Anonymous Comrade writes:

"A Tale of Two RNC Protests"

Jim Straub, Left Turn

The big story in New York was the numbers. On Sunday August 29th, we emerged as a movement with the support and anger of literally more than half a million people in one city; that's double the number the march organizers had anticipated, and as big a demonstration as New York City has seen in decades. There were also numerous other large rallies, including tens of thousands marching for women's lives, poor peoples' issues and workers' rights. All of these actions, plus literally hundreds of conferences, concerts and cultural events, add up to one of the biggest showings for the US left in recent history.But not everything in New York lived up to expectations. What didn't go well? The same thing that has been repeatedly failing at most mass protests for a couple years now: direct action. That is, the highly-specialized, high-risk civil disobedience that attempts to disrupt a city or event with the coordinated direct action of affinity groups, spokescouncils, blocs and clusters.

The planning for a direct action shutdown in New York never really got off the ground. Max Uhlenbeck, of the Life After Capitalism conference, wrote "serious discussion around a direct action scenario did not get underway until April, less then five months before the convention. …With a short timeline, little infrastructure and growing restlessness about the lack of a direct action framework by out-of-town activists who were planning on coming down, the process for decision making was less then perfect. Although the group did initially try to reach out to key sectors of the direct action community — specifically to people of color-led organizations — the end result was that it remained a fairly small group of personal friends through what would be its important formative stages."

In the end, various direct action tactics were tried, ranging from harassing delegates when they went to see Broadway plays, to civil disobedience on August 31st, and some portrayed this lack coordination as a positive feature of decentralization. But despite many arrests, these actions did not disrupt anything (with the exception of actions done by AIDS groups, whose use of disruptive civil disobedience pre-dates the global justice movement). Decentralized 'mouse blocs' and street parties were arrested simply and swiftly en masse by police.

This failure of mass direct action to successfully disrupt anything but the participants' criminal records is partly a result of militarized police response tactics. Activists are confronting the fact that the power structure is willing to pony up limitless amounts of money to fund a repressive apparatus that can spy on, infiltrate, suppress, jail and squash protests bent on disruption. With each successive abbreviated protest date (A16, A1, S29, etc), all the puppets and pvc pipes in the world seem to be less and less able to effect their targets. At convergence spaces and conferences we have said to one another that our vision is too powerful to be fenced in by walls and auxiliary police; this may be, but we have to face the possibility that, at our present size, our physical bodies sure can be.

At our present size — that is, not big and getting smaller. It doesn't seem that direct action protest has gained much support from ordinary working people, and every shutdown plan seems to attract fewer and smaller affinity groups. As Uhlenbeck continued, "With a few important exceptions, most notably the actions that shut down San Francisco right after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the direct action movement in the United States has taken a series of hits." One thing that obviously made the San Francisco anti-war shutdown exceptional was the level of support it received from people all across that city — with a quarter of the city participating in direct action and protest, a militarized police response was unable to clear the streets. "We've lost control for the time being. There are just too many of them," officers said to the press as local elites screamed bloody murder over losing tens of millions in business.

It was this kind of mass support that also characterized the recent New York protests (although more with legal marches and public sentiment, than direct action) — polls said that more than 10 percent of New Yorkers planned to participate in the protests. This support comes in part from San Francisco and New York's modern history as progressive, left-leaning cities; and also from the massive social movements that exist there. These groups range from anti-racist organizations of highschool and college students, an improving labor movement, a revitalized grassroots pro-choice movement, and community-based organizations on issues of neighborhoods, prisons, AIDS, homelessness and poverty — in addition to overwhelming pro-LGBT rights and anti-war sentiment. The growth of these groups, and the tireless efforts of countless organizers to build them and the left in general, is what made possible protest turnouts of hundreds of thousands of people at unifying moments of opposition to empire.

All these organizations seem to have reached a critical mass together in New York and San Francisco, managing to attract an enormous and diverse array of different kinds of local residents to these protests. Judging from the crowds in New York, it seemed to me like these mainstream peoples' organizations, fighting (and some sometimes winning) on the basis of ordinary folks' civil and reproductive rights, job conditions and wages, their material economic conditions and the human dignity they expect — brought out New Yorkers in a way that no amount of stencils, puppets, or wheatpasted fliers ever could. As a result, we had a huge victory. We didn't stop the convention from happening. But we manifested a show of force that viscerally frightened delegates and politicians, stole the spotlight and story, and threatened them with the prospect of someday shutting down their conventions and their system too.

The outpouring of local support in New York City for the protests seemed especially notable to me, contrasting the way it did with my experience organizing against the last Republican National Convention, four years ago in Philadelphia. That was just six months after the Battle of Seattle, and local radical activists were energized by the momentum and wanted to shut down the Republicans. As a result, the great majority of radical organizing against the RNC went into planning unpermitted actions, civil disobedience and direct action. In fact, the two big permitted protests planned (put on by a local anti-death penalty group and a coalition called Unity 2000) both drew fewer participants than expected and received little attention, as the city prepared for a greatly hyped throwdown in the streets between the new 'anti-globalization' movement and Philadelphia's notoriously brutal police (a mob of who had severely beaten an unarmed African-American man on television a month earlier, and boasted the attack was an example of the 'RNC Welcoming Committee' the force was preparing for the protestors).

While the local poor peoples' organization the Kensington Welfare Rights Union planned an un-permitted but massive march down Broad Street with their nationwide network of allies and supporters, direct action activists spent months preparing an attempted shutdown of Philadelphia' Center City as a way to disrupt the third day of the Republican's Convention. The shutdown was planned for August 1st and billed as a day of opposition to the Criminal Injustice system, and the recent success in Seattle gave us a triumphant feeling that we were (finally) part of an already-grown mass movement that could mobilize large numbers for direct action. So the group spent, in retrospect, much less time on local outreach or community organizing than it did on crafting a tactical plan to snarl downtown traffic with an expected 10,000 risk-taking protestors.

At 3:30 on August 1st, the moment our protests were planned to deploy, we realized we had walked into a disaster. The police had infiltrated our planning group, done mass preventative arrests at the convergence art space, and reacted with swift unconstitutional brutality to our actions in the streets (and later, in the jails). But beyond the (expected) police crackdown, we confronted the reality that our numbers were much smaller than expected — we wound up having only 1 or 2 thousand, rather than the 10,000 people the tactical plan was crafted for. And with our lack of broad and deep connections to ordinary homegrown Philadelphian disdain for the Republican party, we saw local opinion turn against us in a sudden and terrifying manner (at the very moment that 500 of our comrades were in jail, some with million-dollar bails, many on hunger strike).

It should take nothing away from the very hard work done by hundreds and the courageous risks undertaken by thousands on that action to recognize that, on balance, the shutdown was a fiasco. Of course, police brutality and mass media distortions make a confrontation like that one such an uneven contest that it is hardly meaningful to say that our side 'lost' or failed. But on reflection, many of the activists who organized the direct action at the 2000 Philadelphia RNC drew several critical conclusions — one unavoidable one being that we had lacked the numbers and support to make our direct action plans succeed.

With this experience to look back on, for me personally the New York anti-RNC protests seemed like a triumphant, 180-degree change for the movement. As a movement, we had gone from an fetishization of militant direct action (with little mass support) in Philadelphia in 2000, to an emphasis on accessible, permitted march organizing that brought out more than half a million people in New York in 2004. Part of this comes from the political polarization resulting from Bush's imperial presidency — but at least to some degree our movement must have made progress in the past four years in order to mobilize that anger in the streets. I think that as a movement we genuinely absorbed some hard lessons.

This shift from an exclusive focus on the tactics of direct action to a strategy of mass organizing is a product of the hard work of hundreds, even thousands of activists. Thinking about this contrast between the two RNCs, I thought about the people I worked with in Philadelphia four years ago and realized how many of them now work as organizers. Off the top of my head, I can think of more than a dozen friends who have gone from affinity groups and black blocs, to unions and community groups. People with 'action names' like Uncle Mike, Spam and Spider who are now SEIU organizers, others who are active rank and file members of UE and CWA, others who work for community organizing groups like ACORN or DARE. Some are high-school teachers or work in adult or alternative education, and others continue the organizing among students of color or HIV+ communities they were already beginning back then.

Two groups that show this transition in strategy between the two RNC protests are SLAM and NEFAC. SLAM (Student Liberation Action Movement) is a women of color-led radical student organization based in New York City. They had already built an incredible group by the time of the 2000 Philadelphia RNC, and unlike many of the anarchist activists in Philadelphia that took the lead in organizing direct action then, they were a group mostly composed of young people of color with explicit anti-racist politics. So, they took an early lead in working to bring voices and issues of people of color to the fore in the Philadelphia RNC and did incredible work on every aspect of the planning, from tactical scouting to community outreach.

Kazembe Balagoon, a founding member of the group, said of the attempted shutdown and subsequent repression that "The weakness of the counter-convention in Philadelphia laid in the lack of understanding around the power of state repression. The Philadelphia police gained a great learning curve from the experience of the WTO protests in Seattle. As such, they were able to gather the necessary forces to shut down our response." Four years later in New York City, the group did not go through the same motions. Despite being on their home turf, SLAM pointedly stayed away from the direct action (such as it was), instead mobilizing large contingents of hundreds of New York students, primarily young people of color, for the mass marches. The group has hardly stopped using militant tactics, however; but when 18 members of SLAM occupied the office of Hunter College President Jenifer Raab, it was protesting cutbacks in education that would affect its base of college students in New York's CUNY system.

Another shift in emphasis, from direct action confrontation at convergences to mass organizing around bread and butter issues, can be seen in the trajectory of the North-East Federation of Anarco-Communists, or NEFAC. Four years ago, NEFAC was seen by many anarchists as basically a federation of the Black Bloc. Their magazine Barricada was often filled with nothing but page after page of what cynical activists call 'riot porn'; graphic images of masked crowds doing property destruction and fighting cops. However, come 2004 NEFAC's dozens of affiliated collectives eschewed direct action and black bloc streetfighting altogether, marching instead as a contingent in the labor and women's marches — reflecting the federation's shift to mass organizing around workplace, poverty and housing issues.

NEFAC member Duke, an organizer with a hospital and healthcare workers' union in Connecticut, said of the federation's evolution: "We began as an organization coordinating around Seattle and were heavily involved in black block actions for the next few years. I think we've moved away from that for a number of reasons. Over time our analysis has grown much sharper. We've delved deeper into issues and as we've identified areas of struggle we want to focus on (workplace struggles for example), we've been able to put our analysis into practice in real ways." Dozens of young anarchists have decided, as a strategic move for an entire federation, to hang up the balaclava (for the time being) to work as members and organizers in unions like SEIU, IATSE, and UE, with poverty groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, founding the Boston Angry Tenants Union, and participating in the Boston Jericho Movement. NEFAC has not renounced its militancy, but merely made the strategic decision as a federation that without massive and militant movements of working people, overthrowing capitalism and the state is impossible. As Duke puts it, "We've matured in a lot of ways, but don't get the idea we aren't still in the streets".

Indeed, among friends and contacts who've gone on to mass organizing after negative (or positive) experiences with direct action a few years ago, it's notable that almost all have retained their militancy and commitment to revolutionary social change. People who used to be crust-punk anarchists are now button-down union organizers working to get the vote out in swing states for John Kerry — but still identify as strongly as ever with their anarchism! Kids who cut their teeth on revolution in the black bloc are now rank and file union members, teachers, community educators or organizers — but have gained little or no respect for corporate property or law and order.

If anything, I think, this shift to mass organizing is not a rejection of direct action — but rather an organic response to the realization that only with massive participation can direct action really shut down the bad guys. San Francisco has already seen perhaps a quarter of it's population participate in direct action, and shut down it's city at the start of a war. New York City just saw perhaps ten percent of it's residents protest. Who's to say that that ten percent won't take a step further when the US empire tries to invade another country?

New York showed us what the numbers we need look like, in the streets. We need to keep it up, and take if further. I think the era of direct action confrontation is over, for a while. Now's the time for mass grassroots organizing. The direct action tools will still be there, in the toolbox, when we come back for them — to put them in half a million hands. Now that'll be a shutdown worthy of the name.