What Were We Planning? The Orchestration of a16 by Brian Edwards-Tiekert The ostensible goal of the a16 action was twofold: to shut down the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) annual meeting, and to draw attention to an organization that, over the last 50 years, has played a crucial role in shaping the global economic order. For the cameras, we had marching bands, 20-foot tall puppets, battalions of Radical Cheerleaders, and street theater troupes. To stop the meetings, we got up before dawn, formed a human perimeter around the IMF, blockaded 18 intersections, and turned back anyone who tried to cross our lines. The result? An action organized on a budget of $120,000 shut down several square miles of a city that spent $1 million on new riot gear and $5 million in wages to beef up its police force. And the 1,300 some-odd protestors who got arrested used legal solidarity tactics to bargain their way out of jail—by the end of the week, they’d all been released with citations for traffic infractions and $5 fines. The training sessions had been going on for months across the country: seasoned activists taught consensus-based decision-making, the theory and practice of nonviolent action, blockade techniques, and strategies for dealing with the police before, during, and after arrest. They also taught workshops in street theater, puppet-making, climbing and banner-hanging. How, exactly, do you go about shutting down a city? The physical layout of the action was pretty simple. The police had established a perimeter around the IMF building. We ringed them in. People blockaded every intersection, alleyway, and sidewalk. If they were in a soft block, they simply linked arms and stood their ground. If they were in a hard block, they were locked to each other—either with their hands inside lockboxes made from PVC pipes, or with their necks U-locked together. The hard blocks depended on the fact that it’s very hard to cut through the locking devices without hurting the people inside them—it takes so long that the police probably wouldn’t bother. The soft blocks simply depended on there being a lot of people around—when the police arrested, pepper-sprayed, or beat up one peron, others would take their place in the line. The logistics are a little more complicated. Each person involved in the action was part of a small “affinity group” [AG], that trained, planned, and acted together. Each group divided up roles: some people were part of the blockade, support people were in charge of feeding them and keeping them comfortable, legal observers recorded police activity, medics took care of people who got injured or sprayed, a communications person kept on top of what was happening at other intersections. Affinity groups were loosely assigned to larger “clusters”—generally, each cluster held down two or three intersections. Then there were roving groups: AGs that roamed from intersection to intersection, shoring up the lines wherever there were confrontations with the police. And it worked—the AGs took their positions at 6AM on April 16th, and no delegates to the IMF meetings got through afterwards. Who organized it all? No one. Or, rather, so many different people that the question of “who” becomes absurd. The AGs were pretty much autonomous. No-one except the people inside a given AG had any idea exactly what it was planning, and no-one told it what to do. The larger action was coordinated by huge meetings of “spokespeople” from AGs and clusters that did little more than decide who would be at what intersection at what time. Everything worked by consensus. The idea was that this type of “de-centralized” structure would be tremendously hard for security forces to break up—there was no chain of command to disrupt, no leaders to arrest, no secrets that infiltrators could exploit, and agent provocateurs, presumably, wouldn’t have much of an effect in a group that used a well-developed consensus process. A16’s loose organizational structure worked. The lines held during the action. Legal solidarity tactics broke the court system by the end of the week. And, when the police raided the Convergence Center and shut it down the day before the main action, it took less than an hour to move the entire operation to a church and get the trainings, lectures, and planning sessions back on schedule. But what are the limits of the de-centralized structure the a16 actions were organized around? While it’s very successful at dealing with simple tasks (i.e. blocking off the IMF building) it’s a nightmare to imagine it dealing with more complicated issues--like producing an alternative development model of global economics and negotiating changes in policy with organizations like the IMF. Consensus-based decision-making is time-consuming and often tedious when dealing with simple matters—it’s unbearable to imagine a 300-person meeting trying to agree on a specific reform agenda. Of course, some defenders of the Seattle model might argue, that’s what groups like Global Exchange and Public Citizen are for—the anarchical shut-downs just put a lot of weight behind a lot of the work that they do. The other problem is that the Seattle model requires a tremendous time commitment on the part of those involved—participants have to attend long trainings, longer planning sessions, then sacrifice an entire day to action and allow for three or four more should they get arrested. Not very many have that much leisure-time, so the action demographic shifts to students and “career activists.” That’s not to say that students and career activists are bad—just that one follows through with this type of organizational model at the expense of some diversity. On the other hand, organizers in both DC and Seattle planned legal rallies alongside the direct action, and the latter supported a much broader range of participants.