Simple, spray-painted slogans

An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle.

They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully, to try to disrupt the G7 Genoa summit in July 2001, though we now know that the extraordinarily heavy security which thwarted them at Genoa was primarily designed to ward off murderous Al-Qaeda terrorists, rather than paint-spraying, slogan-chanting anti-globalisers. Two months later, anarchic protests against the symbols of world trade suddenly looked out of place, after Osama bin Laden took the idea to its apocalyptic extreme at the World Trade Centre.

Little has been heard from the anti-globalisers since. One reason for their quiescence is that the anti-Americanism which underlay their rhetoric became so much more contentious – and required more courage to express – in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 ‘with us or against us’ world. Another is that, in a sharp economic downturn, the need to tame the exploitative power of global brand names looks like a lower priority than, say, the need to encourage corporations to invest and create jobs: indeed, the whole anti-globalisation movement is in danger of looking like a self-indulgent middle-class fad.

Yet in another sense these critics of modern capitalism have actually been winning the argument for the past couple of years. The free-enterprise, big-corporate, bull-market culture which had been so triumphant in the post-Cold War era is more vulnerable to criticism today than it has been for half a century. The stock market collapse has revealed the shameless cynicism of the financial industry which drove it upwards to its peak.