People's Democracy

As the tear gas from Quebec settles across North America and the activists return home, they come back with battle lore and an urge to get on with the business at hand: to deal with the onslaught of neo-liberalism across the world. The impact of these massive demonstrations --- fifty thousand in Seattle, perhaps fifty thousand in Quebec --- is that it sends a charge across the hemisphere to organise with ferocity, to gain the trust and ear of the masses.

There have been substantial effects of these mobilisations: the organised labour movements have revived their coordination for international solidarity, the environmental movements have tempered their anti-productivism when confronted with peasants from the South, and the students, in the USA particularly, seem to be throwing themselves into living wage campaigns. As I write this article, the students at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, continue to occupy the administration building for the second straight week; their demand is that the workers at Harvard, the janitors and secretaries, should make a living wage.

The anti-globalisation movement came out of the energy of many of these students, several of whom are part of the radical United Students Against Sweatshops and other such formations. Unionists, greens, reds, students, anti-racists, feminists --- the list of those who make up this nascent progressive formation is enormous. And despite the revival of the Right in the US and Mexico (albeit of a tempered sort), the Left or at least the progressive movement seems to be undeterred. Should we be hopeful?

At one level, yes. The mobilisations are indicative of the sentiment against capitalist globalisation. Thousands of people travel long distances in this wasteland of mass protest to offer their bodies against the corporations for a host of different reasons: frustration with the lack of democracy in the international agreements, angry at the lapse of environmental and labour regulation, generally displeased with corporate culture, and for a few, eager to participate in the construction of a movement against capitalism.

The media portrays Seattle-Quebec as a renewal of the protest culture from the 1960s, when in fact the ground for these protests was substantially prepared by the student struggles against apartheid and CIA-driven barbarity in Latin America, by the sustained anti-racist formations, by the rejuvenation of US and Canadian unions by immigrant workers, by the audaciousness of movements such as the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, and by the new aggressiveness of neo-liberalism. The bulk of the movement is generally not anti-capitalist but anti-corporations: this is, therefore, a liberal movement against big corporations whose overwhelming dominance of social life makes it a very clear and present target for young people frustrated with the lack of choices in their lives. Drawing from this energy, Seattle-Quebec has qualitatively changed the face of North American politics, and thereby given a fillip to the Left movements in the hemisphere.

But if we step back from this major gain, there is a need to be studiously cautious. Even though Seattle-Quebec has engendered protests elsewhere, and given bodies and energy to campaigns that were ongoing, it appears that the numbers at these protests have already started to dwindle and that those who go have already become veterans of one or more mobilisations. The task of a movement is to grow, and although it might be premature to assess growth, it appears that the Seattle-Quebec movements have not been able to break new ground in terms of making the struggle popular.

Much of this has to do with a lack of focus for the movement: that is, as political theorist Michael Albert noted a few months ago, Seattle-Quebec is motivated by an anti-corporate instinct but there is nothing else that the participants share — no long-term vision, no short-term programme, and a fuzzy idea of what is being achieved tactically at the mobilisations. What, in sum, does it mean to delay the proceedings and get on television? What does it mean to win non-participant observer status for the non-governmental organisations, as the Quebec demonstrations did for the next Summit of the Americas? Can a movement grow when there is little to focus the energy of those who make up the movement?

The first thing to recognise is that Seattle-Quebec is attended by two sorts of people. There are those who have no problem with institutions and with leadership, such as unionists, some greens, the reds and some feminists. Then there are those who are driven by a deeply anti-institutional ethos, who do not wish to ‘belong,’ whether to a political organisation or to anything that has rules, procedures, a programme and a leadership. Among them one should number the anarchists, but also the individualists, many civil libertarians and a host of the greens.

The coalition between the Turtles and Teamsters, the greens and the unions is a fragile one, led mainly by their opposition to corporate power rather than in favour of this or that positive strategy. In this sense, the movement is deeply limited, and indeed it is unclear whether it should be called a ‘movement’ or simply a ‘mobilisation.’ The progressive pole in the US is certainly strengthened by the protests that have developed a veneer of the cool for youth: so that it is now socially important among progressive youth to protest rather than be cynical. However, the urge to protest is not the same as the urge to fashion another world.

Much the same sort of fraught dynamic troubled the last wave of major mobilisations in North America, during ‘1968.’ That year has now taken on an aura that haunts all political actions, since everything is measured against it, just as 1848 was the measure for Marx’ generation, for the vitality of the global movement for freedom.

As 1968 unfolded, one of its theorists, the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, championed the students as the proletariat of his times: the working class, he argued, is a ‘counter-revolutionary force’ and instead the students will create "red bases in the colleges" to lead us all into freedom. The role of the students was exaggerated by themselves, by intellectuals like Marcuse and by the media, who, in France for instance, ignored the crucial role of the communist trade unions at two Renault factories (Billancourt and Sandouville) as well as in the mass demonstrations across the country that culminated in a general strike on May 13, 1968. The next day the metal workers of Sud-Aviation (Loire), auto workers from several Renault plants and elsewhere occupied their factories in opposition to the Gaullist regime. An organised working class enabled and facilitated the student rebellions in France, just as the organised working class endows Seattle-Quebec with political muscle.

Without the militancy of organised labour, the threat to the capitalist elite would make little impact. The role of a mobilisation and demonstration is to make it far too costly, both economically and socially, for capitalist elite to maintain their hegemony. A protest here and there is effective, but not half as powerful as these same protests that come with the threat of some kind of labour boycott in the near future. The power of labour on the frontlines truly enhances the effectiveness of these demonstrations. And indeed the emergence of labour at these periodic events is a sign not only that business unionism is now over, but that the US labour movement, in particular, has ceased to see itself as the global labour aristocracy.

Many years ago Lenin wrote that strikes are a "school of war, a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital." In a sense, Seattle-Quebec is a "school of war" for a generation of activists.

One need not over-dramatise the importance of Seattle-Quebec for the current conjuncture, since capital seems quite confident despite the protests. However, the struggle is being prepared on a hemispheric level for another phase, whether the frontline will be the Quebec 2001 or Buenos Aires 2004 at the Summit of the Americas, or at the ‘Zapatour’ march of the Zapatistas across Mexico, or indeed in the intensified strike wave from Bolivia to Chile, right down the core of South America.

The current development is not identical to 1968, because many of the young activists do not evince the same kind of disregard for labour as was evident in the early 1970s. (Much of the disregard was fueled by the co-optation of the US labour movement, at any rate, into the dynamic of capitalist enterprises.) As the students continue their fight at Harvard University, for example, one gets a glimpse of the fruits of Seattle-Quebec.