Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

confined to niche products. Even The Ecologist, a radical environmentalist
magazine from the 1970s which has maintained credibility and ‘market
share’, became a target of corporate global reach when its special issue
on GM was delayed because the printer was threatened by legal action
(The Ecologist Vol. 28, 5).
Outside political economy treatments primarily aligned with the concerns
of union and organised labour organisations, feminist output represented
the other most significant source of commentary on the simultaneous ‘rape’
of planet and people for profit. Cynthia Enloe’s (1989) Bananas, Beaches
and Bases stands out as one of the most lucid and accessible accounts of
the interrelationships between sweat shop labour in the clothing industry,
the formation of union free export processing zones (EPZs) the gendered
hierarchy of the diplomatic core, strategic military bases and prostitution.
Western feminists were in effect reflecting upon and through network
connections established through the women’s movement which produced
‘sister’ organisations across the planet – a process stimulated by US military
theatre modernisation.
Of these Vandana Shiva is one of the key figures best known for her
prodigious published output (e.g. Mies and Shiva 1993) but equally important
for her sponsorship and work within a feminist women’s collective in India.
Shiva’s ‘Ten Commandments of Globalisation and Corporate Rule’, are a
striking example of her word-smithing qualities:
For citizens
1 Thou shalt have no rights to food, to water, to a safe environment.
2 Thou shalt have no rights to work, to a livelihood, to economic security.
3 Thou shalt have no other identity or morality than that of being
consumers in the global marker place.
4 Thou shalt elect governments, but the governments shall not be to
protect you. They will protect corporations.
For governments
5 Thou shalt give up all functions of protecting your citizens and all
duties and obligations required of you by your national constitution.
6 Thou shalt consider your first duty and obligation to be to promote the
freedom of transnational corporations and to take away the freedoms
of your people.
7 Thou shalt take the environmental wealth of your country and citizens
and hand it over for free to transnational corporations.
For corporations and business
Prefiguration and emergence 25
8 If you are small and local, thou shalt disappear and make way for
transnational corporations.