#alterglobalization

[dailyanarchistposts]

From corporate critique to finance critique

Tellingly, activist ire today is no longer directed at the Starbucks and Niketowns which famously had their windows smashed in 1999. Rather, OWS has zeroed in on institutions of finance that produce nothing tangible that can be wrapped up in ethical packaging. Perhaps this will be the next frontier for the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism, but for now, housing bubbles and the gentrification that follows, betting on derivative futures and other forms of unbridled speculation are all easy targets for populist rage because they irreducibly exist to do nothing but make ever more money. The Wall Street versus Main Street frame expresses a preference for the ‘real’ economy of hard work and the production of useful things, which is counterpoised to a ‘parasitic’ world of banks and traders who shuffle other people’s money around in a global digital casino. Yet this discourse betrays a ressentiment passed off as anti-capitalism. It ignores the fact that small business owners are not immune to this logic, and must maximize profit by increasing sales, increasing worker productivity or lowering wages, the same as individual workers compete with their fellows for raises and better positions to improve their lot. It is not the competitive logic of capitalism that is challenged, but only its most obvious, odious and ‘abstract’ form, which is in reality inseparable from its ‘good’ manifestations.

In the absence of a systemic critique of capitalism, the US left often gets hopeful whenever class and economic inequality are broached in any form whatsoever, no matter how problematically. However, a vague constellation of populist themes and anti-banker sentiment coupled with skepticism towards the traditional left, theory and politics as such could just as easily be channeled in non-emancipatory responses to economic inequality. The explosive rise of Golden Dawn in Greece is a chilling reminder of the continuing danger of reactionary forms of anti-capitalism, ranging from various backward-looking communitarianisms, survivalism, to outright fascism. The atrophy of the left during 40 years of neoliberal hegemony, during which the very word capitalism disappeared from political discourse, has resulted in an uncritical optimism and historical amnesia of the potentially deeply reactionary forms such amorphous discontent might take. Some observers have noted worrisome parallels to anti-Semitism in left critiques which focus only on ‘disloyal’ bankers and an ‘unreal’ cosmopolitan consumer culture opposed to ‘authentic’ national communities and cultures (Arnold 2012; Ogman 2013). However, lacking the strong socialist or communist tradition found in Europe, critiques of capitalism in the USA have often taken nationalist and producerist forms (Wilentz 1984). Thus, this divergent political history results not in the anti-Semitic ‘socialism of fools’ August Bebel warned of, but instead simply a foolish socialism. Today, strong currents of anti-intellectualism, political pluralism, a preference for consensus and an aversion to ideological sectarianism maintain this state of affairs.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Left-neoliberalism: the anarchist as social entrepreneur?

Taken together, many aspects of neoliberalism are mirrored in neoanarchism, but given a left spin. Despite the rhetoric, the emphasis on boycotts, alternative products and consumer activism not only does not threaten capitalism, but in fact reinforces it by creating new markets while promoting the illusion of the powerful consumer operating within the inherently democratic market, with less attention given to detailing structural biases within market economies against ethical concerns like labor rights or ecology. These biases result in sustainable and fair-trade products which are much more expensive than their counterparts, as they must add an ethical surcharge to cover the costs of paying workers more or disposing of waste ecologically, a competitive disadvantage pitting conscience against pocketbook. Consumer-based politics also fuel a favorite right-wing stereotype, what Thomas Frank (2004) calls the ‘latte liberal’: college educated, typically white, wealthy enough to afford expensive specialized foods and products, and out of touch with or dismissive of the concerns of ‘ordinary’ people, in particular material inequality. The result is an aestheticization of politics wherein taste and cultural preference become a cipher and shorthand for politics. In the USA, the political right has deployed this reversed Gramscian strategy to great effect, by opposing a working-class cultural idiom to the French-speaking, Volvo-driving, arugula-eating liberal elitists. Of course, the disastrous impact of Republican economic policy on the working class, and the significant consensus with their Democratic counterparts on such matters, goes unmentioned.

Additionally, neoanarchist politics defines itself in opposition to a form of state power that capital has largely already defunded if not defanged. If states, with all their coercive power, have proven both unwilling and unable to tame the competitive logic of capital accumulation, it is unclear why decentralized autonomous projects would be able to fare any better. Yet alternative economic institutions feature prominently within anarchist (and perhaps unsurprisingly, liberal) discourse: cooperatives, microcredit, community gardens and community-supported agriculture are presented as institutional alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Bookchin (1999) argues:

‘To the extent that American anarchists possessed a theory of social change, it was communitarian — a program of changing capitalist society by instituting presumably independent print shops, food coops, head shops, and even libertarian farms, organized along egalitarian and cooperative lines ... ’ (108)

While greater worker control over the workplace is an unqualified desideratum, such projects are nonetheless subject to the same competitive pressures as other firms operating within capitalist markets. Rather than expansion into the kind of counterpower capable of mounting a challenge to capitalism, the history of such experiments is one of failure: such endeavors are typically short-lived; facing bankruptcy, some lucky smaller enterprises are able to carve out niche market survival as specialty boutiques, while larger ones like Mondragon in Spain become increasingly indistinguishable from traditional firms (Kasmir 1996). Murray Bookchin (forthcoming) has pointed out limits to this strategy for social change:

‘Cooperatives that profess to be moral in their intentions have yet to make any headway in replacing big capitalist concerns or even in surviving without themselves becoming capitalistic in their methods and profitoriented in their goals. The Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers — as opposed to a genuinely socialistic or libertarian communistic endeavor — can slowly eat away at capitalism should finally be dispelled.’

Even the most sophisticated and explicitly political experiment with cooperatives — those which existed during the Spanish Revolution — could not escape the pressures of capitalism. There competition between cooperatives for resources and markets essentially reproduced the familiar problems of socialism in one country (Bookchin 2007, 103). Both the nature of capitalist exchange and the historical record suggest it is unlikely that such alternative economic institutions can beat capitalism at its own game, or even survive. Often, great energy is expended to offer products or services that modern capitalism can produce more cheaply and efficiently, and for dubious political gains. Ultimately, such enterprises remain hostage to the same market forces as any other business, where almost every advance for workers’ rights or ecology constitutes a competitive disadvantage against less scrupulous competitors which must be offset by higher prices. Taken together, the challenges faced by economic alternatives call to mind Adorno’s (2010, 39) warning in Minima Moralia that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Abstract: Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999 to its recent incarnation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this article argues that neoanarchism’s attempts to “change the world without taking power” pose serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today. The text also examines recuperation as a factor in social movement decline, arguing that the incorporation of social movement themes is constructing a “new spirit of capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for a more ethical world while simultaneously insulating itself from critique — a process facilitated by significant ideological resonance between neoanarchism and neoliberalism.

Between September left activism 30 November 1999 and 11 2001, a surge of radical swept across the USA and many other parts of the globe to contest the institutions of global neoliberalism. Forged against the backdrop of the collapse of communism, the decline of the labor movement, a triumphant neoliberal consensus, and a left landscape shaped largely by feminism, ecology and antiracism, the radicalism at the core of the alterglobalization movement (AGM) that emerged at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial protests in Seattle was characterized by a new political sensibility uniting a diversity of concerns, often under the ideological umbrella of anarchism.[1] Departing significantly from both the Marxism of the New Left and classical anarchism, some have dubbed this emergent politics ‘neoanarchism’ (Castells 2005).

Fast forward a decade. The financial crisis of 2008 belatedly vindicates the AGM as the deregulation, deindustrialization and outsourcing advocated by neoliberalism are widely cited as key factors behind the collapse, Keynesianism is revived and the cover of Newsweek proclaims ‘we are all socialists now’ (16 February 2009). Despite his neoliberal pedigree, the Obama campaign successfully tapped into widespread economic dissatisfaction with the slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’, simultaneously playing up his background as a community organizer and even directly borrowing the motto ‘Yes We Can’ from the United Farm Worker movement once led by Cesar Chavez. For a brief moment before being eclipsed by the Tea Party, his administration held out the solution of a ‘Green New Deal’ that could save the planet and capitalism through renewable energy, eco-retrofitting and other green enterprises. Ideas and practices only recently confined to the margins of the radical environmental movement were suddenly thrust center stage. Spearheaded by exradical turned presidential advisor Van Jones, his fate is instructive. Appointed to be Obama’s green jobs czar and chief architect of the proposed green economy, he was forced to resign when his past involvement with radical left groups of the AGM was uncovered by right-wing media.

Yet ultimately the spectacular implosion of neoliberalism in 2008 resulted in, paradoxically, more neoliberalism — bailouts for banks and large corporations, austerity for the populace. The movement slogan ‘another world is possible’ has been rebuked by a zombie neoliberalism that insists ‘there is no alternative’. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has challenged this narrative by problematizing economic inequality and the neoliberal discourse that legitimated it, and reintroduced the words ‘class’ and ‘capitalism’ back into political debate. Occupy Wall Street represents the convergence of a populism animated by those directly hit by the economic crisis with previously existing neoanarchist activists. Its anarchist-inflected politics draws heavily from the AGM of a decade before; movement calls for leaderless direct democracy, critique of corporate power, commitment to anti-oppression politics, radical pluralism and emphasis on direct action directly build on the neoanarchist politics of the North American AGM. Indeed, many key activists who laid the groundwork for OWS, such as David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, are veterans of the main organization of the AGM, the Direct Action Network (DAN). Will OWS share the AGM’s fate?

Modern capitalism has increasingly come to speak the language of social movements: sustainability, authenticity, fairness, freedom. How did the language of the left become the language of business? I propose that an important part of the answer lies in the historical development of left social movements from the New Left through the AGM and OWS today. This article looks at the relationship between social movements and power in an attempt to better understand their interpenetration and mutual codetermination within capitalism, and some implications for emancipatory social change today. This text will address five main themes: first, it will examine several explanations for the decline of the AGM; second, offer an alternative narrative that emphasizes the process of recuperation; third, outline a critique of neoanarchism that highlights affinities with neoliberalism that have made it especially prone to recuperation; fourth, explore how this has transformed both the left and contemporary capitalism; and finally, examine how this legacy both lives on and is being challenged in OWS today.

[radicalarchive]

'Stop The WTO! Carnival Against Capital / N30 Global Day of Action', Seattle, 1999.

[laomyhoran]

#Altermundismo #Alterglobalization