I became involved specifically in the anti-globalization movement when it was sort of in its nascent form in the United States, I've been doing other kinds of organizing before then, but was involved in reclaiming the streets, in the late 90s in New York City, and then when I heard that the World Trade Organization was going to be in Seattle I really jumped on board as early as I could, and went out there and started organizing in part because I felt like what was so interesting about the World Trade Organization, aside from the fact that it was really essentially pissing off a wide swath of movements, the way that it was structured to me was really emblematic of a pinnacle consolidation of power.
To me, it represented sort of the end of a logic around capitalism and the usurping of this sort of shell of democracy that people still believe around the nation-state. And really taking it to the ultimate farcical point.
So I was very interested in going out and really using the World Trade Organization to both show the direction that capitalism was ultimately heading, and I don't think that the World Trade Organization actually succeeded in what it was trying to do, which was essentially make nation-states unnecessary and create a global trade court that really only regarded capitalism as important, in terms of not really requiring the nation-state as a go-between.
That's what the multilateral agreement on investing was attempting to do, and that's what the World Trade Organization was attempting to do, and didn't get that far because of such an enormous outcry, both in terms of direct action, mobilizations, and also a lot of the other smaller nation-states that were gettting the raw end of the deal.
But my interest was in looking at this tremendously anti-democratic organization... and countering it with the politics of our movement which I think were innovative in an interesting way in really proliferating a different kind of knowledge around democracy and what's possible.
That's not to say we were inventing the forms of democratic practice that we were utilizing, but I think we succeeded in broadening the usage and understanding and really creating a language that was international.
And certainly the roots, the types of democratic organizing that we were using come from movements in the U.S. like the anti-nuclear movement, the Clamshell Alliance used spokescouncil models, had roots in Quaker town meetings, had roots in different Native American forms of democracy, had roots in the Iberian Anarchist Federation, so it was sort of a culling of a lot of different forms of knowledge, and using that knowledge to create massive forms of democratic decision-making, that were not cumbersome, that actually had a lot of fluidity.
We're not perfect, but we were able to sometimes have thousands of people, even people that weren't necessarily activists, that didn't have a lot of experience in democratic organizing -- something we certainly don't have a lot of experience, by design, probably, in the United States. Our schools don't teach it, we're not taught to truly be citizens, we're taught to be cogs in a capitalist framework, and most people have never had an experience of actually being involved in a truly democratic process, beyond maybe voting for a class president or voting for an actual president, but certainly not in creating options and creating the ideas in a collective and egalitarian way and collectively come to consensus around.
So the term pre-figurative politics was a term that we used a lot which was essentially meaning that we were attempting to pre-figure the world that we wanted to create, in the way that we were organizing. And that had a lot to do with the actual structure of decision-making.
The term spokes-council was a term that we used for the style of organizing that we used in creating mass direct action. And we used it in a number of direct actions. And the term spokescouncil comes from the idea of mimicking the spokes of a wheel, and we would have people come to those actions and affinity groups and help people find affinity groups which are groups that they either had tactical or political affinity with, or social affinity.
And rather than have a traditional representative structure where you pick one person and they would make decisions based on their own judgment and if you didn't like their decisions, you lived with them; and creating sort of a class of delegates that would make decisions and your only recourse was maybe recalling them whenever that was appropriate; the notion of a spokescouncil offered for all of the people involved to have active participation in decision-making, without having a gigantic room, also, of a million voices and sort of a chaotic situation where you have a thousand people trying to speak and express their opinions.
We would have people in their affinity groups, and the spokespeople -- which usually were totally rotational. Sometimes in the middle of a meeting you could change a spokesperson, they could be recalled if they weren't doing a good job, if they got tired, if they didn't want to be the spokes anymore; it didn't really matter, because they weren't making the decision. They would sit in an inner circle, and their affinity group would sit directly behind them, so the idea is that the affinity groups would be fanning out like the spokes of a wheel around this inner circle of spokespeople.
And when a decision was needed to be made, the spokesperson would actually turn around, consult with their entire affinity group, decide what it was the affinity group as a whole was comfortable with, and essentially report back to the spokescouncil what their affinity group was feeling.
Which was really interesting in a lot of respects: one, it allowed a great number of people to really be invested and engaged in the decision making. It also required that an affinity group really feel strongly about a position before their spokesperson brought it forth to the group, so you didn't have a situation where one person in that affinity group maybe had a wild idea. It required that they at least had the support of the rest of their affinity group, and that the affinity group came to consensus around it before they brought it to the larger whole.
So it creates a situation where you have a lot more well-formulated thinking going into the process before you've got the ear of a thousand people. It was really interesting and really helpful, and I think it allowed people to feel like they were really participating, and they were really participating in decision-making.
I don't think it's a recipe for non-hierarchical aspects and moments, I think that there's leadership in these moments and there's ways to augment or maneuver even within tremendously egalitarian structures, based either on experience or power of persuasion, so it's not a model that doesn't have power differences within it, but it was the best we could come up with for how to flatten out power imbalances.
Later on, we would do different things and add aspects to the model, like having caucuses, women's caucus, people of colour caucus, people with disabilities caucus, elder people caucuses, which allowed different privileges and different ways for communities that suffered traditional forms of oppression, to have more voice in those meetings, or to have voice when they felt like their voice was necessary around particular issues that were coming up, particularly where people might have blind spots.
So there were different ways that we tried to work with the structure to find more and better ways to prefigure our politics throughout the years.
Some of the challenges involved in direct action situations that are different than being in a community situation where you have a lot of time:
You might have a lot of experience working with each other, in the direct action campaigns that we'd be working on, oftentimes you'd be working with people, or all the time, you'd be working with people, some of whom you'd never met before, some of whom were probably cops, and there were challenges around making decisions that made people feel respected and good, but also making them in a timeframe that allowed you to get work done in the framework that you had, which was usually finite.
If we had a convergence, where we might have seven days to plan an action, it didn't work for us to not have decisions, we had to be making decisions. And with consensus process, if you get to a place where people are blocking on a consistent basis, it doesn't allow you to progress forward.
So I think there are moments like that. That being said there are moments where everybody has to agree. I've been in situations in street demonstrations which have an interesting other side to them, which is that for the most part, they're symbolic in nature; there are real people's bodies in the street in harm's way, but they are symbolic, a lot of people aren't looking at losing their jobs or their homes or their families, in a way that people are in struggles in other realms. When I'm talking about direct action struggles, most of what we're doing is symbolic in nature. It can have real impact, but the stakes aren't often as high.
But that being said, in those moments when people are facing going to jail, or being in dangerous situations, we have had really successful spokescouncil meetings and we had them over walkie-talkies, with spokespeople from each street conducting spokescouncil meetings with spokes of affinity groups in each street, deciding an exit strategy.
One particular example, April 16, 2000, in D.C., we had a situation where we felt that the police were going to attack a particular part of the black bloc. And so we had a spokescouncil meeting on the street, we were all on different streets holding different intersections, and what we wanted to negotiate was a snake march, to pick up each street and get everyone out of that situation safely, because people didn't want to be arrested, that wasn't the point.
So there were in the street spokescouncil meeting at each street, with affinity groups meeting in a circle and we had one person from each meeting as a spoke reporting back through the communications system and negotiating how this would work.
