Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "This Is What Democracy Looks Like."
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
This is What Democracy Looks Like, various anti-globalization demonstrators, A Big Noise Film, 2000
At one time, and maybe, as it turned out, it was just this one time in 1999 in Seattle at a WTO meeting the militant mass demonstrations organized by various components of the anti-globalization movement looked like the ‘new wave’ on the world-wide social reform curve. As this short but energetically-paced film footage (from many camera sources) makes clear an alliance between American organized labor (mainly through the middle and lower levels of some of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy but with plenty of enthusiastic rank and file worker support) and more overtly leftist environmentally-concerned organizations (in short, mainly students and their hangers-on) with a fringe of anarcho-lifestyle activists was in the making. While this film, composed of street footage of the action and released very shortly after the event, does not go into much detail about the long term prospects the footage itself does provide some of the reasons, if only accidentally, that this movement has been spinning its wheels since that time.
Look, not every movement has to start out with an explicitly socialist agenda and tactics and strategy to match. Waiting for such an occurrence, or more succinctly, waiting for such a full-blown movement to be hatched fully-formed from the embryo is not how social movements gather steam and become important in history. That said though, such social movements better end with a socialist agenda or they are doomed to that wheel-spinning mentioned above. And that is the nut of the matter here. That and the extreme provocations by the police of basically nothing more than militant (and creative) mass demonstrations. Those police reactions then, and the virtual para-military state that has been erected at subsequent sites for international capitalist economic conferences of various hues, certainly have a chilling effect on mass organizing for them. In the end only the most committed have stayed the course, as the last event in Pittsburgh in 2009 has demonstrated.
Now there is not much that we can do, currently, about the relationship of forces with that police state para-military operation so the last part of this commentary centers on what we can do, the political organizing part. What became clear throughout this film was that what looked like a conventional united front action was more a convenient convergence of a loose coalition of ultimately conflicting forces. In short, the various components had competing political agendas. The labor bureaucracy was talking jobs, protectionism, and, frankly, China-bashing as a way to deal with the crisis of the decline of the American working class’ continually eroding standard of living. The other components spoke to such issues as the downsizing of the industrial state, better protection of the environment, and living more simply, to put it simply. The anarchist fringe I never did get a sense of, as much as I like the young anarchists that I have run into. Militancy, complete with Zapata-like protective handkerchiefs over face, for its own sake has no independent virtue.
All this mixture is not mutually exclusive but what comes out glaringly is that the basic premise expressed explicitly in the title of this thing that more democracy, somewhat ill-undefined, will cure the ills of this sorry old world. Well, as much as we socialist respect the historic achievements of the bourgeois democratic revolutions that have brought humankind this far this is simply not enough. Those movements long ago ran out of steam. And at the end of the day that is what was missing in this film, that idea that we have to go beyond some merely enhanced democratic process. There was plenty of feel-good talk about community, and community-building and very little about the need to not just take over the current nation-state apparatuses and do a little tweaking to right things but to change the institutions, change them utterly. Think about that my friends, as you watch these well-meaning, courageous fighters go through their paces.
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