Fuelling their ire

Ever since demonstrators virtually wrecked the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, every major conference of the World Bank, the WTO or the G-8 industrialised countries has had to contend with street demonstrators. Not representative of the 'loony left' or plain hooliganism, these demonstrations reveal the anger and disillusionment of increasing numbers of people, says KALPANA SHARMA. And for us in the developing world, it is important to pay heed to some of the questions they are raising.

SEATTLE, Washington, London, Quebec City, Prague, Davos, Gothenburg, Salzburg and now Genoa. All these cities have seen street battles, riot police, tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and sometimes real bullets in the last 18 months. And smashed plate glass windows, burning cars, stone-throwing masked demonstrators and space age police. To us sitting in this part of the world, it would appear as if the industrialised north has gone mad. With all that prosperity, what are these people protesting about?

Behind those street battles and the partial images projected by a sensation-obsessed media is a story of disillusionment and displacement that is relevant for us in the developing world. We need to hear the real voices above the cacophony and pay heed to some of what these protesters are saying.

Ever since demonstrators virtually wrecked the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle in November 1999, every major meeting of the World Bank, the WTO or the G8 industrialised countries has had to contend with street demonstrators. Increasingly, a small section of the demonstrators has been violent. It has attacked what it sees are symbols of globalisation - like the fast food chains (McDonalds, Starbucks etc) - and it both provokes and is provoked by the police.

Last month, the Italian Government took elaborate precautions to prevent demonstrators from arriving in Genoa during the G8 summit. Commercial flights to the port city were suspended, trains were cancelled, the entire area around the summit location was sanitised and isolated and heads of state stayed on ships docked in the port rather than on land. Despite this, thousands of demonstrators arrived in Genoa, the majority of them with the aim of peacefully demanding an end to Third World debt.

Genoa, however, became the scene of pitched battles televised daily around the world. The cameras caught only those demonstrators who were throwing stones or other objects. One demonstrator was shot dead by the Italian police. We had no way of knowing what the other thousands were thinking or doing.

In June in Gothenburg, the situation had been even stranger. Before the summit, the Swedish Prime Minister, Mr. Jan Carlsson, had met representatives of different groups of protesters. Schools in the city were opened up for the demonstrators to stay during the summit. But when the protesters gathered in the city, they were met with real bullets, not water cannons or rubber bullets or even tear gas. The Swedish police apparently did not have any crowd control tools. As a result, three demonstrators were injured. The world's newspapers carried the memorable image of a young demonstrator raising his hand to fling a rock at the police, turn his back on them and then fall down after being shot in the back.

Should stones be met with bullets? Is violence inevitable if disparate groups of people - ranging from anarchists to environmentalists, women's groups, peace groups, organisations fighting for cancellation of Third World debt, human rights groups - all come together?

I happened to be in Oslo, Norway, the week after the Gothenburg demonstrations. Ms. Nina Drange, president of Attac (Action pour une taxe Tobin d'aide aux citoyens), the France-based organisation spearheading some of the demonstrations, explained what they were fighting for. "We do not want stone-throwing and violence," said Ms. Drange. But the Swedish police, she said, were "unprofessional and nervous". They did not know how to manage large crowds. She said, "At every demonstration, there are always some people who want to fight. But in Gothenburg, people who are usually peaceful were very angry."

The irony, says Ms. Drange, was that the coalition of groups that assembled in Gothenburg had actually negotiated with the Swedish Prime Minister. But even before they began their demonstrations, one of the schools where some of them were staying was surrounded by the police, 240 people arrested and 60 of them charged. This kind of reaction from the authorities, she says, "radicalises people".

Also, the same evening that the riots broke out, a "confrontational dialogue" was held between representatives of the demonstrators, including well-known economist Ms. Susan George (author of How the Other Half Dies) and Ms. Dot Keith who heads Jubilee 2000, the campaign to end Third World debt, and European leaders. This was televised live on a big screen, watched by many of the 20,000 - 30,000 people who were in the city to register their protest. But it went unreported as the television cameras were focussed on the confrontation between a few demonstrators and the police elsewhere in the city.

Ms. Drange says that organisations like Attac are not just attacking globalisation but they have specific, constructive demands which have been voiced at every demonstration. Amongst these is the demand that the Tobin Tax (a tax on all global financial transactions) be introduced, cancellation of Third World debt, an open and transparent environment for investment, an intensification of the fight against financial piracy and tax havens and removal of European Union trade barriers against the Least Developed Countries (LDC).

Asked why so many people in the West should be concerned about issues that do not affect them directly, Mr. Carl-Erik Schulz, from the department of economics at Tromos University in Norway, who is also a member of Attac, said that people in rich countries like Norway could see the growing inequality even in their own society. "Europe is now much more exposed to the poverty of our neighbouring countries," he said. "The conflicts there come into our own country. That has triggered racism but also concern."

To fully understand the genesis of the current unrest as represented by the growing anti-capitalism demonstrations across the western world, you have to read Ms. Naomi Klein's gripping and persuasive book

No Logo (published by Flamingo, 2000). It has been called "the bible of anti-corporate militancy" and was written before Seattle. But it traces events through the 1990s in the West which resulted in alienation and displacement, and brought people out of their houses to "Reclaim the Streets".

The ideology and motivation of the demonstrators cannot be easily categorised. This is not the "loony left" as some would like to see it, or plain hooliganism. The demonstrations represent the anger and disillusionment of increasing numbers of people, young and old, with Western societies and economies that increase disparities and force increasing numbers of people into low-end temporary jobs.

The dominant characteristic of the economies of the industrialised West in the last decade has been the gradual process of de-industrialisation. Increasingly, corporates are closing down large plants, laying off workers with secure permanent jobs and outsourcing production outside national borders. In the countries where production centres have moved, the labour is usually non-unionised and temporary. Thus, for western corporates and multinationals, such a system minimises the risks and liabilities and maximises profits.

According to Ms. Klein, in 1977, 45,000 United States garment workers lost their jobs. She points out these factories closed down not because they were doing badly but because they could do better by outsourcing. "Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 per cent mark up between the cost of factory production and retail price have been scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the markup is closer to 400 per cent," she writes.

Outsourcing production has coincided with the growth in temporary jobs in the West. What are now called "Mcjobs" are often the only option for thousands of young people coming into the job market. Fastfood chains, shopping malls, chain bookstores and music stores all employ people on a temporary basis, sometimes paying less than the minimum wage. According to Ms. Klein, the number of part-timers in the U.S. has tripled since 1968. Of course, those providing temporary jobs actively discourage unionism and even penalise it.

These part-timers, young and old, also live in a world where manufacturing things has been replaced by branding. You do not buy canvas shoes anymore, you buy a brand. You do not brush your teeth with toothpaste anymore, you use a brand. You do not wear a shirt, trousers, underwear, socks anymore, you wear brands. Ms. Klein calls this the "new branded world" where the nature of the product has ceased to matter, it is the brand that does. She quotes Mr. Hector Liang, former chairman of United Biscuits, saying, "Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what live on are the brands."

But why should branding lead to alienation? To quote Ms. Klein again: "Since many of today's best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and 'brand' them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative ways to build and strengthen their brand images. Manufacturing products may require drills, furnaces, hammers and the like, but creating a brand calls for a completely different set of tools and materials. It requires an endless parade of brand extensions, continuously renewed imagery for marketing, and most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate the brand's idea of itself."

Thus brand marketing has invaded every part of life in these countries. Even toilets in colleges are plastered with advertisements selling a brand. Everywhere you look, you have brands staring down at you. The entire side of buildings have been sold for brand promotion. All this is apart from television, radio, newspapers, magazines, buses, taxis, trains - all carriers of brand messages.

The response to this onslaught of brands on people in the West has been a movement called "adbusting" which has taken various forms. From magazines that parody brands to guerrilla actions that deface brands or hack sites of corporates, all these have been signs of protest.

Through the 1990s, media exposes about the manner in which certain brands, like Nike, were actually produced in other countries also led to both consumer resistance and revulsion with the branded world. Stories of child labour, sweat shops using young women, poor wages and terrible working conditions appeared regularly in the western media. The products being churned out in these factories in developing countries were the leading brands in the West. People began demanding that corporations must be held accountable.

Other forms of protest in the last decade include the Reclaim the Streets (RTS) movement where groups suddenly appear unannounced on major roads or even highways and hold a "spontaneous" rave party or demonstration. In cities like London, on the last Friday of every month, the streets are full of people on bicycles under the banner of Critical Mass. They are registering their desire for a clean environment, better public transport and fewer private cars. The common theme in this type of protest was "reclaiming" what is "not 'ours', as in 'our club' or 'our group', but ours as in the people. All the people". (from a Toronto RTS leaflet).

These expressions of protest are also part of a much more coordinated effort by environmental groups world-wide, human rights groups, those fighting for workers' rights and peace groups on a range of issues. The internet and e-mail have greatly facilitated such coordination across continents.

The anti-globalisation protests, in a sense, provided all these disparate groups an opportunity to come together and register their protest on issues that are organically linked.

Writing in The Guardian, Mr. Jeremy Rifkin suggests that these are "the first stirrings of a cultural backlash to globalisation whose effects are likely to be as significant and far-reaching as were the revolutionary movements for political democracy and market capitalism at the end of the 18th Century". He calls it a new "civil society politics".

One can agree or disagree with this prediction but one thing is certain: the number of people questioning the new globalised world economy is growing. The nature of the protests might change, given the type of violence seen in Genoa. The targets in future might not be such meetings - the WTO is holding its next meeting in Qatar to ensure that Western protestors are kept out - but could be specific corporations that symbolise the global economy.

What is important for us here is to pay heed to some of the questions raised by the protestors. Who profits and who loses in "the new branded world?" What is the real value added to our lives by the proliferation of brands? Is the consumer really king or are all of us becoming pawns in a huge "branded" game? Do we really want a world where rice, flour, vegetables, fruit, pens, ink, paper, clothes, shoes, chappals ... disappear from our vocabulary and we are left only with brands? Is this what poor countries like ours really need?

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