CFC News

the Committees of  Correspondence has begun a news posting network. it is
similar in form to the BRC News. here is a sample of one  of their articles.
they say they will limit their postings to five per day.
----- Original Message -----
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
To: <portside@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 9:01 PM
Subject: A transformed landscape


> Protests Aimed at Powerful Symbols of Capitalism Find
> Themselves in a Transformed Landscape
>
> By Naomi Klein
>
> October 22, 2001; The Nation
>
> As shocking as this must be to New Yorkers, in Toronto,
> the city where I live, lampposts and mailboxes are
> plastered with posters advertising a plan by
> antipoverty activists to "shut down" the business
> district on October 16. Some of the posters (those put
> up before September 11) even have a picture of
> skyscrapers outlined in red -- the perimeters of the
> designated direct-action zone. Many have argued that
> O16 should be canceled, as other protests and
> demonstrations have been, in deference to the mood of
> mourning -- and out of fear of stepped-up police
> violence. But the shutdown is going ahead. In the end,
> the events of September 11 don't change the fact that
> the nights are getting colder and the recession is
> looming. They don't change the fact that in a city that
> used to be described as "safe" and, well, "maybe a
> little boring," many will die on the streets this
> winter, as they did last winter, and the one before
> that, unless more beds are found immediately.
>
> And yet there is no disputing that the event, its
> militant tone and its choice of target will provoke
> terrible memories and associations. Many political
> campaigns face a similar, and sudden, shift. Post-
> September 11, tactics that rely on attacking -- even
> peacefully -- powerful symbols of capitalism find
> themselves in an utterly transformed semiotic
> landscape. After all, the attacks were acts of very
> real and horrifying terror, but they were also acts of
> symbolic warfare, and instantly understood as such. As
> Tom Brokaw and so many others put it, the towers were
> not just any buildings, they were "symbols of American
> capitalism."
>
> As someone whose life is thoroughly entwined with what
> some people call "the antiglobalization movement,"
> others call "anticapitalism" (and I tend to just
> sloppily call "the movement"), I find it difficult to
> avoid discussions about symbolism these days. About all
> the anticorporate signs and signifiers -- the culture-
> jammed logos, the guerrilla-warfare stylings, the
> choices of brand name and political targets -- that
> make up the movement's dominant metaphors.
>
> Many political opponents of anticorporate activism are
> using the symbolism of the World Trade Center and
> Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing
> at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real
> war. The obituaries are already appearing in newspapers
> around the world: "Anti-Globalization Is So Yesterday,"
> reads a typical headline. It is, according to the
> Boston Globe, "in tatters." Is it true? Our activism
> has been declared dead before. Indeed, it is declared
> dead with ritualistic regularity before and after every
> mass demonstration: our strategies apparently
> discredited, our coalitions divided, our arguments
> misguided. And yet those demonstrations have kept
> growing larger, from 50,000 in Seattle to 300,000, by
> some estimates, in Genoa.
>
> At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend that
> nothing has changed since September 11. This struck me
> recently, looking at a slide show I had been pulling
> together before the attacks. It is about how
> anticorporate imagery is increasingly being absorbed by
> corporate marketing. One slide shows a group of
> activists spray-painting the window of a Gap outlet
> during the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The next shows
> The Gap's recent window displays featuring its own
> prefab graffiti -- words like "Independence" sprayed in
> black. And the next is a frame from Sony PlayStation's
> "State of Emergency" game featuring cool-haired
> anarchists throwing rocks at evil riot cops protecting
> the fictitious American Trade Organization. When I
> first looked at these images beside each other, I was
> amazed by the speed of corporate co-optation. Now all I
> can see is how these snapshots from the corporate
> versus anticorporate image wars have been instantly
> overshadowed, blown away by September 11 like so many
> toy cars and action figures on a disaster movie set.
>
> Despite the altered landscape -- or because of it -- it
> bears remembering why this movement chose to wage
> symbolic struggles in the first place. The Ontario
> Coalition Against Poverty's decision to "shut down" the
> business district came from a set of very specific and
> still relevant circumstances. Like so many others
> trying to get issues of economic inequality on the
> political agenda, the people the group represents felt
> that they had been discarded, left outside the
> paradigm, disappeared and reconstituted as a
> panhandling or squeegee problem requiring tough new
> legislation. They realized that what they had to
> confront was just not a local political enemy or even a
> particular trade law but an economic system -- the
> broken promise of deregulated, trickle-down capitalism.
> Thus the modern activist challenge: How do you organize
> against an ideology so vast, it has no edges; so
> everywhere, it seems nowhere? Where is the site of
> resistance for those with no workplaces to shut down,
> whose communities are constantly being uprooted? What
> do we hold on to when so much that is powerful is
> virtual -- currency trades, stock prices, intellectual
> property and arcane trade agreements?
>
> The short answer, at least before September 11, was
> that you grab anything you can get your hands on: the
> brand image of a famous multinational, a stock
> exchange, a meeting of world leaders, a single trade
> agreement or, in the case of the Toronto group, the
> banks and corporate headquarters that are the engines
> that power this agenda. Anything that, even fleetingly,
> makes the intangible actual, the vastness somehow
> human-scale. In short, you find symbols and you hope
> they become metaphors for change.
>
> For instance, when the United States launched a trade
> war against France for daring to ban hormone-laced
> beef, José Bové and the French Farmers' Confederation
> didn't get the world's attention by screaming about
> import duties on Roquefort cheese. They did it by
> "strategically dismantling" a McDonald's. Nike,
> ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Shell, Chevron, Pfizer, Sodexho
> Marriott, Kellogg's, Starbucks, The Gap, Rio Tinto,
> British Petroleum, General Electric, Wal-Mart, Home
> Depot, Citigroup, Taco Bell -- all have found their
> gleaming brands used to shine light on everything from
> bovine growth hormone in milk to human rights in the
> Niger Delta; from labor abuses of Mexican tomato
> farmworkers in Florida to war-financing of oil
> pipelines in Chad and Cameroon; from global warming to
> sweatshops.
>
> In the weeks since September 11, we have been reminded
> many times that Americans aren't particularly informed
> about the world outside their borders. That may be
> true, but many activists have learned over the past
> decade that this blind spot for international affairs
> can be overcome by linking campaigns to famous brands
> -- an effective, if often problematic, weapon against
> parochialism. These corporate campaigns have, in turn,
> opened back doors into the arcane world of
> international trade and finance, to the World Trade
> Organization, the World Bank and, for some, to a
> questioning of capitalism itself.
>
> But these tactics have also proven to be an easy target
> in turn. After September 11, politicians and pundits
> around the world instantly began spinning the terrorist
> attacks as part of a continuum of anti-American and
> anticorporate violence: first the Starbucks window,
> then, presumably, the WTC. New Republic editor Peter
> Beinart seized on an obscure post to an anticorporate
> Internet chat room that asked if the attacks were
> committed by "one of us." Beinart concluded that "the
> anti-globalization movement...is, in part, a movement
> motivated by hatred of the United States" -- immoral
> with the United States under attack.
>
> In a sane world, rather than fueling such a backlash
> the terrorist attacks would raise questions about why
> US intelligence agencies were spending so much time
> spying on environmentalists and Independent Media
> Centers instead of on the terrorist networks plotting
> mass murder. Unfortunately, it seems clear that the
> crackdown on activism that predated September 11 will
> only intensify, with heightened surveillance,
> infiltration and police violence. It's also likely that
> the anonymity that has been a hallmark of
> anticapitalism -- masks, bandannas and pseudonyms --
> will become more suspect in a culture searching for
> clandestine operatives in its midst.
>
> But the attacks will cost us more than our civil
> liberties. They could well, I fear, cost us our few
> political victories. Funds committed to the AIDS crisis
> in Africa are disappearing, and commitments to expand
> debt cancellation will likely follow. Defending the
> rights of immigrants and refugees was becoming a major
> focus for the direct-action crowd in Australia, Europe
> and, slowly, the United States. This too is threatened
> by the rising tide of racism and xenophobia.
>
> And free trade, long facing a public relations crisis,
> is fast being rebranded, like shopping and baseball, as
> a patriotic duty. According to US Trade Representative
> Robert Zoellick (who is frantically trying to get fast-
> track negotiating power pushed through in this moment
> of jingoistic groupthink), trade "promotes the values
> at the heart of this protracted struggle." Michael
> Lewis makes a similar conflation between freedom
> fighting and free trading when he explains, in an essay
> in The New York Times Magazine, that the traders who
> died were targeted as "not merely symbols but also
> practitioners of liberty.... They work hard, if
> unintentionally, to free others from constraints. This
> makes them, almost by default, the spiritual antithesis
> of the religious fundamentalist, whose business depends
> on a denial of personal liberty in the name of some
> putatively higher power."
>
> The battle lines leading up to next month's WTO
> negotiations in Qatar are: Tradeequals freedom,
> antitrade equals fascism. Never mind that Osama bin
> Laden is a multimillionaire with a rather impressive
> global export network stretching from cash-crop
> agriculture to oil pipelines. And never mind that this
> fight will take place in Qatar, that bastion of
> liberty, which is refusing foreign visas for
> demonstrators but where bin Laden practically has his
> own TV show on the state-subsidized network Al-Jazeera.
>
> Our civil liberties, our modest victories, our usual
> strategies -- all are now in question. But this crisis
> also opens up new possibilities. As many have pointed
> out, the challenge for social justice movements is to
> connect economic inequality with the security concerns
> that now grip us all -- insisting that justice and
> equality are the most sustainable strategies against
> violence and fundamentalism.
>
> But we cannot be naïve, as if the very real and ongoing
> threat of more slaughtering of innocents will disappear
> through political reform alone. There needs to be
> social justice, but there also needs to be justice for
> the victims of these attacks and immediate, practical
> prevention of future ones. Terrorism is indeed an
> international threat, and it did not begin with the
> attacks in the United States. As Bush invites the world
> to join America's war, sidelining the United Nations
> and the international courts, we need to become
> passionate defenders of true multilateralism, rejecting
> once and for all the label "antiglobalization." Bush's
> "coalition" does not represent a genuinely global
> response to terrorism but the internationalization of
> one country's foreign policy objectives -- the
> trademark of US international relations, from the WTO
> negotiating table to Kyoto: You are free to play by our
> rules or get shut out completely. We can make these
> connections not as "anti-Americans" but as true
> internationalists.
>
> We can also refuse to engage in a calculus of
> suffering. Some on the left have implied that the
> outpouring of compassion and grief post-September 11 is
> disproportionate, even vaguely racist, compared with
> responses to greater atrocities. Surely the job of
> those who claim to abhor injustice and suffering is not
> to stingily parcel out compassion as if it were a
> finite commodity. Surely the challenge is to attempt to
> increase the global reserves of compassion, rather than
> parsimoniously police them.
>
> Besides, is the outpouring of mutual aid and support
> that this tragedy has elicited so different from the
> humanitarian goals to which this movement aspires? The
> street slogans -- PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT , THE WORLD IS
> NOT FOR SALE -- have become self-evident and viscerally
> felt truths for many in the wake of the attacks. There
> is outrage in the face of profiteering. There are
> questions being raised about the wisdom of leaving
> crucial services like airport security to private
> companies, about why there are bailouts for airlines
> but not for the workers losing their jobs. There is a
> groundswell of appreciation for public-sector workers
> of all kinds. In short, "the commons" -- the public
> sphere, the public good, the noncorporate, what we have
> been defending, what is on the negotiating table in
> Qatar -- is undergoing something of a rediscovery in
> the United States.
>
> Instead of assuming that Americans can care about each
> other only when they are getting ready to kill a common
> enemy, those concerned with changing minds (and not
> simply winning arguments) should seize this moment to
> connect these humane reactions to the many other arenas
> in which human needs must take precedence over
> corporate profits, from AIDS treatment to homelessness.
> As Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen, puts it,
> despite the warmongering and coexisting with the
> xenophobia, "People seem careful, vulnerable, and
> extraordinarily kind to each other. These events just
> might be able to break us away from our gated
> communities of the heart."
>
> This would require a dramatic change in activist
> strategy, one based much more on substance than on
> symbols. Then again, for more than a year, the largely
> symbolic activism outside summits and against
> individual corporations has already been challenged
> within movement circles. There is much that is
> unsatisfying about fighting a war of symbols: The glass
> shatters in the McDonald's window, the meetings are
> driven to ever more remote locations -- but so what?
> It's still only symbols, facades, representations.
>
> Before September 11, a new mood of impatience was
> already taking hold, an insistence on putting forward
> social and economic alternatives that address the roots
> of injustice as well as its symptoms, from land reform
> to slavery reparations. Now seems like a good time to
> challenge the forces of both nihilism and nostalgia
> within our own ranks, while making more room for the
> voices -- coming from Chiapas, Pôrto Alegre, Kerala --
> showing that it is indeed possible to challenge
> imperialism while embracing plurality, progress and
> deep democracy. Our task, never more pressing, is to
> point out that there are more than two worlds
> available, to expose all the invisible worlds between
> the economic fundamentalism of "McWorld" and the
> religious fundamentalism of "Jihad."
>
> Maybe the image wars are coming to a close. A year ago,
> I visited the University of Oregon to do a story on
> antisweatshop activism at the campus that is nicknamed
> Nike U. There I met student activist Sarah Jacobson.
> Nike, she told me, was not the target of her activism,
> but a tool, a way to access a vast and often amorphous
> economic system. "It's a gateway drug," she said
> cheerfully.
>
> For years, we in this movement have fed off our
> opponents' symbols -- their brands, their office
> towers, their photo-opportunity summits. We have used
> them as rallying cries, as focal points, as popular
> education tools. But these symbols were never the real
> targets; they were the levers, the handles. They were
> what allowed us, as British writer Katharine Ainger
> recently put it, "to open a crack in history."
>
> The symbols were only ever doorways. It's time to walk
> through them.
>
> Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the
> Brand Bullies (Picador).
>
> © 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
>
>
>
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