Page 130 - Culture Society and Economy

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‘LOCALIZATION’ EXPLORED

of Third World debt cancellation. Yet others are trade union activists
from developed countries, concerned that free trade and deregulation
are leading to the migration of jobs away from their own members, to
lower-wage and less-regulated economies. This diversity is a source of
the mass strength of the movement. At the same time it poses serious chal-
lenges to the unity of the movement, especially over the longer term.
Clearly, if these very diverse perspectives are to maintain their unity over
the longer term, then some kind of development of a common theoretical
outlook, program and organization, however loosely adhered to, would be
beneficial. 1
Likewise, one must note that the advocates of globalization increas-
ingly place at the center of their criticisms of the movement the claim
that the anti-globalizers have no credible alternative to globalization.
They argue that the movement has a purely negative program – is simply
a form of ‘anti-ism’ – without having any constructive alternative to offer.
The implication of this message is obvious: anti-globalizers are ‘adoles-
cent’ college students or ‘anarchists’ whom no responsible member of
society could possibly support. The entire point of this argument is to
quarantine the anti-globalization movement and to prevent its consider-
able growth from spreading into the central institutions and pivotal
groups of society. In other words, this issue of the presence or absence of
a credible anti-globalization alternative is increasingly becoming a central
one for the development of the movement and the consolidation of its
influence in society.
One should not fail to mention that this question of theoretical clarity
and alternatives is not regarded by all participants in the movement as
necessarily that important. Indeed, many (especially some in the Italian
movement) make the argument that it is precisely this absence of what
I am here calling theoretical coherence which is the strength of the move-
ment and the source of its current credibility. Likewise the absence of
clear-cut organization. This tendency argues that preoccupation with
alternatives was a weakness of past movements in the 1960s and 1970s
and leads to sectarianism, bickering and ultimately to disunity. In addi-
tion to this pragmatic argument against diverting energies to a search for
clear alternatives, there is a more philosophical argument that addresses
this criticisms of the globalizers by embracing them. The approach here
is to proudly affirm that indeed, one has no ‘alternative’ and that to posit
alternatives is simply to seek surreptitiously to replace the existing system
of corporate hierarchy and domination, with another, even more elitist
‘vanguardist’ one, from the Left. Again, the studied avoidance of any
thrust for organizational coherence is often regarded as one of the cardinal

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