In the Wake of Madrid,
the U.S. Election Turns into a Global Referendum
by Cindy Milstein
The world gets smaller and scarier by the day. This
simple fact is the context for my morning routine: a
cup of coffee sipped to the latest news of terrorism.
It is equally the backdrop for my other media scan:
the U.S. presidential race. More and more these two
intertwine. The ballot box, as 3/11 in Madrid cruelly
announced, is now a front in a borderless war that
puts everyone at risk. But as the Spanish people
proved, it can also be turned into a
referendum - albeit one with a certain degree of
ambiguity.
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There are two probable reasons why the Spanish
electorate ousted the Popular Party three days after
the commuter train bombings. On the one hand, the mere
appearance of deception by the ruling government in
terms of who was responsible for the Madrid attacks
was justification enough in the voters’ eyes for a
change of leadership. The election essentially became
a popular initiative as to the head of state’s
trustworthiness in fighting terrorism - reason aplenty
for G. W. Bush (and Tony Blair) to tremble. A
subsequent antiwar ad in the New York Times says it
all: "Have You Noticed What’s Happening to Chief
Executives Who Lie?"
On the other hand, Spain’s election went well beyond
the honesty issue. Former Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar was one of Bush’s staunchest allies despite the
fact that 90 percent of the Spanish populace was
against joining the so-called coalition. In part,
Spaniards feared an escalation of violence, and on
that March morning, their apprehension was sadly
confirmed. Thousands demonstrated for peace on
election eve, and that sentiment catapulted the
Socialist Party to victory. Spanish troops may soon
withdraw from Iraq. Yet in the long run, something
more important won out.
While September 11 muffled critical voices within the
United States in a frenzy of flags and paranoia, March
11 seems to have had the opposite effect. The casualty
load has grown too heavy, too everyday, due to the
maneuvers of both political fundamentalists and
nation-states. Despite their grief, Spaniards demanded
in essence that the citizenry serve as "vigilant
custodians of freedom," to borrow a phrase from
Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. In prying open a
space for debate via nominally democratic mechanisms,
Spain has had a ripple effect. And perhaps nowhere has
the contest over notions such as "freedom" and
"democracy" been greater than in the United States. So
it should come as no surprise that Madrid has also
transmuted the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Rather than a vote for one person or party, then, the
Spanish election marked the start of a global
referendum concerning the geopolitical role of
nation-states - particularly the United States - in
Bush’s "war on terror."
There is an ambiguity to this
election-turned-referendum, however, initiated as it
was by al Qaeda (or some like-minded group). Madrid is
a tragic example of what can potentially happen when
the ethical concerns of the majority carry no sway.
Aznar, like Bush and Blair, had turned a deaf ear to
the massive antiwar protests a year earlier - a tension
between "leaders" and "people" that was in hindsight
ripe for deadly exploitation. The timing of the
explosions seemed geared to fix the Spanish election;
one can only hope this perverted strategy isn’t
repeated elsewhere. But the questions of veracity and
policy are no less significant simply because they
were raised in a terribly wrong manner. A nagging
thought remains: How can people both do the right
thing and avoid validating tactics intended to induce
fear?
Of course, fear is by no means the exclusive tool of
terrorists. The Bush administration has put anxiety to
good use for all sorts of unscrupulous moves, from
shepherding the Patriot Act to establishing Guatanamo
Bay to preemptively striking Iraq, and it will
continue to employ this method throughout the
electoral campaign. For instance, one of the first
Bush ads featured a glimpse of an "Arab male" at an
airport. Fear, xenophobic or otherwise, does not need
to be manufactured these days. The mentality behind
the all-too-real global warfare being waged by
powerful forces like Bush (or John Kerry, if elected)
and Bin Laden (or his brethren) has guaranteed that.
This is why the question of how social movements
should act in the face of such insecurity is so
crucial to one’s humanity.
But for libertarian anticapitalists in the United
States, the referendum’s ambiguity goes deeper. Spain
underscores a paradox: the lack of substantive
political alternatives offered by representative
democracies even as national elections take on added
importance in our interdependent world. The Spanish
electorate had little ability to act decisively except
within the circumscribed space of the polling booth,
but there was a choice beyond one country’s borders.
Spain’s new Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero represented a vote for peace - something Kerry
can’t claim - and yet only if the lens is narrowed to
avoid the structural violence under statecraft,
capitalism, and militarism. Elections can sometimes
function as popular initiatives, and yet only because
there is no place for most of us to participate
directly in making domestic and transnational
decisions.
The harsh reality is that, as always, without
fundamentally changing social relations rather than
political parties, this year’s U.S. presidential
election matters very little. And at the same time,
from a global perspective, it matters more than ever
- even if Bush only symbolizes a more obnoxious,
unilateral version of America-as-superpower than his
Democratic better half. The perplexing question for
antistatist leftists, then, is: How do we
simultaneously ignore the election spectacle and
engage in the influential political space it creates?
The dilemma goes deeper still. Spain ensured that
there is much more at stake in the U.S. election than
Bush versus Not-Bush; but the legitimate questioning
of U.S. geopolitics appears to be exacerbating
anti-Americanism. As one German man was overhead
explaining to his child during the Iraq invasion
anniversary, Berlin’s protesters were "against war and
the shitty Americans." Indeed, in the heart of
Germany’s capital, one sees signs reading "Americans
Go Home." This is not a specifically German problem;
anti-Americanism goes hand in glove with new forms of
nationalism across the globe. Yet even in a country
quite similar to our own, and arguably just as
complicit in structural domination despite its recent
antiwar stance, only 38 percent of Germans view the
United States with favor now, compared to 61 percent
just under two years ago (based on Pew Research Center
surveys). U.S. activists also subscribe to the lazy
dichotomy of "America bad" versus "Not-America good,"
or at the very least benign. One sees this in the
slogans here at home equating the United States with
empire, and as we all know from Star Wars, the empire
is evil.
No matter who wins the White House, the force of the
U.S. government will still be with us, domestically
and abroad. But the United States is only one player
- currently the biggest - within flexible,
multidirectional networks of hierarchical power that
include other states, regional blocs, transnational
corporations, supranational institutions, and
nongovernmental organizations. Placing blame on
America alone serves to mask the insidious kinds of
social control emerging under capitalist
globalization. Just consider the European Union’s
decision to appoint a counterterrorist coordinator at
the supra-state level in light of Madrid. Not only
does this represent a concentration of policing
powers, further eviscerating civil liberties; it is
also integral to developing a political bloc that
aspires to equal or exceed the U.S. government’s
might.
Beyond confusing a critique of the United States with
a critique of centralized governance, anti-Americanism
masks another source of hegemony: capitalism writ
global. America may look like the belly of this beast
given its power and wealth, and yet a singular focus
on the United States obscures the immanent dynamic of
capital. For what drives capitalism’s insatiable
hunger is not its location but its very locomotive: a
grow-or-die imperative. To thrive as a social system,
capitalism must incessantly push past limits (such as
time, space, and national boundaries), all the while
forging social relations in its own image. While
capitalism long ago commodified goods and labor, it
continues to extend into our leisure hours, our
subjectivity, and even our biology. And thanks to new
communications technologies coupled with a host of
structural and cultural changes since the 1970s, the
world’s people are brought closer together in
accelerated real time while being ever more bound to
capital’s constricting logic.
As such, another tension during this
election-as-referendum is: How do we, as "American"
critics of America, work against U.S. dominance and at
the same time, as transnational critics of capitalist
globalization, work against an anti-Americanism that
masks forms of domination, old and new?
Which brings me to the third of my daily
preoccupations: stories of global resistance. Like the
people of Georgia or Taiwan standing for days outside
their parliament and presidential palace,
respectively, when their recent national elections
seemed suspect. Like the people of Argentina and
Algeria, when their political sphere failed them
several years ago, initiating face-to-face assemblies.
Or like Spaniards, pouring into the streets by the
millions on March 12 with the simple message "no to
murder" during a time of sorrow and politics. These
are reminders of what is possible, if only as
preconditions for social reconstruction.
Our goal as antiauthoritarians in America should not
be to turn out the vote (though as voters who despise
Bush, we may want to do that too). Nor should it be to
worry about whether to vote or not (a minor irritant
relative to numerous other statist intrusions). Nor
should it be to match the presidential spectacle with
one of our own. Our aim should instead be to expand
people’s sense of political and social possibilities
in contrast to actually existing (non)democracy and
capitalism. For a political culture must first be
forged before politics - that is, self-governance - can
be imagined, much less constituted.
But we must also recognize that at present, fear
genuinely impacts how people choose or are permitted
to participate in political life. Such insecurity goes
beyond the fear of being blown up on the way to work.
The anxieties caused by capitalist globalization
concern whether one even has work, not to mention
food, health care, and so much more. As the
"anti-globalization" movement demonstrated, it is
possible to reshape political discourse, placing
discussions of problems like capitalism on the
worldwide map. A baby step, to be sure, on the road to
social transformation, and yet many people have been
politicized in and indeed through the process.
We should therefore turn this referendum’s question on
its head. With our projects and literature, we could
ask not how to best fight the war on terror - thereby
brushing aside the usual answers of more military or
surveillance, or conversely "give peace a chance" - but
how to best bring about security for all - thereby
sketching utopian alternatives, as radicals in Germany
are now doing in response to the government’s cuts to
social services with their far-reaching demand,
"Everything for everyone, and what’s more for free!"
Most crucially, we should organize around the U.S.
election as if the whole world were watching, because
it is; and we should watch the whole world, because we
need to.
Terror, elections, and extra-parliamentary politics:
such is the uneasy mix we’ve been handed by recent
world events. As Spaniards have indicated, it’s not
the politician one votes for or against that counts,
but how people collectively respond to critical global
issues. Ethical praxis can reconfigure the
geopolitical landscape. What kind of referendum will
we declare, with thoughtful words and proactive
actions, to help reduce fear and enlarge freedom this
election year?
-
Cindy Milstein
This essay was written for the May/June 2004 issue of
Left Turn magazine. Cindy
Milstein is a board member of
the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a faculty member
at the Institute for Social Ecology, coorganizer for
the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, and a
member of the Free Society Collective in Vermont. Her
work will soon appear in three forthcoming anthologies
on the global anticapitalist movement.
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