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Title: Whose Movement? Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: May 2000 Language: en Topics: Free Radical, social movements, activism Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021205094147/http://www.free-radical.org/issue6.shtml Notes: Issue #6 of Free Radical
A couple days ago, I was talking to an editor at a certain
look-down-its-nose-at-activism newspaper of record, when I referred in
passing to "the movement."
"Which movement?" she asked impatiently. "The sweatshop movement? The
environmental movement?"
I paused, realizing with surprise what I had just said. "No," I
answered. "For the first time since the late 1960s, I think it's
becoming possible to talk about 'the' movement, something greater than
the sum of its parts."
She wasn't convinced. (No surprise there.)
But, I wondered, was I?
Everyone who cares about such things is pondering the state of activism,
in the wake of the plucky D.C. protests against the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund. Are we witnessing the birth of something
truly historic, or is it only a blip? Are disparate fights amassing into
one mega-movement, and do we want them to be?
It's worth taking a closer look at what this current upsurge of activism
is, and is not, in order to clarify what it might become.
Direct action is the driving force behind the new unrest. Direct action
can entail civil disobedience -- the deliberate breaking of an unjust
law -- but it's a far broader category. It encompasses everything from
blockades and banner hangs to strikes, boycotts, and pickets: the whole
panoply of pressure tactics that are not mediated by the political or
legal system.
Engaging in direct action doesn't necessarily mean breaking the law or
getting arrested. It can involve, for example, jamming the telephone
lines of one's opponents, as supporters of the jailed protesters in D.C.
did for days after their arrest. When direct actionists do break laws,
they're often benign ones like traffic rules, rather than laws that are
intrinsically immoral or unjust.
The key is action: not dull rallies where one speaker after another
drones on, or meetings that just lead to more meetings, or studies that
never end. The most dynamic movements today -- from the most daring
segments of U.S. labor to grassroots campaigns against police brutality
-- spend very little time debating doctrine. They generally lack
manifestos, programs, or platforms, relying instead on shared values as
the basis for action.
"A lot of us feel that the issues that we're faced with are so urgent
that it's not about arguing over this and that ideal, but it really is
just getting to work," explains Lilianne Fan, an activist with the New
York-based Students for Solidarity and Empowerment, one of countless new
groups formed after the Seattle WTO protests.
Some activists feel that there's too little political discussion
happening in political circles today; it's a concern I've heard
repeatedly voiced about the New York City Direct Action Network, for
example.
But the emphasis on action over ideology has helped facilitate a range
of novel political collaborations in recent time, perhaps the most
distinctive feature of the new unrest.
I'm not talking so much about the vaunted "teamsters and turtles"
alliance on view at the Seattle WTO actions, but about the earlier
pairings that laid the groundwork for such an alliance.
Since at least the mid-1990s, an array of activist agendas and styles
have been converging in potent campaigns. The movement against
sweatshops, for example, has brought together not only students and
labor, but also Central American solidarity activists and women's rights
advocates.
"There's an understanding that these issues are tied up together," notes
Laura McSpedon, a student anti-sweatshop organizer at Georgetown
University, "that to separate culture and identity and race and gender
from class and the concerns of working people is artificial, and divides
us in unproductive ways."
The character of U.S. environmentalism, meanwhile, has changed
dramatically in recent years. In many parts of the country, the leading
edge of current on-the-ground organizing is environmental justice
activism, which links the fight against economic and racial inequality
to concerns about pollution, toxic wastes, and dumping.
Earth First! now combines social issues and radical ecology as a matter
of course. This radical environmental network was infamous in the 1980s
for the misanthropic sputterings of its self-styled spokesmen (and I do
mean men), who heralded AIDS as a useful form of population control,
among other too-deep-ecology nonsense.
But at the instigation of the late Judi Bari and d ozens of less
prominent activists, EF!ers in the 1990s began to build unlikely
alliances at the grass roots: between tree huggers and timber workers,
white hippies and Native American elders, forest blockaders and urban
community-based groups.
Still, however powerful these blends are, the strength of contemporary
activism lies in the autonomy of the agitators. There neither is nor
will be a single organization -- be it a political party or a movement
group like the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society -- that can
remotely claim to represent the many strains of action.
Forget stifling calls for "unity": Activism now is neither singular nor
unitary. It is the combined product of many small and independent
groups, rooted in many different communities. It's not a single
coalition but a spectrum of self-determined movements -- who are finding
each other, and figuring out how to collaborate.
That's what made me hesitate after I invoked "the movement" to that
editor the other day. When activism is as decentralized as it is now,
does it make any sense to talk of "the movement"? The term is so easily
and often employed to exclude -- as when people use it to refer to
globalization activism alone.
But there's an electric appeal to the phrase "the movement" when it
expresses an aspiration, still a good way out of our reach. Not an
aspiration to unite and homogenize, but to combine and augment. I don't
know if I'll keep saying it, but I sure like the dream.