Re: Glossary for "The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist
Globalization", eds. Eddie Yuen et al., Soft Skull Press, NY, (forthcoming).
Thanks very much indeed to those who gave very useful feedback on the
"terrorism" lemma. The revised entry appears below (and attached) in its
place in the glossary. Responses to the whole thing still more than welcome.
[23 October 2001revision]
Glossary
Iain A. Boal
The compiler salutes that small band of writers drawn to the critical
glossary as a literary form: first, contrarian lexicographers such as
Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) and Charles Bufe (The Heretic's
Handbook of Quotations); poets, too, of a committed imagination with an
accurate ear for the demoralization of the dialect of the tribe-and here I
think, for example, of Benjamin Péret, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom
Paulin; but most to the purpose, a pair of critics, one American and the
other Welsh-Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams-who composed what the former
called "a dictionary of pivotal terms" and the latter dubbed "a vocabulary
of culture and society". These glossators were far from nostalgic for some
Adamic speech, for the "true meaning" of a word; nor did they intend to
combat, in the manner of reactionary linguistic watchdogs, loose usage with
precision, let alone vulgarisms with a style book. It is, in fact, the
active range of meanings that matters, since the immense complexity and
contradiction within terms like "environment" and "violence" register deep
conflicts in the social order.
Language, on this view, does not just label things in the world; it helps to
constitute it. The naming of parts, the framing of questions, the refusing
to explain, are at once the prerogative and the springs of power. Much more
crucial to the powerful, however, than their assertions-that, say, a
fugitive was "suffering from drapetomania"-are the presuppositions that
underlie discourse. It was one thing, in the ante-bellum South, to query the
medical diagnosis of drapetomania, defined as a "pathological propensity to
attempt to escape"; it was quite another to challenge the institutions of
slavery and medicine that conspired to pathologize the seeking of freedom.
Defunct vocabularies, and labels such as drapetomania, abandoned by the
classifying classes as either obsolete (vis-à-vis some new regime of
stigmata) or embarrassing (after a struggle by those so labeled), are
particularly revealing of the strategic links between language and
institutional sites of power. The anti-capitalist movement, standing on
terrain not of its own choosing, too often retorts in an idiom satisfactory
to the sovereign.
Raymond Williams' explorations in historical semantics are much the better
known, but his Keywords was anticipated, a generation earlier, by Kenneth
Burke when he launched a critique of the left's political lexicon in the
face of corporate-fascist reaction to capital's big twentieth century
emergency. Burke recommended "intellectual vagabondage" that would
constitute "a grave interference with the cultural code" of industrial
modernity; he proposed sabotage of the system by defending inefficiency,
pessimism, dissipation, mockery, distrust, hypochondria and treason. One
communist called Burke's negative aesthetic "the philosophy of the petit
bourgeois gone mad", and Burke didn't much disagree. In view of the
millennial coronation of business culture Kenneth Burke's 1931 "Program" in
Counter-Statement repays a fresh reading.
Then in April 1935, at the time of the popular front and the bienio negro in
Spain, Burke gave a brief address to the first American Writers' Congress in
New York on "Revolutionary Symbolism in America". He told his audience that,
when they weren't talking into the mirror, they were using a patronizing
language that was sure to fail, simply because idealizing "the workers" in
the same breath as insisting on the absolute degradation of work under
capitalism was a rhetorical disaster. Burke went on to recommend "the
people" rather than "workers" as a mode of address, even though he was
aware that, in a society riven by hierarchies of class, gender, race and the
rest, "the people" has its own problems, to say the least; any totalizing
term is necessarily ideological. So hostile was the reaction-he was accused
of proposing the rhetorical methods of Hitler-that Burke later hallucinated
excrement dripping from his tongue.
Another totalization-there is none greater-stamped the days of Seattle, both
on the streets and in the suites. I mean, of course, the "globe" (and its
derivatives), under which sign the committees of capital and their opponents
converged. "Globalization", which began as business school jargon, became a
cant word during the nineties, but students of imperialism were frankly
unimpressed by the purported novelty of the phenomenon; already in 1848 two
pamphleteers had remarked that the "need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
everywhere." Actually, the connections are still distinctly patchy; much of
Africa lies unwired, and one in three people in the world have never yet
heard a phone ring.
But this is just to rehearse the banality that capitalist development is
uneven. More to the point-and it goes some way to account for the
disturbances in Seattle and since-is the fact that structural adjustment at
home in the US has been dismantling the remains of the New Deal compromise,
as well as the dividends of the civil rights, feminist, peace and
environmental movements. The pattern of events at Seattle confounded the
rump of professional revolutionaries, stranded since the mock-epic of the
Cold War, no less than the stenographers of power in the accredited media.
Not that the program of the liberal NGOs and the self-anointed leaders of
Seattle's motley crew-"Reform the corporations!" "A place at the table!"-is
other than in bad taste. Still, it would be wise to hear the critic who
observed that, although political writing is always instrumental as well as
utopian, its time of instrumentality-its time as a weapon-sometimes lies a
little in the future. As to what might be entailed in the forging of a
political language adequate to the matters currently at hand, the following
glossary is offered as a gesture, though readers should bear in mind that
its remit is the vocabulary of capitalist globalization and its detractors.
"It is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny is
overthrown, but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of freedom, and
terrible anathemas against the hangmen that people bring down dictators and
empires."
Emiliano Zapata
Activist
Label used, often without qualification, by those campaigning for "social
change", suggesting a liberal confidence in the general direction of
history, as if the Pol Pots and Kissingers of the world weren't themselves
active in the business of social change. The bane of hard-core activists is
"passivity" in their targeted communities (q.v.) and the ivory tower;
anti-intellectualism is the theory, activism the practice. Still, they have
a point: "doing theory" in the academy can be a nasty sight.
Anarchist
Pierre-Joseph ("property is theft") Proudhon was among the first to embrace
this term of abuse-Roget's Thesaurus places it in the company of terrorist,
savage and fanatic-but peaceable anarchists, in the tradition of William
Godwin, Pietr Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, have greatly outnumbered advocates
of "negotiation by dynamite", which remains the specialty of governments.
Still, anarchists have understood that, however much they carry in their
hearts a world organized on principles of mutual aid and free association,
the current owners show no signs of leaving quietly, and for that reason
Buenaventura Durruti once remarked: "The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin
their own world before they leave the stage of history. We are not in the
least afraid of ruins." If the tactics of Seattle's enragés - the symbolic
breaking of corporate property - showed one (masked) face of anarchism, the
other was the classic anarchist organizational form of non-hierarchical
affinity groups.
Autonomy
A term with wide currency among the opposition to capitalist
globalization-cf. Italian autonomia, German autonomen, Zapatista
autonomismo, and "temporary autonomous zones" (TAZ). Not to be understood in
the abstract formalist Kantian sense of autonomy as obedience to reason, but
in Cornelius Castoriadis' sense of movement away from heteronomy in general
( "being in someone else's project", whether state, parent or boss) towards
self-activity-of a collective kind, rather than the "independence" of
loners, self-made entrepreneurs and authoritarians in flight from mother.
Biopiracy
Athough the term slanders pirates (see Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil
and the Deep Blue Sea) it is intended as a corrective to what the
genetic-industrial complex (Monsanto et al.) calls bio-prospecting. Refers
to the privatization of plant and other organic material (fungi, animal DNA,
human body and blood products, etc.) from the global South, home to 95% of
the world's genetic resources, by way of the Northern patent mills. There is
a deep continuity with the post-Columbus plunder of specimens by naturalist
agents of empire and the 19th century global system of botanical
laboratories (e.g., Kew Gardens, Jardin des Plantes).
Biotechnology
The new frontier whose salesmen and stock analysts glimpse whole continents
of (com)modified life waiting to be staked out. The synergy between DNA
technologists, silicon robotics and venture capital has produced a
pre-emptive patent rush, rapid monopolization of life forms licenced by the
courts, and a Niagara of hype (Green revolution redux and even immortality).
These new enclosures (q.v.) are meeting popular resistance worldwide; the
struggle is on to prevent the privatization of the world's germplasm (the
essential means of production for farmers), not to mention the viralization
of life by the vectors of transgenic DNA.
Black bloc
The roving, uncivil, complement to the sit-down blockaders at Seattle,
sharing a commitment to direct action in the streets, but viewing sedentary
disobedience as privileged, moralizing and needlessly sacrificial. Named
after their black clothing, a parody of the dress code of solemn bourgeois
ritual. Its origins lie in European anarchist and autonomist tendencies,
removed from the American legacy of civil-rights (Gandhian and Quaker-style)
pacifism. The tactic of corporate property damage and their open masquerade
have made the black bloc grist for the mills of the spectacle and,
apparently, state provocateurs.
Borders
Be careful what you ask for. "World without borders" has now joined those
other counter-cultural bumper slogans- "Think globally, act locally",
"Flexible work hours!"-as the basic vocabulary of neo-liberalism. The hip
academy's love affair with "transgressing borders" has put them in
interesting company-the German Wehrmacht and the WTO. The dismantling of
barriers is, of course, highly selective in favor of goods and capital
rather than people, a fact well understood by workers trying to enter
fortress Europe or to cross the Rio Grande from the South, and by travelers
to Quebec and Genoa.
Capitalism
From Latin root capit- "head"; for connections not merely etymological
between capital punishment and the punishment of capital, see Peter
Linebaugh's The London Hanged. The economic order that, like its ruling
class, will rarely speak its name, preferring the codewords "market",
"democracy", and "freedom". Capitalism is organized around the production of
commodities by commodities, from which follows the subversion of markets,
the annulling of democracy, and the subordination of freedom.
Civil Society
"Community", "stakeholder", "participation", "transparency",
"empowerment" - these are the grisly fetish words of foundation officers,
non-profit apparatchiks and boardrooms everywhere, echoed in the field by
the NGO cadres busy producing "locals". These liberal shibboleths, that
cluster under the heading of "civil society", name simulacra of the social
and disclose only its disappearance. Not for the first time; at the turn of
the 19th century, Romantic schoolmasters and antiquarians-the clerisy of
European nationalisms-celebrated the "folk" at the very moment its
extinction was assured by enclosure of the commons and the criminalization
of custom. It was the proto-Romantic Rousseau who remarked: "The first
person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say
this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true
founder of civil society."
Coase's Theorem
The notorious December 1991 World Bank memo, written by Lawrence Summers,
later U.S. Treasury Secretary, argued that "the economic logic behind
dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable"
because "under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted,
their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los
Angeles or Mexico City". Brazil's Secretary of the Environment wrote to
Summers about the leaked memo: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but
totally insane" and was fired soon after. The reasoning referred to was in
fact a pure example of the logic behind Coase's Theorem, which relates
market efficiency, property, transaction costs and "exernalities", and
underpins much of neo-liberal legal and economic doctrine, as well as WTO
and IMF policies. Ronald Coase is the economist responsible for tradeable
pollution rights by dreaming of a world of zero transaction costs where
everything can be smoothly brought to market, and no ethical distinction
made between the harm done by an oil refinery to those living downwind and
the harm done to its owners by downwinders being in the way; it's just a
cost-benefit matter requiring only clear and absolute private property
rights (no common goods) and enough police to enforce them. The World Bank's
"impeccable" Coasian logic means that there is no right to clean water, air
or soil but merely the right to pay to keep them clean or to be compensated
for their fouling. Too bad about those not at the bargaining table-above
all, the unborn (or stillborn) generations. Luckily economists have long
prepared us to discount the future; Coase once said that the future
valuation of property was put at risk by "such cataclysmic events as the
abolition of slavery". Coase won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.
Commons
See under "Enclosure".
The law locks up the man or woman,
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
Community
The maximum shibboleth. A mantra used affirmatively across the entire
political and cultural landscape; NPR once interviewed a spokesman from "the
organized crime community". There is an implied antithesis to "the state"
(with its suggestion of power, authority and central decision), in favor of
the local and the face-to-face. The results can be grotesque: the release of
asylum and hospital inmates to "the community" often means, in reality, warm
ventilation grates. The "communitarian" right would rather nobody noticed
that the shattering of communities is a direct effect of capital moving away
in obedience to the logic of the very system they endorse.
Corporation
From corpus,"body". The body of the Catholic church was the
ur-corporation, as the monastery was the prototype for other key
institutions in the West-the asylum, the hospital, the university, the
factory. By a legal fiction the business corporation was given a deathless
personality-an idea related to the theory of the "divine right of kings" by
which the monarch has two bodies, one that decays, one that doesn't ("The
king is dead; long live the king"). The laws of the corporation inversely
mirror the laws of criminal conspiracy. When individuals combine in pursuit
of capital, they are afforded more protection than they enjoy in their own
persons (e.g., limits to both civil and criminal liability, special
treatment re taxation); when individuals combine against capital, they have
less protection than they have on their own-mere association is
criminalized, since the very act of combining is seen as a threat. That is,
two or more people agreeing to commit a misdemeanor-whether or not they ever
go through with it-is considered by the state a felony, because the greater
threat is the sheer coming together in opposition to those interests the
state serves.
DAN
Direct Action Network. Emerged from the direct action training camp two
months before Seattle, organized by the Ruckus Society, offspring of
Greenpeace commando training crossed with Earth First! forest defense
techniques, and adapted to non-wilderness, urban contexts-street blockades,
lockdowns, tall building banner-hangs-combined with political puppetry,
street theatre, culture-jamming and net-based bypassing of capitalist media.
See under "Direct action".
Democracy
System of periodic ratification of political masters by ballot; meanwhile,
the major decisions - who whom, for what, how - remain in the hands of the
few. Democracy is the ideological keystone of the West's charter myth, and
historically consistent, by its own account, with slavery (Athens), monarchy
(England) and plutocracy (United States).
Development
Perhaps the key term of modernity, drawing into a single nexus the
discourses of real estate, childhood and colonialism, for the future
realization of added value. By the colonization of infancy and the
infantilization of the colonies, labor and land (human and natural capital)
are made ready for "improvement", the older word that "development"
replaced, etymologically derived from <pros> "profit".
Direct Action
A mode of politics that tactically-and for some,
strategically-shortcircuits official channels of "representation", often by
interrupting business as usual, and deploying a variety of means, open and
clandestine: street manifestations, blockades, trespass, sit-ins, banner
hanging, squatting, sabotage, crop-trashing, pie-throwing. The debate since
Seattle about property damage and the activity of the black bloc-whether it
is tactically effective ("helps break the spell of the commodity" versus
"allows demonization of the movement as mindless vandalism"), and whether it
constitutes violence ("to treat property as sacred and inviolable is to
think like the state, and anyway what about the silent violence of
structural adjustment or redlining") rehearses old tensions between pacifist
and "physical force" traditions in abolitionist, nationalist and
anti-colonial struggles.
Diversity
The key term of US multiculturalism, a liberal doctrine endorsed by big
business and government for the management of "difference" in response to
the civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements. The doggerel read
at Clinton's first inauguration, "On the Pulse of Morning", confirmed the
ascendancy of multicultural nationalism; contrast the previous inaugural
verse (at Kennedy's induction), "The Gift Outright", Robert Frost's white
puritan poem of blood sacrifice and western conquest. Although capitalist
globalization is spoken of as a homogenizing force (viz. extinction of
languages and species, death of customary lifeways, Weberian harmonization),
it co-opts and even encourages the proliferation of identities-gender,
ethnic and consumer-consistent with profit-taking. Biodiversity, that mantra
of environmentalists, is, to say nothing of its merits, multiculturalism
projected onto the realm of nature; by the same token, the native plant
movement draws, willy-nilly, from the wellsprings of xenophobia and
anti-immigrant rhetoric. To speak of nature is always already to be in the
space of the social.
Economy
The alpha and omega of our epoch. The mere utterance of the words, "the
bottom line", is supposed to halt discussion. The disembedding of the
"economy" from its social and moral matrix has been a long and savage
process; its first paid professor was the Reverend Malthus in 1800. As
often, it was in a work of imagination, not theory-in Daniel Defoe, rather
than Adam Smith-that one encounters the first classic projection of homo
economicus. What is Robinson Crusoe, that lonely, primitive accumulator and
idol of economists, but a cost-benefit calculating machine? Such is the
neurotic Protestant imago that the technicians of the WTO dream of
universalizing.
Enclosure
The exclusion (sometimes physically by hedges and fences) of commoners and
peasants from the means of life, in order to "free" them for wage labor
under capitalist modernity. Enclosure meant not only the extinction (by
force and later by acts of parliament) of customary "rights of common" to
soil, grazing, firewood, timber, and the cultivated and uncultivated bounty
of the earth, but, at least as important, the breaking of communal
consciousness and autonomy. The commodification of land and labor was
capitalism's essential founding process, written "in letters of blood and
fire". The buying and selling of commodities could then be generalized;
property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity.
The structural adjustment programs of the IMF, and the WTO's intellectual
property regimes, amount to new (as well as old) forms of
enclosure-privatization of water and public land, auctioning of the
electromagnetic spectrum, the patenting of seeds, etc.
Environment
When taken to mean external surroundings, "environment" reinforces the old
split between humanity and nature, between inside and outside, which at
least has the merit of not positing a fascist metaphysics of identity (blood
and soil, thinking with the body, woman equals nature). Environments are
constituted by the life-activity of their inhabitants; without the active
involvement of its denizens, no expert has any business claiming even to
identify an environment.
Environmentalists
Corporate capital's stormy petrels, warning of bad weather. That Mobil and
environmentalists both like to operate under the sign of NASA's " whole
earth" image reveals how green politics is a version of global
managerialism. The Malthusian assumptions and the eugenic and racist roots
of environmentalism (population control, native plant fanaticism, defence of
wilderness that was someone else's home) are barely below the surface.
Fair trade
The alternative to "free trade" on offer from the loyal opposition, led by
Global Exchange, a San Francisco travel agency and crafts importer.
Free trade
Traditional slogan of imperial monopolists and protectionists.for export
only.
Gibson's Law
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD." Scientists flatly
contradicting each other became a common sight during the mad cow outbreak,
and caused a crisis of legitimacy in Europe, which will only deepen with
each surprising plague. Because scientists are increasingly licensed by
industry, we are bound to hear more kitsch assertions like "The chances of
GM pollen drift are zero", and "There can be no prions in the milk".
Global South
The old West/East division, based on the political geography of the
capitalist-communist bloc system, is giving way to North/South terminology,
reflecting the post-Cold War configuration of a Northern capitalist core (to
use the metaphor of world-system theory) and a Southern periphery. The
obvious limitations of these hemispheric spatial terms led, in the first
case, to the coining of "tiers monde"/"third world" for countries
"non-aligned" with the two blocs, and recently to the attachment of "global"
to "South" to capture the fact that capitalism's uneven development creates
conditions typically associated with the South inside the Northern
heartlands.
Globalization
Business school jargon that gained general currency in the 1990s, to
describe the dismantling of barriers to the movement of capital and the loss
of local and national sovereignties to the interests of transnational firms,
helped along by developments in telecommunications and the collapse of the
two-bloc world. Globes were originally "emblems of sovereignty" (1614), that
became playthings of merchant princes and navigators, familiar as props in
Renaissance portraiture. It was the task of cartography to project the globe
into two dimensions; without the resulting maps and charts the business of
empire and planetary capitalist hegemony would be literally unthinkable.
GMO
Genetically modified organism. See under "Biotechnology".
Human rights
Liberal discourse lately favored by the managers of the new world order,
not least the military humanists of NATO and the Pentagon who use it,
arbitrarily of course, as a trojan horse for intervention worldwide, by
land, sea, air and, soon no doubt, space-mercy by any means necessary.
IMF
International Monetary Fund. Created by the US and Britain at the 1944
Bretton Woods conference to provide loans to countries with short-term
liquidity problems, and to buffer the irrationality of markets by enshrining
capital controls in Article VI. Since the defeat of this original scheme of
John Maynard Keynes and Dexter White, the IMF has been turned into a major
global instrument for the disciplining of movements toward local autonomy by
savage "conditionalities" on loans.
Independent Media Center
Hub of non-corporate news gathering and dissemination, taking advantage of
the new technics of communications (digital cameras, satellites, wireless
telephony, the internet). The mushrooming of IMCs, modeled on the Seattle
experience, is a response to the continuing enclosures and concentration of
the capitalist media.
Internet
The child of Victorian telegraphy, even down to the utopian hype-in 1852 a
Saint-Simonian disciple announced: "A perfect network of electric filaments
will afford a new social harmony." The space-pulverizing machinery of the
virtual brings, along with new connections, intensified separation, plus
low-grade depression and digital palsy, that nasty relative of the
televisual body ("couch potato"). Its liberatory refunctioning as a tool for
"organizing from below" flourishes in the shade of its dominant use as
essential support for the global transmission of administrative, military
and commercial intelligence, and the enhanced surveillance of labor.
IPR
Intellectual property rights. Their origins lie in the history of the
printing press and questions of copyright ownership; the new technologies of
communication, replication and the rise of corporate patents and branding
have brought trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) sharply into
focus, and onto the main agenda of the WTO. It is symptomatic that the
fortune of today's Croesus is amassed by licensing intellectual property
(software, patents) rather than by owning oil wells or steelmills, in the
style of 19th century robber barons. The managers and brokers of capital
prefer these purified forms of property; they can circulate at the speed of
light.
Libertarian
Historically the contrast was with "determinist" (vis-a-vis free will);
later used by anarchists (e.g., Noam Chomsky) to distance themselves from
authoritarian socialists in their various guises (Stalinist, Leninist,
Trotskyist, Maoist, Castroite); recently the party of market fetishists,
automatic weapons collectors and the anti-tax lobby.
Luddite
The most powerful swearword of capital ("mindless, destructive, resister of
progress"), now doing double-duty since "communist" has, for the moment,
lost its charge. Still, all the sabotage in history would not even register
in the scales compared to capitalism's scheduled destruction. Both the left
and the right told the same lie about the historical luddites, that they
were primitivist and backward looking, as if those skilled weavers at the
dawn of industrial modernity were against the future rather than its
foreclosure by immiseration, factory discipline and the gallows.
Market
More accurately described by the French historian Braudel as the
"anti-market". Capitalism from its birth has been about oligopolies and
monopolies. The necessary contrast to the glory of old marketplaces, fairs,
bazaars, and agoras is the "container", the tilt-up warehouse, and the
supermarket.
Multitude
Key term of the philosopher Spinoza, the anti-Hobbes of early modernity,
now dusted off for the digital epoch by certain critics of globalization.
The argument goes: if capitalism at its dawning produced a multitude, and
the factories of the industrial revolution a proletariat, the social factory
of the cybernetic economy is producing a new (global, wired) multitude.
Some in the current anti-capitalist movement recognize themselves in this
neo-Spinozist scheme, and hope that the power of the new antinomian
multitude will constitute the gravedigger this time.
Neo-liberalism
Post-60's version of classical liberalism's gospel of the market and the
"hidden hand". For forty years the strategy developed during the crisis of
the 1930s to prevent anti-capitalist movements from taking power-national
Keynesianism-was hegemonic in the West, in the form of welfare safety nets,
income redistribution, domestic industry protection, state-financed public
works, and capital controls. The assault on national Keynesianism came in
the shape of globalizing neo-liberalism, propagated in reactionary
think-tanks (funded by oil and armaments fortunes) in response to the
revolutionary events of the sixties and the falling rate of profit. The
immediate intellectual roots lay in the work of an English accountant Ronald
Coase (q.v.), with von Hayek the bridge to classical liberalism, the
University of Chicago its academic home, and Thatcher and Reagan its
door-to-door salesforce. Neo-liberals wish to bury the memory of their
system's savior-"capitalism in itself", observed Keynes in 1924, "is in many
ways objectionable"-by claiming that "there is no alternative" to
unregulated global flows of money and goods, the sale of public assets, the
overriding of workplace and environmental protections, and a recomposed
planetary division of labor; in sum, the removal of any fetters on the rate
of exploitation.
NGOs
Non-governmental organizations. The mendicant orders of late capitalism,
as Antonio Negri put it. By one calculation they numbered a mere nine in
1907, most famously the Red Cross. The Biafran famine in the mid 1960s,
where international state action proved spectacularly inadequate, was the
watershed, and by the late nineties NGO's numbered in the thousands. They
are thriving on famine, disease, and war, and in the spaces (north as well
as south) created by structural adjustment-forced privatization, market
deregulation, and the hollowing out of state agencies.
NVDA
Non-violent direct action. See under "violence" and "direct action".
Pacifism
The rejection of all forms of organized violence. Dismissed right, left
and center -by generals, revolutionaries and pragmatic liberals alike-as
hopelessly unrealistic, though pacifists are unimpressed by what passes for
political realism and look for routes to a peaceable world that interrupt
the codes of violence. The "peace process", however, usually means war by
other means, and pacifists operating under its banner might reflect on
Tacitus' remark about the fate of Carthage: the Romans "made a desert and
called it peace".
Police
Institutionalized by Napoleon in France and by Robert Peel in 19th London
to enforce the wage-form and the criminalization of custom. The more modern
the police force, the more medieval-looking the body armor-though the
weaponry is the scientific fruit of corporate laboratories.
Policy
Etymological variant of "police".
Primitivism
A branch of romanticism (Enlightenment's unruly sibling) having deep
American roots, with recent developments in Detroit and Eugene. Rejects
industrial civilization and, in austere versions, even agriculture; in the
limit case, human language itself is considered a technology of alienation.
Associated in the public mind with the Unabomber, whom the press portrayed
as society's mad outcast, but his manifesto reveals not only a widely held
apocalyptic view of modern science and technology, but in some ways a
traditional white American male profile, viz. anti-urbanism, misogyny and a
fascination with violence and homemade explosives.
Privatization
Etymological kin to "deprivation", though any memory of why that might
be-namely, that "privacy" was a prideful abstention from a life in common-is
long gone. The transvaluation has taken four hundred years, and can be
marked by the junkbond artist Ivan Boesky's notorious speech to Berkeley's
Haas (Levi Strauss) Business School when he announced "Greed is good", and
was cheered to the rafters. The privatization of everything is often
imagined to be the ideal of free marketeers, but their real game involves
the maximum socialization of costs in the sink of nature and labor.
Risk
The entry under "Risk" in the Dictionary of the Social Sciences has a
single cross-reference, to "Profit". That is at least honest, since the
rhetoric of risk, which now drives medicine, law, portfolio management,
criminology, social welfare, education, public health, technology impact,
environmental policy, banking, industrial hygiene, urban planning, military
strategy and genomics, emerged during the 17th century in the milieu of
Lloyd's coffeehouse, where the new capitalist dealers in risk (sale of
annuities, stock jobbing, marine insurance) were busy undermining the moral
economy with the logic of the market and the counting house. Modern
apologists of risk, such as Tony "Third Way" Giddens, inform us that new
technologies make for an unavoidably dangerous world, and therefore the real
menace comes from riskophobes and untrusting luddites facing backwards.
Seattle
Poster city of the "new economy", home of Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks,
the firms that connect its workforce, fly the top layer around, and keep
them awake and flexible. Seattle is a classic example of the denaturing by
containerization of the old waterfronts of the Atlantic and Pacific
littoral, whose passing has been recorded in Alan Sekula's photo-documentary
Fish Story. The Chamber of Commerce is living with the fear that the name of
their city will always conjure up, not a vision of the new economy, but its
nemesis.
Science
Since harnessing fundamental chemistry to colonial warfare and atomic
physics to state arsenals, science seems more menace than hope, the
scientist more Frankenstein than Prometheus. Industry science is often
intended actually to produce ignorance-about cigarettes, asbestos, global
warming, GM crops-turning the skepticism of critical inquiry to corporate
advantage, in order to buy time; a Brown and Williamson (tobacco company)
memo admitted: "Doubt is our product". Science, once (and still)
emancipatory vis-à-vis the mystification of clerics, has become capital's
way of knowing the world.
Sixties
The long shadow of that crowded decade continues to haunt both the
soixante-huitards and those who insist it was all a chimera. That it was a
revolutionary conjuncture, and a global one, should be of interest this time
around. For evidence see Ronald Fraser's 1968, Sonya Sayres et al. The
Sixties Without Apology, Michael Watts' 1968 and All That, and Chris Marker'
s two-part documentary Le Fond de L'Air est Rouge.
Sovereignty
Supreme authority. The parcellized power of feudal lords became absolute
under monarchical and nation-states systems; late capitalism is
re-parcellizing and punching holes in state sovereignty (e.g., Native
American casino enclaves) in the interests of flexible accumulation. Most
conspicuously, the sovereignty of WTO rules now trumps national laws enacted
for the protection of the environment and workers.
Terrorism
The strategic use of violence against civilians-typically by states but
also by those thinking like a state, however marginal and poor in resources.
Terrorism seeks to kill and maim, but also more widely to demoralize, to
spread the message that no one is safe. Terrorism is an act of
communication. It aims to breed rumor, grab headlines, burn an image of pain
and horror into the citizenry's collective skull. The tactic is
cost-effective, and has had successes. Colonial occupiers have given up and
gone home in the face of it. Whether victimization and the sowing of mass
paranoia can ever provide the basis for a "revolution"-that is, the release
and refocusing of repressed social energies-is another question. Whereas
terror is often disavowed (though inherent to rapine, slavery, inquisitions
and colonialism), terrorism lives on the oxygen of publicity. It took modern
form with the Jacobins' spectacular use of Dr Guillotin's enlightenment
machine for rational decapitation. The next fin-de-siècle burst of
"propaganda by the deed"-political assassinations, bombings and
incendiarism, often in fact the work of agents provocateurs in the service
of the state's need to justify the deployment of its hegemonic
violence-turned out to be just a curtain-raiser for the twentieth century
which witnessed the apotheosis of terrorism. Its emblematic instruments have
been, in the industrialized North, the car-bomb, and, in the Third World,
disappearances and the death-squad. But twentieth century terrorism's
hallmark was bombardment from the air, the Damoclean threat of mass death
aimed at the inhabitants of cities-Guernica, London, Dresden, and the ground
zero of globalized atomic terror, Hiroshima. For keepers of nuclear
stockpiles to declare a "war on terrorism" places them very deep in Orwell's
debt. In political rhetoric, the epithet "terrorist" is projected only onto
others-enemies so designated by authorities wherever; in the US, the term is
rapidly proliferating to implicate all resistance to capitalist
globalization, foreign and domestic. Thus fast-track WTO legislation,
corporate bail-outs and environmental de-regulation are called
"counter-terrorism" measures. Not for the first time is "terrorist" (cf.
"luddite" and "communist") being forged as a weapon in capitalism's
arsenal.
Utopia
Thomas More's 16th century book forever lent its name to projections of an
ideal world. They are, typically, static blueprints-More's original Utopia,
though it contained a savage critique of early capitalist enclosures, was
really a nostalgic retrospect for a dying patriarchal feudal order. We are
currently living in the utopia of 1930s automobile company executives, who
gave us fair warning in the GM pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair. Although
Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, P.M.'s Bolo Bolo, and William Morris's
News from Nowhere shine out as beacons in a dismal genre, it grows harder to
envisage the far side of capitalism, the more everyday life is colonized by
the imagineers of the commodity world.
Violence
Chief of the state monopolies-indeed, no state is conceivable without it,
though it will be called "force", not "violence". The stenographers of
domination systematically invert necessary ethical distinctions between the
violence of the oppressor and the oppressed, between harm to persons and
harm to property, between institutionalized violence (right and left) as
opposed to the improvised violence of insurrections. Violence routinized is
a mirror of the state, as non-violence advocates are quick to point out; on
the other hand, non-violence fetishized is often a mark of privilege.
Virtual
The electronic sublime heralded fifty years ago by the barkers of the
cybernetic revolution have finally arrived under the sign of the "virtual".
Video screens constitute the myth space of modernity, which thus far mostly
offers playworlds where wargaming meets Fordist speed-up. It is no surprise
that relationships at a remove are often welcomed when the spaces of
everyday life-depending on gender, race, class and age-are surveilled,
dangerous or denatured, with the chances of pleasurable encounters close to
vanishing. The virtual life is, however, always on the cusp of boredom,
which is fascination's other face.
War
The health of the state (Randolph Bourne, 1917)
World Bank
Emerged out of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
(IBRD), set up at the Bretton Woods meeting in 1944 to funnel low-interest
loans for the rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe, and to head off communism.
It later evolved into the prime agency for Third World aid and development,
or what the Wall Street Journal called "promoting socialism". During the
1970s McNamara oversaw a massive growth in the World Bank's resources; on
his watch the "structural adjustment" loan was devised as a vehicle for
imposing, as they say, "free-market liberalization". In recent years, by
hiring on some of its milder critics, the World Bank is able to play good
cop to the IMF's bad cop.
WTO
World Trade Organization. 1995 successor organization to GATT (General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Its early origins lie in the ITO
(International Trade Organization) set up in 1948 in Havana to coordinate
the international trading system in the wake of the crisis of the 1930s.
GATT was a system of member-state negotiations ( "rounds") concluding in
contracts that fixed tarrifs in industrial products at national borders. The
Uruguay Round ended in 1995 with the establishment of a permanent
international bureaucracy, the World Trade Organization (WTO), having a much
larger scope that does not stop at borders, and includes agriculture,
intellectual property rights (IPR), trade in services, and investment
measures. It is structured in the image of the private tyrannies it serves,
capitalist firms.
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