Naming the Enemy

The events around the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle drew attention to the rise of social movements opposing globalization and the power of corporations. This book provides an analysis of these movements, presenting the critiques they make of growth, consumption and dependence.

A new movement of 'anti-globalists', in Time Magazine's words (24 April 2000), now 'oppose corporate dominion over the planet's poor and disfranchised'. Naming the Enemy is the first systematic documentation of this international resistance to transnational corporations and globalization which has so recently burst into the public gaze with the street protests in Seattle, Washington, London and Prague. A wide and heterogeneous range of social movements now oppose the very fundamentals of market capitalism. Their challenge is beginning, Amory Starr shows, to amount to a sweeping critique of its purposes and practice. She explains how these movements understand their enemies and what sort of future they envision. There are, she suggests, three basic types: Movements trying to constrain corporate power through democratic institutions and direct action; Movements attempting a completely different kind of 'globalization from below' in which corporations will be reshaped in the service of new international democratic structures that will be populist, participatory and just; Movements seeking to delink their localities and communities from the global economy and rebuild instead small-scale socieites in which large corporations have no role at all. This new phenomenon has received scant media or scholarly attention. But it is likely to become much more important politically as the globalized economy dominated by giant corporations and institutions like the World Bank and IMF fails to deliver on jobs, social justice, Third World development and the environment. The course of this new kind of political struggle will have huge implications for human welfare and civil liberties. This unique and important book is relevant to activists as well as students and scholars of globalization, new social movements and political economy.