Anonymous
22nd June 2002, 18:21
Anarchy in the USA
Militant Non-violence and the Politics of Protest
Charles Maol: Hello David.
Can you tell us about how an Ivy League professor came to be involved with what is very much the radical part of the anti-corporate globalization movement?
David Graeber: Well, I have only become an Ivy League professor very recently. It’s a job really, one isn’t born that way. Actually, I come from a short line of radicals. My father actually fought in Spain (against Franco), so I was kind of a red diaper baby. I have always dabbled in activism and been interested in things like that, but to tell you the truth, until recently, the activist scene I encountered was kind of depressing and frustrating. It was very sectarian, a lot of sort of egoistic personalities and a lot of endless battles over what I thought to be very meaningless things. So, I usually didn’t like the scene very much to be honest. In a way, the movement that exists now is the movement I always kind of fantasized about and always wished would exist. And all of a sudden it did, so of course I felt I had to join.
And that part of the movement is very much associated with anarchy.
Yeah.
In your piece “Anarchy in the USA,” you give a brief explanation of what anarchy is. Can you do that for us now?
Oh god, I am trying to remember what I said at the time. Anarchism, anarchy if you like, has always been essentially about the idea that people can manage their own affairs without rulers of any kind. “Anarchy” just comes from “without rulers” in Greek. It’s generally been based on the principals of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid and that you can have a society based on that rather than a society based on competition and various forms of systematic use of coercive force as an instrument of social control.
How does anarchy today relate to the globalization movement?
That’s an interesting question. It’s funny, because in the media it’s always represented as the violent fringe. But, in a lot of ways, I think it’s the real heart of the movement, or better said, it’s soul. It’s certainly the inspiration for what makes the movement so effective. Much of what’s new about it and much of what’s so inspiring about it for others comes from the anarchist tradition.
When you’re protesting you’re recognizing the authority of the people that you oppose even as you oppose them.
The idea of direct action for example; the difference between protest and direct action is that when you’re protesting, in a certain way, you’re recognizing the authority of the people that you oppose even as you oppose them. You say, “We wish you would stop doing this, we wish you would do that instead.” Whatever you’re urging “the powers that be” to do, you are recognizing them as the people who, on some level, legitimately have the right to do that.
Direct action is exactly the opposite; it’s acting as if their power is completely illegitimate. So that, direct action is: if the people ruling the world are creating problems, you try to solve them yourself without any help from them and dare them to stop you, or alternately, you directly try to stop them from doing what they’re doing. That’s what makes it direct. It’s unmediated. Of course, direct action ties into the spirit of direct democracy, which also comes out of the anarchist tradition.
So all of those ideas really come out of anarchism more than anything else.
I have noticed that a lot of young people are drawn to direct action oriented demonstration. Why do you think so many people, especially young people, college kids, etc. are bypassing traditional forms of political action and moving toward direct action?
Interesting question. I think that a lot of people in America in general are incredibly disillusioned with politics, but I think that’s even part of the way politics is supposed to work. It’s interesting, this kind of post-Watergate phenomena. One is no longer outraged to discover that politicians are crooked or that they are liars. People come to just accept that, and in a way that reinforces power.
Pervasive cynicism is the best thing for the people that are running America right now.
People become so cynical that any idea of changing things within the system has just vanished. And in a way this pervasive cynicism is the best thing for the people that are running America right now. So I guess direct action is almost the exact opposite. It incorporates a cynicism about those whom we should be cynical about but will not accept cynicism as a pervasive way of looking at the world.
You mentioned that the mainstream core of America is disillusioned with politics and I think that’s true. How much do you think the people that are involved with direct action, and anarchists for that matter, take into account public opinion, take into account mainstream information flow?
It’s an endless debate. I think that a lot of us are aware that most people in America, probably most people accept 75% of the weight of anarchy, there’s a lot of common ground, but there is no way you can get what anarchist really are and what they are really about through the mainstream media. So there is a terrible frustration about how you reach those people. All they hear is that these are violent, stupid, nihilistic people that reject all forms of organization, civilization or anything else.
How do you get a message through to people who don’t have access to Indymedia - who don’t have access to some of the more arcane forms of communication that we ourselves adopt.
In that context the question is, how do you break through? How do you get a message through to people who don’t have access to Indymedia, for example, who don’t have access to some of the more arcane forms of communication that we ourselves adopt.
So there is always the dual temptation to see if there is some way you can hijack the corporate media, to get across the message, some glimmerings of the message, and the endless frustration when that proves impossible.
You mentioned Indymedia, what role do you think the Independent Media Center and other alternative news sources play in this movement?
I think it’s enormous. I think it’s incredibly important because when doing actions in the past, this was one of the things that was so depressing and frustrating. Getting involved in protest of any kind in past decades, really until independent media came along, or until the web and so forth came along, one really felt as if one was acting in a vacuum. One would do these incredibly interesting, beautiful, passionate, expressive displays, this amazing theatre, and there was this feeling that aside from anybody who happened to be walking down the street, no one would know you did it. The corporate media would just not cover it, at all, unless it was enormous, and then they would probably lie about it, and even then only a tiny percent of what went on would be covered, by definition.
In America there is a whole industry dedicated to making sure people have no idea what is going on in the world.
So, there was this incredible frustration. And there is much more of a feeling now that you can do something, and you know that it echoes somewhere. There’s a community at least that will always know what you’re doing and a broader public which will have access to it; something that never occurred before. So it’s magnified the effect of what we do a thousand times and it becomes, I think, a much less alienating experience.
You mentioned information flow via the web, etc. Getting back to the issues of globalization and the corporate control of media, do you think the American masses have the information, or the knowledge base, if you will, to think about appropriately or discuss with import the issues of globalization?
No, no, absolutely not.
I think that billions of dollars are spent every year to keep the American public ignorant. I think that if you go to Burma or Madagascar or Chechnya or Patagonia and ask the average person you meet what’s going on in the world, they will give you a view twenty times more detailed and accurate than if you went to Nebraska and talked to the average person on the street. And that’s because no one bothers to lie to those guys, they don’t have to, they’re powerless. But for people in America there is a whole industry that is dedicated to making sure they have no idea what is going on in the world.
To get more specific, regarding direct action and the tactics involved in demonstrations against organizations like the WTO and the WEF, IMF, World Bank, etc., can you briefly describe the evolution of these tactics from Seattle to what we saw last week in NYC?
That’s a big question.
Two things, I think there has been a growing acceptance of the principle of diversity in tactics and that different types of tactics are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually contradictory. And I think that people have had to become more accepting on both sides. I mean both the people who, for example in Seattle, were once condemning the Black Bloc and radical property destruction sorts of tactics have come around to being, at least, in solidarity with people like that. Although much of them might still dislike some of the details personally, but a lot of them don’t. They accept the legitimacy of it when they see the corporate media behave the way it does, they accept that it has a certain effect.
At the same time you get the opposite phenomena. A couple years ago, there were all these Black Bloc kids saying puppets are stupid and acting like they all wanted to be Che Guevara, and I think that that attitude is something you see less of too, at least in the milieus that I see. I think people accept that you need the carnival-esque and you need the militancy. You need everything on the table to create a real diversity-to create a sort of mutually reinforcing synergy. So that’s one side.
On the other side, we are confronted with more and more determined efforts on the part of the guys who claim to be the forces of order, as it were, to try to ensure that things become violent and that they finally have an excuse to violently repress us; and their tactics have increased and escalated radically over the last year or so. I think Quebec City was probably the first stage of that. You could see the pieces come together over time and it was obviously all being coordinated because a lot of the same guys, the American Secret Service for example, are giving advice and strategic oversight to all these sorts of meetings.
’Create a riot as an excuse to violently repress dissent.’
In Quebec City you saw the introduction of the idea of a wall. Now a wall is something that is almost guaranteed to create something that will look violent because there is almost no way to practice pacifist Ghandian tactics against a wall. A wall combined with a massive use of tear gas; that came out of Quebec City.
Then right after that, in Barcelona you saw the systematic use of agents provocateur, people who would dress up as the Black Bloc and trash stuff and give the police an excuse to attack non-violent protesters.
Then, in Gothenberg, you see the first use of live ammunition. Then, in Genoa, you get all three things at the same time.
Clearly they’re developing a strategy, and the strategy is precisely, I think, to diffuse what is really new about this movement, which is that it really completely scrambles traditional oppositions between violence and non-violence. We are not violent in the sense that we are not trying to violently overthrow the government, we are not trying to attack people.
Guys in fairy suits with feather dusters chasing them around is something they really don’t know how to deal with.
On the other hand we are not pacifists, we are not even non-violent in quite the traditional sense of “Come hit me and take me away” kind of civil disobedience. It’s a really militant form of non-violence which they find much more difficult to deal with than either the “lie down, take me away, march around with signs” or the guys with AK-47s heading for the hills sort of approaches. A riot they know how to deal with, that’s in the manual, that’s in the book. Guys in fairy suits with feather dusters chasing them around is something they really don’t know how to deal with and it really freaks them out. So I think the effort on the part of the “authorities” has been to try to create a riot so they can use that as an excuse to violently repress dissent.
Now last week in NYC we saw much less of these tactics on the side of the “authorities.”
No, there were undercovers who tried to nab people, hoping that other people would intervene, which they did, and then they could arrest them for interfering with an arrest. That’s the closest I came to something like that last week. There were guys dressed up as Black Bloc trying to start a fight.
Do you see a similarity between the action against the World Bank/IMF in Washington D.C., where there seemed to be a concerted effort by the Black Bloc to refrain from anything that could be construed as violence and the tactics that were displayed last week here in NYC?
Are you talking about A16?
Yes.
Yeah, in a way, yes.
I think there was a very similar reaction in that there was a feeling that we tried to play nice and look what happened to us. At A16 there was a very conscious decision, I think, because it was partly in reaction to a lot of the criticism that the Black Bloc people in Seattle did feel hit home. [The criticism was] about guys who would go and trash stuff and then disappear and not defend an intersection when the cops showed up. They got a lot of shit for that and I think they wanted to make up for it. There was a feeling that we’re just going to support the lock downs, we’re going to support everybody else, we’re going to try to make a synergy, we’re not going to do anything that would give the police an excuse to attack.
And of course the headlines came out and it was “Ha, ha, ha, cops win, no property destruction.” So I think it’s very, very similar in this case. I said this at the press conference; “We feel we sort of held out an olive branch and they responded by breaking our fingers.”
I’m rather worried that the next demonstrations are going to be too militant because so many people are saying exactly the same thing - anything goes now.
Well, OK, now we know what happens if we try to be nice. I mean that’s the way a lot of people are talking anyway. And that’s the exact same feeling about the corporate media, we tried to play along, we tried to do everything they said we should do, and as a result they say the cops, who were beating us up, were wonderful. So much for trying to be nice and doing what they say - a lot of people are saying that. How else would anybody react if they get hit over the head and locked up illegally for days for j-walking or something after having done nothing even remotely disruptive or militant, and discover that they’re still vilified, that their message still isn’t being put out. Cops are being hailed as heroes for having beaten them up despite that. I mean why not trash a bank-a lot of people are saying, it seems to be the only thing that works.
So I’m rather worried that the next demonstrations are going to be too militant because so many people are saying exactly the same thing - anything goes now.
At the press conference you explained some of these things and then said, “To hell with permits.”
Yeah I did, and I still hold with that.
I understand that the Anti-Capitalist Coalition (ACC) did work very closely with the Another World is Possible (AWIP) coalition, who attained the permit for the march.
Yes.
I understand that the two worked together on a consensus basis via the spokescouncil process, can you tell us about how that worked?
Yeah, we really didn’t have spokescouncils until the actions began, until then we had general meetings organized by working groups. Both ACC and AWIP, of course, both had their own working groups, and a lot of them overlapped, like the logistical ones, housing, things like that. The web pages were both managed by the same guy-a lot of the technical stuff. At the same time we kept our educational and outreach working groups, and our scenario working groups separate, but in general there was a lot of overlap.
What happened however, with Another World Is Possible is that we discovered that once they began the permit process, the texture of what they were doing really changed. It’s an interesting case study in what happens the moment you lose your autonomy, even if you lose your autonomy in that relatively minor way which comes out of negotiating a permit with the police.
Suddenly you are drawn into the game of power and everything changes. Like AWIP itself didn’t feel like they had any business organizing civil disobedience or any direct action of any kind, as long as they were the organization sponsoring the permit. It changed the nature of the organization. ACC got saddled with preparing almost all the direct action, which seemed inappropriate because there were certain kinds of direct action which ACC probably wasn’t the best group to organize. Then we had to form another third group to brainstorm scenario ideas. It got incredibly confusing and complicated; very difficult, and a lot of those problems, I think, we were able to resolve during the spokes, but it made the spokescouncils, when a lot of people got into town, rather difficult.
It seemed the spokescouncils were a rather poignant expression of direct democracy.
Yes, the idea of a spokescouncil, and I think it’s a beautiful idea; a spoke is kind of a combination of a spokes person and the spoke of a wheel. So the idea is that every affinity group is there and like spokes of a wheel, and their spokes sits in the very center and speaks with the other spokes so that one person from every affinity group is empowered to speak. However, everybody is involved with the decision making because then you have breakout, so everybody goes through a consensus process. It’s what you do when you have thousands of people and you can’t realistically participate in the conversation but you still want to guarantee than nobody’s voice is squelched.
So you have a spokescouncil, the spokes speak, discuss something; when an important decision has to be made you have breakout, they go back to consult with members of their affinity group and then go back again, empowered to bring various proposals to the larger group. And it sounds very unwieldy but in practice it works remarkably well.
As this is an example of people living an alternative that they advocate on an even large scale, these people very much walking the talk, what are some of these same people doing between these major actions, as far as preparing for demonstrations or just living daily lives?
Well, there’s a million things.
Ultimately the aim is to create alternative institutions on every level which will begin to replace the ones controlled by the state and by capital. Obviously, it’s a really long-term process. But people are involved in beginning all sorts of things ranging from cooperative bookstores and other types of co-ops, to various community garden groups, various groups involved in local struggles, people involved in union struggles. There’s meetings everyday, there’s actions almost everyday in NYC with people engaged in any number of a variety of political struggles, all of which are organized on the basis of directly democratic principals.
(copied from www.gnn.tv)
Militant Non-violence and the Politics of Protest
Charles Maol: Hello David.
Can you tell us about how an Ivy League professor came to be involved with what is very much the radical part of the anti-corporate globalization movement?
David Graeber: Well, I have only become an Ivy League professor very recently. It’s a job really, one isn’t born that way. Actually, I come from a short line of radicals. My father actually fought in Spain (against Franco), so I was kind of a red diaper baby. I have always dabbled in activism and been interested in things like that, but to tell you the truth, until recently, the activist scene I encountered was kind of depressing and frustrating. It was very sectarian, a lot of sort of egoistic personalities and a lot of endless battles over what I thought to be very meaningless things. So, I usually didn’t like the scene very much to be honest. In a way, the movement that exists now is the movement I always kind of fantasized about and always wished would exist. And all of a sudden it did, so of course I felt I had to join.
And that part of the movement is very much associated with anarchy.
Yeah.
In your piece “Anarchy in the USA,” you give a brief explanation of what anarchy is. Can you do that for us now?
Oh god, I am trying to remember what I said at the time. Anarchism, anarchy if you like, has always been essentially about the idea that people can manage their own affairs without rulers of any kind. “Anarchy” just comes from “without rulers” in Greek. It’s generally been based on the principals of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid and that you can have a society based on that rather than a society based on competition and various forms of systematic use of coercive force as an instrument of social control.
How does anarchy today relate to the globalization movement?
That’s an interesting question. It’s funny, because in the media it’s always represented as the violent fringe. But, in a lot of ways, I think it’s the real heart of the movement, or better said, it’s soul. It’s certainly the inspiration for what makes the movement so effective. Much of what’s new about it and much of what’s so inspiring about it for others comes from the anarchist tradition.
When you’re protesting you’re recognizing the authority of the people that you oppose even as you oppose them.
The idea of direct action for example; the difference between protest and direct action is that when you’re protesting, in a certain way, you’re recognizing the authority of the people that you oppose even as you oppose them. You say, “We wish you would stop doing this, we wish you would do that instead.” Whatever you’re urging “the powers that be” to do, you are recognizing them as the people who, on some level, legitimately have the right to do that.
Direct action is exactly the opposite; it’s acting as if their power is completely illegitimate. So that, direct action is: if the people ruling the world are creating problems, you try to solve them yourself without any help from them and dare them to stop you, or alternately, you directly try to stop them from doing what they’re doing. That’s what makes it direct. It’s unmediated. Of course, direct action ties into the spirit of direct democracy, which also comes out of the anarchist tradition.
So all of those ideas really come out of anarchism more than anything else.
I have noticed that a lot of young people are drawn to direct action oriented demonstration. Why do you think so many people, especially young people, college kids, etc. are bypassing traditional forms of political action and moving toward direct action?
Interesting question. I think that a lot of people in America in general are incredibly disillusioned with politics, but I think that’s even part of the way politics is supposed to work. It’s interesting, this kind of post-Watergate phenomena. One is no longer outraged to discover that politicians are crooked or that they are liars. People come to just accept that, and in a way that reinforces power.
Pervasive cynicism is the best thing for the people that are running America right now.
People become so cynical that any idea of changing things within the system has just vanished. And in a way this pervasive cynicism is the best thing for the people that are running America right now. So I guess direct action is almost the exact opposite. It incorporates a cynicism about those whom we should be cynical about but will not accept cynicism as a pervasive way of looking at the world.
You mentioned that the mainstream core of America is disillusioned with politics and I think that’s true. How much do you think the people that are involved with direct action, and anarchists for that matter, take into account public opinion, take into account mainstream information flow?
It’s an endless debate. I think that a lot of us are aware that most people in America, probably most people accept 75% of the weight of anarchy, there’s a lot of common ground, but there is no way you can get what anarchist really are and what they are really about through the mainstream media. So there is a terrible frustration about how you reach those people. All they hear is that these are violent, stupid, nihilistic people that reject all forms of organization, civilization or anything else.
How do you get a message through to people who don’t have access to Indymedia - who don’t have access to some of the more arcane forms of communication that we ourselves adopt.
In that context the question is, how do you break through? How do you get a message through to people who don’t have access to Indymedia, for example, who don’t have access to some of the more arcane forms of communication that we ourselves adopt.
So there is always the dual temptation to see if there is some way you can hijack the corporate media, to get across the message, some glimmerings of the message, and the endless frustration when that proves impossible.
You mentioned Indymedia, what role do you think the Independent Media Center and other alternative news sources play in this movement?
I think it’s enormous. I think it’s incredibly important because when doing actions in the past, this was one of the things that was so depressing and frustrating. Getting involved in protest of any kind in past decades, really until independent media came along, or until the web and so forth came along, one really felt as if one was acting in a vacuum. One would do these incredibly interesting, beautiful, passionate, expressive displays, this amazing theatre, and there was this feeling that aside from anybody who happened to be walking down the street, no one would know you did it. The corporate media would just not cover it, at all, unless it was enormous, and then they would probably lie about it, and even then only a tiny percent of what went on would be covered, by definition.
In America there is a whole industry dedicated to making sure people have no idea what is going on in the world.
So, there was this incredible frustration. And there is much more of a feeling now that you can do something, and you know that it echoes somewhere. There’s a community at least that will always know what you’re doing and a broader public which will have access to it; something that never occurred before. So it’s magnified the effect of what we do a thousand times and it becomes, I think, a much less alienating experience.
You mentioned information flow via the web, etc. Getting back to the issues of globalization and the corporate control of media, do you think the American masses have the information, or the knowledge base, if you will, to think about appropriately or discuss with import the issues of globalization?
No, no, absolutely not.
I think that billions of dollars are spent every year to keep the American public ignorant. I think that if you go to Burma or Madagascar or Chechnya or Patagonia and ask the average person you meet what’s going on in the world, they will give you a view twenty times more detailed and accurate than if you went to Nebraska and talked to the average person on the street. And that’s because no one bothers to lie to those guys, they don’t have to, they’re powerless. But for people in America there is a whole industry that is dedicated to making sure they have no idea what is going on in the world.
To get more specific, regarding direct action and the tactics involved in demonstrations against organizations like the WTO and the WEF, IMF, World Bank, etc., can you briefly describe the evolution of these tactics from Seattle to what we saw last week in NYC?
That’s a big question.
Two things, I think there has been a growing acceptance of the principle of diversity in tactics and that different types of tactics are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually contradictory. And I think that people have had to become more accepting on both sides. I mean both the people who, for example in Seattle, were once condemning the Black Bloc and radical property destruction sorts of tactics have come around to being, at least, in solidarity with people like that. Although much of them might still dislike some of the details personally, but a lot of them don’t. They accept the legitimacy of it when they see the corporate media behave the way it does, they accept that it has a certain effect.
At the same time you get the opposite phenomena. A couple years ago, there were all these Black Bloc kids saying puppets are stupid and acting like they all wanted to be Che Guevara, and I think that that attitude is something you see less of too, at least in the milieus that I see. I think people accept that you need the carnival-esque and you need the militancy. You need everything on the table to create a real diversity-to create a sort of mutually reinforcing synergy. So that’s one side.
On the other side, we are confronted with more and more determined efforts on the part of the guys who claim to be the forces of order, as it were, to try to ensure that things become violent and that they finally have an excuse to violently repress us; and their tactics have increased and escalated radically over the last year or so. I think Quebec City was probably the first stage of that. You could see the pieces come together over time and it was obviously all being coordinated because a lot of the same guys, the American Secret Service for example, are giving advice and strategic oversight to all these sorts of meetings.
’Create a riot as an excuse to violently repress dissent.’
In Quebec City you saw the introduction of the idea of a wall. Now a wall is something that is almost guaranteed to create something that will look violent because there is almost no way to practice pacifist Ghandian tactics against a wall. A wall combined with a massive use of tear gas; that came out of Quebec City.
Then right after that, in Barcelona you saw the systematic use of agents provocateur, people who would dress up as the Black Bloc and trash stuff and give the police an excuse to attack non-violent protesters.
Then, in Gothenberg, you see the first use of live ammunition. Then, in Genoa, you get all three things at the same time.
Clearly they’re developing a strategy, and the strategy is precisely, I think, to diffuse what is really new about this movement, which is that it really completely scrambles traditional oppositions between violence and non-violence. We are not violent in the sense that we are not trying to violently overthrow the government, we are not trying to attack people.
Guys in fairy suits with feather dusters chasing them around is something they really don’t know how to deal with.
On the other hand we are not pacifists, we are not even non-violent in quite the traditional sense of “Come hit me and take me away” kind of civil disobedience. It’s a really militant form of non-violence which they find much more difficult to deal with than either the “lie down, take me away, march around with signs” or the guys with AK-47s heading for the hills sort of approaches. A riot they know how to deal with, that’s in the manual, that’s in the book. Guys in fairy suits with feather dusters chasing them around is something they really don’t know how to deal with and it really freaks them out. So I think the effort on the part of the “authorities” has been to try to create a riot so they can use that as an excuse to violently repress dissent.
Now last week in NYC we saw much less of these tactics on the side of the “authorities.”
No, there were undercovers who tried to nab people, hoping that other people would intervene, which they did, and then they could arrest them for interfering with an arrest. That’s the closest I came to something like that last week. There were guys dressed up as Black Bloc trying to start a fight.
Do you see a similarity between the action against the World Bank/IMF in Washington D.C., where there seemed to be a concerted effort by the Black Bloc to refrain from anything that could be construed as violence and the tactics that were displayed last week here in NYC?
Are you talking about A16?
Yes.
Yeah, in a way, yes.
I think there was a very similar reaction in that there was a feeling that we tried to play nice and look what happened to us. At A16 there was a very conscious decision, I think, because it was partly in reaction to a lot of the criticism that the Black Bloc people in Seattle did feel hit home. [The criticism was] about guys who would go and trash stuff and then disappear and not defend an intersection when the cops showed up. They got a lot of shit for that and I think they wanted to make up for it. There was a feeling that we’re just going to support the lock downs, we’re going to support everybody else, we’re going to try to make a synergy, we’re not going to do anything that would give the police an excuse to attack.
And of course the headlines came out and it was “Ha, ha, ha, cops win, no property destruction.” So I think it’s very, very similar in this case. I said this at the press conference; “We feel we sort of held out an olive branch and they responded by breaking our fingers.”
I’m rather worried that the next demonstrations are going to be too militant because so many people are saying exactly the same thing - anything goes now.
Well, OK, now we know what happens if we try to be nice. I mean that’s the way a lot of people are talking anyway. And that’s the exact same feeling about the corporate media, we tried to play along, we tried to do everything they said we should do, and as a result they say the cops, who were beating us up, were wonderful. So much for trying to be nice and doing what they say - a lot of people are saying that. How else would anybody react if they get hit over the head and locked up illegally for days for j-walking or something after having done nothing even remotely disruptive or militant, and discover that they’re still vilified, that their message still isn’t being put out. Cops are being hailed as heroes for having beaten them up despite that. I mean why not trash a bank-a lot of people are saying, it seems to be the only thing that works.
So I’m rather worried that the next demonstrations are going to be too militant because so many people are saying exactly the same thing - anything goes now.
At the press conference you explained some of these things and then said, “To hell with permits.”
Yeah I did, and I still hold with that.
I understand that the Anti-Capitalist Coalition (ACC) did work very closely with the Another World is Possible (AWIP) coalition, who attained the permit for the march.
Yes.
I understand that the two worked together on a consensus basis via the spokescouncil process, can you tell us about how that worked?
Yeah, we really didn’t have spokescouncils until the actions began, until then we had general meetings organized by working groups. Both ACC and AWIP, of course, both had their own working groups, and a lot of them overlapped, like the logistical ones, housing, things like that. The web pages were both managed by the same guy-a lot of the technical stuff. At the same time we kept our educational and outreach working groups, and our scenario working groups separate, but in general there was a lot of overlap.
What happened however, with Another World Is Possible is that we discovered that once they began the permit process, the texture of what they were doing really changed. It’s an interesting case study in what happens the moment you lose your autonomy, even if you lose your autonomy in that relatively minor way which comes out of negotiating a permit with the police.
Suddenly you are drawn into the game of power and everything changes. Like AWIP itself didn’t feel like they had any business organizing civil disobedience or any direct action of any kind, as long as they were the organization sponsoring the permit. It changed the nature of the organization. ACC got saddled with preparing almost all the direct action, which seemed inappropriate because there were certain kinds of direct action which ACC probably wasn’t the best group to organize. Then we had to form another third group to brainstorm scenario ideas. It got incredibly confusing and complicated; very difficult, and a lot of those problems, I think, we were able to resolve during the spokes, but it made the spokescouncils, when a lot of people got into town, rather difficult.
It seemed the spokescouncils were a rather poignant expression of direct democracy.
Yes, the idea of a spokescouncil, and I think it’s a beautiful idea; a spoke is kind of a combination of a spokes person and the spoke of a wheel. So the idea is that every affinity group is there and like spokes of a wheel, and their spokes sits in the very center and speaks with the other spokes so that one person from every affinity group is empowered to speak. However, everybody is involved with the decision making because then you have breakout, so everybody goes through a consensus process. It’s what you do when you have thousands of people and you can’t realistically participate in the conversation but you still want to guarantee than nobody’s voice is squelched.
So you have a spokescouncil, the spokes speak, discuss something; when an important decision has to be made you have breakout, they go back to consult with members of their affinity group and then go back again, empowered to bring various proposals to the larger group. And it sounds very unwieldy but in practice it works remarkably well.
As this is an example of people living an alternative that they advocate on an even large scale, these people very much walking the talk, what are some of these same people doing between these major actions, as far as preparing for demonstrations or just living daily lives?
Well, there’s a million things.
Ultimately the aim is to create alternative institutions on every level which will begin to replace the ones controlled by the state and by capital. Obviously, it’s a really long-term process. But people are involved in beginning all sorts of things ranging from cooperative bookstores and other types of co-ops, to various community garden groups, various groups involved in local struggles, people involved in union struggles. There’s meetings everyday, there’s actions almost everyday in NYC with people engaged in any number of a variety of political struggles, all of which are organized on the basis of directly democratic principals.
(copied from www.gnn.tv)