiot taunts would-be detractors with: "Power exists whether we like it or not... so we might as well democratise it". You can't dis-invent the Bomb - eh!
As if a host of similar statist adventures (every election anytime/anywhere, the policy reversal of all elected bodies - e.g. the German Greens, the failure of Kyoto, the carbon trading style legislative loop-holing that followed, Nato - and it's complete disregard for law/anybody else, the failure of; the UN; the EU; every other power-invested institution to address anything other than its own pay checks ...and so on) hadn't all resulted in those in power completely fucking over everyone else, Monbiot goes on to outline his global hegemony leading the rest of us skipping to milk and honey-dom. He never mentions, however, if two wolves and a sheep would doing the catering...
Joining Monbiot in the NI is Jim Shultz ('executive director of The Democracy Centre'), who uses the genuinely inspiring example of the Cochabamba people's ejection of the Bechtel water company from Bolivia, to 'envision' - not for people everywhere to rise up against their usurpers, not for the global rejection of economic dictatorship, not even for the ditching of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and all similarly oppressive international trade treaties, but (wait for it) a 'bill of rights' to ensure the FTAA does not overrule regional laws. Go Jim. Go...!
Maybe we should be grateful that the left has come clean - shaken off their Seattle rain capes and returned to bickering about vote counts and electoral funding. For some time, the rhetoric of the leading left wing/environmentalist NGO's has been almost indistinguishable from that of the World Bank's... - though admittedly, this revealed precious little about either faction's agenda
But, the question remains - how wide is the influence of the organised left and their liberal overlord companions - and how substantially are they capable of stemming the rising revolutionary tide anyway?
There are those who hope they are well capable; the bods from the FBI who spent half of last month dismantling LA's RaisetheFist.org with the site's founder, Sherman, locked in the basement; the EU's Working Party on Terrorism who are right now in Spain, drafting a document on intelligence sharing about political activists in order to stamp out "violent urban youthful radicalism"; the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) and the half dozen US state and private sector bodies it initiated under the National Security Council and Department of Defence (to name but two) to combat 'hacktivism' and 'cyberterror!'; the Swedish authorities who have just rejected the appeals of eight activists, each serving between 3-4 years, for using SMS messages to stop their mates getting hammered by police at the EU summit in Gothenburg last year; every boss, landlord and New Labour voter; every shareholder, whip-cracker and charity director, (insert your own 'come the revolution they'll be the first against the wall' list here), and everyone else who, overtly or covertly, revels in the deal capitalism has dealt them.
Back in Porto Alegre, undoubtedly the left's blueprint for a 'world parliament' (in his keynote address Chomsky called it a sketch of the beginnings of a 21st Century International), the predictable has happened. Two years in, and the 2002 Forum is already playing host to corporate lobbyists, media clowns and WEF delegates ("jumping ship from NYC"). Naomi Klein (one of the 10,000 invited 'delegates') describes the WSF as at risk from "turning from a clear alternative into a messy merger" with their New York antithesis.
In protest to what Znet's James Adams calls "left-wing corporatism", 600 attendees of the alternative Jornadas Anarquistas - Anarchist Journeys - (some of the 50,000 'excluded' internationals who had travelled to Porto Alegre to unite and discuss outside the 'conference centres') "broke off from the opening march and occupied a three story house, building barricades in the streets, in order to emphasize that, as one IMC (Independent Media Centre) poster put it, 'Porto Alegre isn't the social democratic paradise that the PT (Brazilian Workers Party) makes it out to be.'" (The PT control the municipal government and view the WSF as a party conference - draping the town in their flags, propaganda and party faithful.) Needless to say: " Local police, under the command of the PT, and dressed in full riot gear, surrounded the house immediately, nearly running over one squatter at a particularly high point of tension." Familiar?
However - despite the fifth International looking set to follow the first into a dog-pit of flying fur and shattered dreams, perhaps things are not so bleak. The 50,000 who gathered outside the auspices of the WSF in Porto Alegre, and the two thousand that took on the WEF in New York - plus the tens of millions who have already learnt the hard way that genuine, direct, democracy will never follow a recount, a rebrand or any amount of reform - do not look like they are about to jack-in the revolution because Washington's 'busted' the safety catch off its' Winchester.
Undoubtedly the atmosphere of resistance has changed. But, just because the warmongers were quicker to colonise the airwaves, it doesn't follow that they win the (global) war. By shirking off that protest-chic, the reformist-statist-liberal-left has finally brought some clarity to the message they have been concealing from disgruntled 'democrats' for years - namely, that they do not seek the overthrow of illegitimate power, merely its replacement. Now that's clear, we can get on with the fucking revolution!