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Title: Summit Protests and Networks Author: Andrew Flood Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: summit hopping, protest, anti-globalization, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 9th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr8/networks.html Notes: This article is from Red & Black Revolution (no 8, Winter 2004)
With the emergence of the summit protest movement into the public eye
after J18 and Seattle, anarchism gained an influence way beyond what the
numbers of anarchists and the level of anarchist organisation might have
led you to predict. Quite quickly in the English speaking world,
anarchism emerged from being a fairly obscure and historical critique of
the left to become one of the main poles in the globalisation movement.
It was not the long-existing anarchist organisations that achieved this.
For the most part it was a new generation of activists using much more
informal methods of organisation and communication. Rather than seeking
to build one powerful and united organisation, they built thousands of
small, informal and often quite short-lived ones. In fact âbuiltâ is
probably too strong a word for a process that in many cases consisted of
a few friends coming together to travel to a protest and act together
during it.
Revolutionary politics has always been strongly influenced by new
technology. The emergence of the mass democratic rebellions in France,
American and Ireland in the closing decades of the 18^(th) century were
linked to the advent of widespread literacy and access to printing. This
allowed the rapid spread of quite complex republican ideas around the
world. At the start of the new millennium it was the internet that
allowed for a model of organisation of highly decentralised networks.
Previously both international communication and one to many
communication needed significant resources and so required mass
organisation and a centralisation of resources. The web and email meant
that for first time huge numbers of people could directly communicate
internationally on a day-to-day basis.
This allowed the coming into being of very large and informal networks.
In terms of debate and organisation these could be no more formal than
an email list. A single mail sent to one list could be picked up and
forwarded to many others so the ideas of one individual or small
collective could spread rapidly to large numbers of people whom they had
never met. This tended to bypass existing organisations many of whom
tended to see the internet as a threat rather than an opportunity . For
a time it also threw the various state spying and police forces into
disarray as they were used to a model where infiltration of one or a
small number of centralised organisations could give them a very
accurate picture of how many would attend something and what they were
likely to do.
Simply put these new methods initially allowed activists to seemingly
appear from nowhere and either shut down summits as in Seattle and
Prague or, as in Quebec, force the state to imprison itself behind high
walls and fences. It was suddenly possible for a small and poorly
resourced group to communicate with and seek aid from people all over
their continent. It was possible for those thinking of travelling to a
protest to get quite detailed local information in advance through web
sites and email lists. After a decade where the only thing of
significance happening on the left was the Zapatistas the initial
success of the summit protests seemed to represent an enormous leap
forward.
The major advantage of this form of organisation is that it allowed the
rapid development and growth of a movement of tens of thousands from a
tiny base without significant resources. Almost without exception groups
formed spontaneously, copying what they perceived as the success of what
others were doing elsewhere. Their knowledge of the process was obtained
not from individual contact or even books but from what people were
writing on a multitude of web sites and email lists.
In the first years it was also possible for network organised summit
protests to have a real impact on the various global capitalist summits.
The business of both the 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in
Seattle and the 2000 World Bank summit in Prague was disrupted, in the
case of Prague leading to the abandoning of the entire event as
delegates fled the city. This was possible because initially the various
state security forces who are used to dealing with top down, centralized
organisations didnât know who to watch and what to take seriously. On a
more local level the initial Reclaim the Streets events that were held
in many cities around the globe also caused confusion amongst police
forces unused to such organising methods.
Of course the state has enormous resources at its disposal and after
some pretty disastrous experimentation â the Quebec NAFTA (North
American Free Trade Agreement) summit, also in 2000 â it adjusted to
these new forms of organisation and developed new policing methods to
deal with them. These new policing methods included an intense level of
repression which saw the shooting of protesters at the Gothenburg and
Genoa summits. Many of the Summits were also moved out of the big cities
where protesters could easily gather to isolated locations and in the
case of the World Bank to Qatar, a dictatorship!
In particular, after the September 11^(th) terrorist attacks, when
security became a very plausible excuse in the mind of the general
public, the effectiveness of attempts to actually shut down or disrupt
the summits of global capitalism plummeted. Protests and confrontations
still occur at many summits but the summit delegates now see these on
Sky News rather then right outside the buildings in which they meet. As
such, the protests have become purely symbolic even if there are often
frequent scuffles with whatever police force has drawn the short straw
of protecting the worldâs elite that month.
The network form of organisation is effective but also rather ruthless
when it comes to experimentation with new methods and tactics. Each
local group is free to go out and try out new ideas without consulting
with anyone else first. If something obviously works then it is reported
on and can be rapidly replicated elsewhere. The ruthless element is that
this freedom to experiment without consultation also means that obvious
failures that would have been spotted at the discussion phase in a more
formal organisation slip through and people have to learn the hard way
all too frequently. And the hard way can mean jailings or losing all
local support for an action that was never going to make any difference
anyway. In contrast a formal organisation would first need a formal
geographically widespread debate over strategy and tactics before they
could be implemented. While this may eliminate repeating the mistakes of
the past it may also result in missed opportunities and certainly limits
the number of new strategies that can be tried at any one time.
In the 1990âs, with the bankruptcy of the old authoritarian left, it was
precisely this space for experimentation and replication that allowed
the rapid appearance of a new movement with new tactics and a new
strategy created through âwalking the roadâ rather then studying the
books.
The state may be slow to respond but it is a massive structure of power
with billions of dollars of resources and hundreds of thousands of
dedicated personnel. So no single form of organisation, unless it is one
that involves the majority of workers, will ever be able to take it on
in a straight fight. This includes not only formal organisations but
also informal decentralised methods of organisation.
Many of the things that make network forms of organisation useful are
also disadvantages in other respects. Their informality means that
âmembersâ have a relatively weak commitment to them so for finance and
resources they are often dependant of donations and loans from more
formal organisations. The ease of getting involved (perhaps no more then
signing up to an email list) also means they are easy for police,
journalists and fascists to infiltrate and, if they are smart about it,
to disrupt by carrying out provocations in the name of the network or
issuing statements from what claims to be a node of a network designed
simply to discredit the network as a whole. In the recent past we have
an example in this in the letter bombing campaign carried out by an
Italian group that nobody had ever heard of but which used the same
initials as the largest Italian anarchist network, the FAI. In a network
that has no formal structure it can be very hard to even issue a
statement pointing out that such actions are not part of the network.
Network methods of organisation have proved to be very effective at
organising one off summit protests. They have also played a vital role
in building international solidarity, in particular with the Zapatista
struggle in Chiapas in the mid-1990âs. But the experience of those
organising the summit protests suggests that in the aftermath the
networks proved fragile and were unable to sustain a local impact.
In Argentina network forms of organisation proved capable of getting
several presidents out of power and were able to help organise the
occupations of dozens of factories but appear not to have made much
progress towards overthrowing capitalism. The slogan was âthey all must
goâ but the reality was that there was always another candidate in the
wings to fill the presidentâs chair when it became vacant.
This does not prove that the network form or organisation is useless,
nor that there is an alternative form of organisation that is better in
all circumstances. But it does suggest a need to look at models of
organisation beyond networks. Or rather at models intended to complement
the network form of organisation and address those areas where it is
weak.
The old left often took the attitude that there was one ideal form of
organisation that could be scaled down to fill all needs and all
circumstances. For the Leninists that was often democratic centralism,
the idea that putting a smart leadership in charge was the way forward.
For some anarcho-syndicalists it was syndicalism but most anarchists
have always favoured a plurality of organisational forms.
From the late 19^(th) century anarchists have advocated a number of
forms of organisation. Sometimes given the nature of the debate these
were put forward as polarised alternatives to each other. But some, like
Bakunin, argued that all these forms of organisation should exist side
by side and that anarchists should be involved in all of them.
What is needed is that committed anarchists also organise in anarchist
political organisations that seek to provide the continuity, theoretical
depth and tactical unity that networks, because of their advantages,
lack. The main goal of networks is to organise lots and lots of people
around a limited project (e.g. a single dayâs protest). Trying to
develop any agreed theoretical depth in such a project would just limit
the number of people who can be involved.
Anarchist organisations have the resources to develop theoretical depth
out of their experience across a range of networks and then take these
ideas into individual networks and argue for them. Anarchist
organisations also have the time to enter into the sort of historical
and theoretical discussion that are not possible in a broad meeting that
seeks to sort out the concrete organisational details of a specific
event.
This sort of analysis is needed if we are to move from confronting the
worst aspects of capitalism as they arise to building an alternative to
capitalism. The creation of an alternative is a long term project that
needs to be able to deal with capitalism in all its different phases
from social democratic to neo-liberal to fascist. In the past capitalism
has been able to disband or suppress protest movements by simply
shifting phase and either giving an apparent, if limited, victory (with
a new social democratic government) or imposing repression that people
are not prepared for (with fascism).
When it comes to doing work in trade unions or in communities where we
can expect that many of those we are addressing and seeking to involve
will be around for many years there is a real advantage in having a
stable formal organisation. This can build up credibility and trust
amongst those it wants to work with in a way that an informal network
that comes and goes simply cannot sustain in the long term.
There is something of a false debate facing the anti-capitalist
movement. At one pole some put forward tight organisation. The Leninists
of course want tightly centralized parties but even some libertarians
see the answer to increasingly effective policing of protest in a turn
towards more disciplined and perhaps semi-clandestine organisation. At
the other pole most activists continue to put forward loose
organisations as a solution in themselves, with some âpost-leftistsâ
even arguing against any form of more co-ordinated organisation.
Both see the two organisational methods as in competition with each
other. This need not be so, in fact for anarchists both forms should be
complementary as the strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other
and vice versa. The rapid growth of the movement has strongly favoured
the network form, itâs now time to look at also building its more
coherent partner. That is to build specific anarchist organisations that
will work in and with the networks as they emerge.