The New Radicalism

By Rachel Neumann, AlterNet
Posted on July 22, 2004, Printed on February 11, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/19308/the_new_radicalism

Long-time political activist David Solnit was one of the key organizers in the direct action against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and the 2003 shutdown of San Francisco's Financial District the day after the US invasion of Iraq. He is a driving force behind the use of puppets, public education, and theater in protests. He is the editor of a new book that collects diverse and passionate voices aimed at providing a how-to guide to "the new radicalism." Globalize Liberation is a manual to help movements develop strong clear analysis of what's wrong and why, a collection of visions of positive alternatives, and a resource and inspiration for strategies on getting the world we want.

Rachel Neumann: While Globalize Liberation is a harsh critic of many tenets of corporate globalization, it seems, fundamentally, a hopeful book. "All we have to do," You write, "is change everything."

David Solnit: Hope is key. If our organizations, analysis, vision and strategies are lanterns, then hope is the fuel that makes them burn bright and attracts people to them. Globalize Liberation is consciously a hopeful book. The dictionary defines hope as "Desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment." Everyone who contributed to the book desires a radically better world, but the confidence that it will be fulfilled is told in concrete experiences from communities in North America and around the world. The essays in Globalize Liberation come out of these interesting times when social movements around the world that are bigger, stronger, more radical and democratic and more connected to each other than at any time in history.

What, right now, gives you the greatest hope?

The positive alternatives people everywhere are organizing that pre-figure a better world are hopeful. Two examples in the book are the unemployed "Piquetero" groups in Argentina pooling their relief money – won through highway blockades – to make coop bakeries, brick factories and popular education centers; and the San Francisco Community Land Trust's work to take affordable housing off the market as a step towards a self-managed non-capitalist city. Also, the fragile legitimacy of the US government and global corporate capitalism is at an all-time low – it's crumbling. This is all cause for confidence and hope.

There is a lot to do to nurture our desire for, and confidence in a better world – like appreciating victories and strengths, and working with people and groups that make us hopeful. Getting people to explain the how-to of their victories for the book has made me more optimistic than when I started.

In your introduction to the book you talk about a new radicalism and use examples of people's movements around the world. Do you think these movements – which often operate without funds, institutional support, or media recognition – pose a real threat to the other, better-funded, corporate view of globalization? And, if so, how do they do this?

First, the term "New Radicalism," is my effort to positively begin defining the grassroots movement of movements around the globe. Contributing author-activist Patrick Reinsborough explained the term, "This name is offered along with some accompanying common principles as an umbrella term for a wide range of creative grassroots movements promoting systemic alternatives around the globe. The New Radicalism meme may prove to be a useful container to help with the self-definition process of cross-movement organizing. As many of us work to strengthen our vision of a movement of movements, we need tools to recognize each other, build solidarity, and share our over lapping visions."

New radical movements are the backbone of the resistance to corporate globalization and have defeated much of the agenda of the corporate globalizers. The WTO, still reeling from Seattle, collapsed again in Cancun due to street resistance led by Mexican campesinos with many other sectors. It was this resistance together with opposition from governments of the global South under pressure from social movements at home. The FTAA also has essentially collapsed due to mass opposition. At their Ministerial meeting in Miami all they could do was damage control – any discussion of the FTAA would have ended in collapse.

While the Summit resistance gets much attention – the book focuses a lot on the frontline local struggles against the impacts of the corporate globalization – in our workplaces, neighborhoods, farms and cities.

But it's complicated. Opposition to corporate globalization comes from many sectors: governments, some of the NGO's or professional nonprofit organizations, political parties and old top-down left groups, do not share a systemic critique, instead working to limit the excesses of the system or replace it with similar anti-democratic structures. It's even more complicated, in that many racist, nationalist and fundamentalist movements are also trying to stoke people's fears and organize the widespread discontent with the current system. Can grassroots and radical movements out organize them?

The scale of the global crisis requires new strategies to make deep changes and replace the old institutions.

Globalize Liberation profiles movements from Argentina, Mexico, and Italy to Florida and California. Besides a distrust of the larger corporate system and a do-it-yourself style of direct democracy, what links these movements?

With the spread of corporate globalization and war – two ways of extending empire – it's become clearer that folks all over the world have common enemies. The banks that stole my uncles money in Argentina do predatory lending in American inner-cities, and bankroll massive ecologically devastating projects and anti-worker business deals all over the world. It's also become clear that we can only go so far defeating these enemies in one place.

I worked with anti-nuclear movements in Tahiti, Japan, Kazakhstan and Europe in the late '80s and early '90s and it was very difficult to coordinate, especially for those groups with little resources. Now, through the Internet, cheaper travel and migration our movements are better connected than ever than ever. Last year saw the culmination of this globalization-from-below in the mass mobilizations of millions of people on every continent against the invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003 – the biggest in history.

The book makes a lot of connections between issues that are often seen as very separate – racial injustice, health care, international trade agreements, and military occupation, to name just a few. How do you see these issues are connected? And, just as importantly, how do you think people can articulate these connections to the media and to others that don't see the connection. How do you get a protectionist long time union worker to care about the U'wa, for example. How do you get an immigrant – scared about his or her status here in the U.S. – to see the connections with the war in Iraq?

Corporations don't separate along issues or have separate committees to poison the air and water, violate workers and human rights or dis-empower local communities. They work together to change the ground rules and to make their efforts cumulative instead of competitive.

Can we explain our specific struggles as part of a larger systemic framework, so our diverse efforts become cumulative – not competitive? The final section of the book, Ideas in Action, has examples from groups and movements who link immediate reforms and survival struggles around farmworker justice, housing, or against prisons with longer term anti-system struggles.

Here's a local example of one effort to do this. On September 9, 2003, Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco Bay Area anti-war group, organized a march and direct action at the Chevron Texaco refinery in nearby Richmond. The action connected solidarity with the resistance with the WTO meeting happening in Cancun, Mexico with the toxic and environmental racism suffered by local communities with the stolen Iraqi oil, which was being processed. The organizing process brought together environmental justice groups, anti-war groups and global justice folks.

You write, "the world can not be changed for the better by taking power." Your words here echo Subcomandante Marcos, of the Zapatistas, who has insisted that the Zapatistas have no interest in electoral political power. That's a radical and revolutionary counterpoint to traditional politics. How do you connect this with the need for voting, electoral change and the calls of some grassroots organizations to get more activists running for political office?

We're talking about a different form of power from the conventional hierarchical power, often called power over. This alternative form of power, sometimes called power with, is about making the changes we want to see ourselves. It's a politics without politicians.

Last century was full of heart wrenching examples of political parties or leaders who took state power and were unable to change the momentum of the state and the global economic system. The old arguments between reform or revolution to take power no longer make sense. It redefines revolution as an ongoing process, instead of a one-time insurrection or a seizure of state power. Globalize Liberation includes strategies and examples of organizing for and exercising this alternative directly democratic power with.

Can we survive in the short term – protect our communities and the earth's air and water and sometimes defeat more destructive politicians like Bush for slightly less destructive ones, but still be honest about the limitations of relying on the institutions that got us into this mess? Can we have the sophistication to make short-term incremental change, while being clear that self-organized communities and movements are the long-term solution and source of real or direct democracy?

How do you see the upcoming political protests at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions?

The conventions are full of opportunities and traps. There is an opportunity to intervene in the narrow public debate and to redefine democracy as going beyond voting to choose pre-selected candidates to voting with our feet 365 days a year by organizing in communities and movements. There is an opportunity to launch radical ideas and stories and further discredit those being told by a system in crisis. There is an opportunity is build strong cross movement working relationships and to become a stronger counterforce to Bush that can continue as a counterforce to Kerry, if he gets in. It's also an opportunity for us to become more literate in asserting people power, as folks all over the planet do to resist, contain and sometime overthrow the governments and corporations they live under.

The trap is being laid by the Bush gang and Homeland Security to use us to further criminalize and intimidate dissent and paint protesters and anarchists as another threat to scare people into submission. If we are thoughtful, fluid and on our toes, their repression will backfire on them. It's clear we will have to fight on many levels to be in the streets, but how we do this is the real battle over ideas and stories.

Throughout the book, articles as well as images of puppets and art illustrate the need for creativity in protest. How crucial is art to globalizing liberation?

The creation story of the new radicalism is that it was popularized globally by the Zapatista's. They are masters of storytelling and performance. Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena calls Marcos the "Subcomandante of Performance Art." One of my favorite US storytellers are the Coalition of Immokalee Workers -made up of South Florida low-wage immigrant workers. Last February they hung out their tomato, sweat and pesticide stained workshirts on a clothesline in front of Yum Brands Corporation headquarters in Kentucky – the world's largest restaurant corporation and owner of Taco Bell, the target of the farmworker led boycott. They told their story as they confronted power.

I see two parts of cultural resistance. The first part is to bring culture into the streets, into our movements communicating not just to people heads, but to their guts and their heart. The other is to bring the principle of creativity and innovation into our organizing. The point is not just to expand the set recipe for resistance with puppets or street parties or whatever, but to constantly think about how else could we articulate our values and ideas. Many of us call this principle "laboratory of resistance," the idea being to experiment and evaluate. An experiment is a success if you learn from it and Globalize Liberation is an effort to learn from the experiments of the last decade.

Rachel Neumann is Rights & Liberties Editor at AlterNet.

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