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December
13, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
By Elizabeth Crawford |
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Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the front Lines of the Globalization Debate, by Naomi Klein (Dimensions, 304 pp., $10.40)
aomi
Klein’s first book, No
Logo, appeared in 1999 on the heels of an attention-grabbing protest
against the World Trade Organization. The book vilified corporations and
brands, and seemed to crystallize the discontent of the protesters, putting
Klein at the center of nascent anti-corporate activism. The book was called
nothing less than a “movement bible” by the New York Times.
Klein's latest effort, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the front Lines of the Globalization Debate is a collection of essays that chronicle anti-corporate protests around the world from 1999 through 2001. It records moments when the “rabble of the real world” protested against the “experts-only club, where our collective fate is determined.”
Our collective fate? What at first sounds like a loopy conspiracy theory is really more a misguided literary imagination applied to economics. Here's Klein at her fictional best:
When . . . water was contaminated, it used to be blamed on the inept financial management or outright corruption of individual national governments. Now, thanks to a surge in cross-border information swapping, such problems were being recognized as the local effects of a particular global ideology . . . conceived of centrally by a handful of corporate interests.
This “global ideology” is, in Klein's opinion, the working of multinational corporations in an increasingly free-market system. It seems that her real problem is the conflict between the local voice of the community and the impersonal voice of corporate advertising. Klein pits the needs of indigenous people against the economic imperatives of corporations, and sees a David and Goliath drama unfolding. This is a literary imagination applied to economics. She holds companies, not local governments, responsible for meeting the needs of local communities worldwide, without considering —or even understanding — the underpinnings of economics.
Her analogy of the fence reveals this flawed approach. “Fence” is the term she applies to the assignment of monetary values to goods and services. This concept is a fundamental principle of economics. However, for Klein, it is a source of outrage. She is angered by the social injustice that occurs when basic goods and services are priced out of reach of the poor.
A virtual fence goes up around schools in Zambia when an education "user fee" is introduced on the advice of the World Bank, putting classes out of the reach of millions of people. . . . There is a real if invisible fence that goes up around clean water in Soweto when prices skyrocket owing to privatization.
Most people, even corporate executives, are pained by social inequities. But social ills have challenged governments for years. Companies are not actually in charge of caring for the poor. However, when corporations are functioning within the law, they help raise the standard of living.
Perhaps Klein is simply outraged that anyone must pay for anything. Maybe Klein should eliminate the “fence” around her book by giving it away. She doesn’t need the royalties — let her live on love.
Like Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — a handbook for yippies looking to stay stoned and ride free — Klein’s ideas have become the rallying point for disenfranchised people looking for a cause. And while Klein admits that those in the anti-corporate movement have disparate intentions, she says they are mostly “NGOs, labour unions, students and anarchists.”
In reality, they are the powerless and the angry — and their outlooks on life have descended for any number of unrelated reasons. Participating in these anti-corporate protests provides a way to express anger, and to be a part of something larger, without having to think of solutions.
What diffuses the threat of this movement — at least for now — is its lack of a coherent agenda and leadership. Klein's essays reveal behind-the-scenes chaos among the protesters, revealing the scrawny man behind the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz. Klein writes that
It’s true that the mass protests in Seattle and D.C. were a hodgepodge of slogans and causes, that to a casual observer it was hard to decode the connections between the treatment of U.S. death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fate of the sea turtles.
Even an attempt to organize this rag tag bunch at Riverside Church in New York failed, according to Klein. Further, when Czech President Vaclav Havel offered to mediate talks,
. . . there was no consensus among protest organizers about participating in the negotiations . . . no process in place to make the decision: no mechanism to select acceptable members . . . and no agreed-upon set of goals.
If Klein had wanted to hearten those in the movement, she could have written essays that show the “progress” of the leaders, recorded tangible victories, and propounded agendas. In doing so she would have created a comprehensive agenda as well as solutions — but that was not Klein’s intent. Sabotage without solutions is just anarchy, and that is what we have here.
Amazingly, the anti-corporate protestors could go on causing disruption and chaos, and even build momentum during soft economic times. Unfortunately, they are not to be dismissed just because they don’t know what they are about.
— Elizabeth Crawford is Adjunct Marketing Professor, Emory Goizueta School of Business.