Naomi Klein: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

Naomi Klein became the spokeswoman for the wide-ranging, somewhat amorphous anti-globalisation movement when she published her book No Logo just two weeks before the riotous December 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle.

Until then, this new wave of activism had barely articulated its presence in the international media. Since then Klein, despite her assertion that the movement "doesn't have leaders in the traditional sense", has become one of its most articulate champions.

Her new book documents the movement's history from the aftermath of Seattle through the trauma of September 11 and Enron's collapse.

Klein says she noticed the images of fences and windows recurring throughout her many columns and articles over this time. Fences that once protected the public were being dismantled, while others ringing in public resources were being determinedly constructed through the processes of privatisation and deregulation.

"Fences have always been a part of capitalism, the only way to protect property from would-be bandits, but the double standards propping up these fences have, of late, become increasingly blatant," she writes.

Windows by contrast are the cracks in these fences, a metaphor she uses for the openings people create when they reclaim public resources and assets.

Like any protest movement, anti-globalisation runs the danger of becoming co-opted by the very processes it seeks to critique and Klein, who is both its spokeswoman and media product, is highly aware of this potential.

Hence her emphasis on its grassroots base, its linking of commonalities across country, culture and class, which she sees as its greatest strength.

Writing elsewhere of the left's historical mistake in choosing one sector, the workers, as the vanguard for political change, she sees hope instead in the sheer diversity of groups around the world who, through genuinely grassroots direct action, are bridging their disparities - reconnecting electricity in South Africa, squatting on land to reclaim it and preventing toxic waste dumps.

The contradiction of being defined as anti-globalisation when these groups - student activists, indigenous people, trade unions, factory workers, anarchists and academics - are increasingly globally networked is not lost on Klein, who writes: "The irony of the media-imposed label 'anti-globalisation' is that we in this movement have been turning globalisation into a lived reality, perhaps more so than even the most multinational of corporate executives."

But she is, nevertheless, convinced that the economic process known as globalisation is, in its imposition of a single economic model, neo-liberalism, essentially anti-democratic, as is its goal to turn every aspect of our lives into saleable commodities.

The stories she recounts in Fences and Windows are a refutation of this process as people struggle, sometimes successfully, other times not, to regain their autonomy.

When residents of Guadalcazar, Mexico, use their local legislative powers to prevent United States-owned Metalclad from building a toxic waste dump in their vicinity they come up against the North American Free Trade Agreement's controversial "Chapter 11" clause, which allows investors to sue governments over expropriating its investments.

Elsewhere in Mexico, at the Kuk-Dong factory, one of Nike's test factories visited by its hired monitors to assess labour conditions, workers go on strike over their right to throw out the company union and form an independent one of their own.

Beaten back brutally, more than 200 factory workers decide not to return to work even when the strike is over. However, a later hunger strike eventually wins them the right to form an independent union.

Alongside these stories of local battles are articles that undermine the assumptions globalisation is being built on. Included among these assumptions are:

* that it is perfectly acceptable to make a country's border more open to business while closing it to unwanted people;

* that costs once borne by business through tariffs and duties can be transferred on to the taxpayer in the form of security costs;

* that genetically engineered grain will help millions of malnourished children, whereas if the political will existed it could already have done so;

* (of particular relevance to New Zealand), that more consumer choice, in the form of organic niche marketing, will resolve the issues around genetically engineered crops or the bigger-is-better assumptions of industrial agriculture.

The most common criticism of the anti-globalisation movement and its writers such as Klein is that it knows what it's against but not what it's for - that is, it lacks a blueprint for where it's going and an ideology to underpin it.

Klein's answer to this, borne out by the few successes her book demonstrates as well as by history, is: "I think political change happens through tremendous upheaval. There needs to be opportunity for there to be real innovation ... we're not really going to move towards building alternatives until we really start to believe and actually have reason to believe that we're going to be able to implement it."

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* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.