Lessons About Tactics After WEF Protests

Lessons on Tactics after New York City

Scouting out sections of New York City in advance of the anti-WEF protests scheduled for the weekend of February 2, I overheard one of the many cops, who had no doubt deduced my political leanings from my hair and clothes, laugh to his partner: “Don’t they realize it’s fucking futile to resist?” Later, on the morning of the main day of action, a police officer, in response to my question, told me he expected the day to be “nice and quiet.”

The cops, it turns out, were right. The protest drew a considerable crowd of 15,000-25,000 people in various marches, but all the same, the day was quiet, and nice too, at least for the World Economic Forum delegates. Protestors on the permitted march were herded like sheep, and corralled by barricades to a marching area not much wider than the sidewalks. The rest of the street was held by riot police and cops on noxious, exhaust-spewing motor scooters. Whose streets? Theirs, apparently. The march was eventually directed into a protest pen just within sight of the Waldorf-Astoria. Once inside the narrow, fenced-in area, demonstrators were subject to videotaping, searches, lengthy detention and occasional arrests. Afterwards, small flocks of protestors milled about from street to street, occasionally bumping into other such groups and asking if anything else was going to happen.

On Sunday, a more daring crowd came out, but, numbering in the hundreds, they were grossly outnumbered by the police, who took advantage of a comparative media blackout to deal with the protestors with impunity. The previous day, police had made some scattered arrests, but on Sunday, police violently hauled off large portions of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence “stroll” and the Animal and Earth Liberation march, targeted specific activists and arrested journalists filming the police brutality. Because I am facing jail time for an action in the SOA protests last November, I had decided not to risk arrest in New York, and attend the protests in a journalistic role, but by the end of Saturday, I found myself agitating for an alternate or stepped-up form of protest, anything but the complacency with which many demonstrators responded to police dictations. The irony of people chanting “Ain’t no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don’t stop!” as they docilely obeyed police officers directing them into narrow barricaded lanes heading away the Forum location, became too much for me.

I began taking down the wooden police barricades until I saw the cops heading towards me, and noticed the lack of support from the crowds around me. I was pretty sure that if the cops had tried to arrest me, my fellow protestors would have let it happen. I admit that in a sense I was wrong to take down the barricades and escalate the situation, because people who cannot risk arrest or assault must have a green zone where they can protest in safety, but I was immensely frustrated that the entire group of 25,000 were avoiding risks and no one, for all I knew, was trying to do anything more. As I found out at the end of the day, there had been a few direct actions, and some arrests in the very march I was in, but no one had spread the word, so most of us were in the dark. In the face of 25,000 demonstrators, the police were able to carry out arrests in practical secrecy. Never again, I told myself at the end of the day, would I participate in an expression of dissent for which the organizers had asked permission from the authorities. Even though Another World Is Possible had obtained a permit for the streets that day, marchers were often fenced in to less than half of the street. Resistance may not have been futile, as the one cop claimed, but it was absent from the day’s events.

Just like the other large anti-capitalist globalization protests have been, the anti-WEF protests can be highly instructive for the movement. The Quebec City demonstrations against the FTAA sanctioned and utilized a diversity of tactics, potentially mending a rift that opened in the movement in Seattle, when many protestors were victims of unprovoked and unanticipated police violence that was largely blamed on more militant activists. Since Quebec, the diversity of tactics discussion has illustrated a strong divide within the anti-capitalist movement. It is on this topic that New York City can be most insightful.

Because violence, or that which is labeled violence by the press, generates bad PR, NGOs financing some of the anti-corporate globalization groups have made a habit of restricting funds unless the organizing groups promise to avoid lawlessness and violence. There are also a number of protestors with legitimate objections to violence and property destruction. The question, since Quebec, has been whether those who support self-defense and destruction of corporate property can work together with pacifists in opposing global capitalism. In my experience, non-pacifists within the movement have been sincerely affected by claims that their actions have alienated and endangered others within the movement. The overwhelming peacefulness of everyone in Saturday’s march, from the Black Bloc to the Puppetistas, illustrates the efforts that have been made to preserve solidarity within the movement. So what can we learn from the actions on February 2nd, which were as peaceful as they possibly could have been?

It seems a fairly well accepted belief that illegal direct action, like property destruction, strengthens and radicalizes the movement, but has a polarizing effect on the public. Legal, peaceful protest, at the best, has the opposite effect. After seeing so many aimless, disenchanted people on Saturday’s march, I strongly believe that permitted protest saps the faith and enthusiasm of the protestors themselves. Does legal protest make up for this loss by winning the public opinion campaign? Decidedly not. Corporate media coverage of the WEF shows that beliefs that the press would slander us no matter what we did were not unfounded cynicism. No mass media sources
covered the issues. Some drew favourable pictures of the Forum, some made fun of the protestors. The New York Times gave the police credit for the peacefulness of the protests, and Fox simply made up news, claiming that thirty demonstrators were arrested for planning to assault cops. We have to recognize that the capitalist press will not help us criticize capitalism.

Perhaps some bystanders were struck by our colourfulness and peacefulness, contrasted with the official depiction of our movement as terrorist, but it seems many people are beyond hope. I heard one New Yorker say, while watching the totally peaceful march, that we were probably off “to loot some store.” Most of the others just grumbled about the traffic. Speaking frankly, and bearing my part of the blame, I’d say the WEF protests were a joke. Thousands of people came out to show that another world is possible, but the only ones who put themselves on the line to help bring about that world were abandoned in the streets, left to be arrested by overwhelming numbers of New York’s finest.

The world’s bankers, CEOs and generals are no more likely to voluntarily repair the damage they’ve caused than the cops are to let us protest unhindered. If we truly believe that this New World Order is oppressive and unjust, and that another world is actually possible, then it is incumbent on us to create that world. We will not be successful simply by asking for this change, much less by asking for permission to ask for this change, whether we do so alone or with 20,000 others.

This article is not a cry for property destruction as opposed to pacifism or vice versa. It is a plea for realism and sacrifice. We do need green zones for people who honestly cannot risk arrest or assault to vocalize support for those participating in direction and to vocalize the issues, but this alone is not enough. Pacifists have got to realize that as long as pacifism means passive resistance and reluctant cooperation, the only alternative for results-oriented activists is window-smashing. For pacifism to be effective, it cannot be safe. The sacrifice is well worth it; militant pacifism is perhaps the only tactic that can strengthen the movement and win public support at the same time. On the other hand, those who target corporate property need to realize that a few smashed windows will not be enough to take the profit out of sweatshop labour and devastation of the environment, and we have all got to realize that NGO money isn’t worth it if there are strings attached, and that the corporate press is not a potential ally.

At the end of Saturday’s protests, I bumped into a few activists from Maine who were feeling as disappointed as I was. After exchanging the obligatory inquiries as to whether either of us knew of anything going on anywhere else, we lamented about the lack of resistance and solidarity on the streets that day. “Next time,” we agreed, and parted. Now, here I am, having vowed, half-seriously, to never again participate in a permitted protest, and, completely seriously, to try and make something constructive result from my participation in the actions against the WEF. I don’t have the experience to know whether it’s true, but the word on the streets is that a people united can never be defeated. I say it’s high time we found out.