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In recent years, the activists have refined their use of direct democracy, discovering new ways to use technology (anything from cell phones to pirate radio) to keep their various groups coordinated. Weeks before the FTAA summit in Miami was set to take place, protest organizers were holding their spokescouncil meetings over telephone conference calls. “We’ve had to figure out how you organize with direct democracy when people are all over the place, and most people can’t come here weeks early,” says Starhawk, a veteran organizer. Moreover, activists are getting better about coordinating the protest actions on the streets and the ones inside the convention halls — as the authorities learned, to their chagrin, in Cancún. “They thought that they could keep the voice of civil society out, [behind the barricades] seventeen kilometers away, but everyday we’ve been able to come in, and show the WTO what the other side is,” says Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South, who helped stage anti-WTO publicity stunts inside the convention center the week of the ministerial. The defiance is contagious: Marches and rallies of thousands of people build up “street heat,” which inspires representatives of nongovernmental organizations to stage their own demonstrations from within the security perimeter — which encourage delegates from developing countries to resist the demands of the United States, European Union, and Japan during trade negotiations (as members of the G21, a group of twenty-one developing countries led by Brazil, China, and India, did at the Cancún trade talks).

If the global justice movement has managed to adapt to growing repression in recent years, some of its older tactics are increasingly being questioned. At every large protest, you can find men and women dressed in black, professing anarchist beliefs, who smash windows and perform other acts of vandalism — and sometimes rough it up with cops. In defense of their form of protest, activists who use “Black Bloc” strategies explicitly appeal to the movement’s own notions of inclusiveness, saying it should be open to a diversity of tactics. As one woman in black wrote: “Third World peasants, vulnerable in their poverty, generally cannot challenge the ultra powerful multinationals … We are the voices of the voiceless, and we must be loud, because the men in suits high up in their office towers don’t hear the screams of misery below or see the wasted ruins of the Earth. So, we attack their symbols. It’s the least we can do.”

But as Jerry Mander sees it, the property destruction and violence simply undermine the protesters’ credibility and suppress their message. “I understand why people do it, out of frustration and so on, but … it’s, in the end, counterproductive,” says Mander, who is the president of the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank critical of free trade and corporate power. “Because then the media covers the violence.” That has been the trend ever since Seattle, Mander says, “Once [the property destruction] happened — which all the other protestors tried to stop — once that happened, the media only reported that and we had no more substantive reporting from that day forward. It’s police vs. protestors. Period.”

Mander and other activists say that the actual amount of violence in the movement is being grossly overstated. “The only violence is the violence of the World Trade Organization, which needs to police us as if we were thieves when they are the ones who are robbing us,” says Javier Sánchez Ansó, director of international relations for COAG, a Spanish farmworkers’ group. Dietrich, an anarchist who is affiliated with the Green Bloc (activists into “guerrilla gardening” and other forms of pro-environment direct action), says that news reports misinform the public about his movement. “The media has just drilled home that we [anarchists] are violent, angry, young white men,” he says. “But that’s not true. I am a young white male, but not violent. The media portrayal of anarchy and anarchism, it never goes into the debate about the politics of what anarchy is, it’s just, ‘Anarchy is chaos.’ Anarchy is people doing it for themselves, direct democracy at its best and finest.”

Nevertheless, the focus on violence in the nightly news seems to be having an effect: In the days before protests began in Cancún, locals said they feared the activists coming into their city. Gabriel Marez, a forty-five-year-old waiter at the La Ruina cantina, told me that he was opposed to the FTAA and other free trade agreements, but added that the protesters upset him: “I am not in agreement with radical forms of protest, with the violence.”

“Personally, I don’t think throwing things at the police brings about social change,” says Danaher of Global Exchange, whose mother was a police officer. “You’re not going to have a revolution in the U.S. with a unified police force. There has to be a significant portion of the police who realize that it’s in their self-interest to be neutral in the class struggle between capital and labor.” Danaher does police liaison work during demonstrations, and speaks with pride about the occasions when police officers tell him, “We really appreciate that you’re trying to humanize the situation.” These days, Danaher is trying to start a nonviolence training camp to bring together police and activists. He says such a confab could help the two sides to better understand each other, and help the global justice movement win allies among the ranks of blue.

After Seattle police were roundly criticized for allowing their city to descend into chaos during the 1999 WTO ministerial, the police have put on a massive show of force at every international summit. (In Miami, law enforcement agencies received $8.5 million from the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill to protect the city from protesters: The funds helped pay for helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and an array of sophisticated weaponry.) Now that police have so many resources at their disposal, the global justice movement should think about moving away from its strategy of “summit-hopping,” some activists say.

“I think that you’re never going to win a fight with the cops. You just won’t,” says David Amdur, a community organizer for the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council, a progressive organization that works with the local Latino community to further immigrant rights. Before he landed his current job, Amdur worked for years as an activist on international causes — first in solidarity with Latin American social movements (he lived in E45El Salvador from 1996 to 2000) and then as a member of the Boston Global Action Network. But these days he believes he’s doing more good by working in local communities. “Part of me feels that the most important maybe is to stay here, to organize something here,” he says. “And the most vital of all is not just to focus on globalization and a summit — it’s about educating people about the FTAA, and motivating people to take action and stop it.”

Amdur and other activists say they shouldn’t abandon the protests, which help energize people and get different groups talking to one another. They acknowledge that the global justice movement has made some efforts to bring local voices to the large-scale protests (consider, for example, Root Cause, a South Florida-based coalition that staged a thirty-four-mile march the week of the Miami ministerial to highlight the FTAA’s potential impact on local communities). But in their view, some sectors of the movement have a misguided belief that protests alone will put an end to free trade agreements. Meanwhile, the focus on demonstrations keeps the movement from doing other important work, such as building coalitions that include more people of color and working-class Americans. “There are times for big mobilizations,” Amdur says, “but there are times when you need to have organizing, education, and mobilizing in your community, because you have to realize in terms of class, in terms of race, and in terms of immigration status, not everyone can go to these big protests.”

A protester holds his opinion high in front of the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington. April 20, 2002.

Global solutions

Writing in The New York Times the very day that global justice protesters clashed with Italian police in Genoa, Thomas L. Friedman declared the anti-globalization movement to be a bunch of irresponsible naysayers: “To be against globalization is to be against so many things — from cell phones to trade to Big Macs — that it connotes nothing. Which is why the anti-globalization protests have produced noise but nothing that has improved anyone’s life.” This portrait of an “anti-globalization” movement of Luddites and reactionaries became even darker after September 11. Soon after the terrorist attacks, Britain’s international development secretary, Clare Short, warned: “There is a danger that the terrorists and the anti-globalization protestors will get what they want, which is to blow up world trade and to separate us.” Canadian journalist Leonard Stern was a tad kinder: The demonstrators were “still several rungs behind Osama bin Laden,” he said, even if they were “climbing the same ladder.”

Global justice activists say their critics are misguided. “It has nothing to do with being afraid of globalization. It has everything to do with putting forward a new form of globalization,” says Bill Moore-Kilgannon, director of campaigns and communications for the Council of Canadians, a Canadian citizens’ watchdog organization. But part of what makes the criticism stick is the fact that the global justice movement has done such a bad job of getting its message out into the mainstream media. “I think some reporters are just lazy,” says Jason Mark, co-author (with Danaher) of the new book Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. “And it’s a lot easier to just write the story in a simple way. I think another part of the challenge is that these issues are a lot more complicated than an anti-war march is. At an anti-war march it’s very simple to get the message: ‘No War.’ Two words … But if you go and interview somebody in the street about the IMF, even without their protesting, it’s going to be difficult for them to offer their vision.”

These days, global justice activists are trying to spell out that vision — on the streets and in the convention halls. Instead of just shouting their opposition to the WTO and other suspect multilateral institutions, they stage “alternative” summits just blocks away from the trade ministerials — anything from forest forums to farmworker gatherings to fair trade confabs. (In Cancún, anarchists from the Green Bloc even built their own “eco-village” in a city park, featuring exhibits of some of the sustainable technologies that people could use in their own communities, such as systems to collect rain for drinking water.) The movement’s most ambitious effort to institutionalize alternatives, however, has been the World Social Forum, an annual gathering that for the past three years has been held in Porto Alegre, Brazil — at the same time that business elites and heads of state meet up in Davos, Switzerland, for their World Economic Forum. The next World Social Forum will be held in January in Mumbai, India; like the first, it will bring together global justice activists from around the world to discuss the movement’s alternatives to neoliberalism.

The going has been slow, but in recent years it seems that the various activist communities have made some progress in sketching out their alternative world. Some of their economic proposals include:

• Last year, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) put out a book, Alternatives to Economic Globalization — the product of a three-year discussion by nineteen academics and policy analysts, including Bello, Mander, and Vandana Shiva. Their report calls for a moratorium on the negotiation of new trade agreements, and also highlights a wide range of “alternative” systems for energy, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing — from hydrogen fuel cells to “smart growth” urban planning, from local food production to accounting methods that take into account environmental cleanup costs.

  At the heart of IFG’s alternative vision is a concept called subsidiarity. “Subsidiarity doesn’t exactly mean localization,” Mander says. “What it means is that power should reside in the governing unit that’s closest to the people where practical.” When dealing with global crises like AIDS or ozone depletion, there is a need for international arrangements with some degree of power “because everybody’s in the same soup,” Mander says. “But they should be one at a time. They should be one case at a time. There should not be an overall structure that dominates all of these things, like the World Trade Organization tries to be.”

  Diversity and democracy are entwined in this idea of subsidiarity — diversity in the promotion of a variety of local solutions to problems, and democracy in the decentralization of production. “The great thing about wind and solar [energy],” Mark of Global Exchange points out, “is you can put it everywhere. The idea is, okay, if each community is creating their own energy source … then that creates more community control, local control. It helps and enhances democracy.” As Danaher puts it, “The basic idea is, democratize access to capital. Capital is horseshit. Concentrated in a pile, it stinks. Spread it out, it makes things grow. It’s like fertilizer, right?”

• Promoting diversity is also one of the explicit goals of Berkeley’s BREAD Hours, one of the world’s local exchange trading systems. An alternative to the greenback, BREAD Hours allow Berkeley residents to keep money within the local community. BREAD Hours are based on labor: Individuals provide services in exchange for Hours, which they can use at local shops, restaurants, and business. (Ithaca, New York, has a similar currency called Ithaca HOURS, and Argentina’s RGT system, a national trading and barter network, transacts several million U.S. dollars of business every year.)
• “Fair trade” is another diversity-friendly form of production that has taken off in the past decade. To be certified fair trade, goods must meet certain standards — among other things, the producers have to receive a stable, minimum price, and the goods must be made under safe working conditions, without forced labor or exploitative child labor. Today, a wide range of products — including coffee, chocolate, and crafts — receive international fair-trade certification, allowing consumers to make sure their purchasing reflects their values. According to Global Exchange, fair trade coffee every year benefits 350,000 farmers organized into more than 300 cooperatives in twenty-two countries; fair trade products overall accounted for $100 million in sales in the United States in 2000. Even Starbucks — whose store managers are never too happy to see anarchists waltz by their plate-glass windows — now sells fair trade coffee in its stores.
• While some global justice activists want to get rid of corporations altogether, others want to reform them by getting at the root of their problem: their obsessive pursuit of the bottom line. The idea of a “triple bottom line” — one that takes into account environmental and social impacts as well as profit — can be seen in the efforts by the AFL-CIO and other labor movements to introduce workers’ rights in the WTO and trade agreements. It can be seen in the “living wage” campaign, which has focused on implementing city ordinances that require city contractors to pay their workers a minimum wage that provides adequate support for their families. And it can be seen in shareholder activism, a strategy that has been pursued in recent years by groups like Amnesty International USA to persuade multinational corporations to stop supporting human rights abuses in countries like Indonesia and Nigeria. By putting forward shareholder resolutions that stir up dissension, Amnesty has been able to insert morality into the usual corporate debates, and promote a form of (albeit limited) democracy in otherwise unaccountable institutions.
• In the anarchist community, activists talk about how their models of decentralized decision-making can help fashion a more inclusive and democratic society. For these activists, the whole purpose of the global justice struggle is to bring radical democracy to the world. “That’s not just the means to the change, but that is the change,” says Solnit. “We can’t change the world through political parties and politicians or reforming corporations. We have to just make a new world, and actually very much not seize power, but exercise power.” These days, Solnit is putting together an anthology of essays (the forthcoming Globalizing Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World) that spells out the political vision that he and his fellow activists share — one opposed to any system of government that centralizes power. “Other social movements have had alternatives, but I think it’s significant in that anti-globalization is at its heart an anti-systemic movement,” Solnit says. “In the last decades we’ve been trapped into single-issue movements that talked about alternatives to the war, alternatives to sexism, alternatives to racism, but not alternatives to the entire system.”

  New forms of political participation in other parts of the world have provided inspiration to Solnit and other global justice activists. In Argentina, where four out of ten people now live in poverty, spontaneous neighborhood councils have been convened in middle-class neighborhoods, where residents are upset over unpopular government decrees. In Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) has organized hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to squat on and take over unproductive land — carrying out their own version of grassroots, extralegal land reform. And since 1989, Porto Alegre, a regional capital city of 1.3 million in southern Brazil, has used a “participatory budget” process that allows thousands of city residents to make decisions about how their tax dollars are spent.

If global justice activists fall almost in lockstep behind the general principles of diversity and democracy, there’s plenty of disagreement over how far to push these things. On one hand, the reformists question whether democracy is always a good thing (couldn’t you consider the genocide of a minority group by a majority group “democracy in action”?). On the other hand, the radicals are concerned about the darker side of their movement’s diversity: co-optation. “To a large degree, single-issue nonprofits, [nongovernmental organizations], and trade unions serve a function for the system of normalizing things, preventing genuine rebellion, keeping people in check, and then providing someone who’s much more manageable,” says Solnit.

Nevertheless, there are signs that the two camps are growing more comfortable with each other’s company. Lisa Hoyos, an organizer for the AFL-CIO, points out that “radicals” like herself could learn from the lobbying strategies of more traditional political campaigns. “When it comes to international trade and the World Bank and all those things, it’s Congress that’s voting on these measures and accords,” says Hoyos, who formerly facilitated the “Our World Is Not for Sale” global justice network. “And I don’t think that, for all the great visibility work we’ve done in protests and so forth, that we’re pressuring them enough.” Meanwhile, reformists are realizing that there are tactical benefits to having a diversity of political viewpoints under one banner. “Those of us who are in the reformist camp are beholden to the abolitionist camp [for] moving our agenda for us,” says Zafra Whitcomb, business and human rights program coordinator at Amnesty International USA. “When a moderate group meets with a governmental or corporate organization, often the organization will say, ‘We’re so glad we can talk to you. We’re so glad you’re not just out there beating us over the head.’”

A new era in organizing

The conventional wisdom is that “successful” social movements need a single, compelling vision, strong, charismatic leadership, and hierarchical, centralized organization. Throughout history, this perspective has won over movements that began as experiments in direct democracy. “By the late 1960s, many new leftists had abandoned efforts to create an egalitarian microcosm of a future society in favor of centralized, often militaristic organizations modeled on those of their Third World revolutionary heroes,” writes sociologist Francesca Polletta in her book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting. “It was among radical feminists and in a counterculture largely disdained by politicos, that experiments in movement democracy continued.” Democracy, in other words, was a luxury of the delusional political fringe.

From the moment it began in the Lacandón Jungle of Mexico, the global justice movement has sought to become an exception to the rule. Seattle became the global rallying cry for a new vision of organizing: one that saw diversity and democracy not as weaknesses, but as strengths; not merely as means, but as ends. By taking this position, activists hoped to avoid the fate of the two progressive experiments whose failures some of them had witnessed in their youth: the U.S. New Left, and international communism. The former had been driven into division by arrogant leadership and an inability to relate across lines of class, gender, and race. The latter had sought to impose yet another hierarchical, oppressive model of organizing society and the economy.

Instead, we might compare the global justice movement to another kind of organizing from another era: the U.S. civil rights movement. It began as a reaction against Jim Crow in the South — in Montgomery, Alabama, against segregated buses, and in Greensboro, North Carolina, against whites-only lunch counters. In later years, however, it grew into a much larger movement, with aims that went beyond tearing down racist laws and institutions. Key leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr., and key activist organizations, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, shifted away from a more or less reactive approach — demonstrating against specific injustices like Jim Crow — and increasingly advanced their own visions of democracy and economic opportunity in America. By the mid-1960s, the SNCC was working among black communities in Mississippi to register voters and build black politica+E94l power; King and other black leaders were calling for jobs and education and “something more” than legal equality for African Americans. As King said in 1968, two months before his death, “What good does it do to sit at the counter when you cannot afford a hamburger?”

Three decades later, another social movement is on the cusp of a similar transition. In their post-MTV, post-Internet version of the Montgomery bus boycott, global justice protesters shut down the city of Seattle and sabotaged the 1999 WTO ministerial. That protest was a defining moment, which unleashed a wave of other demonstrations around the country and across the globe. But like the U.S. civil rights movement did in the late 1960s, the global justice movement has entered a new stage in its organizing: broadening its ranks, diversifying its tactics, and dreaming its own versions of tomorrow.

The question, of course, is whether the movement can rise out of the fringe of left-wing politics — what one activist calls the “anarchist gutter.” Will the movement’s campaign to diversify simply lead to more crippling divisions? Will its effort to further democratize strip it of the very tools it needs to confront its enemies? Last year’s massive rallies against the Iraq War have provided some momentum, and the general drift of public interest is in their favor, activists insist. “The point we’re at now is unique,” says Whitcomb of Amnesty International. “Even though economic globalization has been going on for three centuries, there hasn’t been a true awareness. Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were activist movements … But now I think it’s more decentralized, filtered out through the population. And it’s focused on the issues of economic justice, equal voice, participation, rights to decent work, decent living conditions, fair wages — equal participation in the benefits of economic development. It is shaping a new paradigm.”

HELP NEEDED: To take part in a survey of global justice activists being conducted by Tom Hayden and Victor Tan Chen, please click here.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen