Fences and Windows (5 page)

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, 2000, for a “shutdown” of the Organization of American States, and Calgary a week later for the World Petroleum Congress; the Republican convention in Philadelphia in July and the Democratic convention in L.A. in August; the World Economic Forum’s Asia Pacific Economic Summit 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 D.C. 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 neo-liberal 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. The city of Los Angeles has already 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 centre” in Washington. The International Forum on Globalization, meanwhile, has been meeting since March in hopes of producing a two-hundred-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. [The paper was delayed many times and was still not available at the time of this book’s publication.]

Like the conference organizers at the Riverside Church, however, these initiatives 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 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 was a single unit, he sent those organizing the demonstrations into weeks of internal strife.

Part of the problem is structural. Among most anarchists, who are doing a great deal of the grassroots organizing (and who got on-line 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 like 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, the best approach is to learn to surf the structures that are emerging organically. 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, they are really objecting to a lack of an overarching revolutionary philosophy—like Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy—that they all agree on. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful. At the moment, the anti-corporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, eager for the opportunity to enlist activists as foot soldiers for their particular vision. 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 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.

August 2000

This speech was delivered in Los Angeles at the Shadow
Convention, just blocks away from the Staples Center, where the
Democratic National Convention was taking place. The Shadow
Convention was a week-long conference to explore significant
issues—such as campaign finance reform and the war on
drugs—that the major U.S. political parties were ignoring at
their conventions. This speech was part of a panel called
“Challenging the Money Culture.”

Exposing corporations—the way they have swallowed our public spaces, our ideas about rebellion and bought our politicians—is no longer just a pursuit for cultural critics and academics. It has become, in only a few short years, an international contact sport. All over the world, activists are saying, “Yes, we get it. We’ve read the books. We’ve been to the lectures. We’ve studied the octopus-like charts in
The Nation
that show Rupert Murdoch owns everything. And guess what? We’re not just going to feel bad about it. We are going to do something about it.”

Has anti-corporate activism brought corporate America to its knees? No. But it is not insignificant either. Just ask Nike. Or Microsoft. Or Shell Oil. Or Monsanto. Or Occidental Petroleum. Or the Gap. Ask Philip Morris. They’ll tell you. Or
rather they will have their newly appointed vice-president of corporate responsibility tell you.

We live in an era of the high commodity fetish, to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx. Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of deities in our culture. They are creating our most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian monuments, they are the ones articulating our experience back to us: not religions, not intellectuals, not poets, not politicians. They are all on the Nike payroll now.

In response, we are in the midst of the first stages of an organized political campaign to de-fetishize commodities, to say, no, that sneaker is
not
, in fact, a symbol of rebellion and transcendence. It’s a piece of rubber and leather and somebody stitched the two together and I’ll tell you how and how much she got paid for it and how many union organizers had to be fired to keep the price down. Commodity de-fetishization is about saying that that Mac computer has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr. but does have to do with an industry bent on building information cartels.

It is about recognizing that every piece of our high-gloss consumer culture comes from somewhere. It is about following the webs of contracted factories, shell-game subsidiaries and outsourced labour to find out where all the pieces are manufactured, under what conditions, which lobby groups wrote the rules of the game and which politicians were bought off along the way. In other words, it’s about X-raying commodity culture, deconstructing the icons of the age of shopping and building real global connections—among
workers, students, environmentalists—in the process. We are witnessing a new wave of investigative, name-naming activism: part Black Panther, part Black Bloc, part situationist, part slapstick, part Marxist, part marketing.

And we are seeing it all over L.A. this week. On Sunday, there was a protest at the Loews Hotel, the site of a bitter labour dispute between low-wage workers and management. The strikers chose this week for their rally because they wanted to draw attention to the fact that the CEO of Loews is a major contributor to Al Gore’s campaign. They wanted to make two points: that the economic boom is being built on the back of low-wage workers, and that our politicians are looking the other way because they are kept men and women. Later that day there was a rally at the Gap. This rally also had two purposes. The first was to draw attention to the way the company has funded all those funky khakis commercials—by getting cut-rate deals on their production from sweatshop factories; the second was to draw the connection between campaign donations and corporate lobbying. “What is Gap Chairman Donald Fisher’s favorite hobby?” the flyers asked. “Buying politicians,” they answered, noting the company’s generous donation to both George Bush and Bill Bradley. On Monday, the target was Gore’s personal holdings in Occidental Petroleum, an oil company embroiled in a human rights dispute in Colombia where it plans to drill on U’wa land, despite the tribespeople’s threat to commit mass suicide if their land is desecrated. [The company has since withdrawn from the project.]

I believe this convention will be remembered as the one
where the marriage of money and politics was definitively dragged out of the shadows—here at the Shadow Convention, and on the street with Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) who are symbolically gagging themselves with fake million-dollar bills. Ideas that only a handful of policy wonks used to care about—campaign finance reform, media concentration— have taken on a life of their own. They are floating back as street-theatre skits on Figueroa Street and astonishingly successful participatory media networks like Indymedia, which has taken over the sixth floor of this building, the Patriotic Hall.

With so much springing up in just a few years, how can we dare to be hopeless about the possibility for change in the future? Remember, the young people taking on corporate power on the streets are the very ones who had been written off as beyond redemption. This is the generation that grew up entirely under the marketing microscope. They were the ones with commercials in their classrooms; stalked on the Internet by voracious market researchers; with youth subcultures fully bought and sold; told that their greatest aspiration should be to become a dot-com millionaire at eighteen; and taught that rather than being a citizen they should learn “to be the CEO of Me Inc.” or, in the catch phrase of the moment, “a Brand Called You.” These people were supposed to have grape Fruitopia in their veins instead of blood, and Palm Pilots instead of brains.

And, sure, some do. But many are going in precisely the opposite direction. For this reason, if we are to build a broad-based movement that challenges the money culture,
we need activism that functions on concrete policy levels. But it also has to go deeper, to address the cultural and human needs created by the commodification of identity itself. It is going to have to recognize the need for non-commodified experiences and to reawaken our desire for truly public spaces, and for the thrill of building something collectively. Maybe we should start asking ourselves whether the free software movement and Napster are part of this phenomenon. Maybe we have to start liberating more privatized spaces, as the travelling activist caravan Reclaim the Streets does, throwing wild parties in the middle of busy intersections just to remind people that streets were once civic spaces as well as commercial ones.