symploke

The World Economic Forum, a travelling circus when not a moveable feast, has been protested loudly and one hopes significantly by a broad spectrum of people—hippies, concerned mums, school children, as well as academics and trade unionists—everywhere it has been hosted in recent years, from Seattle, to Melbourne and Prague, to list only the most inflamed cases. In Melbourne, a group calling themselves the S11 Alliance barricaded the conference venue (the Crown Casino in Melbourne) with their bodies and by doing so managed to prevent several hundred delegates from getting to the conference. ¹ Of course they weren’t able to stop the forum altogether, but they did manage to raise enough doubts about security to compel the casino to close its gaming floors for three days.

Watching all this on the news, I couldn’t help but think of the wonderfully satirical closing caption of Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep now in the fire” film clip, which was filmed on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). ² Although the band’s performance managed to cause the NYSE to close trading early, and gave a few stock brokers a bit of a scare, ultimately, as the caption put it: “no money was harmed.” I thought of this because most of the vox pops with so-called business leaders were very concerned that all the protesting would somehow do just that: harm the money. The clarion cry was this: “This protest will show the world that Australia isn’t a safe place to invest. And that being the case the Aussie dollar will never recover against the greenback.” Thus it could literally be said that the police guarding the conference venue were protecting money. [End Page 102]

The forum’s aim, as the protesters understood it, and I doubt they were far wrong, was to give the global business sector an opportunity to tell Australian and Asian governments how to adjust their legislation so as to maximize profit making for multi-nationals keen to exploit this region. In other words, at the mercy of their own weak currencies, the public sector delegates were there to find out how they could make themselves even more amenable to global capital. What was bargained away, then, was welfare safety nets, minimum wages, and all those things only a sheltered economy can afford in this day and age. Thus the S11’s slogan was explicitly “anti-globalization,” but not of a “de-linking” variety. Instead it sought something of the order of an equitable form of globalization (whatever that might mean).

As it happened, I was reading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s new book, Empire at the time of this event. Thus the news seemed a daily affirmation of at least one component of their argument, namely the sobering diagnosis that the police’s job today is to protect money. But, I have to say, it also gave me good reason to feel much less hopeful about the utopian dimension of their argument, that labor itself contains the seeds of a changed future. In 1972, Deleuze and Guattari thought a revolutionary investment of desire was capable of sowing enough discord to actually bring about radical change at the world-historical level. Today, particularly after reading Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence, it is hard to be so optimistic.

Thus it is almost with nostalgia that we now look back on a book like Anti-Oedipus, which amidst the oil crisis and stagflation still had enough confidence in the future to ask: “where will revolution come from, and in what form within the exploited masses?” (Deleuze 378). Three decades later, the exasperating question of our age is whether or not things can continue as they are much longer? Strangely, though, this question is prompted not by a sense of imminent disaster but the feeling that one is long overdue. At the end of the nineteenth century pundits and politicians alike could see that war and some major reorganization of the social structure was imminent, the rising swell of forces meant that it was just a matter of time before it all...