>On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> For me, the major excitement is that the level of activism seems to
> be rising to 60s levels. It's a quantity issue more than a quality
> one. In fact, as the much-demonized Marc Cooper said to me at the
> Seattle jailouse demo, "They're smarter than we were."
Except I don't think there was a higher level of activism in the 60s. I have seen good surveys showing that a higher percentage of contemporary college students have been involved in various kinds of activism than those in the 60s, where the activists were a visible but distinct minority of young people. And this matches my own experience where back in the 80s, a large percentage of students were involved in everything from El Salvador work, anti-Apartheid activism, womens rights struggles such as Take Back the Night marches, gay rights struggles, diversity-on-campus fights, anti-hunger awareness and so on. And the level of activism off campus is much higher than then, with groups ranging from Citizen Action, ACORN and a host of other single-issue groups encouraging more political involvement. There was, I think, a bit of a dip in campus activism in the early-to-mid 90s, but not that drastic if you take account of the affirmative action and rising sweatshop activism.
What gives the 60s a nostalgic glow of activist heft is that a smaller number of activists were involved in an even smaller set of organizations-- especially concentrated on the antiwar movement and SDS as an organization. Their main mode of action was the large demonstration, further accenting the numbers of the day in those organizations.
It is worth noting that despite that overwhelming focus on the war back then, when the Gulf War started, activists were able to rally mass marches in both DC and San Francisco of comparable or larger size than marches of the Vietnam era. And marches for abortion rights in 1989 and gay rights and other causes were able to produce numbers in DC that the Vietnam era marches never matched.
And because of the sophistication of many contemporary activists - being "smarter than" the 60s activists if you will - the mass march and demo is only one tactic in a much larger arsenal of community organizing, media activism, lobbying, direct action, and other tactics. (Not that these were not used in the 60s, but there is unquestionably a technical sophistication today that was lacking then.)
What has been lacking is a unified strategy in the face of the corporate assault that has impacted movements across the board. Seattle created a glimpse of a new strategic anti-corporate vision that has the potential to unite activists ranging from unionists to environmentalists to human rights activists to feminists to socialists. The "Teamsters and turtles" alliance may give progressives a chance to mount a counter-assault against the coordinated political and economic assault of neoliberalism. It is the lack of such strategic coordination that has made much of the activism of the left over the last decades so ineffective-- they can effectively win fights locally, but find themselves losing the national and global context that sets the terms for local battle.
With Seattle, in light of the revival of the labor movement, the campus sweatshop campaigns, and a range of anti-corporate environmental movements, we now see a convergence of strategic vision that sees challenging corporate power at the "commanding heights" level of conflict as necessary to their individual battles.
50,000 people marching is not itself that interesting, and I have seen as many rubber bullets and mass arrests fighting over Peoples Park in the early 90s, but what is exciting is the purpose and strategic connections that lay behind the action.
And it is the hope that this strategic coordination between labor and other activists will grow that makes me hope to God we don't have a movement that looks anything like the 60s. Some folks seem to want to revive the old anti-"labor bureaucrat" rhetoric for old times sake, but most activists I know are moving towards a much higher level of mutual respect, where unionists are acting more respectfully towards community organizations and looser direct action groups are finding ways to respect the internal processes that drive union decision-making.
I spent a number of years in the early 90s working to build a statewide network of labor, community and environmental groups called the California Network for a New Economy, centered at the South Bay Central Labor Council (which Amy Dean now runs and were she was a staffer at the time). We held a number of conferences and networking meetings where a lot of the focus was on expanding mutual understanding between groups that often had little understanding of the institutional and issue needs of the others. The result was less tangible immediate campaigns -- since all the groups were already up to their ears in action -- but a much more coherent understanding of how groups could support each other. That process has been happening in different ways across the country at the national, state and local level.
And Seattle was in many ways one of the shining results. It is precisely because it is a new configuration of forces and not an echo of the 60s that I found it so inspiring.
-- Nathan Newman