The Return of Protest Politics

The radical, violent anti-capitalist protests that erupted at the G-20 and NATO summits last week underscore just how much Europe has slid to the left as a result of the global economic crisis.

The New York Times, in an April 4 story on the NATO protests titled "Riots erupt near bridge that links two countries", writes:
The economic downturn appears to have reinvigorated European protest movements. A mixture of antiglobalization campaigners and peace protesters came together in opposition to the NATO summit meeting. Mark Krantz, an antiwar activist from Manchester, England, said that the economic recession had sharpened support for protest politics. “Our message is jobs, not bombs, and welfare not warfare,” he said, adding, “The era of protest has returned."
But the G-20 and NATO protests that captured the attention of the mainstream American media have actually been tame in comparison to the ones that shook several European Union member-states earlier this year. Last December, 30,000 Greek anarchists burnt most of Athens and other major cities in Greece to the ground to protest police brutality and the failure of capitalism to fullfill humanity's unmet social needs. Greek authorities used so much tear-gas that they depleted the country’s store and had to buy more from Israel, which always has plenty of gas on hand to repress legitimate Palestinian dissent.

The violent riots rocked Greece for weeks, and, as soon as they were over, working-class sectors from farmers to firefighters began their own highway blockades and strikes to press their demands for economic and social justice.

In France, 2.5 million workers marched on the streets on one day in late January, and militant workers and union-members are ready to add rolling and general strikes to the tactical toolbox. Some French workers have even started "bossnapping" to press their demands. Iceland's government was taken down by a mass mobilization of ordinary people banging pots and pans in the streets to protest what they perceived as an inept and corrupt government response to the economic crisis. Tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of high school and university students in Italy, Spain, and Germany, have occupied their schools and shut them down for days or weeks at a time to protest rising tuition and budget cuts. Their slogan is “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis”. In the United Kingdom, dozens of colleges and universities have been occupied by international solidarity activists demanding boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel to protest the brutal, apartheid occupation of Palestine.

But in the U.S., the response to the economic crisis has been much more muted. The New York Times writes in an April 5 story titled “In America, Labor has an Unusually Long Fuse” that the declining power of the American labor-union movement –down to 7 percent of the working-class from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s - and the popularity of the newly elected Democratic President Barack Obama has stifled protest movements and steered dissident energy away from the streets and into the established political process.

But workers at a Chicago glass and window factory recently organized a sit-in of their plant after they were laid off without benefits or severance, and won their demands after Obama publicly supported their efforts. Approximately 10,000 marched on the Pentagon to commiserate the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, and smaller protests of hundreds have expressed anger and rage over the bank bailouts. White anarchists and poor blacks in Oakland, CA spontaneously rioted after a police officer was caught on video murdering an unarmed suspect while he lay prone on the ground last January, and students at several colleges on the East Coast, including New York University, occupied buildings on their campuses in February to demand justice for Palestine.

But does all this signal the return of protest politics to the international stage? At this point, it seems reasonable to assume so. The Economic Intelligence Unit, in a report titled “Manning the Barricades: Who’s at risk as deepening economic distress foments social unrest” places both the U.S. and Europe at a “moderate risk for instability”.

Banks, busts and batons:
The economic upheaval that began with the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market has already evolved into one of the fastest global slowdowns in history, and threatens to become a full-blown depression. Political tensions, already rising, may foment bloody protest that brings down governments.

What is also clear, however, is that the resurgence of an international movement akin to the anti-globalization movement of 1999-2001 is still in its infancy, indeed if it is truly here at all.

For a reinvigorated international social-cause movement to truly sustain itself will require many things, not least of which is the ability to build its capacity. To be successful, organizers will have to reach out to the broader public and grow the size of protests as they continue over time. Criticisms from the moderate mainstream about protesters' lack of a coherent message or clear alternatives to the climate and economic crises should be taken seriously and addressed. Militants will need to both step up their political disruption (breaking a window is cartoonish kids play compared to burning down a bank or kidnapping your boss) and ensure that their actions maintain a separation of time and/or space from peaceful protesters. Protesters of all stripes will need articulate, charismatic spokespeople to deliver well-crafted proposals to the larger public.

Capitalism is in crisis, and its discrediting, if not downfall, has opened up space in the public debate for a reimagining of what our world could look like. The economic crisis and looming catastrophic climate change are the issues to rally behind, but activists and organizers need to connect the dots between government corruption and corporatism with the worsening conditions of everyday life, as well as put forward concrete solutions for change, if they are to capture the public’s imagination at the same time they’re raising the political costs for the powers that be in the streets.