BY PETER BOYLE
The new movement against corporate globalisation has been built around a series of mass civil disobedience actions dogging the gatherings of some of the main institutions of global capitalism. As a result, these institutions are now having a hard time finding "safe" cities in which to meet undisturbed by large, disruptive protest actions.
The World Trade Organisation, for example, is reported to be unable to find a city willing to host its next gathering. According to the London Financial Times: "The tiny Gulf state of Qatar did offer, it's true, but is now back-pedalling madly, pleading lack of sufficient hotel space and the fact that Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, may coincide with the probable date of the meeting some time in November 2001.
"Other candidates are not exactly rushing to take Qatar's place, despite the lure of 5000 or so officials, lobbyists and journalists on expense accounts. After all, who wants the misery Seattle inflicted on itself with the conference last year? Its down-town was shut down, shops were looted, the police chief had to resign and the city is facing a law suit from 600 demonstrators."
Activists are also already plotting to besiege the next meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and World Economic Forum (WEF).
But is the ability to disrupt meetings of these institutions the real basis of the new movement's power?
New direction?
Recently, Michael Albert, one of the founders and editors of www.zmag.org (an influential internet magazine in the new movement) argued for a "mid-course correction" of the activist style of the new movement, placing an orientation to broader masses at the centre. He wrote:
"What's the problem, you might ask? Thousands of militant, courageous people are turning out in city after city. Didn't Prague terminate a day early? Aren't the minions of money on the run? Isn't the horrible impact of the WTO, IMF and World Bank revealed for all to see?
"Absolutely, but our goal isn't only to make a lot of noise, to be visible, or courageous, nor even to scare some of capitalism's most evil administrators into shortening their gatherings. Our goal is to win changes improving millions of lives. What matters isn't only what we are now achieving, but where we are going. To win 'non-reformist reforms' advancing comprehensive justice requires strategic thinking.
"But isn't that what's been happening? Aren't we strategising about these big events and implementing our plans despite opposition?
"Yes, but to end the IMF and World Bank now, and win new institutions in the long-term, we need ever-enlarging numbers of supporters with ever-growing political comprehension and commitment, able to creatively employ multiple tactics eliciting still further participation and simultaneously raising immediate social costs that elites can't bear, and to which they give in. That is dissent's logic: Raise ever-enlarging threats to agendas that elites hold dear by growing in size and diversifying in focus and tactics until they meet our demands, and then go for more.
"The irony in all this is that the efficacy of civil disobedience and other militant tactics is not something cosmic or a priori. It resides, instead, in the connection between such militant practices and a growing movement of dissidents, many not in position to join such tactics, but certainly supportive of their logic and moving in that direction. What gives civil disobedience and other militant manifestations the power to force elites to submit to our demands is the fear that such events forebode a threatening firestorm. But if there is a 2000 or even a 10,000 person sit-in, even repeatedly, but with no larger, visible, supporting dissident community from which the ranks of those sitting-in will be replenished and even grow, then there is no serious threat of a firestorm."
The discussion about tactics should not be reduced to an argument against liberal ultraleftism, especially when more conservative forces are trying to blunt the political radicalism of the new movement.
In Melbourne (S11), in Prague (S26) and Seoul (O20) the clash over tactics also divided the radicals from those who sought to accommodate to the corporate globalisers' attempts to give their predatory institutions a human face.
In Australia the "proper channel for reform" has traditionally been seen as the ALP. If you want change, you beg your local Labor parliamentarian, pass motions in ALP branches, vote Labor into government, cross your fingers and hope for some reform to be legislated by a Labor government.
These are the usual "proper channels" for dissent, but over last two decades many people have come to realise that these channels don't deliver. Labor governments are barely distinguishable from Liberal governments — both explicitly support and have implemented the neo-liberal corporate agenda in Australia.
At S11, some 20,000 people voted with their bodies on militant mass picket lines for breaking out of the "proper channels". The ALP's attempts to weaken/isolate the September 11-13 blockade of the WEF meeting in Melbourne only underlined the political independence of S11, and made our victory all the sweeter.
Civil disobedience
One expression of this movement's rebellion against the political leaderships and structures of the old social movements is its preferred form of protest: civil disobedience. This expresses the strong desire in this movement to break out from the "normal channels" of dissent.
During the S11 protest, the tactic of peaceful, mass blockading captured the imagination of tens of thousands who are sick of "going through the proper channels". Probably many of these people would not have bothered to turn up if it was just another rally addressed by trade union bureaucrats or Labor politicians who are not interested in changing society very much at all.
The mass blockade tactic had a lot to do with the success of S11.
It is true that there were some people at S11 who had the illusion that blockading the WEF might shock the corporate rulers into changing their ways. There were also small groups of political posturers, some dressed up in "battle gear", who remained little more than colourful diversions. And then there were the groups out to prove that they were the "most militant", even if it was at the expense of the success of the movement.
It took a lot of work on the part of clearer left political activists in the S11 Alliance to ensure that the ultraleftists' conception of the blockade as a "one or two hour stoush with the police" (as one leading member of the International Socialist Organisation put it) was not what S11 was reduced to.
It took work to ensure that the blockaders won the moral battle over who was responsible for the violence by holding to organised, mass non-violent blockading. This was not imposed from above on the blockaders; they insisted on it. In the end we had a tremendously successful action.
It also took a struggle within the S11 Alliance to ensure that desperate tactics to "shut down" the WEF meeting did not rob the movement of its main victory, the successful de-legitimisation of the WEF and the neo-liberal agenda for corporate tyranny.
Fear of 'centralisation'
But a bigger challenge for the new movement is to independently articulate its radical politics. The fear of "centralisation" among many left activists currently inhibits the movement from expressing its demands and thus leaves it to NGOs, trade union bureaucrats and other conservative institutions to speak out "for the movement" on the policy issues.
This has become tied up in the debate about tactics and organisation. The failure of the S11 Alliance to formally move beyond the "Shut down the WEF" slogan helped set in place an informal and partial "division of labour" that made more conservative "experts" the issues spokespersons, or allowed the activists with the easiest access to the capitalist media to present their views as the movement's.
While the post-Seattle movement seeks to break from the conservatism of the "old movements" with its civil disobedience tactic, it is also marked by the defeats and retreats of earlier social movements. Many activists in the new movement are worried about "leadership" and "centralism" because of the experiences under earlier movements dominated by social-democratic or Stalinist bureaucrats. The rejection of "hierarchy" is ostentatious in the movement.
There are some who like to pretend that this is a new movement "with no leaders". There is a near-sacred regard for the so-called Seattle model of organising built upon an idealised convergence of small, autonomous "affinity groups", all linked by the internet.
A lot of this is semi-anarchist fantasy. When applied it does not work well. By the time the US activists got to the protests at the Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles some people were saying, "Hey, this doesn't work too well. And, how democratic is it anyway?"
In the lead-up to S26 in Prague some of the "Seattle veterans" were bossing around the Czech activists while preaching about the supposedly leaderless "Seattle model". After Prague, many activists also commented on the inherently anti-democratic, demoralising and sometimes painful effect of small, closed affinity groups having the "right" to provoke the cops into violent responses, then running away and letting masses of peaceful demonstrators cop the baton charges, tear gas and water cannons.
Only greater democratic organisation of the movement can prevent small counterproductive factions (or police provocateurs) from dictating its forms of struggle and political message under the guise of "opposing centralism".
The new movement can organise democratically without sacrificing the cultural and political diversity it treasures. There is no necessity for a central leadership that "tells everybody how to protest" but the movement needs some collectivity if it is going to grow and keep its political independence.
The "affinity group" model was never the sole way the new movement has organised its major mobilisations. The S11 Alliance in Melbourne, for example, operated on the basis of unitary ("centralised"), open activist meetings at which decisions were made by majority vote. Similar coalitions helped organise at Seattle and Washington (April 16), operating alongside and in cooperation with "spokescouncils" of "affinity groups".
At S11 there was a glimpse of the potential the anti-globalisation movement has to give large numbers of people an experience of a grassroots', "people's power" democracy, through the three-day mini-democracies that were built at the various blockade points around the Crown Casino. At most of these blockade points, all the key decisions were discussed, voted on and implemented by those actually participating in the blockade.
It was this participatory, activist democracy, combined with centralised coordination of the entire blockade through the S11 Alliance's marshals — rather than anarchistic, clique-like "affinity groups" — which made the S11 protest so effective.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party. He can be contacted at <peterb@dsp.org.au>.]