| When word reached thousands of demonstrators that global trade talks had collapsed at the latest meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico in mid-September, a rousing cheer is said to have spread through their ranks.
Thousands of kilometres away, in Great Britain, a wistful Paul Kingsnorth felt the same surge of excitement – tinged, however, with a little envy.
"It sounded like it was a lot of fun," Kingsnorth says.
After spending several years circling the globe on an investigation of the so-called anti-globalization movement for his book One No, Many Yesses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (The Free Press), Kingsnorth can’t be blamed for feeling a little left out after missing one of the movement’s major victories.
"I think what happened there was great," he says. "For the first time since the ‘70s, the developing countries got going and refused to be turned over by rich people."
In One No, Many Yesses, the British activist and writer set out to see the real implications of free trade (a.k.a. neo-conservatism, the Washington Consensus, globalization or, if you share Kingsnorth’s world view, out-of-control capitalism). He wanted to better understand a movement that involves millions of people all over the world, but is defined by a complex and largely misunderstood (by North Americans, anyway) collection of diverse ideas that refuse to fit neatly into a sound bite.
Kingsnorth spent time with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico – the first group to rise up against globalization. He met guerillas in New Guinea and water-starved Africans in Johannesburg. The result of his research is the realization that defining the movement may be folly – there’s no template solution for the problems generated by the current economic model, Kingsnorth says, so don’t bother trying to find one.
"The diversity of the movement is a strength and a weakness," he says. "At some stage, it’s going to have to face the challenge of some kind of manifesto, but… I’m quite passionate we shouldn’t come up with a one-size-fits-all movement. That’s what the communists did during the 20th century and it was a disaster. We’re hopeful we can come up with a system that allows for diversity and works in many different ways."
As the title of the book suggests, one of Kingsnorth’s aims is to debunk the notion that the anti-globalization movement is simply a protest movement – that it offers no real alternatives to the problems of the current global economy. He says the movement is united in its opposition to a system that allows multinational corporations to trump local democracy and economies, but the answer isn’t a global vision – it’s custom-built local solutions. The Brazilian land reform movement and Zapatista rebellion, for example, are disparate movements, but both are evidence of alternatives to the current economic model.
Kingsnorth says one of the big challenges for the movement now is to figure out ways to take those solutions to a global level.
The book also delves into problems that have dogged the movement, such as the pace of change, tactics and the ever-present debate over ideology (one South African activist is so fed up with being saddled with what he perceives as out-dated ideological baggage, he tells Kingsnorth, "Fuck the left").
Without an Adam Smith or Karl Marx putting together a manifesto to lead the headless movement, Kingsnorth acknowledges that its biggest struggle may always be finding agreement among its supporters. But he says such a debate indicates that alternatives are being discussed and people are avoiding the ideological traps that failed in the 20th century.
"It it’s going to work, it has to happen from the ground up," Kingsnorth says. |
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