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Title: We the Peeps Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: April 2000 Language: en Topics: Free Radical, protest, activism Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021205094933/http://www.free-radical.org/issue5.shtml Notes: Issue #5 of Free Radical
The best story I heard about the World Bank/International Monetary Fund
actions in Washington, D.C. came from a North Carolina Earth First!er,
concerning the Battle of the Peeps.
It was the second day of protests, and a row of menacing cops in riot
gear faced a ragtag group of demonstrators, in one of many tense
standoffs throughout the city.
The stalemate continued until one protester reached into his knapsack
and pulled out a package of Marshmallow Peeps, those neon yellow
confectionery chicks that appear in store shelves each Easter, and have
developed a hipster cult following.
One by one the activist placed the Peeps in a row between the police and
demonstrators: a thin yellow line. Then another protester pulled out a
doll and started stomping the chicks with it. "Whose Peeps? Our Peeps!"
the crowd began to chant, and the police broke out in laughter.
In an instant, the tension had melted: Even the most vicious cops aren't
likely to pepperspray people who have just made them giggle. The Battle
of the Peeps not only de-escalated conflict with a flourish; it also
poked fun at some of our -- the activists' -- pretensions.
If the D.C. actions didn't have quite the same exuberant highs or
harrowing lows as Seattle, they were much more powerful in terms of
movement-building. Thousands of newly minted activists poured into town
to take part in teach-ins, rallies, and direct action against corporate
globalization, while groups with dramatically different agendas and
styles found fruitful ways to cooperate.
But it's worth dwelling for a moment on how A16 and A17 played out on
the ground, to ponder some strategic and political lessons learned.
At the final spokescouncil meeting for the protests, a D.C. resident
commented that much of what had gone on seemed like war games to her.
She had a point. The basic action scenario was to surround the World
Bank/IMF meetings with a blockade, much as had been done in Seattle.
Different affinity groups joined together in "clusters" and took
responsibility for blocking a slice of the perimeter, some anchoring the
location with a human barricade, others functioning as "flying squads"
which provided reinforcements as needed.
I was part of the tactical team that coordinated flying squads from the
New York cluster, in conjunction with clusters from Seattle, Colorado,
Florida, and several other places. We spent endless hours before the
actions planning how to use radio communications, bike runners, and
bullhorns to deploy protesters as needed.
Our logistical discussions were filled with paramilitary lingo that
became both more seductive and more ridiculous as the big action day
approached. Suddenly, we were referring to ourselves as "tac" or "com,"
discussing "scouts" and "recon." At least some wag had the good sense to
give our supercluster the appropriately cheesy name of Rebel Alliance
(and to broadcast "Star Wars" theme music as some of us lined up for
negotiated arrests on A17).
What wasn't discussed, in big meetings or small, was why exactly we were
doing a blockade, and doing it the same way as in Seattle. The actions
were powerful, but it felt like a slogan -- shut it down -- had dictated
our strategy, and defined our success. Plans already underway for a
series of follow-up actions (most notably the Republican and Democratic
Conventions in August, and a September meeting of the World Bank and IMF
in Prague): Can we try something new?
More troubling was the secrecy that surrounded part of the blockade, and
contributed substantially to our failure to stop delegates from reaching
the meetings. During the big planning sessions before the actions,
members of the organizing collective announced that several areas
surrounding the meeting site were "taken care of," and no one needed to
take them on.
Apparently, there was a plan to stop the delegates at the Kennedy
Center, the staging ground for the meetings, through a high-tech Ruckus
Society-type action, locking down to bus axles and the like. Like many
such sneaky actions, this one proved too difficult to pull off; in the
end, the planners gave up before even trying it.
The problem wasn't so much that a substantial part of the perimeter was
thus left unblocked, and delegates were able to zip right in to the
meetings. In the long view, these kind of tactical blunders rarely have
anything like the importance they seem to have in the moment. The real
damage in keeping a matter of such weight on the down low was to our
democratic process: No one outside a small circle had input into the
decision not to defend the whole perimeter.
There's a larger lesson here, about both tactics and transparency.
Actions like the abortive Kennedy Center lockdown require high levels of
secrecy; large movements, if they're to be truly democratic, require
high levels of openness. The two simply can't be merged, meaning secret
actions must be autonomous ones.
In any case, covertly organized actions -- from lockdowns to banner
drops -- are the most useful when movements are small, for they allow a
small number of people to leverage their power. We're in a different
phase now, with increasing numbers of people becoming inspired to take
action. In both Seattle and D.C., it was crowds of people, simply
linking arms, who mainly held the blockades. Bicycle locks and other
gear played a relatively small role. (Of course, several hundred
lockboxes were confiscated in D.C. during raids by the police, based on
eerily accurate intelligence about where they were being constructed and
stored.)
But it's crucial to note, as anti-corporate and anti-capitalist activism
continues to grow, that what we now have is a massive movement, but not
a mass movement. Instead of ungainly organizations composed of
undifferentiated individuals, the Seattle and D.C. mobilizations were
created through coordination among many small, closeknit groups.
It comes back to peeps -- not in the sugar-shock sense, but in the hip-
hop sense, of the folks you feel most comfortable around. Perhaps the
most enduring contribution of identity politics to radical activism is
its insight that diverse coalitions work best when members are strongly
rooted in their own communities and collectives. And in the wake of the
affinity-group-based actions in D.C., the peeps just keep getting
louder. (4/19/00)