In Defense Of Global Capitalism By Johan Norberg

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Friday October 10, 2003 11:19 by The Devils Advocate

We were Anarchists

Our anarchist party won the school election!
It was the fall semester of 1988 at our school-we were about
16 at the time-in a western suburb of Stockholm. As usual in
an election year, we were staging a ‘‘school election’’ of our own.
But my best friend Markus and I didn’t believe in the system.
Majority elections, to our way of looking at things, were like two
wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. The school
wanted us to elect someone to rule us, but we wanted to rule our
own lives.
Partly, I suppose, we did it because we felt different from the
others. I was into listening to electronic music and goth, preferably
dressed in black and with my hair combed back. We wanted to
play music and read books, while others seemed mostly preoccu-pied
with owning the right accessories and fitting in. The right
wing, it seemed to us, was upper class establishment, dead set
against anything different. But we didn’t feel any more at home
with the left, which to us meant drab government bureaucracy
and regimentation. Even if we preferred Sisters of Mercy and the
Swedish punk singer Thåstro¨m, it was John Lennon’s ‘‘imagine
there’s no countries’’ we believed in. Nation states should be
abolished and people allowed to move freely, to cooperate of their
own free will, everywhere in the world. We wanted a world
without compulsion, without rulers. Clearly, then, we were neither
right wing nor left wing, neither Conservatives nor Social Demo-crats.
We were anarchists!
So we started ‘‘Anarchist Front’’ and put ourselves down as
candidates in the school election on a radical, humorous ticket.
We put up handwritten posters on the walls at school, asking
things like: ‘‘Who’s going to run your life-you or 349 MPs?’’
We demanded the abolition of the government . . . and of the
ban on bikes in the schoolyard. Most of the teachers took a dim
view of this, feeling that we were making a farce of the election,
while we thought that we were making our voices heard in true
democratic fashion. Being called to the headmaster’s office for a
chewing-out merely strengthened our rebellious spirit.
We did well in a tough campaign, polling 25 percent of the
votes. The Social Democrats came second with 19 percent. We
were psyched, convinced that this would be the start of something
big. . . .
That was 15 years ago. In the meantime, I have changed my
mind about a number of things. I have come to realize that
questions concerning individuals, society, and freedom are more
complicated than I then believed. There are too many complexities
and problems involved for everything to be settled in one drastic
Utopian stroke. I have come to realize that we do need some
government to protect liberty and prevent the powerful from
oppressing individuals, and I now believe that representative
democracy is preferable to all other systems for this very purpose
of protecting the rights of the individual. I realize now that the
modern industrial society of which I was so wary has in fact made
possible a fantastic standard of living and widespread freedom.
But my fundamental urge for liberty is the same today as in that
wonderful election campaign of 1988. I want people to be free,
with no one oppressing anyone else, and with governments forbid-den
to fence people in or to exclude them with tariffs and borders.
That is why I love what is rather barrenly termed ‘‘globaliza-tion,
’’ the process by which people, information, trade, invest-ments,
democracy, and the market economy are tending more
and more to cross national borders. This internationalization has
made us less constricted by mapmakers’ boundaries.
Political power has always been a creature of geography, based
on physical control of a certain territory. Globalization is enabling
us more and more to override these territories, by traveling in
person and by trading or investing across national borders. Our
options and opportunities have multiplied as transportation costs
have fallen, as we have acquired new and more efficient means
of communication, and as trade and capital movements have
been liberalized.
We don’t have to shop with the big local company; we can
turn to a foreign competitor. We don’t have to work for the
village’s one and only employer; we can seek out alternative oppor-tunities.
We don’t have to make do with local cultural amenities;
the world’s culture is at our disposal. We don’t have to spend
our whole lives in one place; we can travel and relocate.
Those factors lead to a liberation of our thinking. We no longer
settle for following the local routine; we want to choose actively
and freely. Companies, politicians, and associations have to exert
themselves to elicit interest or support from people who have a
whole world of options to choose from. Our ability to control
our own lives is growing, and prosperity is growing with it.
That is why I find it pathetic when people who call themselves
anarchists engage in the globalization struggle-but against it,
not for it!

Continue Reading at
http://www.catostore.org/pdfs/Preface-PDF.pdf

Taken from site
http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=20&pid=1441157