Turning the Trolls to Stone: Strategy for the Global Justice
Movement
By Starhawk July 2002
In Tolkien's book The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and his friends the
dwarves are caught by trolls and about to be stewed for dinner.
They are saved by the wizard Gandalf, who keeps the trolls busy
talking and squabbling until daylight. Sunlight turns trolls to
stone.
That fantasy story could be a good model for a direct action
strategy for the global justice movement. Essentially, we're all
in the stew pot, with the trolls of corporate power feasting on
the resources and labor of the world. But global corporate
capitalism depends on hiding its true nature and functioning in
the shadows. It cloaks itself in the rhetoric and semblance of
democracy. Exposed to light, it cannot continue to function.
What is corporate globalization? It's an ideology that elevates
corporate profit to the highest value and determining factor for
all human activity, individual and collective. It says that
corporations must be unfettered in their pursuit of profit, that
all natural and human resources should be open to exploitation,
that services and infrastructures once collectively provided by
governments should become arenas of profit making, and that while
some people will gain more than others under this regime,
following this program will make everyone richer and benefit all.
Corporate globalization is implemented by certain institutions,
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that
impose its constraints on the heavily indebted countries of the
third world in return for participation in the global economy. It
is enacted through trade agreements such as NAFTA (The North
American Free Trade Agreement), the proposed FTAA (Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas -- the extension of NAFTA throughout
the hemisphere), and many others, including the global GATT,
(Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), enforced by the World
Trade Organization. These agreements and institutions override
democratically made laws of countries, allowing them to be struck
down in decisions by a tribunal of the WTO which can rule, for
example, that a law restricting imports of goods made with child
labor is "restraint of trade," and not allowed. Many of them
allow corporations to sue governments for loss ofprojected
profits if laws restrict them: a Canadian corporation has won a
judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars from the State of
California for banning an additive in gasoline that pollutes
groundwater. A U.S. corporation has sued Canada for banning an
additive that causes brain cancer in children.
This program is backed by the vast military and police power of
the state -- primarily the U.S. but aided by our friends. The
"war on terror" is the perfect excuse for extending that power
until it becomes a true global hegemony.
This program is problematic on a number of different levels: it
is blatantly unjust, it runs counter to every human impulse
toward compassion, generosity, and mutuality, it contradicts the
teachings of every religion or system of social ethics, it is
destroying the basic life support systems of the planet, and it
doesn't work. It allows corporations free movement across borders
to seek the lowest common denominator of wages and regulations,
and lowers the global standard of living for workers everywhere.
It appropriates the resources that should belong to all and
concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. In fact,
it creates misery, poverty and despair for billions.
Trying to counter that system may seem an overwhelming and
hopeless task. How do we confront a system that can commandeer
such vast economic resources, control the major media, and
mobilize all the military, police and judicial power of the state
in its defense? As powerful as the system seems, it rests on the
compliance and tacit consent of the very people it exploits. The
vast, vast numbers of us who don't truly benefit from the system
support it through our participation.
Without our labor, without our obedience, without our willingness
to police ourselves, the system cannot function. The public
complies with this system in part because the system hides its
true workings under fancy rhetoric, obscure economic theory, and
the trappings of democracy. Trolls breed in the dark.
So a strategy for global justice involves exposing the trolls to
light: telling the truth about the system, showing how it affects
people on an everyday basis, pointing out clearly where it
doesn't work. Ultimately, our goal is to undermine the legitimacy
of the system and erode the tacit consent that supports it.
There are many, many groups, from organizations such as Public
Citizen or the Council of Canadians to independent media, working
on shining that light. But in a world overloaded with
information, how do we get people overburdened with messages of
fear and urgency to pay attention?
Educators speak of the concept of the "teachable moment," that
instant when a bored and apathetic student suddenly becomes eager
and able to learn. People become teachable when they realize that
they have a need for information.That is one of the key purposes
of protest: to create so much excitement, so much urgency and
drama around an issue that people who have previously tuned it
out suddenly feel a need to pay attention.
But people are also controlled by fear. We might hate the system,
but we also depend upon it. What will happen to us if we act
against it? How can we trust those urging us to take action, or
believe that what they propose will be better?
People comply with the system because they don't see an
alternative or believe that they have any choice. Systems of
control always work by limiting our perceptions of our options.
Our challenge as a movement is to delegitimize the current
system, pose a wider range of choices, empower people to risk
opposing the current system, and to embrace an alternative
vision.
We've been relatively good at shining a spotlight, creating
drama, and delegitimizing the current system. In the two and half
years since Seattle, we've awakened public awareness of many of
the institutions of corporate globalization, shifted the terms of
debate, and undercut the unquestioning acceptance of their
policies.
We've been less successful at posing a clear, alternative vision,
and building public trust.Trust is built over time, of course.
The global justice movement is not centered on charismatic
leaders or ongoing institutions that give a face to trust. It's
an amorphous, ever-evolving, self-organizing mass. But if people
involved in the movement devote time, attention, and their skills
as organizers to their home issues and support local community-
based organizations as well as large summit actions, trust can
grow.
But trust has to grow from a vision. And I believe we do actually
have a clear alternative to the ideology of global corporate
capitalism: We stand for democracy, community, and true
abundance. Democracy means that people have a voice in the
decisions that affect them, including economic decisions.
Democracy requires time and public space and quality education
and freedom of information. And democracy means that no group can
be excluded from power because of race, gender, sexual
orientation, age, physical ability, or any other "ism."
We stand for the right of communities to control their own
destinies and resources, whether that is indigenous community
preserving its land and culture or a neighborhood deciding to
keep its local hospital open. Enterprises and businesses must be
rooted in communities and accountable to them.
We say that real abundance means protecting the life support
systems of the planet, that there are things too precious to be
bought and sold for profit, from ancient rain forests to the
water that sustains all life.
Abundance does not come from the extraction and concentration of
wealth, but from its widest possible distribution. True abundance
means security, and that can only come from an understanding that
we have a common responsibility for each other, to see each other
through hard times and support each other through misfortune.
We also say that democracy, community, and true abundance are the
real antidote to the despair that breeds terrorism, and the best
means of assuring our global security.
When we think about actions and tactics, we need to consider how
they fit with our overall strategy. We need to create enough of a
ruckus to arouse people's attention, while making sure it's the
system that gets delegitimized, not us. Different tactics and
actions serve different needs:
Protests that are safe, permitted, and legal serve an important
purpose: they mobilize people who might otherwise be afraid to
take action. They give people a way to overcome fear, feel a
sense of unity, and speak out, and can embody our vision and
build trust.
Direct action, actions that directly confront oppressive power,
actively withdraw our consent from the system, create drama and
confrontation and urgency, and often make the violence inherent
in the system visible. My own generally preferred set of tactics
involve nonviolent direct action, because they allow us to both
create urgency and trust.
Nonviolent actions can be openly organized, letting us mobilize
more people and encourage people to move beyond fear and take
higher risks.
The most powerful actions are those in which we create
confrontations that also embody our vision. When we live the
alternatives, in our organizing, in our coalition building, in
our daily lives, in our courage to act, we become the sunlight
that can freeze the trolls in their tracks.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This
copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her
work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate
this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or
reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part
of it without permission.Readers are invited to visit the web
site: www.starhawk.org.
Getting Our Tactics Right: Lessons from the Calgary G8
Mobilization By Starhawk July 2002
An effective direct action needs to be a bit like Goldilocks's
porridge: not too hot, not too cold, but just right. The recent
protests in Alberta against the G8, the heads of the eight most
industrialized countries, are an example of what happens when we
apply organizing models that don't actually fit the situation
we're in. When we cook for a hotter fire than we actually have,
we end up with porridge that is colder than it needs to be.
The numbers in Calgary were small, never more than five thousand,
but the actions were successful in many ways. They strengthened
local organizing and raised awareness of the issues. By Calgary's
standards, getting that many people out on the streets was a
major victory, especially in light of the campaign of fear
mongering and criminalization waged against the activists by the
government and media. The Canadian labour movement gave the
actions strong support, and the completely peaceful nature of the
protests left the public outraged with the government and G8 for
spending $300 million on meeting security. The organizers did an
heroic job, overcoming huge obstacles to create the
infrastructure for the mobilization and provide a strong
framework for actions.
Nevertheless, Calgary suffered from one grave fault: the lack of
a powerful, coherent action that could have made a significant
impact on the G8. More people might have made the trek to
Calgary, at least from the West Coast, had some clear vision of
an action been put forth. And to truly dismantle the structures
of power we are contesting, an action needs an edge, a sense of
real confrontation.
The Calgary G8 actions were organized around respect for
diversity of tactics. I was never sure why, as nobody I met
actually wanted to use any tactics that went beyond clear
definitions of nonviolence. Even the Anti-Capitalist Convergence,
generally among the more militant groups, planned an action
asking for no physical confrontation.
Calgary just wasn't the place or time for high confrontation
tactics or property destruction, no matter how principled.
Calgary is called "the Texas of Canada" for both its oil wealth
and right wing politics. It has no tradition of street protests,
and its radical culture, though vibrant, is very small. Street
fighting and window smashing would have basically undercut any
future efforts at radical organizing in Calgary and possibly
throughout Alberta.
So why, then, didn't the organizers simply agree to principles of
nonviolence for the action? Partly because "diversity of tactics"
has become the movement default mode, the way we assume a
powerful, militant, major summit action should be organized. The
type of powerful direct action that actually could have been
organized in Calgary has dropped off our radar screen. Conditions
in Calgary cried out for a mass action that was both disruptive
but explicitly nonviolent.
The focus on diversity of tactics has served us well in some
ways. It broke through what can easily become a stifling moralism
around nonviolence and an unthinking reliance on stale, static
tactics. It has allowed us to avoid potentially divisive
conflicts, but at a cost. Instead of actually arguing about what
makes sense in a given situation, we simply say "we support
diversity of tactics" without ever defining what those tactics
might actually be.
Our very vagueness scares people off: nobody really knows if
we've agreed to support anarchist soccer in the streets or
smashing the windows of the local banks. We reinforce the fear
campaigns waged by the media and government.
When we avoid discussions and yes, arguments, about violence and
nonviolence, many people are left thinking "nonviolent" is
synonymous with "safe," "legal," "passive," and "non-
confrontational." The corollary, then, is that any disruptive
action or any civil disobedience becomes seen as violent. But
confrontation and disruption are essential aspects of effective
nonviolent direct action. Risking arrest is a time-honored aspect
of nonviolent civil disobedience. Yet often, now, I hear people
in the movement echo the media's assumption that an action that
leads to arrest must have been violent. At the Calgary action
debriefing, one woman complained vehemently that "We agreed this
caravan was going to be nonviolent, and then suddenly someone was
asking how many people were prepared to be arrested!"
As a result, people who want to act nonviolently end up in safe,
nonconfrontational actions that lack the power to truly confront
or delegitimize the power structure. We lose the chance to
organize mass nonviolent civil disobedience or disruptive yet
nonviolent direct actions. The planning of specific actions is
mostly left to affinity groups, which often don't actually exist,
because we haven't mobilized and organized in a way that could
create and sustain them. Even experienced groups are unlikely to
plan strong, autonomous actions in a vacuum, without the momentum
of others doing the same, and without clear coordination. The
focus on security culture that accompanies "diversity of tactics"
makes coordination difficult, and keeps us from knowing what, if
anything is being planned.
If the phantoms were real, if there actually were an army of
mindless anarchist thugs prepared to sweep into any summit town
and sack it, things would at least get interesting. But the
"thugs" in question are not, in reality, mindless. They are
deeply concerned with things like how to strengthen ongoing
everyday organizing in our home communities, how to expand the
diversity within our movement, and how to be allies with people
of color, immigrants, and labor. Asking those questions is
inevitably going to pull people back from confrontation for its
own sake, and toward planning actions in which labor and
immigrants can actually participate.
When we organize around "diversity of tactics" and then try to
mobilize a broader community of people, we often end up at the
last minute agreeing to keep our actions "green" or at least
nonconfrontational. As a result, our actions end up tamer and
less effective than they could be if, from the beginning, we had
organized a disruptive nonviolent direct action that could truly
interfere with some institution of oppression in more than a
symbolic way.
So, in Calgary, we might have planned a car caravan to back up
the Canadian Union of Postal Workers who went to the barricades
at Kananaskis with messages to deliver. We could have blocked the
road and refused to leave until the postal workers were allowed
through, or blocked delegates from leaving the meeting until they
came out and heard our perspectives on the issues. Or we could
have ended a downtown snake march with mass blockades at oil
companies, to make the connection between oil, global corporate
capitalism, and the "war on terror."
But to take any of those or other truly disruptive actions, we
would have needed to organize in ways that are possible only in
the political space opened up by an explicit commitment to
nonviolence.
Strategic nonviolence lets us mobilize broadly around actions
that are more than symbolic, that actually interfere with the
operations of an institution of power. Unions and NGOs, and at-
risk groups can support and participate in such actions, which
contain many necessary roles at varied levels of risk.
Committing to nonviolence as a strategic move for a particular
action allows us to organize openly, without security culture and
with broad participation in decisionmaking. While open organizing
means we lose the element of surprise in our planning, we can
take that into account. The worst failures in actions are those
that depend on security that is rarely tight enough to actually
foil the authorities, but often too exclusive to let us do wide
outreach for an action. Transparency allows us to actually
educate, mobilize, and inspire people to join us. While security
culture may be necessary at times, it works against empowerment
and direct democracy. People can only have a voice in the
decisions that affect them if they know what is being decided and
what the options are. Transparent organizing also undercuts the
power of infiltrators and provocateurs.
Open organizing means that we accept the risk of identification
by the authorities and even arrest, not because we want to be
martyrs, but to free up our thinking and let us do things we
otherwise wouldn't do. A commitment to nonviolence means that our
actions fall under at least some constitutional protections, and
gives us some leverage against persecution. Large numbers and
prior planning also let us develop jail solidarity strategies
that can minimize the consequences of arrest.
Disruptive nonviolent direct action is not easily organized as a
last-minute substitute for a "red" action we decide we can't pull
off. It requires time to educate, mobilize and prepare people, to
form and train affinity groups, to organize home support and jail
support, to wrestle with fear and weigh the consequences of
taking risks.
If we are to regain momentum in the post 9-11 climate for issues
of global justice, we need actions that can mobilize large
numbers of people to do more than simply march. We need to
embrace discussion and debate, and trust that our movement is
strong, resilient, and mature enough to tolerate open differences
of opinion. We might agree that a diversity of tactics are needed
in the long run to undermine global corporate capitalism, and
still be willing to commit to strategic nonviolence for an action
when it seems the strongest option. Otherwise, we end up without
either diversity or tactics.
The next major mobilization is planned for Washington, DC,
September 28 to October 4. It's time to see, among the spectrum
of activities planned, a powerful, disruptive, explicitly
nonviolent mass action.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This
copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her
work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate
this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or
reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part
of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web
site: www.starhawk.org.
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