Organizing Across the Class Divide

TThe Global Activists Manual

Edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond 2002

Thunder’s Moth Press/Nation Books

Book Review

My primary interest in this collection of essays relates to its extensive coverage of the “Battle of Seattle,”* protests in which 50,000+ people shut down the 1999 WTO ministerial conference by blocking delegates’ access to the Seattle Convention Center.

In my view, the absence Unfortunately it contains no essays by the Seattle protest organizers. With the help of Ralph Nader and Public Citizen, the latter began preparing a year in advance to enable meaningful participation by tens of thousands of activists from around the world – in puppet and banner making workshops, civil disobedience training and a two-day teach-in (in Seattle’s Benaroya Symphony Hall) by San Francisco’s International forum on globalization. affinity group formation.

Thanks to this preparation, organizers already had 13 affinity groups surrounding the Convention Center at sunrise, when Seattle police arrived to cordon off the street. The book also fails to mention the hundreds of Seattleites who hosted out-of-state activists in their homes once the hotels were fully booked.

I agreed with the common theme expressed in several essays that the anti-WTO protests, like anti-globalizaton protests that followed, tended to be mainly white and middle class. I particularly appreciated the analyses by Fred Rose in his essay “Coalitions Across the Class Divide,” about middle class activists’ individual relationship with authority based on their skills and knowledge. For this reason, they tend to think change happens by getting the right truth out and pressuring those in authority to change their views. In contrast, working class campaigns nearly always arise from urgent local problems bringing victims together to demand a solution.

Otherwise I was disappointed The Global Activists Manual spent so little time addressing the impact of class issues in organizing and the abandonment of minimum wage workers by the Democratic party.

This is not terribly surprising, given the publisher. The Nation magazine is notorious for its dismissal of both class politics and intelligence crimes, such as the JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm assassinations and 9-11, as right wing conspiracy theories.

*In which I participated in early organizing meetings