To: GANkeycontacts-AT-egroups.com
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 20:51:58 -0400
Subject: [GANkeycontacts] FW: The network of struggles, the international days and the lack of "unity of vision and strategy"


From: Naomi Klein <nklein-AT-sympatico.ca>
To: antiimf2000-AT-egroups.com
Subject: (en) The network of struggles, the international days and the lack
of "unity of vision and strategy"
Date: Sun, Jun 25, 2000, 2:57 AM

 ________________________________________________
      A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
            http://www.ainfos.ca/
 ________________________________________________

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.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
 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.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Send your letter to the editor to letters-AT-thenation.com.

 Copyright =A9  The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Unauthorized
 redistribution is prohibited.

 If you liked what you just read, you can subscribe to The Nation by calling
 1-800-333-8536 or by following this link. The Nation encourages activists
 and friends of the magazine to share our articles with others. However, it
 is mandatory that academic institutions, publications and for-profit
 institutions seeking to reprint material for redistribution contact us for
 complete guidelines.

 Please attach this notice in its entirety when copying or redistributing
 material from The Nation. For further information regarding reprinting and
 syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 209-5426 or e-mail
 dveith-AT-thenation.com.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------


 For more articles like the one you're about to read, visit The Nation
website at http://www.thenation.com. Featuring editorials, essays, news and
views as well as
special subscription offers to The Nation, this site is the place to go for
provocative, hard-hitting reporting you can't find anywhere else.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-

   ********
       ****** The A-Infos News Service ******
      News about and of interest to anarchists
                       ******
  COMMANDS: lists-AT-tao.ca
  REPLIES: a-infos-d-AT-lists.tao.ca
  HELP: a-infos-org-AT-lists.tao.ca
  WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/
  INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org

-To receive a-infos in one language only mail lists-AT-tao.ca the message:
                unsubscribe a-infos
                subscribe a-infos-X
 where X = en, ca, de, fr, etc. (i.e. the language code)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
<FONT COLOR="#000099">Law Enforcement Professionals: SAVE ON LONG DISTANCE TODAY!!!
</FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/4170/2/_/683224/_/962066986/"><B>Click Here!</B></A>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Community email addresses:
  Post message: GANkeycontacts-AT-onelist.com
  Subscribe:  GANkeycontacts-subscribe-AT-onelist.com
Unsubscribe:GANkeycontacts-unsubscribe-AT-onelist.com
  List owner:   GANkeycontacts-owner-AT-onelist.com

Shortcut URL to this page:
  http://www.onelist.com/community/GANkeycontacts


--part1_cc.69625a1.268c08ee_boundary--


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---