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Title: sneak preview... Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: July 2000 Language: en Topics: direct action, radicalism, Free Radical Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021205095751/http://www.free-radical.org/issue8.shtml Notes: Issue #8 of Free Radical
There's something ultimately unknowable about why protest movements
arise: why one injustice inspires outrage, while another goes
unanswered; why one campaign captures the public imagination, and
another languishes. Certainly no one expected a major upsurge of radical
activism in the United States at the dawn of the 21st century, least of
all the anti-capitalist radicalism we have seen since the late 1999
Seattle World Trade Organization protests.
The question of how protest movements arise – what form they take, how
they define themselves, what political vision they express – is a
different story. The Seattle protests owed their success to a singular
mix of opportunity, skill, and serendipity. But they owed their
character to a thirty-year process of political reinvention: the
creation, in the decades after the Sixties, of an effective,
decentralized, multi-issue radicalism.
Radicalism in the United States was supposed to have disappeared, at
least according to the conventional wisdom of the last thirty years. It
died when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, or when Ronald Reagan was
elected, or when the Berlin Wall fell. It fractured into the aggrieved
grouplets of identity politics or, under the sway of political
correctness, degenerated into the marginalized refuge of scolds.
Or, if radicalism was neither dead nor derailed, conventional wisdom
held that it was anachronistic, a throwback to the glory days of the
Sixties. From the Seventies onward, movement after movement was labeled
"reminiscent of the Sixties" by the media, irrespective of the
constituencies it mobilized, the goals it expressed, or the manner of
its organization.
The cumulative effect of these prejudices has been to treat the
radicalism after the Sixties as if it had no history of its own. One can
find histories, many quite excellent, of individual movements –
environmentalism, say, or feminism – but they have generally been viewed
in isolation from their contemporaries. There have been virtually no
attempts to survey the radical landscape as a whole, to tease out broad
historical patterns from the tangle of organizations and events.
The task is made all the more difficult because of the sheer number and
variety of recent radical movements, which have often seemed like
disconnected fragments. Until very recently, when disparate movements
(like the fabled "turtles and Teamsters") have begun to converge in
surprising and explosive ways, the basic trend in radical activism has
been dispersion: a proliferation of causes, identities, and approaches.
It's been impossible for some time now to speak of "the left" as some
unitary entity, or to select out some single organization or struggle as
representative of the whole – a condition reinforced by activists'
frequent preference for small groups and local battles.
The most successful radical movements of the last three decades,
however, have shared two traits: a rejection of New Left organizing as
undemocratic and poorly structured, and an embrace of direct action. Far
from replaying the radicalism of the Sixties, the movements of recent
decades have renounced many of its hallmarks: the centralized character
of national organizations like Students for a Democratic Society or the
large anti-Vietnam War coalitions; the reliance upon charismatic leaders
and prominent spokesmen to represent the movement; the lack of
grassroots participation in strategic and tactical decision-making
(despite lip service paid to "participatory democracy"); the movement's
domination by men and blindness to issues of gender and sexuality.
The most fertile terrain for radical innovation and transformation has
been direct action. From the anti-nuclear and anti-intervention
movements of the Seventies and Eighties to Earth First! and ACT UP in
the Eighties and Nineties, direct action has functioned as the basic
toolbox for building radical campaigns. It has generally gone hand in
hand with a decentralized movement structure built upon affinity groups,
or small collectives, and a commitment to radically democratic
decision-making.
The notion of direct action has been a part of American radicalism for a
century. The term was first used by the early 20th century Industrial
Workers of the World, the liveliest labor movement in U.S. history. The
Wobblies, as they are familiarly known, called for "industrial action
directly by, for, and of the workers themselves, without the treacherous
aid of labor misleaders or scheming politicians." Direct action, in
Wobbly parlance, could take the form of anything from strikes to
slowdowns to sabotage; the key was that it take place "at the point of
production," the workplace, and be collectively organized by the
affected workers.
By mid-century, the term was taken up by both the radical pacifist and
civil rights movements, each employing it in a different way. In the
fight against Southern segregation and racial injustice, "nonviolent
direct action" and "civil disobedience" were used more or less
interchangeably to signify deliberately disobeying an unjust law, in the
defiant spirit of Henry David Thoreau. By the early Sixties, radical
pacifists broadened its meaning in both spirit and action, to include
what one activist termed "nonviolent obstruction": breaking some
intrinsically innocuous law to prevent a greater evil, such as
trespassing on a missile base in hopes of blocking the deployment of
nuclear weapons.
The direct actionists of our time have combined elements of all three
usages. The basic strategy of direct action movements remains that
outlined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous 1963 "Letter from
Birmingham Jail": "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension
that . . . [an issue] can no longer be ignored." Direct action shines a
spotlight on abuses, brings conflict out into the public eye, leverages
the power of ordinary people. It's a frankly confrontational approach,
whose intention is to catalyze change, not to negotiate the inevitable
compromise.
The setting for most recent direct action, meanwhile, is that advocated
by the Wobblies: "the point of production," that is to say, the
frontlines of the fight at hand. Opponents of nuclear energy, for
instance, took direct action by blockading the entrances of nuclear
plants; AIDS activists occupied the offices of pharmaceutical companies;
ancient forest defenders climbed up into the trees they were trying to
save. Direct actionists devote little if any energy to lobbying or
passing legislation; if they interact with the government, it's almost
always by raising a ruckus.
Finally, the direct action movements of the past few decades have
followed the lead of radical pacifists in broadening their tactics well
beyond classic civil disobedience into an array of obstructionist and
rabble-rousing techniques. Their emphasis is not on rallies, or any sort
of event where speeches take center stage. Instead, their protests are
designed to be disruptive: blocking roads, shutting down bridges, lying
down in front of bulldozers, and things of that sort.
But direct action has also come to mean something else as well, a
do-it-yourself approach to social and cultural change, in which laws are
broken simply because they get in the way. Taking over an abandoned
building to house the homeless, creating a community garden on a
blighted vacant lot, setting up a pirate radio station: These types of
activist projects have flourished in recent decades, combining a desire
to get things done with a longing for communities.
The road from the Sixties to Seattle and beyond has been a bumpy one.
Most of the efforts to transform American radicalism during those years
took place in a difficult and hostile climate, in which conservatism was
ascendant and radicalism often invisible or impotent or both. Throughout
the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a sense of retrenchment and
defeat tinged most radical efforts, even those that could boast
measurable gains. In part because of this embattled position, but also
through a certain vapidity and inaction, many radicals retreated into
either lifestyle politics or interminable debates about "the future of
the left." No history of radicalism in our time can be complete without
discussing the failures and follies of recent decades.
This book does not pretend to be a definitive history, if such a thing
were even possible. While the story I tell meanders throughout the
sprawling radical landscape, it lingers in some places far longer than
others. Gay and lesbian movements, for instance, receive extensive
treatment, having played the same pioneering role vis-à-vis the direct
action radicalism of the last three decades that the black civil rights
movement did vis-à-vis the New Left. Lesbian activists, especially, are
central to the direct action tradition of our time, having created
continuities between movements that were otherwise largely unconnected,
such as the anti-nuclear movement, the movement against U.S.
intervention in Nicaragua, and the AIDS activist fight.
However, it would be impossible to follow every thread in recent radical
history, and there are a number of important efforts that I scarcely
address: progressive electoral politics (Jesse Jackson's Rainbow
Coalition, the Greens, the New Party, the Labor Party); the
reinvigoration of grassroots labor activism in recent years; the "civil
society" activism of citizen watchdog organizations and other nonprofit
groups. I hope that readers who keenly feel these absences will be
inspired to write histories of their own.
The question of African-American, Latino, Native American, and
Asian-American activism in recent decades – and their place in this book
– is more complex. The black freedom struggle of the Fifties and Sixties
has been the single most important inspiration for subsequent social
movements. Yet, with a few key exceptions, including the anti-apartheid
and environmental justice movements and the ongoing fights over ethnic
studies, the direct action struggles of the mid-Seventies through the
Nineties were overwhelmingly white affairs.
Much of the responsibility for this racially lopsided condition lies
with white activists, who for reasons of obliviousness or active bias
have excluded perspectives and agendas other than theirs (and belatedly
– after the movement's basic priorities and strategy were already set –
tried to compensate with missionary "outreach" to communities of color).
At the same time, until quite recently, many activists of color have
chosen against a direct action approach, for reasons of their own.
Especially in the Seventies, but in more recent times as well, a large
number of black and Latino grassroots activists opted to build on their
hard-won new access to political and economic institutions and create
change from within. More radical activists who spurned that approach
often devoted their energies instead to community empowerment campaigns,
many of which were nationalist in character. Meanwhile, as the
incarceration rates for people of color skyrocketed in recent decades
and the police became an increasingly intrusive presence in people's
lives, the notion of deliberately subjecting oneself to arrest came to
seem both personally and strategically unwise.
Just in the last few year, however, there's been a resurgence of direct
action within activist communities of color. The change has been the
most pronounced within the overlapping movements concerned with police
and prison issues, from the New York City campaign against police
brutality to the California-based movement against the criminalization
of youth. This shift – along with a parallel, but more tentative,
embrace of direct action by the more boisterous segments of organized
labor – is one of the most promising features of present-day radicalism.
My own experiences as an activist and journalist have unquestionably
shaped this narrative. I've been involved in radical projects of one
kind or another since 1980, when at the age of 16 I became politicized
by a right-wing effort to restrict minors' access to abortion in my home
state of Wisconsin. I have marched, rallied, protested, blockaded,
chained myself to things, been in and out of jail numerous times. I've
also interviewed hundreds of activists over the years, from a wide array
of movements.
Since thousands of activists braved pepper spray and tear gas to shut
down the WTO meetings in Seattle, there's been a sense of hope and
momentum in radical circles unlike anything else in my lifetime. This
book is a story of how we got there, across decades of what sometimes
felt like pointless wandering in a political desert. The Wobblies would
have had a simpler and shorter explanation for today's radical
renaissance: In the words of their most famous slogan, "Direct action
gets the goods."