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A Critical Assessment on Fences and Windows In Fences and Windows, Naomi Klein presents an active life viewpoint and the advancement of the anti-globalization movement that started with the protest of the Seattle World Trade Organization in 1999 in the Seattle city and continued up to September 11, 2001. Gathering columns, speeches, articles, and interviews, Klein offers provoking arguments on a wide range of subjects. Whether she is discussing the privatization of water, genetically modified food, free trade, or the progress of the movement itself and its future post 9 / 11, Naomi Klein acts as one of the most considerate and bright activists and thinkers for a new generation. The book argues that globalization has only brought its promised benefits to the worlds richest populace and that its accent on privatization has eroded the accessibility of public services around the world. Critics have assumed that the anti-globalization movement (a term hated, Klein notes, by many people actually concerned) does not have a unified organization. However, Klein perceives this decentralization as a power, comparing the little groups hub and spoke association with that of related Web sites.
Despite the boredom that is depicted on TV (black-block radicals trashing Starbucks), this shapeless group of activists includes people from all spheres of community who have one common opinion: They are fed up - fed up with the World Bank and IMF, with closed-door trade meetings, and with surreptitious laws, like the ones that slipped genetically modified foods into our mouths. In a word, all across the globe people are sick and tired of being acted on by a group of international trade brokers and government leaders with fat pockets seeking to privatize away all the social services fought for and won throughout history. The book shows the cruel actuality of the fences that are drawn around democracy at the time when the commercial globalization movement declares to be opening windows to liberty. Nevertheless, it is the varied and decentralized universal integrity movement that performs toward opening the windows to a really democratic globalization, one that sets people over incomes.
While the WTO and FTAA factions act to push through financial legislations that will further take most people out from independent decision making, authorities are widening more vicious strategies to fright the careful masses from partaking in demonstrations. However, as this political atmosphere warms up, the decentralized movement is being organized more cohesively and densely because of this oppression. Fences and Windows reveals how politics is turning into a gated community, and in what way the remonstration actions are struggling, but yet longing for actual democracy. There are no plain responses in Fences and Windows, but a lot of essential information and insight for anyone who is concerned about their world.
In the preface of the book, the author says that [t]he irony of the media-imposed label anti-globalization is that we in this movement have been turning globalization into a lived reality, perhaps more so than even the most multinational of corporate executives or the most restless of jet-setters. This kind of persuasive self-denial that doubles as self-congratulation every time spoils the book. Klein hardly has time to pause and reveal on what she has just said. She briskly adds that thousands of people are sharing ideas and telling stories about how abstract economic theories affect their daily lives, that is what reveals globalization a living reality for its members.
Lurking underneath the text is an acceptance of the real industrialist order. The idea looks like simply to lessen some of capitalism's bad faults, while narrator tells intimate stories of unfairness: a consciousness-raising ring -- thanks to the internet -- extended to the instantaneous, worldwide level, or therapy for the downsized masses. The book has been perfectly organized by grouping its sections into tactful groupings, which are sequentially connected with the fences and windows thesis. For example, the part called Fencing in Democracy encloses stories that explain the techniques in which the profits of openly doing business have mostly been grasped by the wealthy but not the deprived, though Windows to Democracy section depicts how previously oppressed communities and peoples have managed to positively change and improve their lives in creative ways. Another indubitable strength of the book is Ms.
Klein's intelligence and analysis all through the book. She masterly and commonly rolls the tables on neoliberal propaganda, revealing the greediness and insincerity at the heart of the commercial program. For instance, the section Genetically Altered Rice: You Cant Eat Public Relations modifies the statement that heritably engineered (GE) golden rice could save millions of people in Asia. Naomi Klein properly indicates that starvation has more to do with strategy resolutions than with technology, and that pressing on the GE resolution is to simply continue and carry on the profits of the agricultural business at the cost of the people.
In this collection of articles, having the time interval between the Revolution in Seattle and the brutal results of the war on horror, one would have expected to see some progress in Klein's thinking to point what should have been the consequent development of the movement. As a replacement for it, just as the anti-globalization protests seem to be on the ropes -- fighting to gain a rational message to unite the opposite groups constituting it, and to determine the natural contradictions of the anti-globalization significance -- so book weakness is its lack of a sophisticated perception of economics and society. Since these are journalistic pieces, one does not wait for the following coming of Perry Anderson or Immanuel Wallenstein. In addition, allowance should be made for Klein's lack of proper economics education. The haphazardness of evidence in Klein's work echoes the anti-globalization movements application to characterize itself to its most enthusiastic components in addition to the privileged people infrequently eager to lend a concerned ear. The anti-globalization movement can compose a virtue of its weaknesses only so long, prior to the unconverted catch on.
Lots of of the error lines of the anti-globalization movement are apparent in these dispatches, which give a good starting point for a remonstration against this movements anti-intellectuality. A most essential difficulty for the anti-globalizes to think over is that the type of political and intellectual globalization that would be excellent even on their account is not really achievable with any economic globalization, with its destructive consequences. The concept of the anti-globalization movement depends on the types of global relations that were unthinkable before economic globalization. An evident division between economic and other types of globalization is unachievable. Moreover, a case can be made that the type of expansion the anti-globalizes would not mind could best be granted by capitalism itself, more willingly than some of the atavistic financial practices the anti-globalizes wholly seem to hold up. What takes us to a different contradiction of the movement is that it almost never takes on capitalism, instead restricting its critique to greedy, rapacious international companies.
Here is implicated more than a semantic elusion: it leads to the introductory uncertainty hindering the movement. Is it in opposition to capitalism itself or is it in opposition to unfettered companies? Additionally, anti-globalization has many things in common with the isolationist, chauvinistic ravings of the protectionist, ultra-nationalist right. Are chauvinism and protectionism actually the way to enter the twenty-first century? There is a great deal in anti-globalization that would enjoy the mind of a Pat Buchanan. Has remonstration in the movement turn into an end in itself?
The magnetism of the movement appears to be movement itself -- anxious, disposable, and undetectable. Klein's metaphor for the types of obstacles going up around the world to prevent common people from using the benefits economic globalization was supposed to bring is fences. Her metaphor for the opposite procedure is windows. However, are windows in reality contradictory to fences? Fences are strong, visible, and sometimes violable only at the price of custody or fatality. Windows are what permit a glance into the picture of an improved world, but cultural globalization has previously created such windows of bitterness in plenty.
Not all the windows in the world will take down a fence. Furthermore, the sarcasm that anti-globalization is itself one of the biggest fences rising seems to escape Klein and her associates in general. What they are actually looking at from the Windows (of the internet, generally) are fences to capitalism minus capitalism (substance minus shape), a challenge in terms that insults the anti-globalizes if brought to their awareness. Therefore, the books first section, Windows of Dissent, approves of Seattle, Washington, and other well-known places of demonstrations. Klein includes in her characteristic move of quickly recognizing the evident criticism, before quickly disproving it and advancing to the following thrilling emblem of protest. She summarizes her nervousness well: An odd sort of anxiety has begun to set in after each demonstration: Was that it?
When's the next one? Will it be as good, as big? To keep up the momentum, a culture of serial protesting is rapidly taking hold. My inbox is cluttered with entreaties to come to what promises to be the next Seattle. Someone posted a message on the organizing e-mail list for the Washington demos: "Wherever they go, we shall be there! After this, see you in Prague!
But is this really what we want -- a movement of meeting stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead? There is a little reflection on this question in the book. The factual dilemma for the anti-globalizes is that they have been not capable to reveal a substitute economic communication letter that makes some meaning to those not already adjusted to either the fences or the windows metaphors. As the majority of the anti-globalizes seem to be reformist capitalists in radicals masks, they are unable under the law to take the next step to ideological rationality. They perform with anarchy in remonstration techniques, and in meetings and conversations.
However, this movement has drawn more attention for rising protest, not inducing sufficient amount of essence behind it. Soros and Stiglitz have already forestalled them, and in more convincing manner. The only lasting space is narcissistic eccentricity, and certainly, Klein needs no part of that. The option chosen in the book is to believe in the idealistic conception of management without management, another virtue created out of need. The author writes, As I slipped in and out of lecture rooms, soaking up the vision offered by Arianna Huffington, Michael Lerner, David Korea, Cornel West and dozens of others, I was struck by the futility of this entire well-meaning exercise. Even if we did manage to come up with a ten-point plan -- brilliant in its clarity, elegant in its coherence, unified in its outlook -- to whom, exactly, would we hand down these commandments?
It is a false principle. Nobody treats to a ten commandments, but ideological rationality. The book also discloses the probability that outsiders may understand the movement's followers as submissive: This is the flip side of the persistent criticism that the kids on the street lack clear leadership -- they lack clear followers too. To those searching for copies of efforts from the sixties, this absence makes the anti-corporate movement appear infuriatingly impassive: evidently, these people are so disorganized they can't even get it together to respond to perfectly well-organized efforts to organize them.
These are MTV-weaned activists, you can practically hear the old guard saying: scattered, nonlinear, non focused. Once more, the book assembles a double disagreement between linearity and nonlinearity, to implicitly support the latter. The accent must be to repossess the clarity of the sixties (though denying simple simulation), to surpass activists of the sixties where they were unsuccessful in following purist organizational strategies. Whether it is forestalling disapproval from outsiders or announcing a fantastic independence, the fixation carries on to be with system of organization. It is here that the movement sees its final danger of disillusionment. One does not distinguish an nervousness on their part that capitalism may come up with new strategies to obtain the vapor out of the movement (the war on terrors unavoidable end result); rather, the danger, actually, is all from inside.
This is to undervalue, to a terminal extent, capitalism's ability to get used to and oppose. To really split down fences would signify accepting internationalism of a humanist diversity in a way that the anti-globalization movement seems constitutionally inclined not to do. Capitalism is required to be fought with more than symbols that you hope... become metaphors for change.
Klein is yet eager to recognize the assumption of the war on horror as long as it will show the way to converted commitment to tattered public infrastructures. This demonstrates the disorders that can outcome without ideology. She states that there needs to be social justice, but there also needs to be justice for the victims of these [terror] attacks and practical prevention of future ones and that terrorism is indeed an international threat. This is an estimably liberal opinion. Fences and Windows ends by calling for a merger between international and local movements, as the single means to go further. In the end, there is not much more to look further to than cynical neighborhood military exercises against the environmental invasion of neoliberal politics.
In its entirety, the book proposes a world that has turned into post-democratic in the sense that unelected associations and unaccountable conglomerates are exercising much more bigger power over peoples lives than possibly at any time in current human history. Nevertheless, Ms. Klein has given attention to the achievements of people who are speaking truth to authorities. In my opinion, this exceptional work is confirmation that we could not ask for a more expressive and fervent representative of the post-democracy movements than Ms. Klein. Words: 2285 Bibliography: Klein, Naomi Fences and Windows: dispatch's from the front lines of the globalization debate.
Editor Debra Ann Levy. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002 William K. Tabb The amoral elephant: globalization and the struggle for social justice in the twenty-first century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001 Michael Hsu Growing up: Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein.
Asia week, 24 / 01 / 2003
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