>>From a fwd from Yoshie (The Vision Thing, Naomi Klein, The Nation):
>
>>So how do you extract coherence from a movement filled with
>>anarchists, whose greatest tactical strength so far has been its
>>similarity to a swarm of mosquitoes?....
>
>I am tempted to ask, and the point was...? These calls for more
>tightly organized and concerted action are premature. Just keep up the
>drone against these global bastions and see what happens.
[...]
>So, wait and see.
Hey, Chuck, I agree with you. And so, apparently, does Klein. Here's the rest of the article, which was cut off at misleading place.
"...Maybe, as with the Internet itself, you don't do it by imposing a preset structure but rather by skillfully surfing the structures that are already in place. Perhaps what is needed is not a single political party but better links among the affinity groups; perhaps rather than moving toward more centralization, what is needed is further radical decentralization.
When critics say that the protesters lack vision, what they are really saying is that they lack an overarching revolutionary philosophy--like Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy--on which they all agree. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful. At the moment, the anticorporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, anxious for the opportunity to enlist them as foot soldiers for their particular cause. At one end there is Michael Lerner and his conference at the Riverside Church, waiting to welcome all that inchoate energy in Seattle and Washington inside the framework of his "Politics of Meaning." At the other, there is John Zerzan in Eugene, Oregon, who isn't interested in Lerner's call for "healing" but sees the rioting and property destruction as the first step toward the collapse of industrialization and a return to "anarcho-primitivism"--a pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer utopia. In between there are doze! ns of other visionaries, from the It is to this young movement's credit that it has as yet fended off all of these agendas and has rejected everyone's generously donated manifesto, holding out for an acceptably democratic, representative process to take its resistance to the next stage. Perhaps its true challenge is not finding a vision but rather resisting the urge to settle on one too quickly. If it succeeds in warding off the teams of visionaries-in-waiting, there will be some short-term public relations problems. Serial protesting will burn some people out. Street intersections will declare autonomy. And yes, young activists will offer themselves up like lambs--dressed, frequently enough, in actual lamb costumes--to the New York Times Op-Ed page for ridicule.
But so what? Already, this decentralized, multiheaded swarm of a movement has succeeded in educating and radicalizing a generation of activists around the world. Before it signs on to anyone's ten-point plan, it deserves the chance to see if, out of its chaotic network of hubs and spokes, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge."