Should the World Bank propose policies that hurt basket weavers in Bangladesh? Should foreign aid be tied to balanced budgets? Is Goldman Sachs in cahoots with the International Monetary Fund? Since when do we care?
Let's face it. For most ordinary Americans, international affairs are boring and economics befuddling. So why did 10,000 protesters turn up in Washington, D.C., this week to protest the IMF and the World Bank organizations that regulate economic affairs almost exclusively in remote foreign countries?
Pundits will continue to debate policy questions such as the validity of total debt relief or the merits of the IMF's Southeast Asian recovery package. They will discuss how best to increase transparency in international institutions, limit U.S. meddling or expand oversight of environmental factors in economic programs. They will largely argue that the protesters are naive, anarchic and uninformed. And they will be right.
The state did not need to show its brute force on the streets — it could have silenced the protesters by handing out a simple ID quiz and watching those "anarchists" sweat over these questions — what do the letters IMF stand for? Name three countries in Southeast Asia. Where in Asia is Southeast Asia? The protests may have been policy-specific for certain heads of NGOs or foreign intellectuals. But for most of the people there — young, middle class Americans, born after civil rights and Vietnam, and raised in suburbia by television sets — the protests were something nebulous: a radical addendum to the commercial success of movies like "Fight Club" and "American Beauty," and a bizarre phenomenon called John McCain. The protests were not about the IMF, the World Bank or cashew farmers in Mozambique — they were about Revolution, the Man and those eternally glorious aspirations for liberty and equality. They were about us. And, for now, that is wonderful.
The "Seattle East" protests drew out a menagerie of disparate radicals united by the common sentiment of being "pissed off" with the status quo. Economists tell us we are in a brave, new — post-inflation, post-unemployment — world. Wall Street tells us we are on easy street. Eight years ago, it was the economy, stupid. What is it now, Mr. Carville?
Is utopia a "Seinfeld" episode, a long stream of nothing? A world without beliefs, leaders, communities, relationships — a nihilistic realm ruled by consumerism? A world where everything is disposable, replaceable, where irony stands in for ideology, where objects serve as surrogates to families, where opinion polls substitute political convictions, where everything is dispensable, where nothing lasts?
At these protests, Catholics worried about the loss of faith, families and values; trade unionists worried about the loss of meaningful jobs; and environmentalists worried about the loss of our planet. Everyone worried about the loss of community, social capital, of a deliberative, transparent political culture and of any semblance of control over their lives. Instead, corporations control the media, the political process and most eerily our needs, desires and values. If there was one unifying theme in the myriad claims of the marchers, it was the united cry for freedom from these controls, from a world where everything is ephemeral.
Through cheeky slogans, unorthodox protests and serious demands for a genuine democratization of all levels of our public life — from international financial organizations to local politics — the "anarchists" (as the mainstream press labeled them) were crying out for true liberty. "Anarchist," after all, is nothing but a derisive term for those who demand liberty in ways the status quo finds threatening.
Of course, liberty was not the only facet of these protests. After all, libertarians — the ones who would like gun-toting six-year-olds to buy crack from vending machines — have been raising that battle cry for decades. What separates the libertarians from these so-called anarchists is that their demands were couched in a deep commitment to equality. Internationally, the protests vocalized the traditional Marxist themes of dependence and Third World exploitation. Domestically, it recognized that prosperity has not been evenly spread. Globalization of the sweatshop variety has hurt the American working poor, decreasing the number of meaningful jobs, and widening the rift between haves and have-nots. If nothing else, in these prosperous times, it blew a hole in the basic post-Cold War boasts of the free marketeers that the neo-liberal engine was on the right track toward solving the world's economic woes.
In three days, a bunch of high-spirited kids increased awareness about global and domestic inequality, raised the battle cry for true liberty and united disparate "pissed-off" sectors of society. But will this lead anywhere? Or will it dissipate slowly into wisecracks by office water coolers and punchlines on late night talk shows?
If these protests were truly about something beyond the IMF and the World Bank, then these Web-savvy radicals need to network and discover their common threads. People who support the status quo are right to criticize the paucity of ideology, or even coherence, in this movement. The Marxists were based on an ideological Olympus. The 1960s radicals inhaled the works of leading thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills. Today, where are the intellectuals, the ideologues, the Mario Savios, the Tom Haydens, the Port Huron Statements? Without them, the momentum, the synergy of disparate "pissed-off" voices will vanish with the last whiffs of tear gas.
The challenge, then as now, rests with academics and students at major institutions like Princeton. Where are those courageous enough to risk research for radicalism — the Noam Chomskys and Cornel Wests, for whom academia carries a social and moral responsibility to champion radical change? In my short lifetime, I have only seen such courage from the right, from the Dinesh D'Souzas, Milton Friedmans and Ralph Reeds.
Much as I try, I find each of their visions equally unpalatable. In a post-Marxist world, the radical Left must rise and offer new ideologues and ideals. Seattle East proved that we have the foot soldiers. Now we need a message.
(Kushanava Choudhury is a politics major from Highland Park, N.J. He can be reached choudhry@princeton.edu)
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