Reviews
Zmagazine, Februari 2003
Battling Big Business
Camy Matthay
Battling Big Business is
an anthology of essays that exposes an arsenal of
counter-strategies multinationals have used against individuals and groups
resisting globalization. There is enough intrigue, bullying, and
unscrupulousness here to arouse the most jaded citizen and discomfit the
most placid. For those (already) engaged in the battle for the environment,
this book offers a shield of vicarious experience and cautionary advice.
Every essay in this anthology underscores the importance of respecting the
following revolutionary imperatives: know your enemies, be prepared, and do
not get sucked into the very system you are trying to take down.
The first part of Battling
Big Business presents a series of excellent
essays by investigative journalists in various corners of the world who have
shared the experience of having their concern over a local social or
environmental issue -be it the logging of public rainforests, the
deportation of immigrants, incineration of toxic waste, or other indignity-
expand into a global arena where the power brokers aren't political leaders
or justices but those at the wheel of multinational corporations.
Some of the corporate counter-strategies
exposed in Battling Big Business
seem laughable at first glance, e.g., McDonalds launching a libel suit
against a handful of anarchists for circulating a few hundred copies of a
leaflet calling into question the nutritional value of their burgers and the
source of their beef. Yet the details of what can happen when a corporation
shifts into high gear to silence its critics are sobering in that they often
enough include people so morally bankrupt that they're willing to lie,
spy,
loot, and infiltrate.
While infiltration is outright
deception, some of the case studies archived
in Battling Big Business bear testimony to the efficacy of corporate PR
practices that don't appear to be underhanded at all. Corporate 'largesse,'
for example, has proven to be a brilliant strategy -to pre-empt criticism
and strangle public discourse (particularly in recessionary periods that
leach needed funds from public services). More recent developments of this
sort of smiley-faced strategy is evidenced by the disturbing successes
corporations have had in cutting deals with their former adversaries, and in
inducing the defection of elite members of prominent environmental groups
(such as former Greenpeace UK director, Lord Melchett's defection to
Burson-Marsteller).
Andy Rowell analyzes the
former strategy in his perceptive essay 'Dialogue:
Divide and Rule,' while George Monbiot in his gem 'The Greens Get
Eaten,'
speculates about the moral frailty of defectors as well as the particular
weaknesses (and strengths) of environmentalism as one of the most
ideologically diverse movements in history.
Rowell reveals how corporate
counter-strategies such as dialogue lure NGOs
from a public arena into a private one from the 'courtroom to the
boardroom.' He also points out how dialogue gives the appearance of
fairness and goodwill so long as the public is led to believe that all have
equal access. Unfortunately, as plenty of the essays reveal, this has not
been the case. Invitations typically are extended to certain NGOs only a
process that can hardly be construed to be democratic. Furthermore,
corporate hosts tightly control the terms of the debate. The Shell
Corporation, for example, may exert itself to create 'stakeholder dialogue'
about extracting oil in the homelands of the Nahua Indians in Peru (as it
did in 1997 and 1998), but the discussion was limited to how the gas project
should go ahead, not whether it should go ahead at all.
On a positive note, as
destructive as these new strategies are in protecting
corporate power against democracy, that these counter-strategies are being
employed is a measure of the phenomenal attention activists have drawn to
hypocrisies in 'corporate behavior' (and, one would also hope, to
the sheer
inability of corporations under capitalism to do anything more than just
rhetorically address the common good). As encouraging as this perspective
is, Battling Big Business underscores the necessity for activists not to be
just assiduous in the safekeeping and execution of their goals, but to be
thinking faster and more creatively than their opponents. This is where the
second part of Battling Big Business comes in, offering a tactical menu so
perceptive, and so ripe for experimentation, that it seems to have arrived
from the future (well, as a matter of fact from a.f.r.i.k.a. and other
virtual orbits).
A stunning essay by autonome
a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe 'Communication Guerrillas:
Using the Language of Power' calls attention to two interrelated political
facts: one, that a given public will become inured to rituals that become
ubiquitous, and two that 'radical leftist rituals are needed by the state
to
provide symbolic balance against the extreme right as well as to justify new
repressive laws.' Keeping these facts in mind, a.f.r.i.k.a. creates a
compelling argument for activists to set aside the conventional logic of 'us
vs. them' trench warfare and instead to playfully 'distort the channels
and
modalities of communication.'
a.f.r.i.k.a. recounts a
campaign by the German antiracist network 'kein
mensch ist illegal' that employed these techniques with dramatic success
against Lufthansa who was involved in the deportation of refugees. 'kein
mensch ist illegal' produced a high-quality spoof leaflet in
customer-friendly corporate language advertising Lufthansa's new
'Deportation Class.'The leaflet, overidentifying with the logic of profit,
explained that the new lower-price fares were being offered to their
customers for the reduced level of comfort they might experience sitting
next to someone in handcuffs with tape over their mouth.
As it turned out, enough
people believed the airline was capable of such
cynical marketing that they started attacking the airline, the government,
and the policy. Ultimately, Lufthansa begged off on being the chauffer for
the state's unwanted an achievement that most felt would never have
occurred through direct or 'indirect' negotiation.
As a.f.r.i.k.a. pointed
out, the Deportation Class campaign exposed one of
many self-contradictions or 'hidden reversals' of the liberal market culture
of political and economic choice. The image of all commercial airlines is
based on the fantasy of a world without borders, that passengers are free to
travel anywhere in the world in the pursuit of information, sensations, and
goods. The 'no one is illegal' campaign revealed that though airplanes
make
the pleasure of traveling available to all customers, they also take some
people where they definitely do not want to go.
Subvertisments, like the
Deportation Class leaflet, as well as other
communication guerrilla tactics revealed in Battling Big Business have
enormous revolutionary potential in that they remind their audiences, i.e.,
the consumer-citizens of the world's privileged regions, of the suffering,
injustice, and destructive forces required to maintain modern industrial
civilization. Tactics like this -unexpected, irresistible, playful and
deeply provocative- call attention not so much to the 'bad guys' as to the
mind industry and ideology that allows them to rule.
I must admit I thought
this book would depress me as yet another tally of
hegemonic victories; on the contrary, Battling Big Business acted on me like
an amphetamine of hope. As part expose and part 'how to', this book is
powerful vaccine against corporate deception, as well as a deeply inspiring
source of ideas about engineering the breakdown of corporate globalism and
other institutions that inhibit caring, justice, and nonviolence.