Sabotabi's List: Movement

• Sixties-era radical Tom Hayden hailed Seattle as the harbinger of a new era of social justice activism while establishment mouthpiece Thomas Friedman derided “the Seattle circus” as “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates.” The U.K.-based Economist put a forlorn-looking Asian girl on its cover and announced that the real losers in Seattle were the world’s poor, which the WTO sought to assist.
• The U.S. public’s understanding of what had happened was heavily influenced by the repeated use of images of a small group of black-clad protesters operating on the periphery of the demonstration
• Inspired in part by Seattle, they formed direct action affinity groups, legal and medical first-aid collectives, Indymedia centers that offered anyone the chance to be a citizen journalist, newspapers like The Indypendent and much more
• It seemed we had the bastards on the run. But, much of these efforts were built on faulty assumptions
• Protesters confused a single tactic (“Shut it down!”) for a strategy and then allowed it to become an end in itself.
• Longer-range organizing rooted in speaking to people’s everyday concerns
• was rarely practiced in the U.S. wing of the global justice movement
• movement was middle class
• had minimal participation by people of color
• Chronic weaknesses of the postmodern left — an aversion to any form of power as inherently evil and a consequent lack of organization and resources
• over-reliance on consensus-based decision-making
• Through it all, the left has been mostly quiet while the protest void has been filled by fringe right-wing groups.
• Protesting cannot substitute for the hard work of organizing broad-based social movements.

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