Recovering the Power of
the Global Grass Roots
in the Antiwar Movement
by Cindy Milstein
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The global day of antiwar protests on February 15 was
remarkable for several reasons.
First and foremost, of course, was the fact that some
12 million people came out in over 600 cities spanning
every continent to express their outrage at a
potential preemptive strike on Iraq. So enormous and
unprecedented were these demonstrations that even the
New York Times was forced to admit, no doubt
grudgingly, of "a new power in the streets."
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Then too, the face of that new power defied
categorization. There was no single agent of social
change, no all-encompassing political ideology. It was
difficult to typecast dissent based on color, age,
gender, class, and so on. Those who rallied together
on that Saturday in February mirrored the rich
diversity of humanity itself.
Most noteworthy of all, though, was the democratic
impulse that reemerged on this particular day of
activism. In the reactionary months since 9-11,
especially in the United States, resistance has been
marked by a clampdown of its own. The period of a
transparent politics-from-below that interlinked a
multiplicity of uprisings from the Zapatistas to Genoa
in a global movement against capitalism seemed to
disappear with New York's twin towers. Certainly, the
nonhierarchical forms of organization that defined the
"anti-globalization" movement lingered - from
consultas and spokescouncils to a do-it-yourself
infrastructure of media, medics, and legal aid - but
now only among anti-authoritarian leftists, who had
introduced such utopian notions in the first place. In
the post-September 11 culture of fear, liberal social
justice activists and orthodox Marxists alike raced
away from the grassroots practices that had become
normative at the mass direct actions of the recent
past.
Yet they didn't run far. Here in the States,
progressive and Marxist-Leninist groups pushed full
steam ahead with an antiwar movement as if - and this
is pivotal - there was not and never had been an
anti-globalization movement, particularly one
structured along egalitarian lines. One could perhaps
applaud them for their willingness to take charge,
relying on the belief that, "well, somebody's got to
do it." How else could tens of thousands descend on
Washington, D.C. or New York City to hinder the
present military juggernaut without the single-minded,
centralized coordination of an A.N.S.W.E.R. (no matter
how politically despicable) or a United for Peace and
Justice (no matter how politically docile)?
But that's where F15 proved them wrong.
By making use of inclusive structures that allowed
diverse individuals to collectively reclaim social and
political space, the direct action wing of the
anti-globalization movement had forged a desire for
self-organization. Whether one identified with
anarchists and other libertarian radicals who espoused
these prefigurative practices was immaterial. It felt
good to shake off the alienation of everyday life and
join together with others to actively shape a better
world, if only temporarily. Moreover, such experiments
in mutual aid and confederated direct democracy seemed
to point beyond themselves, toward forms of social
organization that could daily institutionalize freedom
for everyone. Even after the anti-capitalist
movement's promise seemed to be eclipsed by a
draconian "war on terror" and a top-down antiwar
movement in response, the decentralist sensibility was
not forgotten.
Which brings us back to F15. New York City was the
metropolis perhaps most symbolically crucial to the
day the world said no to war. The UN Security Council
meetings in Manhattan had taken on larger-than-life
proportions as a contest of wills between
nation-states. The so-called terror alert was upped to
orange, or high, with New York coincidentally named as
a prime target that weekend. And on the island watched
over by the Statue of Liberty, no matter how
tarnished, NYC's police department, with the later
backing of federal courts, would not sanction a
permitted march to express political dissent. If there
was ever a time for an activist group to seize the
moral high ground and, permission or no, announce a
march route, February 15 was definitely it. But United
for Peace and Justice (UPJ) meekly acquiesced to a
relatively small legal rally spot.
In the void created by this failure of nerve, the
eagerness to organize from the bottom-up reappeared.
Tens of thousands of people were emboldened by the
participatory praxis of the seemingly bygone
anti-capitalist movement. They formed themselves into
varied blocs intent on feeding into one big
unpermitted march. Unfortunately, because UPJ had
dragged its heels for so long in hopes the authorities
would relent, these autonomous contingents had only a
few days to attempt any sort of federation. And such
short notice certainly proved limiting. Given a bit
more time, we could have converged together from all
corners of the city and brought NYC to a
near-standstill. But as it was, in the last couple
days before F15, almost hourly a new bloc would add
its name to the list (hosted, to its credit, on the
UPJ website), which eventually totaled 70 feeder
marches: from the Militant Moms Bloc, Housing and
Green Space Feeder, and the NYC People of Color
Contingent, to the Educators Feeder, Queer Anti-War
Contingent, and Doctors, Nurses, and Health Care
Workers March. And these feeders did shutdown dozens
of streets for hours on F15, opening up space for
everything from free expression to work stoppages.
Two such moments leap out. When demonstrators brought
stretches of Third Avenue to a halt, a U.S. Postal
Service truck (along with other vehicles) found itself
unable to go any farther. The driver got out and stood
back as people clambered to his van's roof for an
impromptu dance. Rather than getting angry, however,
he gladly enjoyed the performance along with everyone
else. Later, when groups of protesters stopped to warm
themselves at a chain sandwich-and-coffee shop, they
found a packed communal café instead. The "employees"
brought vats of steamy soup out, and they and the
"patrons" literally ate freely, while other people
passed out antiwar literature, pulled homemade lunches
from their backpacks, or engaged in political dialogue
while sprawled out on the floor.
Such instances of pleasure may seem trivial when
compared to the deadly seriousness of warfare, but
they are part and parcel of what we should be fighting
for. Stepping back from the micro-level of Manhattan
to the macro-level of the world, February 15 again
revealed the strength of voluntary cooperation in
league with global solidarity, perhaps on the largest
scale yet in human history. Contrary to what those
bent on directing this antiwar movement would have us
believe, F15 proved that it is possible to utilize
grassroots organization and still be highly
coordinated. It is also a much more powerful form of
opposition. For starters, police and governments can
easily block the actions of any one single
organization, as happened time and again with regard
to UPJ's plans in New York City. It is much more
difficult to hinder the activities of thousands of
independent yet interconnected groups. More
significant, though, F15 stands as persuasive
testimony to the capacity of human beings to craft
resistance of their own in concert with differentiated
others. This, in turn, offers a sliver of what freedom
might look like for us all.
It doesn't, however, mean that war against Iraq will
be averted; nor that the U.S. government's designs at
unilateralist, Christian fundamentalist control will
be rethought anytime soon. Sadly, even as I write, a
full-out attack looms likely within a week or so. And
just as likely, it will only be the first of many
proactive aggressions in a quest by the United States,
but also others for global domination. The power of
F15 lay not in its ability to stop war but in its
potentiality to again make self-management the norm
for contemporary political struggles. Such a
commitment to nonhierarchical social transformation is
absolutely necessary to build an antiwar movement
capable of abolishing those structural relations (such
as capitalism, statecraft, and racism) that make war
possible - an antiwar movement that models, if only
partially, notions of the good society in the process.
Nowhere is this perhaps more important right now than
in the United States, where principles such as freedom
are only trotted out by the government as the
flimsiest of covers for state terror at home and
abroad.
This past fall in Washington, D.C., a day before the
World Bank/IMF protests, the police used preemptive
tactics to arrest almost five hundred people milling
around a public park near Freedom Plaza at a low-key
"drumbeats against war" circle. After some thirty-plus
hours of handcuffing, body searches, fingerprinting by
the FBI, little food and less sleep, the
traffic-ticket-equivalent charge of "failure to obey"
was dropped. Despite the injustice of jailing those
deemed guilty before being proven innocent, the
state's allegation should, to its everlasting dismay,
be picked up and worn as our movement's badge of
honor.
The coming New World Disorder is already facing
delegitimation by those unwilling to blindly follow
orders. Such ethical acts of defiance include
librarians refusing to tell the government who's
checked out which books, soldiers resisting the call
to arms, and high school students skipping classes on
March 5 for a civic education of their own. In the
hard months ahead, principled noncompliance will
likely continue to escalate, becoming more broad-based
as well as creative.
Yet this same "failure to obey" shouldn't just be
reserved for entities outside an antiwar movement, as
F15 made clear. Be it at the hands of social
democratic NGOs or party-like Marxist-Leninist groups,
resistance too will not be controlled from above.
Indeed, we should deliberately expand on the
emancipatory practices of the anti-globalization
movement; we should self-consciously cultivate
directly democratic and confederated forms of
organization as a basis of unity that equally allows
for diversity. A successful antiwar movement will be
one that openly disobeys self-appointed authorities -
no matter who's issuing the commands.
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– Cindy Milstein
Cindy is a board member for the
Institute for Anarchist Studies, a faculty member at
the Institute for Social Ecology, and a member of the
Free Society Collective in Vermont. A writer for
various anti-authoritarian periodicals, her recent
essays are available in the online library at
Social-Ecology.org
(March 2003)
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