Review of Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising

by Jennie Ruby. Previously printed in "Off Our Backs," Sept/Oct 2002. A venerable feminist newspaper dating back to the 70's, visit them at www.offourbacks.org.

If you want to read something inspiring, read this book. If you are part of the global justice movements, or a sympathizer, read this book. If you just want to understand what the global justice movement is about, this book isn't a bad place to start for that either. Starhawk writes both as a kind of voice of experience and wisdom to the global justice movement and as a woman struggling to come to grips with global issues and action.

Global Issues Made Clear

Starhawk starts out one chapter with a story about a woman drawing water from a well in Central America. She describes the woman's life as it is under the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF): Her children will work for $4 an hour in a maquiladora (factory) that produces clothes or electronics that they cannot afford to buy and that are exported to developed countries. The factory will eventually pollute the water in the well, causing her daughters to be unable to have children. Starhawk draws connections between this woman's life and the experiences of workers in the U.S. who lose their jobs because their factory moves to Central America. She also illustrates how chemicals that give cancer to migrant farm workers also give the same kind of cancer to those who eat the fruit they help process. Then (here comes the inspiring part) she envisions what these same people's lives could be like in "a world in which the health of [this woman by the well], the well-being of her children, the purity of her well were the prime concern of every institution of power."

After describing local and sustainable solutions to poverty, she points out that the only obstacle to reaching that vision is the "structures of political and economic power that currently govern our world." She calls for a revolution, and says, "This time, let's get it right."

The book is divided into two parts: Actions and Visions. The Actions section gives a kind of history of the global justice movement protests in Seattle, DC, Prague, Brazil, Quebec City, and Genoa. The stories are intensely personal and engaging. Most of them were originally posts on the Internet or short responses to events in the movement, but together they outline the history and issues of two years of anti-globalization organizing.

Actions
The media focus on "a few broken windows" receives Starhawk's criticism in her discussion of Seattle. She describes the decentralized organization of the Seattle protesters and credits the Direct Action Network for their work in creating a powerful method of group action. The protest was organized on the basis of affinity groups-small groups who plan how they want to participate in the larger protest. Within a group, some people might plan on doing an action and getting arrested while others may agree to serve support functions. The affinity group concept was familiar to me from the days of the Women's Pentagon Action and the Women's Peace Encampment at Seneca Falls. Probably anyone who has done direct actions is familiar with the concept. The affinity groups were grouped into Clusters, and a representative from each group went to spokescouncil meetings, where overall plans were made. All meetings were run by consensus.

Police have difficulty understanding leaderless organization like this, says Starhawk. She points out that some of the strengths of this organizing pattern are that it empowers individuals to decide how far to push themselves in terms of holding the blockade lines, risking arrest, staying in jail after arrest, and putting up with tear gas. In her view, people so empowered go further and take things better than those who feel pressured by leadership to do those things.

Self-identified as a Pagan, feminist, Witch, and anarchist, Starhawk also describes the creative aspects of the protests, which included "art, dance, celebration, song, ritual, and magic." Throughout the book she describes the actions of Witches and the influence of women's spirituality on the global justice protests. She refers frequently to the need to create a positive vision:

"But I believe the system can be dismantled if we mobilize our radical imagination, if we create an alternative so inspiring and compelling that the masses of people who yearn for both freedom and abundance will join us."

In describing the planning for the Prague protests, Starhawk points out some of the differences between U.S. and European organizers. In Europe, Socialists and Communists are much more out in the open, and actions are assumed to involve conflicts with police and probably property damage. The U.S. experience is different, because socialist and communist elements have remained repressed since the McCarthy era and the norm of nonviolent protest is assumed. Starhawk facilitated an international meeting translated in three languages where it took nine hours to debate whether to have the one big march propounded by the socialists or multiple affinity group actions as promoted by the anarchists. Eventually consensus arrived at one big march that would then break up into different smaller groups with different agendas.

In foreshadowing of her later Genoa experiences, Starhawk mentions that arrested Prague protesters were harassed and even tortured in jail. A year after Seattle, she writes a description of the repressive police methods that have become a pattern at the protests: a media campaign in advance, portraying the protesters as violent; surveillance of meetings; pre-emptive arrests, as in DC; use of tear gas, pepper spray, water cannons, and concussion grenades; random arrests of peaceful protesters; apparent use of provocateurs; intimidation and even brutality or torture in jail.

At the World Social Forum in Brazil [see oob…], Starhawk helped train people planning to protest a later FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) meeting, and she attended workshops that informed her more about the specific problems she had already been protesting. Threats of privatization of access to water, failure to meet indigenous people's needs, threats to small farmers, bioengineering of crops, limitations on women's rights are all part of the problems created by the WTO, FTAA etc.

In Quebec City the spirituality/environmental aspect of the protests comes to the fore. Starhawk marched with a group of Pagans portraying a Living River. Her moving descriptions of what it is like to be part of the protest, doing spiral dances, surviving tear gas, and receiving support from strangers are intensely involving and inspiring. The connection between the symbolic dancing and the daunting, global-level issues being addressed becomes clear:

"The mostly men running the governments and the corporations and the economic institutions of the world seem incapable of grasping reality: that nature is real, and has limits and needs of her own that must be respected; that neither human beings nor forests nor oil reserves can be endlessly exploited without causing great damage to the world; that the basic life support systems of the planet are under assault."

One of the most interesting essays in the book is a discussion of violence versus nonviolence as a strategy for direct action. Starhawk starts by saying that "I experienced the nonviolent direct action groups of the eighties, with their commitment to feminist process and nonhierarchical structure, as far more empowering, effective, and liberating." But she then moves toward an acceptance of different, perhaps violent, tactics as actions by people who are not unethical, but following a different set of values.

I personally think this is a dangerous type of postmodern thinking: I can't say my values are better and why, because, well, those other people see it differently and they aren't bad people, so I can't condemn even what I see as their wrong thinking. But if I can denounce the mentality of Republicans who ignore the fact that oil is not a renewable resource, then I can also say that violent tactics are wrong. I can't help but wonder if her waffling/acceptance of some use of violence is because she is working with men, as opposed to the women's peace actions of the mid eighties. At one point during the Genoa protests, she describes a scene where some of the Black Bloc, protesters who have decided on wearing masks and carrying sticks, want to join with a nonviolent group to try to make their way back to the convergence center through the chaos of police violence and tear gas. When the nonviolent group members ask the bloc members to take off their masks and put down their sticks, the Black Bloc refuse, saying that they should just respect each other's way of doing things. This made me wonder if perhaps these demands for respect were a little one-sided, with young male protesters demanding respect for their violent choices from the perhaps predominantly female nonviolent groups.

Starhawk does not end up endorsing violence at all, but rather focuses on the end goals of the protests. She calls for creative and yet "real" protests, with "real" meaning actually interfering with the processes of the global forces being protested, while gaining the support of a broad spectrum of individuals, even including turning some of the police enforcing the status quo. I like this, and to me, it sounds like nonviolent actions would be the only ones to meet these criteria. Later in the book, after her direct experiences of what she calls Fascism in Genoa, Starhawk more forcefully returns to advocating for nonviolent protest, saying that it can even be more dangerous and require more bravery than "anonymous street fighting." Yet she maintains her position that all the protesters have to respect each other's tactics.

Genoa: after a day of tear gassing and beating protesters in the street, police storm the Independent Media Center and club and beat everyone they can find. Starhawk types with shaking fingers an Internet message from the building across the street as she watches the injured being carried out in stretchers. In the aftermath she writes about the purposeful state violence, clearly labeling it as fascism, and she writes more forcefully for nonviolence.

9-11
She writes fluently about how her spirituality is getting her through after 9-11, and writes even more clearly about the need for tactics "that can be empowering, visionary, and confrontational without reading as prototerrorist."

Visions
If this book had ended with the stories of the global justice protests and the responses to 9-11, it would have been an awesome book. The addition of these through-provoking essays makes it even better. I read these essays practically yelling, "yes, yes, yes" or alternately vigorously underlining and asterisking passages that were either right-on or fabulously thought-provoking. For example, in an essay on the relationship between humans and nature, Starhawk goes beyond the usual admonitions of public television nature shows that tell us that if we don't stop destroying the rainforest, many rare and beautiful creatures will be gone, implying that people are merely destructive. She points out that people are not motivated "out of feeling bad, guilty, wrong, and inauthentic," and advocates becoming more aware of the human place in nature. She cites the Movimiento Sim Terre (Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil) as saying "Human beings are precious because their intelligence, work, and organization can protect and preserve all forms of life"-a much more positive and motivating attitude.

Starhawk's essay on building a diverse movement clarified for me some perceptions I have held for a long time when she discusses the difference between liberation as inclusion and liberation as social challenge and change. Finally, her delineation of principles for a new world should simply be printed out and sent to every world government as its new marching orders. If a better world is possible, Starhawk certainly has some of the keys.

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