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

capitalism and Soviet communism. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, that left only one alternative, or so it seemed. Institutions like the World Bank and IMF havebeen busily “adjusting” economies in Eastern Europe and Asia to help them get with the program: privatizing services, relaxing regulation of foreign corporations, weakening unions, building huge export industries.
    All this is why it is so significant that yesterday’s head-on attack against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF happened here, in the Czech Republic. This is a country that has lived through both economic orthodoxies, where the Lenin busts have been replaced by Pepsi logos and McDonald’s arches.
    Many of the young Czechs I met this week say that their direct experience with communism and capitalism has taught them that the two systems have something in common: they both centralize power in the hands of a few, and they both treat people as if they are less than fully human. Where communism saw them only as potential producers, capitalism sees them only as potential consumers; where communism starved their beautiful capital, capitalism has overfed it, turning Prague into a Velvet Revolution theme park.
    The experience of growing up disillusioned with both systems explains why so many of the activists behind this week’s event call themselves anarchists, and why they feel an intuitive connection with peasant farmers or the urban poor in developing countries, fighting huge institutions and faceless bureaucracies like the IMF and World Bank.
    What connects these issues is a critique not of who is in power—the state versus the multinationals—but of how power is distributed, and a belief that decision making is always more accountable when it’s closer to the people who mustlive with the decisions. At its root is a rejection of “trust us” culture, no matter who is the expert of the moment. During the Velvet Revolution, the parents of many young activists in Prague successfully fought to change who was in power in their country. Their children, sensing that it still isn’t the Czech people, are now part of a global movement challenging the mechanisms of power centralization itself.
    At a globalization conference in the lead-up to the Prague meeting, Indian physicist Vandana Shiva explained mass rejection of World Bank projects as less a dispute over a particular dam or social program and more a fight for local democracy and self-government. “The history of the World Bank,” she said, has been “to take power away from communities, give it to a central government, then give it to the corporations through privatization.”
    The young anarchists in the crowd nodded. She sounded just like them.

Toronto
Anti-poverty activism and the violence debate
    June 2000
    How do you organize a riot? That is an important question right now for John Clarke, the most visible member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Last week OCAP held a rally to protest the spiralling homelessness that has led to twenty-two street deaths in seven months. After it turned into a pitched battle with charging horses and riot police confronted by bricks and boards, Clarke was instantly singled out as a Machiavellian puppeteer, pulling the strings of a limp, witless rent-a-mob.
    Several unions threatened to withdraw their funding from the anti-poverty group, and Clarke himself faces criminal charges for allegedly inciting a riot. [The charges are still pending.] Most commentators took it as a given that the demonstrators could never have decided all on their own to fight back when the police stormed the crowd with clubs and horses. After all, they came armed with swimming goggles and vinegar-soaked bandanas, so clearly they were ready for battle (never mind that this gear was meant as protection against the inevitable tear gas and pepper spray, which even the most peaceful and law-abiding demonstrators have sadly come to expect from the police). Someone must have