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Title: Turning Point Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: May 2001 Language: en Topics: radicalism, North America, Free Radical Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021205033315/http://www.free-radical.org/issue16.shtml Notes: Issue #16 of Free Radical
Radicalism is rising in North America. The large and varied late April
protests throughout the continent against the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) confirmed, if there was any doubt, that this
anti-capitalist, pro-democracy movement of many movements continues to
grow. There's creative ferment everywhere, and the greatest sense of
radical possibility in a generation.
For parts of the American global justice movement, the exposure and
connection that the FTAA protests brought to Canada's more freewheeling
direct-action tradition are greatly accelerating the move toward more
militant tactics that began when the anarchist Black Bloc went
window-smashing during the late 1999 World Trade Organization meetings
in Seattle. These two dynamics – a broad sense of momentum and growth,
and an increasingly combative culture of street protest – give this
moment a feeling of promise, unpredictability, and peril. It's a time of
great excitement, daring acts, much serious organizing, and some very
stupid posturing.
I spent late April in Quebec City, where the leaders of 34 Western
Hemispheric nations were meeting, in a charming walled city made
sinister by the addition of another man-made wall, guarded by phalanxes
of faceless police in riot gear. There an estimated 50,000 demonstrators
were barraged with nearly 5000 canisters of tear gas, in two days of
stunning street confrontations that greatly eclipsed Seattle in
intensity.
Simultaneously, thousands of protesters in dozens of places – from the
Tijuana-San Diego border to El Paso to Kansas City – were answering the
call to "localize the movement for global justice" by holding rallies,
marches, and direct actions that made connections between pressing
issues in their communities and the sweeping trade pact being negotiated
in Quebec City. These were also a response to widespread critiques of
"summit-hopping," the post-Seattle activist trend of jumping from one
mega-mobilization to the next.
In both its lead-up and its realization, Quebec City felt like a turning
point. Two of the main groups calling for the protest, the
Anti-Capitalist Convergence and the sardonically named Welcoming
Committee for the Summit of the Americas – familiarly known by their
French acronyms, CLAC and CASA – announced from the start that they
would organize on the basis of "respect for a diversity of tactics."
Specifically, they committed not to renounce "violence" (always a
slippery term) or to denounce any demonstrators' methods of dissent.
For Canada, this stance wasn't out of line with past radical direct
actions, although CLAC and CASA's position did stir up a lot of
controversy in the weeks and months before the Summit. For Americans,
though, this kind of tactical carte blanche has been virtually unheard
of at large-scale protests since the street-fighting days of the late
1960s. Beginning with the anti-nuclear movement of the mid-1970s, it's
been standard procedure at most mass actions in the United States to
have nonviolence codes, explicit agreements about the limits of
acceptable behavior that all participants are asked to respect. They
have varied in intensity and scope. Some codes have been incredibly
sweeping, prohibiting even angry speech, while others have been more
limited, mainly proscribing physical violence against people (including
police).
One of the hallmarks of the direct-action anti-globalization movement in
the United States has been its growing unease with these traditional
rules. It's not that there's been a mass embrace of street combat or
property destruction among American radicals, although interest in those
tactics is clearly growing among a small but highly visible group.
Instead, there seems to be a broadening consensus against denouncing
people who do those things, a reluctance to draw lines between "good"
and "bad" protesters, and a recognition that the overwhelming majority
of the violence to date has come from the police.
In Quebec City, outrage at the hated wall and the vicious tear gassing
quickly overwhelmed much lingering ambivalence about the "diversity of
tactics" approach. When armed thugs are barraging you with chemical
weapons simply because you've gathered to oppose the secret negotiations
of a tiny elite, it's hard to get real worked up about whether folks
should be throwing rocks at them or not. Don't get me wrong: I strongly
disagree with some things that Black Blocers did in Quebec, particularly
the use of Molotov cocktails. But out there in the streets, under
attack, the atmosphere was one of almost total unity.
From moment to moment, you felt you were in the midst of a fireworks
display, a sporting event, or a war zone. A low thwomping sound
announced the discharge of each gas canister, and you looked up at the
sky to trace its arcing path and gauge how close to you it would land.
There's a delay then before the noxious chemicals are actually released,
and in those crucial seconds, the crowd would wait to see if someone –
usually a Black Blocer wearing thick gloves – would pick up the
superheated thing and hurl it back at the cops. Often, someone would,
and a huge cheer would go up as you saw the trail of gas head toward the
police line. Or, if not, a thick toxic cloud would begin to spread; some
folks would panic, but others always urged the crowd to stay calm. There
would be cries for medics to wash out the burning eyes of the
unprotected – the movement medics were flat-out amazing, selfless and
superbly prepared – and before long, you'd hear the French chant that
became the watchword for the action: "So – so – so – solidarité!"
This scene repeated itself countless times, most movingly for me on
Saturday evening, the second and larger of the two big days of protest.
My buddy Mark and I joined a crowd of perhaps a few thousand engaged in
one of these standoffs on an elevated ramp of the Dufferin-Montmorency
Highway, which juts out from a high cliff that the police were seeking
to clear of protesters. The gassing was relentless: canister after
canister of the foul stuff, sometimes so much of it you could hardly
see. But the more they shot at us, the more it made people want to stay.
Mark and I had mediocre goggles but great masks – the kind painters use
when working with solvents – so we were pretty well protected, but all
around us were people with nothing more than vinegar-soaked scarves
around their faces, coughing and crying but still chanting their
solidarity and standing firm.
Suspended in air, we all held our surreal ground as best we could, but
inevitably we were pushed slowly down the ramp, as the riot squads
advanced and blanketed us with poison. When it comes down to brute
force, after all, the state will always win. But below, underneath the
freeway's concrete tangle, was L'Îlot Fleurie, a longtime sculpture and
community garden that served as a kind of staging ground for the
protests. Mark and I had been there earlier – it was, among other
things, where Food Not Bombs was serving up free meals to all comers –
but as we descended we saw that the place was now packed with thousands
and thousands of bedraggled, euphoric veterans of the weekend's battles.
People were creating art, sharing food, providing first aid, building
bonfires, and making music – astonishing music, for their instrument was
the freeway itself, its guard rails and light posts transformed into the
biggest, most sonorous drum set you ever heard. We threw down our packs
and joined the joyous rave, dancing beyond all fatigue. Up on the cliff
you could see the glint of streetlights on the face shields of the riot
cops, and it made us smile: Sure, they had walled us out and pushed us
down, but it had only brought us all more strongly together, and that
counted as victory.
In certain radical circles back in the States, though, the militant acts
at the front lines are being seen – and celebrated – in isolation, as
part of a growing mystique of insurrection. Check out the collage poster
of FTAA photos assembled by the Barricada Collective, a Boston-based
anarchist group that has been influential in promoting Black Bloc
actions. It features image after image of young men in the throes of
battle – tossing a gas canister, waving a red flag, pushing down the
fence, wielding a big stick, lifting a barricade – with the yeah-right
tag-line, "against the violence of capitalism and the state." Perhaps
one or more of the costumed figures is a woman, but I doubt it (even
though there are plenty of women Black Blocers). You don't see any of
the medics in the poster, or the folks who supplied us with food, or the
camaraderie of L'Îlot Fleurie. You see anger and adrenaline, but you
don't see solidarity.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing more and more loose talk about dangerous things:
someone saying there should be "lots more violence" in the movement;
others talking up the idea of armed struggle; jokes about explosives
that leave a sense of unease. And I wonder if all the folks who are
moving toward greater militancy have really thought through the possible
consequences. Given the government's posture to date toward the global
justice movement, and the Black Bloc in particular, I think it we could
soon see people doing serious jail time for things that happen during
demonstrations.
A call is already circulating for a "diversity of tactics" Black Bloc at
the next big summit action, outside the Washington, D.C. meetings of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank in early October. It reads,
in part, "We will not be content with reforming, or even abolishing the
IMF/World Bank. We will not rest until every last bank has been burned,
till the last memory of banks has been erased from our world."
I find this hyperbole more humorous than menacing. But it brings me back
to the debate about summit-hopping, and why it's a problem for the
movement. New York-based activist Lesley Wood says, rightly I think,
that major mobilizations and local organizing don't have to be seen as
antithetical to one another, assuming people are involved in both: Big
actions like Seattle or Quebec City inspire and energize people in ways
that can directly or indirectly benefit community-based campaigns when
they return to their home towns.
Radicals whose activism largely consists of mobilizing for one big
action after another, however, tend to develop very different politics
from those who are deeply enmeshed in local organizing. There's a kind
of rigor to nuts-and-bolts campaigning with concrete, immediate stakes –
say, fighting to stop a power plant from being built in a low-income
neighborhood with epidemic asthma rates – that privileges strategy over
gestures. Without that grounding, it's all too easy to make the great
militant error of elevating tactics to principles, rather than seeing
them as tools, and to engage in confrontation for its own sake.
But even as I worry about a creeping recklessness that's likelier to
fuck people up than fuck shit up, it's clear that the audacity of the
Black Bloc is an electric charge – and it's getting people juiced. CLAC
has a slogan: "It didn't start in Seattle, and it won't end in Quebec
City." Look for things to intensify.