September 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Consciousness + Commitment = Change

A review of David Solnit's edited volume, Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. City Lights Books. 448 pp. 2004. $17.95.

Jim Haber is a Jewish, Wiccan, Catholic Worker. He is active with Jewish Voice for Peace and United for Peace and Justice, and is coordinating the War Resisters League's national Organizing Network Gathering, November 12-14, 2004 in San Francisco.

Globalize Liberation is a collection of essays inspired by the worldwide movement against the growing corporate control of everything, exemplified by such institutions as the World Trade Organization and corporations like Bechtel and Chevron. The editor, David Solnit, has been a tireless organizer for over two decades, and in his book he taps the wisdom of a wide array of people he's worked with, letting them speak for themselves.

Solnit says the stories, strategies and voices presented in Globalize Liberation are a "new radicalism" that is "a movement of movements" and which "has many names or no name at all." Such paradox speaks to my sense of the world, so I appreciate how he and several of the writers challenge us to embrace seeming opposites in need of reconciliation. Starhawk points out the need for us to embrace the "hard" and the "soft," the "compassionate as well as the hard-core," the "fighter and the healer." The revolutionary Chris Carlsson challenges us not to dichotomize too severely between "radical" and "reformer" in his essay, "Assuming We Refuse, Let's Refuse to Assume." People working for "total transformation" and those focusing on "incremental change" need to embrace, or at least not belittle, each other's work. He articulates what others in Globalize Liberation point to also, that movements today need a sweeping vision, but that articulations of our goals ring hollow unless we "imagine what actions we might take immediately to begin reaching for the world these words describe."

Solnit broke the 33 contributions up into three sections: "What's the Problem," "How to Change Things," and "Ideas in Action." Throughout the collection are examples wherein groups are shown to be trying to do both "prefigurative" visioning and nitty-gritty work. Neighborhood assemblies in Argentina, stopping Thatcher's poll tax in Britain in the late 1980s, linking struggles (like environmentalism and anti-prison organizing) for mutual benefit: all are important histories presented to us with enough detail to help us apply lessons learned to our own struggles.

The ideas that inspired David to bring these voices together and to the fore are that "no one size fits all" and the desire to help us all pack our activist "tool belt with the most useful and practical tools."

Globalize Liberation is full of important case studies from which to learn. George Lakey's lengthy but readable piece, "Strategizing for a Living Revolution," describes victorious nonviolent uprisings, the ingredients of which we too often ignore.

For example, the late 1990s Serbian student movement, OTPOR, was "impatient with the cautious ways of many of their pro-democracy elders." Nevertheless, they were able to, "unite around a strategy, to get creative about tactics, and let the strategy guide which tactics make sense and which don't." To undermine support for the dictator, Milosevic, they practiced "nonviolent responses to police violence during protests." They even built positive -relationships with plainclothes police officers sent to surveil them. They succeeded at turning the families of police officers against police brutality. When they were able to mount a mass uprising, the police did not violently defend Milosevic, and he was overthrown. Many of the examples in this and other essays point to the importance of evaluating and changing tactics in the face of state or other responses to their organizing.

Of all the movements and organizations I work with, the one that I wish had been included in this book is the Catholic Worker movement, with its dedication to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." In fact, there is little to nothing in Globalize Liberation about religious-based social justice activism such as the organizing inspired by liberation theology or the work done by AFSC. Despite the oppression caused by dominant parts of the Catholic Church, significant anti-oppression work, revolutionary work, and the necessary work of caring for people's dire needs now, during the struggle, have all been carried out under the auspices of nuns, priests and lay religious leaders. Their capacity to reach into the mainstream may even be unparalleled.

Despite this omission, many -insightful turns-of-phrase throughout the book stirred me and provoked my thinking. Patrick Reinsborough's "post-issue activism" -recognizes that "the roots of the emerging crisis lie in the fundamental flaws of the modern order and that our movements for change need to talk about redesigning the entire global system -- now." He also -compares the different "points of -intervention" at which direct action can be used.

Most intriguing and radical is "direct action at the point of assumption" by which we strive "to sidestep the machine and challenge the mentality behind the machine," since "[w]e aren't just fighting acts of injustice or destruction but rather we are fighting a system of injustice and destruction."

Chris Carlsson laments "tactical cul-de-sacs," observing that by the April 2000 World Bank demonstration in Washington D.C., a sense of "shared vision" had already devolved into "its original fragments, and was not unified in tactics or strategy."

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers' motto is "Consciousness+Commitment=
Change." Through popular education, leadership development, and powerful political action, they have made "unprecedented material progress for farmworkers in the South."

Betita Martinez's "Racism: The US Creation Myth and its Premise Keepers" reminds activists (and anyone with white skin privilege in particular) that we are not immune from side-stepping hard truths about this country. It was created by military conquest and expanded that way too, by taking almost half of Mexico, and its economic development was dependent on enslaved African labor.

More than anything, I appreciated the final piece in the book, one of several that focused on the Zapatistas. John Jordan honors the humility of Zapatismo, their covered faces being a way of down playing ego rather than as a sign of either fear or threat. "I'm inspired by the notion of a revolution that listens," he says, and I concur. "This idea of a listening revolution turns preconceived notions of struggle on their head. Zapatismo throws political certainty to the wind, and out of the shape-shifting mist it grasps change; change not as a banal revolutionary slogan, but as actual process. Change as the ability of revolutionaries to admit mistakes, to stop and question everything. Change as the desire to dissolve the vertical structures of power and replace them with radical horizontality; real popular participation."

A fundamental problem that impedes positive social change is the need to fill the vacuum that would be created by success. If we get rid of oppressive institutions and power dynamics, what will replace them? Most authors in this book have something to say about this, sometimes just pointing out the problem; others being more concrete in their recommendations. Without exception, the authors name "capitalism" as a problem, but old-school communism or socialism aren't held up as the solution either.

I did think that several of the subjects would have been better if represented by a couple of shorter offerings.

Overall, David and others present a vision in which the work is "making change without taking power." In Starhawk's article, she reiterates her long-standing differentiation between "power over" and "power with." These are concepts I've embraced for some time now, but I'm still not sure that the less politicized masses will trust in something as amorphous and grand as "direct democracy" or even "consensus process." Globalize Liberation makes me feel more hopeful that they can, and in fact already do.

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