jim writes:

"Beyond Miami: The Future of the ACG Movement"

Matt Gaines

There are several ways to look at what happened in Miami recently
during the anti-FTAA demonstrations that took place there from November
19th-21st, 2003. No matter how the event is interpreted, however, it must
first and foremost be remembered that the FTAA has not yet been stopped. It
still remains a looming possibility. Trade ministers, although they ended
the meetings earlier than originally scheduled, refused to call it quits
altogether, and unlike many predicated, what occurred in Miami was not
another Cancun. The real significance of Miami was, more than anything
else, how it revealed the true nature of this wider movement that is
dedicated to opposing all forms of corporate power and achieving global
social, economic, and environmental justice.To begin with, the physical number of protesters in Miami was
extremely low. For an event with such enormous potential, the turnout was
quite dismal. Months in advance, organizations within the movement were
claiming that over 100,000 people would show up to Miami. Inflating protest
numbers after an event is understandable, and sometimes strategic, but to do
so beforehand is just plain odd. Given that local police forces will always
prepare for several times the number of people they actually expect, the
movement's overenthusiastic emphasis on numbers before anything even
happened was disastrous. It basically ensured that there would be a
complete military force of riot cops waiting for us in Miami. Had the Miami
police known that only 15,000 (generous) or 20,000 (really generous) people
were going to be at the protests, nowhere near the amount of money,
resources, or manpower would have been expended. So the down-town area was
completely militarized -- overhead surveillance systems and all -- and the
police squads were fully equipped with every single top-of-the-line crowd
control weapon or agent available. This scenario basically ensured that any
kind of direct-action attempt to breach the perimeter fence and storm the
Intercontinental Hotel (where the meetings were being held) to disrupt the
meeting was entirely out of the question. There was to be no repeat of what
happened in Quebec City in April, 2001. The fence would hardly be touched,
let alone torn down. To paraphrase one Chinese philosopher, the Battle of
Miami was won by the corporate elite and the police long before it was even
fought.

So the movement now finds itself at an interesting crossroads, faced
with numerous questions that it must fundamentally address in order to
proceed in any coherent and organized fashion. What makes the
Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement unique and distinct from most other
social movements is its nonhierarchical, autonomous structure, wherein small
affinity groups function as isolated, mobile units of approximately four to
ten people with their own decision-making processes at large-scale political
mobilizations like the recent Miami protests. Any kind of overarching
leadership structure to control and direct the movements and actions of
demonstrators is entirely lacking, which, of course, has an entire spectrum
of related costs and benefits.

To be sure, there are large national and
international labor, environmental, human rights, and other organizations
which are recognized as providing the main impetus behind organizing these
events, and, in addition, prominent spokespersons are also associated with
the movement. But on the streets, though we like to chant slogans like "The
People/United/Will Never Be Defeated!", we are one large disorganized mass
of people. Up against a tremendously well-disciplined, authoritarian,
hierarchical military regiment of repressive state agents, who by their very
nature are armed with an array of both lethal and non-lethal weapons that
could easily overpower numerous small nations, we are doomed to failure.

Until this basic fact is acknowledged, the dynamics and outcomes of every
future battle will be dictated by the terms of the police, and we will
remained trapped in a state of paralysis and immobility. In part, the
ineptitude of the movement at this particular level of engaging in conflict
with the state stems from an adherence to liberalism, holding positivist
outlooks about the world, and maintaining a firm belief in the principles of
nonviolence and morality as bases for achieving social change. What these
perspectives fail to recognize is that an economic system organized around
private property and an ever-increasing profit imperative is fundamentally
nonresponsive to moral persuasion in any way, shape, or form. So the future
options available to the ACG Movement are in reality quite straightforward.
Either the movement adopts tactically innovative and creative forms of
protest that have some actual potential of disrupting the ability of trade
representatives to hold their nondemocratic meetings in secret, or we should
pursue a strategy that moves away from the summit/ministerial approach to
following the elite across the globe and trying to organize around their
schedules.

What this latter scenario would exactly look like is hard to say,
for although the global economy is largely run by nameless, faceless, and
placeless corporate executives, the financial institutions and trade
agreements that facilitate production expansion and capital accumulation
often have physical locations. For instance, the WTO is based in Geneva,
Switzerland; the IMF and World Bank are located in Washington, DC; if
successfully implemented, FTAA headquarters will most likely be placed in
Miami, Florida. Consequently, community organizing efforts on the part of
Steelworkers in Cleveland, Ohio or Longshoremen on the West Coast to oppose
the Miami FTAA ministerial will have a limited overall effect. Though not
to deny to the importance of local community organizing, the transnational
nature of the current capitalist system necessitates that mobilizations and
resistance against corporate domination likewise assume an international
character. For if capital is transnational, effective opposition must also
transcend national boundaries; additionally, because the interests behind
private capital are for the most part unified, seemingly distinct and
unrelated interest groups that are all affected by processes of
globalization and free trade must coalesce in a much stronger fashion than
has occurred during past events and demonstrations.

To return to an earlier point about the true nature of the ACG
Movement, which it should be remembered is still in its early stages of
development, the composition of the protesters in Miami on November 20th was
predominantly working class. Both organized labor, including a massive
AFL-CIO presence, as well as a strong turn-out from unions like the US
Steelworkers, the IBEW, UNITE, and SEIU, and unorganized labor, which
consisted primarily of immigrant workers and migrant farmworkers, were out
in full force on the streets of Miami. Though typically the American
working class is the most politically unaware and less class conscious than
any other working class population around the world, the analyses of workers
at the Miami demonstrations were better articulated and more complex than
within virtually any other segment of the movement, due to the direct impact
of free trade agreements on job security and the stability of the economy at
home. Therefore, while the transnational nature of this movement cannot and
should not be abandoned or forgotten, the analysis of the movement needs to
be applied much more directly to domestic issues than has traditionally been
the case. In this respect, this is not simply a movement against free trade
and the FTAA. It is a movement with much broader objectives of removing
Bush from office, given his utterly dismal approach to handling the US
economy and success in creating some of the highest levels of domestic
unemployment since the Great Depression, and ultimately addressing how
fundamentally detrimental capitalism is to the experiences and lives of
workers, their families, and their communities.

Without this larger
structural critique, the movement will encounter the same patterns of
paralysis in organizing large-scale political mobilizations, and will remain
without any sensible political strategy for removing the real corporate
evil-doers from their positions of power and privilege, and eventually being
capable of dismantling the inequitable economic system of capitalism that
benefits only a handful of elites at the expense of the rest of humanity.