Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Women Activists’ Accounts
Pam Alldred
Published as a contribution to the Dialogue section of
Feminist Review’s Special
issue on Globalisation, with kind permission from Palgrave.
http://www.feminist-
review.com/
The citation is:
Alldred, P. (2002) Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Women Activists’ Accounts,
Feminist Review, 70 (Special issue on Globalisation) p149-163
Anti-globalisation activists have been thoroughly demonised in the UK
national media in the past year, receiving the kind of coverage usually
reserved for ‘anarchists’ in the tabloid press. That is, the ‘mindless thugs’
caricature of young white men in black ‘hoodies’ intent on violence. Needless
to say, this type of coverage isn’t often accompanied by any representation of
protestors’ own views. In fact, when reports of protest can focus on ‘violence’,
actual political grievances – the issues and the need for direct action
responses to them - are ignored. Even more rare is the chance to hear
women’s anger at the injustice of global capitalism and frustration at the
broken promises of democracy. Contested though they are within ‘the
movement’, at least the terms ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-capitalism’ say
something about what is being protested against.
In the lead up to May Day 2001, protesters were vilified by the mainstream
media as ‘evil scum’, a dangerous ‘terrorist’ threat bringing chaos and rioting
to the streets of London, justifying tens of 1000s of police on duty and the
‘army on stand-by’. This hype did more to publicise the idea of a May Day
Monopoly (anti-privatisation) game on the actual streets of London than its
‘inventors’ could have done, and achieved the boarding up of much of Oxford
Street for a day (resulting in ‘lost sales’ which were totalled up in the ‘damage’
reported), but made violence almost inevitable in the context of aggressive
over-policing and the now familiar abuse of police powers to detain people in
order to search for dangerous weapons by holding them in a police cordon for
hours whilst ‘intelligence’ is gathered. But it is this vilification of protestors that
makes possible the kind of state violence we saw in Genoa in July 2001.
Protesters sleeping in a social centre could be perceived as so Other by the
Italian police that they brutally beat them, threatened to rape women with
batons, peed and spat on them and forced responses to their fascist rhetoric.
The big international protests that grab the media’s attention represent a
massive mobilisation of people angry at the global economic and social order,
disillusioned in the democratic process and at governments bowing to
corporate pressure. But they are sometimes assumed to be the movement,
rather than just one expression of it, and often a geographically mobile,
relatively privileged segment. Many activists in the North take their inspiration
from struggles and mobilisations of ordinary people in the South, and are at
pains to demonstrate how issues such as the privatisation of public services,
the erosion of workers’ rights and increasing inequality amongst people of the
North and poverty, hunger, poor health, sweatshop employment conditions,
environmental contamination and the denial of land-rights or corporate claims
over natural resources are opposite side of the same coin. It’s essential to
make these links apparent to pre-empt parochial or nationalist responses that
fail to see how competition damages those on both sides.
Activism is only the tip of the ice-berg of a global movement, but across the
world, opposition to injustice, ecological destruction and poverty is being
criminalized. Radical dissenters in the UK have already been deemed
terrorists under legislation passed in 2000. Even liberal commentators are
alarmed, but this move flows with chilling logic from a communitarian urge for
shared values, and Tony Blair’s assertion of particular views as those the
nation shares. The Terrorism Act 2000 redefines terrorism to include ‘actions
designed to influence a government’, for the ‘purpose of advancing a political,
religious or ideological cause’ and includes damage to property or
interference with an electronic system. In self-righteous condemnation of
protesters, the mainstream press then neglects to distinguish morally between
damage to property and violence against a person. A current campaign by the
UK socialist lawyers organisation asks: ‘How can fax blockades, uprooting of
GM crops, protest against refugee detention centres, protest against
globalisation, debt and oppressive regimes, a movement to make possible
‘another world’ all be terrorists? In early 2001, an action against the Act, by
London Reclaim the Streets (RTS) adorned London statues of Nelson
Mandela and Emmeline Pankhurst with a plaque labelling them ‘Terrorist’ and
asked who were the real terrorists: governments complicit in the threat to us
all, who put the profits of the oil industry before the reality of climate change
and the interests of the biotech industry before environmental safety, or those
who uproot GM crops to remove the risk?
Several women activists who were unable to contribute to this piece in the
end were going to describe women activists’ imprisonment for ‘criminal
damage’ to fighter planes and other tools of genocide, to highlight the moral
‘bankrupcy’ of a system that fails to distinguish the ‘criminality’ of disabling a
machine from the criminality of bombing raids; of allowing agribusiness to hold
hostage the environment by releasing GM crops before they are proven safe,
or the ‘terrorism’ of political protest using NVDA from the abuse of state power
to assert ideological meanings, yet deem ‘terrorist’ attempts to counter these
meanings. Another was going to contrast Western leaders’ laws to protect the
free movement of capital across the globe in search of greater profits, with the
increasing criminalisation of people’s migration as a result of poverty
exacerbated by international trading laws that protect the interest of rich
nations, wars caused by imperialist foreign interventions, or displacement by
environmental disasters resulting from unregulated industrialisation. But these
concerns are now horrifyingly centre-stage, confirming what we already knew:
that ‘you can’t be a terrorist if you’ve got an air-force’.
As George W Bush and Tony Blair justify a war on Afghanistan in the name of
defending a glorified Western democracy against the terrorist threat we see
the horrifying consequences of the imperialist belief in the superiority of
Western culture that Berlusconi expressed, and people so ‘other’ to and
threatening of ‘our civilisation’ that ‘we’ cannot hear their complaints. In the
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self-righteous conviction of George Bush, his rhetorical use of ‘democracy’
and ‘freedom’ ring hollow, not least given the insult to the word that his own
election was and his privileging of oil industry interests (now, at Kyoto, and in
Alaska). And as Tony Blair defends his actions on the international stage, he
presumes to speak for the British people and of the unassailable values of
‘civilisation’. But there is not a consensus in the UK about the values of
‘civilisation’. This is the ‘democracy’ that passes the Terrorism Act, and
promotes similar EC ruling defining terrorism as ‘urban violence’ by people
with the aim of ‘seriously altering the political, economic or social structures’.
Nor is there contentment about how democracy operates and this is why there
is a direct action movement. And how ‘civilised’ did the Italian police behave in
Genoa? Neither is there a consensus about the war here, (nor even is there in
the US). The reporting of the war and on opposition to it says even more
about the corporate media than did the accounts of may Day: where
organisers estimate 100 thousand people joined the London march to express
their opposition to the war, the media counts 15 thousand, and when on 13
th
October 2001, people in 100 different countries demonstrated against the war
on Afghanistan, there was barely a whisper in the UK national press.
The big demonstrations and international protests are just the tip of the ice-
berg of anger at the injustice of the global economic order, and even for
activists who chose to go on them, they are often just one expression of their
politics (and many activists do prefer more targeted interventions or focus
more on sustaining a counter-culture and developing positive alternatives).
Against the weight of the media hype only a few critical voices get heard (and
many prefer not to engage with the mainstream press anyway) which leaves
‘media tarts’ sounding like figureheads of the movement. So here are the
voices of a few women whose activism I respect greatly. Their accounts don’t
represent all of their politics or activities but in contrast to popular images give
some first person perspectives on current activism, and the political and
personal perspectives that can inform it.
The invitation to contribute framed them as ‘anti-globalisation activists’ and for
some the distinction between anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation is
significant, although in general, they chose to focus less on theoretical
distinctions and identifications, and more on what they do. Perhaps the desire
to make theoretical links and distinctions stems from an academic agenda,
rather than an activist one. As friends and co-activists linked through aspects
of a London-based activist scene, we share some social characteristics, many
are fulltime activists and some work through different kinds of campaigns and
organisations. All are based in the UK, though not all are British, first-
language English or white, some choose pseudonyms.
Six accounts cannot convey the range of perspectives among activists in this
small corner of the movement, let alone women’s resistance more broadly.
But they do offer some illustrations of the connections that individual women
draw between the politics that inform their activism and their everyday lives
and local environments. They demonstrate how material practices and
symbolic acts are sometimes linked in cultures of resistance. The first two
accounts highlight the immediacy of activism for women, both in terms of its
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urgency and its connection to everyday lives through food and emotional well-
being. The first contrasts the global reach of the biotech industry with
resistance rooted in the local and respecting the particular. The second
emphasises the importance of emotional support and self-care as values too
easily trampled in the rat-race, and as essential for making activism itself
sustainable. Both describe the pleasure of developing non-hierarchical ways
of working with other women.
Joyce
They say that the revolution must start in the kitchen, and for me, it did. I was a
waitress, and then a cook for about 16 years. I love everything about food - colours,
smells, flavours, textures, preparing, eating and sharing it - I love its histories, myths,
etiquettes, cultures - alimentary alchemy. It is the very stuff of life, a globally common
experience and the basis for our relationships as social beings. At least it should be.
In the autumn of 1997, the first shipment of genetically engineered soy from the USA
was imported into Britain. I clearly remember reading an article in a newspaper
magazine about genetic engineering, and thinking after the first paragraph how
exciting it sounded. Half way through the article, there was a knot in my stomach and
I felt sick, because this didn't just threaten the ingredients I loved, it threatened life on
earth.
I realised that no matter how wonderful any ’famous' NGO was, it was no longer
acceptable for me to let them save the world on my behalf. So from passive to
active... I've been working on the genetics issue ever since, and it's been a steep
learning curve. I work with a brilliant bunch of people, in an office that supports
grassroots campaigners. We all work under the banner of the Genetic Engineering
Network, which is an amazing and diverse collection of individuals and groups all
over the UK, and increasingly, all around the world, resisting the imposition of genetic
engineering, and ultimately of corporate control over our lives and the world we live
in.
I find it no coincidence, that not only has the campaign been one of the most inspiring
and truly common causes in the environmental movement, but it also has the best
gender balance. There are so many ordinary women doing amazing things. The
diversity of the campaign, the willingness to listen, share, and to decide things by
consensus owe a lot to the way that women work best. The woman in Dorset,
England, who has tirelessly written letters and produced leaflets for as long as I have
known her, the grandmother in Kenya, who feeds 13 of her family on 2 acres of land
with local seed, after having rejected the chemical cocktail promoted by the
multinationals, the mother in Andra Pradesh, India, who grows 85 distinct local
varieties of crops on her 5 acres, to share with neighbouring farmers, the woman that
physically stopped a tractor sowing GE seed in Scotland, with her daughter on her
shoulders, the cartoonist, the bannermaker, the women that pull up GE crops. None
of them would thank me for telling you their names, none of them are (thankfully) the
only ones doing what they do, but all of them gloriously unique. That's not to say
there aren't amazing men working with us too, there are, but the key phrase is 'with
us'.
Undoubtedly, the state of the world has become so polarised, and so desperate, that
the movements resisting the dominant paradigm of trade, and the suffocating
concentration of power in the hands of a few are drawing more people into them. For
some, this means replacing one system with another, a 'blueprint for change', and as
the corporate media insists on lumping us all into convenient boxes, we are
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increasingly being represented by the learned opinions of 'authorities', which really
means other political parties with an axe to grind, authors whose publishers want to
sell more books, or 'stars' from the cult of the media. But there is no one solution, no
'onesizefitsall', no rigid recipe or cure all - that's the whole point. This alternative
evangelism stems from the same arrogance as the system that controls us now - it
may look simple on paper, but authoritarian hierarchies will no more lead us to our
future vision than trade liberalisation will see women paid wages for housework. I
rarely feel emboldened or empowered by experts, I usually feel inadequate. I get my
inspiration from the dynamism and energy, the creativity, compassion and resilience
of ordinary people. Change comes from listening, adapting ideas, seeking
understanding and common ground, recognising and reconciling our differences and
diversity.
There is a wind of change blowing, and it's coming from the South. The South is the
disenfranchised, the unheard, the poor. A vast majority of the people who could be
thus described are women, wherever they live.
In any war, throughout history, attacking the food supply of the enemy has been an
obvious target. In 2001, Palestinian olive groves are being cut down, and fields
trashed by the Israeli army. Campesinos in Colombia are having their plots
indiscriminately sprayed by aeroplanes loaded with pesticides, their crops are dying
and their children exposed to chemical burns - there is no particular reason for
choosing these examples; there are many more. It is the nature of overt war, and
control. Yet there is an implicit war being waged, that has been going on for the last
50+ years. It is the pre-emptive strike, to ensure there will be no choice, no
alternative, no resistance. Women, especially in the North, hardly noticed when
common land was disappeared into private hands, when choices at the shops
became restricted to 4 types of fizzy drinks and 2 types of tomatoes, in one of 4 or 5
supermarket chains. Food autonomy was replaced by convenience, and farmers
were 'persuaded' by market forces to stop saving seed, and were instructed by agro-
experts to grow food to feed processing factories not people. The chemical facilities
that manufactured bombs and weapons of war were converted to produce fertilisers
and pesticides. Genetic engineering is the latest instalment in this catalogue of
control. This is still largely to happen in the global South, the last market for
expansionism. 80% of the world's seed is still farm saved, and 60% of the world's
agriculturists are women.
Meanwhile, the assault continues. Transnational corporations have quietly acquired
patents on the genes responsible for breast cancer, common food staples, traditional
medicines. Legal mechanisms designed to protect industrial invention have been
applied to the natural world, our global commons, the living earth is being poisoned
and women stand and weep as they watch their children fall ill, of cancers and other
diseases of industrialisation.
I know that these are things that will consume the rest of my life, on a daily basis - yet
I don't want to spend my life just fighting. There can be no environmental justice
without social equity, and yet at least 50% of the world's finest minds and bravest
spirits have never been invited to contribute towards the solutions. That's you and
me, girlfriend, it's what gets me out of bed every morning.... so let's go out and plant
some seeds (of resistance).
To find out more about the genetic engineering network, visit
www.geneticsaction.org.uk
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