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["L.A. Kauffman" <lak@free-radical.org>]

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                free radical: a chronicle of the new unrest 
                ----------------------------------------------------------- 
                               by L.A. Kauffman

THE NEW UNREST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Issue #1

For the longest time, being on the left has meant being marginal, 
powerless, and embattled. Since at least the Reagan years, we've 
been history's losers, the dorks and freaks of the political realm. 
Often, we adapted poorly to our general irrelevance, turning inward 
to fight over inanities or purveying stale messages -- "Bad slogans 
repeated, ensure we'll be defeated" -- at predictable demonstrations. 

There were issue-oriented movements that bucked this trend -- big, 
important causes that won sizable victories, like the anti-apartheid 
movement or the AIDS direct action group ACT UP. But viable on-
the-ground activism with a sweeping economic and political agenda? 
That kind of radicalism was almost nowhere to be found. 

History has turned a corner. Suddenly, as this new century begins, 
a new radicalism has emerged: broad, confident, and compelling. 
The World Trade Organization protests in Seattle marked this 
movement's first major victory and mass media debut, but the 
new unrest is not limited to the loud and varied activism around 
issues of corporate globalization.

You can find it everywhere that dissent is growing more vocal and 
spirited. Groups that once worked at arm's length from one another 
are newly discovering common ground -- from the increasingly 
multi-generational and multi-ethnic campaigns against police 
brutality and the "prison-industrial complex" to the new 
collaborations between organized labor and immigrant rights 
groups to secure amnesty for the undocumented.

"People are getting fed up everywhere, people are seeing the same 
things," says JR Valrey, a young activist in Oakland, California, who 
has worked on everything from guerrilla hip-hop concerts to direct 
action protests as part of an expansive community empowerment 
campaign. "It doesn't stop at the borders -- it's nationwide, if not 
worldwide. The world is already an oligarchy with only a few people 
running it, and it's about to turn into one big monopoly, and people 
know that if we don't combine, it's going to eat us."

Han Shan, program director for the Ruckus Society, a five-year-old 
organization that trains activists in the techniques and strategies 
of direct action, echoes this analysis: "I think that people have finally 
begun to dig deeper and understand that there are vast economic 
paradigms that underlie a lot of the environmental problems that 
we have, a lot of the human rights issues that they face."

With this new sense of momentum and common ground, level-
headed organizers are beginning to talk in terms that would have 
seemed delusional just a short time ago. 

"This is the biggest opening for building a mass movement in my 
lifetime," says David Solnit, a veteran of 1980s and 1990s activism 
and one of the key organizers of the Seattle WTO blockade. "Most 
of the past mass movements in this country have been around single 
issues like disarmament or Central America or forests.This is bringing 
people together from all the different fights and very clearly saying that 
the economic system of this country and this world is wrong -- and 
we're going to overthrow it and build a new one in its wake." 

Personally, I'm dubious about anything being actually overthrown -- 
the snarky cynicism of the 1990s is beginning to seem dated, but 
healthy skepticism never goes out of style. 

That said, a whiff of insurrection is unquestionably in the air. 
Everywhere you turn, it seems, people are vowing to shut one or 
another elite institution down. 

The biggest such event in the near-term future is a major protest in 
Washington, D.C., on April 16, designed to disrupt an annual meeting 
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Radical 
activists around the world have declared May 1, 2000 to be a "Global 
Day of Action, Resistance, and Carnival Against Capitalism," with 
talk of blockading stock exchanges and other institutions of the 
global economy. And plans are afoot in Los Angeles and Philadelphia 
to mess with this summer's Democratic and Republican Party 
conventions, on the reasoned grounds that both parties have become
 nothing more than shills for moneyed interests.

Meanwhile, local fights are escalating. In New York City, for example, 
where I live, there has been a longstanding battle against private 
luxury development on publicly owned community gardens. The other 
night, several hundred people calling themselves the Subway Liberation 
Front staged a raucous outlaw party the other night, taking over first 
an L and then an A train. A large part of the crowd, juiced by its own 
defiance, proceeded to the recently bulldozed Esperanza Garden on 
Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they tore down the developer's 
fence and began replanting the land. This impromptu action came at 
a high price: With no news cameras or legal observers to provide 
cover for the radical gardeners, the NYPD swooped in, badly beating 
a number of the participants.

There is much about the new unrest that bears closer examination. 
Will gestures of revolt overwhelm strategic considerations, as they 
did that night in Esperanza Garden? How deep are the new alliances, 
particularly those that seek to bridge racial and class divides? What 
role does the identity politics of recent decades play in activism 
today? How far in the direction of direct action is organized labor 
willing to go? 

For the moment, anything seems possible. "People are very 
conscious of the passing of time and the fact that history is being 
written," observes Nadine Bloch, one of the organizers of the 
upcoming IMF/World Bank protests, "and young people especially 
are jumping in and taking responsiblity for what their future will 
look like."

SELECTED LINKS
April 16 IMF/World Bank protests   www.a16.org
Worldwide Mayday actions    www.lobster1.dircon.co.uk 
News of radical activism   www.infoshop.org/news.html 
Criminal justice activism   www.schoolsnotjails.com 
Ruckus Society   www.ruckus.org 
Esperanza Garden campaign   www.moregardens.org

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L.A. Kauffman (lak@free-radical.org) is a longtime radical writer 
and activist whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, 
The Nation, The Progressive, Spin, Mother Jones, Salon.com, 
and numerous other publications. Currently, she is writing a history 
of American radicalism since 1970. She lives in New York City, 
where she has been active in the community garden movement, 
the Lower East Side Collective, and the Direct Action Network. 

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All contents Copyright 2000 by L.A. Kauffman

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