Chapter 1 : New York Diary: March 2001

CHAPTER 1: NEW YORK DIARY: MARCH 2001

When the CLAC caravan came through, most of us in New York had been locked in a prolonged debate over whether we should be trying to get to Québec at all. At the time, the NYC Direct Action Network was concentrating its efforts on helping to organize a mass “convergence” of activists in Burlington, to run for several days leading up to the action. There everyone would hold a spokescouncil to decide what to do next. Ya Basta! had largely been left to come up with action scenarios. The problem was that there was little reason to believe that several dozen known activists loaded down with gas masks, helmets, padding, and chemical jumpsuits were ever going to be allowed across the border. That meant we either had to forgo the gear or send it to Canada well in advance—neither of which, for various reasons, were particularly plausible alternatives. Faced with a similar dilemma during the World Economic Forum protests in Geneva, Italian Ya Basta! had carried out their actions at the border itself.

For a lot of us, that made a lot of sense. All along, we had been concentrating on immigration issues. We had already appeared, in our colorful costumes, at protests at two different immigration detention facilities in New York. The New York area was particularly full of such facilities. Even in those days before September 11, there were hundreds of asylum-seekers and undocumented aliens locked up in New York, including many asylum-seekers languishing for years under twenty-three-hour lockdown, under conditions considerably worse than for many murderers and rapists. If the ultimate purpose of the international system of immigration and border controls was to lock most of humanity away in places where people in rich countries did not have to think about them, this was its ultimate manifestation: locations where human beings were literally made to vanish. Almost no one in America knew any of this was going on. One idea we were bouncing around was to somehow dramatize the situation, aggressively make the invisible reappear: for instance, to get hold of portraits of some of these detainees, and place them, perhaps along with statements or biographies, on the outside of our shields. We were also aware that the Canadian border post at Champlain, the one Americans normally pass through to travel to Québec, was right next to a very large immigration detention facility of its own. We would demand our rights, as global citizens, to march (in formation) through the border. There was some small possibility we might even get through.

Not all were entirely happy with this plan, or with the idea of any sort of border action. Many thought all this would produce was a media stunt the media wouldn’t even cover. “Direct action,” one DAN activist argued, in a post to several activist listservs, “is not symbolic!” It’s a matter of directly confronting the policy-makers responsible for capitalist globalization, of directly trying to stop their plans. Really, we should be concentrating our efforts on figuring out some way to get into Canada (and how difficult could that really be?).

I was following much of this debate online from New Haven, where I was teaching at Yale three or four days a week. At the time, my activist schedule started with the weekly Ya Basta! meeting on Thursday and ended with the DAN meeting at 6PM Sunday; then I’d take the train up to Connecticut again. It seems to me one way to give the reader a feeling for what an activist life is like would be to simply go through my notes, and give some indications of the meetings I attended during the weeks following the CLAC caravan’s visit. As will soon become apparent, there are reasons these are particularly good weeks to start from. What follows will be something like a diary, and draws extensively on the diary-like notes I did keep at the time—though very much rewritten. It will also contain some much more literal extracts from my field notes.

Thursday, March 1, 2001: Ya Basta! formation training, Manhattan, 7PM

Every other week, instead of meetings, Ya Basta! would hold what we called “formation trainings.” These were held at a dance studio in Chelsea, made available to us by a member of the collective named Betty. Betty was a dancer and choreographer, at that time known around the New York art scene for her unique brand of shadow-dancing. She had first got drawn into activism after the electoral fiasco in Florida in 2000, fell in with the Ya Basta! crew in the bus heading down to the inaugural protests in Washington. She later explained she was attracted mainly to Ya Basta!’s theatrical, performative aspect—though she soon became a stalwart of NYC DAN as well.

The training was attended by maybe twenty people.

I should point out the term “training” is being used here very loosely, since none of us, except arguably Betty herself, really had enough experience to “train” anyone. Moose had been to Italy and seen real Ya Basta! tactics and equipment, but he’d never participated in any actions. Betty, as a dance instructor, knew a great deal about how bodies move around in space, but was new to the world of direct action. The rest of us were basically making it up as we went along. Some members of the collective had been studying ancient defensive warfare techniques involving shield walls and the like, or exchanging ideas with other collectives around the country working on similar experiments. One had recently found a pamphlet on shield tactics put together by an anarchist collective somewhere in the Midwest and posted it on our listserv (which was to have unanticipated effects later on, since the listserv was, like most activist listservs, monitored by the police). One sometime member had once been part of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and knew something about armor. Still, the question of who was “training” whom was always somewhat arbitrary: the role seemed to devolve mainly on the self-important. Not that anyone made much of an issue of it at that point because everything was so obviously all in good fun. “Trainings” were mainly just a chance to put on chemical suits and improvised padding, don the shields we had begun to put together from ashcan-shaped orange highway markers (the big plastic ones—if you cut them in half, they make two perfect three-foot shields), and bash each other about with padded sticks.

It was also a chance to debut new gear and toys. Two weeks ago, someone had come with a box full of cheap Israeli gas masks he acquired through a mail order house. This week I bring a box of kazoos (we had been talking, on and off, about the possibility of creating a Ya Basta! kazoo section). Emma immediately starts serenading us with her rendition of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”

“Not necessarily the most inspiring tune to have chosen.”

“Well, someone did a version called ‘I Fought the Law and I Won,’ but the music is the same.”

We have a long discussion of possible larger-scale tactics. One idea that has been floating around forever has been that of some kind of doughnut gun. The joke goes back to the days before the Republican National Convention in Philly, in 2000, when a newspaper reported that police commanders had been warning street cops not to accept any food protesters might “offer to try to win them over to their side.” One affinity group found this so amusing that they actually proposed setting up a table completely covered in doughnuts, with a sign saying “Police: Join Us and All This Could Be Yours!” The table never materialized. But a lot of us in Ya Basta! felt that purely defensive tactics seemed just a bit limiting. If they’re shooting plastic bullets and tear gas at you, you want to shoot something back—just not anything that could possibly be construed as harmful. Something ridiculous, absurd, but which nonetheless implied that, if this were a battle, we’d be giving as good as we got. Doughnuts did seem the most obvious choice of projectile. We puzzled over possibilities for how to deliver them: would it be a catapult (echoing the ancient/medieval theme)? Or more of a slingshot-type arrangement? Someone had dumpster-dived a gigantic tube and some kind of huge rubber band and brought it to the formation training but we all concluded we would have to consult with someone who actually knew something about engineering.

Anyway, the training was the fun part. Afterwards we’d have a brief formal meeting, and that was always something of a letdown. It was not only because we first got all sweaty and exhilarated and then had to sit on the ground for an hour and talk. It was also because two or three people tended to do all the talking. From the start, Ya Basta! meetings had mostly consisted of a prolonged conversation between three activists: Moose, who was in his twenties, and a slightly older married couple named Smokey and Flamma. Some had specific roles: Laura and I, for instance, constituted the propaganda and media group. But, mostly, the rest of us were relegated to throwing in occasional comments or questions. All this was partly due to the group’s unusual make-up. Moose had come out of DAN, a group that took meeting dynamics extremely seriously. DAN employed a formal consensus process with rotating facilitators, an elaborate system of “stacking” designed to ensure no small group of voices dominated the conversation. Smokey and Flamma hated DAN. Like a number of other anarchists in New York—I’ll call them the “hardcores,” for lack of a better name, the sort that were likely to have more experience in Black Blocs, tree sits, or the squatter scene, or anyway used to working in small, intimate collectives—they saw DAN’s formal structure as itself stifling and oppressive. Since Ya Basta! meetings, unlike trainings, rarely involved more than a dozen people, there didn’t seem to be too much need for formal process anyway. Usually Moose acted as de facto facilitator. This itself would have been a cardinal sin in formal consensus process, since it’s a basic principle that those intending to bring forward proposals at a meeting should never also be running it (in formal meetings, facilitators should try to avoid expressing opinions at all). Since Ya Basta! had originally been Moose’s idea, he normally did bring most of the proposals. At the time, though, none of us saw this as much of a problem—though it did make meetings rather tiresome.

The reason we didn’t see it as problem was because NYC Ya Basta! was still a new group. It’s not unusual for new activist groups to emerge from one person’s vision, and for the first few months, for one or two people to do almost all the coordinative work. Still, this cannot last forever. If the group is to become a real, sustainable collective, there inevitably comes a point where the other members take ownership. Participants start asking “why is it always the same person leading the meeting? Why is the facilitator also the one presenting all the proposals?” There follows a kind of peasant insurrection and, if the collective doesn’t dissolve in bitter recriminations, it becomes a genuinely democratic group.

In Ya Basta!, this was an open question, because, somewhat unusually, there were two foci of imaginative energy: Moose on one side, Smokey and Flamma on the other. One might think of them as different tendencies, perhaps, the DAN types versus the hardcores.[4] At the time, the situation fascinated me because I couldn’t find any sociological basis for the split: in terms of class background or trajectory, ethnicity or educational background, the two groups were indistinguishable. It was purely a difference in philosophy.

The question is of course what would happen when the peasant insurrection actually arrived.

In recent weeks, at least, meetings had started to become more interesting. Two weeks earlier, Mac, one of the Canadians in New York DAN, had come to the training to urge us to consider an alternative to Champlain: a border action at Cornwall, on a bridge in the middle of the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation. Mac was in contact with an old friend, a member of the Mohawk Warrior Society on the Canadian side, who was very enthusiastic about using the FTAA mobilization to make an issue of the fact that the US-Canadian border ran right down the middle of Mohawk lands. Despite the fact that both the US and Canada recognized their territory as sovereign by treaty, local people had to pass through an international border, and submit themselves to customs, just to visit their relatives on the other side. The Cornwall idea had an obvious appeal—especially since Mac thought he could line up a number of Canadian trade unionists to support us on the other side—but it meant abandoning the whole immigration detention issue that we’d been focusing on. It also seemed just a little too good to be true. At the first meeting we consensed to stick with Champlain. The next day, several people thought better of it and we decided, over the listserv, to postpone a decision until the next meeting. The final decision had been to investigate further; so today’s meeting was largely devoted to putting together a group of volunteers to go up to Cornwall over the weekend and check things out for themselves. Shawn, Mac’s contact there, was already getting together some fellow Warriors for the meeting. Moose had already found a car.

Saturday, March 3: Meeting with Mohawks

Actually, we ended up with two cars, since a couple of people from Philadelphia had driven up as well. In addition, we had Moose, Smokey and Flamma, with Mac representing DAN, and a couple of local anarchists currently living in the Independent Media Center (IMC). They were to set out on Saturday morning.

I was supposed to be going too, but a family medical crisis forced me to drop out. Two carloads of activists set out around 9AM. One car broke down in the Holland Tunnel and everyone had to flip coins to see who would continue on.

That evening the following report appeared over the Internet:

Representatives of NYC DAN, NYC Ya Basta!, IMC NYC, Philly Direct Action Working Group and the People’s Law Collective met in Cornwall on Saturday with Tyendinaga Mohawks, Members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and the Guelph Direct Action Group and the People’s Community Union (PCU) in Kingston.

The Mohawks announced that they were prepared to open the border at Cornwall to activists wishing to pass into Canada on April 19, so that the latter can join a caravan to Québec City already being organized by activists in Kingston.

The Mohawks intend this “Day of Rage” as an assertion of sovereignty, since the bridge crossing this border is on Mohawk Land. Currently, Mohawks allow use of the crossing 364 days a year, and open it once a year to assert sovereignty.

This information has since been taken back to the groups in question and submitted to their own process of democratic decision-making. So far, NYC-DAN, NYC-Ya Basta!, and several traditional Mohawk houses have publicly declared their support for this action.

When I read this at the time it seemed a bit opaque. Things became clearer at the DAN meeting the next day. Let me give a fuller account that particular meeting, since it was one of the more interesting I attended.

Sunday, March 4: DAN meeting, Charas El Bohio Cultural Center, 6PM

We met in our usual room at Charas, an activist social center in the Lower East Side. The meeting started small: perhaps ten or twelve of us, though over the next hour or so a lot more drifted in, until, at its height, there were twenty-five or thirty. That day, we also had no less than three foreign visitors: Mike and Corey from SalAMI, and Olivier de Marcellus, who worked with Peoples’ Global Action in Switzerland. The SalAMI people were on an eleven-day American tour, giving action trainings in cities across the Northeast. They were being hosted largely by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and were accompanied by a local ISO organizer. Olivier just happened to be in town.

Nicky and Betty facilitated. I volunteered to take minutes.

Unlike Ya Basta!, DAN meetings had an explicit formal process. They always began the same way. First, we put together an agenda. There was always a skeleton agenda already written on the wall, but everyone had the opportunity to add new items, and then we allocated time for each of them: five minutes for one, fifteen for another, one or two very minor announcements. Mike and Corey had to leave early so we put them up first.

I think everyone was at least a bit curious about Mike and Corey because until now we’d all been dealing only with CLAC, and hearing about the SalAMI folk only secondhand as the irritating pacifists. Most of us were curious what they’d actually be like. As it turned out, both young men were quite well-groomed in button-down shirts and dockers—pleasant-looking fellows who spoke with a slight French accent.

They both stood up. Mike explained that SalAMI had been organizing in Québec City for three years now, but since word had got out about the security fence, they had determined that they weren’t going to be purely reactive and face the enemy on their own terms. So, instead of Québec, they were planning an action in Ottawa, the Canadian capital. The key issue, he explained, was that all the negotiations around the FTAA were being conducted in secret. Apparently, after the failure of WTO talks in Seattle, the US trade negotiators had decided their big mistake had been to give the public some idea what it was they were negotiating. This time they weren’t going to make the same mistake. None of the drafts or any information about what was in them was being released to the public—though all this information was being made available to corporations like McDonald’s, Monsanto, and Citibank.

Mike: The idea is that on April 1^st, we’ll organize a mass demo in Ottawa. We’ve reserved three rooms in Parliament to put the FTAA on trial…

Someone: Wait a minute—you managed to reserve rooms in Parliament?

Corey: Well, it was one of our labor union allies that made the actual reservations.

Majeed: Remember, Canada is a different country. Unions actually have some rights there.

Mike: …also, we’re going to invite anyone working on FTAA projects to let us drill them there, so the next day, the 2^nd, we can conduct a nonviolent CD—a blockade of the Foreign Affairs and Trade offices. We’re going to do what we call a “search and seizure” action, go in, in search of the text. We’ve announced we’re going to do this if they don’t release the text by March 20^th. Of course, in order to pull it off, we’ll need lots of help, to raise media awareness.

Various details followed on attempts to get folksinger Ani DiFranco’s support and possible participation, the media blackout on the FTAA in the US (though coverage was pretty decent in Canada), and other issues. Majeed asked about diversity of tactics.

Mike: Well, obviously we would never turn people over to police, like some emails have been saying. And, if you’re talking about our earlier guidelines, with the rules against masks and whatnot: no, we’ve gotten rid of those. But when we hear the phrase “diversity of tactics”—well, that sounds to us like a euphemism for “free-for-all.”

SalAMI has been putting together what we call a “convergence table,” with over thirty different groups, including unions and student and church groups that the CLAC would never be able to reach. That’s what we consider real diversity. But it’s necessarily based on a principle of nonviolent action; these groups would never even be talking to us if they thought we’d ask them to endorse an action with no parameters at all.

Corey: As for CLAC … Sure, there are leadership issues. And alpha male issues. But we’re still trying to pull things together. Our Creative Action Training is meant for both sides, and we hope that, when the action finally happens, we won’t have two different spokescouncils. If we can at least agree on no molotov cocktails, we can have a single spokescouncil. Otherwise, well, we’re just playing to a fraction of one percent of the movement in my own personal opinion.

Mike: I’ll leave my email.

Corey: Tomorrow we’re having a training at NYU, at 7PM, Help spread word!

Brooke: Actually, I should probably point out that DAN represents a diversity of opinion and our Continental DAN principles are actually sort of vague on the nonviolence issue. I think intentionally so. The exact wording is DAN calls for “nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action.” So we support both. LA DAN is pretty strictly nonviolent. CLAC is trying to get on the CDAN call and it would be good for you guys to also hook into that too.

Mike: These are not easy questions, but I think it’ll all work out (laughs) and Québec will be amazing. It might not be all smiles and hugging each other, but when push comes to shove, we’re all in this together.

Zoe: How long will it be before the barbed wire fence goes up?

Mike: Well, most of the concrete was already laid down before the ground froze. But that’s just the base. Apparently it will be four kilometers around—that’s a 2.5 mile perimeter—surrounding a section of the city with 25,000 residents. They’re all going to be receiving special cards which will authorize them to move in and out. There’s been some effort to encourage people to refuse or even better—this was my suggestion—burn them.

SP: What about people who work in there?

Mike: I’m not sure how they’re handling that. Presumably they’ll be getting some kind of ID too.

Majeed: I have a question. CLAC and CASA (Comité d’accueil du Sommet des Amériques) are explicitly anti-capitalist. What about SalAMI?

Mike: Well, yes, I think you could say we are. Myself personally, I don’t like to use the word ‘capitalism’ because it turns some people off. We’ve taken a common ground approach, but in order to promote a radical alternative vision—right now we have a committee working on mapping some of that out. Certainly you can assume all the basics: we’re anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy, anti-homophobia.

Corey: You have to understand this is going to be one of the largest security actions in history. We decided early on that a Seattle-style shutdown is highly improbable. We’re not going to stop the Summit from happening. So the question when it comes to the wall was: how can we come up with a model for what might be considered a win? What would give us the right to declare victory? People are working on it. One women’s group sent out a call to weave images and slogans of resistance into the fence itself. This would be powerful for the media, but wouldn’t please everyone, certainly. So then what? Target the airports? Do a blockade, close off the gates, and piss off all the residents? This is why we’re calling for a strategic spokescouncil, to make our tactics square with our strategic aims. What’s really important is how our actions effect the public, what they’ll do in terms of constructing long-term alliances…

Olivier remarks, in a soft, very dignified voice, that all this sounds very similar to what happened in Davos during the World Economic Forum protests the month before. The police overreacted and were stopping people miles away from the actual meetings. The repression was so brutal—they were sending police out into the fields to gather cowshit to mix with the water in their water-cannons—that it backfired, causing a huge public backlash and complete victory for us. By the end, when there was a little riot in Geneva (they set fire to several banks), polls actually showed the public were still more supportive of the protesters than the government. And this is in Switzerland!

The SalAMI folk are skeptical. “You can try to go through the wall if you like,” says Mike. “But you have to bear in mind there’s going to be eight thousand cops, five hundred Darth Vaders you’d have to outrun if you actually did get in. That’s why we decided our strategy during the Summit itself will be not to approach the wall at all, but to establish what we’re calling the “Freedom and Truth Areas of the Americas,” maybe a kilometer away. SalAMI wants to maintain this as a truly liberated zone, and you know” (significant glance at the Yabbas in the room), “there’s real room for Ya Basta! tactics to keep the cops out of it.”

Mike and Corey have to run off for a training at NYU. They leave with their ISO chaperon and the meeting carries on.

Next up is Lesley’s report-back from the Mohawk trip—which, she says, went very well indeed. The seven or eight people who made it to Cornwall had met not only with members of the Mohawk Warrior Society but also members of the Kingston Labor Council on the Canadian side (“along with a couple guys from Guelph who we’re calling ‘the Guelph Action Network’”). The Mohawks pledged to open the border to demonstrate their control over the land in Akwesasne. Shawn, their main spokesman, was framing the action as a “day of rage” over the division of their land and both governments’ trampling of treaty rights. The Warriors were hinting at very militant tactics, talking of opening the bridge “by any means necessary”—all of which, Lesley remarks, is really something of a bluff, but it could put the Canadian government in an extremely delicate position as they really would not want to use too much force on Mohawk lands. That really would unify the community against them. In fact, they did not expect any significant opposition: the Warriors actually had been in the habit of seizing the bridge one day a year, for the last few years, as an assertion of sovereignty, and the government had never made any effort to stop them. Canadian auto and postal workers were already planning a caravan from Toronto and Kingston to Québec City; they’d be happy to be there on the other side of the border to support us. “Oh yes,” she added, “and the District Labor Council says they will serve tea.”

All sorts of radical ideas were being bounced around. Some Canadians were talking about the possibility of taking over the locks of the St. Lawrence, to close down shipping traffic. But there was also a word of caution. “Bear in mind Akwesasne itself is a very fragmented, very divided community. They had their own little civil war over there in the 1980s over plans to build a casino. The people we’re dealing with are from the Warrior Houses (who were against the casino); they’re with us, even if everyone in these communities is hardly unanimous.”

I ask how much of this was to go in the minutes—which are posted to an open-subscription listserv. “In fact, the Mohawks told us specifically they want this information to be made public, especially the phrase: ‘Mohawk Warriors calling for Days of Rage.’”

Lesley’s report-back is followed by a number of other announcements: of a benefit for Casa del Sol, a squat in the Bronx; upcoming court dates for the Esperanza Garden defendants (they had been arrested defending a community garden from bulldozers some months before); a reminder of puppet-making every Saturday afternoon for the More Gardens! group. There were also report-backs from various DAN working groups: Labor, Police and Prisons, Legal; the WBAI campaign; the Web team; the Women’s Caucus. Brooke announced that Continental DAN (CDAN) had received a request from some people in Santa Cruz to join the CDAN network. (“Probably a bunch of hippies and deadheads, but we love them anyway.”) There is also a report from the newly created Banner Working Group, which seems to consist of two decidedly crusty looking individuals in black hooded sweatshirts, who unveil a beautiful banner that one of them had painted for DAN to carry during marches.

Next comes New Business. The first item on the agenda is the Burlington Convergence. This, Brooke explained, is beginning to turn into a problem. The original idea had been to provide a place for people to start gathering on Monday April 16, so as to proceed to the border Thursday and ideally make it to Québec in time for the CLAC “Carnival Against Capitalism” parade on Friday the 20^th. That way, there would be several days for everyone to hold trainings, educational events, and spokescouncils. However, at the moment we had just four or five people in Vermont trying to organize everything. Also, the event was technically being organized through NEGAN, the “New England Global Action Network.” In principle, NEGAN was the local equivalent to DAN—but unfortunately, it was top-heavy with “anti-corporate” types, liberal reformers, Greens, and socialist groups—notably the ISO. The ISO had its own agenda and it appeared to have little overlap with ours.

Some background is required here. The ISO is one of the few of the innumerable Trotskyist sects that were founded and split from one another over the course of the 1960s and 1970s that had managed to survive and even expand in the intervening years. It had done so because, unlike the others, the ISO did not concentrate its recruiting efforts in factories but on college campuses. In 2001, the ISO was, in many ways, the anarchist nemesis—particularly, DAN’s. This was in part because they were trying to do similar things via radically different methods. Both were revolutionary anti-capitalists. Both believed in working within broad coalitions and trying to encourage them in more radical directions. The problem was that for the ISO, this was a very long-term process, and in the meantime they were mainly interested in numbers. They were always trying to put together the broadest coalitions possible, which meant wooing the leadership of unions and mainstream NGOs, who would, in turn, almost invariably want guarantees against violence or, often, against direct action of any kind. From the anarchist perspective, this was like trying to put an army of a hundred thousand people in the field, but only on condition that none of them actually do anything.

It would not have been nearly so annoying if the ISO were simply opposed to direct action. Then one could just ignore them. Their members attended spokescouncils and, often, took part in actions themselves. Hence, they were the ones at the spokes always trying to talk everyone into ratcheting things down, turning a plan for militant direct action into an act of strictly nonviolent civil disobedience, turning a plan for nonviolent civil disobedience into a unpermitted march, turning a unpermitted march into a permitted one. The strategy of seeking the largest possible coalition ensured they tended to be chary even of groups that put out too radical a message: it became a kind of running gag among anarchists that if you label an organization “anti-capitalist,” you can guarantee the socialists won’t show up. Finally, groups like the ISO were explicitly vanguardist. They saw themselves as having the correct analysis of the world situation. When they did get involve in broader coalitions, it only made sense that they should provide direction and leadership.

Anarchists, in contrast, tend to refer to their strategy as “contaminationist.” The assumption is that direct action and direct democracy are infectious; almost anyone exposed to them is likely to be transformed by the experience. Anyway the point is not to organize people but to encourage them to organize themselves. Rather than making deals with labor bureaucrats, then, groups like CLAC or DAN tried to appeal directly to the rank and file. Rather than try to take over large organizations, they aimed to create dramatic models of self-organization that others might be inspired to imitate, if, inevitably, it was assumed, in their own idiosyncratic ways.

All this no doubt makes it easier to see why the SalAMI tour was being sponsored by the ISO, and why Mike and Corey came, and left, escorted by an ISO chaperon.

To return to NEGAN then…

The week before, Moose and Marina, a longstanding DAN activist (and former ISO member), had gone up to a NEGAN meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts. Neither were at the DAN meeting today—they had come back with the flu—but everyone knew what happened. The meeting was full of ISO people, who insisted on creating a steering committee, and pushed for majority voting instead of consensus. (One cannot, after all, attempt to pack a steering committee that does not operate by majority vote.) They also proposed that NEGAN concentrate on organizing busses to go up to Québec City on Saturday, so they could work with the labor unions that were going to be bussing their people to the march that day. They argued that this would make it much easier to get through the border. It would also, however, mean completely skipping the day of direct action scheduled for the day before. It was all an enormous problem because the logical thing should have been for DAN to throw all its resources into the Burlington Convergence—organizing spokescouncils and the like was, after all, what we did best. But it looked like the anarchists were simply being bypassed:

Brooke: I have a lot of names of people up there [in Burlington], but… I hope I don’t insult anyone by saying this but: Burlington used to have a Direct Action group. But it was overrun by ISOs and socialist types. Biella and the Native Forest Networks are more anarchist—the former is one woman who’s doing most of the organizing for the convergence basically single-handedly. I’m trying hard to get the Institute for Social Ecology involved (which they will if they know what’s good for them), but so far they haven’t done much either, so for the moment things are really not in good shape up there.

Majeed: You know, I don’t mean to be vulgar or sectarian, but I say, “fuck the ISO.”

David: Um, should I put that in the notes?

Majeed: Actually, yeah. Put it in the notes.

Brooke: Bear in mind there are people reading the notes as far away as California.

Majeed: Whatever. Frankly, I’m just sick of those guys. The moment there’s the slightest illusion of being in a position of power they take over and immediately cut off all debate. They’ve been doing this since at least the Gulf War. I say let’s just contact the “authentic elements.”

David: (still scribbling) “Authentic elements?”

Majeed: You know: people who are doing this because they want the mobilization to succeed, not to further some fucking organizational imperative.

Majeed, a former member of the Iranian Communist Party (which he explained to us was largely Kurdish), now active in DAN Labor, had, since becoming an anarchist, become unusually impatient with vanguardists.

After renewing our determination to help out with “authentic elements” in Burlington, we talk a little about the next scheduled weekly meeting. As it happens, this falls at the same time as a Critical Resistance protest against the Horizon Center, a juvenile detention center in Midtown. Someone suggests: Why don’t we all go to the rally and, if there’s any urgent business that needs to be discussed, we can do it on the subway platform where everyone is supposed to be assembling anyway? Everyone agrees, though Brooke is careful to insist we post it to the list immediately and prominently.

The end of the meeting is quite unusual. Technically, there was an option at the end of every DAN meeting to hold an “educational session.” I don’t think we ever had. But everyone is anxious to learn about Peoples’ Global Action. We had all heard of PGA—in fact, DAN was in a certain sense modeled on it—but few of us (except for Lesley, who has been studying PGA as a grad student in Columbia) really knew that much about, aside from the fact that it was a global network created by the Zapatistas that put out calls for simultaneous global days of action and, most famously, had originally come up with the idea of a global day of action against the WTO meetings in Seattle. So we asked Olivier—or “Oliver,” as he insisted on calling himself—to give us a little background. Olivier is a man who looks to be in his fifties or early sixties, a very aristocratic, European-looking fellow with a truly extraordinary nose. We’re rather surprised to learn he’s actually an American, a 1960s refugee who fled the country over Vietnam and had been living in Geneva ever since.

EDUCATIONAL SESSION

Olivier: Hello. My name’s Oliver de Marcellus, and I’m from Geneva. I’ve been living there since I left the States in 1968. I’ve been with PGA since it started in 1998; before that, I was working with the Zapatista movement.

Brooke: We’d really like to hear more about the history.

Olivier Well, you can read more about it on our web page, which is [[http://www.agp.org][www.agp.org]. (That’s from the French or Spanish acronym. If you type “pga” it’ll send you to the Professional Golf Association.)

About PGA … hmmm. I guess there’s two ways of talking about PGA. The easiest is to say, you can be a member of PGA whether you know it or not. Because PGA is nothing but five principles (which are, I believe, DAN’s founding principles as well). Well, that, and also, taking part in actions which accord with those principles. So, if you look at it that way the only definition of PGA is “people who agree with the manifesto.” By that definition there’s millions of people in PGA and most of them don’t even know it.

That’s the large definition. The smaller definition, which almost doesn’t exist, is as an organization. We’re not supposed to be an organization. We have no funds, no secretariat, no one is qualified to speak for PGA. We do have an International Conveners Committee, with representatives from groups from different continents who are rotated every two years. All this Committee can do is convene international PGA meetings, decide who comes and who from the Global South gets free tickets.

Maggie: How do you define “Global South?”

Olivier: Everywhere but Europe and North America.

At first the Conveners were also supposed to decide on global days of action, but as it turned out it was so hard to get some of them to answer emails and the like, that groups started taking the initiative on their own. So, the way it’s worked out is that actions end up being proposed by the most concerned local groups, the call circulates on the Net to everyone involved, and those who are interested take part, those who aren’t, ignore it. Which I guess is the most democratic way to go about it. (Usually the actions then end up getting approved five months later by the Conveners Committee, retroactively, but no one really notices.)

For instance, the Geneva demonstrations in 1998 were called by the Conveners. The Reclaim the Streets in England called the J18 demos the year after—they proposed it, and people just started doing it. N30 was the same thing—that was the biggest thing we ever did, but it started just as a call to have an action against the WTO, wherever it met, even before we knew it was going to meet in Seattle. In the case of [the actions against the IMF meetings in] Prague it was the same thing—a local group proposed it, and it was taken up. So I guess that’s how we’ve been doing it since 1999.

Brooke: Could you talk about the upcoming conference?

Olivier: Yes. The International PGA conference is going to be held in Cochabamba from the 17^th to the 24^th of September, and the call really will come out this week (I’m sorry, I know we keep saying it, but it really will this week). We’re aiming for two hundred delegates, of whom seventy percent have to be from the South or East; sixty from Western Europe and North America and the rest from the “Global South.” The most sizable contingent will be from Latin America. Right now the epicenter for resistance to globalization is the Andes; that’s the vital spot, which is why we’re holding it in Bolivia to begin with. Well, obviously of course, because that’s the city where there was the huge campaign against Bechtel when they tried to privatize the water system, which was spearheaded by PGA-affiliated groups.

But we’re really hoping there won’t be a coup before it happens.

Stuart: If they did have a coup, it could hardly make the government any worse.

Olivier: But if the hosts are all in hiding, it will make it very difficult to organize.

Also we’re trying to start a more decentralized funding system—which is crucial for getting tickets to the delegates from the South because airfare is just hugely expensive. At the Conveners Meeting in Prague in December, we decided we couldn’t keep getting money from foundations because the more effective we become, the fewer foundations will want to give money to us.

Lesley: And what is the money actually used for?

Olivier: Just for the one thing: to fly delegates into the meetings.

[some discussion follows of DAN’s potential involvement in the Cochabamba meetings… We decide we should really put the PGA manifesto on our web page]

Olivier: That would actually be useful, as one of the functions of the conference is to amend the manifesto. For instance, European delegates will want to make sure something about climate change is put in there as it didn’t seem as obviously pressing when we first wrote the thing in 1998.

David: Can you tell us a little about how it all started?

Olivier: Well, PGA was very definitely first conceived as part of the Zapatista movement. You could sort of say it was founded during the Second Intergalactic Zapatista Encuentro in Spain in 1997. That was when the groups that became the backbone of PGA first met: the European anarchists, the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement, and—actually, probably the most important group of all was the KRRS. That’s the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association, which is a Gandhian Socialist peasant movement in India which has something like ten million members. They first became famous for their “Cremate Monsanto” campaign in the mid-1990s, where they systematically burned genetically modified crops. Last year KRRS mobilized 51,000 people in bullock carts who tried to seize the port of Bombay—and for them, that was, really, just a medium-size action. In May 1998 they turned 280,000 people for a mass anti-WTO demo. That was probably their biggest. But they work on a colossal scale.

Natalie: You know you should really have all this history stuff on the web page.

Olivier: I know. We should. We probably have the corniest web site in existence; it was probably the first anti-globalization web page, but the design is horrendous.

Stuart: You talk about proposals emerging from local groups—by “local groups” do you just mean “any groups that have endorsed the principles”?

Olivier: Well, another aspect of this non-organizational status is that there’s no formal membership. Anyone can propose something.

David: So in theory, we could too?

Olivier: Oh, absolutely. Why not?

But back to the history. PGA had its first meeting in Spain, in 1998, and at that first meeting there were a lot of anarchists from England, like people from Reclaim the Streets-London, active in the anti-roads movement who had no idea similar things were happening on the continent and vice versa. They met the squatters in Italy and Germany, and ideas started to spread. None of us on the Continent, for instance, had ever heard of the idea of a British-style illegal street party. A month later we were organizing one in Geneva. And it was wonderful. Before long, people were organizing them everywhere.

Someone came up with the theory that the result was a kind of global brain: the interconnections of communication are such that you can imagine people not just communicating but acting, and acting damn effectively, without leadership, a secretariat, without even formal information channels. It’s a little like ants meeting in an ant-heap, all waving their antennae at each other, and information just gets around—even though there’s no chain of command or even hierarchical information structure.

Of course it would be impossible without the Internet.

Someone: Of course, they said that at first about the Zapatistas, too.

Olivier: Actually, it was a little annoying at first how the media used to say how the Zapatistas were simply an Internet phenomenon—annoying, that is, for people who actually know how hard it is to reach them. But in a way it’s sort of true. An Internet list by nature can’t be authoritarian—you just put out a proposition and people discuss it, those who like it, go do it. If it’s not that good a proposal, people will do it less. The one thing you absolutely can’t do over the Internet is vote.

Stuart: All this sounds so much like DAN!

Olivier: You know, when I arrived in Seattle for the WTO actions, I didn’t even know what DAN was. Then I picked up a DAN leaflet and there were the PGA principles and pictures of Geneva actions inside, and I said, “Oh, it’s just PGA.” That happens to me all the time. I met someone from PGA Korea last week, and it was: “Really? That exists?” In Prague, there were two busloads of Turks who showed up. It turned out there was a five-city PGA network in Turkey, they’d downloaded our principles from the web page and were going around showing films of Seattle. None of us had the slightest idea until we actually met them. It keeps happening all the time.

Of course, now that there’s Indymedia the information gets back to us more than it used to. When the Net-freaks first explained the idea of simultaneous demos to us, we used to try to coordinate it by everyone sending emails to Geneva. It didn’t work. Bsut now we outsource it to Indymedia, as it were. So, during the actions in Prague, we had 250 simultaneous demos worldwide, of which 70 were reported on Indymedia. And that, in turn, changes our relation to the corporate media—basically, we don’t even need them any more. A few months ago we had an action in Geneva where we occupied the Ecuadorian embassy in solidarity with people holding an action there. After the whole thing was over, we realized we had forgotten to even tell the media about it, because who needs them? It’ll get back to the people in Ecuador that we did it through Indymedia, and that’s all that was really important to us.

What’s happening now is surely the biggest thing since May 1968. At least in Europe. The first time that I’ve felt such a huge, global upsurge. Prague was just… whoa! There were at least eight different countries that sent contingents of over a thousand people. When we started none of us had any idea how to put together a mass convergence or a spokescouncil, we had to make it all up from scratch. Then, come September: lo and behold! It worked! And we ended up kicking the IMF out of town a day early.

And every meeting had to be coordinated in seven different languages: English, France, German, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Czech…

Brooke: Jesus!

Olivier: But it worked!

Betty: Could you speak about the actions in Davos, and what lessons we could learn from them for Québec City?

Olivier: Well, on that:

Unhappily, we appear to represent the biggest threat to the Empire around right now, and they appear to be getting really concerned. I’m sorry to say it because really we’re just a ridiculous bunch of clowns, but there you are.

In Nice, we thought they’d try to block the frontiers before we even got there, and in fact they did—totally illegally—at least against the Italians who in theory have the same EU passports. They also used interesting divide-and-conquer tactics like providing free trains for the union people, and then trying to beat the shit out of the Autonomous people.

We expected the frontiers to be blocked, and that getting to Davos itself would be impossible; so we said, if we can’t get there, we’ll do actions and blockades wherever we have to. If we couldn’t get further than the bottom of the valley where the train meets the highway, below the ski resort where the meetings was actually being held, then fine, we’d block the auto routes there. Or if we can’t get into the country, if they try to close the border, we’d close the border ourselves. We ended up having demos in all three, which was great—five hundred Italians stopped at the border blocked the highway there, five hundred other people snuck into Davos itself, which was great, and there were something like five different groups in the valley bottom… It was a total victory, despite the biggest security mobilization in Swiss history, with tanks and barbed wire everywhere, blasting us with water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets the moment we’d even appear—even when it was just a bunch of silly floats and people dressed up on stilts or in Ronald McDonald costumes. In the end, they overdid it so much even the highly bourgeois Swiss public was on our side. Several cantons voted to remove the federal police from their territory, the president ended up making a fool of himself at the press conference that night because he wanted to talk about the deliberations in Davos, and kept snapping at the reporters, “Why do you keep asking about the demonstrations?”

Natalie: Were there any arrests?

Olivier: Oh yes. But they had to let them out quickly.

So as far as the FTAA is concerned—there’s no reason not to block them in, even if there is this enormous security fence, there still have to be gates. Any place you can block them, the point is made…

We go on talking for some time, about the problems of coordinating with groups with little or no Internet access, about the amazing PGA group called the “Network of Free Black Communities of South America,” founded by escaped slaves in the nineteenth century, about a dozen other things. By the time we headed off to a nearby coffee shop to continue the conversation, it was already almost 11PM.

Tuesday, March 6: FTAA Coalition meeting, 8PM

Actually I missed this one (along with the DAN Labor meeting held at the same time), but I heard what happened.

The FTAA Coalition is a broad, New York-wide group which includes DAN, the Greens, the ISO, and various independent activists organizing for Québec City. So when Moose and Marina finally emerged from their sickbeds to give their report-back from the NEGAN meeting, they had to be relatively circumspect. Apparently there was also some ambiguity about the degree to which the Mohawks on the US side are really on board, since we had only been talking to Canadian ones so far. There was some kind of process going on among the Warrior Houses on the American side and no one was quite sure how things would turn out. There were also increasing tensions about the structure of the coalition itself.

Thursday, March 8: Ya Basta! meeting, Manhattan, 7PM[5]

A much better meeting than usual, held at Aladdin’s apartment in a public housing development in Chelsea. There were about twenty people. This time, the meeting was even facilitated: informally, but well. Even more unusual, everything was captured on videotape.

There’s a long story behind this, but the short version is that there was a young filmmaker named Sasha who had contacted people in the activist community because he wanted to make a documentary. His idea was to contrast standard media images of scary masked anarchists with portraits of the real human beings behind the masks. He soon became involved in Ya Basta! and within a month or two had become effectively part of the group. No one had much trouble with that. But this was the first time he had actually shot a meeting. Actually, it’s the first I know of anyone shooting a meeting of any such group at all—in part, he got away with it only because he promised not to show anybody’s faces, always keeping his camera pointed low. One or two members actually wore masks for the meeting, mainly, I suspected, for dramatic effect.

Anyway, as meetings went, it turned out to be an excellent choice.

There was already a small crisis brewing with the Mohawk action, due to premature publicity. While Shawn, our main ally, had specifically asked for us to use the words “Days of Rage,” and while a piece had immediately come out in a local magazine called Eye News, quoting him as saying that they would seize the bridge “by all means necessary” and showing pictures of masked Mohawk Warriors with machine guns from the Oka occupation in Québec in the 1980s, all this was something in the nature of a bluff. Shawn was calculating that, after the trauma of the near-insurrection and long standoff with the Canadian government over Oka in the 1980s, and a previous near-civil war in Akwesasne itself, the Canadian government would not risk sending a large military contingent if they thought real conflict was likely.

What Moose was really worried about was premature publicity. Specifically, about a dispatch sent out by the two independent, IMC anarchists who had come along on the trip, Target and Warcry. Both were in their own way minor legends in the movement. Target was a punky kid famous for his Black Bloc exploits, who seemed to change his name every other week. Warcry, born in India, was a former tree-sitter, eco-activist, and independent journalist, who then had a reputation as a kind of anarchist poster girl, prominently featured in just about every movie about Seattle—partly owing to charisma, partly because she was one of the few Black Bloc anarchists willing to give interviews. On their return from Canada, they had immediately posted a call of their own that was forwarded to a series of anarchist listservs. In it—at least according to Moose—they had grossly misrepresented what was going on as an ultra-militant armed event and urging anarchists to participate. Apart from being childish, Moose stressed, this was completely out of process: we’d promised not to say anything we weren’t specifically authorized to say. He said we’ll be talking to Warcry later to see if they can’t post some kind of correction, or at least milder version.

Actually, some people were growing concerned with the whole situation. What’s up with the picture of the Mohawk Warrior with the M16? Are these guys really going to be carrying guns? Moose assured us they wouldn’t. At Oka, they occupied a bridge for two months before they even started carrying guns, and even then they never used them on anyone, even when the police fired on them. It’s all a bit of a ploy, he told us. People who lack the privilege of white activists are not in a position of being able to claim to be doing nonviolent action even when, in fact, they are.

Moose also says Shawn has been assuring us that getting through at the bridge will not be a problem, anyway. The problem is more likely to be roadblocks on the way.

So we formally consense on our support for the Cornwall action. Then, after yet another report on NEGAN, we start talking about the larger, New York-wide anti-FTAA Coalition, which actually is experiencing similar problems. The coalition is top-heavy with Greens and ISO people, and organizational tensions have become such that we’ve agreed to a special meeting on Friday just to sort things out. (“Marina is going. She’s the process queen,” observes Moose. She’s also a one-time ISO member turned anarchist who presumably knows how such people think.)

The big news is that CLAC is having a “consulta,” or spokescouncil in Québec City on the 23^rd, and Ya Basta! needs to send representatives—especially since during the last consulta, our people didn’t make it through. I volunteer. So does Emma, an artist currently working in a health food store on the Lower East Side. Emma points out she might not be an ideal choice, since, while part of the collective, she doesn’t intend to do Ya Basta!, but is going to be with the Black Bloc. No one seems to mind.

The selection of delegates is not as delicate a matter as it might be because spokes are not, technically, empowered to make decisions for the group. They’re not really representatives. They are basically conduits for information: they explain what their group is intending to do, bring proposals, and convey information and proposals back to the group for it to consider collectively. (In a proper spokescouncil, where the other members of the affinity group are actually present in the room, this can happen on the spot. At a consulta where they aren’t, the number of decisions that can be made is much more limited.) Still, this raises the question: what is Ya Basta! in fact planning to do, if we do get through to Québec City? For the rest of the meeting, we consider the possibilities. Since no one is much interested in the idea of protecting SalAMI’s autonomous zone in the middle of nowhere, these come down to: (1) helping pull down the wall, (2) trying to get through the wall and enter the perimeter, or (3) providing some sort of diversion—since one thing we do know is that if you do dress up in bright padded outfits, the police will definitely follow you around. The wall is an obvious symbol of the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, but some of us find it a little too symbolic. On the other hand, if we could get inside the perimeter, what would we do there? Smokey had heard a story about a homeless shelter there that effectively had to close down operations because of the Summit—perhaps we could get them to formally invite us to provide security? Someone else had been pursuing the idea of dramatizing the fates of disappeared asylum-seekers: the Coalition for the Defense of the Rights of Immigrants had suggested we might think about placing not their pictures, but a series of specific demands on shields and banners and delivering them to the Summit. But to whom? And how to air them? The US media would never cover the story.

This led to a long debate on the pros and cons of an action against the media itself. Would it be possible, for instance, to shut down the media tent outside the summit building, or even demand they play some tape containing the voices of those frozen out of debate? All agree that the corporate media is a legitimate target, but how would an action against it be effective? What would constitute success? This is the basic question we come up with over and over again in planning for an action: how do we frame the event in such a way that we have the right to declare victory afterwards? And in the case of the media it was particularly acute: even if you did carry out a successful action against the media, who would know?

We don’t come to any decisions. Anyway, as a few people point out, we’re just one collective. Other Ya Basta! groups will be joining at Burlington and we don’t want to make decisions for them. We can save that for the Burlington spokes. But by the time the meeting is over both Emma and I have a fairly clear idea of what we’re going to say.

A final announcement. Moose says: “I’m supposed to tell people that Starhawk is going to be in town tomorrow.” (He pronounces it with a note of mild mockery: Staaaarhawk.) “I mean, me, I’m not too down with this kind of superstar celebrity bullshit, but she apparently wants to meet some of the New York Ya Basta! Collective so I figured I would pass it on.”

Friday, March 9: Coalition structure meeting at Amsterdam Pizza at 111^th Street, 6:30PM

This meeting consisted of maybe twenty activists ranged around a table in the back of a pizza joint pretending that they weren’t having an argument.

What is now called the FTAA Coalition began as a Direct Action Network working group. DAN had a general meeting every Sunday, and a whole series of working group meetings on other days of the week. Some of these working groups are structural (legal, media, outreach) , some are engaged in ongoing campaigns (DAN Labor, Police & Prisons) but there are always some that are just created to work on some specific action: whether the IMF protests in Washington, the Republican convention in Philly, and now, the FTAA in Québec. Often, these latter working groups themselves could start looking like miniature versions of DAN, with their own working groups to handle outreach, communications, transportation, and the like. They became like cellular structures budding off and then reproducing the same internal relation between the parts. We could afford to be flexible because after all, there was no fixed, top-down chain of command; initiatives were supposed to rise from below anyway; so everyone was free to improvise whatever organizational form seemed to work for them.

The problems came when DAN tried to work with members of groups with profoundly different organizational imperatives. I’ve already mentioned the great DAN bugaboo, the ISO. The ISO had become involved in DAN-style politics only recently. They had played little or no part in Seattle. Sometime afterwards, however, they apparently received orders from central command in England to get involved with the global justice movement. Suddenly, all sorts of high-ranking ISO organizers started appearing at DAN meetings. Their enthusiasm seemed to ebb and flow. They had participated enthusiastically in the first big NYC-DAN action—A16, the anti-IMF protests in Washington on April 16, 2000—but, after the Republican convention protests in Philly, during which the ISO contingent was widely accused of having abandoned their position and run away, they largely dropped out and threw their energy behind the Nader presidential campaign. Now they were back.

Working groups were in principle open. Anyone could join. In this case, when DAN created a working group for the FTAA mobilization back in January, the ISO folks had suddenly reappeared, along with members of some other groups they had been working with—the Green Party, certain NGOs—who had never, in fact, been to a DAN meeting proper. Since the ISO and Greens, at least, were not there as individuals but as representatives of organizations, the working group in effect became a coalition. So it seemed only reasonable to declare it one and abandon the pretense of its being a part of DAN. This was not a problem since DAN working groups were pretty much autonomous anyway.

So now we had a city-wide coalition which ostensibly worked on anarchist, or anyway directly democratic, principles. In principle, this was just what DAN should have wanted: we were all about disseminating this kind of decision-making model. But there followed an inevitable clash of institutional cultures. The newcomers immediately started treating the coalition like a new organization: they wanted to adopt principles of unity, create outreach literature, and try to get other groups around the city, immigrant groups, labor unions, and the like, to join. The anarchists didn’t think of the coalition as a “group” at all. They saw it not as a decision-making body but more of a forum, a way for groups already organizing against the FTAA to exchange information and avoid reduplication of effort. It was something along the lines of a spokescouncil. Certainly they saw no reason for it to adopt an ideological “line” of any sort. For some reason, a lot of the arguments ended up aimed at trying to convince one person: a young woman named Julie, who worked for something called the Urban Justice League. Partly this was because none of us really knew her; she seemed fresh on the scene, but very enthusiastic, active, and eager to learn. Julie, on the other hand, turned out to be a creature of the NGO world, and she ultimately swung decisively to the ISO position. In fact, she soon began acting like a one-woman steering committee of her own, making phone calls to union presidents, pastors, and the leaders of various community groups in our name, and trying to assemble the broadest possible coalition. In theory, this was hard to argue with. But we all knew what was likely to come next: these same groups would start demanding we tone down the direct action, or at least stop talking openly about it. The DAN people and other anarchists responded by forming their own autonomous direct action working group of the coalition—calling it, appropriately enough, the “autonomous direct action working group,” or AUTODAWG—with its own listserv and separate meetings. AUTODAWG, we decided, would send one representative to the coalition meetings each week, but otherwise we would work together, much like we’d expected the original DAN working group to do.

The problem was that Julie and the ISO people immediately started showing up to all the AUTODAWG meetings too. Technically, of course, there was no reason they couldn’t—they were open meetings—but it caused great deal of discomfort on all sides. Julie started complaining on the Internet about exclusion and, before long, everyone agreed we really ought to have a special meeting to discuss process and iron things out.

The result was about twenty people all sitting around a table at a student hangout near Columbia University, sharing out slices of two large cheese pizzas, and trying to be reasonable to one another. Julie offered to facilitate (which probably was not a good idea). It soon became apparent that the main problem was lack of trust in one another’s instincts, since, in principle, the ISO side were making some very reasonable points. First of all, they said, consider the new people. There were a lot of new people, especially students, showing up wanting to do direct action. How exactly were they going to plug in and decide what working group they wanted to join if the direct action folk were meeting in an entirely different time and location? Secondly, if one is going to form a coalition that includes labor unions and organized community groups, and you do outreach, they will want to see some kind of mission statement. You can’t just tell them you’re against the FTAA. Of course, the anarchists in the room might have replied by asking what was the point in getting these endorsements anyway: none of these groups were interested in taking part in the action, and any group that might be interested in sending people all the way to Québec to march in the labor parade was almost certainly already making their own arrangements. So, why collect names just to have them on a piece of paper? But no one wanted to preclude the possibility that some new group might be pulled in and decide to take a more radical posture. So, instead, we ended up endlessly talking process.

Julie: For me, there are two issues: First, how do we integrate with the other organizations we’re outreaching to? Having them sign on to a mission statement is a tried and true method for doing that. Anyway, people at large, individuals who aren’t part of an organization, won’t be able to fit into a spokescouncil model. The second is how to avoid reduplication of efforts.

Moose: But the idea of a coalition is not to have an ideology; it’s a means for people with different ideologies or perspectives to work together on an issue.

Green: I want to know what an endorsement would mean in practice. Will unions distribute our flier to their members? If so, that would facilitate individuals joining, as individuals.

Meredith (ISO): Well, the Outreach Working Group has already decided to write a statement and pass it to us. I guess the question becomes what does it mean to be part of the coalition?

Julie: Yes, exactly. When AUTODAWG formed, it was never clear to me if it was a part of the coalition or not. Then, when I showed up at one of their meetings I felt like I was crashing a party.

Enos: Look, I understand how you might have felt that way. But I think part of the reason it happened was because, every time we formed an autonomous direct action working group, it seemed like everyone in the entire coalition would show up. So we started asking ourselves: in what way are we autonomous? In what way are we a different group? Remember, this all started when DAN decided it wanted to work on the FTAA, and created its own working group. Then when all these people showed up, that working group effectively became this coalition. So DAN General was confused and we tried to create a new working group. And it just kept happening.

Marina: You should understand something about how DAN tends to operate, because some of the problem might just be confusion. The people we normally work with—the Lower East Side Collective people, Reclaim the Streets, Ya Basta!—all these groups see themselves as loosely part of DAN. We’re kind of halfway between a group and a spokes network. Reclaim the Streets people for instance, they never come to our meetings, partly because they’re more concerned with local New York issues, partly just because they don’t like meetings, they’re fun-loving party people, that’s part of their whole shtick. But they always show up to actions. So, really, this was a working group for that larger, direct-action oriented community. Some people didn’t want it to be a DAN working group, so we said, all right, let’s just call it an “autonomous” one.

Meredith: Maybe, just to float a proposal here, why not just make a list of working groups we can post on the wall during meetings, so that new people can plug in? How would people feel about that?

Marina: I thought we were here to brainstorm ideas to take back to our groups. I’m uncomfortable about making this a decision-making body. I mean, don’t get me wrong—that’s a constructive proposal…

James: She’s just suggesting we better articulate what we’re doing. Calling that “decision-making” seems just like a matter of semantics, from where I sit.

Enos: I don’t think it’s just semantics. I think the problem is the different nature of the groups involved.

Maggie: I just want to know what to say to people who want to join us…

And so on, apparently ad infinitum. I step out early, partly because, though I had my hand up frequently, Julie never once called on me; partly because several of us had told Starhawk we were coming over at eight. She was staying with a friend named Nesta in Columbia University Housing, just a few blocks away.

Meeting with Starhawk, 8PM

A much, much more pleasant meeting. Inspiring, even.

Just about anyone active in the movement had at least heard of Starhawk. She was a sometime science fiction writer (her most famous novel was about a war between San Francisco and Los Angeles), sometime author of works on feminist paganism, who had been involved in direct action campaigns since the late 1970s. Almost everyone had seen images of her, beating a little drum, leading spiral dances. A practicing witch, she had a reputation as a kind of den mother for the pagan cluster, many wiccans in their forties or fifties, but including many much younger members. Most of us came to the meeting highly skeptical. It was not just the automatic suspicions about movement celebrities, or even East Coast attitudes towards purportedly flaky Californians. The one thing most of us had read by Starhawk was a piece she had written in a widely circulated collection that came out right after Seattle, called “How We Really Shut Down the WTO,” in which she castigated the Black Bloc for refusing to take part in the spokescouncil, defying agreed-upon codes of conduct, and even spoke approvingly of pacifists who pointed out window-breakers to police. The piece, along with even angrier statements by NGO activists like Medea Benjamin, had set off a veritable explosion of rage from the more militant anarchists. Rage, eventually, had led to debate: over questions of solidarity, tactics, what activists owe each other on the streets. A lot of people had changed their minds, Starhawk among them, but at that time, her image had been fixed in everyone’s mind—especially because, unlike characters like Medea Benjamin, who could just be dismissed, she considered herself an anarchist—which gave the whole thing something of the color of a personal betrayal.

So, at any rate, we were suspicious. Still, we came. At least five of us: Moose, Marina, Rufus, Warcry, and myself. If nothing else, everyone was willing to admit Starhawk’s affinity group, the RANT collective, was doing excellent work giving trainings all over the country. By the end of the evening, we were pretty much completely won over.

Partly it was just that she so defied expectations. I don’t know exactly what we were expecting, but at the very least one imagines an anarchist witch would be at least a little bit outré. Instead, what we encountered was one of the most pleasant, reasonable people imaginable. Everything about her was open, friendly, and completely down-to-earth.

Starhawk was staying with her friend Nesta, a noted ecofeminist theorist and occasional Nation writer who was around the same age, currently getting around in an extremely high-tech wheelchair. She was curious about the direct action scene in New York. Moose talked about Ya Basta!, Marina about the People’s Law Collective, Rufus about the Action Medics.

Starhawk talked about her own experience, “I was one of those people who went to Seattle to do my civic duty and, after that, I expected I’d just get back to my life again. Here it is two years later and I haven’t got back yet.”

Nesta was quick to point out that it was not like she had no experience in this sort of thing. Really, they had got their start in the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981. “Remember, how we had to invent all this stuff from scratch? We had no idea what we were doing, how to do things the present generation just takes for granted.”

“Oh, there’s been enormous progress,” Starhawk agreed. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen kids, sixteen, seventeen years old, and they’re already know how to do things it took us fifteen years to figure out.

“Well, if you want to know the history… I was basically an author back then. I had written several books on paganism, the Goddess religion. The network I’m with, Reclaiming, is based on a principle of Magical Activism—we wanted to use magic as a way of reshaping consciousness, to add a spiritual dimension that wasn’t simply Christian. Because, at first, it was only Quakers who really knew how to do any of this. Spokescouncils, affinity groups—all of that really started with the Clamshell Alliance, working against the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. There was this rebel Quaker group called Movement for a New Society that conducted trainings on nonviolence, but also taught this new mode of organizing—consensus, spokescouncils, how to make decisions democratically through small groups and then let them coordinate, bottom-up. And it worked so well that it just took off. At first, there was a kind of battle between the old and new ways of doing things. Most of those campaigns still had paid staff—the usual tiny underpaid staff, but paid staff nonetheless—and what were in effect steering committees, and there were always tensions between the top-down principle and the bottom-up.”

Mumbles of “it’s not exactly like such things never happen any more.”

“And, as I say, then there was the problem of—well, we used to call them the “Quaker fascists,” sometimes—whose kind of spirituality was almost completely alien to ours.

“I was part of a group we called the Matrix Collective, which was part of Reclaiming. We first got involved at the blockade in Diablo Canyon, which was this insane idea they had to build a nuclear power plant directly on a fault line in California, and then later with Lawrence Livermore Group, which was one of the main nuclear weapons labs at Berkeley. We wanted to use the same horizontal structure they’d used at Seabrook, but we also wanted to do ritual. In a way, that meant reinventing everything, because we soon realized that traditional nonviolent civil disobedience is deeply rooted in the ethos of Christianity—or anyway an extremely patriarchal version of religion. There was a reason there was always some male religious hero at the head of the movement. It’s all about chastisement, self-denial, being willing to subject one’s body to pain and suffering in the name of an idea—which is probably Truth or Love or something very nice like that, but still something abstract, transcendent. You negate the corporeal in the name of something higher. Which is what the big world religions are all about, really. So how do you square that with an immanent cosmology which celebrates the body and sees pleasure—especially sexual pleasure—as itself divine?”

She left the question open. “I don’t know if any of us have really figured that out yet. One idea we had was to pull sources of strength out of apparent weakness, to show how little homely things like yarn can, if woven together—sort of like a spell—stop even military machinery. Remember all those webs of yarn from A16?”

“Oh, you mean ones all over the intersections so you had to crawl under them to get back and forth between blockades?” I asked.

“That was the Pagan Cluster’s contribution. Actually the first time I remember using yarn was at a Bohemian Grove action sometime in the early eighties. They are the exclusive men’s club that includes CEOs and lots of Reagan’s cabinet—probably some of Bush’s but it seemed more urgent during the Reagan years. They have a club in downtown San Francisco and a fancy summer resort on the Russian River where every year they have a weeklong summer camp for the rich and powerful, which they begin with a ritual called the Cremation of Care, in which they burn the effigy of a woman. Their motto is “Weaving spiders come not here,” (I’m not making this up!) so we did a direct action where we webbed the whole Boho club in downtown SF and blocked them in.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” I said. “I always used to assume it was just paranoid conspiracy.”

“Then probably the best web story ever was an action at Livermore in… ’82?’83 was it?”

“Oh, that was so hilarious!” said Nesta, who had just driven in from the other room. “I remember that story. The women had woven a long web, like a warp, wasn’t it?, on two sticks that could stretch across the road, wove in pictures of people’s kids, flowers, herbs, etcetera, and used it to block busses of workers…”

“And we had thought of it as a basically symbolic gesture, an artistic statement, really. Nothing that would actually be physically effective. We’d almost finished it and I remember there were these three bike cops sneering at us. Suddenly, they gunned their engines and decided to just plow through it. The next thing we knew, there we were on the ground, and there were the three cops on the ground, and there were their motorcycles, and we were all so hopelessly tangled together it took ten minutes just to cut us out.”

“Do you remember Bork, from the RNC in Philadelphia?” someone asked. “Remember, the one who appeared at the press conference the next day with two black eyes and her face all puffy? The reason they beat her up so badly in Philly…well, they had these cops on bicycles with big scissors. Every time they’d seen one of our banners, they’d hold the scissors out and drive their bikes right through them. Except Bork—obviously she had no idea they were going to be doing this—but she’d reinforced her banner with piano wire.”

“Ouch!”

“If they’d tried to peddle through on neck level they’d have been in big trouble. As it was, two of them got some nasty cuts. (I mean—they never would have if they hadn’t been illegally trying to destroy protesters’ signs.) But, anyway, so they got off the bikes and started smashing her head on the ground.”

Before long everyone was swapping war stories. Starhawk, as it turns out, was mad at the Black Bloc in Seattle mainly because they didn’t respect the collective process—they refused to even attend the spokescouncils. Since then, she had come to thoroughly embrace the principle of diversity of tactics. “We used to do nonviolence training,” she said. “Now we don’t even call it that any more. We give what we call direct action trainings, with classic nonviolence as just one element of a much wider repertoire. After all, it’s the refusal to cause harm or suffering to others that’s the moral point, especially from any spiritual perspective that makes sense to me.” Marina tried to suggest, gently, that she might seriously think about making this change of opinion on her part more broadly known.

One of the reasons Starhawk was anxious to meet with New York Ya Basta!, she finally admitted, was that she was a little worried whether that sort of tactic would translate across the Atlantic. She had first encountered Italian Ya Basta! before the actions against the IMF/World Bank meetings Prague in the fall of 2000. Prague was in many ways just extraordinary. She’d gone early to give trainings on consensus process, and ended up facilitating one of the big spokescouncils. “And it was one of those situations where… well, you know how it has to turn out. There were four different groups and two proposals. Either there would be four marches all starting in different places and they’d all converge somewhere, or there’d be one march and they’d all branch off in four. And there could only be one conclusion really: we’d start together, split apart, and hope, if everything went right, to eventually converge. But, of course, first we had to go through every possibility, every conceivable concern or objection for four, five hours, and finally you’d come up with the conclusion that everyone had to know we’d eventually come up with. By the end I was just exhausted, and practically saying, what’s the point of all this anyway? And then this Romanian guy walked up to me and ‘I can’t believe what just happened. I would never thought anything like that was possible—a thousand people speaking twelve different languages all in a room together, making a decision together, without leaders.’ He was just awestruck. Maybe we sometimes forget how revolutionary a lot of this really is.”

“So did you have much to do with Ya Basta! in Prague?” someone asked. This had been their debut on the larger European stage, and they had performed spectacularly, ending in a famous confrontation with riot police on a bridge leading to the Convention Center where the IMF was meeting, which all of us had watched repeatedly on video.

“Oh, yes. To be honest, at first they rather gave me pause. In part, it was the blatant sexism. For three days of meetings, there was one guy, Luka, who did all the talking. He spoke a little English, but mainly he spoke in Italian. Then there was a woman who did all the translation work—that’s three days of simultaneous translation, which I didn’t think anyone could do for three days without going crazy—and a third, also a woman, who just sat there taking notes. They never rotated, never switched roles. It was obvious both women spoke perfect English, too, but they didn’t venture an opinion once the whole time. Internally, within Ya Basta!, I couldn’t make out any kind of an internal democratic process either. Maybe there were things going on I wasn’t aware of.”

Then it came to tactics. After three days of meetings, Ya Basta! finally decided that their front line would be armed with two-by-fours. Starhawk began talking very slowly and precisely. “To beat against the shields of the riot cops. Not to actually hit them with. The idea was they could push through the police lines that way and they wouldn’t really be attacking the police.”

Eyes blinked.

Mouths opened.

“They really brought two-by-fours?”

“It took us days to consense on that.”

“Jeez,” said Moose. “I mean, okay… I can see the logic but… None of us have ever dreamed of doing anything like that.”

“To be honest,” said Starhawk, “I’m rather glad to hear it. Because when I first heard there were Americans intending to use Tute Bianche tactics, I was a little worried that people might get seriously hurt. You have to bear in mind that it took them five, maybe six years to get to the point where they could do something like that in Europe. Six years of continual media work, hammering away at the idea of the legitimacy of defensive tactics, endless media stunts. And you have to bear in mind that the media in Italy is a thousand times more sympathetic to social movements than the media here. Even on the TV, which is almost all owned by Berlusconi, Luka is up there every time there’s a big action, on talk shows, debating the police or rightwing journalists—things that would be inconceivable in this country.”

“Wow. You know, since I’m the one handling media for New York Ya Basta!,” I said, “I’ve actually been a little worried about that. We’ve considered various media stunts. But basically, the press here always let the cops frame the story—and there’s no way to even broach the subject of, say, the philosophy behind our actions. Believe me I’ve tried. There’s no interest. They just ask us if we’re going to be ‘violent,’ with padding and shields taken as evidence that we’re looking for a fight. We’ve been trying to create the same effect just by being over-the-top silly, with a kazoo band, silly crests, and costumes, so that if people just see us on TV and they’re calling us violent, it’ll be obvious there’s something wrong. But even then we know perfectly well, even if we all dress up as Barney the Dinosaur with our hands tied behind our backs, a good editor could still be able to come up with some image that’ll make us look frightening.”

“Plus, in almost all European countries, there’s a different relation with the police. Everybody knows each other. The whole thing is a little like a game.”

And so on. We drifted off to other topics, but Starhawk had registered her concerns. They had echoed some that had certainly occurred to me at one time or another. I had no idea if any of this was actually going to work.

Tuesday, March 13: AUTODAWG meeting at the National Lawyer’s Guild, 8PM

This was actually the first meeting I’d attended with the Direct Action Working Group everyone had been complaining about.

It began with a report-back. Two Brooklyn activists had just returned from Québec City and were all agog over the beauty of the city, its ancient towers and anarchist graffiti. Then Mac went over breaking developments. He had stayed on at the meeting at the pizza place until the bitter end and done his best to patch things up with the ISO, who, in turn, now wanted to assure us they were completely committed to getting people up to Québec for the direct action on Friday, and not just the labor march the next day. The latest developments from Akwesasne were promising as well: the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was interested in helping, also some auto workers; Warclub, a Mohawk hip-hop band, wanted to be involved in some capacity; our Warrior allies on the Canadian side were already in contact with the Boots family, who were one of the most important Mohawk families on the US side and seemed interested, and so forth.

There were two main orders of business for the meeting itself. The first was the CLAC consulta: I end up being put in charge of coordinating the whole thing. Some discussion followed on the safest options: train, bus, car.

The other was an action planned for April 1. Enos, a local underground cartoonist had been taking point on this one with a friend named Nicky. They had also successfully managed to draft an activist named Twinkie, and this was a bit of a coup. Twinkie was an androgynous young woman whose parents were from Thailand, maybe nineteen or twenty years old with a dramatic punk haircut, famous for many things, but probably most of all for her enormous lung capacity. She was much sought after at demos for her amazing powers of projection, not to mention her knack for being able to invent songs and slogans for any occasion, on the spot. Such people are, as one might imagine, an enormous asset in any demo. In the past she’d largely avoided DAN, preferring to work with more community-oriented groups, but she had decided to throw herself into the FTAA organizing. She also had considerable experience in graphic design.

Enos: We figured that since NEGAN is going to be meeting on the 31^st in Burlington, we could go up from there to the border the next day—which, of course, is also April Fool’s Day. It’s basically a kind of publicity stunt, a media thing, to bring people’s attention to the issues, but also to the fact that they’ve been systematically stopping political activists from crossing over into Canada. And not just turning away people with molotovs, but regular community activists.

Mac: Just last week they refused entry to Lorenzo Komboa Ervin—on the basis of some arrest thirty years ago.

Enos: If they think you’re political, they go through your record and all they need is to come up with one arrest, and they can deny you entry. It doesn’t even have to be a conviction. In some cases, they’ve been denying people entry just on suspicion.

This was, of course, part of the point of the police custom of making mass arrests of hundreds of people at a time during protests. The DC police were particularly famous for surrounding and trapping columns of hundreds of marchers, and then arresting them for “failure to disperse.” The arrests never hold up—they are obviously illegal—but, in the process, everyone is photographed and fingerprinted and this information is then put out on international databases.

Nicky: So, anyway, the idea is to do something to highlight the hypocrisy, since the FTAA is supposed to be all about eliminating border controls—except, of course, what they mean is border controls that affect corporations, not those that affect people. So, we figured we’ll have a bunch of activists dress up as the sort of products that will be getting through. I was going to go disguised as a dollar bill. Someone else was going to dress up as a genetically modified tomato… you get the idea. So when they stop us we can say, “We thought that was the only way we could get through the border.”

Twinkie: I was going to go as an HMO. Though I’m still not entirely sure how the costume is going to work.

Someone: Maybe an insurance salesman?

Enos: Anyway, so we could do some kind of skit based on that, throw a press conference while, in the background, the Canadian police are interrogating and beating up a bunch of vegetables. We’re in contact with some radical media people in Vermont who would definitely cover the story, and we’re hoping to get WBAI, maybe even Frontline for television coverage.

Mandy: You know, technically, if they’re excluding any American with an arrest record, that would include Bush, wouldn’t it? Maybe we could get someone to go as George W with a big “DWI” written across his forehead?

Steve: Doesn’t this all kind of depend on the assumption that they will, in fact, stop us at the border? What happens if they just wave us through? Just out of spite?

Nicky: You don’t have to worry about that. That’s not the way cops work. If the police are under orders to stop activists, then that’s what they have to do. The danger is more they might not even notice we’re activists. That’s what I’m worried about.

Enos: Well, we all know cops are dumb, but… I’m thinking, if they see some guy trying to cross the border dressed as genetically modified food, they’re probably going to figure out they’re dealing with an activist.

Gradually, the meeting becomes something more like a conversation. Two queer activists named Mandy and Jen are wondering if we are romanticizing these “Mohawk Warriors.” Aren’t we really dealing with people who aren’t even remotely on the same page as we are on issues like sexism or homophobia. Twinkie, Target, and Mac are all tripping over each other to respond, detailing the whole history of women’s councils and the constitutional niceties of the confederacy of the Six Nations. (Everyone, it seems, had been reading up on this.) “Actually,” Mac says, “one of the main accomplishments of the Warrior Society during the standoff at Oka was to revive the Clan Mother system as an alternative to the government-sponsored tribal government. By now, all the key decisions on the Canadian side are in the hands of women’s councils. One of Shawn’s hopes for Akwesasne is to start a similar process moving on the other side.”

Mandy is surprised, but guarded. “It sounds wonderful. But don’t you sometimes think it’s all just a little too good to be true?”

The thought had occurred to me as well—maybe all of us. It was hard to deny that, from the perspective of your typical New York anarchist, to have a bunch of Mohawk Warriors promise to open a bridge for you—let alone a bunch of Mohawk Warriors aiming to revive a matriarchal decision-making structure—was about the coolest thing one could possibly imagine. You can only wonder if it’s all just a little bit too cool.

An hour later, we were all strolling over to St. Mark’s place for drinks at the Grassroots Tavern. There was some kind of trash worship party in Brooklyn that night. Everyone was discussing whether it would be worthwhile to go. Mac and Moose get into a long argument about whether DAN was, at this point, an explicitly anarchist organization. Are there any explicitly non-anarchists in DAN? Or at least, other than in DAN Labor? No one is quite sure. Twinkie vanishes and reappeared fifteen minutes later with some Radical Cheerleaders and a huge pile of dumpster-dived sushi. Minor tensions ensued when some of them weren’t let into the bar for lack of ID. After a brief consultation outside, the matter was resolved somehow. Twinkie, on discovering I’m not a vegetarian, keeps handing me pieces of sushi with fish. Not keen on eating dumpster-dived sushi, I kept trying to hide them. She keeps noticing. Rufus gently explains that it’s really the exact same stuff one would have bought in the store twenty minutes earlier: there are laws about when sushi has to be thrown away and, half the time, the moment they put it out, there’s already an activist or local punk kid or two waiting to take it away again.

Thursday, March 15

Outrageous article appears in the Toronto Globe and Mail, reporting rumors that Akwesasne Mohawks will be illegally “smuggling” activists with criminal records over the border into Canada. Apparently, Akwesasne itself has the reputation in Canada of being a den of smugglers—mainly of liquor and tobacco—so the implication is the same boats will be carrying a new criminal export—anarchists—presumably for money. Emails and phone calls are immediately exchanged about how to respond.

YABBA formation in Betty’s studio, 7PM

We merrily bash each other about. This time, Smokey has come up with a suit made out of empty plastic coke-bottles, which proves remarkably resilient against most powerful blows of our padded billy-clubs. We go through various defensive scenarios: How to hold the line if cops are simply trying to break through a shield wall. How to defend a specific individual they’re trying to snatch. One thing that is becoming obvious is that with all this gear, we’re going to need at least twenty minutes prep time before we can go into action.

There’s a long discussion of crests: we’ve managed to secure a fairly large number of surplus British riot police helmets from a mail-order catalog (and each comes with two free rubber shin guards!), and spray-painted most of them pumpkin-orange. A plan has been floating around to personalize them by putting mock-heraldic devices on top: stuffed penguins, kewpie dolls, pinwheels, that sort of thing. The problem is, as Smokey points out, that this would individualize us: police could easily pick any one of us out for arrest if we no longer all looked alike. Would it be possible, perhaps, to have some kind of widget on top of each helmet so that one could plug and unplug crests at will? That way, we could constantly switch them around? But the project seems more trouble than we’re likely to put into it.

Announcements: There will be legal trainings in Burlington from 1PM to 5PM Saturday, probably one mini-training just for Yabbas.

Emma and Moose are away doing a street training.

Smokey and Flamma point out that, even without padding, a Ya Basta! formation could serve as a perfect diversion. During an anti-sweatshop rally two weeks earlier, six of us just put on the chemical jumpsuits. The moment we started suiting up, the top cop ran up and demanded to know what was going on and, throughout the subsequent march, we were surrounded on four sides by police at all times. We tied down the bulk of their forces just with the six of us.

I draft Sasha to join me at the Québec City consulta.

Friday, March 16

Another thing that emerged from the Thursday meeting was that, as “Minister of Information” for Ya Basta!, it was my job to fashion a press release responding to the Globe and Mail piece. After the meeting, I locked myself in my room with a laptop and, around 2 or 3AM, sent off a draft to the Yabba list for feedback:

PRESS RELEASE
From: the New York City Ya Basta! Collective
& the New York City Direct Action Network

On Thursday March 15, an article appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail which misrepresented the results of an historic meeting between US and Canadian activists and traditional Mohawks from Akwesasne earlier this month.

Contrary to the article’s claims, there have never been any plans to “smuggle” activists (let alone “criminals”) across the border. Our intentions have been, from the beginning, public and above-board; public statements were released, among other places, through the NYC Independent Media Center ([[http://www.nyc.indymedia.org][www.nyc.indymedia.org]. ) and on the Internet. It is hardly our fault if reporters and police (who we had assumed were monitoring us fairly carefully!) could not be bothered to look up these readily available public documents.

After setting out the actual facts of the matter, it continued, using a lot of the language we’d developed in previous discussions within Ya Basta!:

WHY HAS THIS BEEN NECESSARY?

While we have always been open, the FTAA itself has been, from the beginning, a secret project, created by government and corporate elites with as little input from the public as possible. For this reason, its sponsors have regularly used international borders to prevent representatives of the public from coming anywhere near their meetings, even though these protesters are, in their opposition to the treaty, simply expressing the views of the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the countries these signatories claim to represent. During the OAS meetings in Windsor, Ontario last summer, which laid the groundwork for the FTAA, approximately two out of every three activists who attempted to cross the border from the US were prevented by physical force. In past months, activists trying to attend meetings in Québec have been turned back at the border, been detained, and been subjected to illegal searches and seizures. We have every reason to believe authorities are intending to use force to prevent environmentalists, union members, and other political dissidents from airing their opposition to the secret negotiations in Québec City in April.

AGAINST THE STUPIDITY OF BORDERS

The use of international border controls to squash political dissent is yet more proof that the process referred to as “globalization” is in fact nothing of the kind; as well as the absurdity of calling the vast international movement that has risen to oppose it in the name of global democracy an “anti-globalization movement.” It’s time to drop the propaganda and speak honestly about these things. If “globalization” were to mean anything, it would mean the gradual dismantling of national borders to allow the free movement of people, possessions, and ideas. Corporate “globalization” has meant the exact opposite: it has meant trapping the poor behind increasingly fortified borders so as to let the rich take advantage of their desperation. The number of armed guards along the US-Mexican border has more than doubled since the signing of NAFTA; refugees and asylum seekers languish like criminals in twenty-three hour lockdown; immigrant communities live in constant terror. We can only expect more of the same if NAFTA is extended to the entire Western Hemisphere.

Instead, Ya Basta! is calling for the abolition of national borders and recognition of a principle of global citizenship. We believe that every human being born on this planet has the right to live where she chooses, and not have her life chances be determined by some random geographical accident of birth. We hold that every human has an equal right to the basic means of existence: air, water, food, shelter, education, and health care. We want to see the authority of nation-states gradually dissolve and power devolve onto free communities on the basis of true economic and political democracy; a process that will lead to an outpouring of new forms of wealth and culture that the impoverished minds of the current rulers of the world could not possibly imagine. The Direct Action Network offers its own success as a rapidly growing continental federation, based on principles of direct democracy and decentralized consensus decision-making, as living proof that rulers—and this includes elected “representatives”—are simply unnecessary. Ordinary people are perfectly capable of governing their own affairs on the basis of equality and simple decency.

National borders were created through violence, and are maintained through violence. They are the remnants of a barbarous age that humanity must, if it is to survive, eventually overcome. We refuse to recognize their legitimacy.

FOR THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF COMMUNITIES AND MOHAWK SOVEREIGNTY

We are choosing to travel via Cornwall in order to express our solidarity with the Mohawk Nation and our recognition of its sovereignty over territories it occupied long before the US and Canadian governments even existed. Nothing illustrates the insanity of national borders more than the fact that the same governments that waged genocidal war against the Mohawks now claim the right to determine who can cross from one part of Mohawk territory to another. Our solidarity with our Traditional Mohawk sisters and brothers is rooted in our support for regional autonomy and communal self-determination in the face of the arrogant power of the state; but, also, in our profound respect and admiration for a Nation whose political contributions to the world—the creation of a federative constitution without a centralized state, the collective management of resources, respect for individual autonomy, the role of peacemaking, the political empowerment of women—provide, for many of us, visions of how a future just society might work that is far more compelling than the US Constitution, which was partially inspired by it. We wish to thank our Mohawk friends for their generous invitation and express our profound commitment to furthering their struggle for sovereignty, communal rights, and social justice, just as they have recognized our right, as world citizens, to make our presence known to the politicians who presume to act in our names in Québec City on April 19^th–21^st.

It ended with contact numbers for Ya Basta! (me), DAN (Eric), and the Mohawk Warriors (Shawn).

Saturday, March 17

9PM, Saturday night there’s a huge Zapatista event. The EZLN had marched into Mexico City to lobby for an indigenous autonomy bill a month before, and the movie was already out. The showing was accompanied by report-backs from two DAN people who’d been there at the time.

Afterwards, parties. Powwow outside one of them about the press release. Time is of the essence, certainly, but (several ask) shouldn’t we have to clear this with the Mohawks before releasing it? Moose says he called Shawn and Shawn just said, “Well, we don’t ask you to approve our press releases.” Eric from the DAN Media Collective agrees to send them out by Blast Fax to every major news outlet in the country the next day, and a copy goes up on the web page.

It’s not clear if anyone ever read it. Certainly no one ever calls us back. All such grand statements simply disappear into the ether, just like all the op-eds and letters we regularly send out to newspapers before major actions. Then, the same media outlets who refuse to run them complain to their readers that it’s impossible to figure out what these anti-globalization types are actually for.

Sunday, March 18: DAN meeting at Charas

Another long meeting. Prolonged discussion on the current state of negotiations with Shawn and OCAP.

Mac urges DAN to endorse the Cornwall action: best, he says, to do so as quickly as possible before the next NEGAN meeting on the thirty-first to ensure people do go to the direct action rather than leaving with the union busses the next day. So we endorse it.

There’s a long discussion about a fund-raising party being planned at a place called the Frying Pan, about the Globe and Mail story and others like it, and, especially, about the media event planned for April Fool’s Day. An April 1 working group had already formed and hashed out the details:

Enos: That recent article in the Globe and Mail is actually symptomatic of the kind of press we’ve been getting. It’s all pretty much the same: we’re going to be violent, disruptive, we’re a bunch of hoodlums, not representative of anyone or anything, coming to set fire to the city. So, we were trying to figure out how to provide some more realistic images of who we are and what we’re about. That’s how we hit on the idea of doing an action with funny costumes, something silly and harmless. The idea was that we could time it for April 1^st, which is not only April Fool’s Day, it’s the day that SalAMI is carrying out their “show the text” action in Ottawa. We show up at the border, we tell them politely that we’re going to join the protests in Ottawa; we get turned back; we hold a press conference. Explain to them this is what we have to do to get any media attention.

That’s pretty much it. To make this work, though, we’re going to need lots more people at the meetings. We only got three or four last time. I’m going as Bush, Nicky will be a dollar bill. Julie from the Urban Justice League is going to be a genetically engineered tomato…

Target: It’s too bad it’s on the first, actually, because that’s the day they’re having the men’s anti-sexism workshop at Charas.

Nicky: Oh, yeah. Oops. Well, hopefully it won’t be the last one.

I spend much of the next week trying to figure out exactly how one goes about renting a car (I don’t drive), making preparations for Québec. Several people say they might be interested in coming, but only one follows through: Dweisel, from the Free CUNY Collective. That makes four of us in one car. I skip the next week’s Ya Basta! meeting and head off the next weekend.