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On Logos and Grassroots:

The anti-globalisation movement between

morals, economics and politics

By Luuk van Middelaar

Working paper

Written for the Institute of Infonomics (Heerlen, the Netherlands)

September 2, 2002.

Edited by Richard Miniter

After all, they need to fill their cars with something

Owens Saro-Wiwa


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Introduction

The last decade or so the feeling has grown in the Western world

that we are living in a new society, changing faster than ever

before, finally unified by global capital flows and by a web of new

and indeed spectacular communication technologies. This

sentiment has found expression in the frequent use of the term

new by social scientists as well as by the general public. Thus new

media, new economy, new spirit of capitalism, and even a new world order (although this last concept could be ironically done

away with after Sept. 11th. 2001).

Commentators agree that the common denominator behind these

developments is the phenomenon of the economisation of social

and political spheres. Because of its world wide scope this

phenomenon is called globalisation.1 The surge of money seems to

be even stronger than during the days when Marx wrote his

Capital, destroying communities, uprooting traditions, and erasing

ancient ways of living.

As often, the new arouses resistance. Rising against the

unknown forces supposedly at work, a new movement is taking

shape that is striving against globalisation, a movement whose

very localisedactions attached to metropolises such as Seattle,

Gothenburg, Washington, Genoa - have succeeded in filling

1 The subject of globalisation has inspired a large number of publications since the mid-nineties. To

give an idea of this overwhelming production: a bibliography on the globalisation of the economy

issued by the GermanBundestag in March 2000, although mainly focussing on publications in German

after 1995, contained already more than one thousand titles. The recent update (covering the period

until December 2001) adds another 500 books and articles. (See:

www.bundestag.de/verwalt/bibliothek/akt_lit/bibliographien/). Useful as a first overview, uniting some

forty key articles written in the nineties by authors such as Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington,Stephen J. Korbin, and others, is the reader Globalization, and the Challenges of a New Century ,

Patrick OMeara, Howard D. Mehlinger and Matthew Krain eds. (Indiana U.P. 2000).


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newspapers throughout the world. The anti-globalisation

movement unites a broad coalition of ecological, Third-World-

oriented, human rights, protectionist, nationalist, Marxist-

Leninist, anarchical and other opposition groups from different

countries; because of its rainbow character, the movement likes to

present itself as a civil society for the era of globalisation. In one

important way this self-proclamation is true: the anti-globalisation

movement offers the only largely shared and publicly expressed

discourse on the recent global developments of economisation and

informatisation issues that are elsewhere only discussed by theprofessional inner circles of universities and think tanks. It is thus

not only interesting but rather important to investigate the

functioning, the force and the eventual failure of this unique public

discourse on global economisation.

In this paper, I will first take a quick glance at the historical

background and present functioning of the anti-globalisation

movement, briefly sketching the ideological and sociological

configuration of the strands and groups that it is composed of. I

will also explain the vital role the Internet played in the connection

of all the grassroots movements (After the Wall, the Web). I will

then concentrate on the key question of how the anti-globalisation

movement theorises about the changing relationship between

economy and politics. What are its responses to the basic issue

underlying any attempt to interpret recent developments in the

fields of economics, politics, and society? Answers will be given in

two parts: first, I will try to map out the basic scheme of the anti-

globalisation discourse (Democracy against Capitalism); second,

I will focus on two of their proposed solutions to perceived global

injustice (Tariffs and Taxes). I will argue that, paradoxically, the


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anti-globalisation discourse against economisation consists mainly

of an analysis of the world in economic terms.2 The campaigners

come forward with economic responses and proposals to change

the political system, thus ignoring power and politics, with

counter-productive, sometimes even devastating consequences.

I. After the Wall, the Web

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was seen by many as the beginning of a new era. The end of totalitarian communism

became synonymous with the final victory of democratic

capitalism. This millenarian thesis was of course most famously

developed by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the

self-confident herald of the End of History.3 Note though that in

Fukuyamas view this so-called End did notmean that History was

completely over as many commentators too hastily

misinterpreted him. It meant that the historical vanguard, that is,

the most developed Western countries, had reached the final

destination of mankind: capitalist democracy. Everything that was,

2 This first struck me during the days after Sept. 11th .. It subsequently became my main working

analysis. The rigid economicist mindset of the American Left and the French Gauche almost obligedthem to interpret the attacks on the World Trade Centre as the revenge of the Poor against the Rich,

with the positive side effect of turning the perpetrators into representatives of victims. Influential

leftwing intellectuals as Saskia Sassen (author of many well-documented books on globalisation),

Susan Sontag, Ignacio Ramonet and Slavoj Zizek considered that America more or less deserved this

punishment for having spread poverty and injustice throughout the world. Italian communist and author

ofEmpire Toni Negri even expressed his sat isfaction about the attacks. This was the boomerang of

globalisation . The fact that the terrorists attacks were probably commanded by one of the richest men

in the Arab world, executed by European-educated middle class young men, not aiming at social justice

but at destruction of a political enemy, was in their eyes irrelevant, just as were religious or cultural

categories to explain this political deed. Economics explained it all. Raised in the Marxist school of

political thinking, these one-dimensional critics were, distressingly, unable to perceive the autonomy

of political motifs.3

Francis Fukuyama, The end of history?, The National Interest, April 1989. Three years later, thequestion mark had disappeared: Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the Last Man (New York

and London 1992).


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according to Fukuyama, still likely to happen (including wars and

regional conflicts) could be considered as part of the alignment of

the provinces, that is, as part of the historical process by which

underdeveloped countries in the periphery would climb slowly to

the same level of welfare and freedom as the happy centre. All

humankind is heading for the same goal. The most important

aspect of Fukuyamas message was thus not: History is Over, but:

History only has One Direction.

This historical perspective might explain the rapidly growing

popularity, in the 1990s, of the term globalisation. Indeed,globalisation can be understood as the movement by which History

marches towards the announced End, the world wide reign of

capitalist democracy. The crumbling of the Cold War frontier, led

to the belief that allfrontiers would disappear. The epoch of the

iron Curtain gave way to the era of (open) Windows After the

Wall, the Web. Many disparate economic, financial, technological,

cultural and social phenomena suddenly seemed to be part of one,

exciting story, the story of globalisation. One should therefore not

even exclude the possibility that the terms popularity found its

origin less in a change in the real world (if the reader wants to

forgive me this nave expression), than in a change in the way

people started to think about historical developments in this world,

or be conscious of them. The whole idea of globalisation might

even be some sort of collective hysteria. As Italian novelist Baricco,

in a stimulating booklet on the subject, put it: Comment expliquer

cette envie collective cet empressement utiliser la catgorie de

globalisation, quoi quil se passe en ralit sur la plante? Or,

stated in a more prosaic manner: Why were the dozens of litres of

Coca Cola per person already consumed by the Brazilians twenty-


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five years ago part of internationalisation, and is the less than a

bottle a year emptied by the average Indian today proof of

globalisation?4 In this paper I will leave aside the intriguing

question if, and to what degree, globalisation is really something

new. Therefore, no fascinating facts and figures on such hotly

debated topics as the relative inter-penetration of the late-19th-

century economies compared to those of the 20th-century, on the

rising coke-consuming capacities of the Indian subcontinent, or on

the world-wide dominance of Roman law in AD 200 as pre-

figuration of American legal power AD 2000. Instead, this paperwill focus on how people have interpreted these perceived changes

and reacted to them; not (or only indirectly) on the thing called

globalisation, but on the discourse-movement called anti-

globalisation.

To consider globalisation as a working idea with which

people understood the post-1989-march toward mankinds

historical destination, has another advantage. Such a reading could

in its turn explain why it was the term globalisation that, during

the 1990s, came to function as a hate-object, why people started

to define their political position as anti-globalisation. Because the

term seems not very well-chosen, and confusing. Sceptical

commentators of the young anti-globalisation movement were

eager to point out the irony that, in fact, the activists were on the

contrary very globalised; uniting people throughout the (Western)

world thanks to the Internet, relying on the same global

information networks which facilitate the spread of foreign capital

that they are fighting against. This conceptual weakness has by

now been recognised: following best-selling author Naomi Klein,

4Alessandro Baricco,Next(Paris 2002, translated from the Italian) 24, 21.


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some of the activists now simply refer to the Movement, others

found different solutions to avoid facile criticism (e.g., some

Flemish activists tried to stimulate the use in Dutch of the

alternative term of anders-globalisme for the old anti-

globalisme). All these efforts were made in order to express the

idea that the movement is not so much against globalisation itself

(this would be awkward and retrograde provincialism) but against

a certain type of globalisation, usually defined as the neo-liberal

globalisation, la mondialisation marchande, etc. This conceptual

confusion could have been avoided, if it had been understood fromthe start that the ubiquity of the term globalisation was the

dynamic expression of the popular post-1989 belief in the final

victory of capitalism. Therefore, what goes under the label of anti-

globalisation can better be understood as anti-capitalism or

counter-capitalism.

Berlin 1989, then, is indeed the best starting-point to explain

Seattle 1999. Only the final victory of capitalism created the

possibility of a new counter-capitalism. As long as communism was

a political force embodied in a totalitarian regime, any anti-

capitalist discourse was discredited beforehand. (Although this had

only been the case since the 1970s, when the last European fellow-

travellers had to admit that their egalitarian paradise was in fact a

political, economic and environmental nightmare.) Thus the

collapse of the Soviet Union did not preclude the possibility of anti-

capitalism. On the contrary, it liberated a space for anti-capitalist

critique that had been swallowed by the dark shadows of the Gulag

Archipelago.5 After some wound licking in the early 1990s, anti-

5 The most shameless even integrated the lessons of the anti-totalitarian critique and started speaking ofun totalitarisme libral , liberal totalitarianism (Danile Mitterrand, quoted in Jean-Franois Revel,


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capitalist discourse could thus re-enter the ideological stage. It had

recycled its political innocence. But in the process it had also lost

its politicalforce. Virgin again, but impotent. This uneasy situation

explains some of the characteristics of the anti-globalisation

discourse which we will encounter the main temptation for any

innocence without power being, of course, empty moralisation. Cut

loose from its past, bereft of a road map for the way forward, anti-

capitalism has difficulties in going beyond saying no to the world

as it is. To refute the End of History, the best thing it came up with

was one religious perspective for another the quasi-radicalslogan: Another world is possible

It has been claimed that its forerunners even brought down the

Berlin Wall. That may not be true. But the Internet surely did play

a substantial role in the growing of the anti-globalisation

movement6.

Some thinkers even link the two phenomena, making the

Web and the Movement the heart of something that appears

always a revolution in human nature. Sociologist Manuel Castells,

the guru of the information society, affirmed back in 1996: our

societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition

between the Net and the Self. This newly found Self is, according

to Castells, the stage of a new form of the political action: New

information technologies are integrating the world in global

networks of instrumentality. Computer- mediated communication

begets a vast array of virtual communities. Yet the distinctive social

and political trend of the 1990s is the construction of social action

La grande parade. Essai sur la survivance de lutopie socialiste, Paris 2000, 353) or of fascismelibral (sub-commander Marcos inLe Monde Diplomatique, March 2000).6

I will continue to use this term.


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and politics around primary identities, either ascribed, rooted in

history and geography, or newly built in an anxious search for

meaning and spirituality. The first historical steps of informational

societies seem to characterize them by the pre-eminence of identity

as their organizing principle.7 Castells thus sees the new forms of

social and political organisation as the direct product of the

information age

One does not have to agree with Castells claims. Yet, one of

the sociologists favourite examples of such a new social

movement did develop into an icon of the anti-globalisationmovement, namely the Mexican Zapatistas Army led by the

subcomandante Marcos.8 Blessed with a feeling for publicity, the

mysterious sub-commander launched a new attack of his

Zapatistas rebellion in southern Mexico on the day of the coming

into force of Northern American Free Trade Area (NAFTA),

January 1, 1994 thus placing his rather ordinary guerrilla under

the sign of the global struggle against neo-liberalism, securing

world-wide sympathy. The Internet played a huge role in this

successful campaign. A website dedicated to a study of Marcos

movement states: The international circulation through the Net of

the struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) has become one

of the most successful examples of the use of computer

communications by grassroots social movements. That circulation

has not only brought support to the Zapatistas from throughout

Mexico and the rest of the World, but it has sparked a world wide

discussion of the meaning and implications of the Zapatista

7Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and

Culture, I) (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK 1996) 3, 22.8Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, II)

(Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK 1997) 79-81.


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rebellion for many other confrontations with contemporary

capitalist economic and political policies.9

The Zapatista movement did exist before the Internet. But it

was the Internet that linked this particular movement to all the

other movements that subsequently came to make up the anti-

globalisation movement. Without the Internet, the global

movement could not have existed. How else would all these

different organisations and grassroots movements have found

each other? People coming from the anti-apartheid movement, the

campaigns against US intervention in central America, pacifists,environmentalists, European former communist parties, new

protest movements in the Third World, they are all united under

the anti-globalisation label. Journalists in Seattle 1999 marvelled

at the smart use of information technology by the campaigners.1 0

Indeed, the Internet and e-mail, the cheapest and fastest media for

an exchange of information, enabled the predominantly small,

non-profit groups with tiny budgets to orchestrate massive

protests. The conviction that they all belong to a world wide protest

movement, undoubtedly contributed in return to the self-

confidence of the local groups that make up this movement the

whole strengthened the parts. The line which connects

Birmingham to Seattle to Washington to Porto Alegre and beyond

has been the Internet. The Web: unparalleled fertiliser for

grassroots

9 http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.html. Lately, the cyber attention

to the Zapatistas has somewhat diminished (due, perhaps, to the rather unromantic negotiation talks

Marcos had with Mexican president Fox?).10

Even before Seattle, a FT-reporter wrote about the mid-1998 protests against a OECD proposal: The

opponents decisive weapon is the Internet. Operating from around the world via web sites, they have

condemned the proposed agreement as a secret conspiracy to ensure global domination bymultinational companies, and mobilized an international movement of grassroots resistance. Financial

Times, 30 April 1998, quoted in: Naomi Klein,No Logo (New York 1999) 443.


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To get an idea of the movements world wide functioning, it

might be useful to finish these preliminary remarks with a

presentation of a few of the more important organisations of the

anti globalisation movement and their websites.

- International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org): a think

tank, founded in San Francisco, January 1994; a very early

grouping of individuals and organisations who wanted to fight the

forces of economic globalisation following the signing of the

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) Treaty. The IFG nowrepresents more than sixty organisations from twenty-five

countries.

- Indymedia (www.indymedia.org): a media centre born in Seattle

1999 uniting independent media organizations and hundreds of

journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage.

Considering that the classical media are part of the System and

cannot guarantee independent news, reporters of Indymedia cover,

via Internet and thanks to small digital cameras, the mass

demonstrations that have given the virtual movement its

substance. Radio coverage is taken care of at Indymedias

wssd.waag.org.

- Protest.net (www.protest.net): can be considered as the diary of

the movement. This website announces major protests all over the

world, with one-issue-subgroups like http://pax.protest.net/ for

anti-war and anti-racism events, etc.


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- The Ruckus Society (http://ruckus.org/): is a facilitating

organisation. Under the motto actions speak louder than words

the Ruckus Society organises nothing less than training camps for

activists apparently, military precision is needed to get enough

media attention for your anti-globalisation action

- ATTAC (www.attac.org). This is a central player in the anti-

globalisation movement. Originally a French organisation, founded

in 1999 by two editors of the leftwing magazine Le Monde

diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet and Bernard Cassen, in order toplea for the regulation of international capital flows via the

introduction of the so-called Tobin Tax. Having now broadened its

scope beyond fiscal matters, and with local satellites all over the

world, Attac is probably the best known and most powerful anti-

globalisation organisation. In the old paper-world, the journal of

its founders finds an important readership all over the world

(www.monde-diplomatique.fr).

-No Logo (www.nologo.org): together with the Attac-movement,

the bookNo Logo (1999) by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has

probably done most to give the Movement a place in public

discourse. The site dedicated to her international best-seller is half

fan-club half classic activists website.

- Another leading personality of the anti-globalisation movement is

French goat farmer and activist Jos Bov. Leader of the farmer

union Confdration paysanne

(http://www.anda.asso.fr/acteurs/fichesonag/confedpaysanne.ht


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m), he had to face a three-month prison for vandalising a

McDonalds restaurant in Millau, southern France (1999).

- World Social Forum (http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/):

massive annual gathering of adherents to the anti-globalisation

movement in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre (a tradition that

began in January 2001), the World Social Forum wants to be the

counterpart of the World Economic Forum held every year in

Davos and attended by the most powerful politicians and business-

men of the world.

- There is a countless multitude of one-issue

organisations/websites. Some fight a particular international

institution, like www.stopthebank.org or www.dropthedebt.org.

Others are watchdog of corporate business in general: for instance

the Observatoire de la mondialisation

(http://terresacree.org/obsmondi.htm) headed by Susan George,

grand mother of the movement, Corporate Watch

(www.corpwatch.org) or the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe

Observatory (www.xs4all.nl/~ceo/). Others again focus on the

Third World (e.g., Third World Network, www.twnside.org.sg/), or

on the environment (e.g., Rain Forest Action Network,

www.ran.org).

- A whole group of organisations tries to hit the enemy in its heart,

by rolling back the commercial, consumerist and corporate

overtones of our own culture: best-known are Adbusters

(www.adbusters.org), Buy-nothing-day


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(www.buynothingday.co.uk) and Reclaim the Street (many local

sites).

- Interesting are, finally, the websites that exist uniquely to prepare

one event (e.g., www.september30.org, www.a20.org these

abbreviations refer to dates or dates-and-places of mass

demonstrations). If one argues that Internet functions as a sort of

new public space, one could say that this virtual public space has

materialised in the streets during protest acts all around the globe.

These single-event-websites show how the Web makes it possibleto swap from the world-wide global to the small-street local.

- Although this world wide myriad of anti-organisations and

websites almost represents, as I said earlier, the unique public

discourse on globalisation, it must be noticed that people in favour

of globalisation are starting to feel the need to speak themselves

out as well: a group of Scandinavian neo-liberals have started the

website www.motattack.nu (motattack means Counter-Attack

a name testifying of the central position of the original Attac). As

if globalisation is no longer seen by its defenders as a natural thing

that will conquer the world anyway, but as a phenomenon that

needs support from the world of words as well.

II. The World is Not For Sale : Democracy versus

Capitalism

On an organisational level, the anti-globalisation movement is held

together and has even been forged by the Internet. On an


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ideological level, it is united by a common analysis of evil:

unbridled global capitalism.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the dominant views of

the anti-globalisation movement on the relationship between the

economy and politics, and its resulting political strategies. It is not

an easy task. Prolific as the anti-globalisation writers are, these

views are hardly ever articulated in a rigorous way. Moral

indignation often takes the place of cool analysis. The most obvious

contradictions pass unnoticed. Not only in the sense that the

movement is made up of interest groups with conflicting demands.Protection of small French farmers does not necessarily go

together with stimulating Third World agricultural exports. Nor is

it easy to reconcile American anarchists fighting against

government, with those former Italian communists who ask for

more state regulation in the field of international finance. Such

fundamental differences more tariffs or less tariffs?, more state

or less state? could easily create unbridgeable conflicts and

chasms in a movement. To avoid these, the best thing it can do is to

satisfy itself with the rhythmic mass celebration of being good and

sharing an enemy. In that sense, the prefix anti- expresses a

necessary condition for the success and survival of the

globalisation movement.

But contradictions not only exist among different interest

groups. They also appear on a more fundamental level, within the

basic beliefs of the average anti-globalisation campaigner. To cite

only one example: while theres the fear that the Western world is

falling prey to capital, that no value will resist the blaze of the

financial argument, that civilisation family, art, charity will be


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sold out,1 1 there is also strong indignation about the Third

Worlds poverty and inequality, resulting in pleas for debt

reduction, and massive capital redistribution. Regardless of the

question whether these sentiments are justified, one is at least

entitled to expect some reflection on how it is possible that in one

case money appears to be the problem, and in the other the

solution.1 2 As things are now, one wonders sometimes what the

anti-globalisation activists consider worse: the fact that we are

rich or the fact that they are poor. (The poor would know how to

answer to that one.)In the present section (The world is not for sale), I will try,

notwithstanding these contradictions, to categorise some of the

political visions of the anti-globalisation movements. In the next

section ( Another world is possible), I will look closer into two

policy proposals for the improvement of the distressing situation

that gives rise to most feelings of guilt, namely the poverty of the

Third World.

Naomi Kleins best-seller No Logo, the publication of which

coincided more or less with the Seattle events of 1999, is a useful

entre en matire.1 3 In this fine piece of journalism about the rise

to power of corporate multinationals and ofbrand, Klein (b. 1970)

traces the beginnings of the anti-corporate movement. She recalls

how the shift in attention on North American university campuses

from the postmodernist questions of identity (gender,

multiculturalism, etc.) to socio-economic issues that were still

11 Reference to the influential Dutch pamphlet, De uitverkoop van de beschaving,NRC Handelsblad,

May 1st 2001, that gained support throughout the political spectrum.12 The implicit answer would probably be that (private) capital is in both cases the agent of evil: their

poverty find originates in our wealth. But, as Paul Krugman once dryly said: After all, globalpoverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations


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regarded as old-fashioned in 1995, came about because of one

particular evolution: the invasion of public space with billboards.

Big multinationals entered the corridors of the state universities,

trying to sell Nike or Pepsi. Big deal the students could have

continued to say, but it was suddenly felt as the final erosion of

public space, as the one drop too many against which action

needed to be taken.

The ubiquity of logos, brands and advertising, leaving no

single spot untouched No Logo is almost pervaded with the

sentiment of suffocation is interpreted by Klein, unsurprisingly,as the sign of a new capitalism. A capitalism that has, in a process

of deregulation and privatisation since the 1970s, in some cases

out-sourced production itself (to low-wage-countries), leaving

branding and marketing as the core-business. Just a new step in

the ever ongoing process of division of labour, one could say. But

for Klein and her readers this movement betrays in the first place a

world of growing injustice: a company like Nike spending

hundreds of millions on billboards on highways or in university

toilets, while the shoes it sells are produced by, say, children in

sweatshops on the Philippines for 60 euro cents an hour. Or Shell

extracting huge profits from Nigerian oil fields, while human-

rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa who fought for the rights of his

Ogoni people in the same region was executed by the Nigerian

regime. Kleins book describes the rising public awareness for such

stories in the 1990s, the new ethical consumer activism resulting in

boycotts of some (but not all) corporate multinationals.

Campaigning groups that a few years later were to form the anti-

globalisation movement, discovered they possessed a power of

13Naomi Klein,No Logo (New York 1999).


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their own: as consumers, they had the economic power to say no,

and they were listened to.

From the campaigners perspective lobby groups in North

America with high moral standards this boycott movement was

successful. (As to the Third Worlds perspective, see next section.)

Multinationals had to respond. In the second half of the 1990s,

American student movements concerned about Burma succeeded

in shaming nearly every brand-name company out of the country,

from Pepsi to Texaco, a catholic archbishop enforced a no

sweatshop zone in his New Jersey archdiocese contacting allschools, the Berkeley City Council passed many boycotts, etc. With

the invention of this new brand-based politics, big business

seemed on its knees before ethical demands.

But Naomi Klein it is one of the charms of her book is

aware of some of the limits of this brand-based approach. Most

fundamentally, only products with public visibility can be the

subject of consumer activism. Companies without retail outlets

like the gas company Unocal, accounting for half of the foreign

investment in Burma go unpunished. Further, if one logo gets

all the attention, others are left off the hook. Thus, when Shell was

partly kicked out the Nigerian petrol market, other companies took

over. The brother of the late Saro-Wiwa (favourably quoted by

Klein) didnt see this as a major problem: It is important not to

make people feel powerless. After all, they need to fill their cars

with something. If we tell them all companies are guilty, they will

feel they can do nothing. What we are trying to really do, () is to

let people have the feeling that they can at least have the moral

force to make one company change.1 4 This is, however

14Ibid., 423.


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understandable, quite a revealing quote: showing the characteristic

combination of powerlessness and moral rightness, against the

background of an unavoidable ongoing participation in the

market economy.

The real weakness of this shoppers-against-capitalism type

of protest, is that it is easily encapsulated by the ever inventive

capitalism it wants to beat.1 5 Thus while Nike was the campaigners

favourite scapegoat, its competitor Reebok just as involved in

sweat-shop production got away with a self-righteous Reebok

Human Rights Award, part of a brand new marketing strategy.Furthermore, the movement depended heavily on products that

people actually want to buy. The author ofNo Logo: If we truly

need the glittering presence of celebrity logos to build a sense of

humanity and collective responsibility for the planet, then maybe

brand-based activism is the ultimate achievement of branding.1 6

When Klein wrote these lines, she could not foresee that her book

would turn itself into a text book example of such a mechanism.No

Logo few commentators could resist to make the observation is

a very strong brand. For proof, all translations have stuck to the

English title (and not Geen Logo, Sans Logo, etc.): the name is

stronger than the product. The makers of the No-Logo website are

well aware of this paradox. They produce hilarious explanations on

how they are, as it were, at the same time inside and outside the

system. The visitor can read: Yes, if you want to, you can buy this

book. This site is not about selling the book. Nevertheless, wed not

15For an interesting analysis of how the managerial new capitalism successfully absorbed the

penultimate wave of anti-capitalist critique from the sixties, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,Lenouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris 1999).16

Ibid., 428.


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be doing our jobs if we didn't at least give you a few links to find

out how to obtain the actual artefact.1 7 Click and buy!

The same contradiction haunts the anti-corporate strategies

of adbusting and culture jamming: the practice of parodying

advertisements and hijacking billboards, that gives the anti-

globalisation movement some Situationist flavour. [S]emiotic

Robin Hoodism, says Klein. Father of the movement is Kalle Lasn

(b. 1940), communist and populiser of the slogan the world is not

for sale. Typically, Lasns anti-marketing magazineAdbusters has

been so well-marketed (dont miss www.adbusters.org), that theradicals for whom it was meant lost their interest because it had

lost its subversive power. And what to think of Buy nothing day?

A regular event the next big one is scheduled for Saturday,

November 30 (see www.buynothingday.co.uk) where we can

participate by not participating. These protests are nave and

sterile. They first define the enemy in exclusively economic terms

(be it global capitalism, consumerism, or commercialism) and then

try to fight it with an economic instrument that is, moreover,

merely negative: economic abstinence as the nec plus ultra of

radicalism. Just as the first British workers who were despaired by

the Industrial Revolution decided to attack the machines that

uprooted their lives had to wait four decades before Marx could

give them a coherent ideology, in the same way the contemporary

non-buying, graffiti-spraying part-time-consumers mistake a

consequence for a cause, thus seriously missing the point. These

neo-Luddites would need a Marx

There is no way out of the world of money, not even for the

people who think theyre fighting against it. This was illustrated in

17http://nologo.org/index.pl?section=book.


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a rather unexpected manner byFT-journalist James Harding, one

of the few to have researched the financial situation of the anti-

globalisation movement. He explains how it has been affected by

the recently declining economic situation. Not only might public

funding become less generous, writes Harding in October 2001,

[m]ore importantly for the protest movement, the boards of

charitable foundations which have been some of the big givers to

critics of international financial institutions, for example, are now

wary of being aligned with the critics of capitalism. The result is

that you will find anti-globalisation activists in San Franciscosounding rather like depressed dotcommers. They talk about the

need to be entrepreneurial. Rather than depending on charitable

giving, they look to running fair trade shops or reality tours for

holidaymakers with a global conscience. They do not have the

managerial talent, they say, to match the groups ambitions with its

resources. Charitable foundations will often fund projects, but not

infrastructure or back office operations. They fret about the strings

attached to donations, particularly when they come from suspect

corporations. The movement, critical though it was of burgeoning

global companies, was buoyed by the wealth which filtered through

from an expanding international economy. In fact, a large number

of businesspeople have - wittingly or unwittingly - become big

donors to counter-capitalism.1 8

Although an enthusiastic British newspaper claimed thatNo

Logo was the Das Kapitalof the growing anti-corporate

movement, this is too much honour. (Unless one follows Marx

own famous phrase about history repeating itself, the first time as

tragedy, the second time as comedy.) Towards the end of her book,

18James Harding, o.c.


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22

Klein understands the limits and paradoxes of consumer activism.

As long as one searches an economic way out of the economy, one

will keep turning around in circles. The Canadian writer admits the

perverse consequences of the massive adoption of codes of

conducts by corporate multinationals, following the protests:

There is something Orwellian about the idea of turning the

enforcement of basic human rights into a multinational industry,

as the private codes would do, to be checked like any other quality

control. Global labour and environmental standards should be

regulated by law and governments not by a consortium oftransnational corporations and their accountants, all following the

advice of their PR firm.1 9 Just before closing time, the cultural and

economic perspective that has been dominant throughout the

book, is exchanged for a political one. But Klein does not give

much content to this. She speaks somewhat vaguely of a truly

globally minded society, and wants to give politics one last try:

Political solutions accountable to people and enforceable by

their elected representatives deserve another shot before we

throw in the towel and settle for corporate codes, independent

monitors and the privatisation of our collective rights as

citizens.2 0

Or is the political towel thrown down? That, at least, is the

disillusioned idea of the anti-globalisation writer presented as the

European answer to Naomi Klein, Noreena Hertz. In The Silent

Take-over(2001), this young British economist tries to defend the

thesis best summarised by the subtitle of her book: Global

Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. Combining recent trends

19Klein, o.c., 437.


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in political studies with wide-ranging anti-globalisation arguments,

Hertz argues forcefully that the classic politics of the nation-state is

dead. She claims that since the doomed neo-liberal days of Reagan

and Thatcher a complete change of paradigm has taken place:

Economics is the new politics, and business is in the driving seat.

On the one hand, big business behaves itself as if it were sovereign.

On the other hand, national administrations stopped listening to

their citizens (as they used to do?) and now exclusively serve the

interests of corporations (had they never done before?). These

rather brutal affirmations are supported by statistics showingmultinationals having a bigger turnover than the GDP of medium-

sized countries, or a Disney CEO earning as much as the total

revenues of some Pacific island. These figures are thought-

provoking indeed, but unfortunately Hertz herself does not do

much thinking beyond them. She has her big phrase ready: As we

enter the new millennium, arguably the entire world is of

international corporations, by international corporations, for

international corporations.21

As a proposition about the state of things in the world, such a

phrase is meaningless. Who can give us the guarantee that the

world could not be of, for and by the people, the rich, the

freemasonry, God, or human genes?

Or take this statement: In the 21st century economic power

has replaced military might.22 Anyone can see this is simply not

true. Of course it helps to be rich, if you want to be militarily

powerful. That is how the United States won the Cold War. But

nowadays the US do not see Iraq as a challenge to their economic

20 Ibid., 442.21 Noreena Hertz, The Silent Take-over. Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London2001) 105.


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power (its GDP is only a fraction of the American one), but as a

threat because of its possible military might. The standard

suspicious counter-argument that it is all about petrol, will not

hold. During the War in Afghanistan, the US were desperately

seeking an alliance with neighbouring Pakistan, because it was in

possession of nuclear weapons not because of its rather modest

petrol stock. Claiming that economics has replaced military power,

is a flagrant categorical error. It comes down to claiming that a

bunch of dollar notes or an international currency transaction

could have destroyed the World Trade Centre.Power politics exist, and it will continue to do so. Even

honest national politics will continue to exist. Provocative as

always, Hertz affirmed in an October 2001 interview that people

nowadays are more interested in the television elections like those

ofBig Brother, than in the elections for the national parliaments.23

Another sign that democratic politics is fading away. But again,

Hertz was clearly wrong. During the spring of 2002, two EU

member-states experienced extremely memorable elections: a

fascist in the second tour of a presidential campaign in one

country, a rightwing leader shot in the other. Both election

campaigns, moreover, were not about economic issues (both

outgoing governments having done a respectable job in this

respect), but about internal security, the definition of the national

political community, and other utterly political subjects. Someone

who is completely blind to this political side of reality, cannot

pretend to make sense of this world and understand where it is

likely to take us.24

22

Ibid., 104.23Noreena Hertz, Knack Magazine (Belgium), October 2002.

24Hertz, Silent Take-over, 9.


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Hertz is a former neo-liberal Ph.D.-student who assisted her

Harvard professor of economics in setting up the first post-

communist stock market in Saint Petersburg, shortly after 1991.

Since then, she has not turned into a radical anti-capitalist, stating

whole-heartedly in her book: capitalism is clearly the best system

for generating wealth. Hertz change of camps, from radical

bourgeois to bourgeois radical, did obviously leave her economic

outlook untouched. That is why, in spite of the more politically

coloured surface of her analysis, she does not help us much further

than Naomi Klein. Consumer activism also is the bottom-line ofHertz political action: Protest by the consumer public is fast

becoming the only way of effecting policy and controlling the

excesses of corporate activity. Until the final conclusion, Hertz is

unable to escape from this consumer perspective: As citizens we

must make it clear to government that unless politics focuses on

people as well as business, unless governments love affair with big

corporations ends, unless politicians offer us a world worth

buying, we will continue to scorn representative democracy, and

will choose to shop and protest rather than vote.2 5 While her anti-

globalisation colleagues sing in a moral protest the world is not

for sale, Ms. Hertz is waiting for the state to make the world worth

buying.

No Logo (1999) and The Silent Take-over(2001) are the two books

that have probably best expressed the widely shared intuitive

notion that, under pressure of the world markets, the space for an

autonomous political world has been considerably reduced over

the last 25 years. In the functioning of the anti-globalisation

25Ibid., 3, 212.


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discourse, two distinct ideas are closely intertwined. On the one

hand, the feeling that public space is being privatised, increasingly

becoming inaccessible. On the other hand, the feeling that the

nation-state is being sold out, thereby becoming powerless. Given

this situation, its reasoning goes, we need new political forms

capable of counter-balancing the global capitalist forces, which is

to say, capable of raising taxes and redistribute money at world-

level. Interestingly, Attac sees as its first purpose in a statement

perfectly summing up this intertwining of ideas to rcuperer les

espaces perdus par la dmocratie au profit de la sphrefinancire.26

The slogan The world is not for sale is thus more than a

loose affirmation: it is a battle cry. It is the exhortation to re-

conquer space for democracy on capitalism (or, as Naomi

would say, for self-determination on brand, or even, as still

others say, for the culture of life on the culture of death27 ).

Capitalism and democracy are in this discourse mutually exclusive

concepts (one can see how anti-globalisation effectively uncouples

what Fukuyama had proudly forged together). They function

exactly as the pair private (space) and public (space): one goes by

definition at the expense of the other. The superposition of these

two pairs explains why the triumph of global capitalism (and/or

the death of democracy) is most naturally comprehended as a

spatial phenomenon. How Reclaim the Streets initially

dismissed as a movement of youngsters occupying the roads for a

party became in the eyes of anti-globalisation cadres a major

struggle, a quintessential democratic movement. The conceptual

26

http://attac.org/fra/asso/doc/plateformefr.htm27Katharine Ainger, A culture of life, a culture of death, The New International, nr. 340, Nov. 2001

(www.newint.org/issue340/culture.htm)


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27

ambiguity (brilliantly exploited by the movement) is that the

equation public space democracy does not hold, nor, for that

matter, private space capitalism.

Because the unbridled enemy is going global, the resistance

that has to enter the same global field. It is in this precise sense

that most members of the anti-globalisation movement are pro a

certain type of globalisation. This reform-minded majority of the

movement has high hopes concerning new global institutions. They

discern the beginnings of a global democracy, a situation in which

international organisations levy taxes and regulate finance, wherepoverty is eradicated, where health care and maybe education are

provided. In short, they dream of a sort of world wide welfare state.

For these reformers, part of the existing international structure

has to disappear: the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO will be

replaced by alternative, more social organisations. The NGOs

making up the anti-globalisation movement would surely be quite

willing to take over; e.g. why not have the above-mentioned World

Social Forum in Porto Alegre on a permanent basis? The NGOs

consider themselves the dawn of a new global civil society. I will

not enter a discussion of this interesting concept here.28 Most

literature on the subject is rather self-congratulatory. Being

convinced that it is morally right, the anti-globalisation movement

is hardly ever plagued by doubts about its right to representthe

people it speaks for. As an observer mildly put it: It has an inflated

sense of its own importance.29 Somewhat more aggressive is the

gibe of one of the rare pro-globalisation players on the Web:

Typically, the opponents of globalisation claim to be representing

28

The London School of Economics has started a yearbook of high quality devoted to Global CivilSociety, first issue 2001. Available at www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/Yearbook29

Harding, o.c.


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a broad public opinion and to speak in the name of the poor. The

people rebelling against the Establishment this is how the

anarchists in Black Bloc or the activists in Attac want to be seen.

This is how the so-called Battle of Seattle was orchestrated. This is

how they legitimate the political hooliganism symbolised by a Jos

Bov. In this lying playacting, the representatives of almost every

government are portrayed as usurpers, whereas a multitude of

micro-sects describe themselves as the true representatives of the

world population. Never has the deception been as complete!30

The reformers in the anti-globalisation movement strivingfor global governance, led by Klein and Hertz, do not represent

the only school of thought. The movement still contains some

authentic revolutionaries a minority maybe, but some of them

highly respected by the softer majority. The two authors that

contributed most to giving this revolutionary strand its intellectual

credits, are Tony Negri and Michael Hardt. Together they wrote

Empire (2000), a sophisticated philosophical variation on the

themes of which Klein, Hertz and others give a light version, for

which they have been hailed in the French press as the two Marx

and Engels of the Internet age. They do make an interesting

couple. Toni Negri (b. 1940), Italian philosopher and political

scientist, formerly the ideologue of the Italian Marxist-Leninist red

brigades in the seventies, is currently imprisoned in Rome for

complicity with terrorist activities. Michael Hardt (b. 1969) is

American associate professor in literature at Duke university.

Together they represent the fusion of European communism and

North American multiculturalism characteristic of the anti-

globalisation movement.

30http://www.motattack.nu/english/index.asp


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Empire is an ambitious book: it aims to give all-embracing

answers to the questions of political economy we are dealing with.

The thesis of the authors is rather simple: globalisation is Empire.

The end of the sovereign nation state which is the generalpoint de

dpart does not lead them to hasty conclusions about the end of

politics, with big business in the driving seat (Hertz). No, Negri

and Hardt do keep a political perspective by claiming that a new

sovereign politico-economic power is in place: Empire. The

problems start when they try to define this Empire. It is impossibleto find out whether the authors think of this successor to the

nation-state as people, capital flows, big business, or an invisible

dark force. The whole conception is built on the religious paranoia

that says: There must be something. What? Empire.

Negri and Hardts paranoia has its philosophical foundations

in the work on disciplinary power by Michel Foucault. This is an

invisible power that pervades us and keeps us, as it were,

imprisoned without us knowing it. This conceptual device of the

voluntary slavery (or servitude volontaire, a term coined by the

French 16th-centurly writer De la Botie) is extremely popular in

anti-globalisation discourse. One can easily understand why: that

people can be oppressed and not know it, enables this moral

vanguard to find victims who are still unaware of their state. No

need to go the Third World: our being happy in our consumer

paradise is the final proof of our oppression by capitalist Empire.

But the concept has its inconveniences. It is, for instance,

impossible to know where to look for it. As Negri and Hardt put the

difficulty themselves: The identification of the enemy () is no

small task given that exploitation tends no longer to have a specific


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place and that we are immersed in a system of power so deep and

complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or

measure. We suffer exploitation, alienation, and command as

enemies, but we do not know where to locate the production of

oppression. But the authors do not despair and continue: And yet

we still resist and struggle.3 1

The form which this resistance will take, is not clearly

described. But one may surmise that the sympathetic anti-

globalisation grassroots will not blow away this imperial monster.

The victory of Empire is so complete that the Counter-Empireneeds to arm itself. Violence will be needed. And the bookEmpire

is not only a theoretical proposition, it is a pamphlet, a call for

Revolution. Unfortunately, these self-declared communists32 do

not give any insight into the world that will be born out of the

implosion (or explosion, one does not know) of Empire. As

talented dialecticians, they can of course find a reason; halfway

through the book the reader finds this announcement: Even when

we manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of

the problematic and the resistances that arise there, however, we

will still not be in a position not even at the end of this book to

point to any already existing and concrete elaboration of a political

alternative to Empire. And no such effective blueprint will ever

arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours. It will arise only

in practice.33 Modest, one could say. But also utterly

irresponsible, in view of the humanitarian, political, economic and

environmental practices that followed the one or two successful

31Michael Hardt and Toni Negri,Empire (Harvard U.P. 2001 [2000]) 211.

32See their closing remarks: This is a revolution that no power will control because biopower and

communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. Thisis the irrepressible lightness and joy of being a communist. (Hardt and Negri, o.c.., 413)33

Hardt and Negri,Empire, 206.


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communist revolutions in world history, and to which such names

as Gulag Archipelago and Cultural Revolution are attached.

By now it will be clear on what type of standard scheme anti-

globalisation, whether of a reforming or revolutionary nature, is

built up. I have mostly focussed on its expression in three

influential books:No Logo (1999), Empire (2000) and The Silent

Take-over(2001). But the same line of thinking is to be found on

the multitude of websites produced by the grassroots movement. It

is a scheme of moving simplicity. On the one hand, a planetcompletely dominated by the evil powers of money: brand, global

capitalism, la sphre financire, Empire. On the other hand, one

finds a truly globally minded society where self-

determination34 is the rule (Klein), where solidarit is the

dominant sentiment (Attac), Counter-Empire (Negri & Hardt) and

other forces of the good that cannot be described in detail. Noreena

Hertz, after having said she is neither anti-capitalist nor pro-state,

claims her own book to be unashamedly [sic] pro-people, pro-

democracy, and pro-justice.35 These are of course empty phrases.

We are all in favour of democracy, justice, and the arrival of Gods

kingdom on earth. The question is how to get there(and to know

when not to go there).

III. Another World is Possible: Tariffs and Taxes

The efforts to put together a positive programme for change have

so far not been very convincing. The activists have rallied around

34Klein,No Logo , 442, 441.


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the slogan: Another world is possible. This phrase defies what

they used to call the TINA-argument (acronym of There Is No

Alternative), but as yet they have struggled to come up with a

vision of what that other world would look like, once its possibility

set forward.

One might object: but what about the huge amount of

proposals, suggestions, pamphlets? Let us examine in detail two

different sets of practical remedies the anti-globalisation

movement has come forward with to resolve the indeed serious

problems of the Third World. The first example is the fight againstchild labour by means of consumer boycotts or trade tariffs, the

second the efforts to regulate international capital with the famous

Tobin Tax.

Economic pressure is often used as a means to reach a political

goal. In a globalised world, the most widespread form is to make

international trade subject to certain conditions. Usually this kind

of protectionism is the work of vested interests and lobby groups.

In some cases, especially if it hits the Third World, it gets bad

press. The Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) of the European

Union is a notorious bte noire. But there is another kind of

protectionism that is considered far more presentable. No one will

blame a country for taking protectionist measures vis--vis another

country because that country has unacceptably bad working

conditions or condones child labour or doesnt enough to protect

the environment. This possibility was even the dream of the anti-

corporate movement as described by Naomi Klein; the

campaigners wanted to go beyond private consumer activism,

35Hertz, Silent Take-over, 10.


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seize the state apparatus and enforce their moral values by law.

This would be the best way to prevent other countries from putting

Western firms out of business through inferior social conditions

(social dumping) or disregard for the environment (eco-

dumping). So when drawing up trade agreements with poor

countries, the argument goes, we must insist on provisions about

the environmental and labour standards, requiring them to

improve these, on pain of our not doing business with them. In the

streets of Seattle, this kind of reasoning led to a violent coalition of

trade unions with socially committed Third World movements, acoalition that gave an impetus to the anti-globalisation movement

as whole. And in the Seattle conference buildings, it was a loose

remark by President Clinton in a local newspaper (December 1

1999) about this kind of boycott that led to a deadlock in the WTO-

negotiations.36

To developing countries this way of thinking came as a

protection coupled with a neo-colonist bid to control their policy-

making.

Low wages and poor environmental conditions are not

necessarily the fruit of bad faith.37 Usually the problem is simply

that productivity is too low. Wages can be raised as labour becomes

more valuable, i.e. in step with productivity, and this can only be

achieved through increased investments, better infrastructure,

more education, new machinery, and better organisation. If we

force these countries to raise wages before productivity has been

improved, this will mean firms and consumers having to pay more

36As related by EU-trade commissioner Pascal Lamy in an interesting book about his inside experience

with WTO and other trade negotiations:L'Europe en premire ligne (Paris 2002). It must be noted that

it werent the street protest that caused the failure of the Seattle WTO-round, as AG-myth wants it, butdiscord amongst the negotiating partners.37

Johan Norberg,In Defence of Global Capitalism (Kristianstadt 2001), 180-189.


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for their manpower than it is currently worth, in which case they

will be put out of business by more productive, better-paid workers

in the western world. Unemployment amongst the worlds poor

would swiftly rise. As economist Paul Krugman stated in a famous

essay, this policy means good jobs in theory, no jobs in practice.3 8

Only through trade with us can these poor countries become richer

and improve their labour and environmental standards. If we

prevent poor countries from exporting to us because their working

conditions are not up to our exacting standards, this will result in

their export industry being eliminated and their workers insteadhaving to look for jobs in native industry, with lower wages and

poorer working conditions. This will not help the worlds poor, but

it will help to protect Western industries.

Of course one might ask if there are not exceptions. Are there

economic conditions so disgusting that we must prohibit trade

because of them? The example often quoted is the employment of

children. There are today something like 250 million child workers

between the ages of 5 and 14. Moral despair about these young

suffering lives set aside, the question is: are these children helped

by the European Union ceasing to trade with the countries where

they live? Not so sure. First of all, 70 percent of child workers are

employed in agriculture. Only 5 percent, (some 10 or 15 million

children), are employed in export industry. The available sources

indicate that these child export workers are the least badly done

by, with the least dangerous working conditions. The alternatives

might be worse.

We tend to forget that only two or three generations ago,

child labour was widespread in the Western world. We were at the

38Paul Krugman, In Praise of Cheap Labor, March 1997.


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time not more inhumane than we are now. Children in Third

World countries are not working because they have nasty parents,

but because their family needs their earnings in order to survive.

So we cannot forbid child labour in these countries just like that,

still less forbid the countries concerned to export products to us,

because in that case the children might be forced into even worse

occupations at the very worst, into crime and prostitution. In

1992 it was revealed that the American Wal-Mart chain was buying

garments manufactured by child workers in Bangladesh. Congress

then threatened to prohibit imports from countries with childlabour. As a result of that threat, many thousands of children were

sacked by the Bengali textile industry. A follow-up by international

organisations showed that many of the children had moved into

more dangerous, less well-paid jobs, and in several cases into

prostitution.39

Clearly, protectionist trade is not the best way to help

stimulate better working conditions in the Third World forward.

This does not mean there is nothing we can do. On the contrary.

We might help to improve poor countries labour productivity by

sharing our technology and know-how with them (unfortunately,

this is not as self-evident as one might hope: in the recent past

American unions have tried to stop the transfer of modern

technology to the Third World). As regards child labour, a 1997

UN-report aiming at an immediate end to child labour was very

critical of consumer boycotts. It stated: Because the causes of

child labour are complex, the solutions must be comprehensive.

() Strategies to help eliminate and prevent it include: access to

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html.39Carol Bellamy, The State of the Worlds Children 1997. Unicef(New York 1997) 23.

(http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/). See also Johan Norberg, o.c.


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36

education; wider legal protection; birth registration for all

children; collection of information; and mobilization of the widest

possible coalition of partners amongst governments, communities,

NGOs, employers and trade unions.40 According to the report,

child labour does not result from poverty alone, but from an

institutional. Therefore, the measures proposed are aimed at

creating a legal framework and a political willin the countries

themselves. This approach has indeed also been advocated by

some representatives of the anti-globalisation movement. But all

too often in the Movement, moral indignation springing from aprima facie division in rich and poor takes the place of a thorough

analysis of the problem. Whenever the anti-globalisation activist is

confronted with social or political problems, what will almost

always come to his mind are economic remedies (boycotts, tariffs,

etc.). Frequently these produce the contrary of the result intended.

The second example of a practical solution the anti-globalisation

movement has come up with to show that another world is

possible is the Tobin Tax. This has been the quintessential

proposal of the movement since Le Monde Diplomatique in June

1998 put new life into an idea launched in the 1970s by Noble prize

economist James Tobin, which he has since famously backed away

from. The magazine created the Association pour la taxe Tobin

pour l'aide aux citoyens, later rebaptized Association pour la

taxation des transactions pour l'aide aux citoyens, in both cases

better known as ATTAC. One can easily see why the idea of a global

tax plays such a central role in the anti-globalisation movement:

otherwise a global civil society could not exist.

40Bellamy, o.c., 4.


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James Tobins idea was very simple : it consists of levying a

very low tax (of 0.050.25 per cent) on all currency exchanges. The

purpose was to slow down capital movements and to make

investors think twice before allowing capital to cross currency

exchange borders. In this way harmful speculation and major

crises could be avoided.41 Moreover and this is the part of Tobins

plan that seduced his recent French followers the considerable

sums thus generated could be used for the general interest, for

instance, to reduce poverty in the Third World. The powerful moral

appeal of the idea is evident. On the one hand: 1.2 billion people inthe world living on less than a dollar a day. On the other hand:

capital speculators who juggle with trillions without producing

anything. Knowing that, indeed, a tax of 0.01 per cent on every

capital transaction in the world would raise more money than the

actual global amount of development aid, how could one be against

such a sublime mechanism to reduce poverty?

Especially in France and Belgium the proposal gained real

political momentum: French Parliament has accepted the idea of

its introduction as from 2003 (on the condition the rest of Europe

joins), and the Belgian Federal Chamber of Deputies is about to

follow its French sister.42 In the European Parliament, a Tobin-

like proposal was recently rejected by a very small majority. But

also in Brazil and India politicians have argued in favour of a tax

on currency transactions.43

41 Because of this latter effect even billionaire George Soros was tempted by the plan: the speculator

and the philanthropist in Soros went hand in hand See also his latest bookGeorge Soros on

Globalization (New York : Public Affairs 2002).42

At the recent UN Summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg (Sept. 2002), the French

rightwing (!) president Chirac himself, although without mentioning the Tobin tax, advocated a

prlvement de solidarit sur les richesses engendres par la mondialisation.43An exhaustive paper on all sorts of global taxes, including what they call Currency Transaction Tax

(CTT), is Global Taxes for Global Priorities, by James A. Paul and Katarina Wahlberg, published


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Nevertheless, the Tobin tax has been the object of considerable

criticism, mostly from a technical, economic point of view.

Therefore it is inevitable go into some basic economics.44 Almost

immediately, the difficulty arises that the tax only works if every

country in the world participates in the system. But one might

argue that this is the case for many international regulations and

not a reason to discard the Tobin proposal straight away. More

importantly though, the Tobin tax will not yield the two results its

inventor promised. Firstly, it is not the right instrument to avoidspeculation, because the really disturbing speculative waves are

usually driven by expectations of gaining 20 or 30 per cent and

will therefore not be stopped by a threshold of less than 1 per cent.

Second, the Tobin tax will not diminish the volatility of the

currencies; there will be less transactions but not necessarily a

smaller fluctuation.

The adherents of the Tobin tax say that what they really want

to get at is sheer currency speculation. But the idea of there being

some hard boundary between useful investments or trade, and

useless speculation is completely false. Derivatives, like options,

which the critics usually regard as pure speculation, are necessary

in order for investments to work. By buying the right to sell a

product at a predetermined price later on (a sale option), a

company can concentrate at what it is good at for instance

extracting minerals. Thanks to this insurance the company does

not have to bother about changing prices or currency rates all over

the world. The people who take over the risk, fulfil a vital role in

March 2002 by the Global Policy Forum and available at UN-site

www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/glotax/general/glotaxpaper.htm.


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the economic system, but in the eyes of the critics they are the evil

speculators. This system would be seriously damaged by even a

low Tobin tax, because it works with a multitude of daily

movements of risk replacement; the oft-quoted 1500 billion dollars

of currency exchanges a day consist mainly of these hedges.

Whatever the shortcomings as regards the functioning of the

markets, the Tobin tax would still have one enormous advantage: it

would yield tremendous revenues (Attac claims 100 billion dollars

a year). Here we come to the real political problem which is

seldom discussed. This problem is: who is going to levy this tax? With what legitimacy? Up till now, only nation-states have been

levying taxes (the United Nations, does not, nor does the EU; the

organisation lives on contribution by individual member states). As

Max Weber understood, the modern state is characterised by the

monopoly of force and the fiscal monopoly. The two logically go

together: in order to levy taxes, one needs to dispose of the

legitimate use of violence. If not, what to do in case someone does

not pay? This line of reasoning, when applied to the Tobin tax,

leads to the conclusion that a tax that is by definition international,

presupposes a global government, and that this government should

ultimately dispose of a global army

And then, suppose this immense treasury of Tobin Hood

would indeed be collected, who will redistribute it? Bernard

Cassen? And according to what criteria? In the name of whom?

One does not need to be over-suspicious to discern here the most

glorious opportunity for the growth of global bureaucracy, a

paradise for power abuse and endless chances for corruption.

44Contribution Paul de Grauwe (economics professor in Louvain) to a conference on globalisation in


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Again, this does not mean there is nothing we can do. In the first

place, public funding is not the only way in which money can flow

from the rich North to the poor South: foreign investment and

private savings are just as important and much more efficient. But

then again, the most fundamental issue might not be economic,

but a problem of political and legal organisation. Because even if

we send the South all the money in the world, it will lead to

nothing and least of all to an automatic development of the

Third World. It does not really matter whether the money comes

from a universal Tobin tax or from the conditional funding of theWorld Bank and the IMF scorned by the campaigners.

For capital transfers to have a positive impact, a huge

amount ofpoliticaland legalwork has to be done. In his bookThe

Mystery of Capital(2000), the Peruvian economist Hernando de

Soto has explained most convincingly why capitalism triumphs in

the West and fails everywhere else.45 De Soto and his

collaborators have done research amongst the poor in cities all

over the developing world Cairo, Manilla, Port-au-Prince, Lima,

etc. They have come to the conclusion that the main problem for

the urban poor is that they function in an extra-legal economy.

For instance, they usually lack formal property rights for the

houses they live in. This means they cannot borrow money to start

a small enterprise connected to the legal economy (this right is, in

most of these countries, reserved to a minority). Moreover, for

bureaucratic reasons, it is often close to impossible to formalise

ones ownership. De Sotos research team found that in the

Philippines, it takes 168 bureaucratic steps and 13 to 25 years to be

Brussels, March 2002. See also Norberg, o.c.45Hernando de Soto, The mystery of Capital. Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails

everywhere else (London 2000).


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officially owner of your own houses, in Lima 207 steps to complete

the first phase out of 5, etc. This would be hilarious if it was not so

distressing. The Third World poor are thus cut off from any

possibility to get out of their desperate situation; for legal reasons,

they are unable to exploit their private property and their capital

will stay dead capital. De Soto, after more than twenty years of

world wide investigations, claims the following: By our

calculations, the total value of the real estate held but not legally

owned by the poor of the Third World and former communist

nations is at least 9,3 trillion dollars. This is a value worthpondering: 9,3 trillion dollars is about twice as much as the total

circulating US money supply. It is very nearly as much as the total

value of all the companies listed on the main stock exchanges of

the worlds twenty most developed countries: New York, Tokyo,

London, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, the NASDAQ and a dozen others.

It is more than twenty times the total direct foreign investment

into all Third World countries in the ten years after 1989, forty-six

times as much as all the World Bank loans of the past three

decades, and ninety-three times as much as all development

assistance from all advanced countries to the Third World in the

same period.46

This is not the place to go further into these figures, nor into

De Sotos interesting historical lessons about how it is that we

ourselves are no longer able to perceive the working of capital (in

short, it is so well integrated into our system that it has become

invisible). The important lesson we can retain here from De Sotos

research is that the way out of poverty lies not in naked money

transfers from North to South. What is needed is the formalisation

46De Soto,Mystery of Capital, 33-34.


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of informal property rights. This will be a long and painstaking

process, but it is potentially of huge benefit. It needs Third World

governments that understand they can gain immense popular

support with these reforms, it needs effective collaboration of this

most conservative profession, the lawyers, and it needs a general

awareness about what is at stake. In short, it needs political will

and legal accuracy. It probably doesnt need western public

expressions of moral indignation about the gap between the rich

and the poor. And it surely doesnt need the funds of some global

taxation those are at best irrelevant, and will at worse turn into adisaster.

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