Protesting, But Why?
Dateline: Washington
The anarchist Emma Goldman is supposed to have defiantly cried that she wouldn't join the revolution if she couldn't dance; nearly 100 years later, her spiritual descendants decided that they wouldn't join the revolution if they had to get wet.
On the second day of the demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the clouds over Washington cracked. The city was deluged with rain, and 9,000 of the 10,000 people who had arrived to protest decided to stay in bed. This is the down side of recruiting all those idealistic college students to your cause. They don't go to class when it rains -- and class is held in English. How could they be be expected to trundle through the cold and wet to listen to some Andean Marxist dude rail against the privatization of the Bolivian waterworks in whatever language it is that they speak in Bolivia?
So Round Two of the great mobilization against globalization ended in a squelch rather than in the photogenic violence of Seattle. Some of the organizers of the event cheerfully explained that they were undismayed by their failure to disrupt the World Bank-I.M.F. meeting -- or even to draw a crowd. They had, they explained, got their message out.
And what is that message? "We want a system that is democratic, that values the environment and that puts the needs of the world's people before the profits of transnational corporations." You would have found this and similar profundities on the protest organizers' main Web site. But if you wanted to know what approximately such a system would look like, you were very much out of luck.
It's rather funny that people who so bitterly denounce the manipulated politics of our allegedly corporate-controlled society should themselves end up repeating the anarchist equivalent of Dick Morris sound bites. But really: what choice do they have? Once upon a time, the left possessed a clear and coherent vision of a better world. Resources were to be owned collectively rather than individually. Important economic decisions would be made by the state rather than by private managers and owners. Everyone would earn more or less the same amount. This ideal was called socialism, and until the mid-1970's it commanded the assent of a very considerable number of intelligent people.
Today, of course, socialism is as dead as King Tut -- deader, maybe, since people are after all still pretty interested in King Tut. And the death of socialism has simply cut the intellectual guts out of the kind of radicalism espoused by the people who tried to shut the World Bank down.
Who today, for example, believes that railways and steel mills operate more fairly and efficiently when owned by the state? Who believes that a poor country can raise its standard of living by forbidding its citizens to buy foreign goods or technology? For 35 years after World War II, poor nations were told that nationalization and protectionism were the superhighway to prosperity (among the most fervent recommenders was the World Bank itself). It was the catastrophic failure of this approach that discredited Third World socialism. But without it, people like the Washington protesters are left with nothing constructive to say about poverty and development.
Oh, they still know what they hate, of course. They hate limousines and the men who ride in them. They hate big corporations and hair spray and Gap khakis; they hate dams and airports and economists. That list of antipathies isn't exclusive to the radical left -- in fact, almost every item on it would be equally offensive to nationalist movements of the far right. Indeed, in its mistrust of technology, its veneration of folkways and its disdain for electoral politics, the antiglobalization left bears more than a passing resemblance to that far right.
For most of the 20th century, however, the radical left got a better press than the far right because the left had something positive to offer: a coherent and compelling vision of an alternative society. Bereft of that alternative, what remains? Only the hate.