Making the Most of 9/11

La Mano Negra submitted the following essay by Brian Oliver Sheppard:

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MAKING THE MOST OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 TRAGEDY

How Government Officials are Trying to to Push
Forward Corporate Agendas by Linking Terrorism
with Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement

The tragedy of September 11 has provided government spin doctors with an unusually delicious opportunity to strike out at controversial and dissident beliefs. Since the attacks, prominent US policymakers have exploited an increase in patriotism and public fear, directing these volatile emotions into consent for pro-corporate, trade liberalization agendas with the implication that such is the path to safety.

In some cases, US government officials have linked the beliefs of the
terrorists to those of anti-corporate globalization protesters, referring explicitly to anarchists and other "enemies of civilization" (their words) as bedfellows. US government officials rarely acknowledge anarchist or anti-capitalist ideas at all; when they do, the intent is always ideological, and usually plays upon the useful, if somewhat antiquated, myth of anarchist as bomb-throwing maniac.

US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, one of the most vehement of
capitalist ideologists in Washington, has declared that what is needed to respond to the terrorists is an economic "counteroffensive" that includes charging ahead with neoliberal trade agreements to, in his words, "complement" the military action that will be required to eliminate terrorists. In a speech on September 24, just thirteen days after the terrorist attacks, Zoellick compared the contemporary crisis of globalization to that of the emerging world order at the end of the nineteenth century.

At that time, "much like today," Zoellick says, there were "great social movements sparked by globalization, although the participants in the revived Olympics of 1896 ran around a track, instead of in the streets, and hurled objects toward chalk lines, instead of at windows." Zoellick also tells us that there were foolish "theorists and thinkers [who] called for a stateless society, without government and law, without ownership of property, without the ruling class and their despised ally, the bourgeoisie." This utopian idealism led to the problem - "much like today" - of "anarchists bent on senseless destruction." In the meantime, "crashing debates in the Socialist
International" [sic] led the misguided to try to overthrow capitalism
altogether.

Within the course of a few paragraphs, Zoellick manages to connect recent terrorist attacks with historic anti-capitalist movements and with modern day anti-corporate globalization protesters, telling us that he gives us "this brief recollection" of radicalism simply to answer people who "wonder if there are intellectual connections with others who have turned to violence to attack international finance, globalization, and the United States."

The trade ambassador's crowning analysis of these kinds of reactions is simply that "[c]hange breeds anxiety" and that "[a]nxieties can be manipulated to force agendas based on fear, antagonisms, resentments, and hate," as terrorists try to do. Zoellick doesn't offer us the possibility that he is doing just that: using the fear felt by post-September 11 Americans to force the agenda of corporate profits onto the world.

Martin Neil Baily, an economist and Clinton appointee to Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, concurs with Zoellick that "the attacks were part of the backlash against globalization." Baily takes the position that the envy of the poor helped motivate the attacks; the US "is a target partly because it is the symbol of the success of market-driven international economies," he writes in a recent policy brief. Baily alludes that the underlying reason for the attacks has nothing to do with how the US came to be a "successful" economy, but simply that it is successful. This leaves us to infer that success is something that just leads to violent
resentment amongst the impotent. It also allows US elites to pat themselves on the back, and believe that terrorists attacked the US not because it has done anything wrong, but, to the contrary, because it is so great. When looked at in this perverse light, the attacks are a verification of success.

Baily champions a "defiant response" to such sore losers. Employing a millenarian rhetoric of crisis not seen since the Cold War, Baily claims that in "the context of the global threat the democracies of the world now face, the petty squabbles over beef or foreign sales corporations seem absurd." Although a continued recession is expected, policymakers should not accomodate success-hating terrorists. "The industrial countries should resist any internal pressures toward protectionism as unemployment rises and, instead, launch a new global trade round," to show the angry poor that
all will proceed as normal.

During an October 24 speech at the Institute for International Economics, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan also chimed in to warn that "[t]errorism poses a challenge to the remarkable record of globalization." By situating the battle lines so that one is either for terrorism, or for neoliberal globalization, people with reservations about the latter can be intellectually bullied into supporting it. "What are the dissidents' solutions to the alleged failures of globalization?" Greenspan rhetorically asks his elite audience. "Frequently, they appear to favor politically imposed systems, employing the power of the state to override the outcomes
arrived at through voluntary exchange."

But what about the politically imposed system that pro-globalization shills advocate? Greenspan, who was an acolyte of ultra-capitalist Ayn Rand, and who is nominally opposed to government intervention into nations' economies, raises the authoritarian socialist spectre of "politically imposed systems." He does not seem to realize that the imposition - political or otherwise - of corporate globalization is exactly what many anti-globalization activists protest, and that the "voluntary exchange" that he refers to does not often exist in the reality of a corporate-run economy. What exists, instead, is the "voluntary exchange" between the hungry and well-fed, the homeless and those owning hundreds of acres of land, the needy and the opulent, the powerless and powerful. What history - and UN statistics - have shown thus far is that postwar, corporate globalization tends to widen the gap between these groups of people, not reconcile it.

Greenspan laments that "an antipathy to 'corporate culture' has sent tens of thousands into the streets to protest what they see as 'exploitive capitalism' in its most visible form- the increased globalization of our economies." He continues:

"Setting aside the arguments of the protestors, even among those committed to market-oriented economies, important differences remain about the view of capitalism and the role of globalization. These differences are captured most clearly for me in a soliloquy attributed to a prominent European leader several years ago. He asked, 'What is the market? It is the law of the jungle, the law of nature. And what is civilization? It is the struggle against nature.'"

Is Greenspan quoting Russian anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin? He never says. However, Kropotkin wrote in the 19th century, "Competition is the law of jungle, whereas cooperation is the law of civilization." As Greenspan portrays it, the quote reflects the pessimistic and ill-conceived view that competition can have only harmful effects, indicative of a more barbaric type of human relations. Nevertheless, a struggle against capitalism is still like a struggle against nature itself, Greenspan's version of the quote implies, much akin to struggling against the law of
gravity or any other natural law. How reassuring it must be for airline executives to know that as they lay over 100,000 employees off, even after receiving government bailout money, that they are simply acting in accord with the "laws of nature."

This sort of capitalism, however, that anti-corporate globalization
protesters oppose, is sure to benefit from new anti-terrorist legislation that effectively lumps domestic dissidents in with terrorists like the ones who hijacked the planes on September 11. The ideas of anti-capitalist protesters and anarchists, rarely discussed by US government officials at any other time, are now being misrepresented in the same breath that these same officials use to condemn the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Wall Street Journal recently titled an article "Adeiu, Seattle," referring
to the famous anti-WTO protests in 1999 in Seattle. The anti-globalization movement has now "receded to the netherworld where we have tucked all the things that seemed important" before September 11, it crows.

It is in this sense that free market cheerleaders will exploit the deaths of 6,000 innocent people, ensuring that their agenda of global corporate hegemony will succeed. In doing such, they do a disservice to the memories of the dead, and, in macabre fashion, receive the terrorist atrocities as a gift with which they can make much use.

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Copyright (c) 2001