SOCIAL MOVEMENTS in ACTION, 2003
Keynote Speaker: Paper

Verity Burgmann

Verity Burgmann teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne.

From Power and Protest to Power, Profit and Protest

For the first six or seven years after the publication of Power and Protest (Burgmann 1993) I felt unable to respond to the publisher's request for an upgrade. There were two principal reasons:

1.new social movement radicalism had dissipated, and had been replaced largely by a relatively apolitical and individualist identity politics;

2.optimism about the future was difficult in a world dominated by neo-liberalism, the obsession with free market principles and practices (which Australians term 'economic rationalism' but which is a term not comprehended outside of Australia).

A crucial aspect of the new world disorder was a change in the balance of forces between labour and capital. Capital under capitalism is always the true source of power in the final analysis, but by the 1990s labour was no longer sufficiently powerful even to extract decent wages for most employees.

Now it was capital rather than labour that was utilising the threat of its own withdrawal. Time and again, workers across the world are threatened with the alternative of plant closure if wage demands are pressed. High unemployment has augmented this increased bargaining power of capital. The threat of capital flight is also used by corporations to extract corporate welfare from governments. In the meantime, governments are unable or unwilling to fund public education and public health to adequate levels. At the same time, harsher industrial relations legislation has restricted even further the capacity of labour to organise collectively. The freedom of association expressed in trade unionism is not a freedom supported by the proponents of choice and the free market.

This ascendancy of neo-liberal ideology and policy, which underpins corporate globalisation, has obviously weakened the restraints upon capitalism that for a time ameliorated its tendencies to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The world has become much more unequal, both between and within nations. The ratio of the top 20 per cent of the world's income earners as against the poorest 20 per cent grew from 30:1 in 1960 to 80:1 in 2000. Wealth disparities are much starker. In Australia in the fourteen years to 1999 the real incomes of the bottom half of the population fell in real terms by 7 per cent, while the share of total income of the top 20 per cent improved significantly. In the United States in the twenty years to 1999 real wages declined 12 per cent although full-time employees were working a full workday per week more than in 1969. During the 1990s in the US, 64 per cent of all financial gains went to the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population.

Because things were getting worse rather than better for most people, resistance began building up during the 1990s around the world. The gap between the expectations caused by the ideology of neo-liberalism and the reality it delivers for the vast majority of the world's inhabitants had become too big to swallow. People began to notice the discrepancies between neo-liberal rhetoric and what happens in practice. They noticed that the promised 'trickle-down effect' never happens, but that this simply incites neo-liberals to press for more of the same.

When prosperity came only to those promising the trickle-down effect, and the pain continued for the majority waiting for the trickle, the mood of many turned sour. Hypocrisies became more apparent too; for example the way in which both mega-million executive packages and starvation wages are presented as world 'best practice'. Neo-liberal globalisation, has generated a widespread reaction to the economic well-being that it promises but fails to deliver to most (Lynch 1998, p. 150).

The big explosion that shook the world was Seattle late in 1999, but much had been going on before. Seattle was the coming out party of the anti-capitalist or anti-corporate movement but it also drew attention to earlier signs of discontent, such as the emergence of social-movement unionism in many parts of the globe from the early 1990s, the Zapatistas from January 1994, large strike waves against neo-liberal policies in Europe, especially France in 1995, and the campaign against the MAI a few years later.

At last, by 2000, I felt able to put finger to keyboard. Although neo-liberal corporatism was maintaining its vice-like hold upon the planet, at last there was significant resistance to analyse and applaud. Moreover, for those of us still attached to paradigms deemed old-fashioned by our postmodern colleagues, considerable intellectual comfort could be drawn from the implicit and explicit critiques of capitalism now being shouted in the streets. For those of us who had spent most of our protesting lives demonstrating against patriarchy, racism and homophobia, while adhering nonetheless to a broadly Marxist view of the structures of power, this new stuff was wildly exhilarating. It seemed to get to the heart of the matter.

In looking back over the past decade and attempting to explain why there was motivation at last to write Power, Profit and Protest (Burgmann 2003) there are two themes I wish to enlarge upon: the return to class and the power of protest.

The return to class

By and large both radical intellectuals and new social movement activists were slow to respond to what was going on around them in the 1980s and most of the 1990s. The time was out of joint. Class analysis went out of fashion at a moment in history when socio-economic inequalities were widening, in Australia as elsewhere. So, as transnational corporations embarked upon an especially aggressive campaign to increase profits and decrease workers' wages and working conditions across the globe, intellectuals were busily debating the death of class.

The ability of social movements to articulate a challenge to globalisation was also retarded by this retreat from class analysis. As Cecelia Lynch puts it, the social movements' inability to critique capitalism abetted 'the discursive and normative demobilization of social movements' in relation to the problem of globalisation. (Lynch 1998, pp. 149, 154)

And she contrasts this situation with what has happened since. Now, she says, suggestions that it is the market, capitalism, corporate power, structural adjustment policies of international financial institutions, and various other forms and nomenclatures of globalisation, that hinder social movement goals have begun to abound within social movement and NGO literature (Lynch 1998, pp. 154, 162).

The heightened forms of capitalist domination and exploitation made it increasingly obvious to new social movement activists and theorists that it is neo-liberal globalising capitalism which most directly frustrates their efforts to protect the environment from the ravages of agribusiness, assert native title rights against the interests of mining companies, protect women from increasing 'flexibility' in employment or trafficking for sexual services, and so on.

A return to class analysis, even if not expressly acknowledged as such, can be detected in the arguments of new social movement activists, because the logic of the global situation has prompted a reformulation of much new social movement analysis. One might commence a critique of genetically modified foodstuffs from an eco-feminist perspective, but it is difficult, given the logic of the situation, not to conclude with an anti-capitalist perspective as well"or instead.

For example, when gay activists in Melbourne in 2001 dismantled the floral clock in the Botanical Gardens to draw attention to multinational drug companies pricing AIDS medication beyond the reach of poorer countries, they did so as Queers Unite to Eradicate Economic Rationalism (QUEER).

Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx, published in 1999, explains what is happening here, and it helps to make sense of the change that has commenced in radical new social movement politics, with the return to class analysis. In my youth in the 1970s there used to be endless debates about whether racism, sexism and homophobia were in the interests of capitalism. Dyer-Witheford cuts through these debates by stressing the contingent relationship between capitalism and these forms of oppression:

Because capital's a priori is profit - its logic in regard to the emancipation of women, racial justice, or the preservation of the environment is purely instrumental. The prevention of male violence toward women, the saving of rain forests, or the eradication of racism is a matter of bottom line calculus: tolerated or even benignly supported when costless, enthusiastically promoted when profitable, but ruthlessly opposed as soon as they demand any substantial diversion of social surplus. Hence capitalism is antithetical to any movements for whom these goals are affirmed as fundamental, indispensable values (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p. 11).

Capital, and especially postmodern globalising capital, readily co-opts difference, as Andrew Milner and I (Burgmann and Milner 1996) argued in 1996. It co-opts difference by offering market-based solutions to discrimination and highly favourable employment terms to a tiny proportion of women and people of colour in the name of recognition of difference.

However, it also readily exploits difference in the way it has always taken particular advantage of women and people of colour within the working class.

Corporations prefer women and non-white workers amongst their workforces precisely because of their increased vulnerability; and corporations are more likely to poison communities that are both non-white and poor (Starr 2000, p. 166). Around the world, migrant workers rendered vulnerable by official and unofficial racism are super-exploited by employers (McNally 2002, pp. 137-38).Globalisation ensures capital unprecedented freedom to globetrot at the whim of profitability while migrating workers are obstructed and vilified. (This is yet another example of the hypocrisies of neo-liberalism.) After gains in the 1970s and 1980s, Australian women in lower occupational groupings experienced declining employment conditions during the 1990s under the impact of neo-liberal policies such as enterprise bargaining and the increasing casualisation of the workforce.

Capital's capacity also to co-opt difference does not suggest a realm of contradiction, for it is class position that most commonly determines whether difference will be co-opted or super-exploited. Either way"via co-option or super-exploitation"class relations are reinforced.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Empire that the postmodernist theorists who advocate 'a politics of difference, fluidity and hybridity' have been outflanked by the strategies of power, because the new enemy 'not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long Live Difference!' Despite the best intentions, then, 'the postmodern politics of difference not only is ineffective against but even can coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule' of contemporary globalising capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2001, pp. 138, 142).

The contingent relationship of capital to difference that has become so apparent under globalisation has not only encouraged the return to class but caused realignments within new social movement politics. Because capital can co-opt or super-exploit difference, it is hardly surprising that the new social movements, like the old, are splitting under the impact of globalisation. On the one hand, there are feminists concerned about glass ceilings, homosexuals into transgressive subcultural lifestyles, green and labour lobbyists wanting a seat at the WTO table"these, to varying degrees, are satisfied with the crumbs from such tables. On the other hand, the more radical sections within all social movements"those most immune to the seductions of the market"are coalescing expressly in opposition to neo-liberal globalisation under the banner of the anti-corporate movement.

It is true that participants in anti-corporate struggles have differing views about the degree of centrality of the labour movement in the movement against neo-liberal globalisation; nonetheless, it is the rejection of increasing inequalities between labour (in all its varieties) and capital that binds the participants within this movement. Naming corporations as the enemy not only ensures the movement's coherence and effectiveness, but indicates clearly that its principal grievance is capitalism"or at least a particular form of capitalism. It is for this reason that it is no longer appropriate simply to 'add class and stir'"to the other ingredients of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and so on.

Analysis of class and exploitation cannot be deployed eclectically alongside other approaches, but must occupy a central position, because capitalism is a system based on the imposition of universal commodification. This reductionism of capital today has a totalising grip on the planet. According to Dyer-Witheford:

it is subsuming every other form of oppression to its logic . . . Patriarchal and racist logics are older than capital, mobilize fears and hatreds beyond its utilitarian economic understanding, and are virulently active today. But they are now compelled to manifest themselves within and mediated through capital's larger, overarching structure of domination . . . because of society's subordination to a system that compels key issues of sexuality, race, and nature to revolve around a hub of profit (Dyer-Witheford 1999, pp. 9-10).

Hence the significant change in title from Power and Protest to Power, Profit and Protest.

The power of protest

The anti-capitalist or anti-corporate movement is often criticised for its negativity, that, as the name 'anti-capitalist' or 'anti-corporate' suggests, it lacks a coherent vision of a dramatically different world order. It is a movement that is clear about what it is against, but less clear about what the alternative should be (Rees 2001, p. 7). However, the current movement's negativity is necessary as a desperate effort to prevent globalising capitalism from poaching so much from the commons that the ecological and social well-being of the planet and its inhabitants are adversely affected in irreversible ways. But there is another important way in which the loud saying of no and the revolutionary posturing is good for the planet.

In Power and Protest I argued that the record of social movement action in Australia suggests that reforms and concessions are won not by the moderates, but by the militants, through extremist postures and activities and the making of extravagant political claims. By carving out political space for themselves, the more defiant within any movement manoeuvre the less defiant into an advantageous political position. Moderate gains are accordingly achieved not so much by moderate and respectable means, but by militant and disrespectful activity. It has been the more implacable, more truly oppositional sections of social movements "new and old" that have destabilised the prevailing bases of power and challenged conservative ideological certainties to the point where the consensual mechanisms of capitalist democracy accede to the more moderate demands of other sections of the same movement. In making these concessions, the system protects itself from political developments which are considerably more dangerous (Burgmann 1993). For example: the much-lauded achievements of the femocrats occurred as the result not just of femocrats working within the corridors of power but also because of the militancy of women's liberationists outside the corridors of power.

What has been true for the nation-state might also be true for globalising capitalism. If the moderates within the anti-capitalist movement truly desire to force the hand of governments or transnational institutions to make concessions, they need not be alarmed about the 'maddies' misbehaving, as they would see it. At Seattle, there were victories at the table, for what was happening in the streets stiffened the resolve of the African delegates inside the WTO. They refused to buckle to US demands and coaxing. They hung together and the talks collapsed (St Clair 1999, p. 96).

The extremist project of rejecting altogether the WTO and similar transnational insitutions constitutes the best means to prompt internal reform, if there is any prospect at all for such a development. In an address to staff and students at the University of Warwick in December 2000, Clinton argued that failure to address poverty in developing nations could lead to 'rejection of the open economic and social order upon which our future depends' (quoted in Hill 2001, p. 36). Conversely, perhaps only 'rejection' of this order will persuade those in power that issues such as increasing inequality and poverty must be tackled.

Efforts to reform are at their most effective when accompanied by the hint, at least, of insurgency from below. On 23 July 2001, the meeting of the G8 in Genoa issued a press release which both deplored the anti-capitalist protests and pledged to do more to ensure the world's poor shared in the benefits of globalisation (ABC News, 23 July 2001).

Without the protests to deplore, there would be no promises to the poor. Without anti-capitalists to threaten revolution or at least query in no uncertain terms the legitimacy of the new world disorder, global civil society would be unlikely to be able to insist upon reforms.

Within transnational institutions reformers acknowledge that capitalism could be undermining the conditions for its own continued profitability and they argue that the new world order might need to give a little in the interests of capitalist stability. The urgings within transnational agencies for reform will become stronger if extreme protest movements continue to threaten the legitimacy of unreformed globalisation. For example, James Goodman has charted the rise of dissenting voices within the WEF, showing the way in which both crises within capitalism and 'dramatic public explosions against neo-liberal globalism' are driving these challenges from within the WEF. So organisations, such as the ICFTU, are invited to participate in discussions with the WEF, which now likes to present itself as an advocate of 'globalisation with a human face'. (Goodman 2000, pp. 45-47). Of course there is much public relations posturing in all this, but there is also evidence of some serious attempts on the part of the transnational insitutions of global capital to confront what they acknowledge to be a legitimation deficit.

In the last chapter on globalisation as the cancer stage of capitalism I outline some of the ways in which the contradictions within capitalism that have always been there are now heightened by globalisation. And incessant marketisation is undermining the social foundations on which the market order depends (Marquand 2000). Social reproduction is jeopardised constantly in the interests of capital accumulation.

In these circumstances, conceding a little to the anti-corporate movement would reduce profitability in the short term but ensure the longer-term acceptability and viability of the system. This raises the ironic possibility that the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate movement is actually global capitalism's best friend. On the other hand, planetary survival and humanity are at stake, so reform is preferable to the barbarism that could be our fate if neo-liberal corporate capitalism is not restrained. This is the power of protest, and at last it is happening again and on a global scale.

The neo-liberal strong state

Otherwise corporate globalisation will continue to manage its legitimation deficit with what I call the neo-liberal strong state, another one of the hyprocrisies of those who preach a reduced role for government.

Repression is in the process of being globalised along with trade and financial markets and this globalisation of repression was apparent well before 9/11 provided fortuitous excuses for these developments. In Australia as elsewhere new legislation has made it easier for citizens to be spied upon and for the government to call out the defence forces against protesting citizens, to ban any organisation deemed 'likely to endanger the security and integrity of the Commonwealth or another country', allow ASIO to detain people incommunicado, and allow the government to label some union activity, civil disobedience and other activism as terrorist, with life imprisonment as potential punishment. It is significant that, at the Sydney demonstrations in November last year against the WTO meeting at Homebush, protest permits for city marches were banned.

The complicity of nation-states with the globalisation project of corporate capitalism is glaringly evident in the fact that it is nation-states which provide the forces to contain or repress the anti-capitalist protesters, to protect globalisation from the social movement that contests its unprecedented and undemocratic power. Nation-states may be losing many functions and options in the face of globalisation, but effective monopoly over the means of coercion in any given geographical area is not one of them. Yet, increasingly violent repression of anti-corporate protests on the part of nation-states is a sign of weakness rather than strength. In the 1920s Antonio Gramsci argued that overt forms of social control are the resort of societies where 'hegemony' is weak, such as Czarist Russia.

Damien Grenfell believes that the police violence at S11 and elsewhere is 'a likely response by state authorities that are drawn into protecting the interests of global capitalism, as the state is forced to fall back upon its resources of violence to manage protest in the face of decline in its legitimacy' (Grenfell 2001, p. 233). However, in the long run this way of handling dissent does not restore legitimacy.

This is where 9/11 has been so convenient for corporate capitalism. 9/11 has enabled corporate capitalism to regain much of the ideological momentum it had lost during the rise to prominence of the anti-capitalist movement. This has enabled the centres of political power most closely connected with corporate capitalism to go on the offensive again. 9/11 has become a convenient excuse for increased suppression of those who have far less in common with militarist, misogynist, fundamentalist religious zealots than those initiating the new repressive measures. There are many similarities between George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, even apart from their families' joint business ventures.

The obsession with terrorism also draws attention away from the serious arguments mounted by anti-corporate campaigners and makes it more difficult for these opinions to be aired. Mainstream media reporting of the anti-corporate movement has never been sympathetic, but I think it has deteriorated further since 9/11. Without actually saying it directly, the reporting is aiming to give the impression that the sort of people who demonstrate against corporate capitalism are similar to the violent fanatics who fly planes into buildings.

I also detect a media inclination to now belittle the significance of the anti-corporate movement, despite the empirical reality of simply huge mobilisations still occurring, especially in Europe and South America. Having helped to build it up in the first place, journalists now seem to want to bring it down, and I suspect this has something to do with 9/11. This situation has made it easier for the White House to behave in ways quite extraordinary in response to 9/11. To appreciate the imperialist racism that has allowed the bombing of Afghani and Iraqui civilians an analogy is helpful: it is as though the American government had responded to Timothy McVeigh's blowing up of the building in Oklahoma City by strafing the hills of Montana in the vague hope of destroying cells of militiamen.

And yet the Middle East situation confirms the worst prejudices of anti-corporate protesters. Even if you don't believe that it was about oil and opening up the middle east to multinational corporations and bringing it into the dollar zone, what has happened since is rather revealing of commercial motives on the part of the coalition of the willing. Coalition companies, including Australian ones, are scrambling for the lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq. It says something about capitalism, that if you bomb a place to smithereens you can then profit by fixing up the damage.

It is hardly surprising that much of the energy of anti-corporate campaigning has been diverted into two other principal social movements in the past year or so:

1.the anti-war movement;

2.and the defence of the increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the consequences of war and other forms of chaos caused by neo-liberal structural adjustment policies.

The anti-corporate movement has not gone away but it is difficult to tell how it will fare in the future. It is very much a work-in-progress (Graeber 2002).

Only time will tell just how long the events of 9/11 will provide corporate capitalism with extra room for authoritarian manoeuvre. And it is a particular brand of authoritarianism brought to us by the neo-liberal strong state. It is not the grim and spartan totalitarianism of George Orwell's imagination, but one bearing the marks of the corporate power with which it is so closely aligned. If the anti-corporate movement does not succeed somehow in taming the worst excesses of corporate capitalism, I have to conclude by saying, with apologies to Orwell: 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Nike running shoe stamping on a human face - for ever.'

References

Burgmann, Verity (1993) Burgmann, Verity (1993) Power and Protest: Movements for Change in Australian Society, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Burgmann, Verity (2003) Power, Profit and Protest. Australian Social Movements and Globalisation, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Burgmann, Verity and Milner, Andrew (1996) 'Intellectuals and the New Social Movements' in R. Kuhn and T. O'Lincoln (eds), Class & Class Conflict in Australia, Melbourne: Longman Australia, pp. 114-30.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick (1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Goodman, James (2000) 'Capital's First International. The World Economic Forum is Coming to Town', Arena Magazine no. 47, June-July, pp. 45-47.

Graeber, David (2002) 'The New Anarchists', New Left Review no. 13, January/February, pp. 61-73.

Grenfell, Damian (2001) The State and Protest in Contemporary Australia. From Vietnam to S11, unpublished PhD thesis, Monash University.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hill, Richard (2001) 'Globalisation as Mystique: Inequality and Poverty in the ìOne World Order', Social Alternatives vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 34-39.

Lynch, Cecelia (1998) 'Social Movements and the Problem of Globalization', Alternatives no. 23, pp. 149-73.

Marquand, David (2000) 'The Fall of Civic Culture', New Statesman, 13 November.

McNally, David (2002) Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Rees, John (2001) 'Anti-capitalism, Reformism and Socialism', International Socialism no. 90, Spring, pp. 3-40.

St Clair, Jeffrey (1999) 'Seattle Diary: It's a Gas, Gas, Gas', New Left Review no. 238, November/December, pp. 81-96.

Starr, Amory (2000) Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization, London and New York: Pluto Press Australia/Zed Books.