capture

Capitalist postmodernity is even better at reincorporating resistance that the State ever was. For one thing, there are similarities between the two: both are fluid, global, networked. It is important to remember that shifting indeterminacies and deterritorialisations are not "an irresistable revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 387). For corporate globalisation's purposes, certain flows are acceptable but not others: flows of capital, and of certain types of labour, for example, but not flows of people.

What's more, global corporate capitalism knows the tricks, it masks itself as if it, too, is a nomad: through street-scrawled chalk advertising campaigns, through military-industrial technology sold back to the kids as freedom, through clothes that are sold pre-ripped, safe, stratified. These are just some of the ways to answer Ang: we are free to consume. Shopping as identity. (Massumi, 1992: 92)

In cases such as S11, there is a symbiotic relationship between some of the participants. For example, The Age newspaper, produced by Fairfax, itself a member of the World Economic Forum that the S11 Alliance was protesting, relies on such protests to create news it can cover, and then sell. Indeed, part of its audience is the protester, who is immediately implicated in the chain of consumption and whose identity is immediately captured by the system, at least in part.

The nation-state's role in this is to reterritorialise, to regulate flows in the form of taxes, quarantines, immigration procedures; to attempt to control both the protesters and the corporations. It guards the borders. Yet in part the effect is to align migrants and refugee movements with the other protesters.

It's no accident that the anti-capitalist movement should segue so easily into the anti-war movement: the State apparatus long ago territorialised the war machine as army.