Mark Steel
"We
need a revolution," said the lad, no more than 19, in the packed meeting
organised by People and Planet at the University of Warwick. "And we, I
mean us here, can begin to make that revolution – right after this meeting
by…" He paused. What would he say? By mobilising the peasantry of the
Coventry area? By going on a Long March to Leicester? "By smiling," he
said. "When these capitalist bastards see everyone smiling, they won’t know
what to do." There are obvious flaws to this strategy, not least that
such a movement would be bound to split, with a militant wing breaking away to
laugh, while the smilers denounced them as impatient hot-heads. But the most
notable side to his speech was that somehow it didn’t seem mad. In fact there
was an endearing freshness about him. He was enthusiastic, genuinely interested
in what everyone thought of his idea, and it was positive – his starting point
was "we can do something".
And
it came a few days after I’d been on holiday in Athens, during which I was
invited to a meeting about "anti-capitalist protest". The first shock
on arriving was the venue, a beautiful open-air theatre, bats fluttering through
the twilight above clicking crickets while lights from the Acropolis flickered
as a backdrop. I wanted to scream: "This is all wrong. Don’t you know
meetings like this are supposed to be in bare, freezing halls with a broken
heater, and start an hour late because no one can find the bloke with the key?
You people don’t know how to organise a meeting at all." Then instead of
the customary 10 people, 700 arrived, including the deputy leader of the Greek
equivalent to the TUC, and the writer of the year’s best-selling novel
throughout Greece.
These
incidents would tell us nothing about the year 2000, except that unofficial
global rumblings tend to back them up. The book No Logo, by Naomi Klein, a cry
against corporate greed, has sold over 100,000 copies. And it’s spawned a
library of books with titles like Globalize This!, Globalization and Resistance
and Resist Globalization. Soon all the permutations will be used up, so we’ll
get books called "Resisting national global corporate trans-corporate
globo-nationalness". Susan George, a veteran campaigner against third-world
debt, who has spent 25 years speaking largely to handfuls of academics, now
regularly fills theatres holding a thousand or more, so that long-term fans
probably feel like supporters of Fulham or Sunderland, muttering "Baaah, it
was cosier when we were shite."
One
"anti-capitalist conference", in Millau, France, attracted 80,000
people. Internationally newsworthy protests against Third-World debt and huge
corporations took place in Melbourne, Prague and Nice. Ralph Nader, the US
presidential candidate supporting this movement, won 2.5 million votes and
attracted between 10,000 and 16,000 at his rallies. If enough journalists had
been covering these events, one of them would have declared that anti-globalisation
was the new rock and roll.
None
of this was sufficient to threaten world leaders. But it was a sign of changing
values. In 1989, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the consensus was that the free
market had triumphed, and was destined to enrich the planet. Now, while there is
little nostalgia for the grotesque regimes of Stalinist eastern Europe, the free
market staggers across the stage to a diminishing audience. In Russia, life
expectancy has decreased by 10 years, and in Africa the average income in almost
every country continues to decline. "Structural adjustment programmes",
in which economies are taken over by organisations such as the World Bank, who
enforce privatisation and cuts in public spending, have been imposed on 90
countries.
Gradually,
these measures are provoking opposition. One consequence of this trend is that
"globalisation" has become one of those words – like
"glasnost" in the Eighties – that everyone uses though few can
explain what it means. A common definition is that you can no longer do anything
about anything. For example John Monks, the leader of the TUC, when asked for
his opinion on job closures at Luton, blamed "globalisation". He
looked like a football manager interviewed after a game, wistfully remarking,
"I don’t agree with the decision but at the end of the day what
globalisation says is final and we’ve just got to accept it."
By
the end of 2001, if you take a dodgy car back to the dealer you bought it from,
you can expect them to squeal, "Well there’s nothing I can do about that,
it’s yer globalisation, see."
One
strange result of all this has been that the most enthusiastic backers of the
ethos that nothing can function unless someone will make a profit from it are
the old parties once considered to be on the left – and none more so than
Britain’s New Labour. They continued to embrace big business as a virtue, and
search for any last utilities to privatise, like someone with no money hunting
down the back of the settee. Eventually they could yell, "Aha, I’ve found
air traffic control, that’ll do."
So
disillusionment with the major parties continued, and when this was reflected in
historically low turn-outs at elections, the excuses were surreal. "The
reason people didn’t bother to vote for us," said New Labour spokesperson
Patricia Hewitt, was that "they are satisfied by us." Which must make
for some splendid debates during canvassing. "Will you vote for us?"
"No thank you, because I think you’re marvellous." "Well vote for
us then." "No, I don’t want to spoil your splendid record by voting
for you."
Across
western Europe and America a similar pattern has emerged, of traditional
left-of-centre parties becoming increasingly tied to the free market, as the
failures of that market become more apparent. So if you’re 19, and flushed with
a desire to redress the growing inequality stalking the planet, you’re hardly
likely to venture in that direction. And joining Labour to turn it into a
radical campaigning party would seem as ridiculous as joining the RAC to turn it
into a radical campaigning breakdown service.
So
the modern generation of activists looks outside the old organisations. They are
often described as anarchists, but only because "anarchist" has come
to mean anyone radical with a nose-stud. Some are members of groups such as
Jubilee 2000, including the Christian couple who told me that they had taken
their holiday in Prague because "we can go to a museum in the morning and a
protest in the afternoon." But most are not part of any organisation.
Instead, they are the thin end of a wedge that includes millions around the
world who have come to the conclusion that, when the richest 360 people on the
planet own the same amount of wealth as the poorest two billion, something has
gone wrong.
And,
when you think about it, if all the two billion got together and smiled at the
360, that would look pretty spooky.