Thinking globally, acting locally: women activists' accounts
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70 thinking globally, acting
locally: women activists’ accounts Pam Alldred Anti-globalization activists have been thoroughly demonized in the UK national media in the past year, receiving the kind of coverage usually reserved for ‘anarchists’ in the tabloid press. That is, the ‘mindless thugs’ caricature of young white men in black ‘hoodies’ intent on violence. Needless to say, this type of coverage is not often accompanied by any representation of protestors’ own views. In fact, when reports of protest can focus on ‘violence’, actual political grievances – the issues and the need for direct action responses to them – are ignored. Even more rare is the chance to hear women’s anger at the injustice of global capitalism and frustration at the broken promises of democracy. Contested though they are within the movement, at least the terms anti-globalization or anti-capitalism say something about what is being protested against. In the lead up to May Day 2001, protesters were vilified by the mainstream media as ‘evil scum’, a dangerous ‘terrorist’ threat bringing chaos and rioting to the streets of London, justifying tens of thousands of police on duty and the ‘army on stand-by’. This hype did more to publicise the idea of a May Day Monopoly (anti-privatization) game on the actual streets of London than its ‘inventors’ could have done, and achieved the boarding up of much of Oxford Street for a day (resulting in lost sales that were totalled up in the ‘damage’ reported), but made violence almost inevitable in the context of aggressive over-policing and the now familiar abuse of police powers to detain people in order to search for dangerous weapons by holding them in a police cordon for hours whilst ‘intelligence’ is gathered. But it is this vilification of protestors that makes possible the kind of state violence we saw in Genoa in July 2001. Protesters sleeping in a social centre could be perceived as so Other by the Italian police that they brutally beat them, threatened to rape women with batons, peed and spat on them and forced responses to their fascist rhetoric. The big international protests that grab the media’s attention represent a massive mobilization of people angry at the global economic and social order, disillusioned in the democratic process and at governments bowing to corporate pressure. But they are sometimes assumed to be the movement, rather than just one expression of it, and often a geographically mobile, relatively privileged segment. Many activists in the North take their inspiration
feminist review 70 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (149–163)
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from struggles and mobilizations of ordinary people in the South, and are at pains to demonstrate how issues such as the privatization of public services, the erosion of workers’ rights and increasing inequality amongst people of the North, and poverty, hunger, poor health, sweatshop employment conditions, environmental contamination, the denial of land-rights and corporate claims over natural resources i
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