Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power
By Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark
New York: Routledge, 2003
$25.00; 350 pages

Note by Robert Weissman

"A new rebelliousness haunts the world. With each day, more and more people are challenging the institutions that exert control over our lives." So begins Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark's Insurrection. "The new rebels have set their sights on that force which during the last generation has nearly supplanted the nation-state as the possessor of true power: the transnational corporation."

Insurrection is an effort not to chronicle the corporate power giving rise to a growing number of citizen movements, but to provide a framework for understanding the movements, and to profile, analyze and critique a handful of prominent campaigns of recent years that have shaken powerful industries.

Danaher and Mark are protagonists in the broad movement they chronicle. Both work with Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based peace, justice and fair trade group. Their involvement with anti-corporate campaigns gives them insights into the rhythms, excitement and dilemmas of organizing efforts. But Insurrection is not a first-person account, and the authors generally do not cite their own personal experiences or those of Global Exchange. Rather, they offer a sympathetic but straight-forward reporting and analysis.

Insurrection locates the rising U.S. movements to control corporate power and for global justice in a long tradition of citizen efforts to combat Big Business abuses, dating back to the Populists and even earlier to the early 1800s Jacksonian struggles against the Bank of the United States. Briefly tracing this tradition through the Progressives, the reforms of the New Deal and on to the consumer and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Danaher and Mark argue that citizen challenges to concentrated corporate power should be viewed as a central trope in the narrative of U.S. history.

They place current disputes in historical context in an effort to highlight common themes and processes (example: the Gilded Age "was as much a time of popular insurrection as it was of corporate ascendancy. Concentration of power rarely comes without conflict, and the 1990s was no exception") and to show that today's campaigns are not fringe activities, but ó like those that preceded them ó fundamentally shaping the contours of the political economy.

Current campaigns, they argue, are diverse in their targets and particular areas of concern, but united by a sense that corporations' profit imperative must be subordinated to broader social considerations. "No matter the specific grievance ó environmental destruction, worker abuse, or human rights violations ó corporate accountability campaigners make a uniform demand: Corporations must be answerable to more than their shareholders. Each corporate accountability struggle represents a challenge to the notion that companies are merely private enterprises instead of public actors that owe obligations to society at large."

The core of Insurrection is a blow-by-blow account of five major strands of the global justice movement: the anti-sweatshop movement, the campaign for dolphin-safe tuna, tobacco control efforts, the Free Burma solidarity campaign, and the conflict over global trade rules.

The sweatshop campaign, which was initiated in the 1990s by a handful of activists such as Jeff Ballinger and Charles Kernaghan, first caught fire when Kathy Lee Gifford responded hysterically to charges that garments for her clothing line were made in sweatshops. Soon, activists directed attention to Nike and other garment and shoe makers that outsourced their production to sweatshop facilities around the globe. As the issue gained greater prominence, the White House eventually stepped into the fray, creating a task force that would develop a sham monitoring mechanism for outsourced factories. Meanwhile, college students turned up the heat on their campuses, focusing attention on where university-branded clothing was made. The student efforts led to a genuinely independent monitoring institution, the Workers Rights Consortium.

Assessing the campaign's record over a relatively few years, Danaher and Mark praise its tremendous success in putting major retailers on the defensive, making consumers conscious of working conditions in factories where their clothes are made, and winning some important gains in working conditions in some plants. But they note as well the tremendous challenge facing the movement in trying to clean up sweatshops generally, rather than just a factory here and there.

The sweatshop campaign's successes are directly attributable to its brand attack strategy, they write. With so much of Nike's shareholder value, and its ability to sell shoes at prices vastly over the cost of production, based simply on the idea of Nike, the company ó and others like it ó is vulnerable to reputational harm. Yet there are major limitations to the brand attack strategy, they conclude, particularly for an industry as deconcentrated as garments and shoes.

First, companies like Nike are vulnerable to grassroots campaigns attacking their brands. But they also have a lot of resources to defend and rehabilitate brands. Second, the brand attack strategy doesn't work for retailers ó such as deep discounters ó which do not trade on their brand name. Third, the brand strategy almost inherently involves going company by company ó but there are too many clothing and shoe companies to affect one at a time. Fourth, there are limits to what can be obtained by voluntary agreements (for example, company pledges to pay for overtime), especially when it is hard to monitor the details of implementation.

No one is more aware of these limitations than leading anti-sweatshop campaigners. They are trying to increase energies devoted to winning more generalized worker rights protections for developing countries, stronger guarantees of workers' right to organize, and directing consumers to fair trade, sweat-free products.

In their discussion of the Free Burma movement, the authors trace the history reported in this issue of Multinational Monitor by Jeff Shaw. Focusing on the importance of removing the foreign investment props for the dictatorial Burmese regime, activists in Massachusetts scored a remarkable victory with the passage of that state's "Burma law." The Massachusetts Burma law stopped the state from contracting with companies doing business in Burma. Because of the significant value of government contracting, such "selective purchasing" laws are an extremely powerful tool for citizen activists.

So powerful that the global business community acted to destroy the instrument. European firms rallied the European Union to challenge the Massachusetts law as illegal under World Trade Organization rules. Before the EU challenge ripened into a full-blown complaint at the WTO, U.S. corporations were on the scene. They filed a lawsuit that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supremes agreed with the business challengers, ruling that Massachusetts was impermissibly regulating foreign commerce, and striking down the state's selective purchasing law.

From this experience, Danaher and Mark warn that social movements cannot become overly attached to any one tool, since it can be taken away. And they contrast the business response to the Massachusetts Burma law to the acceptance a decade earlier of selective purchasing laws that targeted companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. Corporations did not challenge the constitutionality of those laws, the authors note, in part because the anti-apartheid movement was more deeply rooted in the broad public, and business did not want to take the public relations hit such a legal challenge would have entailed. For all of its stunning organizational success, the Burmese solidarity movement is far smaller and weaker than the anti-apartheid movement was.

Insurrection provides detailed and serious reporting on movements that are the best hope for the future of the planet and its people. It is a recounting and analysis that is sympathetic but not sycophantic. It draws important lessons and offers friendly criticisms, a kind of thoughtful assessment for the democratic movements to control corporate power that is all too rare.