After Genoa: Why We Need to Stay in the Streets

By Starhawk

Since Genoa, there has been lots of healthy debate about
where the movement needs to go. The large scale protests are
becoming more dangerous and difficult. The summits are moving to
inaccessible locations. The IMF and the World Bank and the G8 and
the WTO continue to do their business. Are we being effective enough
to justify the risks we're taking? Should we be focusing more on
local work, building our day-to-day networking and organizing?

I was in Genoa. Because of what I experienced there, including the
moments of real terror and horror, I am more convinced than ever that
we need to stay in the streets. We need to continue mounting large
actions, contesting summits, working on the global scale.

Our large scale actions have been extraordinarily effective. I've
heard despairing counsels that the protests have not affected the
debates in the G8 or the WTO or the IM/World Bank. In fact they
have, they have significantly changed the agendas and the propaganda
issuing forth. In any case, the actual policies of these
institutions will be the last thing to change. But for most of us on
the streets, changing the debate within these institutions is not our
purpose. Our purpose is to undercut their legitimacy, to point a
spotlight at their programs and policies, and to raise the social
costs of their existence until they become insupportable. Contesting
the summits has delegitimized these institutions in a way no local
organizing possibly can. The big summit meetings are elaborate
rituals, ostentatious shows of power that reinforce the entitlement
and authority of the bodies they represent. When those bodies are
forced to meet behind walls, to fight a pitched battle over every
conference, to retreat to isolated locations, the ritual is
interrupted and their legitimacy is undercut. The agreements that
were being negotiated in secret are brought out into the spotlight of
public scrutiny. The lie that globalization means democracy is
exposed; and the mask of benevolence is ripped off.

Local organizing simply can't do this as effectively as the big
demonstrations. Local organizing is vital, and there are other
things it does do: outreach, education, movement building, the
creation of viable alternatives, the amelioration of some of the
immediate effects of global policy. We can't and won't abandon the
local, and in fact never have: many of us work on both scales. No
one can go to every summit: we all need to root ourselves in work in
our own communities. But many of us have come to the larger, global
actions because we understand that the trade agreements and
institutions we contest are designed to undo all of our local work
and override the decisions and aspirations of local communities.

We can make it a conscious goal of every large scale action to
strengthen local networks and support local organizing. Aside from
Washington DC, Brussels, or Geneva, which have no choice, no city is
ever going to host one of these international meetings twice. Even
now, we hear rumors that Washington is considering relocating or
limiting the upcoming IMF/World Bank meeting. But if we find ways to
organize mass actions that leave resources and functioning coalitions
behind, then each grand action can strengthen and support the local
work that continues on a daily basis.
Summits won't remain the nice, juicy, targets that they are for long.

Over the last two years, we've reaped an agenda of meetings that were
set and contracted for before Seattle. Now that they are locating
the meetings in ever more obscure and isolated venues, we need a
strategy that can allow us to continue building momentum.

As an example, some of us have been talking about linked, large-scale
regional actions targeting stock exchanges and financial institutions
when the WTO meets in Qatar in November. The message we'll be
sending is: "If you move the summits beyond our reach, and continue
the policies of power consolidation and wealth concentration, then
social unrest will spread beyond these specific institutions to
challenge the whole structure of global corporate capitalism itself."

Marches, teach-ins, countersummits, programs of positive alternatives
alone can't pose this level of threat to the power structure, but
combined with direct action on the scale we've now reached, they can.
Of course, the more successful we are, the meaner they get. But when
they use force against us, we still win, even though the victory
comes at a high cost. Systems of power maintain themselves through
our fear of the force they can command, but force is costly. They
cannot sustain themselves if they have to actually use force in order
to accomplish every normal function.
Genoa was a victory won at a terrible price. I hope never to undergo
another night like I spent when they raided the IMC and the Diaz
school, knowing that atrocities were being done just across the way
and not being able to stop them. I ache and grieve and rage over the
price. I would do almost anything to assure that no one, especially
no young person, ever suffers such brutality again.

Almost anything. Anything except backing away from the struggle.

Because that level of violence and brutality is being enacted, daily,
all over the world. It's the shooting of four students in New
Guinea, the closing of a school in Senegal, the work quota in a
maquiladora on the Mexican border, the clearcutting of a forest in
Oregon, the price of privatized water in Cochabamba. It's the
violence being perpetrated on the bodies of youth, especially youth
of color, in prisons all over the United States, and the brutality
and murder going on in Colombia, Palestine, Venezuela? And it's the
utter disregard for the integrity of the ecosystems that sustain us
all.

I don't see the choice as being between the danger of a large action
and safety. I no longer see any place of safety. Or rather, I see
that in the long run our safest course is to act strongly now. The
choice is about when and how we contest the powers that are
attempting to close all political space for true dissent.

Genoa made clear that they will fight ruthlessly to defend the
consolidation of their power, but we still have a broad space in
which to organize and mount large actions. We need to defend that
space by using it, filling and broadening it. Either we continue to
fight them together now when we can mount large-scale, effective
actions, or we fight them later in small, isolated groups, or alone
when they break down the doors of our homes in the middle of the
night. Either we wage this struggle when there are still living
forests, running rivers, and resilience left in the life support
systems of the planet, or we fight when the damage is even deeper and
the hope of healing slim.

We have many choices about how to wage the struggle. We can be more
strategic, more creative, more skillful in what we do. We can learn
to better prepare people for what they might face, and to better
support people afterwards. We have deep questions to consider about
violence and nonviolence, about our tactics and our long range
vision, which I hope to address in a later posting.

But those choices remain only so long as we keep open the
space in which to make them. We need to grow, not shrink. We need
to explore and claim new political territory. We need the actions of
this autumn to be bigger, wilder, more creatively outrageous and
inspiring than ever, from the IMF/World Bank actions in Washington DC
at the end of September to the many local and regional actions in
November when the WTO meets in Quatar. We need to stay in the
streets.

Starhawk

http://www.starhawk.org