Finds Some Surprising "Root Causes,"
Ross, Benjamin
ACERTAIN KIND Of leftist just can't help blaming American imperialism for September 11. In the search for "root causes," their instinct to designate the United States as villain overwhelms their...
...Knowing no other left, rebellious spirits often step unthinkingly into roles prepared for them in this caricature of one...
...Refuting such ideas is a necessary if tiresome task, and those who have undertaken it deserve attention and sympathy...
...I F THE CULTURAL left is being nurtured by corporate marketing strategies, its persistent anti-Americanism may seem surprising...
...This, then, is the corporate version of rebellion...
...But this appeal to competitive efficiency has lost its relevance...
...The Czech president, an avant-garde playwright, friend of Frank Zappa, and ardent admirer of the Velvet Underground, would seem perfectly suited to the role of counterculture hero...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...And it's not without value for understanding ideologies that are nourished by corporate strategy...
...Overlooking the perpetrators' frank expressions of a thoroughly medieval worldview, they quickly conclude that terrorism must result from poverty and oppression...
...In the last analysis, disdain for democratic rebellion is inherent in the entire project of the corporate promoters of the counterculture...
...Organic food exemplifies the cycle by which rebellious styles pass into the profitable mainstream...
...A chain of organic supermarkets, the Whole Food Stores, dominates the market, featuring high markups, nonunion labor, and new stores opening in upscale suburbs...
...economic determinism is a poor guide indeed to the root causes of that movement...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Anybody who comes along and says, 'Let's off the pig,' has got her ear...
...American radicalism is no longer associated with any economic class...
...Bush administration trade negotiator Robert Zoellick doesn't go quite so far, accusing critics of trade treaties merely of "intellectual connections" with terrorists...
...The export of tangible goods has been overshadowed on the trade agenda by "intellectual property rights...
...There's an odd congruence here with the views of the big-business right...
...In this light, the "subversive" political and DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 41 AFTERSHOCKS cultural affinities of rock singers and movie actors are seen as just the opposite...
...Trade is about more than economic efficiency," he declaims, "it reflects a system of values . . . . Just as the Cold War reflected a contest of values, so will this campaign against terrorism...
...Why does it so resist refutation by mere facts...
...In most communities the war on terrorism receives near-unanimous support...
...The story of his decades-long struggle for his country's freedom, although nonviolent, does not lack for drama...
...There's even an intriguing commonality between the economic sectors that promote the two groups...
...These rights grant legally protected monopolies in the form of patents, trademarks, and copyrights...
...The blame for terror falls on poverty, on an economic mechanism that impoverishes— whether the offending system is labeled "imperialism" or "protectionism" is immaterial to the argument—and ultimately on the ideology that underlies that system...
...Noam Chomsky suggests that left intellectuals who do not join in his critique of American imperialism "increase the likelihood of further atrocities like that of Sept...
...BENJAMIN Ross wrote "Suburbs, Status, and Sprawl" in the Winter 2001 issue of Dissent...
...There's no mystery in how a Zoellick can gain influence...
...Similarly flawed analyses of the September 11 terrorist attacks reflect the same underlying intellectual disease: theoretical systems that are justified by metaphysical assertion, regardless of how they stand up to facts...
...Capitalist revolutionaries' instinctive empathy for their communist counterparts is rooted in a common understanding of what it really is that revolution, in the end, is about...
...Notwithstanding the avowed aim of opening markets, very rarely will forthcoming trade treaties create new outlets for what American workers produce...
...When trade treaties focus on intellectual property rights, they no longer encourage competition but suppress it...
...The rebellion of the marketers dispenses completely with demands and goals...
...In a society saturated with consumer goods, cultural distinctions of all kinds are heavily promoted as a way of creating profitable marketing niches, and alternative lifestyles create demand for new products...
...The owners—media giants, drug manufacturers, fashion conglomerates, and the like—now seek to give their privileges worldwide effect...
...But for the most part, the sponsors of the identity left and globalization are the same brand marketers, media conglomerates, and purveyors of fashion—sectors that profit not by filling material wants, but by satisfying psychic needs...
...Is the left afflicted, as right-wing publicists often suggest, with a peculiar madness that drives its victims to the point of self-caricature...
...The Chomskys and Zoellicks have no doubt got it wrong about Islamic fundamentalism...
...In a quotation spotted by Naomi Klein in Fortune, the president of MTV is described as "inherently an anti-establishment person...
...What accounts for the magnetic attraction that the corporate publicity machine, when it chooses to promote some version of radicalism, feels toward violent and tyrannical forms of leftism...
...Instead, it is concentrated in a geographic and social territory set off by clear lines of cultural demarcation...
...Automatic sympathy for the anti-American tyrant of the day is not an accidental add on, but a part of the package, reflecting the underlying convergence of marketing and cultural contestation...
...The conclusion is hard to escape: It is precisely because Havel is a committed democrat that he does not fit the role assigned to counterculture celebrities...
...Zoellick's ideas, too, have attracted notice, although only Alan Tonelson seems to have observed how closely his take on terrorism resembles the "anti-imperialist" view...
...When Zoellick parses the roots of terrorism to advance his agenda, he is opportunistically seizing the argument closest at hand, but his rhetorical excess does more than that...
...Instead of True Believers subsuming their personal will to an absolute, we find extreme moral relativism that asks a question unknown to Leninists: Who am I to judge...
...My intention here is not to pursue those disputes, but to search for root causes of a different kind...
...it reaches into avantgarde executive suites...
...Yet Havel is conspicuously passed over in the ceaseless promotion of the music he is so close to, and the use of his image to advertise vodka, skis, or haute couture would be unthinkable...
...Communism redefined the proletariat as an ideal type, one that real workers might or might not attain, and Mao went on to sever altogether the connection with factory work...
...But such reasons do not suffice to account fully for the phenomenon...
...Advocates of the corporate trade agenda quickly seized on the attacks to justify everything from fast-track trade negotiations to making entrepreneurs in China pay royalties on T-shirt logos...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...And in the place of the Popular Front, striving to break out of immigrant communities into the wider society comes an impulse to self-isolation...
...The countercultural wing of the business world is itself peculiarly attracted to revolutionary tyrants, who have become such common marketing icons that the irony is hardly noticed...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Their yearning for theocracy was really a hunger for bread and freedom...
...Chomsky's critics, some serious and many not, are too numerous to list...
...One needn't subscribe to conspiracy theories to see a Republican trade negotiator as a capitalist tool...
...To this end, they want a new minority, a subculture of self-defined radicals that serves as a distinct market in itself and, more important, incubates new fashions that spread to wider circles...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...For these philosophers, the point is neither to interpret the world nor to change it, but to sell to it...
...This role suits a certain kind of left, one that sheds concrete tasks and defines itself by its ability to embody the metaphysical essence of leftness...
...In a postindustrial economy, the unique selling proposition is difference...
...And corporations that strive to keep their own employees from organizing aren't much bothered by violations of labor rights elsewhere...
...Why the neverending search for fault in our own actions...
...Free traders overtly support the interests of multinational corporations...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...TO DISCERN the interests served by trade negotiators may not be hard, but a tougher riddle is posed by propensities deeply embedded in the left...
...This cult of violent revolution is not limited to creative types...
...Or is there something in the wider society that nourishes such attitudes...
...The entertainment media's treatment of Vaclav Havel is a telling sign that the antidemocratic bias is deep seated...
...The rebellious fringe seeks a new alternative, and the signature food of the antiglobalization movement is vegan...
...The overlap is incomplete...
...While none defend the terrorist acts of September 11, once they speak ritual words of condemnation, they move the discussion to the need to understand a somewhat overzealous response to American-sponsored injustice...
...The obvious motivations provide an incomplete explanation...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Most directly, and no doubt most important, his policies serve the shortterm financial interests of multinational corporations...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...This process of ceaseless differentiation creates the mechanism for continued economic expansion after markets have been sated with the identical goods turned out by mass-production industry...
...A peak of Tam's career was her 1995 "Mao collection," where models entered through a huge cut-out of Mao's profile...
...on teenagers' clothes the peace symbol now has about the same significance as Tommy Hilfiger's name...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...One Paris couturier offers a $350 Mao jacket that is sewn to order, with size and fabric specified over the Internet...
...The radical subculture, along its entire spectrum from confrontation to co-optation, is part of this process...
...For these thinkers, theory trumps reality...
...As long as the proletariat was conceived, at bottom, as a bunch of people who worked 42 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS in factories, one was unavoidably responsible to those people, and socialism remained a democratic movement...
...Poverty breeds terrorism, the reasoning goes, and free trade is the solution to world poverty...
...Featured on a limited-edition Swatch timepiece and on Fischer Revolution skis, it has appeared in ad campaigns for Apple computers and Smirnoff vodka...
...Any appeal to the society at large would be superfluous, if not directly counterproductive...
...Why the urge to explain the misdeeds of any anti-American tyrant, no matter how odious...
...The climate is quite different on many university campuses and in the Berkeleys, Santa Monicas, and Takoma Parks—neighborhoods known for their concentrations of post-sixties radicals...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Spring 2002 • 43...
...cultural radicals speak the language of antiglobalization but often allow themselves to fall into molds prepared by Hollywood and Madison Avenue...
...Paradoxically, it is the cultural delineation of the current left that points to its economic role...
...But economics is still the key to multinational business...
...When Hollywood promotes identity leftism, it is not undermining capitalism—which should surprise no one— but feeding fuel to the fires of consumer demand...
...Some on both sides go on to accuse anyone who questions their theoretical systems of giving ideological comfort to terrorism...
...In the search for "root causes," their instinct to designate the United States as villain overwhelms their spirit of critical inquiry...
...So assiduously has it been publicized that the understanding of radicalism as a potpourri of trendy cultural gestures has become deeply imprinted in American culture...
...Engineering students living in Europe on checks from home must have been the wretched of the earth...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...protection of drug patents is high on the agenda of trade negotiators, whereas no one would use Che Guevara to sell a cancer treatment...
...Homegrown anti-Americanism is nothing new, but today's extreme left is very different from that of half a century ago...
...As styles age, they move toward the mainstream...
...What once was hippie fare now graces yuppie tables...
...With the Black Bloc, anarchism becomes fashion statement as well as political ideology...
...To be sure, violent revolution generates the stark images that marketers prize, while peaceful reform is often messy and undramatic...
...This conception represents the logical conclusion of an evolution that began with Lenin...
...At the heart of economists' standard case for free trade is the glory of competition...
...For the Chomsky-Zoellick school of analysis, it matters little how well preconceived theories fit the facts about the men who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center...
...Another designer inspired by the Great Helmsman is Vivienne Tam, who dresses Julia Roberts, Madonna, and Britney Spears...
...What accounts for the persistence of such thinking...
...It serves to cover a gaping hole in the free traders' reasoning...
...the only content is the participants' self-definition as rebels...
...the aim is not to unite the people, but to subdivide market niches...
...But there is no contradiction here...
...Indeed, the writer Thomas Frank argues that the cultural inheritance of the sixties plays a crucial role in sustaining consumer capitalism...
...Everyone benefits when trade barriers disappear, they contend, because production shifts to more efficient sources of supply when new competitors enter a market...
...But the breadth of Zoellick's denunciations, lumping moderate critics of free trade with violent fundamentalists, compensates for their lack of Chomskian specificity...
...Mao Zedong, who clad a billion Chinese in identical garments, has long been a favorite of the fashion world...
...The traditional justification for free trade—that all nations benefit when each country specializes in the lines of work where 40 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS it is most efficient—is ill-fitted to current circumstances...
...Media conglomerates may not mind the suppression of Chinese and Cuban workers, but they can hardly think of Mao and Che as friends of capitalism...
...So ubiquitous has it become that Newsweek in 1997 published an essay on "Che Chic...
...The image of Che Guevara is an emblem of cool on T-shirts and posters...
...Its stance of perpetual rebellion sheds new styles into ever-widening circles, engendering a perpetual demand for things that are different from what "everyone else" buys...
...Having transformed economic debates into stock market commentary and rendered labor unions nearly invisible, the media have pushed conflict between capital and labor off the radar screen of mass culture...
...The parallels between the schools of reflexive anti-Americanism and big-business globalism are far from exact, but they are multiple and they are suggestive...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is editors@dissentmagazine.org . (4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...The free traders' cure for world poverty is different from that of anti-imperialists, to be sure, but their diagnosis of the terrorist disease is the same...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...By connecting terrorism to free trade, Zoellick relocates the debate from economics to the terrain of metaphysics and takes a logical detour around this contradiction...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
