>On Behalf Of Chuck0
> Nathan, have you ever seen downtown Seattle? It resembles a corporate
> theme park. Almost everything is a chain store. In this context and in
> the greater context of SHOWING a radical resistance to the capitalism
> that is the WTO, the property destruction was a logical and appropriate
> action.
Ah, it was "symbolic" protest, not any real attempt to build an movement that could hurt the chains economically. ie. it was postmodern "resistance"
But since the point is symbolism, then that just reinforces the right of other activists to struggle over the symbolic meaning of the day. The media is pretty simple-minded, so the argument that everyone is free to do their own action is just untrue. Window-breaking is a direct symbolic attack not just on the corporations but on the symbolic protests of other activists.
So if denouncing the window-breaking and cleaning up the mess helps the main demo's symbolic strategy, then don't complain. It's all symbolic combat for control of meaning. And if your protest is going to undermine another larger strategy, it will get shut down.
This is just a difference in philosophy. I come out of the union movement where someone scabbing against the majority decisions gets sanctioned, because what they do endangers other people. I have no problem with leftwing "policing" when the policing reflects broad democratic agreement. If activists were shutting down scabbing on the Right, there would be few complaints on this list. Scabbing on the "left" is just as anti-democratic.
If you want to make the argument that there was not a broad agreement among tens of thousands of activists not to commit property destruction, you can try. But it would be false. A small band of anti-democratic folks decided they could lie to other activists about their intentions and betray the work of those other activists.
And the point of the Seattle struggle for the vast majority of activists was not a one-day symbolic show, but to build a movement and build support from the population for a broad anti-corporate struggle.
The fact is that Global Exchange does not engage in just symbolic work. They build real consumer boycotts and direct action pressure on multinationals, from Nike to the Gap, that hit their corporate bottom-line and force changes in their behavior.
They have had success with Nike and (while probably not their singular effect), Gap's stock price has fallen in half since they began their campaign against the Gap. They've mounted pressure on the World Bank with the boycott bonds campaign. And they have worked with sweatshop activists on and off campus to put pressure on clothing contractors to abide by anti-sweatshop agreements.
The Seattle "anarchist" preening for the cameras (and many anarchists did not support it) as they toss a few bricks through well-insured windows looks sad and self-indulgent, not militant.
If you don't ultimately hurt the economic bottom-line, don't delude yourself that symbolic "showing" of "radical resistance" means anything. It's just that, a show.
Of course, the whole Seattle protest was a show, but what gave it power was that the elite knew it was not just a handful of folks throwing bricks, but a broad movement that could follow up the show with real action and economic power.
The same cannot be said for the window-breaking folks.
-- Nathan Newman