Our anarchist party won the school election!

It was the autumn term 1988 at my school – we were about 16 at the time – in a western suburb of Stockholm. As usual when it was election year, we were to stage a "school election" of our own. But Markus, my best pal, and I didn’t believe in the system. Majority polls, 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 dead keen on listening to synthesizer music and goth, preferably dressed in black and with backcombed hair. We wanted to play music and read books, while the others seemed mostly preoccupied with gizmos and fitting in.

The right wing, it seemed to us, was upper class establishment, dead against anything different. But we didn’t feel any more at home with the left, which to us meant drab governmental bureaucracy and regimentation. Even if we preferred Sisters of Mercy and the Swedish punk singer Thåström, it was John Lennon’s “imagine there’s no countries” we believed in.

National states must be abolished and people allowed to move freely and 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 Democrats. 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 hand-written posters on the walls in school, proclaiming 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 school yard. Most of the teachers took a dim view of this, feeling that we were making a farce of the election, whereas we thought that we were making our voices heard in true democratic spirit. Being called to the headmaster’s study for a telling-off merely strengthened our rebellious spirit.

We did well in a tough campaign, polling 25 per cent of the votes. The Social Democrats came second with 19 per cent. We were over the moon, convinced that this would be the start of something big . . .

That was thirteen years ago. In the meantime I have changed my mind on a number of things. I have come to realise that questions concerning individuals, society and freedom are more complicated than I then believed. There are too many aspects and problems involved for everything to be settled in one drastically Utopian stroke.

Political power used to be local. Globalisation enables us to override this by trading or across national boundaries.

I have come to realise that we need a government which protects liberty and prevents the powerful from oppressing individuals, and I have come to understand that representative democracy is preferable to all other systems, for this very purpose of protecting the rights of the individual. But my fundamental urge to liberty is the same today as in that wonderful election campaign of 1988. I want people to be allowed freedom, with no one oppressing anyone else, and with governments not being permitted to fence people in or exclude them with tariffs and frontiers.

This is why I love what is rather barrenly termed globalisation, the process whereby people, communications, trade, investments, democracy and the market economy are tending more and more to cross national boundaries. This internationalisation has made us less constricted by the map-makers’ boundaries.

Political power has always been local, based on physical control of a certain territory. Globalisation is enabling us more and more to override these territories, by travelling in person and by trading or investing across national boundaries. Opportunities for choosing other solutions and foreign alternatives have multiplied as transport costs have fallen, we have acquired new and more efficient means of communication, and trade and capital movements have been liberalised.

We do not have to shop with the big local company, we can turn to a foreign competitor; we do not have to work for the village’s one and only employer, we can be offered alternative opportunities; we do not have to make do with local cultural amenities, the world’s culture is at our disposal; we do not have to spend our whole life in one place, we can travel and relocate. Above all, this leads to a liberation of our thinking. We no longer make do with local routine, we want to choose actively and freely. Companies, politicians and associations are having to exert themselves to elicit interest or support from people who are acquainted with a host of alternatives from the world’s diversity. Our possibilities of controlling our own lives are growing, and prosperity is growing with them.

This is why I find it pathetic when people who call themselves anarchists engage in the globalisation struggle, but against it, not for! I visited Gothenburg, Sweden, in June 2001 during the big EU-summit. I went there in order to explain why the problem with the European Union is that in many ways it is fighting globalisation and liberalisation, and to present my view that borders should be opened and controls dismantled.

I never got the chance to hold my speech. The place where I was to speak was suddenly in the middle of a battle zone, when so called anti-globalisation anarchists were smashing shops and throwing stones at policemen who were trying to defend a democratic meeting.

They are anarchists who demand prohibitions and controls and throw stones at people with different values. Anarchists who demand that the government resume control of those people and enterprises who no longer find their initiative restricted by national boundaries. They make a mockery of the idea of freedom. To our cheerful Anarchistic Front, people like that had nothing to do with anarchism. In our simplified teenage vocabulary they were, if anything, fascists.






Contributed by Johan Norberg, author. Reprinted with permission from A World Connected.

To read another Global Envision book review of Johan Norberg's latest book, In Defense of Global Capitalism,, see A Spirited Argument in Defense of Global Capitalism.