Boots made by walkin' all over you; Nike, Starbucks, Borders,

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 28, 2001 | by Joanna Blythman

The challenge is to link ongoing campaigns into a coherent "anticapitalist" movement. In France, for example, the dismantling of a branch of McDonalds in Millau and subsequent trial of the guerilla/ farmer Jose Bove acted as a focus for anti-US imperialism sentiments. In the UK to date, global biotech companies got an unexpected bloody nose when they tried to impose GM foods on consumers, aided by the government's pro-GM stance. In Scotland there are many potential flashpoints for anti-global activism. Why, for example, should Borders cashmere manufacturers be threatened with crippling trade tariffs and face job losses over Europe's alleged discrimination against imports of bananas? For the time being though, anti- capitalist activity in Scotland is focused on the Trident nuclear missile submarines at Faslane. "Many people are dismayed and worried by the election of George W Bush and the prospect of a much more aggressive US foreign policy. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate tool for globalising war," says Ross.

And so, if the organisers of Globalise Resistance are proved correct, the wee small hours of Monday February 12 will see Faslane become Scotland's answer to Seattle. There is a sense of history repeating itself. When the first US Polaris submarine sailed into the Holy Loch in 1961, the quay at Ardnadam pier was occupied by a broad and hitherto unlikely alliance of leftists, pacifists, clerics, citizens who had never attended a demonstration in their lives before and young people, quite simply terrified by the thought that missiles capable of world carnage were on their doorstep.

The difference these days is the agenda has broadened. More people are worried about the prospect of an increasingly undifferentiated planet, where national distinctions and traditions are overwhelmed by the sheer marketing muscle of a uniform, global culture controlled by big corporations. And post-Seattle, they see there may be ways of resisting it.

l Globalise Resistance Conference, February 2-3, Glasgow Caledonian University. Phone 07808 117488 or www.gn.apc.org/ globaliseresistance l Faslane Blockade Action Line 0141-433 2859 Joanna Blythman is the author of The Food Our Children Eat, Fourth Estate, #7.99 www.nologo.org Who's who in global resistance?

Canadian Naomi Klein effectively wrote the manifesto for Seattle protesters in her surprise best seller No Logo (Flamingo #14.99). In it she investigates how corporations have colonised our cultural space and exposes the sweatshop economy that props up some popular consumer brands. Perhaps her most subversive contribution is showing how youth can fight consumerism with its own best weapons by "culture- jamming" the message of big brands.

With his bristling handle-bar moustache, Jose Bove is the peasant hero of the French Global Resistance. He dismantled an under- construction McDonalds in Millau as a symbolic target for the inexorable march of globalisation, the WTO and its deleterious effects on small-scale, local, non-polluting agriculture. A sheep farmer (and Greenpeace and anti-nuclear activist), his motto is: "The world is not for sale".