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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.
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