Transcripts
"Analysis of two books : No Logo and Captive State"
by Loukas Christodoulou
- No Space, No Choice No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies, N. Klein, HarperCollins, London, 1999.
- Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, George Monbiot, Macmillan 2000.
These books can be seen as both positive and negative--both broadening the profile of ecological resistance while serving to safely package it up with promises that it's all about saving nice old liberal democracy from nasty new corporate power. This double role which such books play make me rather ambivalent about them. Do they hurt more than they help? Probably not. Just because we know that a certain tactic isn't the best way to go doesn't mean we can't acknowledge its usefulness in other respects-- and just because it is rather helpful shouldn't stop us from pushing as hard as we can for the ways that we think are the best, recognising that sometimes these forms will bring us into conflict with more liberal protesters.
Am I trying to have my cake and eat it? In a perfect world, Monbiot and Klein would make their liberal middle class readers more sympathetic to anti-corporate and environmental struggle, which would thus raise the number of people willing to listen to even more radical ideas. Well hooray, that's our outreach policy for the middle class sorted then. Shall we start trying to get the poor and exploited interested as well?
Ironically Monbiot and Klein are seen by much of the media as representing 'anticapitalism' par excellence, yet they actually represent a part of the protest movement which is about sustainable capitalism.
Another objection to the books is based on my conception of modern society: I believe that there are divisions based on people's position within any particular systems of exploitation (and economic exploitation is just one of them.). Those who benefit from exploitation will be less likely to oppose it and will be trained to defend it. Protest by such people will be motivated more by idealism and so, even if radical, may fade as youth does. When a middle class man 'suddenly' gives up anti-capitalism and feminism we might recognise that, for him, those were never going to be really dangerous issues. Monbiot and Klein's analyses therefore rest more on a belief that certain overtly obscene forms of exploitation are 'unfair' than that they actually threaten them.
I see much of the direct action movement as having gone beyond simple protest or idealism--we have begun to base our lives on autonomous centres and radical community rather than living off liberal niches within capitalism. The criticisms which are produced by those in a niche cannot challenge the essential social relationships which are the foundations of 'unfairness,' i.e. the turning of people and other animals and the environment into decimalised resources to be manipulated to turn profits which has been the motor of modern society. Klein and Monbiot's analyses are therefore anti-corporate without being anti-capitalist. They should be analysed within the framework of liberalism--an ideology which assumes that everyone in society has the same interests and the only thing needed to clear it all up is for us all to communicate more. Klein and Monbiot both state strongly that we are all citizens, we all have equal rights, all we need to do is to exercise them. What they are asking us to then is to trust that liberal democracy is good enough to allow us to use this political system to sort out all our problems.
Social change can best be accomplished by a wide variety of groups campaigning on many of the fault-lines of--whatever you call the beast ('class society,"patriarchy,"greed,"ignorance"); whatever angle it gets at you on. And so I think that Klein and Monbiot are in the position of speaking to certain groups in society who are motivated in narrowly anti-corporate ways. We can accept Monbiot and Klein's protest as far as it goes. The point is that it doesn't go far enough!
Books like these--that describe the struggle against corporations as the struggle to defend liberalism--are dangerous. They tend to push the concept that protest is essentially a form of lobbying, that it is about making better relations with the structures of power, rather than the destruction of power and the building of an ecological society.
Loukas Christodoulou
April 2001
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