Fences and Windows (4 page)

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, D.C., to protest the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund 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 the vision offered by Arianna Huffington, Michael Lerner, David
Korten, Cornel West and dozens of others, 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 anti-corporate 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 that was hoped. Rather than being adopted as activist policy, they were destined to be swept up and tossed around in the tidal wave of information—Web diaries, NGO manifestos, academic papers, homemade videos, cris de coeur—that the global anti-corporate 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 copies of efforts from the sixties, this absence makes the anti-corporate 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, unfocused.

It’s easy to be taken in by these critiques. If there is one
thing that the left and right agree on, 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, D.C., 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 they are wrestling with all derive from corporate-driven globalization, 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 decentralizing power and building community-based decision-making potential— whether through unions, neighbourhoods, 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 Web sites 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 Web-like image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations occur with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and laboured manifestos 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 centre 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 centres of activity, the spokes the links to other centres, which are autonomous but interconnected.

It seems like a perfect description of the protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C. 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 non-violence 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 World Trade Organization, G7 and Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summits in Auckland, Vancouver, Manila, Birmingham, London, Geneva, Kuala Lumpur and Cologne. Each of these mass protests was organized according to principles of co-ordinated 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, they threw up temporary structures: empty buildings were turned into “convergence centres,” and independent media producers assembled impromptu activist news centres. The ad hoc coalitions behind these demonstrations frequently named themselves after the date of the planned event: J18, N30, A16 and, for the upcoming IMF meeting in Prague on September 26, S26. When these events are over, they leave virtually no trace behind, save for an archived Web site.

All this talk of radical decentralization can conceal 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 anti-corporate campaign is made up
of many groups, mostly NGOs, labour 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 anti-sweatshop leaflets for protests at Nike Town. The groups remain autonomous, but their international co-ordination is deft and, to their targets, frequently devastating.

The charge that the anti-corporate movement lacks “vision” falls apart when looked at in the context of these campaigns. It’s true that the mass protests in Seattle and D.C. were a hodgepodge of slogans and causes, that to a casual observer it was hard to decode the connections between the treatment of U.S. death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal 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 anti-sweatshop movement, for instance, has rapidly moved from simply criticizing companies and campus administrators to drafting alternative codes of conduct and building a quasi-regulatory body, the Worker Rights Consortium in partnership with labour activists in the global south. The movement against genetically engineered and modified foods has leaped from one policy victory to the next, first getting many genetically modified foods removed from the shelves of British supermarkets, then getting labelling 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, land reform, debt cancellation 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 does not mean they are incoherent. Rather, decentralization is a reasonable, even ingenious adaptation both to pre-existing fragmentation within progressive networks and to changes in the broader culture. It is a by-product 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 anti-corporate 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 feels that he or she doesn’t quite fit into one of the thirty thousand or so NGOs or thousands of affinity groups out there, she can just start her own and link up. Once involved, no one has to give up individuality to the larger structure; as with all things on-line, we are free to dip in and out, take what we want and delete what we don’t. It seems, at times, to be a surfer’s approach to activism—reflecting the Internet’s paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for community and connection.

But while the movement’s Web-like structure is, in part, a reflection of Internet-based organizing, it is also a response to the very political realities that sparked the protests in the first place: the utter failure of traditional party politics. All over the world, citizens have worked to elect social democratic and workers’ parties, only to watch them plead impotence in the face of market forces and IMF dictates. In these conditions, modern activists are not so naive as to believe change will come from the ballot box. That’s why they are more interested in challenging the mechanisms that make democracy toothless, like corporate financing of election campaigns or the WTO’s ability to override national sovereignty. The most controversial of these mechanisms have been the IMF’s structural adjustment policies, which are overt in their demands for governments to cut social spending and privatize resources in exchange for loans.

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 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, an activist with Reclaim the Streets, says trans-nationals “are like giant tankers, and we are like a school of fish. We can respond quickly; they can’t.” The U.S.-based Free Burma Coalition talks of a network of “spiders,” spinning a web strong enough to tie down the most powerful multinationals. A U.S. military report about the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, even got in on the game. According to a study produced by RAND, a research institute that does contracts for the U.S. military, 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 A.M., but the meeting delegates, the protesters had just learned, had slipped inside the police barricades before 5 A.M. With 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. “Okay, everybody listen up,” Kevin Danaher, one of the protest organizers, 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 co-ordinated 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.