Collective Action: Histories of North American Activist Movements
Jed Brandt | 15.04.2004 14:33 | Analysis
FROM THE INDYPENDENT: Activists keep reinventing the wheel, but there is a rich history of struggle, victories and failures to learn from. This installment of "The Real Quick Reading List" looks over some of the best histories of the North American left.
A Real Quick Reading List...
The spectacular and recent rise of a global direct action movement hasn’t produced any great narratives, if we leave the Zapatistas’ poetic sketches aside. Instead, the three stand-out histories of the post-Seattle movement are anthologies.
The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization, soon to be re-released and updated by Soft Skull Press, is the definitive book on both the anti-capitalist manifestation in Seattle in 1999 and the direct action protest movement that exploded in the next couple of years. Focused on Europe and the U.S., The Battle of Seattle follows up with reports on Prague, Genoa, Quebec City and the protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Collectively authored by “Notes From Nowhere,” We Are Everywhere is a wild ride that rushes around the world highlighting both the radicalism and innovation of the last five years. Just released in paperback is A Movement of Movements, edited by Tom Mertes with a focus on the contradictory ideas behind the new movements rather than a blow-by-blow of particular events. The collected essays are something of a companion book to We Are Everywhere and include a wider variety of perspectives with a little more analytical heft.
One understandable weakness each of these books share is that the implications of the American government’s hard right turn after September 11, 2001 are not dealt with. Even though they were all printed in the 21st century, they read as history.
If Seattle was the birth of the next left, then Act-Up was the midwife. The enormity of the AIDS crisis forced thousands of people into confrontation with the government, medical establishment, and society’s long-standing hatred of gay people during a time of general apathy. From Act-Up to the WTO, edited by Shepard Hayduk, takes us from Act-Up’s militant and clever social messaging in the 1980s and early 1990s to the anti-capitalist radicalism of today. Affinity groups, savvy propaganda and the fight for public space in the face of the commercialization of everything are some of the main themes brought out in riveting detail.
Also of note, A New World In Our Hearts, edited by Roy San Filippo, details the rise and fall of Love and Rage, the last national anarchist federation which ironically disintegrated on the eve of Seattle.
For all the claims of novelty, the patterns of activism that dominate today’s landscape are largely descended from the innovations and jury-rigs of the 1960s. The primacy of “process,” persistent racial fragmentation and small, informal organizing projects with murky long-term objectives have been with us ever since. The roots of the situation are often ignored by those who don’t want to carry the baggage of a prior generation. That’s a shame, because there was a lot more going on than oedipal rage with a good soundtrack.
Clayborn Carson’s In Struggle takes the reader beyond the pantheon of official civil rights saints to on-the-ground organizing and the rapid-fire philosophical development of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Learning about profound individuals like Ella Baker and Bob Moses plus the organic radicalism of SNCC’s “facilitative leadership” model rooted in Southern black communities is essential for anyone trying to figure out how transformative movements are built beyond the usual suspects.
Carson’s book brings the internal culture of SNCC to life and unlike many histories is neither lament nor hagiography. It lets real heros be real people.
For those wanting a deeper knowledge of the high-profile militants that managed to build a popular base, The Black Panthers Reconsidered, Detroit I Do Mind Dying , and the insanely out-of-print Young Lords history Palante are all mind-blowing. Kirkpatrick Sale’s encyclopedic SDS is way more informative and a better read than Todd Gitlin’s morality tale of the 1960s, Days of Hope, Days of Rage about the signature organization of the white New Left.
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 by Alice Echols tells the story of Radical Feminism, a branch of the Women’s Liberation Movement that arguably had the deepest impact on our culture, changing how we view family and bringing the revolution home, for real. Radical Feminism demanded that women be the agents of their own emancipation, a way of thinking that was flowering among all kinds of people who were tired of being “issues” to a movement controlled by middle-class white men who happened to be leftists.
The sixties didn’t end in a day, but carried on with diminishing returns through the seventies to finally crash into the Reagan era and the disastrous decision of a half-dozen surviving socialist parties to dissolve behind Jesse Jackson’s failed bid for the presidency. Largely unknown, thousands of committed activists recognized the inadequacies of protest politics and earnestly attempted to will a working class communist movement often by leaving college campuses to work in factories and fields as latter-day Narodniks.
With maudlin sobriety, Max Elbaum chronicles the quixotic rise and sectarian decline of what came to be known as the New Communist Movement in Revolution In the Air. Elbaum’s semi-polemic is a debatable, cautionary tale of how revolutionaries can become the very things they hate. Nevertheless, it manages to inspire a rethinking of how high we can aim.
Related is Legacy to Liberation, edited by Fred Ho, a history of the Asian-American movement through roughly the same period. The anthology gives due to a wide range of summations instead of one particular trend’s somewhat embarrassed apologia. Similarly, The Puerto Rican Movement catalogues the range of diasporic activism from the migration through the collapse of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party.
Though it’s going back a ways, a couple of recent books on the old left have put some breath in the ghost. Radical artists have to read Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, a bookish take on the cultural milieu associated with the Popular Front of the 1930s. From organizing projects in Hollywood to the moment of Orson Welles, Denning manages to simultaneous evoke the time and problematize its legacy. Lastly, Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelley tells the story of the Communist Party’s work among black sharecroppers in depression-era Alabama. This may seem far from our reality today, but the triple-trick of race, class and the tension between long-term objectives and day-to-day necessities haunts every American movement to this day.
The spectacular and recent rise of a global direct action movement hasn’t produced any great narratives, if we leave the Zapatistas’ poetic sketches aside. Instead, the three stand-out histories of the post-Seattle movement are anthologies.
The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization, soon to be re-released and updated by Soft Skull Press, is the definitive book on both the anti-capitalist manifestation in Seattle in 1999 and the direct action protest movement that exploded in the next couple of years. Focused on Europe and the U.S., The Battle of Seattle follows up with reports on Prague, Genoa, Quebec City and the protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Collectively authored by “Notes From Nowhere,” We Are Everywhere is a wild ride that rushes around the world highlighting both the radicalism and innovation of the last five years. Just released in paperback is A Movement of Movements, edited by Tom Mertes with a focus on the contradictory ideas behind the new movements rather than a blow-by-blow of particular events. The collected essays are something of a companion book to We Are Everywhere and include a wider variety of perspectives with a little more analytical heft.
One understandable weakness each of these books share is that the implications of the American government’s hard right turn after September 11, 2001 are not dealt with. Even though they were all printed in the 21st century, they read as history.
If Seattle was the birth of the next left, then Act-Up was the midwife. The enormity of the AIDS crisis forced thousands of people into confrontation with the government, medical establishment, and society’s long-standing hatred of gay people during a time of general apathy. From Act-Up to the WTO, edited by Shepard Hayduk, takes us from Act-Up’s militant and clever social messaging in the 1980s and early 1990s to the anti-capitalist radicalism of today. Affinity groups, savvy propaganda and the fight for public space in the face of the commercialization of everything are some of the main themes brought out in riveting detail.
Also of note, A New World In Our Hearts, edited by Roy San Filippo, details the rise and fall of Love and Rage, the last national anarchist federation which ironically disintegrated on the eve of Seattle.
For all the claims of novelty, the patterns of activism that dominate today’s landscape are largely descended from the innovations and jury-rigs of the 1960s. The primacy of “process,” persistent racial fragmentation and small, informal organizing projects with murky long-term objectives have been with us ever since. The roots of the situation are often ignored by those who don’t want to carry the baggage of a prior generation. That’s a shame, because there was a lot more going on than oedipal rage with a good soundtrack.
Clayborn Carson’s In Struggle takes the reader beyond the pantheon of official civil rights saints to on-the-ground organizing and the rapid-fire philosophical development of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Learning about profound individuals like Ella Baker and Bob Moses plus the organic radicalism of SNCC’s “facilitative leadership” model rooted in Southern black communities is essential for anyone trying to figure out how transformative movements are built beyond the usual suspects.
Carson’s book brings the internal culture of SNCC to life and unlike many histories is neither lament nor hagiography. It lets real heros be real people.
For those wanting a deeper knowledge of the high-profile militants that managed to build a popular base, The Black Panthers Reconsidered, Detroit I Do Mind Dying , and the insanely out-of-print Young Lords history Palante are all mind-blowing. Kirkpatrick Sale’s encyclopedic SDS is way more informative and a better read than Todd Gitlin’s morality tale of the 1960s, Days of Hope, Days of Rage about the signature organization of the white New Left.
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 by Alice Echols tells the story of Radical Feminism, a branch of the Women’s Liberation Movement that arguably had the deepest impact on our culture, changing how we view family and bringing the revolution home, for real. Radical Feminism demanded that women be the agents of their own emancipation, a way of thinking that was flowering among all kinds of people who were tired of being “issues” to a movement controlled by middle-class white men who happened to be leftists.
The sixties didn’t end in a day, but carried on with diminishing returns through the seventies to finally crash into the Reagan era and the disastrous decision of a half-dozen surviving socialist parties to dissolve behind Jesse Jackson’s failed bid for the presidency. Largely unknown, thousands of committed activists recognized the inadequacies of protest politics and earnestly attempted to will a working class communist movement often by leaving college campuses to work in factories and fields as latter-day Narodniks.
With maudlin sobriety, Max Elbaum chronicles the quixotic rise and sectarian decline of what came to be known as the New Communist Movement in Revolution In the Air. Elbaum’s semi-polemic is a debatable, cautionary tale of how revolutionaries can become the very things they hate. Nevertheless, it manages to inspire a rethinking of how high we can aim.
Related is Legacy to Liberation, edited by Fred Ho, a history of the Asian-American movement through roughly the same period. The anthology gives due to a wide range of summations instead of one particular trend’s somewhat embarrassed apologia. Similarly, The Puerto Rican Movement catalogues the range of diasporic activism from the migration through the collapse of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party.
Though it’s going back a ways, a couple of recent books on the old left have put some breath in the ghost. Radical artists have to read Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, a bookish take on the cultural milieu associated with the Popular Front of the 1930s. From organizing projects in Hollywood to the moment of Orson Welles, Denning manages to simultaneous evoke the time and problematize its legacy. Lastly, Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelley tells the story of the Communist Party’s work among black sharecroppers in depression-era Alabama. This may seem far from our reality today, but the triple-trick of race, class and the tension between long-term objectives and day-to-day necessities haunts every American movement to this day.
Jed Brandt
e-mail:
jed@indymedia.org
Homepage:
http://nyc.indymedia.org
