Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement: Responds

...Although not all student protesters are DISSENT / Fall 2001 109 radical—one antisweatshop activist who was occupying the University of Pennsylvania's administration building earnestly described himself to me as a "capitalist"—most will tell you that they are protesting not only sweatshops but the rotten way our world is organized...

...USAS's work—like that of many other past activists— consistently suggests the possibility that social movements can exist beyond, or completely outside, this binary...

...Explaining why his group failed while others succeeded, 2000 Yale graduate Saurav Sarkar, who now works for the National Labor Committee, says, "We weren't confrontational enough...

...Isaac worries that anticorporate or anticapitalist rhetoric turns off "ordinary citizens...

...reformers need militants to scare the powerful into concessions, as the recent experience of the Fair Labor Association and USAS at Kuk Dong shows...

...Isaac worries that anticapitalism will lead students into "binary thinking about alliances and strategies," yet, looking at the movement's evolution, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that USAS's systemic analysis has actually multiplied its alliances and complicated its thinking in admirable ways...

...It's a dumb standoff...

...By that they mean the lack of real democracy, the global income gap, and the fact that corporations and rich people run the world to suit themselves, with no regard for human need or the natural environment...

...workers at Kuk Dong went on strike because they knew they had powerful advocates in the WRC and USAS...

...Potter, the corrupt embodiment of Big Money, or Julia Roberts and her mighty breasts taking on the chemical companies in Erin Brokovich...

...Our political task is to reorganize them and direct them to new ends...

...I also disagree with his blanket dismissal of the possibilities for anticorporate, or even anticapitalist, resistance...

...But reformers and militants can also be the same people...

...These events, along with the anticorporate consciousness that many USAS activists have developed from their own campus battles or from visits to third world countries, have shaped the language and idiom of the campus protests...

...LIZ, FEATHERSTONE is co-author of Students Against Sweatshops, which will be published by Verso later this year...

...They underestimated the autocratic, corporate nature of their university and the degree to which it would serve elite interests unless forced to do otherwise...

...They would have accepted Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling's invitation to set up a monthly meeting, under the pretense that students would then have the opportunity to "shape" the FLA...

...The "reformists" will argue that what's important is making "real" change in the present, rejecting any larger vision as "pie-in-the-sky" irresponsibility, while the "revolutionaries" may reject all present compromise in favor of theorizing about a better future, for which the correct historical conditions are always, somehow, yet to arrive...

...They are savvy about their audiences, as they should be...

...When big companies like the Gap and Nike exploit workers around the world, they unintentionally give those workers a foundation for common campaigns, a reason for solidarity...

...Among middle-class white people in the United States, anticorporatism has become the dominant idiom of resistance—even penetrating electoral politics, from Ralph Nader's Green presidential campaign to Al Gore's odd "populist" outburst against drug companies...

...By using student power to influence the corporate university, students do not endorse corporatism, anymore than past protests—or the recent living-wage sit-in at Harvard—endorsed elitism or inequality when they made use of activists' elite status...

...Though Isaac cites "picketing Starbucks" as a wild-eyed piece of utopianism quite different from practical USAS strategy, most anti-Starbucks picketing is connected to campaigns led by Global Exchange, which, like USAS, has pursued specific, reformist goals and won concrete victories...

...If global capitalism is so secure in its glorious "flexibility," someone ought to let the world's financial leaders know...

...AN ANALYSIS of "how the whole system works" has also enabled USAS to make connections between sweatshops and other injustices...

...Yale Students Against Sweatshops activists never occupied their president's office and consistently believed that they could convince their administration through rational dialogue alone...

...I agree, too, that part of USAS's strength lies in its ability to stay focused on specific and achievable goals and to, at times, negotiate with corporations—whether their own universities or the likes of Nike and Reebok...

...Others have begun campaigns to urge their universities to boycott World Bank bonds...

...Increasingly, student antisweatshop activists, labor leaders, and workers alike talk about the "globalization of resistance...

...It would save them the trouble of holding their meetings in places like cyberspace and Qatar, which they do, increasingly, out of fear of protesters...

...What Isaac calls "compromise" is an age-old labor movement tactic called "bargaining...

...Many USAS activists participated in Seattle and subsequent demonstrations against state power's collusion with global capital—meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization of American States, and so on...

...Even if we do indulge Isaac's breathless awe of the contemporary economy, there's no need to share his pessimism about the possibilities for opposition...

...The university is a corporation, but it's a unique one in that a small number of young people can greatly disrupt its daily operations...

...In general, USAS activists who were less trusting of administratorCEOs, and thus more militant, were more likely to achieve their goals...

...In addition to the U.S.—and global—labor movement, USAS is now deeply influenced by a worldwide movement against corporate control and economic inequality, a movement known in many other countries as anticapitalist...

...Within unequal societies, student activists, no matter how radical they may be, use their own elite status to influence other elites (school administrators, CEOs, national governments...

...Isaac is right that we shouldn't exaggerate the conservatism of the corporate university...

...It's as American as Jimmy Stewart in Its a Wonderful Life, defending the small business and small town way of life against the bad Mr...

...The left often agonizes over the choice between pragmatism versus utopianism...

...People are drawn in by the horror stories," says the WRC's Maria Roeper, "but then they start seeing how the whole system works...

...They would never have opposed the FLA and formed the WRC...

...They have allied themselves with U.S...

...Yale, for example, never joined the WRC...

...Had they done so, students would then have given up all their power to pressure either universities or manufacturers...

...Sometimes radicals make the best reformists, and vice versa...

...Anticapitalism, on the other hand, can be a turn-off...

...Rhetoric about newness seems particularly irrelevant to the garment industry, which has long been one of the most mobile forms of capital...

...If negotiating with elites is what students do, it's also what labor activists do, whatever their political ideologies...

...if capitalism is safe, Genoa's hard-working carbinieriand their counterparts from Gutenberg, Sweden, to Washington, D.C.—could sit down, have an espresso, and put away their guns...

...few of them waste time debating the significance of Pabloism or the class nature of the former Soviet Union...

...who wants to sound like a glassy-eyed newspaper pusher...

...I doubt that the situation of a worker in today's global economy really feels so much more hopeless than that of a slave in pre-Civil War America or of a Pennsylvania coal miner at the turn of the last century...

...It would be difficult to come up with one...

...antipoverty groups such as the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and strengthened relationships with local unions...

...thus, the collegiate apparel industry's only monitoring organization would have been controlled by corporations...

...Anticorporatism does not turn off ordinary citizens...

...It is important here to distinguish between anticorporatism and anticapitalism, a distinc110 DISSENT / Fall 2001 tion Isaac does not make...

...Skepticism about the corporate university leads to disruptive actions that increase students' visibility and bargaining power...

...Isaac does not cite a single instance in which this sort of consciousness has prevented USAS from achieving reforms...

...Ordinary" lowwage workers in the United States and abroad tend to hate corporations...

...This reveals fundamental misunderstandings, both about student protest and about labor activism...

...Yet many—among themselves, at anticapitalist demonstrations, or in interviews with a sympathetic journalist—espouse anticapitalist beliefs, and such beliefs have, as far as I can tell, only strengthened the movement...

...The campus antisweatshop movement was greatly invigorated and strengthened by "Seattle" and by the anticorporate spirit that the protests against the World Trade Organization inspired on campuses nationwide...

...If the global movement is to flourish, which I believe it will, such marriages of global and systemic analysis to specific reform efforts will be crucial...

...The campus antisweatshop movement was launched in 1997 by a group of Union Summer interns, during a period of intense graduate student labor organizing on many campuses...

...If students lacked an anticorporate analysis, they would have been satisfied by university codes of conduct, trusted universities and companies to enforce these codes, and seen no need for further action...

...But I have never heard USAS activists use hackneyed jargon...

...Indeed, where Isaac sees infinite adaptability, Hardt and Negri see porousness and fragility...

...Many chapters have launched living wage drives on campuses, for example, or are active in the Sodexho Marriott boycott, which is now widespread and has been strikingly successful...

...That principle has not been moralistic or purist, but practical...

...Sitting down with companies at the boardroom table is very different from sitting across from them at the bargaining table, and students' opposition to a world run by profithungry corporations has consistently prevented them from doing the former...

...Since its twelfth-century beginnings, student protest has, as Andrew Ross points out in a recent essay in the Village Voice, been an intra-elite struggle...

...That anticorporate consciousness led to a greater mistrust of the corporate university and an escalation in such confrontational tactics as sit-ins—which are effective...

...Isaac dismisses that political context and vision as "unhelpful," but I think it has been profoundly helpful, keeping the antisweatshop movement principled and yes, highly practical...

...AS A JOURNALIST who has written—and thought—a great deal about the student antisweatshop movement, I agree with Jeffrey C. Isaac that United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) has done an excellent job of achieving modest yet significant reformist victories...

...If anticapitalism is a "failed rhetoric," why are the global elites so worried about it...

...DISSENT / Fall 2001 111...

...Like other activists in the movement against corporate globalization, many students feel that solving these problems will require a fundamental re-imagining of economic power...

...In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, "Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or unequivocal...

...And someone better let the cops in on the secret...

...USAS is NOT the only group within the global movement to be pursuing specific, practical campaigns...

...Isaac characterizes the Worker Rights Coalition's pressure on companies—and students' negotiations with the corporate university —as compromises that belie USAS activists' radical rhetoric and somehow suggest the impossibility of fighting corporations in this new, magical, omni-corporate era...

...Yet I disagree profoundly with Isaac's assumption that such a strategic approach contradicts activists' anticorporate or even anticapitalist ideals...

...Isaac's understanding of contemporary resistance is impaired not only by his lack of vision —and his lack of sympathy for visionaries —but by his conception of contemporary capitalism as newly amorphous, flexible, and therefore indomitable...

...for them, the new regime of globalized capital "creates greater potential for revolution...

...Global Exchange, a leading force in larger protests against global corporate power—but regarded by almost no one as a radical organization—has forced Starbucks to buy "Fair Trade" coffee from growers who meet specific environmental and labor standards...

...It's always been tough to fight those in power...

...it deeply resonates with them...

...The victories at Kuk Dong would never have occurred, in part because the struggle itself would never have begun...

...Demanding better behavior from the corporate U is simply students' newest way of making political use of their own class power...