Recorded Books Inc. - Fences and windows: dispatches from the front lines of the globalization debate

The Market Swallows the Commons

IV/Capitalizing on Terror

This is not a follow up to No Logo, the book about the rise of anti-corporate activism that I wrote between 1995 and 1999. That was a thesis-driven research project; Fences and Windows is a record of dispatches from the front lines of a battle that exploded right around the time that No Logo was published. The book was at the printers when the largely subterranean movements it chronicled entered into mainstream consciousness in the industrialized world, mostly as a result of the November 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Overnight, I found myself tossed into the middle of an international debate over the most pressing question of our time: what values will govern the global age?

What began as a two-week book tour turned into an adventure that spanned two and a half years and twenty-two countries. It took me to tear-gas-filled streets in Quebec City and Prague, to neighbourhood assemblies in Buenos Aires, on camping trips with anti-nuclear activists in the South Australian desert and into formal debates with European heads of state. The four years of investigative seclusion that it took to write No Logo had done little to prepare me for this. Despite media reports naming me as one of the leaders or spokespeople for the global protests, the truth was that I had never been involved in politics and didnt much like crowds. The first time I had to give a speech about globalization, I looked down at my notes, started reading and didnt look up again for an hour and a half.

But this was no time to be shy. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of people were joining new demonstrations each month, many of them people like me who had never really believed in the possibility of political change until now. It seemed as if the failures of the reigning economic model had suddenly become impossible to ignoreand that was before Enron. In the name of meeting the demands of multinational investors, governments the world over were failing to meet the needs of the people who elected them. Some of these unmet needs were basic and urgentfor medicines, housing, land, water; some were less tangible for non-commercial cultural spaces to communicate, gather and share, whether on the Internet, the public airwaves or the streets. Underpinning it all was the betrayal of the fundamental need for democracies that are responsive and participatory, not bought and paid for by Enron or the International Monetary Fund.

The crisis respected no national boundaries. A booming global economy focused on the quest for short-term profits was proving itself incapable of responding to increasingly urgent ecological and human crises; unable, for instance, to make the shift away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy sources; incapable, despite all the pledges and hand-wringing, of devoting the resources necessary to reverse the spread of HIV in Africa; unwilling to meet international commitments to reduce hunger or even address basic food security failures in Europe. Its difficult to say why the protest movement exploded when it did, since most of these social and environmental problems have been chronic for decades, but part of the credit, surely, has to go to globalization itself. When schools were underfunded or water supply 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, one enforced by national politicians but conceived of centrally by a handful of corporate interests and international institutions, including the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The irony of the media-imposed label anti-globalization is that we in this movement have been turning globalization into a lived reality, perhaps more so than even the most multinational of corporate executives or the most restless of jet-setters. At gatherings like the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, at counter-summits during World Bank meetings and on communication networks like www.tao.ca and www.indymedia.org, globalization is not restricted to a narrow series of trade and tourism transactions. It is, instead, an intricate process of thousands of people tying their destinies together simply by sharing ideas and telling stories about how abstract economic theories affect their daily lives. This movement doesnt have leaders in the traditional sense just people determined to learn, and to pass it on.

Like others who found themselves in this global web, I arrived equipped with only a limited understanding of neo-liberal economics, mostly how they related to young people growing up over-marketed and underemployed in North America and Europe. But like so many others, I have been globalized by this movement: I have received a crash course on what the market obsession has meant to landless farmers in Brazil, to teachers in Argentina, to fast-food workers in Italy, to coffee growers in Mexico, to shanty-town dwellers in South Africa, to telemarketers in France, to migrant tomato pickers in Florida, to union organizers in the Philippines, to homeless kids in Toronto, the city where I live.

This collection is a record of my own steep learning curve, one small part of a vast process of grassroots information sharing that has given swarms of peoplepeople who are not trained as economists, international-trade lawyers or patent expertsthe courage to participate in the debate about the future of the global economy. These columns, essays and speeches, written for The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and many other publications, were dashed off in hotel rooms late at night after protests in Washington and Mexico City, in Independent Media Centres, on way too many planes. (Im on my second laptop, after the man in the cramped Air Canada economy seat in front of me pressed Recline, and I heard a terrible crunching sound.) They contain the most damning arguments and facts I could get my hands on to use in debates with neo-liberal economists, as well as the most moving experiences I had on the streets with fellow activists. Sometimes they represent hurried attempts to assimilate information that had arrived in my inbox only hours earlier, or to counter a new misinformation campaign attacking the nature and goals of the protests. Some of the essays, especially the speeches, have not been published before.