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NETWORKING FUTURES
THE MOVEMENTS AGAINST CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION
By JEFFREY S. JURIS Duke University Press
Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4269-4
Chapter One
THE SEATTLE EFFECT
Let's make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism ... (and) for humanity. This intercontinental network of alternative communication will weave the channels so that words may travel all the roads that resist.... (It) will be the medium by which distinct resistances communicate with one another. This intercontinental network of alternative communication is not an organizing structure, nor has a central head or decision maker, nor does it have a central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who speak and listen.
It was November 29, 1999, and three friends and I were speeding up Interstate 5 on the way to Seattle for the big protest against the WTO. We had left San Francisco at dawn, hoping to make it before midnight. We had no idea what to expect, but we all had the feeling something big was about to happen, that we were somehow making history. We had not taken part in the previous weeks of direct-action training, but we were eager to join the fray. Shortly after passing through Eugene, I turned to my friend at the wheel, a longtime environmental activist, and asked him why he was going to Seattle. His face lit up and he responded, "This is going to be historic, radical environmentalists and organized labor are finally pulling it together. I don't know exactly what is going to happen, but this is going to be huge, there is no way I would miss this!" He seemed to be echoing a widely shared sentiment.
To be honest, at the time I had only a vague understanding of what the WTO was. I knew about the globalization debates and had been active in Latin American solidarity movements for years. Having lived and worked in Guatemala in the early 1990s, I knew a lot about structural adjustment and the destructive environmental and economic policies of the World Bank and IMF in Central America. During my first few years as a graduate student, I had worked with a local Latino employment cooperative in Oakland but had recently begun to collaborate with a San Francisco-based NGO supporting grassroots projects in the Global South. Moreover, as a student of social movements, I had also closely followed the Zapatista uprising, but I still had no sense of belonging to a grassroots movement against neoliberalism. The next few days would change all that. As for so many others, Seattle was my initiation into a new and inspiring world that would soon be known around the planet as the "antiglobalization" movement. Beyond street protests, each new mobilization would leave behind a new coalition of environmental, labor, solidarity, economic justice, women's, and indigenous rights networks, slowly weaving together the kind of decentralized intercontinental network-a broad transnational web of resistance-the Zapatistas had called for several years earlier.
Throughout this book, I move back and forth between the local and the global, between Barcelona and the distant locales that form part of the broader global networks Catalan activists have helped to produce. This chapter provides an overview of anti-corporate globalization movements, examining their emergence as a transnational phenomenon and analyzing their major defining characteristics. What are anti-corporate globalization movements? When and why did alternative networks emerge? How do different sectors articulate within broader movement fields? The rapid diffusion of network-based models has facilitated interaction among diverse political perspectives, reflecting a broader confluence among organizational forms, political norms, and new technologies. During the April 2001 protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec, radical activists proclaimed, "The movement didn't start in Seattle, and it won't end in Quebec!" My story begins in Seattle, however, because it was the first in a string of mass direct actions that were broadcast on a global scale and where so many diverse networks came together against a common enemy-corporate globalization-producing something larger than the sum of its parts.
The Battle in Seattle
We arrived in Seattle shortly before midnight. The streets were empty, and there was no indication of the gathering storm that would hit the following day. After a brief night's sleep, we made it down to the port for the action at 7:30 the next morning. We quickly downed some fresh coffee at the pier and then decided to join a large, motley group of protesters heading toward the conference center. We saw colorful costumes, huge puppets depicting world leaders, and protesters dressed as giant green sea turtles. The sound of drums was everywhere. Protesters wore backpacks stuffed with food, gas masks, and lemons, and many wore bandannas around their necks in preparation for the street battle to come. Just before reaching the conference center, we passed an intersection locked down by fifteen activists, blocking oncoming traffic. I would witness similar scenes around the world during the next few years, but this was my first mass direct action, and I had never seen anything like it. We were thoroughly unprepared.
As we approached the conference center, small groups began to break off from the larger crowd, taking up distinct positions around the perimeter. Activists communicated by cell phone, and everything seemed extremely well organized, but there was no central command. Indeed, the networked form of the various protest blocs reflected what I would come to recognize as an emerging networking logic, mirroring the decentered structure of the e-mail lists activists had used to mobilize for the action. All of a sudden, people began forming a human chain around the conference center. We decided to join in. It was cold and drizzling, but locking arms together with strangers united in common cause produced a feeling of human warmth. Fifteen minutes later, we caught word the building had been surrounded and most of the major downtown arteries shut down. Everyone cheered. Many clusters like the one we had joined that morning had gone out from different points around the city, some taking part in the blockade, others locking down intersections, still others occupying major bridges and overpasses.
For the next several hours, we held our position in front of the conference center, blocking delegate after delegate from entering the building. Some smiled and walked away, others protested violently, and some even tried to slip through by pretending to be protesters. As I would later learn through direct-action trainings, we had organized a flawless "hassle line." Activists organized similar scenes around the city, and many delegates remained blocked inside their hotels, including a reportedly furious Madeleine Albright (Cockburn and St. Clair, 2000, 31). As we held our position, chanting slogans such as "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" and "No Justice, No Peace!" giant turtles and butterflies occasionally passed by with colorful signs proclaiming "Teamsters and Turtles: Together at Last!" and "No Globalization without Representation!"
Everything appeared calm throughout the morning, and we even chatted with police officers stationed directly behind us. Little did we know the first tear gas canisters had already been fired at protesters around 10:00 a.m. (Hawken 2000, 21). Those first groups held their ground, but the city would soon be engulfed in a major police riot. After a while, we caught our first whiff of tear gas floating with the shifting winds from the other end of the convention center. As the tension began to mount, we soon saw our first "Black Bloc" contingent. Dressed in black, gas masks buckled to their waists, wearing hoods and bandannas to cover their faces, they moved swiftly and purposefully, darting in and out of a stunned group of dancing turtles. That afternoon they began smashing the windows at major corporate outlets in downtown Seattle: Nike, Starbucks, the Gap, and Bank of America.
At around 1:00 p.m. the massive labor march approached the conference center. I decided to walk over and have a look. In addition to the Teamsters, longshoremen, and steelworkers, there were colorful contingents of Korean workers, Latino immigrants, indigenous activists, and French farmers. Many activists later criticized the "lack of color" in Seattle, pointing to the predominantly white middle-class backgrounds of the protesters (cf. Martínez 1999; Starr 2004), but this charge was less evident at this particular intersection. Organizers had expected the labor marchers to join the direct action, but marshals directed them away from the conference center. Many of the thirty thousand labor marchers broke ranks, however, and joined the protesters in the streets, swelling our number to more than fifty thousand.
Before heading back to the blockade, I followed several activist groups who were playing cat and mouse with riot cops through the side alleys next to the Paramount Theater. The streets were overflowing with people, some playing instruments, others dancing and singing, still others holding puppets and banners. It felt like a huge street carnival, with the added excitement of periodic confrontations with the police. The tension was intoxicating. At one point, I walked over to a group of people holding a meeting next to a large fence. Someone had a sticker on his shirt that read "Direct Action Network," the coalition that had organized the protests.
Rumors had already begun circulating that the WTO ministerial had been canceled; the excitement was mounting. After reloading on coffee, we walked through the streets on the other side of the conference center, back down toward the pier. At one intersection, protesters had set up a makeshift stage with speakers blaring music and periodic speeches and spoken word performances. A large group began dancing circles around an affinity group locked down in the middle of the street. Occasionally, protesters would step up to the microphone and recite spoken-word poetry. Although I had been to many mass gatherings, I had never felt such ecstatic freedom and spontaneous communitas (Turner 1969). We had slipped into a time out of time, a moment when the prevailing order had been overturned, creating what the anarchist writer Hakim Bey (1991) calls a "temporary autonomous zone." This was highly charged carnival indeed.
It turns out we were in the midst of a two-hour hiatus when the police had run out of tear gas and pepper spray (Cockburn and St. Clair 2000, 30). But they soon refueled and initiated another round of indiscriminate assaults. Shortly before 4:00 p.m., we walked over to the next corner and witnessed riot cops launching tear gas canisters into the middle of an affinity group blockading an intersection. They soon began shooting pepper spray at protesters' faces and lobbing tear gas canisters into the crowd. My eyes started to burn violently. A woman offered us wet rags and lemon, but after the next loud bang, the crowd began to stampede. My friend and I quickly turned and ran to avoid being trampled. Over the next few hours, we darted through the streets, moving in toward police lines, only to run away frantically after more tear gas was fired. There was something eerily addicting about the whole experience, and during my field research over the next two years, I would relive similar encounters over and over again in cities like Prague, Barcelona, and Genoa.
After nightfall, looting began at Starbucks and other downtown stores. Many activists tried to intervene, shouting, "No violence! No violence!" but to no avail. The mayor of Seattle declared martial law, bringing a curfew into effect. The situation in the streets quickly deteriorated, so we went back to the hotel, as we were not planning to risk arrest. We met up with our friends and decided to have a drink at the bar next door. Exhausted, we watched the live scenes on the evening news, our eyes still burning. Images depicted looting and chaos, interspersed with an occasional festive scene. Meanwhile, broadcasters denounced the violent anarchists in black. Similar images were broadcast across the United States and around the world. Over the next few weeks, the WTO would become a household name, and globalization the center of an intense public debate. Although the protests continued for several more days, including continued mass arrests and jail solidarity actions, my friends and I headed back to San Francisco the next morning.
The Seattle Effect
Beyond direct action, the anti-WTO protests involved more than seven hundred organizations in daily forums, teach-ins, and demonstrations. The overall mobilization was organized by a broad coalition of direct-action groups, environmental organizations, NGOS, and labor unions, including the Direct Action Network, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and King County Labor Council. The way these diverse elements came together and transformed the anti-WTO protests into a global media event produced what I call the "Seattle Effect." As images circulated around the world, similar protest convergences would soon take place in other cities, generating a growing transnational wave of protest against corporate globalization. Moreover, the diverse networks that converged in Seattle represented key sectors within an emerging anti-corporate globalization field. The way they interacted on the streets mirrored how alternative movements and struggles would converge within transnational networks, as new technologies and emerging networking logics allowed activists to organize across distance, diversity, and difference.
Direct Action
The mass action was coordinated by a loose coalition called the Direct Action Network (DAN), which included Seattle-based activists and groups such as Art and Revolution, the Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, the Ruckus Society, and Global Exchange. The overall action strategy involved nonviolent civil disobedience, including blockades and lockdowns, consensus-based decision making, and an affinity group structure based on small, autonomous groups of five to fifteen activists, which formed larger clusters and organized via spokescouncil meetings. The direct-action organizer and trainer Starhawk (2002) described the action in this way:
The participants in the action were organized into small groups called "affinity groups." Each group was empowered to make its own decisions around how it would participate in the blockade. There were groups doing street theater, others preparing to lock themselves to structures, groups with banners and giant puppets, others simply prepared to link arms to non-violently block delegates.... Affinity groups were organized into clusters. The area around the Convention Center was broken down into thirteen sections, and affinity groups and clusters were committed to hold particular sections. As well, some groups were "flying squads"-free to move to wherever they were most needed. All of this was coordinated at spokes-council meetings.... In practice, this form of organization meant that groups could move and react with great flexibility during the blockade.... No centralized leader could have coordinated the scene in the midst of the chaos, and none was needed-the organic, autonomous organization we had proved far more powerful and effective. (17-8)
Although perhaps overstated, this flexible, decentralized strategy, which Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001) call "swarming," physically embodied the decentered networking logic that came to define anti-corporate globalization networks more generally. Indeed, many radical activists view this system as a model for organizing broader networks and social relations, facilitated on a larger scale by the introduction of the Internet, reflecting the increasing confluence among organizational forms, political forms, and new technologies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NETWORKING FUTURES by JEFFREY S. JURIS Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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