The King agreed to meet the rebels at Smithfield, on the edge of the city. Watt Tyler rode across the cornfields to meet him. ‘Why will you not go back to your own country?’ asked Richard. They would not go back, said Tyler, until the King had given them what they wanted. They wanted the removal of harsh criminal laws designed to repress the poor; the end of outlawry; the abolition of all lords and all bishops except for the King himself and one Archbishop. They wanted all Church land and goods to be divided up among the people and all land owned by lords and barons to become common. Finally they wanted an end to serfdom – for ‘all men to be free’.
The King’s response was simple: he agreed. The rebels had his word, he said, that their demands would be met. The system would be reformed and the King would do the reforming. After all, it was in everyone’s interests that the powerful meet their responsibilities. Now, said the King, Tyler should take his people back home.
Tyler was taken aback. There seemed little he could do but agree. He called for a drink and was given a flagon of ale, which he drank ‘in a very rude and villainous manner before the King’. One of Richard’s valets insulted him for his behaviour. A fight broke out. Tyler had a small dagger. The King’s men had concealed swords. Within seconds, one of them had run him through. Watt Tyler was dead.
When they saw what had happened, the peasants panicked. With their leader dead they were directionless. Some drew their bows and began to fire upon the royal party. Without blinking, the fourteen-year-old King rode straight towards the assembled commoners. Tyler, he shouted, had betrayed them; he was a traitor. Now they had a new leader – Richard himself. ‘I will be your King, your captain and your leader,’ he cried.2 And they believed him. The crowd fell to their knees in gratitude, begging their master’s forgiveness for doubting him. The rebellion was over.
The hundred thousand returned home and prepared for the better life that their King had promised. But Richard kept none of his pledges. Instead, he sent soldiers to arrest the ringleaders and hang them. Months of bloody reprisal swept through Kent and Essex. What had looked, just days before, like the irresistible rise of the marginalised against the elite, had dwindled to nothing. ‘This storm,’ wrote one historian, ‘assumed vast dimensions, spread over the whole horizon, swept down on the countryside with the violence of a typhoon, threatened universal destruction and then suddenly passed away as inexplicably as it had arisen.’3 The weather had changed. Feudalism was saved.
Here in the early twenty-first century, I am sitting at my desk thinking about where I have been and what I have seen. I am thinking about a new revolt of the marginalised; a new storm gathering out there, beyond the radar screens of the powerful. It seems a long way from Blackheath, bishops and barons – a long way, too, from where I’m sitting, in front of a computer screen in the depths of an English winter. From here, without an effort of the imagination, it can seem equally unlikely to overwhelm the way the world works. But I think it could happen. In fact, I think it is happening already.
What I have seen, on five continents, is a rapidly rising popular movement, led by the poor in the ‘developing’ lands and now developing in the rich world too. It is a movement of people who feel cut off. Some cut off by faceless economic forces from the wealth that others revel in. Some cut off by illegitimate private power from a role in their own governance. Some cut off by trade laws drawn up half a world away from their own land, their traditional resources, their way of life. Some cut off by an all-pervasive consumerism from any meaning other than money and any goal other than growth.
For these people – millions upon millions of them – globalisation is exclusion. It is a system, a process, which cuts more and more people off every year; a system which grows by excluding increasing numbers of people from what they need, desire or value. It is this exclusion which has created this movement, and which is swelling its numbers as the anger spreads and the resistance continues to mount.
A new march on the capital has begun. And the more I think about it, the more I see comparisons between 1381 and 2003; lessons that can perhaps be learned from the storm that was weathered – just – by King Richard II and that which is currently being nervously confronted by the new rulers of the world. Perhaps they are lessons that this movement is already learning.
Reliance on a leader, for example, can be fatal: once Tyler is dead, where do you turn? Spontaneous uprisings can be stunningly effective: they can also disappear again with remarkable speed if they are not well organised, focused and in it for the long haul. When a king, or a corporation, promises to work with you for the general good, listen to the alarm bells. When you march on the city, you don’t plead – you demand. It’s the only way to make them sit up and listen.
The most important lesson, though, is surely the oldest one of all – that power is never given, it is always taken. You can gather in vast numbers, you can storm their palaces, you can tear the capital apart, you can call for striking change – but if you hope to achieve that change by expecting an inherently unjust system, one which thrives on inequality, to deliver the goods, you are likely to be very disappointed.
If this sounds like revolutionary talk I make no apologies. I wrote at the beginning of this book that this was a revolution, and it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Perhaps not a revolution in the sense that recent history has taught us to understand it: not a series of power-grabs by red-starred guerrillas or ‘People’s Parties’ equipped with Big Ideas for a New Utopia. But a revolution nonetheless. When will it happen? It is happening already. It is going on in Soweto and Porto Alegre, Jayapura and La Garrucha, Itapeva and Point Arena. It is growing in speed, size and ambition. Even as I sit here at my desk, I hear whispers of it – I hear the grinding of the machine, and the spanners being employed in response. Things are moving out there. This has only just begun.
Here is a randomly plucked selection of events that took place just in the time it took me to write this chapter:
Exhibit A: CONSUMER CHOICE
In Ecuador, a new left-wing president, Lucio Gutierrez, won the presidency, beating his billionaire businessman rival comprehensively, and adding another country to the increasing number of Latin American states which are experiencing an anti-neoliberal backlash. In the months leading up to his election, thousands of people took to the streets of the capital, Quito, to protest about the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, a White House-driven plan to extend NAFTA to every country on the continent. In early November 2002, tens of thousands of indigenous people and others flooded into Quito, chanting, ‘Sí a la vida, No al ALCA’ (‘Yes to life, No to the FTAA’).
Exhibit B: RACE TO THE BOTTOM (OF THE ATLANTIC)
The Prestige, a 25-year-old oil tanker, ran aground, broke in two and sank in the Atlantic with 70,000 tonnes of oil on board, coating the north-west coast of Spain with thousands of tonnes of crude. The ship, noted the Observer, was ‘chartered by the Swiss-based subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate registered in the Bahamas, owned by a Greek through Liberia and given a certificate of seaworthiness by the Americans. When it refuelled, it stood off the port of Gibraltar to avoid the chance of inspection. Every aspect of its operations was calculated to avoid tax, ownership obligations and regulatory scrutiny.’4
Exhibit C: EUROPEAN UNION
Twenty-five thousand people gathered in Florence, Italy, for the European Social Forum, and 750,000 people took to the streets of the same city to loudly reject a likely attack on Iraq. Organisers of the World Social Forum, to be held again in Porto Alegre, announced that they were expecting at least 100,000 people in 2003 – almost twice the previous year’s attendance.
Exhibit D: WEALTH CREATION
Jean-Pierre Garnier, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical corporations, demanded a pay rise. Garnier, who lives in Philadelphia, explained that his current package, worth around £7 million, was not enough. He demanded a new deal worth an estimated £24 million to keep him motivated. Glax
oSmithKline recently experienced a 25 per cent decline in profits.
Exhibit E: TRIED IT, DIDN’T LIKE IT
In Argentina unemployed workers, jobless as a result of the country’s dire economic state, have begun re-opening bankrupt factories themselves, running them as co-ops. They are part of a virtually unreported popular rebellion taking place across the country. In late 2001, Argentina’s economy spectacularly collapsed. Vast debts, decades of IMF-imposed privatisation, austerity and spending cuts and a collapse in ‘market confidence’ destroyed, within hours, the lives of millions of people in a country held up for years as a neoliberal success story. Today, people across Buenos Aires and elsewhere are forming street-level ‘popular assemblies’ to run their own neighbourhoods and economic affairs, and refusing to listen to the strictures of either markets or politicians. Que se vayan todos – ‘away with them all’ – has become a popular rallying-cry in a nation which did everything the globalisers told it to and paid the price.
Exhibit F: YOU CAN’T BUCK THE MARKET
Morgan Stanley, one of the US’s leading investment banks, advised its clients not to invest in companies with active unions or decent pension schemes. ‘Look for the union label . . . and run the other way,’ the bank recommended, explaining with disarming frankness that ‘rigidity in labour costs, processes and pension requirements, while perhaps beneficial to employees, may prove toxic to shareholders’.5
Exhibit G: WHO ASKED YOU?
The World Economic Forum released the results of a global survey it had carried out on the subject of ‘trust’. The ambitious project collected the views of 36,000 people in forty-seven countries on six continents, which were said to represent the views of 1.4 billion people. Two-thirds of those questioned did not believe that their country was ‘governed by the will of the people’. Over half of those questioned trusted neither their national parliament nor large corporations to ‘operate in society’s best interests’. The World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF were trusted less than the UN, NGOs or even the armed forces. ‘Trust in many key institutions has fallen to critical proportions,’ fretted the Forum.6
Perhaps you can hear it from where you’re sitting now: that low, distant rumble, growing steadily louder as you focus on it. It’s the sound of change, and it’s coming your way – our way – whether we like it or not. The world is not going to go on like this: with the richest 20 per cent of us rolling in 86 per cent of the wealth, the poorest 20 per cent scraping by on 1.3 per cent. It cannot and will not, and the rise of this movement is just one sign of how that change is likely to make itself felt.
Before I set out on my travels, I had two questions foremost in my mind. What, in summary, does this movement stand for? And how can we build a new world based on those principles? Now, after all I’ve seen, I think that I can begin to answer them.
What do we stand for?
This is an enormous and chaotically diverse movement, full of passionate and intensely argumentative people. It’s impossible to sum up everything that every person or group stands for, particularly as some of them contradict each other. It is possible, though, to draw up a list of principles and values which run through most of this movement.
This is a movement which stands for redistribution – redistribution of both wealth and power. It stands for equity – a world in which everyone gets their share, of material wealth, of representation, of influence. It stands for autonomy, and for genuine democracy, both participatory and representative. It stands for a model of organising which rejects, in many though not all cases, traditional hierarchies, and similarly rejects the old left-wing model of leader and followers, vanguard and masses. It stands for DIY politics – a willingness and a desire to take action yourself, to take to the streets, to act rather than to ask. It stands for economic independence, anti-consumerism and a redefinition of the very concepts of ‘growth’ and ‘development’. It seeks a world where there are strict limits to market values and private power, where life is not commodified, where the commons are redefined and reclaimed, where ecology and economy go hand in hand. It stands for a rejection of top-down models and all-encompassing ‘Big Ideas’. And it stands, perhaps above all, for a reclamation and a redefinition of power itself.
In my eight months of travelling I had a lot of revelations, a lot of epiphanies: enough to last me for years to come. I discovered things I didn’t know, abandoned a few beliefs I’d held, confirmed others, took on some new ones. But my biggest revelation, the biggest connection I made, the most important understanding was also, in many ways, the simplest: that this is really all about one thing. Power.
This, above all, is what connects all the movements I visited. The battles they are all fighting are not, fundamentally, about trade, treaties, agriculture, consumerism or corporations at all. These are all manifestations of a strikingly old-fashioned power struggle – a struggle for which ‘globalisation’ is only the latest word. It’s a timeless, international battle to decide who runs the show; who wields that power and how, and by what authority do they do so? And what I discovered as I travelled was that virtually everything, everywhere came down to two thrillingly simple questions:
1. Who’s in charge?
2. Why?
When this is understood, much else begins to fall into place. It becomes easier to see why this movement came first from the south, from the poor countries, those left behind by the system and its beneficiaries. It becomes clear, too, why those who believe this should not be a real resistance movement at all, but rather a coalition of polite negotiators working to ‘make globalisation work better’, or to persuade corporations to ‘behave responsibly’ are wide of the mark. This is a movement designed and built to contest power – to question, and to claim, legitimacy. And that is exactly what it is doing.
It also becomes easier to understand why this movement insists on trying, as it goes, to redefine what power means, and how it is used. Increasingly, it seeks to do two things with power. First, to wrestle it from increasingly remote and illegitimate elites, and spread it around at ground level. Secondly, to redefine what it is – to try to decentralise it, rather than, as so many past radicals have done, to try to seize it from one elite and hand it to another.
It is also a movement which understands that as power is concentrated further in corporations, stock exchanges, dealing rooms, presidential palaces and summit venues, the result is a steady and inexorable requisitioning of public goods for private gain. Power, in other words, is being used to exclude and to enclose. If this is at heart a power struggle it is a struggle, too, against that enclosure: against the theft of the public by the private. It is a struggle to reclaim space.
In Chiapas, the Zapatistas declare autonomous zones, reclaiming their political and physical space from the clutches of Mexico’s ‘bad government’. The citizens of Cochabamba fight the enclosure of their common water resources. Protesters in Genoa try to take back the streets that the Red Zone has enclosed. Sowetans reconnect their own electricity. The Reverend Billy wails in public about the theft of community space by chainstores. The MST scales the fences around enclosed land and claims it for the poor. The people of Boulder stake a claim to their streets on behalf of local traders. Everywhere, a struggle for power: everywhere a fight for space.
This movement, then, is an unprecedented, international gathering of political resistance, built to contest power and seeking a very different world order based on very different values from those on which the globalisation project rests. Those values can, I think, be boiled down to their essence and reduced to five key principles: democracy, diversity, decentralisation, sovereignty and access. If I list them, now, along with their polar opposites, you can see why:
What We Want
What We Get
DEMOCRACY
Political and economic. More, and genuine, decision-making power at local level, over everything from resource use to education and ‘development’ decisions. Removal of market control over governance.
DICTATORSHIP
Of markets, corporations and their allies and supplicants in national governments. Managerial political elites, with ‘left’ and ‘right’ increasingly indistinguishable, and societies guided by market values.
DIVERSITY
Cultural, geographical, ecological, political and economic – a world with many worlds in it.
MONOCULTURE
From crops to clothes to ideas: a global mall, the disappearance of difference, the bleaching of the human rainbow in the name of the global market.
DECENTRALISATION
From food-growing to planning decisions, everything to be done at the lowest level possible; redefining power, spreading it around, locking it down.
CONCENTRATION
Of ownership and thus of power. Decisions made at the highest level by bought-up politicians, unelected trade representatives and overpaid brokers.
SOVEREIGNTY
Self-determination, autonomy, liberty – people actively and independently deciding their own fate, and that of their community and nation.
DEPENDENCE
A world of consumers rather than citizens, reliant on distant corporations, governments and advanced technology to provide for their needs.
ACCESS
Access to common land, resources, public services and a genuine civic domain; defined areas of life into which market values do not intrude.
One No, Many Yeses Page 32
