popular uprising - 2012 - Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Paul Mason
Verso
2012
237 pages

Back in the years of 1994, 1995, and 1996, when the Internet was just emerging as a mainstream media service, a large number of books with titles like 'Cyberia' were published about the new frontier of digital freedoms to be found in cyberspace. These books made grandiose predictions about the utopia that lay beyond the horizon now that the internet's mass availability had just come into view. The predictions about increased democracy and global intelligence and everything else now seems incredibly naive to the critical observer, but now the gushing cheerleaders of 1990s internet freedoms and consciousness, like Timothy Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Mark Dery are replaced by critics such as Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Jodi Dean, and Robert McChesney; critics who discuss the adverse effects digital and networked technologies have on society, literacy, politics, commerce, etc.

One of the early adopters of these networked technologies as they appeared in the 90s, were the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous revolutionaries struggling for greater autonomy in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Beginning their revolution on January 1, 1994, the EZLN disseminated their communiques via the internet, in Spanish and English, to the world, marking the very beginnings of what was popularly known as the anti-globalization movement and what is referred to by anarchist anthropologist (a title he refuses on his twitter page) David Graeber as the global justice movement (a name for the movement which I haven't seen in print in any source other than his work). The Zapatistas use of the internet to get their message out was notable for two reasons, first was the novelty of the internet at the time, and the novelty of its use by political radicals, and the second was that it was being used by revolutionaries in a remote and impoverished section of Mexico by indigenous people. That radicals of the fourth world were using the latest in communications technologies garnered the EZLN the label of the first post-modern revolutionaries. In the year 2000, with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the anti-globalization movement became a global phenomenon with the full attention of the mainstream media, and one of the aspects of this movement the mainstream media fixated on was the protesters use of technology. At the time, it was of interest to observers that activists were using things like laptops and websites to any extent.

The interesting thing about Paul Mason's book, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere, is not that it has anything interesting to say about the uprisings seen around the globe in 2011. Mason's is far from the only book to examine those events, and what it has to say about them is typical of sympathetic journalists. Of course, Mason gets that the human element of these movements, but personal testimonies of movement participation have been a major feature of these uprisings, and there are entire books from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement written by the people. Its that it's a book-length emanation of this continued amazement over that activists are using digital technologies that makes it interesting. History is filled with examples of radicals using their contemporary communication technologies to disseminate their ideas at the same time that they engage in direct action. Consider the mass of writings produced by radical groups, such as the Diggers during 17th century England because of their access to printing presses, or the Yippies studies of television formats and media theories so they could appear effectively on the medium. That activists use current communication technologies in their struggle is to be expected, but because so much hope has been invested in the internet's potential to direct change, it is still possible, in 2012, for an individual to write a book with nothing more profound to say about activists than that they're using blackberries and facebook to communicate with one another. That's what Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere is, a lengthy assertion that technologies are at the forefront of political change rather than people and their ideas. A return to the hope felt in the mid-90s that the internet has produced new kinds of spaces where all our hopes for mankind will be realized. That recent communication technologies permit activists with rapid-fire abilities to evade systems of control and authority, a point of view that's obviously incorrect. When Paul Mason writes that new activists using smartphones and social media are "pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being", he's echoing the never-realized transhumanist pronouncements of 80s and early/mid-90s tech gurus like Timothy Leary. When Paul Mason makes analogies between the current situation and the French Revolution and says "A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop." He's repeating the same amazement shown in 2000-2001 over activists using computers. I think it is possible that a reader could dive into the literature of the anti-globalization movement and come up with similar statements, and the major difference between then and now, is that now the brandnames for each communication format are noted.

Taken at a broader level, there is an intense delirium for digital technologies in all fields and social areas, and similar books are being written discussing how incredibly epoch making tablet computers and social media are in everything, including political activism. While its undeniable that these technologies are having major effects across society, I don't see how people can look at the internet and its related technologies, and also look at how they're actually used by people on a daily basis, and see their effects only as positive steps taken towards a more perfect world. One of the effects of the internet as a communications technology is that it occupies our fields of vision and sets limits on what we can see in ways that always refers back to itself. In this way, of course, digital and networked technologies appear to us as problem solving in an of themselves if they're all we can see in the world. In Mason's book, he quotes an activist who refuses to read radical texts of the past, instead favoring new ideas, especially if they're spread on twitter. While Mason offers these statements as examples of new kinds of activists who are resistant to ideologies, a ludicrous position as ideology is always at play, this activist actually reveals herself to be vulnerable to manipulation due to her preference in consumer communication products. These new consumer technologies commodify communication, friendship, emotion, and possibly even revolution. What's being described here is designer communication, and it is inserting itself into the revolutionary spirit in ways that are actually insidious. Mason is writing in 2012, now in 2014 it might be interesting to think about how an obsessive fetishizing of these communication tools contributed to the dissolution of the movements they apparently pushed forward a couple of years ago. They are, fundamentally, consumer products and provide consumer experiences, and a book can just as easily be written about these media companies like facebook doing things like deleting the Anarchist Memes page. Activists can hold discussions on facebook, activists can also lose their job for revealing their political attitudes on their facebook page. As communication tools, social media networks should not be taken as inherently revolutionary or the primary means through which revolution is won.

pacifism - book - 1966 - Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History

Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History
Staughton Lynd (ed)
Bobbs-Merrill
1966
530 pages

Nonviolence in America is a large anthology of texts that all share the advocacy of non-violent resistance as a means of effecting social change. The book is edited by Staughton Lynd, an American dissident and historian who, over the course of his life as an activist, has taken on a variety of social causes and deployed an equally diverse number of strategies to raise awareness of them. Nonviolence in America is one of the first publications in a fairly lengthy and impressive bibliography that has continued up until 2011.

Lynd’s anthology of writings by American authors espousing techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience was published in the mid-1960s and it was likely compiled, in part, as an inspiration to the burgeoning anti-war movement and the new left, to show a long history of such forms of activism in American society. The earliest writings include late 18th century texts written by Quaker abolitionists, and proceeds from there to the contemporary-to-publication Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States.  The anthology is great for including items such as Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay Civil Disobedience in their entirety rather than reducing such an important piece to excerpts or key passages.  Furthermore, the book also includes pieces from seemingly unlikely sources such as anarchists like Voltairine De Cleyre and labour leaders describing auto-worker sit-down strikes during the most dramatic period of organized labour history in America.

The anthology never waivers from its focus and demonstrates a strong history of effective non-violent direct action activism in a society that appears obsessed with violence. It is a testament to the historical repetition of the enormous moral power of enduring violence without returning it. The book was published in the year before the Black Panthers formed their first chapter in Oakland and fingered the trigger of revolutionary violence in 1960s America. The emergence of the BPP produced an already forming schism in the American Civil Rights movement and inspired other groups such as the SDS splinter group, The Weathermen, to pursue violent action. Lynd’s anthology was published again in 1995, when the anti-globalization movement was building, and the debates of the merits of violent vs non-violent protest tactics were renewed and continue today.

organized labour - book - 1931 - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
Louis Adamic
Peter Smith
1931 (Revised Edition - 1963)
495 pages

Louis Adamic, the author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, was not an academically trained historian.  He was rather one of the working class intellectuals that Antonio Gramsci theorized in his essay The Formation of the Intellectuals published in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.  That is, an individual who emerged from his or her specific form of class consciousness to act as philosopher from their social situation.  Adamic was, as a young man, an unemployed and unskilled worker, a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the international radical labour union, to become a speaker and historian of that movement.  He lacked formal education but possessed a will to compile the history of a movement that, in his time, no academic historian was likely to produce. That is, the history of fighting labour in the United States from the mid-19th century through to the 1920s.  

Adamic’s history begins with the Molly Maguires, or “Mollies”, a group of ruthlessly aggressive Irish immigrant miners who would kill any mining bosses that created unfavourable conditions.  This history then progresses into early wildcat strikes which led to the organization of labour unions.  Adamic has a fondness for the more radical unions (such as his own IWW) and opposes them to the more bureaucratic and conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed under the boss-like cigarmaker Samuel L. Gompers.  The heroes of Dynamite are probably Bill Haywood, the brawling Miners Union leader, and Eugene V. Debs, the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who personally led their rank and file into street battles with police and strikebreakers.  Adamic appears to have a fondness, as well, for the users of dynamite, as the statement “Dynamite!  That’s the stuff!” appears throughout his text as an affirmation of radical labour’s fighting spirit. Woven into Ademic’s historical narrative of violent labour activity are the stories of anarchists who have taken up the cause, or of related persecution of anarchists of this period, including the episode of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of mine boss Henry Clay Frick, Louis Lingg and the Haymarket Explosion, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution, which occurred while Ademic was researching and writing this text.

Adamic seems to adore the fighting spirit, even the willingness to use dynamite to advance the interests of working people. Conversely, he speaks with derision of Gomper’s willingness to compromise, negotiate with bosses, which he portrays as the behavior of one who was essentially a career politician. Furthermore, when Adamic speaks of Miner and IWW leader “Big” Bill Haywood’s willingness to leap into combat with only his fists as weapons, he discusses with loathing the AFL’s alliances with Mafia ‘protection’ men, and hired brutes who fought against the bosses’ Pinkerton (for-hire strikebreaking muscle) bullies. Thus Adamic identifies a rift in the American labor movement and firmly priviledges one side over another in his narration of the history of labor-centered violence.

anti-globalization - book - 2003 - We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism
Notes from Nowhere Collective (editors)
Verso
2003
521 pages

Hello out there on the internet!  I borrowed We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism from the Toronto Public Library.

There are at least two texts that are fundamentally important to the study of the worldwide movement to resist globalization.  The first of these texts is Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which examines the global effects of consumer branding and its associated activities, with regards to consumption, production, and opposition.  The other text is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, a theoretical text proposing that a shift in political and social organization has occurred from a period of modernist capitalism to a postmodernist ‘empire’ oriented around networks and perpetual crisis.  We Are Everywhere can be added to this list as a companion text that details numerous accounts of resistance to the damaging actions of multi-national corporations and international administrative organizations.  

We Are Everywhere is a book assembled by the Notes from Nowhere Collective, a group of western (I gather from reading each member’s brief bio at the back of the book that most of them are from the U.K. although at least one member appears to be American) writers, educators and activists.  They are all involved with other activist media outlets and events such as Indymedia and Reclaim the Streets parties.  Through their engagement with an international activist media, and with anti-globalization efforts in their home countries, the collective appeared to develop a holistic view of the worldwide activist scene, which they brought to this text.  

We Are Everywhere is a comprehensive series of dispatches, written by a large number of different writers and in a number of different forms, from the global anti-capitalist movement.  The book includes articles and anecdotes about various actions, writings whereby individuals representing an activist group survey that groups actions, photo-essays and interviews with activists.  The book also maintains a timeline, of events of significance to the anti-globalization movement, that runs along a bottom register of most of its pages.  

In addition to its wide array of textual forms, We Are Everywhere strives to be truly global in its scope. The Notes from Nowhere collective begin the book with accounts of the 1994 events in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas surrounding the foundation of the ELZN movement and their demands for autonomy for the indigenous populations of that region.  Thus the book charts a history of international activism that begins in January 1994 in Mexico and attempts to include pieces on actions and protests from as many different locales as possible, from Mexico to Italy, Kenya, Brazil, Paupa New Guinea and so forth, everywhere, ending with a 2003(?) interview with South African activist and intellectual, Ashwin Desai.  In Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss how multi-national corporations have realized some of the ideas put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where the localized nodes of networked corporations can adjust their operations to suit the contours of the location.  Many pieces featured in We Are Everywhere describe the unique tactics of protest and sabotage developed by local activist organizations in counter-force to shape-shifting corporations. Furthermore, many pieces describe anti-globalization protests as carnivalesque (c.f. Reclaim the Streets), and out of the hundreds of black-and-white photos featured in the book many of them depict protesters in costume and blur the lines between revelry and serious political activity.  

The Notes from Nowhere collective have compiled a volume that fits into a book-type that attempt to survey a global activist scene.  Other such books include The New Revolutionaries, edited by Tariq Ali, which represents the global far-left scene of the 1960s, and Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, which surveys Marxist activity worldwide in the contemporary period.  Ali’s book is primarily written by well-known movement intellectuals and spokespeople, and From Marxism is the work of a single author.  The editors of We Are Everywhere give voice to the participants of the movement and its associated sub-movements, and provides a view into global efforts to confront global capital between the years 1994 and 2003.  

Related: see the Signalfire blog for daily accounts of anti-globalization activity, workers strikes, student protests and general unrest from around the world.

organized labour - book - 2001 - From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States
Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty
Illustrations by Joe Sacco
The New Press
2001
364 pages

    Hello out there on the Internet.  I borrowed From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States from Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

    From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States is a comprehensive yet concise chronicle of American organized labour.  The book starts with a description of working conditions for indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonial subjects in the new world, and moves through history ending with discussions of the disparities between workers wages and the salaries of corporate CEOs.  The text charts the struggles to maintain labour unions and the perpetual dialectic between workers and management in attempting to negotiate better conditions.

    From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend is a scholarly work by labour historians.  Priscilla Murolo is the Co-Director, Graduate Program in Women's History/History at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.  Much of Murolo’s work focuses on the labour history of women.  A.B. Chitty is a librarian at Queens College of the City University of New York.  As the authors' history of American labour moves out of the slave period and into an era where organizations gained strength, the reader (me) can become bogged down by the acronym names of all of the worker’s organizations that formed through the twentieth century.  Thankfully the authors included a glossary of acronyms at the beginning of the book although one union can sound like another if you do not keep careful track of how each group entered the text.  The book does not have footnotes or citations, but instead has a ‘Suggested Reading’ section near the end, with a list of other scholarly works pertaining to organized labour and the history of work.

    There are no photographs or other historical visual materials in Murolo and Chitty’s text.  Instead, award winning (American Book Award, Guggenhem Fellowship, Eisner Award) comics artist and writer, Joe Sacco, drew short interludes in comic book format.  Sacco's work detailed workplace situations and management attitudes that compelled the workers to organize.  Sacco also drew panels illustrating the most common professions of the different phases of American labour history: the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial eras.  Sacco’s illustrations are not necessarily scholarly (the ‘boss’ of his illustrations has the same features from comic to comic even if times and settings change) but they provide some relief from reading Murolo and Chitty’s dense text.  

    Murolo and Chitty’s histroy of American labour unions is comprehensive.  The authors detail the initial struggles for unions, often lead by European immigrants who arrived steeped in a radical tradition, to the rise of the radical Industrial Workers of the World that held a prominent position in labour politics through the early part of the twentieth century.  The authors also focus quite a bit on the unions that turned into powerful lobbyist bureaucracies, such as the American Federation of Labour, with lawyers for leaders rather than workers.  There is a frequent sense that worker’s organizations were sites where fairly normal people would temporarily become radical in their outlook and behavior, however the authors also describe a fair amount of conservatism among organized labour.  The authors also focused on the varying attitudes different unions held towards racial integration and the inclusion of women, which were not always progressive.  And at certain times and places unions were segregated and the rank and file would occasionally agitate to maintain that status.  The authors also identified unions that were willing to look beyond racial prejudice and build on class ties rather than race.  

    Murolo and Chitty’s text covers much notable successes and failures of organized labour in America.  What is missing in their text are accounts of efforts to organize that are thwarted.  There were a number of high profile stories from recent years, for example, of the workers at particular McDonalds or Wal Mart locations who attempt to unionize but fail.  Their failure occurred either because the workers fear repercussions or because corporate management closes the store, but it is this aspect of labour history that is not found in From The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend.  Researchers should rely on this text for the history of workers who successfully organized, and with regards to the history of established labour unions Murolo and Chitty’s book is quite strong.