Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

fake million-dollar bills. Ideas that only a handful of policy wonks used to care about—campaign finance reform, media concentration— have taken on a life of their own. They are floating back as street-theatre skits on Figueroa Street and astonishingly successful participatory media networks like Indymedia, which has taken over the sixth floor of this building, the Patriotic Hall.
    With so much springing up in just a few years, how can we dare to be hopeless about the possibility for change in the future? Remember, the young people taking on corporate power on the streets are the very ones who had been written off as beyond redemption. This is the generation that grew up entirely under the marketing microscope. They were the ones with commercials in their classrooms; stalked on the Internet by voracious market researchers; with youth subcultures fully bought and sold; told that their greatest aspiration should be to become a dot-com millionaire at eighteen; and taught that rather than being a citizen they should learn “to be the CEO of Me Inc.” or, in the catch phrase of the moment, “a Brand Called You.” These people were supposed to have grape Fruitopia in their veins instead of blood, and Palm Pilots instead of brains.
    And, sure, some do. But many are going in precisely the opposite direction. For this reason, if we are to build a broad-based movement that challenges the money culture,we need activism that functions on concrete policy levels. But it also has to go deeper, to address the cultural and human needs created by the commodification of identity itself. It is going to have to recognize the need for non-commodified experiences and to reawaken our desire for truly public spaces, and for the thrill of building something collectively. Maybe we should start asking ourselves whether the free software movement and Napster are part of this phenomenon. Maybe we have to start liberating more privatized spaces, as the travelling activist caravan Reclaim the Streets does, throwing wild parties in the middle of busy intersections just to remind people that streets were once civic spaces as well as commercial ones.
    This reclaiming is already happening on many fronts. The commons is being reclaimed around the world: by media activists, by landless peasants occupying unused land, by farmers rejecting the patenting of plants and life forms.
    And democracy is being reclaimed as well, by the people in this room and in the street outside. It doesn’t want to be enclosed in the Staples Center, or penned in by the bankrupt logic of the two corporate parties. And here in Los Angeles, the activism that came to world attention in Seattle is bursting out of its own confines, transforming itself from a movement opposed to corporate power to one fighting for the liberation of democracy itself.

Prague
The alternative to capitalism isn’t communism, it’s decentralized power
    September 2000
    What seems to most enrage the delegates to the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague this week is the idea that they even have to discuss the basic benefits of free-market globalization. That discussion was supposed to have stopped in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and history ended. Only here we all are—old people, young people, thousands of us—literally storming the barricades of their extremely important summit.
    And as the delegates peer over the side of their ill-protected fortress at the crowds below, scanning signs that say “Capitalism Kills,” they look terribly confused. Didn’t these strange people get the memo? Don’t they understand that we all already decided that free-market capitalism was the last, best system? Sure, it’s not perfect, and everyone inside the meeting is awfully concerned about all those poor people and the environmental mess, but it’s not as if there’s a choice—is there?
    For the longest time, it seemed as if there were only two political models: Western