arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

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: Trade equals 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).