One No, Many Yeses by Paul Kingsnorth, Free Press (UK), 拢10, ISBN 0743220269 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
THIS is the first travel book of the anti-globalisation movement. You can probably perceive the contradiction already. It is a given that travel and communication are the great globalisers. Yet the Internet made this movement possible just as cheap air tickets made Paul Kingsnorth鈥檚 research possible.
But this is a post-Communist, postmodernist movement that happily drinks Coke and surfs the Web while decrying the forces of global capitalism that made them possible. These revolutionaries come from rainforests and shanties and college cloisters. They still love Che Guevara, but are too slippery for old Trotskyists to take over. Radical chic, for sure. That鈥檚 their nature, and quite possibly their strength.
Advertisement
Kingsnorth studied history at Oxford and helped edit The Ecologist magazine 鈥� which runs on the legacy of financier James Goldsmith鈥檚 millions 鈥� before heading for Seattle and Soweto and the 鈥減enis gourd revolution鈥� of West Papua. But didn鈥檛 Marx survive on money from Engels鈥檚 cotton mill? Didn鈥檛 Stalin love cowboy movies?
Reading One No, Many Yeses reminded me of John Reed鈥檚 classic reportage from the Russian and Mexican revolutions a century ago. Not least because Kingsnorth鈥檚 book begins with the Zapatistas coming out of the Mexican jungles to declare bankrupt the inheritors of the old Mexican revolution. Can the new movement do better? We shall see, but its literature is starting to shape up quite well.