Anti-globalisation movement: the new populism
A review of Naming the Enemy: Anticorporate movements confront globalisation, by Amory Starr

Naming the Enemy is the first book which sets out to make an overall analysis of the new movement which hit the world’s headlines only twelve months ago in Seattle.

The author, Amory Starr, teaches Sociology at Colorado State University, but she has also been an activist in various anti-globalisation movements over the last five years.

Starr regards the movement as a multi-class people’s movement against big, multinational capital. In her model the "people" include small entrepreneurs. The working class is accorded no special role—indeed she considers that “historical materialism is confounded by the failure of the working class to play its revolutionary role”.

What we have in this book is a manifesto for neo-populism. Starr points out that “anti corporatism was part of the populist tradition". This is an old tradition in the US dating back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century when big corporations started to emerge.

It was based socially on the small farmers and had as its ideal a return to a society of small property owners and a democracy free from the influence of bankers and big business.

Populism identifies only large scale monopolistic capitalism as “the enemy”. It emphasises the harmfulness of international trade and big finance. It sees the answer as a return to the small scale, the primitive communal, the local. It excoriates international culture as a corrupting factor.

Above all it assigns the working class no special role because in its view this class is too heavily bound up with large scale production. The peasantry and indigenous peoples are seen as the fount of wisdom.

Its criticism of capitalism is moralistic, archaic, and its solutions a series of “back to's”—back to nature and the land, back to the small rural community, back to small businesses, back to simplicity, back to religion.

It methods of struggle and organisation are individualist not collective.
All this means that it cannot distinguish progressive from reactionary trends in the petit bourgeoisie and ends up accommodating to the latter.

Starr believes that “a community’s shared values and visions provide a cultural lens for critical analysis” and that “traditional indigenous culture is the basis for critiques of oppression”. These cultures provide “spiritual bulwarks against, and oases of escape from, dehumanising forces”.

We can agree that this is the case for communities suffering oppression and super-exploitation—whether at the hands of corporate imperialism or at the hands of local oppressors. But there is nothing intrinsically progressive in these sorts of culture. Oppressors can also have such cultures—the Hutu chauvinists in Rwanda could carry out a genocide.

Elevating the “indigenous” means that she shies away from any serious analysis of anti-corporate popular culture. This results in a serious underestimation of the role that modern cultural action (raves, street parties, etc.) have played in the revival of a rebellious youth movement.

Starr organises her analysis around what she calls “three modes of struggle” These are “contestation and Reform or restrained globalisation”, “globalisation from below or democratised globalisation” and lastly “delinking, relocalisation, sovereignty”. It is clear that she believes that only the latter is really radically anti-global.

In the first type belong movements seeking to reform the economy and social life, to change the actions of corporations, governments and global institutions.

In this category she puts a bewildering mix of movements. Everyone from NGOs and churches through land reform and peace movements to Reclaim the Streets and anti-Sweatshop campaigns are listed under this heading.

What she does not emphasise is that the struggles for partial demands by such campaigns have an international, mass, progressive character. That they are bringing huge numbers of workers, students, peasants and indigenous peoples into alliance with one another. Certainly this tendency needs to become conscious and to break away from its current reformist strategy and leaders who embody this.

She then moves on to the second category, “globalisation from below (democratised globalisation)” which she regards

She sees this as uniting all those organisations who seek the development of a people’s internationalist populism—the attempt to create a global civil society. Once again her list is wide ranging - Greenpeace, key labour unions in the USA, South Korea and Mexico and most remarkably, for its inclusion at all, the Socialist International.

In government in most of Europe this is the instrument of capitalist globalising policies “with a human face”. In no sense is the Socialist International part of the anti-capitalist movement.

In fact this entire “socialist” sub-category is threadbare—only the US and Australian Democratic Socialists are mentioned. Apart from the latter those organisations which openly proclaim themselves revolutionary are totally missing. Yet they have played a major role in the mobilisations, at least outside the US.

The Zapatistas are given— correctly— considerable coverage since they undoubtedly acted as a major stimulus to the convergence of all these movements in the Americas and beyond. In a series of declarations between 1995 and 1998 they linked into the anti-NAFTA movements in Mexico, the USA and Canada.

New technology obviously played a vital role in spreading these links and creating - by the time of Seattle - the sense of a common movement. Hence the presence of sizeable delegations and individual representatives of third world unions, peasant movements and indigenous people’s organisations in Seattle. But even this is played down thanks to Starr’s preference for the primitive.

She interprets this whole strand as striving for “an international, non-violent revolution to be achieved by the rising up of people’s movements everywhere.” For her there is a real danger that this will still lead to increased globalisation, centralisation, dominance, and the triumph of the cosmopolitan over the ethnic and local:

“The goals of globalisation from below require centralisation (which) makes the system vulnerable to many of the problems of corporate globalisation. It is a set up for logics of comparative advantage that would again subordinate localities to priorities set at the centre, denying them control over their own resources.”

The core of her argument is that the real problem is the scale of capitalist development, its global, and even its national, character. International and national trade are bad—local trade is good. International (cosmopolitan), not just corporate, culture is bad but local indigenous culture is good. Only the local is authentic and it is good. The large scale is the enemy.

The reactionary consequences of this view come out in Starr’s appreciation of the third strand of the movement—the one she most identifies with. This strand of the movement has, she believes, developed a truly correct alternative vision.

She declares her marked preference for anarchism over socialism:

“Where anarchism differs from socialism is in the post-revolutionary vision—local autonomy of worker-collectives and no state ... localised ownership of the means of production in a stateless society will enable local economic autonomy and will prohibit élite power. Whilst vigorously internationalist, the future vision of the movement is about relocalisation.”

Starr testifies to her convergence with anarchism at the level of organisation in recalling her experiences in the battle of Seattle. The form for doing this was the widespread use of “affinity groups”:

“My entire group felt that we should also use anarchist principles in organising ourselves during the week of protest. Many anarchist principles were in obvious use There was no attempt at centralisation, control, official messages, or forms of protest as whole. The only attempts at co-ordination were engaged in dialogically and person-to-person. Everyone who participated has now experienced the anarchist alternative to bureaucratic top down systems. We saw self-organisation at work and it worked.”

Even in Seattle all accounts make it clear that success was the result of a (chance) convergence of the forces of organised labour and the affinity group protesters. Neither the (admittedly) bureaucratically centralised Teamsters nor the decentralised Turtles had “the organisation that worked”. But the chance coalescence of their forces and the unreadiness of the police combined to achieve a historic victory, despite these weaknesses.

The full scope of the author’s populism is revealed in the uncritical attitude she takes to the “sustainable development” ideologists. This movement she says “emphasises the resources and needs of the locality and focuses production almost entirely on local basic needs and simple pleasures, delinking from larger economies.”

She launches a “defence and celebration of small-scale entrepreneurship”. This includes a prettification of some of the most savage exploiters—engaged as they are in “primitive accumulation”. The investigation of most small shops and workshops would reveal this—it is not only the multinationals that engage in child and even slave labour.

Alongside this the author approves strongly of a back to the soil movement. This system, Starr believes, could act as an economic basis for small scale communities, “secure from economic fluctuations”, a “scaling back of overdevelopment”.

This indicates the self-conscious primitivism of her analysis—the answer to humanity's problems lies in the past. This explains in part her incredible lack of discrimination when it comes to “primitive” communities. She not only approves the oppressed and exploited indigenous people’s of central and south America but currents which the left and Marxists, correctly, regard as reactionary.

Starr tells us that “African American activists frequently describe their communities during segregation as more healthy culturally, socially and economically”. She quotes (unidentified) French Jews as saying “emancipation destroyed their culture”.

She claims Israeli Jewish fundamentalists (Haredim) who oppose planners, big hotels, swimming pools, archaeologists and autopsies are defending their communities. Islamist jihads are also efforts to protect community and culture from corporate culture.

Starr condemns tourism for its ecological and cultural destructiveness and suggests that in a delinked, relocalised world people will not want to travel around, and in any case will not be welcome. Several times Starr uses the word “cosmopolitanism” in a derogatory sense— a bit scary given the precedents for this in the twentieth century (Stalin and Hitler).

US racist populists come in for positive treatment. Even the Montana Militia! Sure they are racists, she admits, but they are extreme localists too. Outrageously she suggests that “these movements should be considered within the scope of options for political economic struggle”— i.e. we should interpret their paranoia about the federal government, the United Nations, their Christian fundamentalism, as a form of legitimate anti-corporate struggle.

Likewise all these movements' extreme reactionary moralism (anti-gay, anti-women’s rights) their bigotry, their rejection of the secular state can be re-interpreted as a critique of corporate amoralism The “rigidity of life” of all these religious fundamentalist movements is a rejection of corporate values and thus “a liberation struggle” an attempt to regain “moral order over social life.”

Starr's neo-populism drives her to question bourgeois democracy and human rights in a reactionary manner:

“Shall we begin by acknowledging the limits of secularism? The limits of state enforcement of civil rights? Of the civil rights process itself? Of the universalism of human rights? Of its antagonistic relationship with place and culture……If we could just mange to grow our own food and incorporate our shit into our own soil, might that open more possibilities for others to be themselves than some universalising, inevitably bureaucratic participatory democracy.”

Amory Starr has inadequately named the enemy. Worse she has falsely named as friends or allies some of oppressed humanity’s worst enemies. The enemy for Marxists is not only corporate power but capitalism and all other remaining forms of exploitation and oppression.

Amory Starr turns away from the most progressive aspect of the anti-capitalist movement—its internationalism, its creation of a world community of struggle by the oppressed. She does not want to see the central role which the working class and the propertyless poor must come to play.

It is the mass strikes and actions of these strata that point the way to the only real answer to global capitalism—world revolution and world socialism.

Populism with its idealist methodology, its obscuring of class, its backward looking praise of traditional communities and cultures, has nothing to offer to the anti-capitalist movement.

Naming the Enemy: Anticorporate movements confront globalisation, by Amory Starr. Pluto Press - Australia/Zed Books - London and New York. 2000

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