Context, Creation, Community
By Stevphen Shukaitis
Published as “Contesto, creazione, comunita” in DeriveApprodi Volume 13 Number 3 (December 2003): 59-63.

The state of existing social movements in North America is, to risk a clichéd introduction preceding what I hope to be an earnest and insightful reflection in the potentialities of existing organizing, is at the paradoxical stage where it is both the best and worst of times. This is not meant as a trite phrase or way of couching existing difficulties and limitations of current organizing within a “rosy” framework, but comes from the realization that many of the most positive aspects found within organizing during the past few years contain key limitations, as well as that many of the so called weaknesses of such organizing also contain perhaps their greatest strengths. The purpose of this intervention, that stated, will be to consider the current organizing in the New York City and New Jersey area focusing on issues of locality, community, the building of networks and associations, and how such relates to the potentialities and limitations of organizing within these multiple and overlapping social worlds.

It is always difficult for social scientists, organizers, and activists to engage critically and constructively with an on going movement (or even current social phenomena) that they themselves are engaged in any active or substantive way. This Weberian dilemma of “value neutrality,” or what Burawoy describes as the “uncertainty principle”(2) (the closer one is to a social phenomena the harder it is to discuss or analyze with any sense of distance) constantly plagues such efforts. Nevertheless such becomes all the more important both to activists seeking to understand the strength and weaknesses of their organizing. As observed by Dixon and Bevington, cloistered ivory tower academics on the whole have not produced much in terms of “social movement theory”(3) that bears much relevance to these movements.(4) Despite the difficulties such may contain, the benefits provided by genuinely engaged social theory, social theory that appreciates and draws from the theorizing that occurs within our movements, far outweighs biases that are bound to occur.

One’s point of intervention, then, contains within it more than just the location from which the theoretical reflection “starts.” The point of departure also signals, even if only tacitly, some of the theoretical and personal biases of whoever is reflecting, which clearly has implications for one reads and perceives the analysis. For the purposes of this format I will describe the starting setting as coming from the perspective an early 20’s college educated suburban raised “white”(5) male (with a conflicting class background) who became involved in what is most commonly perceived as “activism” through various alienating experiences with social processes, institutions, and various aspects of the existing power structure(s). The discussion then will be framed by three main events: the WTO meeting and actions in Seattle in 1999, the September 11th “martyrdom operations” and resulting events, and the organizing represented by the events of February 15th, 2003.

From Seattle: Imagining the Radical Possibilities of Now
The events of N30 had multiple and disparate effects upon the various tendrils of organizing in the United States lumped together as part of “the movement.” Their overriding effect was creating a sense of radical utopian possibility; the sense that the organizing of direct actions and campaigns could have substantial effects both in terms of building awareness around institutions of neoliberal governance, but also in the disruption of their functioning. While the abstractness of concepts such as “globalization” or “neoliberalism” may seem to pose multiple difficulties for organizing around and against, the events of Seattle showed that such actions could function effectively on multiple levels.

But the point here would not be to engage in any sort of extended discussion or framing of the various social movements in terms of Seattle. There has been much writing analyzing discussing such (although academics have tended to not take all that seriously, at least not at first), but to discuss how the effects of such can be illustrative of general characteristics that seem to unite many disparate tendrils of political organizing within the US. The task would be to carry out the task that one might conclude the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective was hinting at when they wrote that “while the movement has affected some practical and consciousness building victories, it is still too malleable and indecisive to put an uncritical trust behind its visual organization.”(6) The events of Seattle reflected the coalescence of a largely imaginary community that could converge as necessary to contest the working of equally geographically un-rooted neoliberal financial institutions and workings of corporate power.

For instance, one of the prime themes of critical emerging in discussing the events of N30 (or almost any major day of mobilization during the last few years) has been around the overwhelmingly white character of the mobilizations.(7) A closely related issue has been how little such mobilizations and organizing around them have been connected to or involving the local geographic community, especially given the lower involvement of people from communities that are often the most affected by the institutions of neoliberal governance that are being organized against.(8)

One of the most interesting and unresolved issues in organizing in the United States centers on the question of community.(9) Namely, just what does community mean? Part of the on-going discussion about the effectiveness of organizing has centered on the issue of stressing organizing in one’s community. However, this has to a large degree left out questions of just what is meant by community. This to a large degree can be explained by the multiple definitions of community. For instance, community can be used to refer to an area or neighborhood that is bounded by a specific geographic community or locality, or it can be used to refer to a community of interest or of identity, which does not have to be bounded by locality. In this tension one can se both how the “anti-globalization”(10) movement has succeeded (by being mobile enough to contest ephemeral fiscal domination) and limited (by the difficulties posed by not being rooted in geographic communities and localities).

What this gets to is the very transitory and geographically un-rooted nature of many of those active within the newly emerging manifestations of the globalization movement. To make a broad generalization, many are relatively young college students and others who are not strongly rooted in their local communities. One could argue that their transitory position itself correlates to working in such ways (i.e. organizing around issues and concerns not based off their geographic locality and community) because their position is in itself transitory. This would contrast to the organizing efforts of those who are the whole are older and more rooted in their geographic community.

This could be useful understanding the differences in between activists and organizers within the globalization movement and student organizing and those involved in more community based organizing in relation to how people come to engage in such activities in the first place. To paint a broad (and perhaps unfair generalization) while those involved in the globalization movement have come to politics or organizing through a sense of alienation from the dominant power structure and try to create a sense of community and belonging through one’s organizing activity, more traditional community organizing has been based on an existing sense of place and identity.(11)

I would argue, although there is not enough space to explore this adequately in this space, that the lack of historical understanding of the origin of whiteness or of the processes of racialization in large part a detriment to white activists and organizers honestly confronting and working to dismantle white privilege. If whiteness is something that is viewed an omnipresent, as a process working through all the power dynamics and existing social institutions, as a phenomena that has no historical origin, it becomes very difficult to work against. Without an understanding of the specific historical circumstances and reasons for why such would arise in social processes and maintain itself, to become tightly integrated into widely held conceptions of identity closely linked with the oppression of others, it becomes difficult to reject. If one attempts to deconstruct white identity and privilege without any conception of its origins or alternative conceptions of identity and social process, what is one left with?

It would seem that confronting white privilege and racism itself would entail both understanding the historical, social, and economic events that led to creation of the various existing power structures and their reliance upon racism and the creation of alternative conceptions of identity not rooted in essentialist notions of race. As argued by Black Panther Chairman Huey P. Newton, “in order for man to survive there has to be some universal identity that extends beyond family, tribe, or nation – an identity that is essentially human and does not depend upon people thinking that others are something less than they are.”(12) This could perhaps be part conceiving of global citizenship, of thinking what it would mean to be part of a community with rights, obligations, and responsibilities not mediated by the boundaries of a nation state but of a common sense of humanity. It is this sense of community and identity that would unite the varying definitions of community as framed by geographic and interest or identity.

Fear, Loathing, and Self-Marginalizing on the Scene Politics Trail
P.B. Floyd has commented that the ability of radical politics to expand beyond the “activist ghetto” or to diversify itself has been at least in part due to its close ties to counter-cultural tendencies and the seeming preference (when looked at in terms of hours spent on) for having puppets in the movement rather than people. He suggests that there needs to be more creative thought put into strategies for outreach that are not evangelical or alienating.(13) The Red & Anarchist Network has also described such a problem, which they describe as “anarcho-sceneism.”(14) Clearly there are many reasons for this kind of political self-marginalizing and the creation of “scene” politics. Some of these are found within our more egregious behaviors (puritanism, cliquishness, having meetings at inaccessible times or locations, etc) as well as external factors and conditions that lead to self-marginalization.

Such could potentially explain at least partially the reason why student and globalization activists perpetuate patterns that maintain their own isolation. Jacques Godbout and Alain Caille in their work on the logic of the gift (in the sense of the term as used by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss) to understand avant-garde artists state “the temptation is always great among modern artists who want to reconstitute a lost community to cut the producer off from the user and to fall back on a community only of producers.”(15) Drawing a parallel to such student and activist groups, one could argue that they are in ways a form of the avant-garde in the political sense, as thus act in a way that their attempts to create forms of community that individuals within them have lost or never experience thus act in ways that are self-marginalizing in effect, even if not in intent.

Perhaps one of the best examples of such is in the arguments put forth by the Curious George Brigade, who argue that fantasies of mass organizing lead organizers to create overly large, bureaucratic, and ultimately alienated forms of political organization that end up creating more work to sustain their existence than necessitated by their effectiveness.(16) Conversely, they argue for the rejection of super structures and mass organizing instead opting for tight knit communities and affinity groups that enable further decentralization, reduction of hierarchy, and facilitate political projects being chosen on the needs of those directly involved in the affinity, rather than mediated through desires and ends that can be produced by the larger organization. Although their comments and criticism of bureaucratic mass organizing are very insightful, the question still remains how tight knit webs of affinities and collectives manage to avoid becoming overly cliquey and closed to new involvement or how such can handle tasks large than those handled by an affinity. Clearly there needs to be some form of networking model worked out that enables collectives, affinities, and clusters to coordinate joint actions and projects as necessary without becoming overly burdensome are an end in itself, as the Curious George Brigade shows to be detrimental and ineffective.

The dynamic of existing organizing trying to root itself in a sense of community and place works itself out in many ways including temporally. For instance, when trying to ferret out changes and patterns in anti-war organizing, a large section of those current efforts to organize against the occupation of Iraq may have little to no memory of their even being an anti-war movement during the 1991 Gulf War. The author of this article, for instance, clearly remembers sitting at the kitchen table working on his Boy Scout pinewood derby car when the first images came on the television announcing the beginning of the war. Needless to say, given the age that would place one at, it’s not entirely surprising that even many of those who are engaged in current organizing could easily have little to no recollection of previous anti-war efforts.

Although it may be said in total honesty that post September 11th, 2001 there was not much of a question of whether could be marginalized by rather how much. As many of the larger NGOs, unions, and sections of “civil society” withdrew their support for the actions against the World Economic Forum in particular and almost anti-war organizing, it seemed that even the most earnest efforts to build associations and outreach seemed somewhat futile. Quite bluntly it did not seem as if the “hide beneath the flag and pee our pants”(17) united liberal front wanted anything to do with what was going on. During this period such constraints posed great difficulties for anti-authoritarian organizers and activists who ended up with new and unfamiliar tasks such as securing permits for the mass legal events and debating the finer points of green zones. Although the result was mostly under whelming (and understandably so), it was to a large degree outside of the ability of those involved to any great degree.

Historicizing the Resistance, Building New Communities
During recent months there has been a dramatic increase of discussions and joint strategizing between those who are currently organizing and figures from previous radical organizations and movements. This has primarily taken the form of panel discussion and video showings, usually based around the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and other such groups. So while many currently active may have little recollection or connection to these previous forms of organizing, these discussion and connections have served to communicate their experiences, and perhaps to communicate information that one could argue is grounding individuals within a traditional of radical activism. One of the features that has been noted about recent anti-war organizing is that although such is still composed largely of college aged people, there is a much greater diversity reflected in the age and background of those involved as compared to previous anti-war organizing.

Thus a good deal of the process and practice of organizing within the newly emerging currents of the global justice movement in the North American context can be understood as a means of trying to create a community through shared action, and to situate that community in an on-going historically rooted political tradition. This would constitute a dispersed community, based more on informal networks and gatherings than on pro-longed contact and interaction. This is perhaps not many mean when they use the term “community,” thinking more in terms of a geographic or spatial locality.

Michael Hardt, for insistence, argues that one of the greatest strengths of the globalization protest movement(s) was to reinvent internationalism, to conceive of politics and actions in terms of global networks not delineated by nations. Conversely, the wave of protest largely directed against the war and the US in particular, although logical in that the US government was by far the driving force behind the current Iraq war, “tends to reinforce the notion that our political alternatives rest on the major nations and power blocs.”(18) This is key point to remember for all social movements in the US as the 2004 election cycle nears, with the inevitable efforts at co-optation coming from the Democrats, Greens, etc who will try to argue that the only method to gain “pragmatic” political achievements in through the electoral process. Such could easily lead to a politically bi-polar or purely oppositional political mind frame, forgetting the importance of building alternatives outside of the narrow political logic of state politics.

In a similar manner, describing the issues for mobilization if the context and community in which I operate is also difficulty. Before describing such one would have to clarify what the particular context that is one is describing as delineated by the multiple overlapping boundaries of geographic locality and social contexts based upon race, class, occupation, political affiliation, and so forth. Also, in the contexts bounded by the area of New York City and New Jersey where I live, there is such a population density and level of organizing that one could most likely argue that any issue would be a primary issue in at least one configuration of social and geographical conditions.

Nevertheless, I will broadly try to draw out some of the general characteristics that connect the various organizing efforts in the varying contexts and communities where I operate. By far the most visible forms of organizing have been the various anti-war efforts. In the New York City and New Jersey area this would encompass both major coalitions and organizations like United for Peace and Justice, the Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War, hundreds and possibly thousands smaller groups and affinities, and that amorphous form of organizing that seems to divide and re-congeal under various forms including Another World is Possible, the Direct Action Network, No Blood for Oil, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, and at one point at Ad-Hoc New York Coalition in Support of the People’s Strike. Very closely connected would be the loose grouping of solidarity organizations, such as those who are working to advocate the concerns or case of places like Colombia, Palestine, East Timor, Burma, and so forth. In New Jersey and New York there has been particular emphasis on solidarity work with Palestine, including New Jersey Solidarity, the New York branch of the International Solidarity Movement, and New Jersey Jews Against the Occupation.(19) Clearly there is often a great deal of overlap between anti-war organizing and the globalization movement, although with notable differences.

There has been an increasing amount of connections made between anti-war organizing and both local forms of organizing through efforts such as the Student Liberation Action Movement, who have linked their opposition to the war to how such militarism negatively affects funding for schools, healthcare, and local needs.(20) United for Peace and Justice has also linked actions and demonstrations against the WTO to opposition to war,(21) and have drawn connections to how war and militarism are tied intimately with the economic oppression of local New York City communities. Organizing against the Free Trade of the America Agreement and the Central America Free Trade Agreement have also been linked to how such is tied to military conquest and disciplining of central America and corresponding affect to the New York area.xxii

Local alternative media institutions that I have worked with such as Rise Up Radio (on WBAI 99.5 FM, a community sponsored station) and the New York City and New Jersey Independent Media Center have also stressed the connection between anti-war and economic issues, between global issues and local conditions. In New Brunswick, for instance, much of the organizing against the New Brunswick Development Corporation, who has been integral in the gentrifying of the area, has made ties between multiple issues and concerns. Such tied and connections have also been made a central part of the organizing coordinated and developing through the New York Social Forum, which has connected anti-authoritarians and radicals with the more progressive of social service organizations.

But What Are You For?
In certain ways I am loath to level an assessment of “what I think the movement should do.” It seems rather arrogant and pointless to start drafting agendas, plans, or schemes for forms of organizing whose success thus far has largely been due to its de-centered and (mostly) chaotically complementary character. Despite having said that I will proceed to come up with some suggestions that I think could be useful in building up the strengths of existing organizing and rooting the inspiring radical creativity and energy displayed into more sustainable forms.

At this point current organizing seems to hit a wall with that perennial question/objection, “so I understand what you’re against, but what are you for?” The many disparate tendrils of current organizing have displayed remarkable ingenuity in forging alliances of opposition – but coming up with alternatives more definite than just saying “another world is possible” has been more difficult. There are, of course, exceptions to this observation, such as participatory economics and ideas coming from libertarian municipalism.(23) David Graeber has suggested that the new democratic forms and processes being developed by the movement are its central ideology and define an alternative neoliberal globalization and the state, or at least a basis for an alternative.(24) But overall such ideas and sketches have not coalesced and gained enough support to convince the corpses in the suits that the “end of history” is really over.

At this point I see the greatest strength of the existing movements and its greatest weakness as being closely related, if not the same thing. The most inspiring developments that I have seen in recent months would be the growth of efforts and emphasis on building sustainable cultures of resistance, of building alternatives to capitalism and the state, of building community infrastructure. This very well is probably in reaction to growing frustration with continued cycles of meeting-action-jail solidarity leading to no apparent effect and the realization that even when millions turn out in the streets to oppose a war, that does not necessarily mean that it will effect any noticeable change. I think this general movement within the movements, so to speak, has also been reflected in a growing amount of connection between different forms of radical arts, poetry, music, and forms of creative expression – based more upon politics and the idea of sustaining and building a long term resistance movement than just of opposing a particular war or series of state or corporate actions.

This is most likely in part due to my involvement in the Ever Reviled Records(25) Worker Collective, a democratically owned and run anarchist record label releasing radical and progressive music. This tends to bias my perspective. But there has also been a number of other developments that could lead one to conclude that there are is some serious effort being put into the building of long lasting community based infrastructure through projects like the hundreds of community gardens in NYC, the opening and renewal of bookstores and cooperatives (Bluestockings, Mawonaj Cafe, Jane Doe, etc) and the renewal and growth of organizations that focus on such (the IWW in New Jersey, the various Social Forums, and so forth) and a renewed interest in community assemblies and neighborhood associations (many inspired by the Argentinean experience and necessity).(26) It is odd in some ways though that it often seems that there are large sections of progressive movements that have not shown support for these alternative institutions even as they are engaged in on-going critiques that they provide alternatives to. It seems that part of what is happening is in some ways not only a new interest in creating alternatives, but a new appreciation of some of these existing alternatives from people whose frustration with the sometimes futile nature of various forms of organizing leads them to the realization of the importance of supporting these alternative infrastructures. In the long run this kind of alternative and community structure building is absolutely essential to the continued success of organizing and ultimately necessary if one seriously wants to dismantle capitalism and the state.

Can the Mime Get Out of the Box?
The left in North America, to a large degree energized by the new perspectives, tactics, ideas, and experiences of the globalization movements has managed to greatly expand its ability to confront and contest many aspects of the state, capitalism, ecological devastation, racism, and other forms oppression. This has happened successfully for a number of reasons (and has been constrained from further success by another host of factors) precisely because of how recent forms of organizing have managed to surpass many of the seeming limitations of traditional stodgy left wing political activism. Existing movements have managed to vastly reframe many issues surrounding capitalism and economic and state power within bounds where such have become issues of contestation. Such organizing has managed to remain physically and ideologically mobile, to be able to adapt itself to the political circumstances of the day (even if with some slight delays).

However, these methods also contain within them unique limitations and constraints. As the communities of contestation that such organizing has brought together have remained able to adapt and to keep from being tied to any specific area that also limits them. While these movements have operated by creating a multiplicity of flexible and largely imagined communities and associations, such in many ways see to have prevented the rooting of such in the sustained and geographic communities that often are the ultimate victim of the economic and state oppression that are being contested. It is like the mime that’s caught within the confines of the imaginary box she has created for herself. It is past the times to imagine new communities and localities, to hope that our schemes and utopias might be possible, it is now the time to stop making wishes to start to build and support those projects in the here and now.