Whatever Happened to the Counter-Globalization Movement? Some Reflections on Antagonism, Vanguardism, and Professionalization

Abstract

“Anarchy in London!” cries the headline on the newsstand outside London Liverpool Street station. The day’s papers depict protesters hurling a computer monitor and keyboard through a smashed window of a bank. Amid the shattered glass of spectacle, an engulfing sea of photographers stands eager to get a shot. At the G20 protests in April 2009, there seemed to be more media than protesters, more tweeting than blockading, more camera flashes than flares. The disjuncture of protest ritual and media hype in light of an absent social force was evident as we walked away from the Bank of England blockade. We felt a sense of irony, but also frustration. The economic system faced a crisis big enough to make those in power fear global capitalist meltdown, but there was no more than a glimpse left of the powerful anticapitalist movement evolving around the turn of the millennium. This global “movement of movements” had been a harbinger of the current crisis, with its message of the massive injustices and evident instabilities of neoliberal globalization. Against the story of neoliberalism’s inevitability, there had been another. Yet the dreams of other possible worlds now appeared even more fanciful than the movement’s critics had reported at the time.