On the afternoon of Saturday 18 November, a group of around 100 protestors attempted to break through the barricades that police had erected around the site of the G20 summit at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Clashes with police ensued, with protestors attacking the water-filled barricades and, a short while later, an empty police brawler van, which was also being used as a barricade to block access to the Hyatt. The next day Victoria Police launched a massive operation — Operation Salver — which began making arrests within twenty-four hours. In the days and months that followed, a total of twenty-eight people were arrested and charged. Most of the charges relate to the events of the Saturday afternoon, but there are also some related to a series of occupations on the Friday before — of the Defence Recruiting Office and the office of Tenix Solutions, a defence contractor company which has been making big profits from the war in Iraq — and a scuffle with police outside Parliament House on the Saturday evening.

The list of charges laid against the twenty-eight women and men is long and frightening. It includes multiple counts of riot, affray, conduct endangering serious injury, criminal damage, assault and aggravated burglary. In March this year the first of the arrestees was sentenced. Akin Sari pleaded guilty to nine charges after having being detained on remand for several months. He was sentenced to a staggering twenty-eight months jail, with a minimum non-parole period of fourteen. His sentencing came mid-way through the committal hearing for the other twenty-three arrestees going through the adult court system (four more will go before the Children’s Court on 28 April this year). During the hearing ten people agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges, leaving thirteen who have now been committed to stand trial in the County Court. It is unlikely that this will happen before the end of 2009. Meanwhile, those who pleaded guilty will face court again this month, and the prosecution has stated that it will be seeking custodial sentences in a number of cases.

The arrests, prosecution and threat of prison sentences have, not surprisingly, shaken the group of arrestees and the people around them. Indeed, it is difficult to convey a sense of just how agonising it can be to be caught up in the middle of the criminal justice system — the constant court dates; the endless impersonal bureaucracy, forms and bail variation applications; the feelings of being harassed, belittled, of drowning in bewildering and incomprehensible legal jargon. Most of those arrested are now receiving legal aid, but many faced significant legal costs in the period immediately following their arrest, and a few are facing legal fees approaching the tens of thousands of dollars. Then there are travel expenses for those from inter-state, the cost of child care and lost wages when people are required to be in court. At least one arrestee has lost their job as a result of their arrest. The solidarity network established soon after the first arrests has raised over $10,000, but this has barely scratched the surface of what is needed.

The emotional and material stress on those who were arrested has been intensified, in many instances, by the conduct of the police. From the beginning Operation Salver aggressively pursued those it could identify and employed tactics intended to frighten and intimidate. Undercover ‘snatch squads’ were used in a number of arrests, with heavy-handed raids used in other cases. Five men in Sydney were arrested in a series of dawn raids that saw doors kicked in and people woken by armed police officers standing over their beds. Some younger members of the group have reported being pressured about their right to silence, while one man was secretly recorded in the back of the police car as he was being taken to the police station after his arrest. Draconian bail conditions initially barred arrestees from communicating with one another, prevented those living in Victoria from travelling outside the state despite posing minimal flight risk, and required them to report to police as often as three times a week. Supporters of the arrestees have argued that the bail conditions were used as a form of punishment of people who had not been convicted of any crime, and it is only after lengthy court appearances and strenuous arguments by defence counsels that these conditions have now been eased.

Given the events of the G20 weekend, the fact that there were arrests is hardly surprising. The aggressive determination of the police and prosecution to secure convictions and gaol time, however, and the severity of the charges that have been laid, are frighteningly unfamiliar in the recent history of the policing of public protest. Beneath the dramatic hyperbole of the prosecution, police, the state, and the mainstream media, the charges that the G20 arrestees are now facing simply overwhelm the reality of the events that took place. One young man facing charges of riot and affray in the Children’s Court — charges that carry sentences of up to ten years — is accused of nothing more than throwing a plastic bottle at an empty van. He was fourteen at the time of his arrest.

While the Police Association has railed against Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon for leaving its members defenceless in the face of marauding violent hordes, the evidence so far tendered before the court has detailed nothing more serious than minor shoulder injuries suffered by one policewoman, a wrist which may or may not have been broken, and a case of tennis elbow which medical witnesses have testified could well have been the result of a pre-existing injury. Injuries, yes, but hardly the catalogue of wounds one would expect from the kind of out-of-control rioting and carnage that police say occurred. As one supporter commented, you would see worse violence at a Frankston pub on a Friday night.

The aggravated burglary charges against three people are particularly significant in the prosecution of the group as a whole. The ‘agg. burg.’ charges, as they are known in the court lingo with which the arrestees are rapidly becoming familiar, are particularly severe charges, carrying maximum sentences of twenty-five years imprisonment. It is because of these charges that all of the arrestees who have not yet pleaded are facing a drawn-out jury trial in the County Court rather than being processed through the much swifter Magistrates Court. The three agg. burg. charges relate to the Friday morning office occupations. Here again, the reality of what occurred on the day diverges sharply from the gravity of the charges. The entirety of the damage claimed by the prosecution is a few ripped-down posters and a bit of writing on the office walls. Yet pushing through charges of aggravated burglary against three of the defendants has allowed the prosecution to make sure that all of the arrestees had the choice of either pleading guilty, or facing a County Court trial.

The charges facing the twenty-eight arrestees are not those that demonstrators have traditionally faced. Typically, individuals arrested as a result of their involvement in political demonstrations have faced a familiar range of charges, including unlawful assembly, trespass and breach of the peace. Charges such as riot, aggravated burglary and assault represent a sharp departure from previous experience, and are indicative of the nature of the state’s response to the G20 protests. Operation Salver has, by all appearances, been run as a stock-standard criminal investigation, and the prosecution has thus far been overwhelmingly concerned with the criminality of the offences of which the arrestees have been accused. The arguments being raised against the arrestees have not been politically charged, but have rather sought to paint them as violent thugs intent on random acts of destruction. In the face of such depoliticisation of the case, it is worth taking a moment to revisit the reasons why people were at the G20 in the first place.

The meeting of finance ministers from twenty of the most ‘systemically important’ countries in the world economy drew the ire of protestors for a host of reasons. Among them were the institution’s commitment to a free trade and neo-liberal agenda; its pursuit of economic and social policies which result in the material impoverishment of billions of people; the presence of the former World Bank chief and architect of the ‘war on terror’, Paul Wolfewitz as an invited guest; and, among significant sections of the crowd, opposition to capitalism and the structures of power and privilege that dominate social life.

People took to the streets, as well, with a sense of outrage at their exclusion from the centres of power and decision making. The clashes that erupted with police were not random acts of violence, but targeted attempts to dismantle the barriers which, both physically and symbolically, marked the lines of division between the powerful global elite represented inside and the rest of us left standing outside. People went to the G20 not looking for opportunities for senseless violence, but to create an opportunity for direct political expression and communication where none was being offered. No one predicted the events that took place that afternoon. The attempts to dismantle the barricades and the attack on the police brawler van were genuinely spontaneous outbreaks of anger directed at the symbols of what people perceived to be the exercise of illegitimate, unaccountable authority.

What is happening, then, when the police and prosecution disengage the events in question from the political context in which they took place? This depoliticisation is, in its own way, a political act: it is a strategy for criminalising protest and making invisible the very issues that protestors are seeking to illuminate. But, in the case of the G20 at least, there is a lot more going on than the simple criminalisation of protest. There is a whole range of factors that have been playing out over the last sixteen months, and the nature of the police and prosecution strategies has been shaped by their confluence.

In one sense, it certainly seems that the aggressive prosecution of the G20 arrestees has been intended to have a deterrent effect against engaging in protest activity by dramatically raising the costs of such engagement. The G20 policing operation in Melbourne was the warm-up for the APEC summit in Sydney the following year, and there was extensive cooperation between the task forces involved in the policing of both events. All of the G20 arrestees were amongst the first to be placed on the ‘Excluded Persons List’ created at APEC, which banned particular individuals from being within the areas around the summit. And in Sydney, even more so than in Melbourne, the state took extraordinary steps to shut down public space in the heart of the city. Barricades, concrete roadblocks, barbed wire fencing and militarised exclusion zones were used to keep the power brokers safely quarantined from the people whose lives their decisions affect. And, as at the G20, the APEC demonstrations saw the introduction of unprecedented penalties threatened against anyone who sought to defy exclusion. Specific pieces of legislation handed police new powers in dealing with protestors. The assumption of bail, for instance, was reversed for anyone arrested for an offence within the exclusion zone.

In addition, there were attempts to identify and charge known activists in the days and months after the G20. In Sydney, local police long involved in monitoring student protests played a key role in the G20 arrests, and university administrations were asked to help identify any student activists who might have been involved. There was also heavy surveillance of the Goongerah forest area in Victoria’s Gippsland region after the G20 protests, with police looking for prominent environmental activists. Two women amongst the arrestees were identified, for example, after an Authorised Officer from the Department of Environment and Sustainability identified them from prior forest activism.

However, while police did arrest and charge a number of prominent activists, many of the arrestees were unknown to police. Many were not connected at all, or only very loosely, to the groups that played key organising roles in the three days of protests. Moreover, the bulk of evidence used by the police and prosecution has been video footage collected during the protest and after the fact, not material gathered through surveillance of those groups prior to the protest. It does not seem that the police went into the G20 policing operation with the aim of looking for opportunities to arrest and prosecute pre-identified individuals. Rather, it seems that they have been using every method at their disposal post-event to identify and arrest as many people as possible.

One possible reason for this lies in the long-running dispute between the Police Association and Police Command. The G20 summit took place smack bang in the middle of the Police Association’s enterprise bargaining negotiations, and just prior to the Victorian state elections. Police Association Secretary Paul Mullet slammed Nixon after the protest for employing ‘soft’ community policing tactics rather than the more authoritarian tactics that have traditionally been used to combat demonstrations (that is, brute force). Mullet has insisted that rank-and-file officers were left under-resourced and unsupported during the protests. One hypothesis that seems to fit with events is that the massive resources given to Operation Salver, and the tough prosecution of those people arrested, have been part of a strategy of appeasement of the powerful Police Association and the rank-and-file officers whose loyalty it commands. Certainly Mullet has been calling for the heads of the G20 protestors, and all protestors for that matter, recently issuing a call for a blanket ban on the right to protest. In this sense, perhaps, Operation Salver has simply been a case of police getting back at the protestors, and doing it in the most aggressive way possible.

At any rate, regardless of what factors have shaped the form of the policing and prosecution of the G20 arrestees — and clearly there were several — the fact remains that twenty-eight women and men continue to endure the effects in a very real, very frightening way. One is already imprisoned, and will not be eligible for parole for at least another seven months; ten are preparing for sentencing; four will have their cases heard in the Children’s Court at the end on April; and another thirteen are facing a wait of more than a year before they go to trial. The events of the last sixteen months have raised important questions around strategy and tactics, questions that continue to be debated and examined. But the pressing concern now is to act in solidarity with the arrestees.

Victoria Stead is a Melbourne activist. She took part in the G20 protests in 2006, and is involved in the solidarity campaign for the arrestees (see www.afterg20.org). She also works for the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University.  

‘In Genoa, we have seen the end of political mediation between institutions and movements’, wrote Luca Casarina in Il Manifesto. Casarina, spokesperson of the north-eastern social centres and part of the Genoa Social Forum, was referring to talks held prior to the protests between the GSF and the government, after which it was assumed that the police would not use extreme, let alone lethal, force. Afterwards, around thirty protesters were in intensive care, and one was dead. Throughout Europe, both before and after the protests, people were hunted down and arrested, or simply beaten, on suspicion of being part of the anti-G8 demonstrations. Casarina later described those talks as a ‘trap’ — the mirage of a space in which negotiations on the limits of engagement might occur and bind the participants, the existence of, as he terms it, a ‘pact’. In announcing the end of mediation, Casarina could (perhaps should) have been speaking of a moment that has occurred at each successive anti-summit protest since the J18 protests against the G8 Summit in 1998. The phrase ‘since Genoa’ signals ‘the end of mediation’ made irrefutable, experienced as a shared event — even as it was a long time, perhaps a century, in the making.

Civil society

In another register, the end of mediation is also the end of ‘civil society’, where ‘civil society’ is defined as the terrain upon which the relations between the state and ‘its’ populations are mediated through various institutional forms: unions, parties, and so on. But mediation, in order to be other than simulation presupposes an effectively sovereign state; one that is capable of mediating between and irreducible to the institutions of ‘civil society’ — hence the motif of the state as ‘umpire’. A sovereign state is one which stands above and outside the divisions of ‘civil society’, composed in turn of fixed, caste-like identities — and for a time, capital and labour composed as identities — whom the sovereign bestows with privileges, or not. In other words, a sovereign state has its subjects. It is monarchical in form and derivation: power is organised hierarchically. This ‘over and above’ capital, then, is the precondition of civil society and thereby the possibility of mediation.

Today there is much talk about ‘the decline of sovereignty’, of the supposed inability of the (nation-)state to counter the interests of something called global capital, as if there is no other way for the (nation-)state to exist and exert its power other than in a sovereign fashion, above all (and) outside of capital, as a distinct subject. This supposes that the absence of sovereign power is the absence of state power per se.

The reverse is the case. The decline of sovereignty implies a state that is emphatically repressive and whose power proceeds and is organised immanently, as morality rather than politics. This is why, for instance, in Genoa, Seattle and Melbourne, any reputed negotiations between protesters and the state could never arrive at something like a ‘pact’, but were a prelude to the use of batons, tear gas and bullets. To put it another way: the ‘social pact’ gives way to ‘mutual obligation’ — a one-way, moralising edict that seeks to re-establish immanent control (i.e. self-policing) of dissent while licensing state violence as virtuous.

The republican state takes its cue from the emergence of the ‘free labourer’ and the techniques of control that are adequate to it, such as the internalisation of the command to work as an ‘ethic’. There is no such thing as a fully accomplished form of the republican state — it is unstable, oscillating between sovereignty and democracy, or majestic sovereignty and announcements of the ‘sovereignty’ of ‘the people’. Its juridical constituents are, initially, subjects without subjection and, increasingly, citizens inscribed with rights and duties. The economic analogue of citizenship is none other than the commodity, where equality and difference are expressed in quantitative terms. Citizenship relegates qualitative differences to the private realm of ‘taste’, just as the market does.

Simulations

Attempts to revive sovereignty, mediation and the institutions of civil society, in the absence of their ability to deliver something like an actual ‘pact’, results in a decidedly one-sided restoration. The power of the sovereign to be above the law becomes the sovereign exemption as norm, in other words, the abolition of the rule of law. (Hence the conduct of border policing, the camps and migration policy generally). Attempts at mediation between institutions and movements give effect only to control and the re-emergence of mediation in a ghoulish manner.

And so, PR companies are hired by the World Economic Forum (and the G8) to demand that protesters ‘not use violence’ while the government drafts a bill that would legalise the use of the military in situations of civil conflict (and the Carabinieri shoot to kill). Interestingly, the Dutch police are organising an international conference entitled, ‘Global Civil Society, Maintaining Public Order’ at which police from Australia, the US and Europe will — it is advertised — sit down with invited ‘representatives’ of ‘the global civil society’ to plan what is required to maintain global order. This is how ‘civil society’ exists today: as an invitation-only simulation in the service of ‘law and order’.

Exodus

Struggle by no means disappears merely because long-standing figurations do. It reappears in ways that are more adequate, or simply as experiments in new ways of effectiveness. In a situation which promises only repression what is at stake is the displacement of the question of figuration (the fixed form of the subject as a discrete entity) by the question of mobility and of escape. The question of ‘who’ is replaced by the question of ‘how’ or, as graffiti on Crown Casino declared, ‘How we struggle is the struggle’.

These new possibilities were manifested during the S11 events in Melbourne. Far from being a simple doctrinal difference during S11 between the Leninists of the Alliance (since reformed into the Socialist Alliance for electoral purposes) and others in the Autonomous Web of Liberation, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘how’ was always based on the prior question of composition and determined by it. The former tried to accomplish a passage from Keatingesque corporatism to sovereignty, a recombination of the Many (redefined as discrete subjectivities) into the One, chiefly through the drafting of programmes and demands. The latter maintained a strict indifference to doctrinal disputes that might give effect to the assertion of univocality, of hierarchy and therefore of the possibility of mediation. ‘Dessert capital, dessert the state’ was much more than an incitement to cream-pie the powerful. Organisational forms, strategies also, are not a matter of planning or the force of will, but of composition — organisational forms are passages from this point.

Globalisation

There is no ‘anti-globalisation movement’ that assembled to protest at S11 (or at the other summit protests) — no movement, singular; and barely anything resembling a movement that is anti-globalist in political perspective. Instead there were different networks, groups and sometimes just groups of friends who gathered to protest for various, often contrary, reasons. Moreover, the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ was a fiction assembled on the terrain of mediation. Whether announced by determined anti-globalist lobbyists such as the International Forum on Globalisation, or repeated by archaic opportunists such as the International Socialist Organisation, the ‘anti-globalisation’ label was a necessary moment in asserting that one was at the helm of said movement and could therefore speak (to the media) and mediate on its behalf. Without a label that made it seem as if there was one set of aims shared by protesters, any claims to mediation would fall flat. The lobbyists would not be granted a seat at the table, as it were; and the Leninists could not assert their claim to be the vanguard of something that, prior to S11, they had related to only in its most mediated (or better: televisual) forms.

It should be no surprise, then, that some are confused by the fact that the no border networks emerged in Australia at S11. When Paul James writes, in response to three articles which seek to critique the very notion and practice of migration controls, that he agrees with ‘the anti-globalist critique of capitalism’, and wishes to ‘turn that critique back on the no border advocates’, I admit to being a little confused as to his assumption that either Maksimovic (Arena Magazine No. 52), Bhuta and Costello (Arena Magazine No. 53) or my piece in the ‘Rogue States’ reader is anti-globalist. He could not have been more mistaken.

As regards form, if not always content, the anti-summit protests were globalised and globalising protests, occurring on the terrain of a global circulation of struggles and precepts that is unprecedented in scope and magnitude. Moreover, pro-migration actions have always been a significant part of the anti-summit protests, at both anti-WEF protests (in 1999 in the EU and Melbourne in 2000), and at both anti-G8 protests (J18 in 1998 and Genoa in 2001). The exception to this is Seattle and the anti-WTO protests, where it was more a case of the overwhelming resources brought to bear, with the alliance between Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan given more credit than the politics of the anti-sweatshop and anti-third world debt campaigners without whom there would have been no blockade. But this should be a source of amusement rather than an uncritical repetition. Why would anyone in the US complain about the supposed decline of ‘American sovereignty’? For my part, I have never been persuaded that a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the nation is not an updated version of national socialism, reconfigured in the manner of Patrick Buchanan (or Pauline Hanson) as a multicultural defence of the inherent separateness of authentic ‘cultures’ — that is as an upbeat global apartheid.

Civilisation

‘Civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ are two sides of the same construct, the vocabulary of an initial encounter and conflict between empires and what remained ‘outside’ but was in the process of being colonised by them. In time, this distinction was replaced by that of ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds, no longer an outside of empires but a geopolitical distinction created by a bipolar war that was proxied onto and constitutive of the ‘third world’. This war was, in the main, conducted over the seizure and flows of a globally produced surplus. Here, the ‘third world’ becomes characterised by a permanent state of war, a ‘barbarism’ that was the necessary and inseparable counterpart of civilisation. The civilisation of the ‘first world’ was funded on the basis of this distinction, allowing for an increasing level of debt and the deferral of debt repayments so as to fund the results of mediation, of civil society.

But today, the distinction between ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds has been traversed by decades of struggle marked by the globalisation of nation-states as a prelude to the enclosure of land and an accompanying, unprecedented flight from the ‘third’ to the ‘first’ world. In other words, the distinction was traversed by the globalisation of wage labour, where capital was subsequently globalised not as a subject, but as an intrinsic element of sociality, as the means by which people are related to each other and to life itself.

Fortresses

What is usually defined as the globalisation of capital (which in institutional terms consists of the first tentative formation of only some of the apparatuses of a global state) is a response to this globalisation of labour that was unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Since 1989, there have been attempts to secure a level of political, military, juridical and, not least, moral authority that corresponds to, and is capable of delimiting and conditioning the movements of people. In particular, this is a question of ensuring that people move only as labour, as commodities on the world (labour) market; and by implication that if they do not they are ‘excluded’ as ‘surplus populations’. So, far from being a mere instance of hypocrisy, the paradoxical deregulation of capital movements and the re-regulation of the movements of people since the early 1990s is an abiding mark of the peculiarity of the commodity called labour-power. This is why, contrary to a rather naive view of border controls, the border is both porous and exclusionary at the same time. Likewise immigration controls recreate the segmentations of the global labour market in the face of a globalised proletariat that, unlike every other commodity, strives toward equality as a political rather than a merely quantifiable concept. Likewise, they reinstate the principle that movement must be the movement of commodities (or capital), conducted as tourism, ‘guest work’ and the like. In this, the boundaries of citizenship serve to actively create the lowest rungs of the labour market as well as to establish the concentration camps where those deemed ‘surplus’ to production are relegated, whether in Australia or in Pakistan, and always treated as deserters. Today, it is a stark choice, but hardly an abstract one: either open the borders or resort to more lethal, exceptional means to halt the movements of people as human beings.

Neo-liberalism does not have a vision of a borderless world. It has a vision of a world that is capitalist, where borders exist or do not at those points where they are necessary. If Microsoft deploys images of a borderless world, it does so in order to take up desires that already exist, with a twist: the concealment of bodies. Therefore, fortresses are the order of the day — from ‘Fortress Australia’ to the barbed wire citadels of the various summit meetings. What is at stake here is whether or not bodies might be arranged or move as something other than factors of production or commodities in circulation, as something more and other than things. ‘Since Genoa’, and ‘since the Tampa’. Now this is the question.

Angela Mitropoulos is a Melbourne-based writer and activist.

The Prague autumn will be a decisive test for the emergent movement, opposing the extension of unregulated free trade to every facet of life on the planet. Lack of easy entry past Czech borders, and the possibility of a heavy police crackdown will hit hard — the movement will reach a crisis point from which it will either move to the next level or dissipate entirely.

It would be fair to say that the 1998-1999 global anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests took many of us by surprise, and that this demands some re-examination of the forces and processes for change that exist today. The World Bank, the WTO and the pro-free-trade first-world press have pulled out all the stops in their efforts to portray the protestors as a ragbag of luddites, protectionists and economic illiterates, only to find that the protest movement had put down roots in so many separate areas of social life — churches, unions, students, the professional-managerial classes — that such misconstruction merely damaged the credibility of the vilifiers. The World Bank’s James Wolfensohn and the WTO’s Mike Moore bend over backwards in public to talk about the costs and benefits of free trade, as the machines they nominally run grind on remorselessly, imposing futile major projects, and murderous structural adjustment programs on the non-developing world. But they are smart enough to know that they face a real challenge.

So where did the protest come from, and why did it suddenly catch fire? The small but growing movement against global marketisation was given a double boost in 1998, when the Jospin Government withdrew France from discussion towards the establishment of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment at the same time as the UK anti-genetically modified foods movement won mass support, cleared GM foods from all the supermarkets, and brought the hitherto unassailable Monsanto to its knees.

These victories seem to have focussed a movement that had already begun to coalesce with new methods of organisation. The expansion of the Internet has allowed special interest protest groups to operate more efficiently and communicate more effectively, but it was only when this was combined with new modes of organisation that an event like Seattle became possible. Learning from the anti-structural/command excesses of the 1980s, the organisation of diverse organisations via affinity groups, protest councils and the like has allowed for protests that can have a greater degree of strategic planning and organised tactical response than was the case fifteen years ago. The configuration of protestors within smaller groups focussing on issues of particular interest to them minimises the need for preliminary debate about organisational styles, membership and the like. People go to — or come from — the groups within which they feel most comfortable.

The network aspect of this has been played up, but in reality the network structure has only been of optimal effect because it has been complemented by a traditional — if temporary — command and decision-making structure.

The facilitators of this new-style movement have deliberately kept the program minimal. Drawing together groups from across the spectrum — from anti-technology anarchists to corporate reformists — they demand nothing more (or less) than the abolition of the WTO. In fact even such a minimal demand is not subscribed to by all the groups in the movement. Many would like to see the WTO strengthened and with a different character — a world trade organisation that regulates the global economy to ensure adherence to labour, environmental and cultural standards. Nor is the composition of the movement wholly dedicated to these standard left/social movement goals. Much of the clout at Seattle was provided by the Teamsters who had turned out in force, and were ‘geed up’ by a rousing speech from Reform Party far-right candidate Patrick Buchanan.

But such a movement hangs together only as long as it meets with no significant success. When it has achieved a degree of power and public support sufficient to get proposals for global political change on the table, the cracks will start to show. Many of the shock troops for the Seattle protest came from veterans of Earth First and the Ruckus Society — American anarchists whose critique is leftist, but whose solution of frontier-style self-organisation sits on the libertarian-right end of the spectrum.

Furthermore there is no clear road to the end ostensibly being sought. GM companies found themselves suddenly surrounded by angry consumers and shareholders — their individual, private nature making them easy to topple. Nothing less than a mass withdrawal from the WTO is likely to crush it, and that seems unlikely anytime soon.

In the midst of this explosion of action, it has become almost impossible to talk about the lag in theoretical understanding of the contemporary situation. After twenty years of defeat and all but total marginalisation, such talk is held to be defeatist, jinxing. At the meetings that flowered across Europe after the successful J18 protests of mid-1999, even the most purist of the remnant revolutionary marxist sects pulled their heads well in, for fear of being shouted down at even the most cursory mention of ‘class’, ‘ideology’ or the like. Anarchism of a determinedly anti-analytical nature has become the dominant tone of the movement, especially in Europe, connecting with punk/situationist style groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the rave movement and other subcultures. This is being re-evaluated in the UK, after a series of ill-thought-out and counterproductive actions — such as digging up a public park in order to ‘reclaim’ it — but there is no immediate prospect of a lift in consciousness.

Nevertheless it will come. As the disastrous and stultifying final stages of Marxism-Leninism become a historical memory, and the ineffectuality of action without theory becomes apparent, a hunger for praxis will arise. What currently passes for a political philosophy among the new anti-global-free-trade movement derives neither from Marx, nor Bakunin, nor even Rousseau, but from Pollyanna. It is a stark refusal to acknowledge the profound contradictions of community and individuality, global connection and democracy, surplus production and equality, and an ideology whose minimalism disguises the contradictions whose fault lines run across the middle of the protestors’ own lives. I can’t be the only person to have stopped off at a Starbucks en route to a demonstration whose participants were busy trashing one.

Such a historical juncture throws the question of what is to be done firmly back on ‘theoretical producers’ as to how they communicate with groups who may once again be receptive to a fundamental rethinking, whose vision may now be wide enough to encompass a new big picture. Above all, this must connect the everyday life of the North with the global and corporate structures oppressing the South. This is a prelude to a post-marxism that does not go under that name, a new key to understanding the world. It is one that has been underway for some time in the publications of this organisation, and from other quarters. Continuing the revolutionary spirit of what has gone before means abandoning much of its vocabulary — and with it the ubiquitous ‘post’ prefix that went with it. Class, alienation, labour-power, value, ideology and so on — the general structures which underpin them have not changed, but their particular and material form has, and these new phenomena must be named and identified. ‘Class’ for example can be a general term to cover material social categories/agents, but its particular form is still interpreted as a relationship to ownership of the means of production — where physical production has been the privileged term. To theorise a world in which intellectual production will determine the form of value requires a rethinking of material social categories. ‘Class’ may now be too laden with the particular connotations of Marxism to serve as a useful general term for these categories/ agents.

To talk in a new way of the contradictions of an information/media/excess society and to show that such phenomena are a dimension of the same processes that immiserates the South may be seen as quixotic at a time when many believe that events have confirmed the most basic tenets of Marxism. But without a better picture of how things are, there can be no sketching of a vision of ‘socialism’ that is neither fantastical nor mundane. And without a better picture of what a revolutionised future would look like, there can be no sustained revolutionary (in the widest sense of the term) movement in the twenty-first century.

Gerard Henderson, one of our local clear thinkers, is both illustrative and to the point. ‘[T]here is little governments can do about the process of globalisation. People want to trade and people want to move … it is almost impossible to resist such developments.’ He goes on: ‘For a small trading nation like Australia, there is no alternative … A country with the population size and economic might of the US might be able to take a stand against aspects of globalisation. Likewise, possibly, the European Union. But not 19 million strong Australia.’ Then comes the clincher: ‘Not without a significant decline in living standards.’

Gerard Henderson has much support for his position. He certainly won’t be contradicted by the economic experts who regard the protestors as quite insane. Nor will he find resistance from Third Way thinkers — Tony Blair or Anthony Giddens for instance — who assume there is no alternative to globalisation as we have known it.

Yet with such a strong version of reality on the side of the global economy why have the protests gained such support? And in taking up this question it should be kept in mind that the WTO protests do have a larger picture with a definite momentum. This can be illustrated by reference to world-wide phenomena, but there is more than sufficient local material to make the point. Take for a start the meteoric rise and fall of One Nation, a party which rode the wave of deep resentment towards global restructuring and had mainstream politicians in fear of the political abyss. And as the political fortunes of One Nation sank like a stone, the forces of protest renewed themselves. They removed the most powerful politician in Australia, Jeff Kennett, and now John Howard is in their sights. Don’t talk to this embattled sector about the high living standards offered by globalisation.

What Gerard Henderson and others assume is that while there is pain, disruption, even loss of livelihood, there is no choice. Globalisation is just one of those tragedies of economic development, like the industrial revolution. Some people get hurt, but the greater good emerges given time.

In the face of this common sense those who protest against it have little to say that can shake it. They know they are against it. They know they are increasingly shut out of the core practices of social life and are, at best, being managed as problems. But to shake the common sense view and shape politics in a definite direction requires much more: a perspective which can locate how it is that globalisation has these effects, and which can then be drawn upon to develop social policy in a plausible alternative direction.

It is here, of course, that commentators like Gerard Henderson win hands down, for the moment. They win because there are no self-evident plausible alternatives, a situation the Left is reluctant to face. Certainly the socialist utopia has no credibility, and the implication of most commentators that to reject globalisation is to reject modernity in favour of a village level of development rings true for too many.

A policy which can cut through conventional globalisation needs an awareness of what is unique to global culture and economy: its capacity, through the combination of the market with the full range of high technologies, to render most, if not all, of social reality as elements of a market calculus. This universality, this capacity to reduce all particulars to a general value, laid the ground for what the economic rationalists called the ‘level playing field’. It was the renewed power of this market which has swept aside public institutions since the early 1980s.

At the same time it is this very universality of global culture, mediated as it is by the various high-tech media forms, which undermines all particular relations and institutions. What is a strength is also a weakness. While globalisation claims to re-assert the local, it nevertheless undermines diverse expressions of culture or economy based on particular social relations. Thus the emphasis on the ‘local’ in the global/local divide is more an expression of need and of loss than a practical reality with institutional force. And it is this structural process which gives the lie to the implicit hope in writers such as Gerard Henderson that things will balance out over time.

Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx faced such a bleak reality. Prior to ‘their’ market lay a community structure they assumed and built on. Here Smith found the basis for an ethics, while Marx found the basis for a politics. And these structures were composed of particular social relations — this family, that community, ‘our’ history.

In other words today’s global market is by no means merely a market. The fusion of the market with the new powers of high technology allows it to combine economy and culture in a new way. The nineteenth century could be characterised as having boundaries between the market and cultural contexts — a prior community — which was its foundation. These particularistic cultural settings had the effect of limiting the reach of the market because they co-existed with it. They limited the ‘freedom’ of that market.

The postmodern market, on the other hand, reaches into and reshapes those social forces which Smith and Marx took for granted. It is this background force which allows Gerard Henderson to speak with such confidence, even though he has no grasp of its special powers. He has history on his side, he might well conclude.

Yet just as the share market today experiences jitters even as it celebrates its latest triumph, he has no reason to feel too confident. A social order built on the global market is inherently unstable, as evidenced in processes which systematically destroy all local institutions and social relations. And its savagery towards stable work is legendary. Even in the heart of the booming techno-sector no job has security, as 16,000 Telstra employees have just discovered. Hence the ‘irrational’ vehement opposition to — and bitterness towards — the global way. Yet instability will not in itself turn the tide. It is the emergence of a social idea able to contain the global market which is the crucial matter. Such an idea combined with a social determination to make the idea practical would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.

The novelty of our situation lies with this special power of the global market over us: firstly the sheer power of its apparatus to devour and shape all social relations; secondly the widespread belief, shared by protestors, economists and Gerard Henderson alike, that there can only be one market structure in social affairs. These two aspects join to close off social policies which could contain and manage globalisation.

In fact there have been many types of exchange historically. Some have coexisted with others for long periods of time. For example reciprocal exchange, which does not rely on the money form, is as old as human society. Its structures today still make a crucial mark on the formation of selves in co-operative relations with others, although increasingly they are truncated. With the economic market itself there are also important distinctions to be made. In his investigation of the meanings of the market, Marx emphasised the universality of its medium of exchange. This is a crucial insight but it can be overstated. Postmodern globalisation allows us to see this is a relative question. Some markets are regional. Their sphere of exchange is regional and hence they depend upon particular individuals and communities. Such markets emerged in the first instance around restricted mediums of exchange. Others have a more universal character but still are particular to a nation. These obviously contrast with global markets.

If reciprocal exchange has managed to co-exist with markets before the emergence of the global market, the same cannot be said for money markets. The policy problem is that our only experience of market exchange has been through one dominant form of exchange. Once there were regional markets. We know them only as traces within the national market. In the year 2000 it is now possible to tell a similar story about the national market. Now it ‘survives’ as it can within the logic of the global market. What most people assume is that there should only be one form of market exchange. And notably, today, that is the global logic of info-money.

A choice between a global market and a national market has little to recommend it. The choice is too stark and is not viable. But in the face of an all-consuming global market the co-existence of other market structures as well as reciprocal exchange which better preserve particular social relations and regional identities is a choice which is non-negotiable. Only then would the space for cultural choice open up and allow sectors within our economy which are not at the mercy of the global market. Then global diversity would mean something. The social policy question becomes one of how to have at least two markets which co-exist, employing mutually exclusive mechanisms.

It would be novel historically, and test the social and practical imagination of us all. But it is an alternative to what we have come to know as ‘globalisation’. Could this become one of the social policy issues at the World Economic Forum which is to be held at Crown Casino, Melbourne on 11–13 September, 2000?

An extended version of this editorial can be found in Arena Journal No. 14