jump to Coase's Theorem

Glossary of Terms Relevant to Globalization
Iain A. Boal

The compiler salutes that small band of writers drawn to the
critical glossary as a literary form: first, contrarian
lexicographers such as Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) and
Charles Bufe (The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations); poets, too, of
a committed imagination with an accurate ear for the demoralization
of the dialect of the tribe - - and here I think, for example, of
Benjamin Peret, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Paulin; but most
to the purpose, a pair of critics, one American and the other Welsh
-- Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams -- who composed what the
former called "a dictionary of pivotal terms" and the latter dubbed
"a vocabulary of culture and society". These glossators were far
from nostalgic for some Adamic speech, for the "true meaning" of a
word; nor did they intend to combat, in the manner of reactionary
linguistic watchdogs, loose usage with precision, let alone
vulgarisms with a style book. It is, in fact, the active range of
meanings that matters, since the immense complexity and
contradiction within terms like "environment" and "violence"
register deep conflicts in the social order.



Language, on this view, does not just label things in the world; it
helps to constitute it. The naming of parts, the framing of
questions, the refusing to explain, are at once the prerogative and
the springs of power. Much more crucial to the powerful, however,
than their assertions -- that, say, a fugitive was "suffering from
drapetomania" -- are the presuppositions that underlie discourse. It
was one thing, in the ante-bellum South, to query the medical
diagnosis of drapetomania, defined as a "pathological propensity to
attempt to escape"; it was quite another to challenge the
institutions of slavery and medicine that conspired to pathologize
the seeking of freedom. Defunct vocabularies, and labels such as
drapetomania, abandoned by the classifying classes as either
obsolete (vis-a-vis some new regime of stigmata) or embarrassing
(after a struggle by those so labeled), are particularly revealing
of the strategic links between language and institutional sites of
power. The anti-capitalist movement, standing on terrain not of its
own choosing, too often retorts in an idiom satisfactory to the
sovereign.

Raymond Williams' explorations in historical semantics are much the
better known, but his Keywords was anticipated, a generation
earlier, by Kenneth Burke when he launched a critique of the left's
political lexicon in the face of corporate-fascist reaction to
capital's big twentieth century emergency. Burke recommended
"intellectual vagabondage" that would constitute "a grave
interference with the cultural code" of industrial modernity; he
proposed sabotage of the system by defending inefficiency,
pessimism, dissipation, mockery, distrust, hypochondria and treason.
One communist called Burke's negative aesthetic "the philosophy of
the petit bourgeois gone mad", and Burke didn't much disagree. In
view of the millennial coronation of business culture Kenneth
Burke's 1931 "Program" in Counter-Statement repays a fresh reading.

Then in April 1935, at the time of the popular front and the bienio
negro in Spain, Burke gave a brief address to the first American
Writers' Congress in New York on "Revolutionary Symbolism in
America". He told his audience that, when they weren't talking into
the mirror, they were using a patronizing language that was sure to
fail, simply because idealizing "the workers" in the same breath as
insisting on the absolute degradation of work under capitalism was a
rhetorical disaster. Burke went on to recommend "the people" rather
than "workers" as a mode of address, even though he was aware that,
in a society riven by hierarchies of class, gender, race and the
rest, "the people" has its own problems, to say the least; any
totalizing term is necessarily ideological. So hostile was the
reaction - -he was accused of proposing the rhetorical methods of
Hitler -- that Burke later hallucinated excrement dripping from his
tongue.

Another totalization -- there is none greater -- stamped the days of
Seattle, both on the streets and in the suites. I mean, of course,
the "globe" (and its derivatives), under which sign the committees
of capital and their opponents converged. "Globalization", which
began as business school jargon, became a cant word during the
nineties, but students of imperialism were frankly unimpressed by
the purported novelty of the phenomenon; already in 1848 two
pamphleteers had remarked that the "need of a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere." Actually, the connections are
still distinctly patchy; much of Africa lies unwired, and one in
three people in the world have never yet heard a phone ring.

But this is just to rehearse the banality that capitalist
development is uneven. More to the point -- and it goes some way to
account for the disturbances in Seattle and since -- is the fact
that structural adjustment at home in the US has been dismantling
the remains of the New Deal compromise, as well as the dividends of
the civil rights, feminist, peace and environmental movements. The
pattern of events at Seattle confounded the rump of professional
revolutionaries, stranded since the mock-epic of the Cold War, no
less than the stenographers of power in the accredited media. Not
that the program of the liberal NGOs and the self-anointed leaders
of Seattle's motley crew -- "Reform the corporations!" "A place at
the table!" -- is other than in bad taste. Still, it would be wise
to hear the critic who observed that, although political writing is
always instrumental as well as utopian, its time of instrumentality
-- its time as a weapon -- sometimes lies a little in the future. As
to what might be entailed in the forging of a political language
adequate to the matters currently at hand, the following glossary is
offered as a gesture, though readers should bear in mind that its
remit is the vocabulary of capitalist globalization and its
detractors.

"It is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny
is overthrown, but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of
freedom, and terrible anathemas against the hangmen that people
bring down dictators and empires." -- Emiliano Zapata



Activist
Label used, often without qualification, by those campaigning for
"social change", suggesting a liberal confidence in the general
direction of history, as if the Pol Pots and Kissingers of the world
weren't themselves active in the business of social change. The bane
of hard-core activists is "passivity" in their targeted communities
(q.v.) and the ivory tower; anti-intellectualism is the theory,
activism the practice. Still, they have a point: "doing theory" in
the academy can be a nasty sight.

Anarchist
Pierre-Joseph ("property is theft") Proudhon was among the first to
embrace this term of abuse. Roget's Thesaurus places it in the
company of terrorist, savage and fanatic. But peaceable anarchists,
in the tradition of William Godwin, Pietr Kropotkin and Emma
Goldman, have greatly outnumbered advocates of "negotiation by
dynamite", which remains the specialty of governments. Still,
anarchists have understood that, however much they carry in their
hearts a world organized on principles of mutual aid and free
association, the current owners show no signs of leaving quietly,
and for that reason Buenaventura Durruti once remarked: "The
bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their own world before they leave the
stage of history. We are not in the least afraid of ruins." If the
tactics of Seattle's enrages -- the symbolic breaking of corporate
property -- showed one (masked) face of anarchism, the other was the
classic anarchist organizational form of non-hierarchical affinity
groups.

Autonomy
A term with wide currency among the opposition to capitalist
globalization -- cf. Italian autonomia, German autonomen, Zapatista
autonomismo, and "temporary autonomous zones" (TAZ). Not to be
understood in the abstract formalist Kantian sense of autonomy as
obedience to reason, but in Cornelius Castoriadis' sense of movement
away from heteronomy in general ( "being in someone else's project",
whether state, parent or boss) towards self-activity-of a collective
kind, rather than the "independence" of loners, self-made
entrepreneurs and authoritarians in flight from mother.

Biopiracy
Athough the term slanders pirates (see Marcus Rediker's Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) it is intended as a corrective to what
the genetic-industrial complex (Monsanto et al.) calls
bio-prospecting. Refers to the privatization of plant and other
organic material (fungi, animal DNA, human body and blood products,
etc.) from the global South, home to 95% of the world's genetic
resources, by way of the Northern patent mills. There is a deep
continuity with the post-Columbus plunder of specimens by naturalist
agents of empire and the 19th century global system of botanical
laboratories (e.g., Kew Gardens, Jardin des Plantes).

Biotechnology
The new frontier whose salesmen and stock analysts glimpse whole
continents of (com)modified life waiting to be staked out. The
synergy between DNA technologists, silicon robotics and venture
capital has produced a pre-emptive patent rush, rapid monopolization
of life forms licenced by the courts, and a Niagara of hype (Green
revolution redux and even immortality). These new enclosures (q.v.)
are meeting popular resistance worldwide; the struggle is on to
prevent the privatization of the world's germplasm (the essential
means of production for farmers), not to mention the viralization of
life by the vectors of transgenic DNA.

Black bloc
The roving, uncivil, complement to the sit-down blockaders at
Seattle, sharing a commitment to direct action in the streets, but
viewing sedentary disobedience as privileged, moralizing and
needlessly sacrificial. Named after their black clothing, a parody
of the dress code of solemn bourgeois ritual. Its origins lie in
European anarchist and autonomist tendencies, removed from the
American legacy of civil-rights (Gandhian and Quaker-style)
pacifism. The tactic of corporate property damage and their open
masquerade have made the black bloc grist for the mills of the
spectacle and, apparently, state provocateurs.

Borders
Be careful what you ask for. "World without borders" has now joined
those other counter-cultural bumper slogans -- "Think globally, act
locally", "Flexible work hours!" -- as the basic vocabulary of
neo-liberalism. The hip academy's love affair with "transgressing
borders" has put them in interesting company -- the German Wehrmacht
and the WTO. The dismantling of barriers is, of course, highly
selective in favor of goods and capital rather than people, a fact
well understood by workers trying to enter fortress Europe or to
cross the Rio Grande from the South, and by travelers to Quebec and
Genoa.

Capitalism
From Latin root capit -- "head"; for connections not merely
etymological between capital punishment and the punishment of
capital, see Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged. The economic order
that, like its ruling class, will rarely speak its name, preferring
the codewords "market", "democracy", and "freedom". Capitalism is
organized around the production of commodities by commodities, from
which follows the subversion of markets, the annulling of democracy,
and the subordination of freedom.

Civil Society
"Community", "stakeholder", "participation", "transparency",
"empowerment" -- these are the grisly fetish words of foundation
officers, non-profit apparatchiks and boardrooms everywhere, echoed
in the field by the NGO cadres busy producing "locals". These
liberal shibboleths, that cluster under the heading of "civil
society", name simulacra of the social and disclose only its
disappearance. Not for the first time; at the turn of the 19th
century, Romantic schoolmasters and antiquarians -- the clerisy of
European nationalisms -- celebrated the "folk" at the very moment
its extinction was assured by enclosure of the commons and the
criminalization of custom. It was the proto-Romantic Rousseau who
remarked: "The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground,
took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple
enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society."


Coase's Theorem
The notorious December 1991 World Bank memo, written by Lawrence
Summers, later U.S. Treasury Secretary, argued that "the economic
logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage
country is impeccable" because "under-populated countries in Africa
are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly
inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City". Brazil's
Secretary of the Environment wrote to Summers about the leaked memo:
"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane" and was
fired soon after. The reasoning referred to was in fact a pure
example of the logic behind Coase's Theorem, which relates market
efficiency, property, transaction costs and "exernalities", and
underpins much of neo-liberal legal and economic doctrine, as well
as WTO and IMF policies. Ronald Coase is the economist responsible
for tradeable pollution rights by dreaming of a world of zero
transaction costs where everything can be smoothly brought to
market, and no ethical distinction made between the harm done by an
oil refinery to those living downwind and the harm done to its
owners by downwinders being in the way; it's just a cost-benefit
matter requiring only clear and absolute private property rights (no
common goods) and enough police to enforce them. The World Bank's
"impeccable" Coasian logic means that there is no right to clean
water, air or soil but merely the right to pay to keep them clean or
to be compensated for their fouling. Too bad about those not at the
bargaining table-above all, the unborn (or stillborn) generations.
Luckily economists have long prepared us to discount the future;
Coase once said that the future valuation of property was put at
risk by "such cataclysmic events as the abolition of slavery". Coase
won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Commons
See under "Enclosure".

"The law locks up the man or woman,
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose.

Community
The maximum shibboleth. A mantra used affirmatively across the
entire political and cultural landscape; NPR once interviewed a
spokesman from "the organized crime community". There is an implied
antithesis to "the state" (with its suggestion of power, authority
and central decision), in favor of the local and the face-to-face.
The results can be grotesque: the release of asylum and hospital
inmates to "the community" often means, in reality, warm ventilation
grates. The "communitarian" right would rather nobody noticed that
the shattering of communities is a direct effect of capital moving
away in obedience to the logic of the very system they endorse.

Corporation
From corpus,"body". The body of the Catholic church was the
ur-corporation, as the monastery was the prototype for other key
institutions in the West -- the asylum, the hospital, the
university, the factory. By a legal fiction the business corporation
was given a deathless personality -- an idea related to the theory
of the "divine right of kings" by which the monarch has two bodies,
one that decays, one that doesn't ("The king is dead; long live the
king"). The laws of the corporation inversely mirror the laws of
criminal conspiracy. When individuals combine in pursuit of capital,
they are afforded more protection than they enjoy in their own
persons (e.g., limits to both civil and criminal liability, special
treatment re taxation); when individuals combine against capital,
they have less protection than they have on their own-mere
association is criminalized, since the very act of combining is seen
as a threat. That is, two or more people agreeing to commit a
misdemeanor-whether or not they ever go through with it-is
considered by the state a felony, because the greater threat is the
sheer coming together in opposition to those interests the state
serves.

DAN
Direct Action Network. Emerged from the direct action training camp
two months before Seattle, organized by the Ruckus Society,
offspring of Greenpeace commando training crossed with Earth First!
forest defense techniques, and adapted to non-wilderness, urban
contexts-street blockades, lockdowns, tall building
banner-hangs-combined with political puppetry, street theatre,
culture-jamming and net-based bypassing of capitalist media. See
under "Direct action".

Democracy
System of periodic ratification of political masters by ballot;
meanwhile, the major decisions -- who, whom, for what, how -- remain
in the hands of the few. Democracy is the ideological keystone of
the West's charter myth, and historically consistent, by its own
account, with slavery (Athens), monarchy (England) and plutocracy
(United States).

Development
Perhaps the key term of modernity, drawing into a single nexus the
discourses of real estate, childhood and colonialism, for the future
realization of added value. By the colonization of infancy and the
infantilization of the colonies, labor and land (human and natural
capital) are made ready for "improvement", the older word that
"development" replaced, etymologically derived from "profit".

Direct Action
A mode of politics that tactically -- and for some, strategically --
shortcircuits official channels of "representation", often by
interrupting business as usual, and deploying a variety of means,
open and clandestine: street manifestations, blockades, trespass,
sit-ins, banner hanging, squatting, sabotage, crop-trashing,
pie-throwing. The debate since Seattle about property damage and the
activity of the black bloc-whether it is tactically effective
("helps break the spell of the commodity" versus "allows
demonization of the movement as mindless vandalism"), and whether it
constitutes violence ("to treat property as sacred and inviolable is
to think like the state, and anyway what about the silent violence
of structural adjustment or redlining") rehearses old tensions
between pacifist and "physical force" traditions in abolitionist,
nationalist and anti-colonial struggles.

Diversity
The key term of US multiculturalism, a liberal doctrine endorsed by
big business and government for the management of "difference" in
response to the civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation
movements. The doggerel read at Clinton's first inauguration, "On
the Pulse of Morning", confirmed the ascendancy of multicultural
nationalism; contrast the previous inaugural verse (at Kennedy's
induction), "The Gift Outright", Robert Frost's white puritan poem
of blood sacrifice and western conquest. Although capitalist
globalization is spoken of as a homogenizing force (viz. extinction
of languages and species, death of customary lifeways, Weberian
harmonization), it co-opts and even encourages the proliferation of
identities-gender, ethnic and consumer-consistent with
profit-taking. Biodiversity, that mantra of environmentalists, is,
to say nothing of its merits, multiculturalism projected onto the
realm of nature; by the same token, the native plant movement draws,
willy-nilly, from the wellsprings of xenophobia and anti-immigrant
rhetoric. To speak of nature is always already to be in the space of
the social.

Economy
The alpha and omega of our epoch. The mere utterance of the words,
"the bottom line", is supposed to halt discussion. The disembedding
of the "economy" from its social and moral matrix has been a long
and savage process; its first paid professor was the Reverend
Malthus in 1800. As often, it was in a work of imagination, not
theory -- in Daniel Defoe, rather than Adam Smith -- that one
encounters the first classic projection of homo economicus. What is
Robinson Crusoe, that lonely, primitive accumulator and idol of
economists, but a cost-benefit calculating machine? Such is the
neurotic Protestant imago that the technicians of the WTO dream of
universalizing.

Enclosure
The exclusion (sometimes physically by hedges and fences) of
commoners and peasants from the means of life, in order to "free"
them for wage labor under capitalist modernity. Enclosure meant not
only the extinction (by force and later by acts of parliament) of
customary "rights of common" to soil, grazing, firewood, timber, and
the cultivated and uncultivated bounty of the earth, but, at least
as important, the breaking of communal consciousness and autonomy.
The commodification of land and labor was capitalism's essential
founding process, written "in letters of blood and fire". The buying
and selling of commodities could then be generalized; property and
price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity. The
structural adjustment programs of the IMF, and the WTO's
intellectual property regimes, amount to new (as well as old) forms
of enclosure -- privatization of water and public land, auctioning
of the electromagnetic spectrum, the patenting of seeds, etc.

Environment
When taken to mean external surroundings, "environment" reinforces
the old split between humanity and nature, between inside and
outside, which at least has the merit of not positing a fascist
metaphysics of identity (blood and soil, thinking with the body,
woman equals nature). Environments are constituted by the
life-activity of their inhabitants; without the active involvement
of its denizens, no expert has any business claiming even to
identify an environment.

Environmentalists
Corporate capital's stormy petrels, warning of bad weather. That
Mobil and environmentalists both like to operate under the sign of
NASA's " whole earth" image reveals how green politics is a version
of global managerialism. The Malthusian assumptions and the eugenic
and racist roots of environmentalism (population control, native
plant fanaticism, defence of wilderness that was someone else's
home) are barely below the surface.

Fair trade
The alternative to "free trade" on offer from the loyal opposition,
led by Global Exchange, a San Francisco travel agency and crafts
importer.

Free Trade
Traditional slogan of imperial monopolists and protectionists.For
export only.

Gibson's Law
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD." Scientists
flatly contradicting each other became a common sight during the mad
cow outbreak, and caused a crisis of legitimacy in Europe, which
will only deepen with each surprising plague. Because scientists are
increasingly licensed by industry, we are bound to hear more kitsch
assertions like "The chances of GM pollen drift are zero", and
"There can be no prions in the milk".

Global South
The old West/East division, based on the political geography of the
capitalist-communist bloc system, is giving way to North/South
terminology, reflecting the post-Cold War configuration of a
Northern capitalist core (to use the metaphor of world-system
theory) and a Southern periphery. The obvious limitations of these
hemispheric spatial terms led, in the first case, to the coining of
"tiers monde"/"third world" for countries "non-aligned" with the two
blocs, and recently to the attachment of "global" to "South" to
capture the fact that capitalism's uneven development creates
conditions typically associated with the South inside the Northern
heartlands.

Globalization
Business school jargon that gained general currency in the 1990s, to
describe the dismantling of barriers to the movement of capital and
the loss of local and national sovereignties to the interests of
transnational firms, helped along by developments in
telecommunications and the collapse of the two-bloc world. Globes
were originally "emblems of sovereignty" (1614), that became
playthings of merchant princes and navigators, familiar as props in
Renaissance portraiture. It was the task of cartography to project
the globe into two dimensions; without the resulting maps and charts
the business of empire and planetary capitalist hegemony would be
literally unthinkable.

GMO
Genetically modified organism. See under "Biotechnology".

Human rights
Liberal discourse lately favored by the managers of the new world
order, not least the military humanists of NATO and the Pentagon who
use it, arbitrarily of course, as a trojan horse for intervention
worldwide, by land, sea, air and, soon no doubt, space -- mercy by
any means necessary.

IMF
International Monetary Fund. Created by the US and Britain at the
1944 Bretton Woods conference to provide loans to countries with
short-term liquidity problems, and to buffer the irrationality of
markets by enshrining capital controls in Article VI. Since the
defeat of this original scheme of John Maynard Keynes and Dexter
White, the IMF has been turned into a major global instrument for
the disciplining of movements toward local autonomy by savage
"conditionalities" on loans.

Independent Media Center
Hub of non-corporate news gathering and dissemination, taking
advantage of the new technics of communications (digital cameras,
satellites, wireless telephony, the internet). The mushrooming of
IMCs, modeled on the Seattle experience, is a response to the
continuing enclosures and concentration of the capitalist media.

Internet
The child of Victorian telegraphy, even down to the utopian hype --
in 1852 a Saint-Simonian disciple announced: "A perfect network of
electric filaments will afford a new social harmony." The
space-pulverizing machinery of the virtual brings, along with new
connections, intensified separation, plus low-grade depression and
digital palsy, that nasty relative of the televisual body ("couch
potato"). Its liberatory refunctioning as a tool for "organizing
from below" flourishes in the shade of its dominant use as essential
support for the global transmission of administrative, military and
commercial intelligence, and the enhanced surveillance of labor.

IPR
Intellectual property rights. Their origins lie in the history of
the printing press and questions of copyright ownership; the new
technologies of communication, replication and the rise of corporate
patents and branding have brought trade related intellectual
property rights (TRIPs) sharply into focus, and onto the main agenda
of the WTO. It is symptomatic that the fortune of today's Croesus is
amassed by licensing intellectual property (software, patents)
rather than by owning oil wells or steelmills, in the style of 19th
century robber barons. The managers and brokers of capital prefer
these purified forms of property; they can circulate at the speed of
light.

Libertarian
Historically the contrast was with "determinist" (vis-a-vis free
will); later used by anarchists (e.g., Noam Chomsky) to distance
themselves from authoritarian socialists in their various guises
(Stalinist, Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Castroite); recently the
party of market fetishists, automatic weapons collectors and the
anti-tax lobby.

Luddite
The most powerful swear word of capital ("mindless, destructive,
resister of progress"), now doing double-duty since "communist" has,
for the moment, lost its charge. Still, all the sabotage in history
would not even register in the scales compared to capitalism's
scheduled destruction. Both the left and the right told the same lie
about the historical luddites, that they were primitivist and
backward looking, as if those skilled weavers at the dawn of
industrial modernity were against the future rather than its
foreclosure by immiseration, factory discipline and the gallows.

Market
More accurately described by the French historian Braudel as the
"anti-market". Capitalism from its birth has been about oligopolies
and monopolies. The necessary contrast to the glory of old
marketplaces, fairs, bazaars, and agoras is the "container", the
tilt-up warehouse, and the supermarket.

Multitude
Key term of the philosopher Spinoza, the anti-Hobbes of early
modernity, now dusted off for the digital epoch by certain critics
of globalization. The argument goes: if capitalism at its dawning
produced a multitude, and the factories of the industrial revolution
a proletariat, the social factory of the cybernetic economy is
producing a new (global, wired) multitude. Some in the current
anti-capitalist movement recognize themselves in this neo-Spinozist
scheme, and hope that the power of the new antinomian multitude will
constitute the gravedigger this time.
Neo-liberalism
Post-60's version of classical liberalism's gospel of the market and
the "hidden hand". For forty years the strategy developed during the
crisis of the 1930s to prevent anti-capitalist movements from taking
power -- national Keynesianism -- was hegemonic in the West, in the
form of welfare safety nets, income redistribution, domestic
industry protection, state-financed public works, and capital
controls. The assault on national Keynesianism came in the shape of
globalizing neo-liberalism, propagated in reactionary think-tanks
(funded by oil and armaments fortunes) in response to the
revolutionary events of the sixties and the falling rate of profit.
The immediate intellectual roots lay in the work of an English
accountant Ronald Coase (q.v.), with von Hayek the bridge to
classical liberalism, the University of Chicago its academic home,
and Thatcher and Reagan its door-to-door salesforce. Neo-liberals
wish to bury the memory of their system's savior -- "capitalism in
itself", observed Keynes in 1924, "is in many ways objectionable" --
by claiming that "there is no alternative" (TINA) to unregulated
global flows of money and goods, the sale of public assets, the
overriding of workplace and environmental protections, and a
recomposed planetary division of labor; in sum, the removal of any
fetters on the rate of exploitation.

NGOs
Non-governmental organizations. The mendicant orders of late
capitalism, as Antonio Negri put it. By one calculation they
numbered a mere nine in 1907, most famously the Red Cross. The
Biafran famine in the mid-1960s, where international state action
proved spectacularly inadequate, was the watershed, and by the late
nineties NGO's numbered in the thousands. They are thriving on
famine, disease, and war, and in the spaces (north as well as south)
created by structural adjustment -- forced privatization, market
deregulation, and the hollowing out of state agencies.

NVDA
Non-violent direct action. See under "violence" and "direct action".

Pacifism
The rejection of all forms of organized violence. Dismissed right,
left and center -- by generals, revolutionaries and pragmatic
liberals alike -- as hopelessly unrealistic, though pacifists are
unimpressed by what passes for political realism and look for routes
to a peaceable world that interrupt the codes of violence. The
"peace process", however, usually means war by other means, and
pacifists operating under its banner might reflect on Tacitus'
remark about the fate of Carthage: the Romans "made a desert and
called it peace".

Police
Institutionalized by Napoleon in France and by Robert Peel in 19th
London to enforce the wage-form and the criminalization of custom.
The more modern the police force, the more medieval-looking the body
armor -- though the weaponry is the scientific fruit of corporate
laboratories.

Policy
Etymological variant of "police".

Primitivism
A branch of romanticism (Enlightenment's unruly sibling) having deep
American roots, with recent developments in Detroit and Eugene.
Rejects industrial civilization and, in austere versions, even
agriculture; in the limit case, human language itself is considered
a technology of alienation. Associated in the public mind with the
Unabomber, whom the press portrayed as society's mad outcast, but
his manifesto reveals not only a widel

Privatization
Etymological kin to "deprivation", though any memory of why that
might be -- namely, that "privacy" was a prideful abstention from a
life in common -- is long gone. The transvaluation has taken four
hundred years, and can be marked by the junkbond artist Ivan
Boesky's notorious speech to Berkeley's Haas (Levi Strauss) Business
School when he announced "Greed is good", and was cheered to the
rafters. The privatization of everything is often imagined to be the
ideal of free marketeers, but their real game involves the maximum
socialization of costs in the sink of nature and labor.

Risk
The entry under "Risk" in the Dictionary of the Social Sciences has
a single cross-reference, to "Profit". That is at least honest,
since the rhetoric of risk, which now drives medicine, law,
portfolio management, criminology, social welfare, education, public
health, technology impact, environmental policy, banking, industrial
hygiene, urban planning, military strategy and genomics, emerged
during the 17th century in the milieu of Lloyd's coffeehouse, where
the new capitalist dealers in risk (sale of annuities, stock
jobbing, marine insurance) were busy undermining the moral economy
with the logic of the market and the counting house. Modern
apologists of risk, such as Tony "Third Way" Giddens, inform us that
new technologies make for an unavoidably dangerous world, and
therefore the real menace comes from riskophobes and untrusting
luddites facing backwards.

Seattle
Poster city of the "new economy", home of Microsoft, Boeing, and
Starbucks, the firms that connect its workforce, fly the top layer
around, and keep them awake and flexible. Seattle is a classic
example of the denaturing by containerization of the old waterfronts
of the Atlantic and Pacific littoral, whose passing has been
recorded in Alan Sekula's photo-documentary "Fish Story."The Chamber
of Commerce is living with the fear that the name of their city will
always conjure up, not a vision of the new economy, but its nemesis.

Science
Since harnessing fundamental chemistry to colonial warfare and
atomic physics to state arsenals, science seems more menace than
hope, the scientist more Frankenstein than Prometheus. Industry
science is often intended actually to produce ignorance-about
cigarettes, asbestos, global warming, GM crops-turning the
skepticism of critical inquiry to corporate advantage, in order to
buy time; a Brown and Williamson (tobacco company) memo admitted:
"Doubt is our product". Science, once (and still) emancipatory
vis-a-vis the mystification of clerics, has become capital's way of
knowing the world.

Sixties
The long shadow of that crowded decade continues to haunt both the
soixante-huitards and those who insist it was all a chimera. That it
was a revolutionary conjuncture, and a global one, should be of
interest this time around. For evidence see Ronald Fraser's 1968,
Sonya Sayres et al. The Sixties Without Apology, Michael Watts' 1968
and All That, and Chris Marker's two-part documentary "Le Fond de
L'Air est Rouge."

Sovereignty
Supreme authority. The parcellized power of feudal lords became
absolute under monarchical and nation-states systems; late
capitalism is re-parcellizing and punching holes in state
sovereignty (e.g., Native American casino enclaves) in the interests
of flexible accumulation. Most conspicuously, the sovereignty of WTO
rules now trumps national laws enacted for the protection of the
environment and workers.

Terrorism
The strategic use of violence against civilians-typically by states
but also by those thinking like a state, however marginal and poor
in resources. Terrorism seeks to kill and maim, but also more widely
to demoralize, to spread the message that no one is safe. Terrorism
is an act of communication. It aims to breed rumor, grab headlines,
burn an image of pain and horror into the citizenry's collective
skull. The tactic is cost-effective, and has had successes. Colonial
occupiers have given up and gone home in the face of it. Whether
victimization and the sowing of mass paranoia can ever provide the
basis for a "revolution" -- that is, the release and refocusing of
repressed social energies -- is another question. Whereas terror is
often disavowed (though inherent to rapine, slavery, inquisitions
and colonialism), terrorism lives on the oxygen of publicity. It
took modern form with the Jacobins' spectacular use of Dr
Guillotin's enlightenment machine for rational decapitation. The
next fin-de-siecle burst of "propaganda by the deed" -- political
assassinations, bombings and incendiarism, often in fact the work of
agents provocateurs in the service of the state's need to justify
the deployment of its hegemonic violence -- turned out to be just a
curtain-raiser for the twentieth century which witnessed the
apotheosis of terrorism. Its emblematic instruments have been, in
the industrialized North, the car-bomb, and, in the Third World,
disappearances and the death-squad. But twentieth century
terrorism's hallmark was bombardment from the air, the Damoclean
threat of mass death aimed at the inhabitants of cities -- Guernica,
London, Dresden, and the ground zero of globalized atomic terror,
Hiroshima. For keepers of nuclear stockpiles to declare a "war on
terrorism" places them very deep in Orwell's debt. In political
rhetoric, the epithet "terrorist" is projected only onto others --
enemies so designated by authorities wherever; in the US, the term
is rapidly proliferating to implicate all resistance to capitalist
globalization, foreign and domestic. Thus fast-track WTO
legislation, corporate bail-outs and environmental de-regulation are
called "counter-terrorism" measures. Not for the first time is
"terrorist" (cf. "luddite" and "communist") being forged as a weapon
in capitalism's arsenal.

Utopia
Thomas More's 16th century book forever lent its name to projections
of an ideal world. They are, typically, static blueprints-More's
original Utopia, though it contained a savage critique of early
capitalist enclosures, was really a nostalgic retrospect for a dying
patriarchal feudal order. We are currently living in the utopia of
1930s automobile company executives, who gave us fair warning in the
GM pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair. Although Ursula Le Guin's The
Lathe of Heaven, P.M.'s Bolo Bolo, and William Morris's News from
Nowhere shine out as beacons in a dismal genre, it grows harder to
envisage the far side of capitalism, the more everyday life is
colonized by the imagineers of the commodity world.

Violence
Chief of the state monopolies -- indeed, no state is conceivable
without it, though it will be called "force", not "violence". The
stenographers of domination systematically invert necessary ethical
distinctions between the violence of the oppressor and the
oppressed, between harm to persons and harm to property, between
institutionalized violence (right and left) as opposed to the
improvised violence of insurrections. Violence routinized is a
mirror of the state, as non-violence advocates are quick to point
out; on the other hand, non-violence fetishized is often a mark of
privilege.

Virtual
The electronic sublime heralded fifty years ago by the barkers of
the cybernetic revolution have finally arrived under the sign of the
"virtual". Video screens constitute the myth space of modernity,
which thus far mostly offers playworlds where wargaming meets
Fordist speed-up. It is no surprise that relationships at a remove
are often welcomed when the spaces of everyday life -- depending on
gender, race, class and age -- are surveilled, dangerous or
denatured, with the chances of pleasurable encounters close to
vanishing. The virtual life is, however, always on the cusp of
boredom, which is fascination's other face.

War
The health of the state (Randolph Bourne, 1917)

World Bank
Emerged out of the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), set up at the Bretton Woods meeting in 1944 to
funnel low-interest loans for the rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe,
and to head off communism. It later evolved into the prime agency
for Third World aid and development, or what the Wall Street Journal
called "promoting socialism". During the 1970s McNamara oversaw a
massive growth in the World Bank's resources; on his watch the
"structural adjustment" loan was devised as a vehicle for imposing,
as they say, "free-market liberalization". In recent years, by
hiring on some of its milder critics, the World Bank is able to play
good cop to the IMF's bad cop.

WTO
World Trade Organization. 1995 successor organization to GATT
(General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Its early origins lie in
the ITO (International Trade Organization) set up in 1948 in Havana
to coordinate the international trading system in the wake of the
crisis of the 1930s. GATT was a system of member-state negotiations
( "rounds") concluding in contracts that fixed tarrifs in industrial
products at national borders. The Uruguay Round ended in 1995 with
the establishment of a permanent international bureaucracy, the
World Trade Organization (WTO), having a much larger scope that does
not stop at borders, and includes agriculture, intellectual property
rights (IPR), trade in services, and investment measures. It is
structured in the image of the private tyrannies it serves,
capitalist firms.


found on

http://galmuri.co.kr/galbook/read.cgi?board=joe_bd&y_number=110

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