Baby Steps to a Global Revolution?

Seattle. A16. The WTO. The World Bank and the IMF. The protests against transnational corporate power have begun to sink in. A year ago, a mass movement that raised such issues as corporate accountability and Third World debt seemed an impossibility. But since the shutdown of the World Trade Organization meetings in November and the protests against international lending institutions in Washington, DC, it has become obvious that Americans -- particularly young Americans -- are not as apolitical as people have tended to think. A movement of young activists is afoot. And their target is not one politician or businessman, but an entire system of international capital that they insist is creating an intolerable corporate culture, strangling democratic freedoms and further impoverishing countries of the Third World.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Juliette Beck are activists separated by a generation, but unusually like-minded in political point of view. Ehrenreich, who came of age during the women's movement, is one of the country's most outspoken and respected writers on feminist and labor issues. She is an essayist and columnist for Time, The Nation, Mother Jones and Harper's and is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War." Juliette Beck, 27, is economic rights coordinator for Global Exchange, an international human rights group based in San Francisco. Since helping to organize the Seattle demonstrations and the World Bank-IMF protests, she has become one of the most visible leaders of the movement, profiled in The New Yorker, named among the "New Radicals" in Time magazine and invited to speak on public TV and radio. On April 26, Ehrenreich and Beck met at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to discuss the new activism: its origins, goals, problems and possible future.

If anti-corporate globalism is becoming the political movement of our time, why is that so? What passions have corporate culture and Third World labor issues activated in young Americans?

JB: I think what corporate America has imposed on people is a disconnect from reality, from the environment, from production processes. And so when young people start to connect these issues, it also connects them to the people who are making their clothes, to the people who are picking their food. They realize the corporations have created a very unjust and inhumane system, which brings people into action, quite literally. People realize that their clothes are made by girls in sweatshops who didn't have the opportunity to go to school as they are, and they know that's just morally wrong. They want to do something about it. The corporate globalization movement is connecting movements that have traditionally been more disconnected, such as the environment, labor and human rights movements. It is connecting people to the world around them, to the world we live in.

Why is the new activism focused on global rather than local or domestic concerns?

BE: It's been a long time that some of us have been saying capitalism is international and that the activism has to get international. You cannot organize anymore -- whether it's working-class organizing or any constituency -- without an understanding of globalization. And you’re just a fool if think you can attack your own issues within the nation state only. I think much of the activism today comes out our unique superpower situation. Plus, I never would have said this in the '60s -- because it sounds too melodramatic -- but I think we are becoming a police state. I used to cringe when people would talk like that, but now I don't think there's any question of it. The extant of incarceration, the targeting against minorities and teenagers and the attempts to outlaw groups indicates this. We're up against a highly militarized police and I don't think there's any parallel in the world.