from 23 april 2004
blue vol III, #7
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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.



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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