debonaire@mindspring.com writes:

12/05/01 As this story has attracted some interest and discussion, we have decided to bring it back to the front page.

This is a glossary/appendix from a forthcoming book published by Softskull Press titled 'Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to capitalist Globalization (December, 2001)

Readers are invited to submit terms/cliches/buzzwords which they find worthy of elaboration, ridicule or dissection. Please post.

Glossary of Terms Relevant to Globalization

Iain A. Boal

The compiler salutes that small band of writers drawn to the critical glossary as a literary form: first, contrarian lexicographers such as Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) and Charles Bufe (The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations); poets, too, of a committed imagination with an accurate ear for the demoralization of the dialect of the tribe - - and here I think, for example, of Benjamin Peret, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Paulin; but most to the purpose, a pair of critics, one American and the other Welsh -- Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams -- who composed what the former called "a dictionary of pivotal terms" and the latter dubbed "a vocabulary of culture and society". These glossators were far from nostalgic for some Adamic speech, for the "true meaning" of a word; nor did they intend to combat, in the manner of reactionary linguistic watchdogs, loose usage with precision, let alone vulgarisms with a style book. It is, in fact, the active range of meanings that matters, since the immense complexity and contradiction within terms like "environment" and "violence" register deep conflicts in the social order.

Language, on this view, does not just label things in the world; it helps to constitute it. The naming of parts, the framing of questions, the refusing to explain, are at once the prerogative and the springs of power. Much more crucial to the powerful, however, than their assertions -- that, say, a fugitive was "suffering from drapetomania" -- are the presuppositions that underlie discourse. It was one thing, in the ante-bellum South, to query the medical diagnosis of drapetomania, defined as a "pathological propensity to attempt to escape"; it was quite another to challenge the institutions of slavery and medicine that conspired to pathologize the seeking of freedom. Defunct vocabularies, and labels such as drapetomania, abandoned by the classifying classes as either obsolete (vis-a-vis some new regime of stigmata) or embarrassing (after a struggle by those so labeled), are particularly revealing of the strategic links between language and institutional sites of power. The anti-capitalist movement, standing on terrain not of its own choosing, too often retorts in an idiom satisfactory to the sovereign.

Raymond Williams' explorations in historical semantics are much the better known, but his Keywords was anticipated, a generation earlier, by Kenneth Burke when he launched a critique of the left's political lexicon in the face of corporate-fascist reaction to capital's big twentieth century emergency. Burke recommended "intellectual vagabondage" that would constitute "a grave interference with the cultural code" of industrial modernity; he proposed sabotage of the system by defending inefficiency, pessimism, dissipation, mockery, distrust, hypochondria and treason. One communist called Burke's negative aesthetic "the philosophy of the petit bourgeois gone mad", and Burke didn't much disagree. In view of the millennial coronation of business culture Kenneth Burke's 1931 "Program" in Counter-Statement repays a fresh reading.

Then in April 1935, at the time of the popular front and the bienio negro in Spain, Burke gave a brief address to the first American Writers' Congress in New York on "Revolutionary Symbolism in America". He told his audience that, when they weren't talking into the mirror, they were using a patronizing language that was sure to fail, simply because idealizing "the workers" in the same breath as insisting on the absolute degradation of work under capitalism was a rhetorical disaster. Burke went on to recommend "the people" rather than "workers" as a mode of address, even though he was aware that, in a society riven by hierarchies of class, gender, race and the rest, "the people" has its own problems, to say the least; any totalizing term is necessarily ideological. So hostile was the reaction - -he was accused of proposing the rhetorical methods of Hitler -- that Burke later hallucinated excrement dripping from his tongue.

Another totalization -- there is none greater -- stamped the days of Seattle, both on the streets and in the suites. I mean, of course, the "globe" (and its derivatives), under which sign the committees of capital and their opponents converged. "Globalization", which began as business school jargon, became a cant word during the nineties, but students of imperialism were frankly unimpressed by the purported novelty of the phenomenon; already in 1848 two pamphleteers had remarked that the "need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." Actually, the connections are still distinctly patchy; much of Africa lies unwired, and one in three people in the world have never yet heard a phone ring.

But this is just to rehearse the banality that capitalist development is uneven. More to the point -- and it goes some way to account for the disturbances in Seattle and since -- is the fact that structural adjustment at home in the US has been dismantling the remains of the New Deal compromise, as well as the dividends of the civil rights, feminist, peace and environmental movements. The pattern of events at Seattle confounded the rump of professional revolutionaries, stranded since the mock-epic of the Cold War, no less than the stenographers of power in the accredited media. Not that the program of the liberal NGOs and the self-anointed leaders of Seattle's motley crew -- "Reform the corporations!" "A place at the table!" -- is other than in bad taste. Still, it would be wise to hear the critic who observed that, although political writing is always instrumental as well as utopian, its time of instrumentality -- its time as a weapon -- sometimes lies a little in the future. As to what might be entailed in the forging of a political language adequate to the matters currently at hand, the following glossary is offered as a gesture, though readers should bear in mind that its remit is the vocabulary of capitalist globalization and its detractors.

"It is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny is overthrown, but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of freedom, and terrible anathemas against the hangmen that people bring down dictators and empires." -- Emiliano Zapata

Activist

Label used, often without qualification, by those campaigning for "social change", suggesting a liberal confidence in the general direction of history, as if the Pol Pots and Kissingers of the world weren't themselves active in the business of social change. The bane of hard-core activists is "passivity" in their targeted communities (q.v.) and the ivory tower; anti-intellectualism is the theory, activism the practice. Still, they have a point: "doing theory" in the academy can be a nasty sight.

Anarchist

Pierre-Joseph ("property is theft") Proudhon was among the first to embrace this term of abuse. Roget's Thesaurus places it in the company of terrorist, savage and fanatic. But peaceable anarchists, in the tradition of William Godwin, Pietr Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, have greatly outnumbered advocates of "negotiation by dynamite", which remains the specialty of governments. Still, anarchists have understood that, however much they carry in their hearts a world organized on principles of mutual aid and free association, the current owners show no signs of leaving quietly, and for that reason Buenaventura Durruti once remarked: "The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their own world before they leave the stage of history. We are not in the least afraid of ruins." If the tactics of Seattle's enrages -- the symbolic breaking of corporate property -- showed one (masked) face of anarchism, the other was the classic anarchist organizational form of non-hierarchical affinity groups.

Autonomy

A term with wide currency among the opposition to capitalist globalization -- cf. Italian autonomia, German autonomen, Zapatista autonomismo, and "temporary autonomous zones" (TAZ). Not to be understood in the abstract formalist Kantian sense of autonomy as obedience to reason, but in Cornelius Castoriadis' sense of movement away from heteronomy in general ( "being in someone else's project", whether state, parent or boss) towards self-activity-of a collective kind, rather than the "independence" of loners, self-made entrepreneurs and authoritarians in flight from mother.

Biopiracy

Athough the term slanders pirates (see Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) it is intended as a corrective to what the genetic-industrial complex (Monsanto et al.) calls bio-prospecting. Refers to the privatization of plant and other organic material (fungi, animal DNA, human body and blood products, etc.) from the global South, home to 95% of the world's genetic resources, by way of the Northern patent mills. There is a deep continuity with the post-Columbus plunder of specimens by naturalist agents of empire and the 19th century global system of botanical laboratories (e.g., Kew Gardens, Jardin des Plantes).

Biotechnology

The new frontier whose salesmen and stock analysts glimpse whole continents of (com)modified life waiting to be staked out. The synergy between DNA technologists, silicon robotics and venture capital has produced a pre-emptive patent rush, rapid monopolization of life forms licenced by the courts, and a Niagara of hype (Green revolution redux and even immortality). These new enclosures (q.v.) are meeting popular resistance worldwide; the struggle is on to prevent the privatization of the world's germplasm (the essential means of production for farmers), not to mention the viralization of life by the vectors of transgenic DNA.

Black bloc

The roving, uncivil, complement to the sit-down blockaders at Seattle, sharing a commitment to direct action in the streets, but viewing sedentary disobedience as privileged, moralizing and needlessly sacrificial. Named after their black clothing, a parody of the dress code of solemn bourgeois ritual. Its origins lie in European anarchist and autonomist tendencies, removed from the American legacy of civil-rights (Gandhian and Quaker-style) pacifism. The tactic of corporate property damage and their open masquerade have made the black bloc grist for the mills of the spectacle and, apparently, state provocateurs.

Borders

Be careful what you ask for. "World without borders" has now joined those other counter-cultural bumper slogans -- "Think globally, act locally", "Flexible work hours!" -- as the basic vocabulary of neo-liberalism. The hip academy's love affair with "transgressing borders" has put them in interesting company -- the German Wehrmacht and the WTO. The dismantling of barriers is, of course, highly selective in favor of goods and capital rather than people, a fact well understood by workers trying to enter fortress Europe or to cross the Rio Grande from the South, and by travelers to Quebec and Genoa.

Capitalism

From Latin root capit -- "head"; for connections not merely etymological between capital punishment and the punishment of capital, see Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged. The economic order that, like its ruling class, will rarely speak its name, preferring the codewords "market", "democracy", and "freedom". Capitalism is organized around the production of commodities by commodities, from which follows the subversion of markets, the annulling of democracy, and the subordination of freedom.

Civil Society

"Community", "stakeholder", "participation", "transparency", "empowerment" -- these are the grisly fetish words of foundation officers, non-profit apparatchiks and boardrooms everywhere, echoed in the field by the NGO cadres busy producing "locals". These liberal shibboleths, that cluster under the heading of "civil society", name simulacra of the social and disclose only its disappearance. Not for the first time; at the turn of the 19th century, Romantic schoolmasters and antiquarians -- the clerisy of European nationalisms -- celebrated the "folk" at the very moment its extinction was assured by enclosure of the commons and the criminalization of custom. It was the proto-Romantic Rousseau who remarked: "The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society."

Coase's Theorem

The notorious December 1991 World Bank memo, written by Lawrence Summers, later U.S. Treasury Secretary, argued that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable" because "under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City". Brazil's Secretary of the Environment wrote to Summers about the leaked memo: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane" and was fired soon after. The reasoning referred to was in fact a pure example of the logic behind Coase's Theorem, which relates market efficiency, property, transaction costs and "exernalities", and underpins much of neo-liberal legal and economic doctrine, as well as WTO and IMF policies. Ronald Coase is the economist responsible for tradeable pollution rights by dreaming of a world of zero transaction costs where everything can be smoothly brought to market, and no ethical distinction made between the harm done by an oil refinery to those living downwind and the harm done to its owners by downwinders being in the way; it's just a cost-benefit matter requiring only clear and absolute private property rights (no common goods) and enough police to enforce them. The World Bank's "impeccable" Coasian logic means that there is no right to clean water, air or soil but merely the right to pay to keep them clean or to be compensated for their fouling. Too bad about those not at the bargaining table-above all, the unborn (or stillborn) generations. Luckily economists have long prepared us to discount the future; Coase once said that the future valuation of property was put at risk by "such cataclysmic events as the abolition of slavery". Coase won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Commons

See under "Enclosure".

"The law locks up the man or woman,

That steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater felon loose,

That steals the common from the goose.

Community

The maximum shibboleth. A mantra used affirmatively across the entire political and cultural landscape; NPR once interviewed a spokesman from "the organized crime community". There is an implied antithesis to "the state" (with its suggestion of power, authority and central decision), in favor of the local and the face-to-face. The results can be grotesque: the release of asylum and hospital inmates to "the community" often means, in reality, warm ventilation grates. The "communitarian" right would rather nobody noticed that the shattering of communities is a direct effect of capital moving away in obedience to the logic of the very system they endorse.

Corporation

From corpus,"body". The body of the Catholic church was the ur-corporation, as the monastery was the prototype for other key institutions in the West -- the asylum, the hospital, the university, the factory. By a legal fiction the business corporation was given a deathless personality -- an idea related to the theory of the "divine right of kings" by which the monarch has two bodies, one that decays, one that doesn't ("The king is dead; long live the king"). The laws of the corporation inversely mirror the laws of criminal conspiracy. When individuals combine in pursuit of capital, they are afforded more protection than they enjoy in their own persons (e.g., limits to both civil and criminal liability, special treatment re taxation); when individuals combine against capital, they have less protection than they have on their own-mere association is criminalized, since the very act of combining is seen as a threat. That is, two or more people agreeing to commit a misdemeanor-whether or not they ever go through with it-is considered by the state a felony, because the greater threat is the sheer coming together in opposition to those interests the state serves.

DAN

Direct Action Network. Emerged from the direct action training camp two months before Seattle, organized by the Ruckus Society, offspring of Greenpeace commando training crossed with Earth First! forest defense techniques, and adapted to non-wilderness, urban contexts-street blockades, lockdowns, tall building banner-hangs-combined with political puppetry, street theatre, culture-jamming and net-based bypassing of capitalist media. See under "Direct action".

Democracy

System of periodic ratification of political masters by ballot; meanwhile, the major decisions -- who, whom, for what, how -- remain in the hands of the few. Democracy is the ideological keystone of the West's charter myth, and historically consistent, by its own account, with slavery (Athens), monarchy (England) and plutocracy (United States).

Development

Perhaps the key term of modernity, drawing into a single nexus the discourses of real estate, childhood and colonialism, for the future realization of added value. By the colonization of infancy and the infantilization of the colonies, labor and land (human and natural capital) are made ready for "improvement", the older word that "development" replaced, etymologically derived from "profit".

Direct Action

A mode of politics that tactically -- and for some, strategically -- shortcircuits official channels of "representation", often by interrupting business as usual, and deploying a variety of means, open and clandestine: street manifestations, blockades, trespass, sit-ins, banner hanging, squatting, sabotage, crop-trashing, pie-throwing. The debate since Seattle about property damage and the activity of the black bloc-whether it is tactically effective ("helps break the spell of the commodity" versus "allows demonization of the movement as mindless vandalism"), and whether it constitutes violence ("to treat property as sacred and inviolable is to think like the state, and anyway what about the silent violence of structural adjustment or redlining") rehearses old tensions between pacifist and "physical force" traditions in abolitionist, nationalist and anti-colonial struggles.

Diversity

The key term of US multiculturalism, a liberal doctrine endorsed by big business and government for the management of "difference" in response to the civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements. The doggerel read at Clinton's first inauguration, "On the Pulse of Morning", confirmed the ascendancy of multicultural nationalism; contrast the previous inaugural verse (at Kennedy's induction), "The Gift Outright", Robert Frost's white puritan poem of blood sacrifice and western conquest. Although capitalist globalization is spoken of as a homogenizing force (viz. extinction of languages and species, death of customary lifeways, Weberian harmonization), it co-opts and even encourages the proliferation of identities-gender, ethnic and consumer-consistent with profit-taking. Biodiversity, that mantra of environmentalists, is, to say nothing of its merits, multiculturalism projected onto the realm of nature; by the same token, the native plant movement draws, willy-nilly, from the wellsprings of xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric. To speak of nature is always already to be in the space of the social.

Economy

The alpha and omega of our epoch. The mere utterance of the words, "the bottom line", is supposed to halt discussion. The disembedding of the "economy" from its social and moral matrix has been a long and savage process; its first paid professor was the Reverend Malthus in 1800. As often, it was in a work of imagination, not theory -- in Daniel Defoe, rather than Adam Smith -- that one encounters the first classic projection of homo economicus. What is Robinson Crusoe, that lonely, primitive accumulator and idol of economists, but a cost-benefit calculating machine? Such is the neurotic Protestant imago that the technicians of the WTO dream of universalizing.

Enclosure

The exclusion (sometimes physically by hedges and fences) of commoners and peasants from the means of life, in order to "free" them for wage labor under capitalist modernity. Enclosure meant not only the extinction (by force and later by acts of parliament) of customary "rights of common" to soil, grazing, firewood, timber, and the cultivated and uncultivated bounty of the earth, but, at least as important, the breaking of communal consciousness and autonomy. The commodification of land and labor was capitalism's essential founding process, written "in letters of blood and fire". The buying and selling of commodities could then be generalized; property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity. The structural adjustment programs of the IMF, and the WTO's intellectual property regimes, amount to new (as well as old) forms of enclosure -- privatization of water and public land, auctioning of the electromagnetic spectrum, the patenting of seeds, etc.

Environment

When taken to mean external surroundings, "environment" reinforces the old split between humanity and nature, between inside and outside, which at least has the merit of not positing a fascist metaphysics of identity (blood and soil, thinking with the body, woman equals nature). Environments are constituted by the life-activity of their inhabitants; without the active involvement of its denizens, no expert has any business claiming even to identify an environment.

Environmentalists

Corporate capital's stormy petrels, warning of bad weather. That Mobil and environmentalists both like to operate under the sign of NASA's " whole earth" image reveals how green politics is a version of global managerialism. The Malthusian assumptions and the eugenic and racist roots of environmentalism (population control, native plant fanaticism, defence of wilderness that was someone else's home) are barely below the surface.

Fair trade

The alternative to "free trade" on offer from the loyal opposition, led by Global Exchange, a San Francisco travel agency and crafts importer.

Free Trade

Traditional slogan of imperial monopolists and protectionists.For export only.

Gibson's Law

"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD." Scientists flatly contradicting each other became a common sight during the mad cow outbreak, and caused a crisis of legitimacy in Europe, which will only deepen with each surprising plague. Because scientists are increasingly licensed by industry, we are bound to hear more kitsch assertions like "The chances of GM pollen drift are zero", and "There can be no prions in the milk".

Global South

The old West/East division, based on the political geography of the capitalist-communist bloc system, is giving way to North/South terminology, reflecting the post-Cold War configuration of a Northern capitalist core (to use the metaphor of world-system theory) and a Southern periphery. The obvious limitations of these hemispheric spatial terms led, in the first case, to the coining of "tiers monde"/"third world" for countries "non-aligned" with the two blocs, and recently to the attachment of "global" to "South" to capture the fact that capitalism's uneven development creates conditions typically associated with the South inside the Northern heartlands.

Globalization

Business school jargon that gained general currency in the 1990s, to describe the dismantling of barriers to the movement of capital and the loss of local and national sovereignties to the interests of transnational firms, helped along by developments in telecommunications and the collapse of the two-bloc world. Globes were originally "emblems of sovereignty" (1614), that became playthings of merchant princes and navigators, familiar as props in Renaissance portraiture. It was the task of cartography to project the globe into two dimensions; without the resulting maps and charts the business of empire and planetary capitalist hegemony would be literally unthinkable.

GMO

Genetically modified organism. See under "Biotechnology".

Human rights

Liberal discourse lately favored by the managers of the new world order, not least the military humanists of NATO and the Pentagon who use it, arbitrarily of course, as a trojan horse for intervention worldwide, by land, sea, air and, soon no doubt, space -- mercy by any means necessary.

IMF

International Monetary Fund. Created by the US and Britain at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference to provide loans to countries with short-term liquidity problems, and to buffer the irrationality of markets by enshrining capital controls in Article VI. Since the defeat of this original scheme of John Maynard Keynes and Dexter White, the IMF has been turned into a major global instrument for the disciplining of movements toward local autonomy by savage "conditionalities" on loans.

Independent Media Center

Hub of non-corporate news gathering and dissemination, taking advantage of the new technics of communications (digital cameras, satellites, wireless telephony, the internet). The mushrooming of IMCs, modeled on the Seattle experience, is a response to the continuing enclosures and concentration of the capitalist media.

Internet

The child of Victorian telegraphy, even down to the utopian hype -- in 1852 a Saint-Simonian disciple announced: "A perfect network of electric filaments will afford a new social harmony." The space-pulverizing machinery of the virtual brings, along with new connections, intensified separation, plus low-grade depression and digital palsy, that nasty relative of the televisual body ("couch potato"). Its liberatory refunctioning as a tool for "organizing from below" flourishes in the shade of its dominant use as essential support for the global transmission of administrative, military and commercial intelligence, and the enhanced surveillance of labor.

IPR

Intellectual property rights. Their origins lie in the history of the printing press and questions of copyright ownership; the new technologies of communication, replication and the rise of corporate patents and branding have brought trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) sharply into focus, and onto the main agenda of the WTO. It is symptomatic that the fortune of today's Croesus is amassed by licensing intellectual property (software, patents) rather than by owning oil wells or steelmills, in the style of 19th century robber barons. The managers and brokers of capital prefer these purified forms of property; they can circulate at the speed of light.

Libertarian

Historically the contrast was with "determinist" (vis-a-vis free will); later used by anarchists (e.g., Noam Chomsky) to distance themselves from authoritarian socialists in their various guises (Stalinist, Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Castroite); recently the party of market fetishists, automatic weapons collectors and the anti-tax lobby.

Luddite

The most powerful swear word of capital ("mindless, destructive, resister of progress"), now doing double-duty since "communist" has, for the moment, lost its charge. Still, all the sabotage in history would not even register in the scales compared to capitalism's scheduled destruction. Both the left and the right told the same lie about the historical luddites, that they were primitivist and backward looking, as if those skilled weavers at the dawn of industrial modernity were against the future rather than its foreclosure by immiseration, factory discipline and the gallows.

Market

More accurately described by the French historian Braudel as the "anti-market". Capitalism from its birth has been about oligopolies and monopolies. The necessary contrast to the glory of old marketplaces, fairs, bazaars, and agoras is the "container", the tilt-up warehouse, and the supermarket.

(continued in comment below, titled 'Glossary by Ian Boal (continued).'