below is a bit out of Time magazine this week, also promoting Chuck again. I'm trying to gauge what the meaning of the fixation with the @ soccer league means (you know how different media sources often repeat each other and stories can run in a wave). On one hand, I think it's really good that they're portraying anarchists in a more realistic light, because it would be easy to write a scare story that these kids are a mass movement out of Columbine high school or something (CSPAN was showing police with seized gas masks and bottles of the anti-tear gas solution made of lemon juice + other ingredients, and they were saying that it was bleach and urine to throw at police). On the other hand, they may be seizing on the soccer league image to portray anarchists as educated middle class tossers who are only into the social and self-image aspects, but they're totally ignorant about politics beyond the basics. I think the former is more likely.
I went to the anarchist book fair in SF this weekend. Always a lot more people show up at that (for the social aspect) than ever show up to Books to Prisoners or other anarchist organizations affecting change. John Zerzan was there. He was being a bit ridiculous and people weren't really challenging him much. He spoke for 20-30 min right after Christian Parenti, who makes a lot of sense. His first comments were that because anarchy is really on the upswing and revolution is imminent, they should stop inviting nonanarchists to speak at the bookfair. Then he said they have to make a big line between anarchy and leftism, and he called Noam Chomsky and Z magazine and The Nation all with the same brush of liberalism. He said that they just focus on anti-corporate dominance whereas ending the technological system is the key. then he was talking about how pacifism and protest by numbers is a failed strategy - for Vietnam and for the current protests.
Time
"APRIL 24, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 16
The New Radicals
The people who brought us Seattle have now done Washington. Are they
dreamers or sly subversives?
BY WALTER KIRN
[INLINE]
FORGING ALLIANCES: Young activists show support for a Teamster protest
against China [INLINE]
Maybe part of the problem is the word. Globalization. It has a
sinister ring, like a euphemism from the same technocrats who gave us
"downsizing" during the Reagan years and "pacification" during
Vietnam. The term conjures up a futuristic vision of vast, implacable
economic processes steamrollering their way across the earth, leveling
forests, languages and customs without regard for puny individuals.
Globalization: right or wrong, it sounds unstoppable. Which may be one reason so many people of so many different
persuasions have sworn to stop it. The word itself throws down a
challenge. The first mass uprising to meet that challenge occurred
last year in Seattle, when 40,000 protesters from across the
ideological map surrounded, shouted down and roundly embarrassed the
assembled representatives of the World Trade Organization. In
Seattle--a city whose name has since become a political rallying cry
akin to "Chicago in 1968"--environmentalists, union members,
human-rights crusaders and old-school populists locked their arms
around a spinning globe and, at least for a moment, slowed it down.
They tried to do it again in Washington. Their target: a meeting of
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two great
institutions of global finance and, say critics, corporate dominion
over the planet's poor and disfranchised. When the organizations met a
year ago, about two dozen protesters showed up--barely enough to block
a single limo. But mindful of Seattle's violence, D.C. cops last week
shut down the demonstrators' "convergence" point (a warehouse) and
came out in force. This time, they faced not dozens but thousands of demonstrators on the barricades, all joined by a feeling that the new
world order is really a slick new version of the old one, ruled by Big
Money and Big Government. On Saturday night alone, police arrested
nearly 600 anti-globalists for "parading without a permit." Thanks in
large part to the Internet, which has allowed them to cement their
bonds, air their grievances and swell their ranks, the activists have
got their acts together, the clout of old-fashioned labor welded to
the cybersavvy of campus radicals. Their growing movement makes Hands
Across America look like a game of ring-around-a-rosy.
A movement of whom toward what, though? That's the puzzle. What's the
opposite of globalization? Socialism? Isolationism? Vegetarianism? The
answer is all three things, and many more. The radical-chic outfit of
the season is a coat of many colors. If you trained a license
plate-reading surveillance satellite on Washington last week (or
better yet, swept low in a black helicopter), you would have seen
bumper stickers, signs and buttons promoting animal rights, organic farming and Pat Buchanan for President. You'd even have seen a soccer
ball or two being kicked around by--this is real--something called the
Anarchists Soccer League. (Q. How do anarchists score goals? A. Any
way they damn well please.)
What you'd have had to look very hard to see in Washington was anyone
resembling a leader. Because there isn't one, in the usual sense. No
Abbie Hoffman. No Pat Robertson. Sure, Ralph Nader is wandering around
(see accompanying story), and so is satirical filmmaker Michael Moore,
but they're not calling the shots or giving marching orders. The
Mobilization for Global Justice isn't a top-down affair. Like the
Internet itself, and unlike the coalition's corporate enemies, the
antiglobalist movement is a body that manages to survive, and even
thrive, without a head.
It has lots of arms instead, some of them stretching far out into
cyberspace. "The Internet has helped people keep in touch in a shorter time frame," says Chuck Munson, 34, who runs a website called
http://Infoshop.org that acts as a meeting place for anarchists, who
are notoriously hard to organize. "The advantage is that we can
communicate with each other quickly."
The Web breeds a sense of togetherness too, and togetherness is
important to these activists, so many of whom have spent the last few
decades of market capitalism uber alles feeling more than a little
isolated. "From my perspective, and I came out of the '60s," says Carl
Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, "Seattle was the
first time where you saw multigeneration, multiclass and multi-issue
in the streets together." Pope remembers marchers hugging each other
and a bracing moment when a group of young radicals gave a
clenched-fist salute to several construction workers, who responded in
kind.
This feeling of solidarity grew online long after the last splinters
of glass from Seattle's vandalized Starbucks had been cleaned up.
While their foes were busy checking real-time quotes for Intel and GE,
the antiglobalists were swapping digital photos of police brutality,
reading Noam Chomsky's essays on media brainwashing and posting tips
on defending against pepper spray (wear a handkerchief soaked in
vinegar). The irony of all this is stark, and possibly galling to the
technocrats: the Web was supposed to be globalism's great tool, not a
forum for its enemies. The Web was supposed to weld together markets
into one enormous worldwide trading floor, not organize thousands into
picket lines. MORE>>