What Happened?

[nihilistic_kid]

In the 1990s, the anti-globalization movement was left-wing, anti-corporate, and internationalist. Today it is weak and has been largely replaced by an anti-globalism movement that is right-wing, anti-Semitic, and ultranationalist. A few elements have brought us here

Comments

[sabotabby]

I agree with most of this. I only have direct experience with Occupy here, but it wasn't very militant, was obsessed with form over function, and was riddled to rotting with conspiracy theorists and libertarians. I don't know how much of a global force it could have ever been.

But as for the rest of it, absolutely.

[evilsausage]

I was in the middle of OWS from day one, here in NYC, where it originated. I don't know too much about how it played out in other places, but here the anarchists and crusty punks voted down any effort to demand anything or issue statements about why we were there. This led to it becoming nothing more than an urban camping trip. Sad, because it had the potential to be so much more than that.

[sabotabby]

That's what happened here too. Only it was a faint shadow of NYC, where everyone was obsessed with doing the People's Mic properly and camping (in a completely unobtrusive area that didn't actually affect anything) so I went a few times and gave up on all of them.

[evilsausage]

Yeah, I was in the Demands Working Group here. And I wasn't looking to demand things because I thought the government would negotiate with us. I wanted to issue demands that would case Joe Sixpack to read his morning paper, decide that we were pursuing goals that were in his best interests, and then join up. But with the punk rawk kids in the way, that didn't happen.

Another problem was the NYPD kept dropping hobos off in the park, which led to them panhandling from passers by, who then thought it was OWS bothering them for beer money on the street.

[autopope]

Urgh ...

I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but this is very narrowly filtered through a left/right political lens (and yes, I am aware that both the Democratic and Republican parties are part of the "right" by your -- and my -- definition).

I think there's something bigger happening, which is the decay and downfall of the entire post-Ancien Regime system that emerged in 1918, hiccuped in 1933-45, and emerged ascendant again after the war -- catalysed by climate-change-induced wars and migration, and the moral bankruptcy of the triumphant neoliberal apparatus after it dismantled first the eastern bloc and then the western social democratic systems of mixed-market economies. (Oh, and the total decay of the fourth estate, thanks to the vastly increased fluidity of information transfer and the shattering of the consensus narrative.)

Not sure where to go from here, but a trad-left approach is going to get about as much traction as calls for the revival of feudal monarchism.

[nihilistic_kid]

Yes, I am only speaking of the election and the shift toward the alt-right specifically as the home of anti-globalist sentiments.

The anti-globalization movement of the 1990s was much more fluid than a trad-left approach-there were hardly vanguard parties or syndicalists leading the way in Seattle, Quebec City, etc. and when the police figured out how to bust these giant manifestations the move toward smaller, but fairly coordinated actions, cultural displays, solidarity etc.

[autopope]

I have no idea what we need going forward. (And by "we", I vaguely mean folks who are progressive in outlook and dislike oppression and the fascist right: an umbrella wide enough to cover the traditional left, greens, liberals, progressives, left-anarchists, and so on.)

[nihilistic_kid]

I think what's clear is that if one doesn't make an appeal to the subjectivity of working people as working people from the left, someone from the right is happy to fill that gap.

[cherdt]

I do not understand why globalization is terrible. I genuinely don't get it. Is the idea of globalization inherently problematic, or is it the specific implementation that causes problems?

I remember friends of mine heading to Detroit in the summer of 2000 to protest the Organization of American States. I asked them why they were protesting, but they had no answers. They thought it sounded like fun and something that forward-thinking people should generally do.

[nihilistic_kid]

The more careful members of the movement called it the "anti-corporate globalization" movement. Basically, countries in the periphery of the world system are broken open, put onto austerity budgets, and the resources and workforces consumed by the world center.

Even the IMF is finally cooling to this strategy as a way to develop the underdeveloped world.

But indeed, you're right: the left movement, which is internationalist, was always in favor of the free flow of ideas, culture, and open borders for people. The corporate system's need for constant expansion into new markets and the homogenization of the world-everything is Starbucks and McDonalds-is the problem, not globalization per se.

[dr_memory]

Well...the old left certainly was. I keep running into a depressing number of self-identified "leftists" who seem to think that solidarity is something that only applies to workers on one side of such and such dotted line, and that there is no imaginable way that they could find common cause with a regular influx of immigrants.

(I personally think that worries about homogenization are a red herring that we could do with less attention toward: the difference between a starbucks and the local coffee shop is a matter of taste: I'd happily tolerate a starbucks on every corner if their workers and supply chain were well paid, and I'm not sold that it's easier to police the supply chains of a thousand boutiques than of a chain.)

[fivemack]

Tesco, Starbucks and Wetherspoons are vastly preferable to the worst independent corner shops, coffee shops and pubs; what they have done is stick a fairly hard lower limit on how bad an independent entity can be and survive, whilst creating a world in which there are all sorts of reasonably obvious niches for your competent independent entity to occupy.

What has hurt many people in the UK enormously is that every European Union citizen has the right to work anywhere in the UK, whilst minimum wages are still something that are set per country rather than on an EU-wide basis. I don't see that happening anything like as much in the United States; I've never heard an American story about young men leaving their wife and baby in Alabama, making their high-tens-of-thousands in Seattle, and sending remittances back.