“Public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point not just in my lifetime but in my parents’ lifetime as well”

Naomi Klein 2010 [1]

“The stock of people in business has never been so low”

Lord Digby Jones, ex-Director General of the CBI, 2010 [2]

It’s hard now to recall what an exhilarating moment Seattle was. It came at a time when most on the left were dispirited and disorientated. There had been next to no good news from the US of all places for decades Suddenly we could see thousands of activists fighting with riot police not just in America but in Seattle, symbolic capital of a ‘frictionless’, ‘post industrial’ capitalism.

The riots and demonstrations at the WTO clearly involved an alliance between young political and environmental activists and workers, the kind of movement that socialists dream of. What was striking too was that the protests were at the same time seriously militant and impressively big.

And then there were the placards and the singing, which suggested a whole new radical language. Signs and chants of people before profit, this is what democracy looks like, globalise this, whose streets our streets, resist corporate tyranny, pointed to a combative political generalisation not seen for decades.

The feeling that Seattle marked a break from the wilderness years of the left was confirmed within months when similar protests were organised at business summits round the world. The most spectacular of the series was a year and a half later at the G8 in Genoa, Italy when delegates were besieged in the centre of the city for 3 days by a total of 300,000 protestors. Even establishment commentators were able to see that globalisation itself was creating an alarming counter reaction:

The international finance and trade bodies seek to make the world profitable for the same corporations that are running the show in US politics, the demonstrators say… Framing the issues in this way has allowed disparate causes to unite against common enemies. Save the rainforest and anti-sweatshop activists, for example, stand against the same trade and development policies that might boost corporate investment in a poor country engaged in selling off its natural resources. Global capitalism is unjust and ineffective in these situations, the activists say. [3]

The movement can’t be reduced to the great demonstrations. In fact what happened after Seattle was only a movement at all in a loose sense. But Seattle helped to accelerate a linked cycle of protests and strikes and land occupations and mass forums and various kinds of direct action around the world. It was a cycle that did real damage to the globalisers’ project.

In the second half of the decade the cycle stalled and the movement went into something of a crisis. Protests continued and there is a direct line of development from Seattle through to the recent climate protests, but problems were evident in the fall off of the demonstrations and a tiredness about the big anti capitalist conventions. Now, ten years on, some on the left are writing the whole thing off. Following the huge and militant climate protests in Copenhagen and at a time of economic crisis and popular contempt for capitalist institutions that can’t be right.

What we need to do is try to understand the movement’s crisis and to learn from its history so we can do our best to reinvent the movement for a new situation. Looking back over the last ten years, the priority seems to be a rethink of the relationship between spontaneous action and the role that conscious, radical activists need to play to try and influence it.

The double impact of neo liberalism

The neoliberal project launched by Thatcher and Reagan has had a deeply contradictory impact on the left. On the one hand its been an exhausting and demoralising experience. By 1999 many on the left were too drained to get excited about anti capitalism. The movement emerged at a time of confusion and demoralisation. Many socialists were still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the right’s subsequent attacks. Meanwhile, led by Tony Blair, social democrat leaders almost everywhere were very publicly selling their souls to the purveyors of the free market. New Left Review Editor Perry Anderson used strong language but expressed a widespread sense of gloom when he wrote in spring 2000:

“The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat. For the first time since the Reformation there are no longer any significant oppositions, – that is systematic rival outlooks- within the thought world of the West, and scarcely any on a world scale either ” [4]

Anderson and others were so focussed on the defeats of the 1980s, the impact of the fall of the Soviet Union and the degrading of social democracy that they forgot how the lived reality of capitalism can generate resistance and in the process renew the search for alternatives. As a result they missed the first great emancipatory movement for decades.

Because as well as dejection neoliberalism has generated resistance and radicalisation.

The programme of neoliberalism involves a permanent attack on the bases of the social compromise that sustained consent for the post war capitalist system. The problem for neo-liberalism’s boosters is that most people living it have had a horrible time.

The result is, in the words of the French socialist Stathis Kouvlakis, “Neoliberalism in France and elsewhere cannot and could not produce anything but weak consensus, passive, essentially by default, relying in the end on the weaknesses of its adversaries. Its real base scarcely goes beyond some entrepreneurial layers, certain fractions of the better off middle classes and middle management in limited sectors including the dot com industries, new technologies and finance.” [5] This and the inherent aggressiveness of neoliberalism means that its leaders have, in Kouvelakis’ words, “domination without hegemony.” [6] However devastating the defeats which ushered it in such a combination was bound to create opposition over time.

Two other characteristics of the project helped encourage a kickback. Neoliberalism was both highly ideological and internationalised. Its pioneers knew it would involve frontal attacks on the mass of the population and for that reason spent a lot of time and energy trying to justify the project intellectually. As the huge gulf between reality and rhetoric became clear this encouraged critiques of the project as a whole. Meanwhile the attempt by the US and its allies to export the neoliberal model through structural adjustment programmes and other mechanisms – again with a balast of ideological blather – helped activists North and South to see the importance of mutual solidarity.

The US and its allies made the mistake of institutionalising their post Cold War hubris in high profile international gatherings designed to promote or impose their model. Events like the summits of the World Trade Organisation, the very public gatherings of the group of 8 most powerful economies and the World Economic Forum were perfect rallying points for the new movement of opposition.

But the movement was also shaped by the left’s crisis. The feeble showing of social democracy in the face of globalisation had a partly radicalising effect. In the absence of credible reformist opposition, it was easier to grasp neoliberal capitalism as a total system. On the other hand the low ebb of much of the radical left meant that Marxist politics was at least at first marginal to the project.

The achievements

However diffuse, the movement made its mark. Apart from anything else it chased the G8 and the WTO into the hills. For a long time after Seattle and Genoa the masters of the universe felt unable to meet near any large population centres. This tactical retreat symbolised real ideological damage. Economic commentators were seriously concerned that their institutions and their economic policy were falling in to disrepute.

“The protestors are right to say that the most urgent political moral and economic question of our time is third world poverty. They are also right to say the wave of globalisation, however powerful it may be, can be turned back. It is the fact that these two things are true which makes the protestors, and crucially the current of opinion that sympathises with them, so terribly dangerous” [7]

They were right to worry. After Genoa majorities across Europe supported the anti-capitalist protests [8] and a list of its spokespeople and intellectual supporters from Arundhati Roy to Jose Bove, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky became the first radical celebrities for decades.

The stalling of the Doha round of negotiations after protests at the 2003 WTO showed the movement had some disorganising impact on the other side. The movement can also take part of the credit for the current low profile of the IMF, which is still suffering from a terrible image problem. Just as important the movement helped put radical protesting back in the mainstream. International demonstrations of the scale and energy of Genoa were something completely new and without them the anti war movement would never have achieved its epic scale or its global reach. And it wouldn’t have taken on the radical anti-imperialist character it did at least in countries where the left were able and willing to give it a lead.

The international mobilisations also catalysed new domestic movements. Famously in Italy the police murder of activists Carlo Guiliani in Genoa led to a wave of mass protests across the country that revitalised the left and lead more or less directly to two or three years of mass mobilisations against the Berlusconi government culminating in a series of mass strikes. In Spain an anti EU demonstration of 500,000 in Barcelona ‘against a Europe of Capital and War’ persuaded the unions to organise Spain’s the first general strike in eight years [9]. In France, Germany, Greece and elsewhere there was a similar interaction between the movement and domestic struggles. Even in Britain, where the return of working class confidence has been slow, the anti capitalist mood and the anti war movement has helped restore combativity. [10]

The impasse

Despite its successes, from roughly the middle of the decade the movement experienced a crisis. You could see it in the tailing off of the demonstrations, fragmentation in some of its key networks like Attac in France, and the stagnation of the movement’s most characteristic institution – the social forums.

The social forums were monster regional and global assemblies which at their peak drew as many as a hundred thousand activists together in one place to discuss politics and protest. They launched a host of campaigns including the global anti war demonstrations on 15 February 2003. At their best the forums were electrifying manifestations of the desire for a common project for a better world. The possibilities they suggested were mind boggling. No one who was there could forget sharing a stadium with tens of thousands of workers and peasants and activists from around the world listening to calls for resistance from Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky in Porto Alegre in 2003 or joining the million strong march against capital and war which took over Florence at the ESF in 2002.

Tragically, although the WSF still meets, it has become something of a ritual, largely irrelevant to any activity. Partly this is because it was organised round an agreement to deny any kind of internal democratic decision making process. The forum was to be in the words of Chico Whittaker, one its Brazilian pioneers, ‘an open space’ rather than a deliberative gathering. [11] This meant that there was no agreed mechanism for debating political approaches or strategic priorities.

Partly as well, though the movement’s emphasis on internationalism was one of its great strengths, it could conceal weaknesses. ‘Summit hopping’- serial demonstrating at international gatherings – had its limits and put off the day when the question of building domestic movements had to be faced.

But these were symptoms of deeper problems, particularly the way in which the movement was in awe of spontaneity. If some on the left had forgotten the importance of spontaneous struggle, the movement itself worshipped it. Movement ideas tended to echo the hype of the globalisers that economics reigned supreme. The revival of autonomist ideas led by Michael Hardt, Tony Negri and John Holloway downgraded politics. For Hardt and Negri globalisation produces opposition by creating a ‘smooth space’ in which the multitude becomes a counterpower because of the erosion of mediating structures like nation state, representative institutions and trade unions. [12] These views led to the conclusion that globalisation had superseded the world of competing nation states. And the emphasis on spontaneity led to an in-principle opposition to any kind of political leadership.

The spontaneity hype was ironic considering the Herculean feats of organisation by often small networks of individuals that co-ordinated the great protests. And it led to a string of problems. Naomi Klein, herself an admirer of horizontal, non-hierarchical methods of organisation, was sharp enough to point out their tactical downsides early on. She describes how a blockade of the IMF in Washington in 2001 ran in to problems because the group at each intersection declared autonomy and there was no central plan.

“This was impeccably fair and democratic, but there was just one problem-it made absolutely no sense. Sealing off the access points had been a co-ordinated action. If some intersections now opened up and other rebel- camp intersections stayed occupied, delegates on their way out of the meeting could just hang a right instead of a left, and they would be home free. Which is, of course, exactly what happened.” [13]

But as the British historian of the movement Ray Kiely points out, the problems went beyond the tactical:

“A politics which over emphasises autonomy can easily descend into one that advocates local de-linking or, on a personal level, a politics of ‘dropping out ‘ rather than changing the system. Certainly there is a fine line between advocating social transformation and retreating from mainstream society and from politics based on social transformation…

one potential result of this approach to politics is that resistance through spectacle ‘may offer no more than the experience of managed spectatorship.” [14]

Alongside the decision to exclude any democratic decision making process from the social forums there was a formal ban on political parties. Partly this was an understandable reaction to the behaviour of the social democrats, but it was extended to cover all left parties, including the revolutionaries. The fact was that reformist leaders could find ways round the ban, Presidents Lula of Brazil and Chavez of Venezuela both spoke to crowds of many thousands at the World Social Forums in their countries, activists from less well connected left groups had a harder time.

So, ironically, the result of the hostility to politics was that quite moderate forces came to dominate. It meant for example that the NGO’s, also keen to keep radical politics out of the mix, found their place at the movement’s top table. The Make Poverty History coalition which helped organise the 200,000 strong protests at the G8 in Scotland in 2005 even tried (unsuccessfully) to work with the authorities to keep the issue of the war in Iraq off the main demonstration.

There was a constant tension at the forums between the many who wanted to make links between the various issues that concerned activists, to establish a critique of a whole system, and those who wanted them taken separately. And, certainly at the WSF events themselves, it was the single issue campaigners who won the day – visibly. At the last World Social Forum in Porto Allegre the huge site was divided in to massive thematic areas, ‘the environment’, ‘human rights’, ‘development’, ‘war and peace’ etc. You could spend your whole weekend specialising in just one aspect of the problem that confronts us, and many did.

The different approaches inside the movement underline how even radical rationales for keeping politics out of the movement are wrongheaded. They assume that militant unity is something that just happens in the right circumstances, rather than something that needs to be consciously fought and argued for.

As Gramsci famously argued there is no such thing as a purely spontaneous movement. Every movement in fact contains activists with various ideas and perspectives. Even when Social Democracy is at an all time low ebb, sectional and gradualist ideas continue to influence unless actively challenged. The depoliticisation and lack of real strategic discussion laid the basis for disorientation when difficult questions came up. Most significantly, 9/11 destabilised the movement. Though the movement provided a launchpad for the anti war demonstrations, the questions of imperialism, nationalism and racism raised broke the its momentum in many places, particularly the US. There were many attempts to downplay the war’s significance. Some networks like Attac tried to avoid the issue of the War on Terror altogether because it saw war as a diversion from economic issues rather than intimately connected to them. They wanted to preserve the illusion that neoliberalism could be tackled at the level of economics alone.

The aversion to national politics meant that most of the movement ducked the question of building radical electoral alternatives. It thus missed one important mechanism for breaking out beyond its activist base and let sometimes less principled radical forces off the hook. In Italy Rifondazione Communista, an earlier left split from the Italian Communist Party got a huge boost from its impressive participation in the movement at Genoa and beyond and then made the disastrous decision to join a government with a neo liberal programme. This helped disorganise and demoralise the most powerful movement in Europe at the time, a result which might have been avoided if the movement itself had paid more attention to politics.

In general the suspicion of politics and strategic discussion made crisis almost inevitable.

It meant the movement never faced up to the problem of how to move out from the great mobilisations, how to relate to wider forces in society and start giving a lead to the millions beyond the activist world made to suffer by the system.

Anti-capitalism and the economic crisis

The movement was of course a product of a particular moment, the capture of social democracy by the market just at the time when free market economics was losing all credibility. But the terms of the contradiction have sharpened since then, partly because of the spate of disastrous and blatantly imperial wars and partly because of the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s. Meanwhile the threat of climate chaos increases the sense of emergency and vividly illustrates the psychotic short term-ism of our rulers.

The situation is much more dangerous for the ruling class than that of ten years ago. Crises always tend to expose the apparent separation of the political, the ideological and the economic that is one secret of capitalism’s ability to survive. This is particularly true now when states have intervened so generously to save the banks. Far from resolving the situation, state intervention has raised the crisis to the level of the state, and in so doing made it more dangerous and politicised it. Politicians have become (even more) tainted and the notion of the market as an impersonal force of nature has broken down. More and more people are making connections between venal politics, a biased, bloated media, trigger happy foreign policy and a corporate world addicted to profit.

The failure of almost every section of the ruling class to spot the problems created by unchecked speculation discredits them all and creates a crisis of legitimacy. A failure to sort the problem out now would create a full blown crisis of leadership.

Some of the more intelligent pro marketeers sense the extent of the damage. As one influential US CEO writes “The Anglo Saxon financial system is seen as having failed. The global downturn, and all its human devastation is being attributed to that failure…globalisation is in retreat, both in concept and in practice. Much of the world now sees it as harmful. Those nations, especially developing ones, that embraced increased capital flows and open trade have been particularly injured.” [15]

This is the view from above and this particular commentator is drawing no conclusions about capitalism itself. Others have. For what is significant is that apart from stimulus measures, limited financial deregulation and some moves towards protectionism there is no new economic model emerging and certainly nothing resembling a progressive Keynesianism. Contemporary political economy may well prohibit this as John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff point out. Short of mass mobilisations state intervention to boost productive jobs and welfare is almost unimaginable in economies as dominated by finance capital as many in the West. [16] Far from leading to a return of Keynesian social policy the crisis is generating its opposite; promises of massive cuts in social spending in order to pay for a public bailout of the banks, which has had little or no impact on bank policy. [17] The promised new round of attacks on the welfare state and pay and conditions will hopefully lead to resistance. But the ideological fall out is immediate and serious.

The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs pointed out that the moment the bourgeoisie no longer appears to have an understanding of its own system is the moment it “loses its own qualification for leadership.” [18] Again and again recent opinion polls show unprecedented contempt for people in power. Not surprisingly bankers have taken the big hits but the disillusion goes much wider. One British poll taken earlier this year showed only one percent people said they trust politicians, putting them on the bottom of the league table with estate agents. Bankers actually did better with two per cent. [19] A similar US poll showed business executives at a historic low trust rating of 14 per cent with congressmen below them beating only car salesmen, telemarketers and lobbyists.

The recent outcry over MPs expenses in Britain was not mainly about individual misdemeanours but a sense that the whole political class is on the make, captured by the values of a society based on greed. This sense that democracy is being hollowed out – central to the anti capitalist movement – has led to a crisis in democratic participation almost everywhere. Across the world there has been a falling away of voter turnout in elections and a parallel break down of party loyalty. One study shows that in a survey of 15 European countries 75 per cent of the lowest electoral turnouts have been since 1990.

The study’s author Peter Mair argues this is a two way process, not just a result of mass disillusion. Establishment insiders are well aware of the sense of a democratic deficit, but their favoured response is not to reconnect with the electorate but to continue down the road of social managerialism. Mair quotes influential US social scientist Fareed Zakaria as representing a growing trend: “what we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.” [20]

Such thinking has clearly been influential in New Labour circles. While Prime Minister Blair himself boasted “I was never really in politics . . . I don’t feel myself a politician even now,” for him the role of ‘progressive’ politics was not to provide solutions from above, but to bring together ‘dynamic markets’ and strong communities so as to “offer synergy and opportunity.” [21]

Mair concludes, “The past few decades have witnessed a gradual but inexorable withdrawal of the party leaderships from the realm of civil society into that of government and the state. Today opposition, when structurally constituted, increasingly comes from outside conventional party politics, whether in the form of social movements, street politics or popular protests. The parties, on the other hand, are either governing or waiting to govern.”

The huge stresses imposed by neoliberal economics have had an impact way beyond the economic sphere. The erosion of mediating mechanisms in civil society that Mair describes is likely to lead to tremendous volatility.

Permanent war and climate chaos

As we have seen, 9/11 and its aftermath had a contradictory effect on the anti-capitalist movement. But the war led to a massive expansion of protest and in many countries including Britain, Greece, Turkey and Canada the anti-war movement built on the model of broad radicalism first hinted at in Seattle. In Spain, Britain the US and – alas only temporarily – Italy the movements helped remove warmongering Presidents and Prime Ministers.

The level of popular mobilisation around the war on terror has varied with the fortunes of war and the scale of involvement of particular governments. It is important to recognise though that neither the onset of economic crisis nor the absurd claims of success in Iraq mean the de-prioritisation of imperialist war by the west. Certainly no one should believe that President Obama can resolve the central problems that drove the US down the path of the War on Terror in the first place. In general for the US, military power is still its strongest card in a world that is more and more economically contested. Specifically, the fact that Iraq has become at best a military stalemate and a public relations catastrophe makes success in Afghanistan virtually essential for the projection of US power abroad. Hence the otherwise baffling decisions to continue to pump more and more troops in to an obviously failing enterprise.

Britain is locked into its role as junior partner to the US in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as recently retired commander of the British forces Sir Richard Dannatt has very clearly outlined:

“Succeed we must: our own national security, our credibility and reputation, our strategic partnership with the US, and the future of NATO are all bound up in Afghanistan…We should not assume that the experience of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan make intervention less likely…the weight of likelihood is that intervention and stabilisation operations will be the pattern for the future, and with increasing frequency. Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations – they are signposts for the future.” [22]

The threat of devestation through climate change is a major mobilising issue in its own right. But Governments’ failure to get to grips with the threat – catastrophic in itself – is also horrible evidence of politicians’ inability to see beyond ‘economic realities’- ie profit margins. Millions are now anxious about the endgame but the mid and short term impact is terrifying too. Sharp climate swings will increase tensions within the system by creating local economic disasters, resource shortages and huge refugee flows.

The grim conditions that generated the anti-capitalist movement are still here with a vengeance. Aggressive corporations continue to dictate policies around the world that threaten the fabric of our lives and the very future of the planet. Far from being sidelined, or trying to limit the worst excesses of corporate greed, national governments continue to pursue neoliberal policies come hell or high water. Meanwhile the imperialist logic of the economic crisis was spelt out once again by British General Sir Richard Dannatt: “Ironically the global economic crisis will also serve as a catalyst of global insecurity – increasing the threats and perhaps by extension, the demands on our armed forces.” [23]

The challenge for today

Although the social democratic parties are on the retreat in many places and there has been an alarming resurgence of the far right in some countries, there are few signs of tide-turning victories by neoliberal governments. In South Africa a new strike wave developed last summer out of protests against the pro-capitalist policies of the new ANC government there. There has been a relatively high level of struggle ever since the end of the 1990s in South Africa, but government officials believe that the rate of protests in 2009 far exceeded those for 2007 and 2008. [24] France has experienced a rumbling crisis for years punctuated by government offensives and huge social struggles that led in 2003 and 2006 to peaks of popular mobilisation bigger than that of May 1968 [25].

In Egypt the cycle of mass anti imperialist and pro democracy mobilisations and strikes which marked most of the decade continues. Despite heavy government repression the free union of taxpayers last year won an important victory for the right to organise. [26] Last year too Ireland experienced one of the most spectacular social struggles it has ever seen as 120,000 people took the streets of Dublin to oppose a tax on pensions. Even in Britain where workers suffered perhaps the worst defeats in Europe in the 1980’s, there has been a significant rise in workers combativity -and over the last eighteen months there has been a spate of high profile workers’ occupations. [27]

These are no more than snapshots but they show that, far from dissipating, the kinds of resistance which helped to galvanise and sustain the anti-capitalist movement continue in the midst of economic crisis. And of course in the context of the crisis they take on a new significance. In these circumstances and with reformist organisations further weakened by events of the last decade, the radical left really can’t afford to stand on the sidelines.

The first crucial point is that we mustn’t repeat the mistake of downplaying the political dimensions of the situation. What we are facing is a compound, societal crisis detonated by economic disaster. There is a growing minority who see climate chaos, MP’s corruption, inequality, the growth of the far right and so on all as aspects of a fundamental systemic problem – the fact that society is driven by profit. Encouraging statistics from Britain for example say that 6% of young people here when asked, put themselves in the most radical category the ‘far left’. And this at a time when the far left is going through something of a crisis.

But this politicisation isn’t confined to an activist minority. Almost everyone is feeling the strains caused by what has come close to system failure. Because of the feeble showing of the mainstream left anger and rejection remain underground or express themselves in unexpected ways. That is why the media has often been the only vehicle for outrage at bankers bonuses, politicians kickbacks and general inequality.

The second conclusion is that while its next to inevitable that the state of affairs will produce further resistance, if we are going to learn anything from the last decade it must be that this resistance will not automatically take us safely to our destination. It is not enough to just encourage, support or glorify the struggles that emerge however important they are. Lenin called that attitude ‘tailism’ and he was right to rail against it [28].

The power of ruling ideas doesn’t evaporate at the first clarifying scent of struggle. Reformism remains the first instinct for people brought up in our atomised, hierarchic world. While a growing minority join the dots and start to understand the way the system works, most people don’t become revolutionaries or activists just through their own experience. Nor is it enough for the left to passively ‘propose alternatives’ however alluring they may be. We have to help to generate the networks, movements, campaigns that can give people the ideas, the examples and the confidence they need.

And so the third and final conclusion concerns organisation. Revolutionaries need to organise together in order to pool our resources and clarify our ideas. But the only earthly purpose of this is to more powerfully reach out. The left has to remember that the point of organising as socialists is so we can be part of building movements and united fronts with others that can mobilise the bitterness that millions feel and actually make a difference. We need to find ways of taking people forward politically, of making the connections on the streets that people are sensing in their minds. The climate protests at Copenhagen were impressive, the anti war movement remains mobilised and crucial, but how can it be that the left has failed to organise protests over MP’s expenses, corporate bonuses or even in the last year or more, the bank bailouts?

The history of anti capitalism is full of ironies. Despite the widespread downplaying of politics and the highlighting of spontaneity, the truth is the energy and radicalism of the movement helped inspire struggle and resistance around the world. Now just at the time when such a movement could have an explosive impact it is having trouble getting back on its feet. One of the reasons for this is that large sections of the left are unconsciously mimicking the autonomists they criticise so fiercely by just hoping that the next strike will break through of its own accord.

Naomi Klein is absolutely right to say that “what is missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that does not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and more sustainable economic model.” [29]

But we can’t just hope such a movement develops. We have to show imagination, flair and confidence and be part of making it happen.

Chris Nineham helped organise some of the early international anti-capitalist mobilisations.

Notes

[1] Naomi Klein, No Logo 10, London 2010

[2] Lord Digby Jones interviewed in City AM, Feb 8 2010

[3] D Montgomery, ‘For many protesters, Bush isn’t the main issue’, Washington Post, 20 January 2001, p14.

[4] Perry Anderson, New Left Review, Spring 2000, quoted in A Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Five Days That Shook the World, The Battle of Seattle and Beyond, p10.

[5] Stathis Kouvelakis, La France en Revolte (Paris 2007), p254.

[6] Stathis kouvelakis, ‘France, une Crise d’Hegemonie Prolongee’ in Contretemps new series number 1, January 2009.

[7] Economist, 23 September, 2000

[8] Polls reported in Socialist Worker July 28, 2001

[9] Andy Durgan, Warm Days in Seville, Socialist Worker, June 8 2002

[10] Charlie Kimber, In the balance: the class struggle in Britain, in International Socialism No122, (London Spring 2009), p 38.

[11] Chico Whitaker, The WTO as Open Space, in World Social Forum: Challenging Empires (New Delhi 2004), P113.

[12] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire Cambridge (MA Harvard University Press 2001), p 269.

[13] Naomi Klein,Fences and Windows (London 2002), p23.

[14] Ray Kiely, The clash of Gobalisations (Netherlands 2005), p218.

[15] Roger C. Altman, Globalisation in retreat, further geopolitical consequences of the financial crisis’ in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, p4/5

[16] John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Crisis, Causes and Consequences (monthly Review 2009), p139.

[17] Seumas Milne, The Crash Created a historic opportunity. It isn’t yet lost. The Guardian 6 Aug 2009.

[18] Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London 1971), p121.

[19] Only one percent people said they trust estate agents and politicians, while bankers (2 per cent) and journalists (3 per cent) got some more public faith, The Telegraph reports.

[20] Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, (New York 2003), p 248.

[21] [4] Tony Blair, ‘Third Way, Phase Two’, Prospect, March 2001.

[22] General Richard Dannatt, speech to the Chatham House Insitute, May 18, 2009, http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14009_150509dannatt.pdf

[23] As above.

[24] Pete Dwyer, Betrayals behind South Africa’s Protests, Socialist Worker, August 8 2009

[25] Stathis Kouvelakis, La France en Revolte, P158

[26] Hossam el-Hamalawy blog on August 4, 2009

[27] Charlie Kimber In the Balance, the Class Struggle in Britain, in International Socialism, 122, (London 2009), p 38.

[28] V.I. Lenin Whatis to be Done

[29] Naomi Klein, No Logo 10 London 2010