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The Global Activist's Manual
Local Ways to Change the World
Edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond, United for a Fair Economy
320 pp.
Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books: 2002
$15.95
ISBN 1-56025-401-7
Article: a Network Model for Local Organizing
"Got the globalization blues? Read this savvy guide to global activism and read it today. It could change your life and, believe it not, help you make history."
— Charles Derber, Author, Corporation Nation
This book is for any one who’s interested in the post-Seattle global justice movement. Two dozen case studies from across the country describe the different ways that volunteer activists are building up strong, successful projects and networks. There’s a lot to learn from these examples if you are building the global movement in your union, community, congregation, or campus.
Sections of the book focus on direct action, building coalitions, taking on corporations, changing the rules of the global economy, crossing borders, challenging white supremacy, stopping sweatshops, developing leaders, and challenges for the movement. The book ends with practical tips on media, research, fundraising, security, etc. plus an extensive resource list.
Inspiring, incisive writing by over 30 authors, including:
Martin Stephan, Idaho environmentalist: “All the world’s forests and people are interconnected and that’s how we have to organize.”
Chris Crass, Challenging White Supremacy: “What we are envisioning is a consciously anti-racist and multiracial movement against global capitalism.”
Naomi Klein: “This is a movement that has declared it has ‘no followers, only leaders.’ We have seen what thousands of leaders can achieve on the streets, from Seattle to Prague.”
David Solnit, Freedom Rising: “Our global resistance is like an ecosystem — an ornate, shifting web of relationships, ideas, events and local struggles.”
“Many people these days complain about the global economy but this book tells you what you can do to change it. Dozens of case studies written by farmers, students, workers, environmentalists, and human rights crusaders will inspire you with ideas and passion for how we can take back the planet from the greedy grasp of global corporations.”
— Kevin Danaher, Global Exchange
Table of Contents
Introduction - Naomi Klein
Foreword
Direct Action
Harnessing direct action for community organizing - Cameron Levin
Direct action’s revolutionary potential - David Solnit
Using direct action effectively - Denis Moynihan
Building Coalitions
Globalizing SOA Watch - Bruce Triggs
Crossing borders with labor - CBLOC
How immigrants and global justice activists can work together - Angela Sanbrano
Prison activists and the global justice movement - Laura Raymond
The Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition - Larry Weiss
Coalition-building: Lessons from the Jobs with Justice model - Mary Beth Maxwell
Tips on coalition-building - Cherie R. Brown
A code of behavior for coalitions and networks - S.M. Miller
A network model for local organizing - Mike Prokosch
Taking on Corporations
Beyond the bottom line: A campaign for a sane economy - RAN
Paradigm shift: challenging corporate authority - Paul Cienfuegos
Changing the Rules of the Global Economy
Fast Track is in the House - Mike Dolan
The Citizens Trade Campaign - Mike Dolan
Stopping the Free Trade Area of the Americas - Mike Prokosch
The World Bank Bonds Boycott
Lessons from the anti-apartheid movement - Zahara Heckscher
State of Maine anti-sweatshop commission - Bjorn Claeson
Stop Wasting America’s Money on Privatization - AFSCME (box)
Follow the (corporate) money… and shut it down! - Randy Kehler
Crossing Borders
Building a Movement on Both Sides of the Border - Kristi Disney
Farmers cross borders, cut through government fog - Denise O’Brian
Projects of the Heart - Tony Vento
The fight against Boise Cascade - Martin Stephan
Bringing together the environmental justice and globalization movements - Heeten Kalan and Ravi Dixit, SAEPEJ
The Bucket Brigade in South Africa - Heeten Kalan
Teenagers - Gail Phares
Challenging White Supremacy
Race in the Anti-Globalization Movement - Colin Rajah
Beyond the whiteness -- global capitalism and white supremacy - Chris Crass
Anti-oppression principles
Anti-oppression workshop
Stopping Sweatshops
Sustaining the student anti-sweatshop movement - Marian Traub-Werner
Central America Labor Solidarity: Lessons for Activists? - Stephen Coats
The Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign/Dennis Chinoy and Bjorn Claeson
Developing Leaders
Organizing farm-workers through popular education - CATA
Organizing a new movement - Andrea Fabry, Ching-ling Wo and Hoon Kim
Challenges
Epilogue - Mike Prokosch
Practical Tips
Internet communication
Internal, old-fashioned communication
Getting your message into the media
Press release
Popular education
Research
Organizing guides
Long-term planning
Starting a new group
Fundraising
Security
A Network Model for Local Organizing
Mike Prokosch, 10/29/00
Since the spectacular 'shutdown in Seattle' a year ago, the US movement against corporate globalization has racked up an impressive series of accomplishments. It staged three national mobilizations against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both parties' national conventions. It maintained its momentum after Seattle, attracting and training thousands of youth. It started linking to domestic organizations and taking up issues like prisons and police brutality.
Meanwhile, the movement's counterparts in the global South organized over 50 major protests against the Bank and IMF, including general strikes in Argentina and Paraguay and the brief overthrow of Ecuador's government. In Prague, the European movement shut down the annual IMF-World Bank meeting one day early. The WTO has been unable to launch an urgently desired new negotiating round, and its director looks increasingly like a lame duck.
The global financial institutions are in trouble. Their reinvention as poverty-fighting and anti-AIDS institutions has failed to restore their legitimacy. More gravely, they have lost their ideological monopoly. Governments and economists no longer invoke the free market without admitting that is has so far failed to solve the problems of poverty and development (though they continue to promise that it will, someday).
Not shabby for a year's work. Yet in several ways, the US movement is not yet living up to the ideal coalition that briefly appeared on Seattle's streets last year. Since then, Teamsters and turtles have rarely come together, and without them the national movement is coming to resemble the 'headless youth swarm' that the media depict.
Labor's absence is not yet a cause for alarm. Campaigning for Gore crowded out labor's global trade agenda this year, especially since that agenda conflicted with Gore's free trade stance. However, labor's national focus on the election did not prevent local union members from protesting alongside global activists, and their national unions can join in now that the elections are over.
The near-disappearance of environmental issues is more serious because it reflects an organizational vacuum. Many of the national environmental organizations support transnational corporations on issues like NAFTA. Few are risking their Beltway influence by siding with the rabble in the streets. There are exceptions, but among them Friends of the Earth's membership is not mobilized, and the Sierra Club's half million members pay more attention to US conservation than to planetary salvation.
The global movement's dirty secret is that its active environmental wing consists of small feisty groups like Rainforest Action Network and a menagerie of anti-GMO crusaders, family farmers, and global warming activists scattered across the country. It is their worldview more than their actions that is moving many youth toward broad action against the system. The resonance and urgency of the ecologist critique gives it tremendous potential, but without more organization, it's mostly potential.
Thus it's up to the youth wing of the movement to keep up the post-Seattle momentum. This it has certainly done. Yet in the protest trajectory that took the movement from the WTO to the Democratic Convention, critics find more energy than strategy, more noise than message. True, the movement does not have a single goal. But expecting one is unrealistic. This movement is inherently diverse. Corporate globalization is mobilizing people in an extraordinary array of ways -- defending workers' rights, saving the earth, reclaiming democracy, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Their solutions will be diverse, even if they unite behind the question of democracy and decision-making power. This will always be a plural movement, which is not a bad model for global cooperation.
If we want to bring more coherence to the movement, perhaps we should start with its organizing strategies. The US movement is using three competing organizing models, all of them incomplete and inadequate for actually changing the rules of the global economy.
The first model is direct action. It's a revolutionary strategy for stopping business as usual and opening up the space for direct democracy. It is utopian and punk: it's acting to bring the future into being -- now. Even if that future only survives for a few hours, as on the streets of Seattle early one November 30, the collective experience is powerful enough to fuel those there and attract thousands more. The 'youth swarm' that shut down the WTO swelled as it moved on to Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, putting globalization on the media's agenda. But without a well-developed movement backing them up, direct action organizers ran out of strategy. What would they do next -- go shut down somewhere else?
If this direct action movement is young, the campaign model looks older. It's been knocked around and become worldly wise. Its goals can be revolutionary, but its strategy is one of institutional reform. Instead of taking on the whole system, national and global campaigns try to change the policies of one corporation or governmental body. For example, Rainforest Action Network has started targeting Citigroup. The campaign goes beyond a 'trade' analysis, exposing the crucial role of global finance and linking Citigroup to predatory lending in US minority communities. RAN is trying to mobilize broad environmental consciousness in this focused campaign. Meanwhile, the Citizens Trade Campaign is fighting corporate trade legislation and helping kick off a multi-year drive to stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the planned expansion of NAFTA to the entire hemisphere. Other examples include the World Bank Bond Boycott, which is modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaigns of the 1970s and 80s.
Campaigns like these can awaken new activists and train them as organizers. In the absence of a populist movement, campaigns keep pressuring corporations to reform. However, their organizational sponsors can have other interests besides movement-building. Most depend on campaigns to increase their name recognition and raise money. What works for them may not work for local organizers. "Many national campaigns offer a cookie-cutter approach to organizing," says Kristi Disney, an organizer with the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network. "We believe it takes locally rooted action to bring these lessons home and to lay the groundwork for a successful global movement."
The third organizing model is local and coalitional. Environmental groups, labor unions, and community-based organizations pledge to support each others' actions; in the process, they build trust and the sense of a larger movement. Led by Jobs with Justice and community organizers, this strategy builds solidarity across sector and race lines. By calling for local solidarity actions during this September's IMF-Bank meeting in Prague, Jobs with Justice and its partners turned the globalization movement homeward to start building sustainable ties to labor and communities of color.
Coalitions take the postmodern place of a party that would unite many interests behind a single program. They project solidarity, but how far can that go? Can it overcome the conservatizing influence of many community-based organizations, with the strings that attach them to foundation funding and politically diverse memberships?
What these strategies have in common is that each first arose to challenge power at times when progressive influence was ebbing. Thus, instead of building a movement, each strategy was expected to be the movement -- to defend, extend, recruit, train, and project a national progressive presence all by itself.
Now we are in a time of movement expansion. Perhaps we can put these three strategies together and create a model that overcomes the weaknesses of each. In this integrated organizing model, direct action could be used more strategically. National campaigns could support local organizing but not substitute for it. Solidarity coalitions would gain a larger political agenda that might gradually unite the agendas of their member organizations.
This synthetic model works at the local or state level, where locally-rooted, interest-based organizing can pull in people -- especially the working class and people of color who were so rare in this year's national protests. To see how it would work, let's look at some promising networks that have been formed since Seattle.
Early in 2000, New Englanders created six global action networks. The two in western Massachusetts and Connecticut grew rapidly by mobilizing students and youth for the April protest against the IMF and World Bank. Next came the summer protest at the Republican Convention, but the networks' numbers and confidence were already waning.
What saved them was local alliance-building. Mass Action teamed up with Western Mass Jobs with Justice and other local partners for a September rally outside Wal-Mart, challenging the company's sale of sweatshop clothing and its sweatshop treatment of Wal-Mart employees. Connecticut Global Action Network shut down a few blocks of downtown Hartford to support pro-union janitors at United Technologies headquarters. Both mass actions drew several hundred people.
Now, with their new local allies and their direct action base, the global action networks are planning to take on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The campaign starts with a major direct action in Quebec next April, and over the next four years it could pull together labor unions, environmental activists, and the other partners in an ongoing Seattle coalition.
The deliberate combination of this national campaign, local solidarity coalitions, and direct action could help New England's six networks grow. Each, though, will develop differently. Each has a distinct local economy that defines potential allies, and each is being driven by a different social base. The student-led networks in western Massachusetts and Connecticut look different from the logger-Earth First! coalition that is emerging in Maine's resource-extraction economy. Still more models appear across the country in Detroit, Seattle, or in New York, where the Direct Action Network worked with SLAM to fight police brutality and the prison industry.
Pointing the way for these new networks are decade-old examples like the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network. Using national campaigns, local interest-based organizing, and cross-border worker exchanges, TIRN built a statewide coalition of 40 labor, community, religious, student, environmental, and other organizations. The network fought NAFTA-style trade bills and sent activists to Seattle. Its working-class leaders are standing up for the Mexicans displaced by NAFTA who are flooding into the Southeast. "We have got to get together across what divides us -- borders, race, religion, profession," says union organizer and TIRN member James Harrell -- "and do something to stop people from getting poorer while companies get richer off of what they tell us is necessary to compete in the global market."
Mike Prokosch coordinates the globalization program at United for a Fair Economy.
Epilogue: Models for the Future
Mike Prokosch, November 8, 2000
What is our movement? It is dozens of interests responding to a common reality: the growing power of global investors and corporations over work, the environment, democracy, and life itself. This threat is not primarily economic. It is political and ethical, and it unites people around the globe whose economic interests diverge.
What do those people around the globe believe? That the "everyone wins" ideology of free-market capitalism is a lie. The ideology says yes, there are winners and losers in the global economy, but the invisible hand of comparative advantage will smooth out those differences... someday. The new movement says no: there are winners because there are losers. The "poor countries" were not just born underdeveloped; they are being underdeveloped -- by global corporations, investors, and the "Washington consensus." They can never win prosperity in the unequal power structures of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank.
There's more. Inequality is not just growing between countries, it's growing within them. Corporations are choosing their most profitable times to downsize workers and turn them into contingent contractors. Millions of underpaid, overworked people are creating the billion-dollar fortunes at the global pyramid's peak
So this is a movement to transform our own nations, not just the "global economy." It is a movement of the excluded. Of those who have been excluded from prosperity all their lives. Those who are being excluded right now, losing their wages, benefits, or security. Those who are still included in the prosperity but excluded from the power of shaping their societies.
We share this exclusion from power and it unites us around the globe. That is our political relationship. At the same time, we occupy different places in the economic winner-loser spectrum. That defines our ethical relationship. It unites us through our differences, as you can see in the strength of initiatives like the anti-sweatshop movement.
These are long-term trends and realities. What do we want to replace them with? Here are some things people seem to be saying around the world.
Sustainability. Indefinitely expanding capitalism threatens to exhaust the Earth's resources and overload its capacity to absorb toxins and heat. Human survival requires a new economic model, one of sustainability rather than expansion. While this concept is environmental, it also speaks to labor activists. It says our economy should be working for human (and environmental) well-being, not profits.
Democracy. A political system run by corporations and their wealthy owners is not working for the majority. They must have power to make the political economy work for people.
Equality. Wealth and power must be redistributed to ensure development for the huge majorities at the bottom.
The Shape of Our Movement
What other worldwide experiences unite this movement? And what created its peculiar shape -- diverse, decentered, autonomous yet linked?
Diverse. More and more wealth is collecting at the top of the global economy. 458 individuals now own more of the world than its poorest three billion inhabitants. If the wealth were spread around, billions of people would be spending it on basic necessities. But a billionaire can only buy so many pairs of shoes. Most of his wealth -- more and more of the world's wealth -- is going into investment.
As the pool of investment money grows, it must find new profitable markets. Geographic markets, like Russia and Brazil. Also sectoral markets, like health care, education, water, and DNA. The growing concentration of financial wealth is commodifying all of life and pushing money relations into every corner of human society. That is pushing the most diverse and unlikely allies into motion. The trend will continue until the concentration of wealth and the reach of corporations are reversed.
Decentered. The computers that make today's globalization possible also democratize its opposition. The internet links activists worldwide on an equal basis -- at least, those who have access. This makes a decentered, "headless" movement possible. But it doesn't fully account for the movement's organizing ideology. A
Autonomous yet linked. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the anticolonial era. For 45 years, Third World peoples used the space between communism and capitalism to win political independence and some room for economic experimentation. Now that space is gone, barely memory. Without the Second World, there's no room for the Third. There is no alternative to capitalism, which no longer bothers to wear a human face. Instead, neoclassical economists are telling us that the most Darwinian version of capitalism will decrease poverty. B
The Wall's collapse hit left parties particularly hard. Not only did it devastate their analytic frame and their grand strategy. It undercut their organizing model: centralized parties which oriented and built mass organizations like labor unions, peasant federations, and student organizations. Revolutionary socialists and other activists started looking for new social change models. Latin Americans, for example, developed a new, more lateral organizing ideology based on "civil society" -- women's, human rights, and other organizations.
An overlapping trend in the United States was the growth of identity-based groups based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. Today's global justice movement adopts the "identity organizing" ideology of autonomy and diversity, and builds on its greatest contribution -- the realization that people will organize most passionately if they are organizing from their own reality.
These realities and ideologies converged in the first post-Cold War rebellion -- the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.
The Zapatistas established a model that today's globalization movement is copying. Using the Internet, they leapfrogged over a government media blackout and reached their international supporters directly. Appealing to human rights, they mobilized support. Then, in 1996, the Zapatistas told their supporters to network globally, forming an alliance of autonomous groups based in different organizing realities. C
Zapatista communiques capture the intense localness of this organizing ideology. Who is Marcos, the person behind the black ski mask? "Marcos is a gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro... a rocker on campus... a peasant without land, an underground editor, an unemployed worker, a doctor with no office, a non-conformist student, a dissident against neoliberalism..." D
Toward the Future
In a unipolar world, we are organizing a pluripolar movement. Its organizing ideology is:
- decentered
- multi-class, multi-ethnic, multi-motivated
- no hierarchy of oppressions, no one vanguard
This book did not critique that model. Instead, it took the model as a starting point and looked critically at local organizing projects across the United States, in the hope that you would find examples to help you organize.
Still, we aren't idolizing decentralization or assuming it is the highest stage our movement can reach. Our movement is so young it is practically tripping over itself. organizes national demonstrations almost without national coordination. It is going up against concentrated power without clear strategies or well-articulated visions of the world it wants. It will need them, and we are going to enjoy creating them with our allies around the world.
In the mean time, the US movement faces several organizing challenges.
1.The movement must connect to the realities most Americans live.
The movement against corporate globalization burst into being in Seattle at the end of 1999. Then it went from national action to action -- without developing the mass support to make those actions successful.
Direct action is a powerful tool. But without mass support, it will be marginalized and repressed. Successful direct action is only the tip of a mass movement.
2.The movement needs structure.
A Salvadoran organizer once told US solidarity activists that their movement was like a body with a huge heart... but no bones to move it forward. Some of the tools that can help build that skeleton are long-term planning, popular education, and other specific skills that appear in the next section.
3.The movement needs direction.
"Will this outpouring of grievances ever become a movement?" asked one observer. Yes, through the careful use of campaigns.
National campaigns can focus us on key targets like the World Bank, World Trade Organization, transnational banks and corporations. Campaigns can keep pressuring them till they bend or break. Earlier we chose a few that target the link between corporate power and governmental decision-making. We also chose global campaigns because we need to globalize our organizing.
Campaigns can reform institutions. However, they won't transform the system that is destroying environment and society. Campaigns are a tool. Use them to build a base where you are organizing.
We could name other challenges facing this infant movement. Developing leadership. Developing unity. Creating a common vision. Learning from the history of past movements. We look forward to working together on all of these challenges.
Footnotes.
A. "The new protest phenomenon has been characterized by the broad range of interests which have come together to conduct the demonstrations with minimal dissension.... The methodology has been remarkable in terms of organization, especially because a central "director" is not evident and, in part, the resulting lack of infighting has been the secret of success. Like the Internet itself, the anti-globalist movement is a body that manages to survive and even thrive without a head."
-"Anti-Globalization - A Spreading Phenomenon," Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Report # 2000/08, August 22, 2000.
http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/miscdocs/200008e.html
B. "Many leaders and political parties of Second and Third World societies who at one point (at least momentarily) had carried the aspirations of a mass-popular electorate, confronted globalization during the 1980s-90s, rapidly reversed allegiance, and imposed ineffectual and terribly unpopular structural adjustment programmes. Very different circumstances prevailed, amidst very different ideologies, but this fate befell, amongst others, Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Musoveni (Uganda), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Nujoma (Namibia), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walensa (Poland), and Yeltsin (Russia). The trend was just as pronounced in labour and social democratic parties in Western Europe, Canada and Australia, and even where once-revolutionary parties remained in control of the nation-state -- China, Vietnam, Angola, and Mozambique, for instance -- ideologies wandered over to hard, raw capitalism."
-Patrick Bond, "Can Thabo Mbeki change the world?", Frantz Fanon Inaugural Memorial Lecture, University of Durban-Westville School of Governance, August 17, 2000, p. 4.
C: The lineage of electronic organizing
The "electronic buzz" behind the battle in Seattle began on January 1, 1995. Along with their armed uprising in Chiapas, the Zapatistas kicked off an internet offensive that inspired cells of support around the world. Using electronic communiques, press releases, and human rights documentation, the EZLN shone a global spotlight on Mexican government repression and censorship.
Electronic organizing was born. Its infancy continued through the Zapatista Encuentro of 1996, which spawned a network called People's Global Action. PGA used the internet to help organize international caravans in 1999 against the G7/8 summit in Cologne and the WTO summit in Seattle. Reclaim the Streets, a British anti-highway/squatter movement, used the internet and highly decentralized organizing to occupy London's financial center in July, 1999.
Meanwhile, NGOs in North America and Europe successfully stopped negotiations for a "corporate bill of rights" called the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) largely by internet. Students in the US also used the internet extensively to coordinate the growing anti-sweatshop movement.
D: (full quote) "Marcos is a gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, an indigious person in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker on campus, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Department of Defense, a feminist in a political party, a communist in the post-Cold War period, a prisoner in Cintalapa, a pacifist in Bosnia, a Mapuche in the Andes, a teacher in the National Confederation of Educational Workers, an artist without a gallery or a portfolio, a housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night, a guerilla in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century, a striker in the CTM, a sexist in the feminist movement, a woman alone in a Metro station at 10 p.m., a retired person standing around in the Zocalo, a peasant without land, an underground editor, an unemployed worker, a doctor with no office, a non-conformist student, a dissident against neoliberalism, a writer without books or readers, and a Zapatista in the Mexican southeast. In other words, Marcos is a human being in this world, Marcos is every untolerated, oppressed, exploited minority that is resisting and saying 'Enough!'"
-Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, edited by John Holloway and Eloina Pelae, p.10.
Mike Prokosch coordinates the globalization program at United for a Fair Economy.