-------- Original Message -------- Subject: (en) The network of struggles, the international days and the lack of "unity of vision and strategy" Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 02:57:24 -0400 From: Naomi Klein <nklein at sympatico.ca> Reply-To: a-infos-d at lists.tao.ca To: antiimf2000 at egroups.com
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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nklein at sympatico.ca wrote:
Naomi thought this item from the The Nation Magazine would be of interest to you.
THE VISION THING
by NAOMI KLEIN
"This conference is not like other conferences."
That's what all the speakers
at "Re-Imagining Politics and Society" were told before we arrived at New
York's Riverside Church. When we addressed the delegates (there were about
1,000, over three days in May), we were to try to solve a very specific
problem: the lack of "unity of vision and strategy" guiding the movement
against global corporatism.
This was a very serious problem, we were advised.
The young activists who went to Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization
and to Washington, DC, to protest the World Bank and the IMF had been getting
hammered in the press as tree-wearing, lamb-costumed, drumbeating bubble
brains. Our mission, according to the conference organizers at the Foundation
for Ethics and Meaning, was to whip that chaos on the streets into some
kind of structured, media-friendly shape. This wasn't just another talk
shop. We were going to "give birth to a unified movement for holistic social,
economic and political change."
As I slipped in and out of lecture rooms,
soaking up vision galore from Arianna Huffington, Michael Lerner, David
Korten and Cornel West, I was struck by the futility of this entire well-meaning
exercise. Even if we did manage to come up with a ten-point plan--brilliant
in its clarity, elegant in its coherence, unified in its outlook--to whom,
exactly, would we hand down these commandments? The anticorporate protest
movement that came to world attention on the streets of Seattle last November
is not united by a political party or a national network with a head office,
annual elections and subordinate cells and locals. It is shaped by the ideas
of individual organizers and intellectuals, but doesn't defer to any of
them as leaders. In this amorphous context, the ideas and plans being hatched
at the Riverside Church weren't irrelevant exactly, they just weren't important
in the way they clearly hoped to be. Rather than changing the world, they
were destined to be swept up and tossed around in the tidal wave of information--web
diaries, NGO manifestoes, academic papers, homemade videos, cris de coeur--that
the global anticorporate network produces and consumes each and every day.
* * *
This is the flip side of the persistent criticism that the kids on
the street lack clear leadership--they lack clear followers too. To those
searching for replicas of the sixties, this absence makes the anticorporate
movement appear infuriatingly impassive: Evidently, these people are so
disorganized they can't even get it together to respond to perfectly well-organized
efforts to organize them. These are MTV-weaned activists, you can practically
hear the old guard saying: scattered, nonlinear, no focus.
It's easy to
be persuaded by these critiques. If there is one thing on which the left
and right agree, it is the value of a clear, well-structured ideological
argument. But maybe it's not quite so simple. Maybe the protests in Seattle
and Washington look unfocused because they were not demonstrations of one
movement at all but rather convergences of many smaller ones, each with
its sights trained on a specific multinational corporation (like Nike),
a particular industry (like agribusiness) or a new trade initiative (like
the Free Trade Area of the Americas). These smaller, targeted movements
are clearly part of a common cause: They share a belief that the disparate
problems with which they are wrestling all derive from global deregulation,
an agenda that is concentrating power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
Of course, there are disagreements--about the role of the nation-state,
about whether capitalism is redeemable, about the speed with which change
should occur. But within most of these miniature movements, there is an
emerging consensus that building community-based decision-making power--whether
through unions, neighborhoods, farms, villages, anarchist collectives or
aboriginal self-government--is essential to countering the might of multinational
corporations.
Despite this common ground, these campaigns have not coalesced
into a single movement. Rather, they are intricately and tightly linked
to one another, much as "hotlinks" connect their websites on the Internet.
This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding
the changing nature of political organizing. Although many have observed
that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the Internet,
what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates
these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. Thanks to the
Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with sparse bureaucracy and minimal
hierarchy; forced consensus and labored manifestoes are fading into the
background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured
and sometimes compulsive information-swapping.
What emerged on the streets
of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic,
decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet--the Internet come to
life.
* * *
The Washington-based research center TeleGeography has taken
it upon itself to map out the architecture of the Internet as if it were
the solar system. Recently, TeleGeography pronounced that the Internet is
not one giant web but a network of "hubs and spokes." The hubs are the centers
of activity, the spokes the links to other centers, which are autonomous
but interconnected.
It seems like a perfect description of the protests
in Seattle and Washington, DC. These mass convergences were activist hubs,
made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of autonomous spokes. During the
demonstrations, the spokes took the form of "affinity groups" of between
five and twenty protesters, each of which elected a spokesperson to represent
them at regular "spokescouncil" meetings. Although the affinity groups agreed
to abide by a set of nonviolence principles, they also functioned as discrete
units, with the power to make their own strategic decisions. At some rallies,
activists carry actual cloth webs to symbolize their movement. When it's
time for a meeting, they lay the web on the ground, call out "all spokes
on the web" and the structure becomes a street-level boardroom.
In the
four years before the Seattle and Washington protests, similar hub events
had converged outside WTO, G-7 and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summits
in Auckland, Vancouver, Manila, Birmingham, London, Geneva, Kuala Lumpur
and Cologne. Each of these mass protests was organized according to principles
of coordinated decentralization. Rather than present a coherent front, small
units of activists surrounded their target from all directions. And rather
than build elaborate national or international bureaucracies, temporary
structures were thrown up instead: Empty buildings were turned into "convergence
centers," and independent media producers assembled impromptu activist news
centers. The ad hoc coalitions behind these demonstrations frequently named
themselves after the date of the planned event: J18, N30, A16 and now, for
the IMF meeting in Prague on September 26, S26. When these events are over,
they leave virtually no trace behind, save for an archived website.
Of
course, all this talk of radical decentralization conceals a very real hierarchy
based on who owns, understands and controls the computer networks linking
the activists to one another--this is what Jesse Hirsh, one of the founders
of the anarchist computer network Tao Communications, calls "a geek adhocracy."
The hubs and spokes model is more than a tactic used at protests; the protests
are themselves made up of "coalitions of coalitions," to borrow a phrase
from Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange. Each anticorporate campaign is made
up of many groups, mostly NGOs, labor unions, students and anarchists. They
use the Internet, as well as more traditional organizing tools, to do everything
from cataloguing the latest transgressions of the World Bank to bombarding
Shell Oil with faxes and e-mails to distributing ready-to-download antisweatshop
leaflets for protests at Nike Town. The groups remain autonomous, but their
international coordination is deft and, to their targets, frequently devastating.
The charge that the anticorporate movement lacks "vision" falls apart when
looked at in the context of these campaigns. It's true that the mass protests
in Seattle and DC were a hodgepodge of slogans and causes, that to a casual
observer, it was hard to decode the connections between Mumia's incarceration
and the fate of the sea turtles. But in trying to find coherence in these
large-scale shows of strength, the critics are confusing the outward demonstrations
of the movement with the thing itself--missing the forest for the people
dressed as trees. This movement is its spokes, and in the spokes there is
no shortage of vision.
The student antisweatshop movement, for instance,
has rapidly moved from simply criticizing companies and campus administrators
to drafting alternate codes of conduct and building its own quasi-regulatory
body, the Worker Rights Consortium. The movement against genetically engineered
and modified foods has leapt from one policy victory to the next, first
getting many GM foods removed from the shelves of British supermarkets,
then getting labeling laws passed in Europe, then making enormous strides
with the Montreal Protocol on Biosafety. Meanwhile, opponents of the World
Bank's and IMF's export-led development models have produced bookshelves'
worth of resources on community-based development models, debt relief and
self-government principles. Critics of the oil and mining industries are
similarly overflowing with ideas for sustainable energy and responsible
resource extraction--though they rarely get the chance to put their visions
into practice.
* * *
The fact that these campaigns are so decentralized
is not a source of incoherence and fragmentation. Rather, it is a reasonable,
even ingenious adaptation both to pre-existing fragmentation within progressive
networks and to changes in the broader culture. It is a byproduct of the
explosion of NGOs, which, since the Rio Summit in 1992, have been gaining
power and prominence. There are so many NGOs involved in anticorporate campaigns
that nothing but the hubs and spokes model could possibly accommodate all
their different styles, tactics and goals. Like the Internet itself, both
the NGO and the affinity group networks are infinitely expandable systems.
If somebody doesn't feel like they quite fit in to one of the 30,000 or
so NGOs or thousands of affinity groups out there, they can just start their
own and link up. Once involved, no one has to give up their individuality
to the larger structure; as with all things online, we are free to dip in
and out, take what we want and delete what we don't. It is a surfer's approach
to activism reflecting the Internet's paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism
coupled with an intense desire for external connection.
One of the great
strengths of this model of laissez-faire organizing is that it has proven
extraordinarily difficult to control, largely because it is so different
from the organizing principles of the institutions and corporations it targets.
It responds to corporate concentration with a maze of fragmentation, to
globalization with its own kind of localization, to power consolidation
with radical power dispersal.
Joshua Karliner of the Transnational Resource
and Action Center calls this system "an unintentionally brilliant response
to globalization." And because it was unintentional, we still lack even
the vocabulary to describe it, which may be why a rather amusing metaphor
industry has evolved to fill the gap. I'm throwing my lot in with hubs and
spokes, but Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians says, "We are up against
a boulder. We can't remove it so we try to go underneath it, to go around
it and over it." Britain's John Jordan, one of the founders of Reclaim the
Streets, says transnationals "are like giant tankers, and we are like a
school of fish. We can respond quickly; they can't." The US-based Free Burma
Coalition talks of a network of "spiders," spinning a web strong enough
to tie down the most powerful multinationals. A US military report about
the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas even got in on the game. According to
a study produced by RAND, the Zapatistas were waging "a war of the flea"
that, thanks to the Internet and the global NGO network, turned into a "war
of the swarm." The military challenge of a war of the swarm, the researchers
noted, is that it has no "central leadership or command structure; it is
multiheaded, impossible to decapitate."
* * *
Of course, this multiheaded
system has its weaknesses too, and they were on full display on the streets
of Washington during the anti-World Bank/IMF protests. At around noon on
April 16, the day of the largest protest, a spokescouncil meeting was convened
for the affinity groups that were in the midst of blocking all the street
intersections surrounding the headquarters of the World Bank and the IMF.
The intersections had been blocked since 6 am, but the meeting delegates,
the protesters had just learned, had slipped inside the police barricades
before 5 am. Given this new information, most of the spokespeople felt it
was time to give up the intersections and join the official march at the
Ellipse. The problem was that not everyone agreed: A handful of affinity
groups wanted to see if they could block the delegates on their way out
of their meetings.
The compromise the council came up with was telling.
"OK, everybody listen up," Kevin Danaher shouted into a megaphone. "Each
intersection has autonomy. If the intersection wants to stay locked down,
that's cool. If it wants to come to the Ellipse, that's cool too. It's up
to you."
This was impeccably fair and democratic, but there was just one
problem--it made absolutely no sense. Sealing off the access points had
been a coordinated action. If some intersections now opened up and other,
rebel-camp intersections stayed occupied, delegates on their way out of
the meeting could just hang a right instead of a left, and they would be
home free. Which, of course, is precisely what happened.
As I watched clusters
of protesters get up and wander off while others stayed seated, defiantly
guarding, well, nothing, it struck me as an apt metaphor for the strengths
and weaknesses of this nascent activist network. There is no question that
the communication culture that reigns on the Net is better at speed and
volume than at synthesis. It is capable of getting tens of thousands of
people to meet on the same street corner, placards in hand, but is far less
adept at helping those same people to agree on what they are really asking
for before they get to the barricades--or after they leave.
For this reason,
an odd sort of anxiety has begun to set in after each demonstration: Was
that it? When's the next one? Will it be as good, as big? To keep up the
momentum, a culture of serial protesting is rapidly taking hold. My inbox
is cluttered with entreaties to come to what promises to be "the next Seattle."
There was Windsor and Detroit on June 4 for a "shutdown" of the Organization
of American States, and Calgary a week later for the World Petroleum Congress;
the Republican convention will be in Philadelphia in July and the Democratic
convention in LA in August; the World Economic Forum's Asia Pacific Economic
Summit is on September 11 in Melbourne, followed shortly thereafter by anti-IMF
demos on September 26 in Prague and then on to Quebec City for the Summit
of the Americas in April 2001. Someone posted a message on the organizing
e-mail list for the Washington demos: "Wherever they go, we shall be there!
After this, see you in Prague!" But is this really what we want--a movement
of meeting-stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the
Grateful Dead?
* * *
The prospect is dangerous for several reasons. Far
too much expectation is being placed on these protests: The organizers of
the DC demo, for instance, announced they would literally "shut down" two
$30 billion transnational institutions, at the same time as they attempted
to convey sophisticated ideas about the fallacies of neoliberal economics
to the stock-happy public. They simply couldn't do it; no single demo could,
and it's only going to get harder. Seattle's direct-action tactics worked
because they took the police by surprise. That won't happen again. Police
have now subscribed to all the e-mail lists. LA has put in a request for
$4 million in new security gear and staffing costs to protect the city from
the activist swarm.
In an attempt to build a stable political structure
to advance the movement between protests, Danaher has begun to fundraise
for a "permanent convergence center" in Washington. The International Forum
on Globalization, meanwhile, has been meeting since March in hopes of producing
a 200-page policy paper by the end of the year. According to IFG director
Jerry Mander, it won't be a manifesto but a set of principles and priorities,
an early attempt, as he puts it, at "defining a new architecture" for the
global economy.
Like the conference organizers at the Riverside Church,
however, these initiatives will face an uphill battle. Most activists agree
that the time has come to sit down and start discussing a positive agenda--but
at whose table, and who gets to decide?
These questions came to a head
at the end of May when Czech President Vaclav Havel offered to "mediate"
talks between World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the protesters planning
to disrupt the bank's September 26-28 meeting in Prague. There was no consensus
among protest organizers about participating in the negotiations at Prague
Castle, and, more to the point, there was no process in place to make the
decision: no mechanism to select acceptable members of an activist delegation
(some suggested an Internet vote) and no agreed-upon set of goals by which
to measure the benefits and pitfalls of taking part. If Havel had reached
out to the groups specifically dealing with debt and structural adjustment,
like Jubilee 2000 or 50 Years Is Enough, the proposal would have been dealt
with in a straightforward manner. But because he approached the entire movement
as if it were a single unit, he sent those organizing the demonstrations
into weeks of internal strife that is still unresolved.
Part of the problem
is structural. Among most anarchists, who are doing a great deal of the
grassroots organizing (and who got online way before the more established
left), direct democracy, transparency and community self-determination are
not lofty political goals, they are fundamental tenets governing their own
organizations. Yet many of the key NGOs, though they may share the anarchists'
ideas about democracy in theory, are themselves organized as traditional
hierarchies. They are run by charismatic leaders and executive boards, while
their members send them money and cheer from the sidelines.
* * *
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?
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.v
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 dozens of other visionaries, from the disciples of Murray Bookchin
and his theory of social ecology, to certain sectarian Marxists who are
convinced the revolution starts tomorrow, to devotees of Kalle Lasn, editor
of Adbusters, and his watered-down version of revolution through "culture-jamming."
And then there is the unimaginative pragmatism coming from some union leaders
who, before Seattle, were ready to tack social clauses onto existing trade
agreements and call it a day.
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.
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Naomi
Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador).
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
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