IN OUR REGULAR EFFORT to copy whatever every other pundit large and small is doing, we hereby offer our own take on this week’s second most overhyped media topic (after the continuing post-election fun): The WTO Riots One Year Later.
The chief result, to these eyes, is a whole New Positivity among leftoids and progressives who, for as long as a quarter century, to believe everything they really wanted from society was hopeless, that all you could do was protest.
Initially, that was what the anti-WTO affair would be: Just a lot of people protesting really loudly against the biennial convention of the World Trade Organization (which, by striving to make governments do whatever corporations want, had become an all-purpose villain for anyone who had anything bad to say about a social order dictated by markets and profits).
It just happened that a lot more folks than anybody knew had something bad to say about such an order.
The sheer massiveness and breadth of the anti-WTO groups, and the degree of organization and choreography behind them, gave those 50,000 marchers, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers across North America and Europe, hope that the situation could actually be changed. That People Power really could mass up and stop, or at least call into question, the relentless reorganizing of the whole world around “market forces.”
Subsequent actions haven’t had the immediate impact that the anti-WTO affair did; but that’s only to have been expected. The AFL-CIO brass and some established environmental lobbies, for instance, wanted no part of the outsider protests at the US political conventions or with the Nader for President campaign; they still think they can get at least part of their agenda by continuing to Work Within The System.
And the Way-New Left that coalesced around Nader still has work to do in welcoming more true diversity (i.e., encouraging the participation of farmers, carnivores, and males without ponytails).
This ebb-and-flow, solidaritywise, is all to be expected. One chief aspect of the anti-WTO worldview is the battle between two visions of the future–the WTO’s, in which every activity on Earth would be controlled for the benefit of CEOs and financiers; and the protesters’, in which all manner of individuals, nations, and other groupings would maintain the right to forge their own priorities. Many of these are conflicting, or appear to be (jobs vs. environment, jobs vs. other people’s jobs, free expression vs. cultural tradition, etc.).
But that, as I wrote last year, is part of the whole point.
We, as a nation and a planet, can agree to disagree. We can forge our own paths, our own alliances, our own visions. We don’t have to accept an existence dictated by the single-minded whims of the Dow and NASDAQ. We can, as the X-Files movie said, “fight the future.”
We’re taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy.
TOMORROW: Amid all this, Tom Frank still finds plenty to bitch about.
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