Prague Protests--Globalization Generates a Global Backlash
Learning From The Prague Protesters

Instead Of Vilifying The Prague Protesters, We Could Learn From Them
Published on Friday, September 29, 2000 in the Guardian of London
by Katharine Viner

Prague is over; the IMF/World Bank meeting has shut down early, thanks
to pressure from activists who travelled from all over the world to protest
against the bank's policies in developing countries. To most people it
looked like yet another set-piece confrontation between a ragtag bunch
of scruffy protesters and hard-headed cops in riot gear; after Seattle and
Washington came S26, the Battle of Prague.

Yes, there was violence. "Black block" anarchists threw rocks and
Molotov cocktails at the police; police charged and beat protesters, fired
teargas and water cannon. But even the wildest of commentators estimate the
number of violent activists as 1-2% of the 15,000 protesters. Almost all of the
many hundreds of NGOs, trade unions and affinity groups attending were
peaceful. Yesterday reports were coming out of Prague about police
brutality and human-rights abuses against arrested protesters. Members of
Ya Basta, a popular group of Italian activists who were extraordinarily
well-disciplined and restrained in their direct action, have been labelled
"terrorists" by the Czech authorities.

But much of the protest was a positive affair: there was a samba band, a
pink cardboard tank, upbeat trade unionists from Mexico to Manchester;
there were well-attended counter-summits, with intellectuals and philosophers
theorising on the nuts and bolts of the movement. Many of the
demonstrators could give, on demand, a sophisticated critique of the global
economy.

Focusing on the violence makes it easy to demonise the demonstrators as
something dangerous and "other". They are dismissed in a variety of
contradictory ways: they're rioters, they're rich middle-class kids with
nothing better to do, they're crusty undesirables, they're disorganised,
they lack vision, they're Luddites. But by condemning them in such crude
terms, we condemn ourselves to misunderstand the most significant
political movement to emerge in a generation.

The Telegraph casts the activists as "highly educated, bourgeois
offspring rejecting the ways and wealth of their parents' generation". Well,
you do have to have the fare to get there. But when it comes to
anti-globalisation, the developing world has led the way. The west is playing
catch-up. Anti-IMF/World Bank protests have been held all over the global
south for more than a decade, from Indonesia to Brazil, from the Philippines to
Bolivia.

Critics of the movement can't bear the anarchy of it; they see its
disparateness as cluelessness rather than a deliberate attempt to
overcome traditional hierarchies. But if a movement can force such powerful
institutions as the IMF and World Bank to come to a halt early, and if
protesters can get inside the conference centre in spite of 11,000 riot
police, 5,000 army back-up and a few tanks, their organising skills
might be considered rather impressive.

In the run-up to Tuesday's demonstration I attended the convergence
centre, where "spokes council" meetings took place, and found the sense of
community and organisation there astonishing and moving. Every "affinity
group" - NGO or group of friends - sent a spokesperson to meetings to make
decisions and work out strategy. It sounds impossible to contain, and it was
laborious, but it worked and consensus was found. It felt like proper
democracy in a way that the ballot box does not.

I was aware, too, of something different about the experience of S26,
but it wasn't until the journey home that I realised what it was. No one had
tried to sell me anything. The night-time parties weren't sponsored by a beer
company. Nothing was branded.

The movement's umbrella is a huge one, which can accommodate a vast
array of opinions. Is that so terrible a thing? The Zapatistas - heroes to many
protesters - say that anti-globalisation demonstrators are made up of
"one no, many yeses". The no is to rampant capitalism, the yes is to
different kinds of societies. It's web-like, it looks like the internet, and it
couldn't exist without it.

The movement needs to ask itself where it goes from here. It must find a
role that is not only, as Naomi Klein, chronicler of anti-corporatism,
puts it, turning up at international meetings like Deadheads following the
Grateful Dead. But this is a new movement, and it's in no hurry. Whether
it burns out or turns into the next big thing will take time to see.

Clare Short says that the protesters are "today's Luddites ... their
call to halt historical change and tear down our international institutions
offers no solution" - as if neoliberal globalisation were an inevitability. It
isn't. It's a particular form of economics, of human behaviour and
development - as Nelson Mandela pointedly told Labour's conference in
Brighton yesterday - and resisting it might just be more modern and
radical than critics of the anti-globalisation movement dare to think.