What Now? More than just shutting shit down by Sarah Norr When I came back from Seattle, I helped write an account of the protests there. I asked the Hermes staff if I was supposed to be writing about the WTO, or about my experiences protesting it. The two stories were filed in completely different parts of my brain – it’s hard to think about the global economy when you’re surrounded by tear gas and Darth Vader look-alikes. After DC, I noticed again how our tactics are taking on a life of their own. There1s been a lot of debate about whether the protests in Seattle and DC constitute a "movement." If they do, I think it’s a movement of shutting things down as much as a movement against corporate globalization. I don’t mean to say that protestors don’t know or care about their targets; everyone I talked to in DC was informed about the IMF and genuinely believed in our cause. But the IMF and World Bank have been doing essentially the same thing since 1982, and their meetings attracted only a few dozen protestors last year. It was the direct-action momentum left over from Seattle – as much as any specific bad thing the IMF did in the past year – that brought us all to DC. The importance of direct action to this movement is a great thing. For decades, Americans were lulled into thinking that real, disruptive protest was dead. In the political climate that we grew up in, proving that people can still rise up against the system is as revolutionary as any of our demands. And protest itself can show us what we should be fighting for. I went to DC to stop the IMF, but what I saw there – thousands of people, out on the streets, making their voices heard, making contact, talking about ideas, talking to strangers, drumming, dancing, singing in subway cars – now seems like a goal for our movement, not just a tactic. But there are problems with letting civil disobedience define our movement. Large-scale direct action can1t happen everywhere, all the time, on every issue. The broad resistance we saw in Seattle and DC is great, but we also need to work for concrete, immediate change, and to stick to particular issues for the long haul. In the past few months, I’ve forgotten all my WTO factoids and learned new IMF horror stories. But somebody’s got to stay on the WTO’s ass, or Seattle is just going to end up a minor obstacle in its diabolical quest for world domination. As we gain more power, it’s becoming more and more important that we offer particular solutions, not just a reactive force. That’s not necessarily possible through shutting down cities. In order to get enough people out on the streets to form blockades, organizers have refused to take any stance except opposition to the WTO and IMF. But if protestors succeed in gaining a voice in these institutions, we’re going to have to come back to the differences we’ve put aside, and figure out how to turn abstract goals like justice and democracy into actual policies. This summer, the Seattle/DC crew is planning to shut down the Democratic and Republican political conventions. That could mean that we lose focus completely, as we broaden out from globalization issues to everything else in the world. If we try to fight everything bad at once, we make ourselves easy to ignore; politicians can endorse our rhetoric without being held accountable on particular votes. On the other hand, moving our focus closer to home could give us powerful new allies. A lot of Seattle and DC protestors lament the fact that more people of color haven’t joined the movement as we define it. We might do better if anti-IMF folks talk to people working on issues of racial and economic justice at home, and find causes that we can all put our energy behind. If we unite the movement against corporate globalization with local social-justice activism, we’ll really scare those bastards on Wall Street. Broadening the movement wouldn’t solve the problems of reliance on direct action. But it would give us more disruptive power, more popular support, and a more diverse base of activists. For sheltered white kids like me – and that includes many, but not all, of the a16 protestors - this is a good time to face up to injustices at home that we don’t normally see. Of course I already knew that police brutality was widespread, but it took on a new meaning after a cop clubbed my friends in the face. We need to realize that the police and other repressive power structures are always around. I may only become aware of them when I deliberately put myself in their path. But whole communities are being treated like shit by the cops all the time. I was disturbed to read that DC cops had threatened to lock the protestors up with the "real prisoners." Apart from all the fucked up race and class implications of that threat ("Behave yourselves or we’ll put you at the mercy of those black rapists!") – those prisoners are people, too. They’re in there all the time, and the whole world isn’t watching. None of this is new information to any of us. But it’s the first time that many of us know what it feels like to be afraid of cops, to watch your friends get hurt and not be able to do anything, to go through the motions of regular life while people you care about are in jail. While the emotional reality of police abuse is still with us, we have a chance to target repression in the US as well as abroad. Again, the protests themselves are changing the goals of our movement – mostly for the better. It’s still way too soon for me to pass absolute judgements on this movement. I don’t know how to balance disruptive direct action with long-term, concrete advocacy. I don1t know how to broaden the movement without losing focus. But the bottom line is that we need to think and talk about where we’re headed. I sometimes feel like a passenger in this movement, like I’ve gotten caught up in something too big for me to have any control over. The energy of Seattle and DC is so powerful that it’s tempting to follow it wherever it rolls. But it doesn’t just roll of its own accord. Someone is making real strategic decisions that are changing the nature of the movement – who to target, what to demand, what issues to include. That someone shouldn’t be Kevin Danaher. It should be all of us. We’re putting our bodies into this struggle; we have a responsibility to use our minds too. It’s hard to take time away from logistics to share ideas or speculate or make long-range plans. But I don’t think we should just wait and see where this movement takes us. We kick ass when we stand up together. We know we can do it now, and we’ve got a gigantic opportunity to use that knowledge. To wind up with a cheesy metaphor: we just derailed a mighty powerful train. It’s up to us to figure out where to drive it.