The Fourth World War: a review
The documentary, The Fourth World War (Big Noise, 2003), uses intense footage, artistic editing, and poetic narrative to effectively weave together a portrayal of unified popular resistance to globalization in the decade and a half since the end of the Cold War (known to some as the Third World War). The ADD-friendly storyline jumps between popular struggles in Argentina, Chiapas (Mexico), South Africa, Korea, and Palestine. Also featured are the anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City, the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, and the February 15, 2003, anti-war protests, though a depiction of the human geography surrounding the struggles is not given to these latter three events. The documentary is effective in portraying the reality of a global struggle centered in the South, especially to an audience previously ignorant of the anti-globalization movement. Activists with some experience, however, will likely find the film short on information, though useful in depicting people of color in the Global South as being at the frontlines of a struggle that is militant, dangerous, and courageous.
Accordingly, militant anarchists have often been the ones supporting and hosting showings of The Fourth World War. The film can, after all, be useful in reenergizing worn-out activists and inspiring people outside the movement to join in. However, despite its substitution of sometimes trite poeticizing for in-depth critique or information, the film subtly presents an underlying analysis that militant anarchists would do well to question.
Most obvious is the film’s Zapatismo. As far as I know, the term “Fourth World War” is borrowed from the iconic Zapatista Subcommandante himself. Beyond this, there are two primary manifestations of Zapatismo apparent within the documentary’s quiet ideology. The first is cultural. To its credit, The Fourth World War highlights the struggle in the Global South rather than making the non-Euro/American countries play second string to the First Worlders. The narration and interviews emphasize the importance of indigenous histories and traditions, and the struggle itself is often described as a hegemonic story trying to stamp out independent cultural narratives. The filmmakers also use a number of Zapatista metaphors, like “ghosts” representing collective memory. The second manifestation is politic, if not downright political. The same positivistic balancing act that has allowed the Zapatistas to cultivate alliances across a broad spectrum that includes such antagonists as institutional liberals, Marxists, and anarchists is present to a refined degree in a documentary that features Korean trade unionists, Palestinian liberationists, Argentine Marxist academics, indigenous Mexican peasants, North American college radicals, Italian anarchists, and South African anti-apartheid veterans, without even a whisper of conflict or disunity. Such attempts to portray united popular fronts are simplifying or optimistic at best, and at worst intentionally manipulative.
This possibility brings us to the film’s economic and structural analysis, which upon examination appears to be a watered-down version of the likes of Antonio Negri or other neo-Marxists. According to an Argentine intellectual whose interspersed interview segments provide a major portion of the documentary’s analysis, neoliberal globalization means that “nation states must be destroyed, and people must survive in the market, which is to say, “fuck them.”” At another point in the film, one of the two narrators explains: “We rose up to seize the state, and found that the state did not exist. That in reality, we faced a system stretching far beyond our borders.”
Marxist intellectuals trained to see history as a dialectical evolution interpret globalization as the process of ultra-bourgeois power structures destroying the very states the proletariat were poised to seize and removing power to a more distant, global stage. Deemphasizing government, or even romanticizing the nation-state, also makes sense for Marxists who find themselves overshadowed by anarchism and complementary ideas like autonomism and indigenism, at a time when the Soviet Union is a bad memory and the People’s Republic of China has come full circle back to capitalism. Marxists unwilling to criticize industrial civilization, dream of a world in which no one will have to be a worker, or acknowledge that the existence of the state requires exploitive economic systems, must blame an all-powerful global system for their epochal failures and false predictions.
Of course, capital is increasingly coordinating itself across national boundaries, but the experience of NAFTA and the European Union have shown clearly that globalization also means militarizing borders and strengthening the xenophobic ideologies that are a bulwark of the nation-state. The IMF or World Bank would be most distressed to hear that “the state did not exist” because without a state capable of projecting itself militarily across the globe (the US, and to a lesser extent its European allies, come to mind), the transnational institutions of globalization would lose their strongest enforcement mechanisms. How many countries only received structural adjustments on the heels of a coup or invasion, and how many only complied under the threat of such actions?
Interestingly, peasants and protestors, interviewed not to provide analysis but to describe their particular struggle, particularly in Chiapas, Argentina, and South Africa, identify government forces or the state itself as their primary oppressor. In fact, it is highly curious that The Fourth World War can show so much footage of police beating protestors and get away with claiming that depriving people of the nation-state means “fuck them.” Didn’t the nation-state invent police forces? Are we to believe that police did not beat people until local governments gave their loyalties to multinationals? And exactly at what point in history did nation-states guarantee that their people did not have to “survive in the market”? The complaints of the death of the nation-state are the complaints of educated professionals who find themselves further away from the centers of the postcolonial power structures that once seemed to be within their reach; who find themselves shunted by the weakening of the labor bureaucracies that once looked to them for ideological guidance. A more realistic understanding of globalization, which this film does hint at while quoting the Zapatistas, tells us that the world’s populations were forced into nation-states through colonialism and “independence” with the direct purpose of facilitating European, and later settler-state (US, Canada, Australia) imperialism.
Understanding that the enemy, the perpetrator of the Fourth World War, has been active for at least 500 years, would make us skeptical of protests that challenge the World Bank but go no further. Such an understanding would certainly make us skeptical of films that attempt to portray such protests, along with armed indigenous struggles, as part of an unbroken global movement. But The Fourth World War does not encourage critical evaluation of the movement, and arguably does not do enough to deepen our understanding of this global war, of which corporate globalization is only a recent chapter. Perhaps allowing a realistic understanding of the unbridled genocidal and oppressive impulses of the system that is waging war against “all of us” would contradict the narrator’s exhortations to “end this war,” but never to fight it, win it, and destroy the system that engineered it, as though some sort of truce would be possible and preferable.
Despite the relative militancy of this film, The Fourth World War still prescribes a pacified resistance. While it is laudable that the filmmakers showed their North American audience how common it is in the rest of the world to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police, it is irresponsible of them to show Palestinian children throwing rocks in slow-mo to exciting and triumphant music without showing those children getting shot, without being honest that it will take more than rocks and more than a couple martyrs to win. It is also questionable for the filmmakers to adopt a posture of solidarity with the people of Palestine and Chiapas without depicting any of the highly popular armed actions of clandestine groups in both places, or even mentioning the existence of such in Palestine.
Instead, the narrators say things like: “Our refusal is a stone against their tanks,” which they actually intend as an empowering statement, rather than an admission that beliefs and verbalizations alone are useless without actions, preferably of the armed variety. The better Israeli tanks, for instance, cannot be taken out without a tremendous quantity of explosives. Decades of moralizing world opinion have certainly not decreased the supply of Israelis willing to operate those tanks, and without the armed resistance of those very Palestinians disappeared by this film, Israel would have found it easy to destroy and absorb all of Palestine long ago.
Other narratorial pronouncements are equally confusing, like the reference to “days when flesh and bone were stronger than lead” or the assurance that “we have defeated other empires before this one.” On the contrary, human bodies have never been able to consistently stop bullets without suffering potentially lethal damage, and no empire I can think of in the last thousand years has been defeated, except to be absorbed or divided by competing empires. Arguably, the filmmakers could be referring to the overextended Mongol Empire, but that hardly seems topical.
At one point, a narrator claims that “we defeated” South African apartheid, which at the least is connected to imperialism, but at another point in the film admits that one year before the apartheid regime allowed elections to take place, the ANC (African National Congress) signed its first World Bank loan, symbolically announcing its willingness to cooperate with a global sort of apartheid. All the same, let us examine this dubious victory, from the narratorial perspective. “We did not overthrow apartheid through elections or decisive military engagements. We defeated apartheid and we will stop this war [the Fourth World War] by making it unworkable on the ground through thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience.” And there you have it. The documentary ends with triumphant music played over protest footage of dancing in the streets, emphasizing the putatively transformative power of repetitive protests. “We walked and these moments changed us,” the narrators say.
But they do not explain how “these moments” will change the world, how getting beat up in the streets makes the system “unworkable,” and why, if we want to make the system unworkable, we should confine ourselves to less effective methods like human chains, burning tires, and mass rallies announced to the police in advance. Perhaps because they are afraid of the consequences of treating this war like a war. Perhaps because they do not want to jeopardize the fragile progressive coalition of people with undeniably antithetical views on the topic of revolution. Perhaps because they do in fact want North Americans to continue uncritically generating political capital for leftwing organizations by marching peacefully and colorfully in the streets. They may even want to borrow the voice of the oppressed, to paraphrase the climactic Marcos quote, to warn other bourgeois North Americans invested in the system of a dangerous conflict that must be acknowledged and recuperated, to end this war and turn it into a victorious peace, a Pax Americana if you will.
One thing is certain: “thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience” have certainly not freed South Africa, or India, or any other example, from the hegemony of the global system. On the other hand, armed struggle achieved the desired aims in Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, though the Marxist-Leninist ideologies of all three revolts only guaranteed the development of a new authoritarian system. Why did all the major liberation struggles after the Second World War follow a Marxist path? Perhaps because the only teacher of world revolution before them was the Soviet Union, that unfortunate result of Russian liberatory struggles consolidated after the Leninists betrayed and eliminated their anarchist and other anti-authoritarian allies. Ultimately, and this history only emphasizes the point, The Fourth World War does a disservice to the idea of solidarity by presenting it as a safe and uncritical thing. We should be skeptical of those who tell us we can ever end a war with a system whose very existence is warfare; who tell us we can win freedom without fighting and dying for it. Ultimately, The Fourth World War glosses over the many very real disagreements within the movements confronting the global system only to make two highly contentious points, regarding the nature of the enemy and the method of struggle, in a veiled, uncritical, and propagandistic way.
