After Genoaby Jonathan Rutherford
Introduction
The politics of direct action have become the flag that is waved in defiance at the corporate world and its ideology of neo-liberalism. Waving a flag is fine for symbolic effect, but when the wind drops, it tends to go limp. It is not an effective method of politics for the longer term. The anti-globalisation movement has recaptured a sense of idealism and hope in a cynical age. But if it is to consolidate itself as something enduring and politically effective, it must develop a critical analysis and political economy. Its over-reliance on the politics of spectacle makes it easily hijacked, either by Trotskyist groups intent on exploiting the movement's political capital, or by a tiny hardcore attacking the police. It needs a sustainable and credible politics of alliances which engages the broader and not unsympathetic public.
The anti-globalisation movement has relied on taking the moral high ground at the expense of concrete objectives and alternative policies to neo-liberal trade, unregulated capital markets and the current regime of global governance. The term anti-globalisation itself is misleading. It suggests a totalising economic development which embraces all economic sectors and all social life and to which there is no alternative. Most economic activity in rich countries is either not traded at all. If it is, it is trade with countries of similar income levels. An absolutist rejection of "globalisation" makes any position, bar total opposition to it, impossible.
There needs to be a more considered analysis of how capitalism is changing which will enable us to develop a strategic politics. Three key themes emerge:
First, the state and the exercise of national governance remain the most important means of checking global capital. The rise of international financial markets underpinned the globalisation of sectors of the economy. But crucially, the rise of capital markets have been boosted by the deregulation of domestic economies. National governments have privatised and marketised the telecoms industry and public utilities. Liberalisation of trade has been an ideological and political process. Nation-based representative democracy is still a critical factor in determining economic regulation, labour law, public sector spending and structures of global trade and finance.
Second, the version of modernisation espoused by New Labour, increasingly shared by other European centre left parties, has created a political life in which the only significant criteria of the public good is utility, merit and cost. Individuals are valued by their market success or productive usefulness. It is a regressive and anti-democratic modernisation. It is besotted with business and "national competitiveness."
Third, in contrast to the managerialist approach of governance, Western societies are experiencing extraordinary cultural change. New forms of diversity and ethical values are emerging which will alter the terrain of the political. The local and the global, the political and the ethical, the public and the private are categories and relationships in a state of flux.
Changes since the 1970's
The application of new information and communications technologies to production over the last three decades has led to an extraordinary level of capital accumulation. It has given rise to a global capitalist elite (dominated by the U.S) with historically unparalleled degrees of wealth. In Britain, the degree of inequality between rich and poor matches the period of the mid-nineteenth century. The dismantling of welfare states and the deregulation of the employment market in the Anglo Saxon economies has shifted risk from employer to employee, from state to individual, promoting an individualised culture of self reliance. The structural relationship of the working class to the means of manufacturing production has fragmented, and it has been unable to mobilise individuals against these new forms of risk that they face. Individual bonds to traditional institutions and social relationships have become increasingly vestigial. The individualisation of society places a question mark over the revival of social democracy as we have known it, as the alliance of class interests which brought it into effect has disappeared.
Neo-liberal capitalism has undermined representative democracy and forms of national and public authority. But the consumer market has also extended the notion of choice into culture, personal life and family relationships. The democratising of gender and family and the greater emphasis on culture and private life has given rise to a popular search for an ethics and practice of identity and emotional relationships. A new contract between the individual and society is emerging, and it has been here, not in the public realm of governance and politics, that there has been a reevaluation of what an ethics of living might be. The anti-globalisation movement has emerged out of this conjuncture and reasserted a collective challenge to poverty, exploitation and inequality - concerns which made socialist democracy in the twentieth century a central, humanising force. It is confronted with the task of fashioning a new spirit of solidarity in a highly individualised society. To achieve this, it needs to create a notion of the public good with due concern for the individual desire for personal autonomy, emancipation and cultural self-expression.
The precursors of this new politics are to be found in the social movements and identity politics of the 1970s which displaced the industrial, collectivist ethos of socialism. Today, personal identity is a defining paradigm of how we live in most Western cultures. We all need to belong, and to experience our lives as something which is meaningful to ourselves and to others. However, achieving a purposeful identity is no longer solely the struggle of the 1970s social movements against discrimination and oppression. With the growth of the knowledge driven economy, identity, like culture has become increasingly aestheticised and commodified. It is a central instrument in branding and advertising which articulates individual desire, need and aspiration as an act of consumption. When a part of ourselves becomes enmeshed in the exchange values of commodity relations, it becomes more difficult to define who we are and what we want. The realm of social relationships is devalued and can leave us with the feeling that life is meaningless because the relations we engage in are so often utilitarian and instrumental. We may no longer fear hunger or destitution, but there are now new dreads of loneliness, failure, insecurity and disenchantment.
In a culture of individualism and privacy we need to recover a recognition of our interdependence, and to reinvent a language of relationships between people. Ethical life begins the moment we encounter others who are not reducible to ourselves and realise that we must negotiate sharing the world with them. Ethical motivation is not inspired by divinity or higher authority, it comes from within the individual. Responsibility for the other is not self sacrificing altruism. It is the pursuit of self knowledge and understanding achieved in our relationship with others. In the words of Spinoza, ethics is the striving to persevere in our existence. It is the practice of being with oneself in the presence of an other person.
The challenge is to evolve an ethics whose principles provide for a public space in which people, as feminist scholar Daryl Koehn has described it, "can contest each other's descriptions of practical problems of mutual concern" and "respectfully and fairly hear those who speak in a different voice and to critically assess the truth of their claims." The appeal of the anti globalisation movement has been its ability to renew political life and begin to create an inclusive, democratic, global, public space.
In the past, ethically based politics have tended to embed themselves in principled positions whose rigidity and insistence on the purity of meaning have undermined their capacity for dialogue and the forging of alliances. As Gramsci has taught us the task of building an hegemonic politics is to win across disaffected elements of a ruling bloc and establish a new political formation. In Europe, the resistance of the ruling social democratic parties to neo-liberal globalisation has been minimal. Having repositioned themselves as "centre-left" parties, their collective response is the mantra "there is no alternative". Nevertheless an alternative is emerging from unexpected quarters. Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank's Senior Vice President and Chief Economist was fired in 2000, under the orders of the US Treasury's (then) Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Summers, for his outspoken criticism of the handling of the East Asia crisis. His downfall came with the publication of an article in The New Republic: "During the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century, I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department responded. And I was appalled." Stiglitz's concern was not just the secretive and anti-democratic nature of the IMF, but the U.S' determination to build free capital markets into the basic architecture of the world economy.
In Britain, Adair Turner, former Director General of the CBI and currently Vice-Chair of Merrill Lynch Europe, launched a sustained and convincing argument against New Labour's obsession with the concept of national competitiveness. Government thinking about economic strategy and globalisation has been pervaded by the idea that national economies compete with one another in the global market. Turner argues that it is a meaningless concept and "almost entirely wrong." It degrades debates about labour market regulation, encourages a misleading approach to measuring public sector productivity, and limits choices and "tradeoffs". Capitalism, he argues needs to be moderated and constrained to serve wider social objectives. Instead of dismissing their arguments as the acceptable face of the corporate establishment, the anti-globalisation movement has to recognise the significance of their arguments and use them tactically to win across the growing numbers of disaffected members of European social democratic parties.
After Genoa the goals are altogether less dramatic and romantic. The movement, which was never singular or homogeneous in the first place, needs to develop a unity in its differences. By articulating the kind of pragmatic ethics suggested by Koehn it can give itself a cohesiveness without surrendering its diversity. The carnivalesque and direct action politics remain central, but at the same time, it needs tangible, concrete goals that are broadly shared by a wide global constituency of people. These goals might include a fair, rules based system of global trade, and a global financial architecture that regulates the short term liquid financial transactions of the capital markets through for example the Tobin Tax. In the rich countries they would include a renascence of the public service ethos, a substantial investment in the public sector, and some form of progressive income tax. In broad terms such goals need to espouse a new democratic settlement between the individual and society underpinned by a public sector which is an effective and democratic redistributor and facilitator of wealth, resources and life opportunities.
Paradoxically, globalisation has increased the importance of the local. The impetus for change in the global structures of governance will originate in local struggles for democracy and economic justice. In Britain, PFI is providing a thirty year, ring fenced capital flow to corporations who are already exploiting this income stream by refinancing their newly acquired public sector assets. Local public services are being transformed into new corporate networks producing global commodities, and subject to the risk of mergers and acquisitions. The political attempts to open up the public sector to the global trade in services and for-profits corporate interests, provides an opportunity to build an alliance between the anti-globalisation movement, unions and local users of services. It is a popular combination that thinks globally and acts locally, takes strength from its cultural diversity, and offers the seedbed for an ethical and political challenge to the neo-liberal consensus. It might just mark the beginning of the end of the long Left interregnum.
Jonathan Rutherford is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Middlesex University