There’s an odd congruence here with the views of the big-business right. Advocates of the corporate trade agenda quickly seized on the attacks to justify everything from fast-track trade negotiations to making entrepreneurs in China pay royalties on T-shirt logos. Poverty breeds terrorism, the reasoning goes, and free trade is the solution to world poverty. The free traders’ cure for world poverty is different from that of anti-imperialists, to be sure, but their diagnosis of the terrorist disease is the same.
Some on both sides go on to accuse anyone who questions their theoretical systems of giving ideological comfort to terrorism. Noam Chomsky suggests that left intellectuals who do not join in his critique of American imperialism “increase the likelihood of further atrocities like that of Sept. 11.” Bush administration trade negotiator Robert Zoellick doesn’t go quite so far, accusing critics of trade treaties merely of “intellectual connections” with terrorists. But the breadth of Zoellick’s denunciations, lumping moderate critics of free trade with violent fundamentalists, compensates for their lack of Chomskian specificity.
For the Chomsky-Zoellick school of analysis, it matters little how well preconceived theories fit the facts about the men who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center. Engineering students living in Europe on checks from home must have been the wretched of the earth. Their yearning for theocracy was really a hunger for bread and freedom. The blame for terror falls on poverty, on an economic mechanism that impoverishes—whether the offending system is labeled “imperialism” or “protectionism” is immaterial to the argument—and ultimately on the ideology that underlies that system. For these thinkers, theory trumps reality.
Refuting such ideas is a necessary if tiresome task, and those who have undertaken it deserve attention and sympathy. Chomsky’s critics, some serious and many not, are too numerous to list. Zoellick’s ideas, too, have attracted notice, although only Alan Tonelson seems to have observed how closely his take on terrorism resembles the “anti-imperialist” view. My intention here is not to pursue those disputes, but to search for root causes of a different kind. What accounts for the persistence of such thinking? Why does it so resist refutation by mere facts?
There’s no mystery in how a Zoellick can gain influence. Most directly, and no doubt most important, his policies serve the short-term financial interests of multinational corporations. One needn’t subscribe to conspiracy theories to see a Republican trade negotiator as a capitalist tool.
When Zoellick parses the roots of terrorism to advance his agenda, he is opportunistically seizing the argument closest at hand, but his rhetorical excess does more than that. It serves to cover a gaping hole in the free traders’ reasoning. The traditional justification for free trade—that all nations benefit when each country specializes in the lines of work where it is most efficient—is ill-fitted to current circumstances. Notwithstanding the avowed aim of opening markets, very rarely will forthcoming trade treaties create new outlets for what American workers produce. The export of tangible goods has been overshadowed on the trade agenda by “intellectual property rights.” These rights grant legally protected monopolies in the form of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The owners—media giants, drug manufacturers, fashion conglomerates, and the like—now seek to give their privileges worldwide effect.
At the heart of economists’ standard case for free trade is the glory of competition. Everyone benefits when trade barriers disappear, they contend, because production shifts to more efficient sources of supply when new competitors enter a market. But this appeal to competitive efficiency has lost its relevance. When trade treaties focus on intellectual property rights, they no longer encourage competition but suppress it. By connecting terrorism to free trade, Zoellick relocates the debate from economics to the terrain of metaphysics and takes a logical detour around this contradiction. “Trade is about more than economic efficiency,” he declaims, “it reflects a system of values . . . . Just as the Cold War reflected a contest of values, so will this campaign against terrorism.”
To discern the interests served by trade negotiators may not be hard, but a tougher riddle is posed by propensities deeply embedded in the left. Why the urge to explain the misdeeds of any anti-American tyrant, no matter how odious? Why the never-ending search for fault in our own actions? Is the left afflicted, as right-wing publicists often suggest, with a peculiar madness that drives its victims to the point of self-caricature? Or is there something in the wider society that nourishes such attitudes?
Homegrown anti-Americanism is nothing new, but today’s extreme left is very different from that of half a century ago. Instead of True Believers subsuming their personal will to an absolute, we find extreme moral relativism that asks a question unknown to Leninists: Who am I to judge? And in the place of the Popular Front, striving to break out of immigrant communities into the wider society comes an impulse to self-isolation. American radicalism is no longer associated with any economic class. Instead, it is concentrated in a geographic and social territory set off by clear lines of cultural demarcation. In most communities the war on terrorism receives near-unanimous support. The climate is quite different on many university campuses and in the Berkeleys, Santa Monicas, and Takoma Parks—neighborhoods known for their concentrations of post-sixties radicals.
Paradoxically, it is the cultural delineation of the current left that points to its economic role. In a society saturated with consumer goods, cultural distinctions of all kinds are heavily promoted as a way of creating profitable marketing niches, and alternative lifestyles create demand for new products. The radical subculture, along its entire spectrum from confrontation to co-optation, is part of this process. With the Black Bloc, anarchism becomes fashion statement as well as political ideology. As styles age, they move toward the mainstream; on teenagers’ clothes the peace symbol now has about the same significance as Tommy Hilfiger’s name.
Indeed, the writer Thomas Frank argues that the cultural inheritance of the sixties plays a crucial role in sustaining consumer capitalism. Its stance of perpetual rebellion sheds new styles into ever-widening circles, engendering a perpetual demand for things that are different from what “everyone else” buys. This process of ceaseless differentiation creates the mechanism for continued economic expansion after markets have been sated with the identical goods turned out by mass-production industry.
Organic food exemplifies the cycle by which rebellious styles pass into the profitable mainstream. What once was hippie fare now graces yuppie tables. A chain of organic supermarkets, the Whole Food Stores, dominates the market, featuring high markups, nonunion labor, and new stores opening in upscale suburbs. The rebellious fringe seeks a new alternative, and the signature food of the antiglobalization movement is vegan.
In this light, the “subversive” political and cultural affinities of rock singers and movie actors are seen as just the opposite. Having transformed economic debates into stock market commentary and rendered labor unions nearly invisible, the media have pushed conflict between capital and labor off the radar screen of mass culture. When Hollywood promotes identity leftism, it is not undermining capitalism—which should surprise no one—but feeding fuel to the fires of consumer demand.
If the cultural left is being nurtured by corporate marketing strategies, its persistent anti-Americanism may seem surprising. But there is no contradiction here. The countercultural wing of the business world is itself peculiarly attracted to revolutionary tyrants, who have become such common marketing icons that the irony is hardly noticed.
The image of Che Guevara is an emblem of cool on T-shirts and posters. Featured on a limited-edition Swatch timepiece and on Fischer Revolution skis, it has appeared in ad campaigns for Apple computers and Smirnoff vodka. So ubiquitous has it become that Newsweek in 1997 published an essay on “Che Chic.”
Mao Zedong, who clad a billion Chinese in identical garments, has long been a favorite of the fashion world. One Paris couturier offers a $350 Mao jacket that is sewn to order, with size and fabric specified over the Internet. Another designer inspired by the Great Helmsman is Vivienne Tam, who dresses Julia Roberts, Madonna, and Britney Spears. A peak of Tam’s career was her 1995 “Mao collection,” where models entered through a huge cut-out of Mao’s profile.
This cult of violent revolution is not limited to creative types; it reaches into avant-garde executive suites. In a quotation spotted by Naomi Klein in Fortune, the president of MTV is described as “inherently an anti-establishment person. Anybody who comes along and says, ‘Let’s off the pig,’ has got her ear.”
What accounts for the magnetic attraction that the corporate publicity machine, when it chooses to promote some version of radicalism, feels toward violent and tyrannical forms of leftism? The obvious motivations provide an incomplete explanation. To be sure, violent revolution generates the stark images that marketers prize, while peaceful reform is often messy and undramatic. And corporations that strive to keep their own employees from organizing aren’t much bothered by violations of labor rights elsewhere. But such reasons do not suffice to account fully for the phenomenon. Media conglomerates may not mind the suppression of Chinese and Cuban workers, but they can hardly think of Mao and Che as friends of capitalism.
The entertainment media’s treatment of Vaclav Havel is a telling sign that the antidemocratic bias is deep seated. The Czech president, an avant-garde playwright, friend of Frank Zappa, and ardent admirer of the Velvet Underground, would seem perfectly suited to the role of counterculture hero. The story of his decades-long struggle for his country’s freedom, although nonviolent, does not lack for drama. Yet Havel is conspicuously passed over in the ceaseless promotion of the music he is so close to, and the use of his image to advertise vodka, skis, or haute couture would be unthinkable. The conclusion is hard to escape: It is precisely because Havel is a committed democrat that he does not fit the role assigned to counterculture celebrities.
In the last analysis, disdain for democratic rebellion is inherent in the entire project of the corporate promoters of the counterculture. For these philosophers, the point is neither to interpret the world nor to change it, but to sell to it. In a postindustrial economy, the unique selling proposition is difference; the aim is not to unite the people, but to subdivide market niches. To this end, they want a new minority, a subculture of self-defined radicals that serves as a distinct market in itself and, more important, incubates new fashions that spread to wider circles. Any appeal to the society at large would be superfluous, if not directly counterproductive.
This role suits a certain kind of left, one that sheds concrete tasks and defines itself by its ability to embody the metaphysical essence of leftness. This conception represents the logical conclusion of an evolution that began with Lenin. As long as the proletariat was conceived, at bottom, as a bunch of people who worked in factories, one was unavoidably responsible to those people, and socialism remained a democratic movement. Communism redefined the proletariat as an ideal type, one that real workers might or might not attain, and Mao went on to sever altogether the connection with factory work. The rebellion of the marketers dispenses completely with demands and goals; the only content is the participants’ self-definition as rebels. Capitalist revolutionaries’ instinctive empathy for their communist counterparts is rooted in a common understanding of what it really is that revolution, in the end, is about.
This, then, is the corporate version of rebellion. So assiduously has it been publicized that the understanding of radicalism as a potpourri of trendy cultural gestures has become deeply imprinted in American culture. Automatic sympathy for the anti-American tyrant of the day is not an accidental add on, but a part of the package, reflecting the underlying convergence of marketing and cultural contestation. Knowing no other left, rebellious spirits often step unthinkingly into roles prepared for them in this caricature of one.
The parallels between the schools of reflexive anti-Americanism and big-business globalism are far from exact, but they are multiple and they are suggestive. Similarly flawed analyses of the September 11 terrorist attacks reflect the same underlying intellectual disease: theoretical systems that are justified by metaphysical assertion, regardless of how they stand up to facts. There’s even an intriguing commonality between the economic sectors that promote the two groups. Free traders overtly support the interests of multinational corporations; cultural radicals speak the language of antiglobalization but often allow themselves to fall into molds prepared by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The overlap is incomplete; protection of drug patents is high on the agenda of trade negotiators, whereas no one would use Che Guevara to sell a cancer treatment. But for the most part, the sponsors of the identity left and globalization are the same brand marketers, media conglomerates, and purveyors of fashion—sectors that profit not by filling material wants, but by satisfying psychic needs.
The Chomskys and Zoellicks have no doubt got it wrong about Islamic fundamentalism; economic determinism is a poor guide indeed to the root causes of that movement. But economics is still the key to multinational business. And it’s not without value for understanding ideologies that are nourished by corporate strategy.
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