“United Colors of Dissent:  Exploring the Relationship Between Commodification and Resistance in the Contemporary Movement Against Corporate Power” 

 

 

 

Peace and Global Studies Senior Thesis

Garrett Bucks

April 4th 2003

 

 

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”

-Guy Debord

 

 

On November 30, 1999, officials from across the globe gathered in Seattle for the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization.  They were joined by tens of thousands of nonviolent protesters who came to express their dissatisfaction with the organization’s corporate-driven policies.  By the end of the day, the unthinkable had occurred; the protestors had successfully shut down the opening session of the most important financial meeting in the world. That evening, nightly news programs were filled with a disorienting collection of images.  Environmentalists dressed as sea turtles danced joyfully in front of stoic lines of police officers.  Longshoremen, proudly sporting satin union jackets, sought cover from clouds of tear gas.  Pundits struggled to explain this seemingly chaotic display of resistance.  In the days that followed, some would condemn the protesters as uneducated rioters.  Others would speak glowingly about the birth of a global revolution.  All would attempt, however, to try to make sense of what had occurred that day, to trace the roots of an event that had taken the entire world by surprise. 

Three years after the protests, intellectuals, activists and journalists alike are still attempting to understand what occurred on the streets of Seattle on November 30th.  The demonstration, as well as the broader movement that it has inspired, has already been studied from a number of different perspectives.  This paper attempts to complement these various analyses by looking at the development of this contemporary protest movement through the lens of commodification.

The phenomenon of commodification, wherein non-commercial objects and activities are co-opted in order to drive consumer culture, is an important element in the expansion of global capitalism.  This phenomenon is particularly identifiable in the history of leftist social movements in the latter half of the 20th Century.  From the 1960’s onward, activists have struggled as their political objectives have been sanitized and repackaged by corporations and advertising agencies.  Out of their frustrations, a new generation of activists has been born that are attempting to reclaim personal autonomy and public space in the face of corporate hegemony.   Although these self-proclaimed culture jammers and space reclaimers have only been active for a short period of time, they offer a unique methodological approach to organizing that not only provides a response to the threat of commodification, but also offers a new vision for the efficacy of decentralized social movements under late capitalism.

This paper will attempt to add to broader understandings of the organizing philosophy of the contemporary anti-corporate movement by analyzing just one of its many constituent units (those activists who are particularly wary of corporate commodification).  While it would be ridiculous to claim that this perspective offers a full understanding of the current wave of global protest, it can be argued that the movement against corporate globalization has been tremendously influenced by the recognition, on the part of many of its participants, of the threat of commodification.  Additionally, looking at contemporary protests through the lens of historical phenomena (such as commodification) provides an opportunity to understand the ways in which social movements have been affected by broader changes in the global economy.  That being said, this paper is not meant as a totalizing explanation for current anti-corporate sentiment, but simply as one attempt, among many, to understand a living social movement.

In order to further avoid being unfairly totalizing, I am intentionally cautious about the language that I use to describe the current wave of protest activity.  While this particular movement has commonly been characterized as being “anti-globalization,” this phrase, as has been widely noted, is a misnomer.[1]  Instead, this paper will primarily describe the movement as being “anti-corporate” in nature.  This distinction is important, because it identifies that the common bond that connects many protesters is not opposition to a more “globalized” world, but a resentment of unfettered corporate power.  The term “anti-corporate” is also used in order to distinguish the movement from more monolithically “anti-capitalist” movements.  While many participants in the current movement do hold, as a final goal, the abolition of capitalism, this viewpoint is not universal.  The movement also includes a number of individuals and groups, who, while distrustful of the form that corporate capitalism has taken, are not necessarily opposed to capitalism in general. 

 

The Coronation of the Commodity

 

The commodification of social movements in the late 20th Century has not occurred in a cultural vacuum.  Quite to the contrary, it is impossible to understand this process without examining the broader ways in which the nature of commodity production has changed over this time period.  As David Harvey outlines in The Condition of Postmodernity, the global economy has evolved considerably through the course of the 20th Century.  For Harvey, this transformation can be understood, roughly speaking, in terms of the shift first towards industrial Fordism and later towards a system of flexible accumulation.

 Put simply, Fordism refers to a stage of economic development in which economic growth is achieved through mass production and mass consumption.  In order for Fordism to function properly, there has to be not only a transformation of systems of production (as represented by developments such as the assembly line), but also the creation of a global consumer class with the means and the desire to consume the new commodities being produced.[2]  This development is explained particularly well by Jean Baudrillard, who notes that “it becomes vital for the system at this stage to control not only the mechanism of production, but also consumer demand.”[3]  This dual requirement necessitates a shift not only in the practices of private corporations, but also in the compliance of societies as a whole, including individual consumers and the state.  Across the Western world, the time period directly after World War II was marked by relatively high levels of state intervention in the economy both in order to stabilize markets and to provide the financial and infrastructual needs necessary for increases in production and consumption.[4]

It is therefore possible to identify, through the emergence of Fordism, the development of an economic, social and political order that is centered on the commodity.  Under this system, the relationships between corporations, workers and the state are constructed not as ends in themselves, but as means through which mass commodity consumption can occur.  According to Guy Debord, this totalizing form of commodity fetishism contributes to what he terms the “spectacle society,” a world in which human beings are fundamentally separated from one another, where organic connections are sacrificed for the “representation” of commodities.

The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.  It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see-  commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.[5]

           

            In order for the society of the spectacle to successfully reproduce itself, it is not only important that society be arranged around the needs of commodity, but that individuals within that society identify primarily as consumers and relate to one another through the medium of commodities.  The development of Fordism therefore necessitates a well-developed means of encouraging continued consumption.  It is for this reason, Baudrillard argues, that commodities can no longer be understood on the basis of their use value, but instead must be evaluated as a “sociological system of signs” which encourages “a certain type of communication.”[6]  In this case, the “system of communication” being developed by commodities as signs is relatively simple:  the constant promotion of an active consumer society.

It follows then, that if the commodity is transformed, so too are the ways in which it is marketed.  Advertising in a Fordist and post-Fordist era has therefore had to serve two important functions, both of which support and reinforce one another.  On one hand, advertising offered an early antidote to one of the downfalls of mass production.  With the demise of small-scale, localized production, commodities became more uniform and therefore less distinguishable from one another. In order to respond to this shortfall, companies looked to other means, such as increased advertising, to establish their uniqueness.  It was in this moment that the brand was born, an action that brought with it the implicit recognition that, as Naomi Klein notes “within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference [has] to be manufactured along with the product.”[7]  While the phenomenon of branding actually began in the late 19th century with the growth of mechanized production, it grew in importance as mass production became increasingly ubiquitous.

Interestingly, at the very moment that advertising was being developed as a means of distinguishing products from one another, so too were different forms of advertising working together to promote a more cohesive goal.  The role of advertising within the Fordist system was not simply to promote a single product, but to encourage consumption as a lifestyle.  Various forms of advertising built on and reinforced one another, until consumption became ubiquitous.  As Andrew Wernick notes, “by addressing individuals always as potential customers, and so attributing to them a priori a social identity linked firmly to that role, advertising builds the standpoint of consumption into the design of its every text.”[8]  Fordism therefore helped introduce not simply a culture of commodities, but of advertisements as well.

            The process through which commodities became reified did not, of course, begin with the transition to Fordism.  As Debord argues, however, it was not until the full development of Fordist mass production that the centrality of the commodity became particularly overt.[9]  Fordism can therefore be identified as an important moment in the history of commodification.  By placing the commodity firmly at the center of society, as the hub around which human relationships are organized, Fordism introduced the possibility that those relationships existed solely for the sake of the commodity, and as such, could also be commodified.  The commodification of human relationships (including social movements) could not occur more fully, however, without the transition in the 1970’s from Fordism to flexible accumulation.

 

Globalizing the Spectacle Society

 

By the early 1970’s, the Fordist model had begun to reach its limits. Decreased productivity, coupled with the rapid development of Asian and Western European economies and a series of “oil shocks” led to lowered growth and increased inflation in the United States.  The ensuing shocks to the hegemony of the dollar led to the decreased stability of international financial markets, ultimately manifesting itself in recession in 1973.[10]  After decades of growth and prosperity, Fordism had finally begun to appear vulnerable.

According to Harvey, it was the inherent rigidity of Fordism that eventually led to its downfall. The success of the system required consistent corporate policy, an unwavering commitment to uniform mass production and limited flexibility in government policy.  Harvey argues, for example, that one of the reasons why Western nations suffered high levels of inflation during the 1970’s was because the potentially risky act of printing more money was one of the few fiscal policy options readily available to a nation state committed to Fordism.[11]   Although Fordism had shown signs of faltering before this point (as will be seen, its inherent rigidity was already a cause for concern in the 1960’s), it was the early-1970’s economic shocks that finally triggered the movement towards a new, less rigid system.  Fordism was replaced by flexible accumulation, an economic regime rooted in “flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption.”[12]  In exploring the implications of flexible accumulation, it is important to understand it not as a departure from Fordism, but as an extension of it, another stage in the evolution of global capitalism.  While flexible accumulation maintained Fordism’s commitment to economic growth, the transition between the two regimes required two major shifts in the nature of the manufacturing process.

The first of these changes occurred in the relationship between corporations and their workforce.  Firms realized that there was a comparative advantage in manufacturing products in those regions with less restrictive governmental policies (particularly concerning labor standards and environmental protection). Thus, industrial production moved increasingly to the Global South, while the United States’ economy become increasingly ordered around what is broadly defined as the “service sector.”[13]  While Fordism retained at least an ostensible commitment to the ideal that corporations have some responsibility to their employees (even if this was only the responsibility to pay them enough to purchase more commodities), the employee has become increasingly peripheral under flexible accumulation. 

Naomi Klein explores this new relationship between firms and their employees as a further function of the development of “branding.”  As Fordism shifted to flexible accumulation, “branding” became not simply a strategy for the differentiation of products in the corporate marketplace, but an increasingly important aspect of corporate identity.  As will be shown shortly, the contemporary brand is identified less with the tangible products they produce than with a non-tangible image.  Nike CEO Phil Knight readily admits, for example, that his company is interested in identifying themselves less as a “production oriented company” and more as a “market oriented company.”[14]  Nike’s identity is constructed not through the physical shoes that it produces but through abstract concepts such as “athleticism and “sportsmanship.”  Klein argues that it is not coincidental that this particular moment in the history of branding has occurred at the same time that corporations have begun to rely on subcontracted, overseas labor to actually produce their products.  

            For Klein, the evolution of the brand and the new logic of labor relations under flexible accumulation are intimately connected to one another.  It is natural that corporations that are primarily interested in the aesthetic act of self-promotion will take a significantly lower interest in the production side of their operations.  This has tremendous implications for those workers that manufacture a product.  In Klein’s words, “when the actual manufacturing process is so devalued, it stands to reason that the people doing the work of production are likely to be treated like detritus- the stuff left behind.”[15]  The sheer impact of this transformation is obscured by discussing it in merely theoretical terms.  Put more directly, workers under a system of flexible accumulation are increasingly expendable- they are not entitled to wage or employment security.  As will be seen, although individuals as employees may be devalued, they can still play a valuable role in the flexible accumulation regime, albeit as consumers.        

            A system of flexible accumulation therefore encourages a form of alienation that is much broader than that originally conceived by Marx (the alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor).  Alienation in contemporary society is necessarily understood as the separation of an increasing portion of society from the realities of production.  The entire manufacturing process is kept hidden, removed to a peripheral location.  It is the representation of production, rather than production itself, that is at the center of the world economy.

In many ways, this phenomenon was predicted by Debord, who argued in the late 1960’s that “the spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world, and is superior to the world.  [In this society] spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another.”[16]  It is for this reason that workers in the manufacturing center are devalued while those involved in the representation of commodities (as in the upper echelons of the Western service economy) are reified.  Flexible accumulation privileges an abstract representation of the commodity (such as an advertisement) over its tangible, physical form.  The commodity takes its global meaning not from a legitimate copy of itself, but the distorted vision offered through advertising.  In this way, flexible accumulation can be seen to provide an economic model for what Giles Deleuze calls the simulacrum, the false representation of reality that is allowed to attain legitimacy.[17]

Not only are products being manufactured in new locations under flexible accumulation, they are also being produced in different ways.  The Fordist reliance on uniform mass production proved to be too unwieldy to be ultimately sustainable, and was replaced by what Harvey terms “economies of scope.”  Rather than producing large quantities of a single good, firms have turned to the production of a wide variety of goods in smaller batches.  While this trend may seem, upon cursory examination, to decrease the importance of mass consumption, as Harvey explains, the increased speed of production under flexible accumulation actually produces an increased reliance on a well-developed consumer economy.

Turnover time- always one of the keys to capitalist profitability- stood to be reduced dramatically by deployment of new technologies in production (automation, robots) and new organizational forms (such as the ‘just in time’ inventory-flows delivery system, which cuts down radically on stocks to keep production flow going.  But accelerating turnover time in production would have been useless unless the turnover time in consumption was also reduced.[18]

 

Flexible accumulation therefore requires even higher levels of consumption than was found under Fordism.  Additionally, the increased emphasis on diversification and the creation of new market niches on the production side of the economy requires a new emphasis, on the part of corporations, on changing styles and trends in the consumption side of the economy.  Suddenly, advertisements do not simply have to prove that a product is worth purchasing, but that it is the “next big thing,” that it represents an innovation that is as contemporary as the tastes of the individuals being wooed.  Flexible accumulation has therefore created, in the corporate world, a new obsession with the “ferment, instability and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist [cultural] aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion and the commodification of social forms.”[19]  This point has particular implications, as will be seen later, for the relationship between corporations and social movements.

Corporations are not simply interested in the values and aesthetic preoccupations of those individuals viewed as being on the “cutting edge” of society; to the contrary, an intense knowledge of this sector of society is absolutely necessary for the survival of the flexible accumulation regime.  As Klein notes, since the transition to flexible accumulation, the corporate world has been on a “cultural feeding frenzy [to] seize upon every corner of unmarketed landscape in search of the oxygen needed to inflate their brands.”[20]  In a sense, the “brand” to which Klein refers can be viewed in two senses, not simply as a noun (the “brand” as a corporate entity) but as a verb as well (the literal “branding” of the world, the declaration that nothing is outside the reach of the global economy).  This point is furthered by Henry Giroux, who argues that corporate logos “do not simply signify goods, [but also] serve as a marker to remind us that there are no public spheres, desires, practices, and needs that cannot escape being commodified.”[21]  It is almost inevitable, then, that this never-ending search for the newest, hippest market niche would require corporations to become particularly preoccupied with the activities of youthful, progressive social movements.  Nothing is hipper, after all, than dissatisfaction with the system.  The importance of this point cannot be overstated.  Contemporary corporations actually rely on the commodification of social movements in order to remain competitive in the world economy.

Notably, both aspects of the transition to flexible accumulation that have been discussed here are multinational in nature.  Of these, the change in the location of production is perhaps the most immediately evident.  The “margins” to which production is being pushed are those countries that were once colonized by European nation-states; in this sense this new form of decentralized, corporate-driven globalization can be accurately termed “neo-colonial” in nature.  There is a new dynamic present in these neo-colonial relationships, however, which develops from the increased need to encourage commodity consumption.  In order to avoid the commodity glut (increased levels of production relative to consumption) that developed under Fordism, corporations must be constantly searching for new markets, for new potential consumers.  Residents of the global south are being integrated into the global economy not simply as producers, then, but consumers as well.  The percentage of the world’s population that is not being actively encouraged to purchase commodities and accept (intrinsically) the logic of flexible accumulation is growing rapidly smaller. 

Whether an individual grows up in suburban America or rural Indonesia is, in some senses, irrelevant, because they will be equally likely, in either case, to be the subject of the same socialization project.  In order to perpetuate flexible accumulation, corporations are busy across the world “homogenizing consumer tastes… while persuading citizens to interiorize their necessary flexibilization, abandon social goals in pursuit of ‘international competitiveness,’ and reorganize their human aspirations into something called “consumer choice.”[22]  Tellingly, Klein reports that the teenage girls who manufacture clothing and computer software in the Philippines’ largest “free-trade zone” return every night to dormitories that they have decorated with advertisements for Western fashion companies and television programs.[23]   

For many theorists, the relationship between the two phenomena is not simply coincidental. Contemporary Marxists such as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson argue, for example, that flexible accumulation is merely the economic logic of an all-encompassing system that governs all forms of social interaction.  Jameson contends that this system, which he refers to as “late capitalism” (a term originally coined by Ernest Mandel), requires for, its perpetuation, not only a hegemonic economic regime, but an equally powerful cultural regime as well.

According to Jameson this need for a driving cultural logic is currently fulfilled by postmodernism, the reaction to modernist rigidity in a number of disciplines.[24]  Put simply, the postmodernist critique in disciplines such as social theory focuses around the validation of difference and a multiplicity of perspectives in the face of universalizing discourses.  Jameson argues that, although postmodernism is often deployed as being a relatively benign school of thought, it provides one of the key means through which late capitalism perpetuates itself.  He writes that “what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe.”[25]  The rise of postmodernism, according to Jameson, can be at least partially explained as an attempt to distract intellectual energy away from the reality of the system.

For Jameson, commodification is so readily present under late capitalism precisely because it is so inescapable.  The economic and cultural system that enables commodification is so pervasive that it becomes increasingly difficult for activists to maintain the necessary critical distance to counter it effectively.  “The prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity.”[26]  Jameson argues that one of the primary ways in which this distance is further erased is through the acceptance, by activists, of a postmodern politics that he feels sacrifices a broad critique of economic systems in order to validate local struggles.[27]

 This argument is echoed by Harvey, who is particularly skeptical about the ability of any social movements that rely on a postmodernist logic to avoid “the slide into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the face of the universalizing force of capital circulation.”[28]  While neither theorist goes so far as to argue that these movements are the “direct consequences” of late capitalism,[29] they share a common pessimism about the ability of activism in a postmodern age to sufficiently challenge the late capitalist economic and cultural regime.  If postmodernism simply is the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as Jameson claims in the title of his book on the subject, then the ability of any movements to significantly challenge that system while operating from within a postmodernist framework is severely limited.  This critique has tremendous potential implications for the theoretical and practical options available to any activists attempting to engage in counter-hegemonic political activities.  For this reason, it will be necessary to return to this argument later in the paper in order to examine whether or not it can be accurately applied to contemporary social movements.

 

Corporate Culture Meets the Counterculture

 

Up to this point, the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation has been discussed in general, theoretical terms.  Faced with a need to increase commodity production, corporations began, through the course of the 20th century, to move from a focus on production to a focus on representation.  One of the primary ways that this occurred was through the commodification of social movements.  Having established an understanding of the broader cultural forces at work during this time period, it is now possible to look specifically at the relationship between corporations and social movements in the latter half of the 20th Century. 

In order to do so, it is helpful to take as a starting point an examination of the advertising industry through the course of the 1960’s.  Previous to the 1960’s, the modus operandi of the industry was a modified Taylorism that valued the creation of large amounts of cold, rational and utterly passionless advertising copy.  The industry’s collective goal was the production of ads that were as free of controversy as was possible.  As Thomas Frank argues, this utter fear of controversy and creativity led to an industry-wide stasis.

To this day, nothing more effectively summons the ills of the technocratic and overorganized society better than the advertising it produced during the 1950s.  Here one will look in vain for anything that deviates even slightly from the Cold War orthodoxy of prosperity, progress, and consumer satisfaction… Never has [advertising] insisted so dogmatically on such an abstractly glowing vision of American life.  And never has it been so vulnerable to mockery.[30]

 

In its unwavering attempt to depict a vision of American life that was idyllic and free of controversy, the advertising industry evolved into a caricature of itself, so removed from the society that it was attempting to influence so as to inspire a significant negative reaction.  While it is appropriate to note that this reaction can be seen, in part, to have taken the form of the 1960’s youth counterculture, a significant response came from within the industry as well.  For Frank, it is impossible to fully understand the history of the decade without looking at this internal rebellion within the industry. 

Interestingly, the transformation of the advertising industry in the 1960’s foreshadowed the broader shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation that would occur one decade later. By rigidly adhering to advertisements that were dispassionate, rational and non-controversial, the industry was simply adopting the logic of Fordism.  Unfortunately, its commitment to this model, even when it began to breed mockery and resentment from consumers, meant that the industry failed to fulfill its proper societal role (that is, it was not encouraging enough people to purchase commodities).  It is not surprising, then, that the impetus for reform in the industry came quickly and internally.  By the early 1960’s, a new wave of advertising agencies began to develop that replaced Fordist rationality with a newfound commitment to spontaneity, creativity and dissent.  The changes that these new agencies would inspire within the industry can be seen as providing a model for the movement towards flexible accumulation that would occur one decade later.[31]  It was, as Frank points out, a watershed moment not only for the industry but for the economy as a whole as well. 

Capitalism was entering the space age in the sixties…  The old values of caution, deference, and hierarchy drowned creativity and denied flexibility; they enervated not only the human spirit but the consuming spirit and entrepreneurial spirit as well.  And when business leaders cast their gaze onto the youth culture bubbling around them, they saw… an affirmation of a dynamic new consuming order that would replace the old.[32] 

 

At the front of this new, forward thinking crusade within the advertising industry was the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency, the first advertising firm to integrate cynicism and frustration with consumer culture directly into the advertisements that they created.  DDB’s advertisements for Volkswagen, for example, emphasized the vehicles’ aesthetic irregularities, poking fun at what would become the brand’s trademark:  short, oddly shaped vehicles that looked dramatically different from the larger American automobiles of the day.  Some advertisements went so far as to poke fun at the act of advertising itself.[33]

Because the use of self-deprecating humor in advertisements is currently commonplace, these advertisements may not seem like a particularly noteworthy departure from conventional logic.  At the time, however, DDB’s advertisements were viewed as a radical attack on the advertising industry’s orthodoxies simply because they attempted to re-establish a relationship with skeptical consumers.  As Frank argues, “the advertising style of the 1950’s had been profoundly contemptuous of the consumer’s intelligence, and consumers knew it… The genius of the Volkswagen campaigns… is that they… spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through advertisements.”[34]  Not only did these advertisements communicate directly to consumers, they did so with a knowing wink and nudge.  They took sly jabs at the bombastic advertising culture of the day.  In doing so, they were able to accomplish a goal that was at once both monumental and paradoxical:  Consumers were encouraged to purchase additional commodities in order to escape, somehow, from the dishonest, dehumanizing world of consumerism. 

Doyle Dane Bernbach advertisements proved to be incredibly successful.  Not only did the agency’s profits soar, but their influence led other advertising agencies to create advertisements that attempted to reflect consumer cynicism as well.[35]  As the 1960’s progressed, however, an interesting development changed the form that these new advertisements took.  While early DDB advertisements had to speak to an anonymous, frustrated consumer, the development of the 1960’s counterculture provided advertisers with a more readily identifiable market for their new, hip ads.

The counterculture was, in many ways, an advertiser’s dream come true.  Although the movement was by no means homogenous, it can be broadly characterized as a widespread reaction to “the blandness of the quality of life under a regime of standardized mass consumption.”[36]  While some young people responded to this frustration by becoming actively involved in political organizing, others attempted to “drop out” of the system, either literally or figuratively.  Regardless of the specific form it took, the societal critique being advanced by young radicals was surprisingly consistent with that of the advertising industry.  According to James Farrell, the movement’s attempts to challenge “American culture’s dominant myths,” such as “technocratic scientism… industrial capitalism, lifestyle suburbanism and compulsive consumerism”[37] directly paralleled the new cynicism that was being championed by advertisers.  These parallels provided the advertising industry with a tremendous opportunity.  Disenfranchisement was no longer simply a depersonalized emotional phenomenon; it became an identifiable target market.  The counterculture provided a living, breathing roadmap for the societal critique that corporate America was so desperate to assimilate. 

            Not only was the counterculture an easily identifiable target market, it also proved to be uniquely susceptible to commodification.  In large part, this was due to the fact that, while the counterculture attempted to counter the rigidity of modern society, it often did not offer an explicit critique of corporate power and heavy consumption patterns.  While some elements of the counterculture (such as San Francisco’s Diggers) did focus their political projects around a direct critique of the economic system, the movement as a whole focused primarily on proclamations of individuality and hedonism (as represented by the “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” mantra), which, far from challenging the system, actually supported its consumptionist logic.  In her analysis of dissent in the 1960’s, Julie Stephens identifies that, for all of its anti-establishment rhetoric, the counterculture promoted an ideology that could have just as easily emerged on Madison Avenue.

The language of an anti-disciplinary politics itself closely mirrored the increasingly pronounced anti-disciplinary side of contemporary capitalism.  Ironically, it was the assault on restraint, self-control, self-denial, sacrifice of pleasure and postponement of pleasure that most perfectly reproduced the language and ethos of consumer capitalism.[38]

 

Aided by these dynamics within the movement, the commodification of the counterculture occurred at a number of different levels.  In the advertising industry, the new wave of advertisements ranged from direct attempts to utilize the language and message of the counterculture, as evidenced by Columbia Records’ “But the Man Can’t Bust our Music” campaign, to the simple deployment of countercultural fashion, such as the use of “Nehru jackets, beads, and day-glo colors” in a 1968 ad for Campbell’s Soup.[39]  By 1967, the publisher of a prominent advertising industry periodical issued a sixteen question quiz designed to introduce older employees at advertising firms to the aesthetics of the counterculture.  As the preface noted, the youth of America may have been disenfranchised with some aspects of American life, but they still had “bread in their jeans and a lot of ways to spend it.”[40]   Meanwhile, outside of the advertising industry, an identifiable cottage industry sprung up across the country in the form of outlets selling the “outward signs of hippie life- music, psychedelic posters, clothes, beads and drug paraphernalia.”[41] As the marketing of disenfranchisement became increasingly profitable, the corporate embrace of all things countercultural spread not simply to the advertising world, but to other media as well. 

Television programming during the decade expanded to include seemingly sympathetic plot lines about generational conflict, countercultural rock icons as well as underrepresented cultural groups.[42]  Programs that had previously been associated with a homogenous, suburban vision of America (such as Bewitched or the Lucy Show) featured episodes that focused on lighthearted but positive portrayals of young radicals.[43]  Meanwhile, new youth-oriented publications such as Rolling Stone developed a reciprocal relationship with the youth-oriented advertising industry.  Kenneth Bindas and Kenneth Heineman explain that “by showcasing interviews with rock’s musical heroes, and thereby capturing the attention of young consumers, [magazine founder Jann] Wenner knew that youth-oriented advertisers would flock to Rolling Stone.”[44]  It should be noted that in all of these instances it is not the most vehemently counter-hegemonic aspects of the counterculture that were portrayed in mainstream corporate culture.  To the contrary, at any given point it was only those messages that perpetuated, rather than challenged, consumption patterns that were encouraged and displayed publicly. 

It is not by accident, after all, that those aspects of the counterculture that structured their opposition around vaguely defined societal restrictions on personal freedom were embraced by advertisers and media outlets while those that called for a more revolutionary anti-corporate movement (such as the Diggers) were safely ignored.  Interestingly, the 1967 quiz that familiarized advertisers with the counterculture featured a number of questions about popular catch-phrases, but no substantive political content.[45]  Because the counterculture as a whole lacked an explicit anti-corporate analysis, its more radical elements could be more easily marginalized.

 The very nature of the counterculture therefore enabled corporations to carefully deploy a public picture of the movement that rendered it increasingly benign and harmless, what Stuart Ewans terms “a disembodied consolation of styles.”[46]  As Farrell explains, “the more the counterculture could be construed as a lifestyle apart from politics, the more capitalists could sell the style without the substance.”[47]  Viewed in this light, the absence of any political content in the advertising industry’s “counterculture quiz” can be seen as an attempt to ensure a consistency in industry depictions of the counterculture.  There was no reason why the average employee at an advertising agency had to understand the political goals of small elements of the counterculture if the industry as a whole did not wish to validate those viewpoints.

Bindas and Heineman explain this phenomenon as being part of a broad pattern of interactions between social movements and the dominant culture.  Borrowing from theories originally developed by sociologist Todd Gitlin, Bindas and Heineman argue that societies will actually allow for dissent to occur up to a point.  “When… countercultures gain partial acceptance in society [however], they are incorporated into the liberal-conservative capitalist framework… in a “process of legitimization rather than manipulation.”[48]   This idea, that hegemonic forces in a society actually rely on the constant assimilation of dissenters in order to facilitate the evolution and strengthening of established power relations, is an important departure from popular conceptions of a monolithically antagonistic relationship between antisystemic movements and the dominant cultural system. 

The particular ways in which youth movements in the 1960’s were co-opted is additionally notable.  The counterculture was sanitized and assimilated not as part of a nefarious government effort to control dissent.[49]  To the contrary, the counterculture was co-opted through the active efforts of a decentralized network of corporations.  The assimilation and commodification of the counterculture by corporate interests served two important purposes.  First, it provided short-term benefits to the system by providing the advertising industry with a readily identifiable target market.  At the same time, the assimilation of the values of the counterculture into the logic of the dominant system ensured the long-term survival of that system.  As the system made its first steps towards internal reform (utilizing, in its attempts to do so, elements of the countercultural critique of Fordist rationality), the counterculture was temporarily mollified and distracted with sanitized images of itself in popular media.  Those images, in turn, helped aid the commodification of the movement, effectively rendering it ineffective as a political force but incredibly viable as a product to be bought and sold.

By successfully transforming the counterculture into a marketable commodity, corporations have been able to retain their ownership over the movement long after its demise.   Continued portrayals of the 1960’s both in popular media and in advertising indicate that, as a marketable discursive category, the counterculture still holds tremendous resonance in American boardrooms.[50]  This ensures that corporations will continue to successfully construct the ways in which future generations view the counterculture.  The successful process of commodification is therefore imbued with a certain timelessness, capable of affecting the popular representation of dissent in the past, present and future.

 

Defining “Difference”:  The Commodification of Identity Politics

 

            The co-optation of the counterculture can be seen as a watershed moment in the history of relationships between mass culture and counter-hegemonic movements.  It set a precedent both for advertisers and the corporations that they serve.  As corporate America completed its transition to flexible accumulation, its interest in all expressions of dissent and disenfranchisement only increased.  After successfully capitalizing on the social movements of the 1960’s, corporations realized that the path to continued profitability could be found in an intimate relationship with anti-establishment movements, particularly those that had a youthful appeal.

            Individual volumes could be written on the ways in which various social movements in the 1970’s and 1980’s were commodified.  While the transformation of “punk” from the organic expression of dissatisfaction with working class British life to a marketable, commodified “style” is perhaps most infamous, it is by no means the only example from this period.[51]  Even the environmental movement, whose constituency is by no means solely youthful, has had to constantly struggle with co-optation.  For years, corporations have attempted to utilize the language of the movement in order to distract public attention from their own environmental transgressions.[52]  Although a study of any one of these movements would be particularly instructive, they are mentioned here simply to establish the historical continuity of commodification.  In order to understand the ways in which corporate co-optation has directly influenced the new movement against corporate power, it is necessary to move forward in history to examine the so-called “identity politics” movements of the early 1990’s. 

By the 1990’s, the continued evolution of the flexible accumulation system had resulted in an even more globalized economic order.  As corporations continued to move manufacturing bases to the Global South, while increasing the commodification and colonization of previously non-corporate spheres of life, their ability to exercise power on a global scale also increased.[53]  The creation of organizations such as the WTO, which was given the ability to override the laws of its member nations in order to promote free trade, represented a new height in the consolidation of corporate power.[54]  Paradoxically, corporations evolved to a state where they were simultaneously increasingly decentralized (having established outposts in increasingly disparate locations, both symbolically and geographically) and increasingly centralized (possessing increased power over state activities).  Notably, despite the growth of corporate power in the 1990’s, the mass social movements of the era failed to directly challenge this new proliferation of corporate power.  Instead, political organizing at the beginning of the decade focused primarily around a very particular type of identity politics.

Identity politics is a broad term that refers to the history of political organizing around issues of gender, sexuality and race.  Use of the term should not infer that each of these movements is not worthy of individual attention.  Instead it should be simply viewed as a useful tool for identifying the common threads that weave through various struggles for liberation.  For instance, many of these movements have developed along analytically similar lines.  According to Shane Phelan, “the opening move of identity politics must always be to make one’s identity not simply of personal concern but of political relevance.  This is true whatever nuance or significance one gives to the particular feature being discussed.”[55]  Classifying these movements together is additionally helpful because of the ways in which individual identity politics movements have often taken similar historical trajectories.

The early 1990’s represented a particularly interesting moment in the history of identity politics.  Not only was much of the energy for the movement at the time coming from youth and students, but it was also taking a particular form.   Drawing on her own experience with identity-based campus struggles, Naomi Klein notes that her generation of activists was initially uninterested in the concrete struggles for equality undertaken by their predecessors.  Instead, she remembers the political campaigns of her youth being focused primarily on more abstract issues such as “representation.”

In the absence of [other strategies], we traced back almost all of society’s problems to the media and the curriculum, either through their perpetuation of negative stereotypes or simply by omission… So outraged were we media children by the narrow and oppressive portrayals in magazines, in books and on television that we convinced ourselves that if the typecast images and loaded language change, so too would the reality.[56]

           

            Klein’s recollections provide some interesting clues as to why multicultural movements in the early 1990’s developed such a single-minded focus on a politics of representation.  Klein’s generation came of age in the era of flexible accumulation, which, as has already been discussed, situates not simply commodities, but the abstract representation of commodities at the center of human relationships.  The oft-used term “MTV generation” is actually highly appropriate, particularly when used metaphorically.  As is often noted, MTV has created a television empire through the use of “montage, collage, segmentation, non-linear narrative [and] the quotation of irrelevant cultural representations.”[57]  Kuan-Hsing Chen goes so far as to argue that, by separating itself fully from reality, MTV provides a perfect model of Deleuze’s hyper-real simulacrum.[58]  MTV is representation epitomized.  And although it would be ridiculous to claim that it was the primary influence in the lives of young activists such as Klein, it can be argued that the popularity of MTV over the past twenty years indicates a societal obsession with representation.  It is fitting then, to describe the generation of young people who were born in the 1970’s and 1980’s as the “MTV generation,” if only because it accurately describes the ways in which young people have been shaped at the turn of the century by the mass presentation and validation of simulacra. 

            It is natural, then, that the community of radicals described by Klein would be more readily attracted to political movements that organized around issues of representation rather than those that dealt with the daily physical realities of life in the marginalized communities that they were representing.  Their political concerns can be seen as being entirely consistent with the society in which they were raised.  As Harvey and Jameson might identify, however, it was this location firmly within the logic of late capitalism that led the identity politics movement to be particularly susceptible to that regime’s tendency towards commodification. 

As has already been established, corporate culture at the time of these particular identity politics campaigns was not simply interested, but fully reliant on the cultural/political images being created on the margins of society.  Thus, politics of “difference” as Henry Giroux identifies, became not simply a political marker for communities that had suffered historical oppression, but an important buzzword for corporations and advertising agencies as well.  The signifier “difference” therefore becomes contested territory, the site of a struggle between two potential meanings:  one liberatory, the other co-opted. 

Between the dynamics of commodification and those of resistance, difference becomes a site of conflict and struggle over bodies, desires, land, labor and the distribution of resources.  It is within the space between conflict and commercial appeal that difference carries with it the legacy of possible disruption and political struggle as well as the possibility for colonizing diverse markets.[59]

 

If the politics of difference is to be understood as a struggle between those for whom identity is a political issue and those for whom it is a commodity, the early 1990’s call for “representation” was extremely problematic for activists.  Doing so provided the space for corporations to respond quite literally to the call for the validation of marginalized groups in its advertisements.  Looking back on the identity politics movement, Klein realizes that the political campaigns to which she committed herself so passionately were actually ideal candidates for commodification.  “If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get.  And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, airbrushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture.”[60]  Put simply, advertisers were more than willing to answer the call for multicultural representation, provided that they could do so on their own terms. 

Advertising in the early 1990’s took its clues from identity politics, and, in doing so, often appeared to be much more radical and counter-hegemonic than society at large.  Corporations eager to establish a new brand identity for a new decade sought to identify themselves as explicitly as possible with struggles for liberation and cultural equality.  This did not mean, however, that these corporations were in any way likely to include, in their quest for a more progressive brand image, any mention of the need to confront the inequalities of the late capitalist economy.  Likewise, it did not mean that these corporations offered anything but the most surface-level commitment to the causes that it championed in their advertisements.  At all times, the primary commitment of these new “conscious brands” continued to be the perpetuation of an economic system that was reliant on heavy consumption patterns.[61]

The Benetton clothing company provides a particularly interesting case study of the behavioral patterns of this new generation of “conscious” corporations.  Benetton first realized the potential benefits of identity advertising in the mid-1980’s, when it launched its “United Colors of Benetton” campaign featuring fashionable, multicultural models wearing Benetton clothing.  Upon learning that its primary target market (18-34 year old women) were among the most socially aware and politically active demographic groups, the firm went further to establish its political identity, moving beyond the demands and concerns of identity politics and on to other social movements.

In 1992 [the company’s advertising director Olivero] Toscani embarked on his most dramatic effort to combine high fashion and politics in the service of promoting the Benetton name.  He selected a series of highly charged, photojournalistic images referencing among other things, the AIDS crisis, environmental disaster, political violence, war, exile and natural catastrophe.[62]

 

            A cursory examination of the dynamics present in Benetton’s advertisements can lead to the misleading conclusion that these ads represent a legitimate expression of the company’s social conscience.  After all, Benetton advertisements provided young activists with even more representation than they had originally demanded.  Not only did the company’s ads feature multicultural models, they also highlighted specific social problems.  This is exactly the type of analysis that Benetton hoped would be adopted by young activists after viewing their advertisements.  Upon closer examination, however, this reading proves to be highly misleading.

As Henry Giroux identifies in his deconstruction of the “United Colors” advertising campaign, Benetton has never actually exhibited any legitimate commitment to the social concerns present in its advertisements.  While publicly advancing an image of social responsibility, the company has maintained a commitment to labor and production practices that are far from progressive.  Not only has Benetton’s history been one of “conglomerate-building management practices [and] increasing use of temporary workers at the expense of a full-time, unionized workforce” but the company’s founder, Luciano Benetton, has gone so far as to advocate (during his tenure as an Italian Senator) for a “lesser State presence in the economy.”[63]  Benetton’s socially aware advertising campaigns can therefore be viewed as a mask for corporate practices that might offend their progressive target market.  They are not alone in this false presentation of social consciousness.  For example, Nike, whose ads have variously promoted racial and gender equality, has been widely criticized for its labor practices, which include the use of sweatshop labor.[64]

            These advertising campaigns can be viewed as the ultimate example, not of corporate commitment to social problems, but of a hyper-real representation of those problems.  “Conscious” corporations filled their advertisements with images that were immediately recognizable and appealing to progressive activists.  These images were not simply divorced from the company’s legitimate social commitments; they were also fully removed from any social context in which they might have any legitimate political meaning.  The images in Benetton ads, for example, “[were] decontextualized from any meaningful historical and social setting and then recontextualized through the addition of the United Colors of Benetton logo.”[65]  Once again, the logo can be seen to effectively “brand” a particular cultural space for the interest of corporations.  By placing their logo on political images, Benetton did not acknowledge or affirm those images or the struggles that they represented.  Instead, the brand claimed those images for its own purposes, calling the viewer to abandon politics and instead achieve social enlightenment through consumption.

As has been shown, the identity politics movement was particularly susceptible to commodification.  While it would be easy to argue that this susceptibility was merely a function of complete naiveté on the part of young activists, this is not entirely accurate.  Having grown up in the most advertising intensive era in the history of the Western world, members of the so-called “Generation X” continued to be incredibly cynical of advertising.  Discussions within the advertising industry in the early 1990’s typified members of the younger generation as being a particularly “media savvy, advertising critical and even anti-consumerist market.”[66]  As can be seen by the commodification of the 1960’s counterculture, however, this cynicism only makes a particular group more attractive to advertisers.  Advertisers were anxious for any access to the wallets of this new generation of corporate cynics, and were able to find it simply because that cynicism was still not mobilized in the form of a direct critique of corporate culture.  Activists remained too heavily committed to values (such as the need for “representation”) that were an intrinsic part of the dominant system to be able to formulate their distrust of corporations more explicitly.  

Although identity politics activists were therefore not fully unaware of the dangers of co-optation, their inability to frame their analysis around a direct confrontation of corporate power left them in a difficult situation.  When new forms of socially conscious advertising began to develop, it was not clear how they should respond— whether the advertisements should be countered or accepted as a positive step in the direction of better representation.  After all, it is difficult for a social movement to respond critically to advertisements that, in many ways, read like a perfect representation of their demands and values.  By failing to integrate a critique corporate power directly into their political demands, whatever cynicism or distrust these activists possessed was rendered moot.  As in the 1960’s, corporations were once again able to define the terms of political expression.

 

Communities, Not Commodities:  The Backlash Against Corporate Power

 

 

Fortunately, political organizing in the early 1990’s was not only marked by co-optation.  While many identity-based political movements were finding their message utilized for advertising fodder, a small fringe of the identity politics movement was paving the way for a new era of activism that was more overtly anti-corporate in nature.  Indeed, it is possible to identify, through the direct action AIDS activism of groups such as ACT-UP, the methodological and tactical roots of the contemporary movement against corporate power.

Like other identity politics movements, ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) drew its members primarily from a specific demographic group, in this case the queer communities of large metropolitan areas such as New York and San Francisco.  Unlike other groups, however, these particular communities did not have the luxury of organizing solely around issues of “representation” because they had to contend with the immediacy of an epidemic that was demolishing their communities.  The imminent threat of AIDS led many to commit their political lives to finding any possible way to counter the disease.[67]    In doing so, ACT-UP activists discovered very quickly that, in order to effect change in AIDS policy, it was necessary to confront not only the government, but also media outlets and corporations.  In short, they modeled the connections that a new generation of activists would make between micro-issues and intersecting structural problems.

In 1988 [ACT-UP activist] Vito Russo said, “After we kick the shit out of this disease, I intend to be able to kick the shit out of this system, so that this never happens again.”  In other words, fighting the AIDS pandemic meant fighting undemocratic international trade laws, an unjust immigration system, the prison industrial complex, poverty, unresponsive government, budget cuts, a disaster in healthcare, and countless other manifestations of bureaucracies that put profits ahead of people.  Oppressions overlap and influence each other, as do movements.[68]

 

 

            By structuring their analysis around such a far-reaching epidemic, ACT-UP differed methodologically as well as ideologically from their identity politics counterparts.  At any given moment, ACT-UP could be found targeting any number of targets in government, corporate or civil society.  They were able to do so by organizing themselves into small, grassroots “affinity groups” who “would secretly plan mini-actions, frequently involving colorful, inventive, media ready acts of civil disobedience that would take place at the same time as a major ACT UP street action.”[69]  What was particularly innovative about ACT-UP’s approach was not simply that it was anti-corporate, but also that its tactical approach was specifically attuned to their diverse collection of targets.  Rather than confronting a single, easily identifiable entity, ACT-UP challenged a disconnected network of adversaries.  In doing so, they utilized tactics that were equally decentralized. 

Had ACT-UP’s tactics simply been innovative they might have been less influential.  Instead, ACT-UP attracted so much attention because its innovative techniques were so successful.  In its short history, ACT-UP succeeded in shortening the federal AIDS drug testing and approval process, “increasing funding for AIDS research, housing, care, and education; and creating legislation to protect the rights of people with HIV.”[70]  The speed with which government agencies and corporations were forced to respond to ACT-UP’s direct action campaigns was nothing short of remarkable.  ACT-UP activist Eric Sawyer recalls, for example, that within a month after an ACT-UP demonstration calling for public housing for homeless people with AIDS (which featured a make-shift “squatters camp” in front of the New York housing commissioner’s office), the city pledged $25 million dollars for a new housing program.[71]

In short, ACT-UP was like nothing the activist world had seen before.  They combined identity politics with anti-corporate analysis, direct action with guerilla theatre, decentralization with a global focus.  It is impossible to trace the birth of the movement against corporate globalization, particularly from a tactical perspective, without a mention of ACT-UP’s continuing influence.  In many ways, the radical AIDS movement taught activist communities in the Western world how to integrate local, community-based struggles with a broader challenge of global corporate power.  The integration of ACT-UP’s techniques into a broader movement did not occur immediately, however.  Before ACT-UP’s influence could be fully felt, it was first necessary for a broad coalition of activists to ground their work more explicitly in an anti-corporate analysis. 

The 1990’s represented a turning point in the relationship between activists and corporations not simply because of the example of ACT-UP, but also because of the sheer pervasiveness of corporate control of the private sphere. Multiple generations of activists had, at this point, experienced co-optation firsthand, allowing them to identify, across the boundaries of age and ideology, a shared experience of frustration and violation.  With the advertising industry constantly finding new ways to colonize activists’ lives, there was no shortage of metaphorical straws that broke the camels back.  

For some activists, the shift towards anti-corporate activism was a natural progression, as was the case with feminists protesting the cosmetics industry.  At times, however, the impetus for anti-corporate action came from unexpected places.  For some campus activists, the first opportunity to strike back against advertisements came with the incursion of advertisements into dorm bathrooms.[72]  Other young activists were spurred to action as they discovered that their favorite coffeehouses and bookstores were being taken over by international chains.[73]  Meanwhile, aging 1960’s radicals were reawakened politically through frustration with “Nike’s use of the Beatles’ tune “Revolution,”… Apple’s appropriation of Bob Dylan and The Gap’s (posthumous) mugging of Jack Kerouac.”[74]  While these examples are disparate, they are rooted in similar epiphanies, personal realizations that no space is safe from corporate colonization.

Some of these moments of epiphany may seem initially frivolous (entire movements are not built, after all, on frustrations with bathroom advertisements).  They are highlighted, however, not to represent the full political objectives of anti-corporate activists, but simply as examples of some of the entry-points by which activists came to consciousness and began to explore the pervasiveness of corporate control.  Activists did not simply realize, after all, that advertisements in bathrooms were frustrating.  Instead they discovered, in a number of different ways, the various means through which corporations had conquered public and personal space.  While the specific examples may seem frivolous, they helped lead activists to the important collective realization that, as Stuart Ewan puts it, “not only are mass media images intrusive into nearly every second of people’s inner lives, but… increasingly these images are penetrating into the most intimate desire of people’s waking lives.”[75]  In this light, the fact that so many of these activist epiphanies occurred in unexpected ways only goes to highlight the extent of the corporate reach.

The anti-corporate awakening that occurred in the 1990’s required not only that activists identify the pervasiveness of commodification, but also that they realize their ability to effectively counter corporate power.  By discovering that corporate power relied on the co-optation of human lives in general and activist lives in particular for its own perpetuation, political activists began to discover the power that they could potentially exercise not only over individual corporations, but also over an entire economic regime.  As has already been noted, the evolution of hip-seeking corporations through the course of the 20th Century meant that activists became a desirable target market.  When activists began to realize that powerful corporations relied so heavily upon their consent and ambivalence, they were opened to a whole new realm of possibilities for action.  They discovered that they could utilize their “coveted market status” in order to confront, rather than support consumer culture, to pull the rug out from under the brands that were so eager to control their consumption patterns.[76] 

What is particularly fascinating about the evolution of activism in the 1990’s is the fact that activists reacted to their own struggles with corporations not by becoming more insular, focusing solely on their personal experience, but instead by moving outward, searching for connections with those who had borne more directly the devastating impact of global economic readjustment.  In doing so, they have not had to sacrifice their original political objectives, but instead have discovered a new lens through which to explore those commitments.

In becoming anti-corporate, identity-based movements neither abandon their identity nor adopt a new one; they oppose corporations form their identity-based stance, while also making connections outside of an identity-politics mode.  They have redefined enemies in ways that do not depend on identity as the basis of understanding and allies in ways that do not depend on a subtle and fragile ‘politics of difference.’[77]

 

An example of this evolution outward can be found in the development of campus anti-sweatshop activism.  After becoming frustrated with the incursion of corporations such as Nike onto campus, college activists began researching those company’s labor practices.  They soon found out that the corporations that had previously attracted their ire simply for their co-optative branding tactics were also heavily reliant on sweatshop labor.[78]  This realization, in turn, led once single-minded activists to explore the ways in which corporate power is at the base of an intersecting matrix of oppression.  It also provided the point of connection for new alliances between students, environmental groups and labor activists.  As one campus activist put it, “Nike [was the] gateway drug,” that provided the entry-point into a new era of connections between activists.[79] 

            It is possible to identify, through the birth of this connective, international political movement, the dialectical process through which a hegemonic cultural and economic system inspires, through its own ambition, a counter-movement.  The development of late capitalism created a system in which the organic connections between individuals were sacrificed for the hyper-real representation of commodities.  This, in turn, inspired a movement that attempted to subvert the spectacle society by re-establishing their connections to one another. In the face of commodification, activists realized that community building could be a radical act.

Having been affected personally by the co-optative tendencies of late capitalism, Western activists were able to develop relationships with others who had found themselves enveloped by the global economy.  New networks were formed between farmers in France, scientists in India and community organizers in the Americas.  While these activists might have previously interpreted their struggles as isolated campaigns against privatization, genetically modified food and gentrification, they were instead drawn together by a common critique of global capitalism.  This sentiment is readily identifiable in the discourse of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which, from its inception, has attempted to forge alliances across borders in “an intercontinental network of resistance.”[80]  Indeed, the willingness of Zapatistas to stand in solidarity with any struggles against corporate power has enabled them to become ad-hoc spokespersons for activists across the globe. 

Just as global activist networks have expanded, so too have their analyses.  The manifestos of the new movement are increasingly rooted in a realization that corporate control of private lives had gone too far.  While the specific struggles against privatization and commodification being waged across the globe may vary from location to location, they are, as Naomi Klein identifies, bound together by a newly found common thread. 

[Individuals and groups across the globe are engaging in] quiet conspiracies to reclaim privatized spaces and assets for public use.  Maybe it’s students kicking ads out of their classrooms… Maybe it’s Thai peasants planting organic vegetables on over-irrigated golf courses or landless farmers in Brazil cutting down fences around unused lands and turning them into farming co-operatives… [regardless of the form it takes,] a new culture of vibrant direct democracy is emerging, one that is fuelled and strengthened by direct participation, not dampened and discouraged by passive spectatorship.[81]

 

 

 

A Better World is Possible:  Politics as an Act of Experimentation and Discovery

 

United by a common cause, activists across the world have continued to focus their attention locally, albeit in discernibly new ways.  For Western activists who discovered “their dissident voice by rejecting spectator/consumer society and creating their own culture,”[82] a new era of activism has necessitated a departure from traditional tactics.  As Stephen Duncombe, an early Reclaim the Streets organizer remembers, “the dominant progressive protest model in the US throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s [where an easily identifiable leadership group organized a mass demonstration offering little more than an opportunity to march and listen to speakers] was dull and deadly.”[83]  Weary of traditional organizing methods, activists turned for inspiration to the one contemporary group whose tactics looked dramatically different.  It was at this point, after being awakened to the promise of anti-corporate activism, that organizers began following the model developed by ACT-UP.

            Although these new activists shared with ACT-UP an understanding of the importance of confronting corporate targets, their goals in doing so varied in important ways.  At all times, the goal of ACT-UP was to build awareness of the plight of people living with AIDS and HIV.  In attempting to “reclaim the global commons” from corporations, however, activists were faced with a much more abstract goal.  The rallying cry of anti-corporate activism  quickly became the reclamation of space, both personal and public, from the corporate simulacra.  In attempting to do so, activists were literally opened to a limitless palette of options for action. 

The presence of advertisements in classrooms, in bathrooms and on every street corner provided a unique opportunity for decentralized subversive campaigns.  Every advertisement, every chain store and every corporate headquarters became a potential space to be reclaimed.  By utilizing ACT-UP’s tactics in order to oppose this dispersed web of corporate images, activists stumbled upon a unique opportunity to reclaim their personal sovereignty in the face of corporate power.  In the process, they have created what activist Andrew Boyd calls “a new kind of anti-corporate movement distinguished by creativity, self-organization, coalition building and the will to take on global capitalism.”[84]  It is this movement, as will be seen, that was eventually introduced to the world through the Seattle protests against the WTO and that continues organizing against corporate power today.

Although the contemporary anti-corporate movement has taken on different forms, it has maintained, as a central part of its analysis, a commitment to decentralized decision-making and a wariness of totalizing theories of social transformation.  Borrowing directly from ACT-UP, anti-corporate activists organize themselves in small-scale affinity groups that operate entirely by consensus.  At larger mobilizations, these affinity groups send representatives to mass spokescouncil meetings, which make consensus decisions as affirmed representatives of a larger activist community.[85]  For David Graeber, an anthropologist who has both observed and participated in the movement, a commitment to these particular methods represents an attempt by activists “to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like.”[86]  While anti-corporate activists may not share a single vision for a better world, they maintain a commitment to building more equitable models of popular participation together.

Implicit in this approach is a distrust of any models of social transformation that rely on a single, all-encompassing vision of the future.  As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, this distrust can be seen to stem, at least partially, from the failure of previous, more totalizing social movements to sufficiently achieve their vision of social transformation (particularly in the case of those movements that seized state power but then failed to deliver on their promises of progressive change).[87]  It can also be viewed, however, as a conscious attempt to avoid replicating the hierarchical nature of the corporations that the movement opposes.  Direct democracy is therefore important for contemporary activists because it allows local groups to begin the process by which they can imagine, for themselves, the ways in which a more equitable world would be governed.  As Naomi Klein notes, it is a movement that is “committed to a single world with many worlds in it, that stands for ‘the one no and the many yeses’.”[88]  In other words, activists have been able to stand in solidarity with one another through a common rejection of corporate power, while allowing room for a heterogeneous, evolving vision of the future.

            At this point, it is necessary to look specifically at the tactics that have been developed by anti-corporate activists.  In particular, two general techniques will be discussed:  space reclamation and culture jamming.  In outlining each approach separately, it is important to understand that neither is mutually exclusive, and that both have been utilized by anti-corporate activists before, during, and after the demonstrations in Seattle.  Of the two, the technique of space reclamation is perhaps closest in form to ACT-UP actions, in that it maintains an emphasis on the physical mobilization of individuals in public spaces in order to confront corporate power.  

Space reclamation originally emerged in major Western urban centers as a response to the continued loss of public space to corporations.  It is a technique that is instilled with a particular urgency, because, in the words of Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk, “as city governments cement relationships with large transnational companies… the imperative to privatize public space becomes more and more compelling.”