Seattle '99 - The Difference Makers
The World Trade Organisation has come and gone from Seattle this week under its banner metaphor of 'Time is Money', and the protestors have also come and gone (although hundreds are still 'lingering on' in prison) under their banner metaphor of 'Time is Running Out' for the environment and for a hard-pressed labour force.
The WTO fiasco ground to a halt with no new agreements. The main blocks of political-economic interests - USA Vs Europe could not agree on agriculture production among others - thus living out the two metaphors of 'Wasting Time (which is Money)', and being 'Behind Schedule / Sliding Backwards / and Not Covering any Ground (standing still)', which is Not Making any Progress in their negotiations.
The Excretion of Differences -
This 'Time Wasting / Backsliding No Progress' metaphoric context was achieved largely by the ways in which the 'forces of order' were deployed to do their work. Their work, let us recall, is the work of denying or eliminating DIFFERENCE from the dominant conversational spaces - in this case from the conversational space of the WTO meeting.
The dominant institutional discourse says that 'The Health & Well-Being of the Rulers must be protected'. This involves and uses two other discourses: -
The result is that 'Protestors' must be treated like 'shit'.
The police, army, national guard, swat teams etc, must be used not only to 'prevent access' to the WTO delegates / speaking space, but must also treat those Protestors of Difference as refus-ed, as rubbish. It is not enough to 'repel boarders' but it is necessary also to EXPEL the difference-makers from the body-politic. In these conditions of repel-expel the populace is treated like dirt.
In Seattle we have seen many 'innocent bystanders' get beaten, arrested, sprayed, etc - it doesn't matter if you think you are waiting for your usual bus to get home - in reality, you have just become a piece of garbage under the dominant discourse. No one can be 'innocent' in front of a police manoeuvre of 'repel-expel'.
A Seattle newspaper reports: - 'Yesterday morning, a judge told 125 women, kept in a holding tank awaiting arraignment, that he would dismiss charges against them if they would give their names. The protesters declined and settled in. "They're going to have trouble processing us," said a woman, who called from the jail and identified herself only as Beka. "We're gumming up the system, and they're going to want to just get rid of us."
In this way the system gets very 'constipated' - and it is very COSTLY (Time is Money) to deal with long legal backlogs ('At a Standstill' - 'Blocked' - 'Not Getting Anywhere').
No doubt in the next few days we will see the usual calls for (the usual cover-up) 'inquiries', investigations into police activity, accusations against city officials, and all the usual(ly) unanswered questions.
But none of these calls for inquiries matters because none of it can touch the domain of powers and influence which ordains this type of scenario. Chomsky somewhere quotes John Dewey as saying - ''Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, and as long as this is so, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.''
Chomsky points out that the corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies have always seen the need to control the public mind and engineer consent by using propaganda.
Capitalism is NOT Democracy -
It should be clear from this last week of protests that 'capitalism' (as represented by the WTO in this case) can NOT be equated with 'democracy'. This is still a common erroneous bit of thinking - by people who live in 'democracies'. Because 'capitalism' developed within societies that were 'democratic' there is this mistaken identification of one with the other.
But business organisations are NOT democratic in their constitution, organisation, intent or process. They tend to be modelled on the notion of power hierarchy as found in the military organisations - with a Leader who sends Orders down the line to Subordinates who are expected to Obey and Satisfy his Interests.
Nothing 'democratic' about that.
It must also not be forgotten that many (all?) democracies have a built in mode of suspending their 'Constitution' where they feel a threat to their existence. Many people have described what happened in Seattle as the implementation of a 'police state'.
Being Configured by the Dominant Discourse
The Propaganda Machine (newspapers, TV, magazines, radio) operate to galvanise support for the special interests which dominate both state and private activity. The media (as also the police, army, bureaucracy, military etc) are NOT independent entities dedicated to uncovering and 'objectively reporting' the 'truth'. Instead, they describe and reflect the world as powerful interest groups wish it to be perceived. The owners of the media set the basic premise of discourse and this determines what the general population is allowed to see, hear and think about.
This is like setting the bias of the thermostat which heats the condominium building. Once it is set, all the inhabitants are free only to open their windows (to cool down when it is too hot) or to close their windows (when it is too cold and they want to warm up). They have absolutely no power to RESET the bias, to reset the context-setting controls. If you don't like it you can either freeze or swelter.
In Seattle someone helped to set the CONTEXT by specifying a 'No Protest Zone', and, by default, all the rest of the city as a 'Protest Zone'. There will no doubt be another investigation as to WHY and HOW someone decided to cordon off 25 city blocks as a 'No Protest Zone'.
The point is that this is like the thermostat setting - the protestors / police relationship has to take place within this frame of reference. Of course, as things 'got out of control', the police were seen to be arresting peacefully protesting groups who were OUTSIDE the 'No Protest Zone' as if they were INSIDE the arrest zone - but hey! Who said we had to play by the rules (that we just made up)?
One of the civil rights issues already in the newspapers today is that the minority coalition in Seattle wants to change police policies that discriminate against people of colour. Leaders of each group say such policies were played out when Seattle City Councilman Richard McIver, the council's only African-American member, was stopped twice by police and nearly arrested in downtown Seattle Wednesday night on his way to a World Trade Organization reception at the Westin Hotel. McIver said police gave him a rough time even though he showed them his business card and WTO credentials.
Internal Collapse
The collapse of the WTO talks into paralysis of disagreement was due not least to the operation of similar principles on the 'inside' of the WTO events as those in play on the 'outside' in relation to the protestors - that is, the 'repel-expel' principle and the Context-Setting strategy.
On the inside we could see the 'repel-expel' principle at work in that of the 130 countries participating, we find 25 'privileged' countries having secret negotiations behind closed doors - guarded by ushers which in the role of the 'police' act to repel and expel those protesting members of the other 100 countries who want to know what is going on, and who want to 'have a say'.
It is probable that Mr McIver would have recognised the plight of these representatives of the third-world developing countries (had he been able to get 'in' on time) - who were not allowed to enter these special meetings and participate by the police/ushers - even though they were official delegates of their countries with the correct documents!
Here we also see the power of setting the Bias or Context for where the 'important speaking & listening' was going to take place, and WHO could participate.
Once again, the complaints of all of these people (on the 'inside', but yet on the 'outside' of the powers that be) proved to be 'indigestible', leading to the inevitable breakdown of the talks. More global constipation.
Finally, we had WTO head Michael Moore talking to a Seattle conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions on Nov. 29. He succeeded in speaking only within the same old misleading metaphor - 'Workers have nothing to fear from WTO-led globalisation because more trade means more jobs'.
The simple fact remains that without some enforceable international labour standards greater freedom to import and export goods has meant freedom for trans-national corporations to shift basic production to the countries with the lowest wages. We even have examples of famous companies setting up in China where they have used slave labour in prisons to man their factories. One delegate who had just returned from a fact finding trip to Cambodia reported on an export sector in which 160,000 mostly female textile workers toil 10 hours a day for $2, where workers are beaten for making mistakes and fired for complaining. To say nothing about child slave labour.
The slogan that 'more trade means more jobs' is somehow frighteningly stupid.