Party crasher

The growing grassroots movement against corporate globalization is targeting this summer's major party conventions. But what does it all mean?

by Ben Geman

PHILADELPHIA -- Inside the major party convention halls this summer, the nominations of Texas Governor George W. Bush in Philadelphia and Vice President Al Gore in Los Angeles will be scripted, sanitized, and devoid of drama. They'll be as dull and pre-programmed, in other words, as the candidates themselves.

Outside the halls, however, the scene will be anything but dull. Tens of thousands of activists are expected to flood the streets of Philadelphia and LA for mass protests, marches, and civil disobedience. The protests at the nominating conventions -- the Republican National Convention takes place in Philadelphia July 31 through August 3; the Democrats will meet in Los Angeles August 14 through 17 -- will mark the next big action of the growing movement against corporate globalization that came to prominence with last year's demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. A smaller, but nevertheless impressive, showing at last spring's Washington DC meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund proved the movement wasn't a fluke.

The convention protests will likely show that this growing grassroots movement has staying power -- and that it's evolving and making new allegiances. Organizers will focus on issues like welfare rights, health care, prisons, and American poverty, and they'll work with locally-based groups and organizations that have focused more on domestic policy. In Philadelphia, for example, organizers will team up with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union -- which will engage in civil disobedience July 31 with an unpermitted "March for Economic Human Rights." The group has been working to transform activism against welfare reform into global issue (see "Welfare Outrage Goes Global," June 8, 2000). Other planned events include a march by the Ad-Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care July 29 and a Unity 2000 rally the next day focusing on health care, prisons, and low wages. In Los Angeles, planned events range from a march against the WTO to protests around police brutality, immigrants' rights, and workers rights. While this will mark a substantial shift in focus from globalism to domestic issues, the ties made between groups like the Ruckus Society and local activists will likely strengthen the movement overall. "You know how in Seattle it was the Teamsters and the [sea] turtles?" says Margaret Prescod, an organizer of the Los Angeles protests. "Now it's the Teamsters, the turtles, and the welfare mothers. You have a lot of people doing community-based work in a way that didn't happen in Seattle and didn't happen in DC."

The new focus was apparent last weekend in Philadelphia. At the Friends Center, a Quaker institution, located downtown, about 100 people gathered for the "People's Action Camp," a weekend of tutorials in non-violent civil disobedience, media, and strategy training for activists, and forming human blockades. People's Action was put together by the Philadelphia Direct Action Group and the California-based Ruckus Society, which trains activists in non-violent civil disobedience and played significant roles in the Seattle and Washington DC protests. Saturday's training unfolded with some get-to-know-you games. Standing in a circle of about 60 people, the activists were asked to state their names and organizations -- and the answers displayed an impressive array of groups: ACT-UP; student activists from New York; the Next Movement, a Boston-based group of young activists of color; Chicago ACORN, and Refuse and Resist!, a farmworker advocate.

The diversity of groups also showed something else besides a new focus from global issues to local ones: color. In Seattle and DC, the props and puppets were colorful. But the protester's faces, when you could see them behind masks and bandannas, were largely white. The crowd at the training sessions in Philly is nothing if not diverse. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latinos stand alongside white activists. "We made a conscious effort here for this training to link the issues of global corporate domination to what is going on domestically and to bring to the table activists who represent constituencies of the most marginalized peoples in the United States -- people of color, poor people, people with AIDS, the queer community," says Amadee Braxton of the Philadelphia Direct Action Group and the Black Radical Congress.

Activists say that moving from protesting WTO policy to, say, prison reform flows naturally from their critique of global corporate influence. Indeed, activists now use the phrase "structural adjustment" -- the term describing the budget cuts and trade liberalization required by the IMF and World Bank in exchange for loans -- to describe domestic policy. "We were talking about structural adjustment in the Third World without realizing how much happens in low-income communities and communities of color in the United States," says Han Shan of the Ruckus Society. If there's a unifying theme in this diffuse movement, it's that the same agenda placing free trade above human rights and the environment in developing nations is pushing an American domestic policy that limits wages, privatizes prisons, and lets big money influence elections.

But the new voices heard at last Saturday's activists' training in Philadelphia are also asking tough questions -- of the movement. Terry Washington, 23, of the group Next Movement, says the mobilization against corporate globalization has made some mistakes along the way, such as focusing too much on the Web to organize and exchange information. "A lot of people say how great the Internet is, but a lot people don't have Internet access, especially people of color," says Washington. Another issue, notes Prescod, is that minority activists aren't always on the same playing field as their white counterparts when it comes to facing off with police. "Driving while black is a problem, much less standing in a picket line while black," she says.

The bottom line, however, at least as it was shown last weekend is that the protest plans are being driven by issues. "The US political system no longer runs from left to right. It runs from top to bottom," says Beka Economopoulos of the Rainforest Action Network. "People at the bottom realize they are not within shouting distance of the folks at the top. No matter what reason activists are outside the DNC or the RNC, there's a common belief that democracy is broken. It's been sold, and big business has bought it."

THERE'S NO reason my parents should have to take out a second mortgage for me to go to school," says Nermin Abdelwahab, a 20-year-old Hunter College student dressed in jeans and a Zapatista T-shirt showing masked armed rebels. Abdelwahab is practicing sound bites in front of a camera during a media training for protesters organized by the Ruckus Society. The goal is to teach activists to present clever, concise, and seconds-long answers to what is hoped will be a media crush at the convention protests. Earlier, Abdelwahab had declared: "We're out here to protest for social and economic justice that does not exist in the two party system." I've been recruited to critique the responses. I tell her it was a good idea to talk about college tuition -- something most people identify with.

The trainings are proof these activists are serious about getting their message out, at the convention demonstrations and elsewhere. But at the same time, it shows just how hard it is to pin down exactly what this movement is about, even as its message takes shape. Or, I should say, its messages. Trainees discussed everything from the influence of money in elections to AIDS.

These multitudes of voices, issues, and concerns shouldn't be mistaken for disorganization. Where the movement against corporate globalization specifically is concerned, it's a deliberate -- and tactical -- strategy that betrays the new movement's post-modern roots. There's no coherent structure and communication takes place largely through the Web. There are tactical allegiances and networks but no over-arching structures or detailed ideologies. This lateral structure was on display in the Seattle and DC protests. There, activists organized themselves into autonomous "affinity groups" of between a handful and a couple dozen people that worked together to coordinate the mass actions. The loose organization allowed dozens of groups with varying ideologies and causes to fight a common enemy. While everyone assembled in DC, for example, agreed that the IMF and World Bank can be destructive, the autonomous structure allowed them to protest together without consensus on what, exactly, should be done to change the playing field on global trade.

But as the conventions loom, activists are asking whether this loose structure can carry the movement beyond the Philadelphia and Los Angeles protests or where the next big mobilization might be (probably the September meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Prague). "I don't know where this is going," says Evan Henshaw-Plath, who helped set up the Seattle "Independent Media Center" Web site (www.seattle.indymedia.org), which featured articles, photos, and other records of the WTO protests from a viewpoint very different than the much maligned "corporate media." "What came out of Seattle was a particular style of organizing that proved very powerful. How do we continue to build and grow off of that and develop more direction and move forward without just event-chasing? That was and continues to be an effective way of capturing the popular consciousness of the moment but I don't think anyone is sure what the next step would be. There is a lot of uncertainty there."

"We don't want to just have a series of big demonstrations and events. That will just fizzle out," adds longtime activist Mike Morrill of Unity 2000, which is organizing a large, multi-themed march on July 30. "We don't want people just to be adding to their T-shirt collection." Instead, he and others say the protests must be followed by continued advocacy for deep policy changes, both at big demonstrations and in the activists' separate communities.

And here is where the training in Philadelphia may make for lasting change. The Ruckus Society trainers say the weekend tutorials are aimed at giving activists tools to keep working beyond the conventions. Similarly, the effectiveness of the convention protests themselves will be measured by whether groups that confront globalization can form lasting bonds with domestic and community-based organizations.

That's not to say, however, this new movement consists of nothing but waiting around for the next big demonstration. For example, trade policy activists recently forced Starbucks into buying "fair trade" coffee. And the new movement is setting down roots. For example, the Direct Action Network, which has regional chapters that help coordinate mass non-violent protests, is forging the Continental Direct Action Network, a nationwide superstructure linking the different groups. In Pennsylvania, Morrill says, he and others are planning a conference to ensure the groups that come together for the Philadelphia protests remain connected, to create a "movement of movements." Elsewhere, about 30 people, including Henshaw-Plath, gathered July 2 in Boston to discuss transforming the Boston Independent Media Center, which sprang up to cover the March "Biodevastation" conference and protests, into a permanent institution.

And in a sense, some of the "what next" question is answered by the organizing methods themselves. A common theme in the organizing of these protests is that the new activism shouldn't descend into the hierarchical, top down, undemocratic structures that, activists say, the American political system they are protesting has become. Activists are "really taking on the challenge of walking the walk," says Mike Prokosch, a veteran activist with Boston's United for a Fair Economy. "I have not seen a lot of power trips."

CATHIE BERREY has just locked herself by the neck to a table in the Friends Center with a kryptonite bike lock. "You can lock down to anything like this," she says. Berry, 34, is a "blockade trainer" with the Ruckus Society. Aside from the aforementioned u-shaped lock, her teaching materials include steel chains and cables. Berrey is careful to note that she is training activists in tactics and not for specific events. "I just train people in hypothetical situations they may or may not engage in," she says. What "hypotheticals" actually unfold beyond the already-scheduled protests is anyone's guess.

That's where groups like Ruckus and the Philadelphia Direct Action Group come in, beyond their participation in the scheduled events. One wild card will be how the activists use "direct action" to disrupt the conventions and how many of them do it. While there is no call to explicitly try and shut down the events -- as there was with success in Seattle and far less successfully in DC -- activists say that "creative non-violent direct action" will take several forms. The non-violence training that unfolded in the basement of the Friends Center, for example, featured a "hassle line" role play as people linked arms to pretend they were blockading a NRA function.

We'll probably see different, smaller-scale actions by a range of different groups. "A lot of people are interested in creating strategic disruptions to get the message out," says Kevin Rudiger of the Los Angeles Direct Action Network. "There are these high-priced fundraisers, $10,000-per-plate dinners, which are part of the problem, that are happening all over town, and I would not be surprised to see some of these targeted by protesters with non-violent direct action. There are all sorts of other events, receptions sponsored by corporations, which we see as connected to this whole issue of corporate control. There are a lot of these types of events which are potential targets." The Philadelphia Direct Action Group, for example, lists "jail solidarity" as one of the events alongside the schedule for August 3.

"All I have to say about the Direct Action strategy is that it will not be business as usual," adds Washington, DC resident Adam Eidinger, an organizer of the DC protests who's helping publicize the Philadelphia and LA demonstrations. "There will be people inside the convention halls," he vows. "Our people."

Ben Geman can be reached atbgeman[a]phx.com.