Tactics and ethics in responses to globalization: Responds
Glenn, David
BEFORE WE talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839— less than a decade after they'd dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of...
...Almost certainly not...
...The Milwaukee farmers of 1839 might have been proud...
...By the way, I'd apply this principle of cheerfully serving jail time not only to the vandals, but to the broader civil disobedience in Seattle: the blocking of streets and the "shutting down" of the WTO's first afternoon session...
...Several muscular committeemen grabbed him and suggested politely that he had made a mistake...
...The particular anarchist groups that probably committed the small Seattle crimes seem to be steeped in a subculture that romanticizes violence and is much too pessimistic about the prospects for building broad, democratic social movements in the United States.* (3) I should be willing to acknowledge that my vandalism breached the social contract—by serving time in jail...
...Rachel Neumann writes that a very small number of the Seattle activists gave "visual punctuation" to the proceedings by smashing storefront windows—notably targeting retailers like Nike, whose overseas labor practices have been especially evil...
...I am far more skeptical about this idea than Neumann is...
...IN LATE December, a few weeks after the WTO meetings, the Campaign for Labor Rights (CLR) sent out an e-mail bulletin about the U.S.-based Fresh Del Monte Produce (no relation to the better-known Del Monte...
...And they found dozens of fresh ways of puncturing business as usual—most famously when a few activists released thousands of crickets in the middle of a city land auction...
...but neither did it slide into the kind of raw destruction that might have alienated important allies or generated embittered vanguardism...
...And in the wake of Wisconsin's famous welfare-reform program (nearly 90 percent of the state's recipients have left the rolls), why aren't there visible, angry social movements concerned with child care, health care, the sexist division of housework, and all the other issues faced by women in poverty...
...1) Every effort should already have been made to bring Fresh Del Monte to justice through less drastic means...
...S0, WITH THOSE two ideas in tension, on to Seattle...
...2) In my vandalism I should be working in harmony with a visible, democratic social movement...
...Which is to say: I'm grateful that the state suppressed the white racist mobs that tried to disrupt school desegregation here in the 1970s...
...This story leaves me with two equal and opposite reactions: (I) Milwaukee today needs some of that old shark-committee spirit...
...And all of that is true, I think...
...In February 1839— less than a decade after they'd dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve...
...They'd staked out plots on land to which the city held title—spent years of labor nurturing gardens and building block committees—and now the city was selling those gardens to for-profit developers...
...Given all this—the vandalism caused no physical injuries, and it may have helped the cause as much as hurt it—should we accept Neumann's argument that property destruction "may be an apt response" to social injustice...
...This doesn't mean that I believe all our social arrangements and criminal laws are perfectly just...
...Now Washington announced that much of this land would be sold at a public auction, opening the door to speculators and land sharks from Chicago and beyond...
...So this was not goody-goody, strictly legal stuff...
...And I shouldn't whine about being a "political prisoner," either—that would be an insult to the suffering of actual political prisoners, in Guatemala and elsewhere, who have been persecuted for exercising basic rights...
...Their response was to form "shark committees...
...Captain Carlos Enrique Hernandez Diaz, the chief of security for Fresh Del Monte in Guatemala, was allegedly part of the goon squad...
...ACOUPLE OF years ago in New York City, community gardeners faced a situation very similar to that of the Milwaukee farmers of 1839...
...These were great acts—they were the heart of what happened in Seattle—but they were also illegal as hell...
...Should the state arrest Operation Rescue members if they try to disrupt a national Planned Parenthood convention...
...It would be easy to answer with a simple no: it was counterproductive, because it repulsed tens of millions of citizens who might otherwise have been sympathetic, and because it gave the mass media covering Seattle something to talk about other than labor rights, the environment, and police brutality...
...Assuming these reports are true, we're talking about a violent crime against some courageous and deeply impoverished workers...
...This principle—the ancient idea that violence should be resisted with the minimum feasible amount of counterviolence— ought to be obvious...
...As some of Neumann's own historical examples (the Algerian revolution, the Weathermen) teach us, vanguardist organizations with cults of "action" can easily turn monstrous...
...And there's reason to worry that a few of the sects at the WTO protests may be heading down that road...
...ARGUMENTS sible less violent tactic before we resorted to property destruction...
...If the state's treatment of these cases is in fact unequal, then our American Civil Liberties Union dues should be put to work...
...In the more-or-less liberal and democratic United States, as long as the state gives equal treatment to (a) a left-wing journalist who has smashed Fresh Del Monte's windows, (b) a frat boy who has smashed a sports bar's windows, (c) a racist skinhead who has smashed an anarchist bookstore's windows, then any talk of political prisoners in these cases would be callow posturing...
...So in terms of realpolitik, let's call it a wash...
...As the amateur historian Robert Wells gives the story, the federal auction, which was held in the village of Milwaukee, went like this: "I bid twenty," a land shark said...
...Why hasn't there been more resistance...
...As Neumann says, "rage is a natural and required response...
...Hundreds of farmers had staked out claims on land to which the federal government held title...
...Having expressed my rage, I should drive from Fresh Del Monte down to the police station and start doing my forty-five days for criminal destruction of property...
...At the very least, I think some basic ground rules should be obeyed...
...2) Thank God the shark committees' style of mob violence isn't tolerated in Milwaukee anymore...
...I, too, was depressed by the emotional flatness that crept into the Diallo protests at City Hall after a few weeks...
...Or better, only if three conditions are met...
...I'm grateful that the state will try to arrest and prosecute anyone who goes around smashing windows, for political reasons or otherwise...
...Well, the standards should be the same across the board...
...Kauffman's essay at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/ 1999/12/10/anarchists/index.html...
...And, although many gardens have been lost, the campaign did manage to save hundreds of them...
...And it's a gesture of good faith from the visible, democratic social movement I work with (see condition 2) to the public at large: as we fight for radical change, we will always respect the basic norms of civilization...
...When Thomas Friedman and Al Gore lie awake at night during the next few years agonizing about globalization, the Seattle vandalism, a vivid symbol of potential global unrest, will surely flash through their minds...
...I should not be a vanguardist, operating in contempt of society instead of within it...
...Hardly...
...But would it be ethical for me to drive down to Florida this afternoon and throw some rocks through Fresh Del Monte's headquarters...
...This vandalism may have raised Nike's insurance premiums by a nickel or two, but no one was physically injured...
...On the other hand, with the audience that DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 93 ARGUMENTS counts most in the short run—the WTO bureaucrats and their courtiers—the broken windows probably did strike a useful chord...
...After a while, even the most stubborn of the outside speculators was convinced and the settlers got their land at ten shillings an acre, with a limit of 320 acres per man...
...According to the CLR report, Fresh Del Monte appears to have directed efforts to crush an established union at one of its Guatemalan subsidiary's banana plantations...
...In October 1999, a band of two hundred armed men forced the union leaders to resign, and wages at the plantation have since dropped by 20 percent...
...He insisted that he had a right to bid...
...If Middle Americans were repulsed by the Seattle vandalism in part because they're worried about precedents like these, who can blame them...
...The settlers feared that they would lose everything they'd toiled for—that the free market would uproot their families just as they themselves had uprooted the area's indigenous people a few years earlier...
...It poses a real challenge for radicals: to find new nonviolent ways of puncturing the social 94 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 equilibrium, new modes of protest that don't seem pathetically stale...
...It's a sign that I recognize norms of decency that Fresh Del Monte does not...
...And many in the public at large will probably support us because they'll know that we'd already tried every fea*For more about the tone of these groups, see L.A...
...DAVID GLENN is writing a book about the city of Milwaukee and the American social contract...
...The city has been astonishingly quiescent during the past three decades, as thousands of its high-wage manufacturing jobs have been relocated to Mexico, China, and other countries whose labor movements are tyrannized...
...If he came back to bid some more, they threw him in again...
...The gardeners and their allies responded with a campaign that struck just the right tone, that treated New York's political machinery with exactly the disrespect it deserves...
...Of course our justice system is profoundly unjust in some ways, but I also think it's obvious that the state's defense of civic order is a fundamental and necessary condition of a decent society...
...Hauling him down to the river—someone had thoughtfully chopped a hole in the ice—they tossed him in...
...Neumann is absolutely correct when she says that many of our familiar techniques, even mass arrests, have become bloodless and routinized...
...Let's put all questions of ethics aside for a moment, and ask, Did the vandalism in Seattle help the protesters' cause...
...DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 95...
...The audacity of the shark committees— their willingness to disrupt the social order, their refusal meekly to accept their fate—is in short supply these days in the city they founded...
...But this dilemma is no excuse for us to cross the line into raw property destruction (and in any case, broken windows themselves would start to seem trite pretty quickly...
...This is our challenge, I think, and the best way of interpreting Herbert Marcuse's call to "be these [new] human beings here and now": to avoid lifeless bone-dry reformism on the one hand and revolutionary posturing and cheap violence on the other...
...They wasted no time in argument...
...At the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings, for the first time in many years, we saw broad-based, left-wing movements that wanted not only to go through the rituals of protest but to make some real noise (or, as some of the anarchist groups there put it, to "fuck shit up...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
