NYT Reporter Learns that the Earth is Round

NYT stenographer Robert Mackey observed yesterday in a penetrating web-piece that G-20 "Protesters Fail to Bring Down Global Capitalism With Costumes and Puppets." Perhaps he doesn't choose his own headlines, but given the content of the piece, it doesn't seem like he vetoes them, either. He observes that the protest

was suddenly alive with thousands of new images of outlandishly dressed demonstrators, many of whom would not have seemed out of place at a rave. Parsing what, exactly, these outfits and props were meant to achieve, besides drawing the attention of people with cameras, was not always easy.

Perhaps in my radical ghetto, sorting and sifting a constant barrage of proposals that these "outfits and props" were meant to draw attention to, the goals of these socialist hooligans were obvious. I'm thinking of things like Brazilian economist Marcos Arruda's multi-pronged proposal to ensure "Endogenous, democratic, sustainable, solidarity-based development," by returning power to local communities, by redistributing land-wealth through agrarian reform and monetary wealth through massively progressive wealth taxes, and "national financial architectures to serve a mode of development oriented towards the needs and aspirations of people, communities and the nation," by mandating low interest rates, dispelling the fairy-tale of the independent central bank and making monetary policy subservient to human needs, controlling hot capital flows, eliminating speculative investments, and decommodifying "work, land, water, and energy."

Now, the NYT reporter does have a point, hidden in his condescending rhetoric, rife with naivete, as he wonders:

Are anti-globalization activists succeeding in their aim of capturing the attention of the world’s visual journalists — with their costumes and puppets and burning effigies — but in the process failing to communicate much more than could be gleaned from watching an Ionesco play performed in, say, Old English?

He's correct: the World Economic Forum at Davos or the G20 talks or a world economic conference under the auspices of the UN General Assembly would be far better places to present complicated schematics for rebuilding global financial architecture and effectively socializing the economy. There is, however, a problem: economists like Arruda, and analysts like Susan George and Walden Bello and Noam Chomsky, or confused, well-meaning, highly articulate journalists like Naomi Klein, aren't the type of luminaries invited to present proposals at such soirees.

I don't think Mackey understands this. As he continues,

After this latest round of anti-globalization protests, it seems fair to ask if marches that draw attention mainly to men bearing symbolic canaries, or dressed like pink storm troopers, are really helping to advance the cause of those who want to fundamentally change the world’s economic system.

What do readers think, is the media to blame for focusing so much on what is most visually arresting, or are the protesters at fault for spending too much energy attracting attention and not enough articulating practical steps that might actually change the system?

First, how else should they be attracting attention? Writing polite missives to their representatives, suggesting radical change? Throwing rocks at police officers? Calling up Barack Obama and explaining to Captain Pragmatic that since capitalism is destroying the ecology, it doesn't seem practical? I agree that there are better ways. A world-wide general strike or global factory occupations and occupations of government offices would be great, again, with a caveat: that would be taking class war to the streets. I can't imagine Mackey would approve of such steps. But the problem of attracting the attention of capitalist media for radical nostrums is one that's been befuddling activists since they had the crap beaten out of them at Seattle and Genoa. As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber points out,

One can now begin to understand the environment in which images of Black Bloc
anarchists smashing windows, and colorful puppets, predominate media coverage. “Message” is
largely off-limits. Almost every major mobilization has been accompanied by a day of public
seminars in which radical intellectuals analyze the policies of the IMF, G8, and so on, and
discuss possible alternatives. None to my knowledge have ever been covered by the corporate
press. “Process” is complicated and difficult to capture visually; meetings are usually off-limits
to reporters anyway. Still, the relative lack of attention to street blockades and street parties, lockdowns,
banner drops, critical mass rides and the like, is harder to explain. All these are dramatic,
public, and often quite visually striking. Admittedly since it is almost impossible to describe
those engaged in such tactics as “violent”, the fact that they frequently end up gassed, beaten,
pepper-sprayed, shot at with plastic bullets, and otherwise manhandled by police provides
narrative dilemmas most journalists would (apparently) prefer to avoid.4 But this alone does not
seem an adequate explanation.

Well, we have the steps. We have the blueprints. We have the proposals lined up. We have hyper-literate interlocutors and hyper-intelligen t planners at the ready. Fuck, Mackey says one of the activists offered up a cogent criticism of the macro-economic system. The problem is power. The power to implement such policies. But the NYT's filters don't allow anyone who thinks that the capitalist system is a way of organizing societal power to get paid to scribble away on its blogs, does it? Let alone someone who knows that such proposals are totally feasible, except for one problem: they approximate a concrete implementation of traditional socialist ideals.

Can't have that, right?

NB: I posted this as a response on Mackey's blog entry. They refused to print it. Shocking!

Postscript: After about five submissions, they finally posted it. Mackey averred that the protesters should be adopting Gandhian tactics of non-violent resistance, which is what factory occupations and general strikes are. But you need to build critical mass for such efforts to be successful, and in the meantime the movement tries to attract what attention it can to its policies and positions. Mackey suggests that "Complaining that there are seminars that do not get enough coverage is sort of avoiding the issue of what, if anything, can be done with the world as it is, to make it more like the world as you'd like it to be."

This is kind of interesting--is the NYT blogger interested in discussing how to effect a transition to socialism??? Or interested in discussing how to change media coverage from abysmal to merely atrocious? I don't know. But he ignores the Graeber quotation, which seriously engages the question, so I'm not sure.

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, discourse, financial architecture, global economic crisis, Global intifada, manufacturing consent, NYT

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