of the situation provided a strong impression that, whatever the hell it was, it wasn’t very democratic.
For young radicals in the United States at the turn of the century, Seattle was our “coming out party.” We were “coming out” not only to the nation and to the world, but also to ourselves—realizing our own existence as a force. Overnight, the game had changed. Margaret Thatcher’s claim that There is no alternative had suddenly been replaced by the new slogan of the global justice movement: Another world is possible.
I threw myself into the new global justice movement with a renewed spirit. I got myself to Washington DC in early 2000, two months before the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—which would serve as the site of our next battle against neoliberalism and the global capitalist elite. For two months I worked with Nadine Bloch and Madeline Gardner in a hole-in-the-wall office that Greenpeace had graciously lent to the effort. I dove headlong into a half-dozen working groups, especially the direct action, training, and public relations working groups. Considering myself an anarchist at the time, I also did a great deal of informal diplomacy between fellow anarchists and more established organizations, like labor unions and environmental organizations. On April 16 and 17 we pulled off another strong mobilization of tens of thousands of people, drawing public scrutiny to global financial institutions that had managed to operate behind the scenes for decades. After that, we targeted the national conventions of both political parties, the Republicans in Philadelphia and the Democrats in Los Angeles. Then there was the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Quebec City. There was the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy. The list goes on. Each city provided a site for dramatic skirmishes between protesters and police at the perimeters of the secured fortresses of the global elite.
We were never able to repeat the incredible tactical success of Seattle. And there were all sorts of problems along the way, including the diminishing returns on our tactical repetition. The media called us “summit hoppers”—as if the same exact group of people descended upon each city. And the negative optics of “protesters vs. police” was eclipsing the much more advantageous juxtaposition of “the people vs. the global elite.” These problems aside, the approximately two-year window of the global justice movement provided an amazing shot in the arm. I was thrilled by our success. By subjecting global elite institutions like the WTO, IMF and World Bank to public scrutiny, the movement was able to set some measurable limits on their policies and their agenda. Many of the changes were rhetorical, where the institutions started to emphasize fighting poverty and so on. But a rhetorical shift is a start; it sets the stage for potential policy and structural changes.
During these years I put a lot of intention and effort into building up my grassroots organizing experience and skill set. I wanted to learn as much as possible, so I could be as effective as possible—and to try to help this budding movement to be as effective as possible. While Seattle and the burst of momentum that followed felt amazing, I viewed our tactical maneuver of actually shutting down the WTO ministerial meeting as an anomaly and thought that we had to get more creative than simple repetition. Moreover, I saw the value of our intervention in Seattle as mostly symbolic and believed we would need to increase the capacity of our operation many times over if we were to ever achieve any political outcomes worth writing home about.11 But Seattle provided the all-important taste of victory that made such a trajectory seem possible. I committed to developing my own political skill set, and to doing what I could to spread organizing, mobilizing, and campaigning skills among my fellow movement participants.
Second break
In addition to leading skills trainings, I kept finding myself in communications-related roles—in the global justice movement, with various local organizing efforts, and then later in the post-9/11 antiwar movement.12 Roughly half of this communication work was directed externally, i.e., “public relations”: developing campaign messages, writing press releases, training spokespeople, and so on. This would remain one of the ways I would contribute to movements and campaigns for years to come—up through the present—from serving as communications director of School of the Americas Watch, to managing the PR operation for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, to plugging into the PR working groups of mobilizations like Occupy Wall Street. The other half of my communication-related work was internally directed, and it often took priority. It turns out that contentious movements can be internally contentious as well. I spent a great deal of my energy attempting to build consensus. Sometimes this required delicate diplomacy between coalition partners, sometimes strong facilitation of heated meetings, sometimes long one-on-one conversations over coffee, and sometimes more formal mediation processes. The role became something of a niche for me, and I found it fulfilling in a number of organizing contexts. I was good at helping people to understand each other better—to make peace and play nice with each other. I had had to do so much “translation” work in the first place, for myself, in order to transition from a rural conservative religious working-class background and assimilate into social movements that often drew participants from more educated, affluent, secular, and liberal-leaning backgrounds. Perhaps as a result, I tended to hear all of the movement messages from several standpoints at once, often thinking about whether and how a message could be made to connect with the values of “unlikely allies,” like I myself had been.
And perhaps that’s also why the internal consensus-building role I played sometimes bothered me. It felt like navel-gazing. My diplomatic efforts were not in the service of bridging across great divides, but rather across marginal distinctions between individuals and groups that all scored well above the ninetieth percentile on the lefty-land spectrum. On the one hand, I felt myself effective at building working consensus. I could facilitate marathon meetings—often eight, ten, or twelve hours long—and my patient touch sometimes seemed to do the trick in moving different factions forward in a common direction. I got a lot of positive feedback, and that felt really good. At that point in my life the discovery that I had something useful to contribute was important for my own development and self-worth. Not very much time had passed since I had nearly flunked out of high school—with a Grade Point Average so low that college would not even become an option, had I been interested, until several years later. So that all felt positive. On the other hand, over time I started to think that the decisions we arrived at were often not very good decisions. The heated disagreements seemed self-referential and far removed from my sense of what might reach broader audiences or measurably impact the issues we cared about. The groups that I was working hard to get to play nice with each other were often very small, lacking a social base. I wondered what difference it made if they worked together or not. It felt like the difference between one or two drops in an otherwise empty bucket. After the fleeting moment that was the global justice movement had passed, we had again become so small. Even at the apogee of the global justice movement, we were really only at the point of “getting started”—in terms of the numbers needed to actually make a substantial impact on political outcomes. Without a growth trajectory, I did not see how we would attain the collective power needed to make the changes we imagined.
Rather than strategize together about how we might tap into a broader social base of power, we would waste enormous amounts of time in esoteric debates. During the lead-up to the IMF and World Bank protests in DC, I remember the Direct Action working group spending more than half of our meeting time—for five consecutive weeks—debating the wording of the mobilization’s mission statement.13 It wasn’t that a mission statement was totally unimportant to me, but there was an enormous amount of practical work that still had to be done—first to mobilize people to come to DC, and then to work out the overwhelming logistics (e.g., housing, food, training, meeting spaces, and legal support) for when they would arrive by the thousands. Critical tasks were being sidelined because of an excruciating collective editing process of text that had probably been good enough the first time around. Besides, there were so many ways that we were getting our messages out daily that were far more impactful than a one-paragraph mission statement that would be posted on our website. We wheat-pasted posters all around DC, mailed an informational broadsheet to hundreds of organizers and organizations across the country, and held press conferences and countless interviews with reporters in the lead-up. Our press work was reaching millions of people. So why all the fuss about a damned mission statement?!
