I don’t usually post long, point-by-point rebuttals of other people’s work, but I’m going to make an exception for a particularly inane opinion piece in today’s Scotsman. The article is Rise and fall of [the] anti-capitalist movement, by Fraser Nelson.
TWO weeks on Sunday, a group of young people from all around Britain will take a gamble on the weather and hold an afternoon picnic on St James’s Park in London. They may well be mistaken for a church youth-group outing, but the real content is far more serious: this is the 2004 anti-capitalist protest.
After much hand-wringing, the Mayday Collective has cancelled their annual protest in the capital - its newsletter says the decision was taken “only after several disappointing and poorly-attended meetings”. Recent rallies, the newsletter complained, featured “neither slogans being mouthed nor speeches being listened to - there was just, well, people dancing.”
Nelson has completely misinterpreted the last quote, if he even read the original source. The leaflet is reproduced here, and the line about ‘people dancing’ is actually in praise of the ’space’ opened up by the the likes of Mayday movement in defiance of ’slogans being mouthed’.
So what was once a loose but dazzling coalition of would-be revolutionaries, window-breakers and street-partiers will this year be represented by a band of earnest picnickers collectively chewing cucumber sandwiches in the London sunshine.
This is all a far cry from the scenes at Seattle in November 1999, when the World Trade Organisation’s annual meeting drew thousands of protesters who were dispersed with tear gas. Scenes reminiscent of the 1968 Paris student protests were beamed around the world - and acted as a clarion call to protesters worldwide.
The 2000 Mayday protest in London saw thousands descend on Whitehall, to find that police stood back as they defaced monuments, including Sir Winston Churchill’s statue and the Cenotaph. Those who missed it travelled to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, the European Union summit in Gothenburg, and the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001.
Then two hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York, and the world changed. Attendance at such demonstrations has plummeted since then: the game of political violence (which already claimed one life in Genoa) had lost its innocence.
Attendance at such demonstrations did not plummet after September 11th. The EU summit in Barcelona was accompanied by protests by a crowd of over 150,000. The size of protests aimed purely at economic and social issues has indeed tailed off, but only as protests about military issues have grown. And the vast majority of protestors at all the events Nelson describes were not interested in some ‘game of political violence’. They were, and remain, interested in the cause of global justice.
Anti-war protests have sapped much of the anti-capitalist momentum, but even these have receded after the capture of Saddam Hussein. As the brutality of his dictatorship became better-understood, the logic in protesting against its removal became less clear-cut.
Saddam’s brutality was already known. Most sensible anti-war people did not see the need to protest a conflict which was already mostly over, and had mixed feelings about the merits of a sudden Coalition withdrawal from Iraq.
Rather than reclaim this support, the anti-capitalist movement seems to have lost its vogue.
A number of factors are at work - and the most important is a battle of ideas which is now raging but did not exist during the “Battle of Seattle”. Then, the required text was the bestselling No Logo, by Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist who argued that big companies and their brands were exploiting the world’s poor by introducing sweatshop labour.
She hit a zeitgeist. By 2000, shops had globalised: holidaymakers had been going abroad to see Gap, Zara and Starbucks line up on high streets the world over. Shoppers were regularly turning the labels of their new clothes to see the names of faraway countries, even on the wares of self-proclaimed patriots such as Marks & Spencer. They smelt a rat - and Klein gleefully pointed them to it.
There was nothing either ‘gleeful’ or particularly new about Klein’s reporting of sweatshop conditions in Third World garment factories. She just integrated the well-known phenomenon of sweatshops into a well-argued cultural critique. Notice that Nelson is not arguing that the conditions in the sweatshops was not as bad as Klein claimed - he is simply implying that she should not have said so. The fact is, reputable clothing firms in the rich world only (and reluctantly) improved the conditions in their overseas factories because of the efforts of Klein and many before her to expose them.
And opposing Klein’s interpretation was - no-one. It became received wisdom that globalisation meant exploitation and that multinational companies were profiting on child labour, aided and abetted by the World Bank etc.
A classic straw man argument. I haven’t seen any suggestions that the World Bank aided and abetted the exploitation of child labour. Fraser Nelson has not paid attention to the views of the people he’s deriding.
For years, Klein was hailed as the queen of the small people versus the big people. The turning point came in Paris last year, when a 21-year-old activist led a protest of 80,000 in praise of “liberty” - and by liberty, they meant capitalism. They had come to “take back the streets” from the strikers then blocking the Paris traffic.
Sabine Herold was a student who had set up a centre-right think tank and called her movement “libertarianism”.
Firstly, Klein isn’t all that big, but I hadn’t noticed her being “hailed as the queen of the small people”. Secondly, fair play to Sabine Herold. That said, the National Review says she addressed a crowd of only 18,000 and not 80,000 but even if it’s nowhere near the scale of ‘anti-globalisation’ protests it’s still quite impressive.
But the main force in the pro-globalisation battle comes from an even more unlikely quarter: Sweden. The country with the highest taxes in Europe has produced Johan Norberg, 30, a former anarchist who has scored an international success with his book, In Defence of Globalisation.
Hailed as a 21st century manifesto of individual liberty and international development, his book has been translated into English and is selling worldwide - praised as the most powerful work ever written about globalisation.
Unlike No Logo, it is entirely based on facts - drawing from the United Nations’ own data to show that the overseas low-wage factories have made more progress against world poverty in the last 50 years than in the last 500.
What a silly comment, but enlightening in its silliness. The first 50 years have indeed seen more progress against poverty around the world than the previous 500, but that would not exactly be hard, since the previous 500 were characterised by the despoilation of the rest of the globe by the Europeans. And the biggest reductions in poverty were seen before the real dawn of the ‘globalised’ economy in the late 70s and early 80s. The countries which have made the most progress against poverty since then, such as India and China, have done so while conspicuously flouting the principles of free trade.
The facts he produces speak for themselves: when UN inspectors visited a town where a Nike sweatshop had been closed after protests from the United States, it found that former employees were working as prostitutes.
Such people worked in sweatshops because the alternative was even worse.
Sure, some did. And some were tricked into leaving their rural homes and working for wages well below what they were promised. And it’s worth pointing out again the magical process by which so many sweatshops improved their pay and conditions only after being exposed by campaigners, journalists and human rights activists.
Where globalised companies had been allowed to stay, their logo was the perfect form of policing. Standards rose, wealth was created.
“Protesters have never rejected the pro-capitalist arguments. The problem is, they’ve never heard them before,” argues Norberg.
Hardly. If Norberg believes this then he’s the one who’s been living in ignorance. This site contains tons of links to people hearing and rejecting the very same ‘pro-capitalist’ arguments.
What had been a one-sided debate has now become an internet-based forum where the likes of Norberg and Ms Herold have the more persuasive arguments - that the world’s problems stem from politicians obstructing free trade both at home and abroad.
I doubt either Norberg or Herold put forward that simplistic an argument.
New recruits are seeing a debate about globalisation, not a monologue - and a different array of facts. Giving aid to African dictators has been a notorious failure; giving trade to Asian businesses has been a resounding success.
What does he even mean here? What was aid for African dictators supposed to be succesful for? They pocketed the aid and debts, as we knew they would. Then we insisted that their democratic successors pay us back. When aid has been given to democratic African governments it has cut early mortality and increased literacy. And during the mid-20th Century the US channelled billions of dollars in aid and easy-terms credit to South Korea and Taiwan, which makes the point doubly spurious.
Heavyweights like Joseph E Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner, have entered the debate. His bestseller Globalisation and Its Discontents argues that free trade can be a tremendous force for good - but the World Bank has no idea how to best use it.
And the next salvo in the debate will be fired from the World Bank, whose figures will show that globalisation has lifted 400 million out of poverty in the last 20 years - greater progress than at any time in world history.
There’s plenty of debate about exactly how reliable those figures are, but regardless, since most of those 400 million no-longer-quite-as-poor people live in China it is hardly an advertisement for the wonders of free market capitalism. Also, to say that it is greater progress than at any time in world history is meaningless, since we don’t have comparable figures for before 1980.
My next post explains that the figures Nelson and Norberg cite show that the numbers of people in poverty outside China (i.e. in areas that have generally ‘embraced globalisation’ more enthusiastically than China has) have actually risen since 1981. The number of people in poverty in Africa has almost doubled since 1981, and has also increased in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In percentage terms, the proportion in poverty has increased in Africa and EECA and has dipped very slightly in Latin America.
Complaints that trade is exploitative have become the political equivalent of wearing flares and a tank-top: the world has moved on with such speed that many anti-globalisation arguments have become demonstrably untrue.
Instead, the intellectual leaders of this movement are joining the new radicals in focusing on protectionism: specifically the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, which subsidises farmers to ensure developing countries cannot compete.
The result? “Increasing shopping prices, enormous costs for taxpayers and developing countries in kept poverty,” says Norberg, who calls it the “white man’s shame”.
The Guardian newspaper, regarded as the journal of the anti-globalisation movement, agrees - and has also started a website against agricultural subsidies. The loudest voice belongs to charities such as Oxfam and the Jubilee Network, which have changed their tune in the last four years.
Rather than rail against corporate profit, they are more likely to join the attack on trade barriers.
This is perhaps the most moronic comment of all. Corporate profits, after all, are likely to be higher behind trade barriers. And there is no contradiction between attacking unfair trade barriers and subsidies in the rich world and exploitation in the sweatshops of the poor world.
Although they would be loathe to admit it, they are now fighting from a pro- globalisation perspective.
They are fighting, as they have always fought, for a better globalisation.
When such organisations are calling for free trade, this saps a substantial amount of credibility from the arguments of the anti-globalisation campaigners.
They are not calling for free trade, they are calling for freer trade into the markets of the rich world. There is a difference. The idea that Jubilee are calling for ‘free trade’ without qualifications will come as news to them or anyone who has read their recent highly-publicised book, The Real World Economic Outlook.
All in all, Fraser Nelson has written a very dumb article. I would write a letter saying so but I don’t think they’d print all this.
