Naomi Klein, star of the anti-globalisation movement, debated Professor Anthony Giddens, advocate of the 'Third Way', on 22 October, at the London School of Economics (LSE). Giddens is director of the LSE, and Klein is a visiting fellow on the Ralph Miliband programme.
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Giddens showed up the gaps in Klein's logic, and the flaws in many of her ideas. But if he won the audience's minds, it was Klein who won their hearts.
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There is, argued Klein, 'a global crisis of faith in representative democracy'. She noted a growing gap between leaders and their populace, and a growing social and economic inequality. At the root of this crisis in democracy is privatisation - the selling off of public space and public interests to private interests. American schools are run by advertisers, South American sewers are run by multinational companies, and so on.
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Privatisation is 'seen as a panacea for a cut-off state', said Klein - but it widens the gap between the people who take decisions and those who have to live with them.
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Giddens clearly enjoyed taking this apart. Of course, there is a crisis in representative democracy and a problem of inequality, he said, but privatisation has little to do with it. Just look at Japan - its fully privatised rail system is the best in the world, and far more responsive to citizens' needs than any ailing nationalised rail system. It is 'crass' to oppose privatisation point blank.
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But Klein wasn't just being crass. Rather, she seemed to be displacing the problems of politics and the crisis in democracy on to the economy. Klein was talking less about privatisation itself, than the idea of privatisation - privatisation-as-metaphor. Klein's conception of corrupt leaders selling off the commons neatly expressed her disillusionment with representative democracy. But the contemporary political malaise cannot really be explained by privatisation and the activities of multinationals - and the more Klein tried to pose solutions to the problems she identified, the clearer this became.
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Klein went on to give examples of how democracy can be rejuvenated - through looking elsewhere, to countries where the crisis of the liberal elite is at its deepest. According to her, the solution to the kind of political problems we face in places like London can be seen in places like Argentina.
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The Argentine crisis of December 2001 meant that the government froze savings, defaulted on its debt, and five presidents marched in and out of office within weeks. Since then, the institutions of liberal, capitalist democracy have been clinging on for dear life. Many banks are closed, business has ground to a halt, wages are erratic. The whole political class is regarded with utter contempt by the populace. 'Que se vayan todos!' ('They all must go!) is the cry.
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Here, people have begun to take matters into their own hands. In the barrios of Buenos Aires, people have formed neighbourhood assemblies, which discuss politics, organise public services, pass resolutions and take votes. As factory owners have deserted factories, some workers have taken over the machinery and run them as cooperatives. These embryonic organisations, says Klein, are 'building alternatives' - they are developing a 'vision of another way of doing politics'.
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 | | Why is Klein looking for the New Political Alternative in an Argentinean soup kitchen? |
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This is participatory democracy in action. It started out of necessity, said Klein, but it has moved beyond this, and has 'started to look like government'. This is what the left-wing theorist Ralph Miliband was talking about when he called for 'maximum self-government in the productive process in every sphere of life'. Moreover, she continued, the formations we are beginning to see in Argentina represent the key to our predicament here in the West. This is something that we should try to build in our own towns and cities.
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On this point, Giddens demurred. Participatory democracy, he said, is no way to organise a modern, capitalist society: it can only deal with small, local questions, not national ones; it lacks the checks and balances of representative democracy, and so gets taken over by local elites. Countries in crisis need to get their institutions up and working again - by transforming their banks, and stamping out corruption. It is only through large-scale economic development that developing countries can prosper.
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Academics from the floor developed these points. One noted that these kinds of social organisations springing up in Argentina were essentially pre-capitalist. The 'system has broken down', he said, and so what we seeing is the 'replaying of a social system that has already been superseded by capital accumulation'. Another commented on the long history of failures in the system of participatory democracy, in the civil rights movement and the new left of the 1960s.
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Klein agreed that direct democracy has some limitations. Of course, she said, countries need governments and standardised laws to function. But the limitations of the neighbourhood committees go far deeper than Klein allows for.
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Argentina's neighbourhood committees are filling in the gaps left by a severe political and economic crisis. Argentines say that there was a 'vacuum of power', which led them to take matters into their own hands (1). The committees have been sustained by a political class that seems reluctant to take the reins and get the country back on track.
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Klein told the story of one anti-politician, who, rather than stand for election, has asked people to write the policy they think would make their vote meaningful on their ballot paper when they vote. People have begged him to stand, but he replies: I can't help you, go to your neighbourhood council. To me, this suggests that the neighbourhood committees are more a sign of the perpetuation of crisis in Argentina, than the seed of some new movement pointing the way out of it.
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Others have recognised this. 'In general, the neighbourhood assemblies have not outlined a way out of the crisis', wrote Argentinean academic Guido Galafassi, in the journal Democracy and Nature (2). One Argentine book, What are the Popular Assemblies?, ended with the questions: 'If we "throw them all out", what and who will we put in their place? Will new political subjects emerge?' (3)
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One problem with Klein's arguments is that she mistakes expressions of political crisis for new political solutions. But the main problem is something that the LSE academics neglected to raise at all. Why is Klein looking for the New Political Alternative in an Argentinean soup kitchen? And why are many others doing the same thing? Since the crisis has begun, hundreds of international activists have made the trip to Argentina to learn from community organisations.
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By continually looking for the revolution elsewhere, rather than engaging in problems at home, the anti-globalisation movement has turned a longstanding weakness of radical movements into a way of life.
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| | Klein's kind of talk touches parts that The Third Way can't reach |
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Klein's new book, Fences and Windows: dispatches from the front lines of the globalisation debate, describes this phenomenon well. International activists are an itinerant band, moving from protest to protest, from country to country. 'To keep up the momentum, a culture of serial protesting is rapidly taking hold', she said. 'But is this really what we want - a movement of meeting stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead?' (4)
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Activists stalk 'trade bureaucrats' to show what they are against - but they also stalk people in developing countries to show what they are for. South African shanty towns organise electricity cooperatives, Bolivians riot against water privatisation, Palestinians throw stones at Israeli troops, Brazilian peasants seize land - and the international activists turn up proclaiming that this is what politics is about. In Klein's words, these are the 'glimpses', or the 'windows', pointing to a new democratic alternative.
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Perhaps - or perhaps these actions are just a sign that when people of the developing world face unbearable hardship, they will do something about it. It is not surprising that Bolivians rioted when they couldn't pay their water bills - what is puzzling is that people in London and New York got so excited when they did.
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In Fences and Windows, Klein describes the organisational and political confusion that has blighted the anti-globalisation movement. She describes how the Czech president's offer to negotiate between activists and the World Bank in Prague threw the movement into a state of chaos; how activists staged protests against their own World Social Forum; how protestors were given a choice about whether they wanted to remain in a ring blockading delegates at an international conference, so some stayed and some left.
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While Klein tries to make this into a virtue of 'diversity' and 'flexibility', she obviously recognises that there are problems in The Movement. But rather than get its own house in order, rather than work out what it stands for, the anti-globalisation movement is always trying to find the answer around the next corner of the developing world.
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Despite all this, Klein has an element of popular appeal that Giddens does not. She is critical about the limitations of the movement, and she's serious about what she does. At the LSE lecture, Klein won rapturous applause from her audience - mainly students and young people. While Giddens may have picked holes in her argument, it's unlikely that his dry brand of pragmatism inspired anyone.
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Klein is genuinely looking for a new kind of politics, for a way to change the world. In Fences and Windows she describes the sense that things could be different: 'a sense of possibility, a blast of fresh air, oxygen rushing to the brain.' This kind of talk touches parts that The Third Way can't reach. It shows that the centre-left establishment hasn't wrapped up all the essential questions of politics, that it hasn't provided all the answers for a post-Cold War era.
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Perhaps if Klein stayed home a bit more, if she battled out the questions of politics in London, New York or Toronto rather than looking for the answers in Buenos Aires or Johannesburg, she might add some stronger ideas to her idealism - and create something that Professor Giddens would find a bit harder to debunk.
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Read on:
spiked-issue: Anti-capitalism
Politicians jump ship, by Josie Appleton
(1) The Seed of a New Form of Citizen Participation, IPS, 24 March 2002
(2) Argentina on fire: people's rebellion facing the deep crisis of the neoliberal market economy, Democracy and Nature, Vol 8
(3) 'Throw them all out': Argentina's Grassroots Rebellion, NACLA, July/August 2002
(4) Fences and Windows: dispatches from the front lines of the globalisation debate, p23-4. Buy this book from Amazon (UK)
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