Sunday, February 24, 2008

Who Killed the U.S. Anti-Globalization Movement?

In a recent interview with the Spanish anarchist website Alasbarricadas, Infoshop’s Chuck Munson comments on how the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and the International Socialist Organization worked to shut down the U.S. anti-globalization movement in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:

One thing that is probably unknown to people outside the U.S., and even most American anarchists and activists, is that some of the people leading the anti-war movements deliberately worked to kill off the U.S. wing of the anti-globalization movement in the hours after the September 11 attacks. It was inevitable that this would happen, as there were groups such as the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Paty USA, and the International Socialist Organization who had been frustrated by the anarchist nature of the anti-globalization movement. They had all notoriously “missed” the Battle of Seattle and the movement had resisted all of their attempts at entryism. The WWP responded to the September 11 attacks by quickly forming the ANSWER coalition, which started as a front group packed with their front groups and allies. They correctly guessed that the U.S. response to the attacks would lead to a war which would generate a new peace movement, As a small authoritarian organization, they were able to organize a “coalition” without having to deal with any democratic messiness. The WWP was able to position ANSWER as the leading anti-war coalition through a series of mass protests in Washington, DC and San Francisco. These protests didn’t make much news, nor did they do anything to stop the war, but they impressed an American left which was feeling powerless after the U.S. invaded Iraq. ANSWER stuck with a series of mass mobilizations every six months, which were conducive towards building credibility for their organization, but ANSWER never strayed outside a comfort zone that limited itself to permitted spectacles in large cities.
ANSWER was the WWP’s response to the anti-globalization movement. The ANSWER side of this story is known to some U.S. activists, but what most of them don’t know is that the leadership behind UFPJ conspired to shut down the anti-globalizaton movement in the wake of September 11. On the night of September 11, 2001, local anti-globalization activists in D.C. were part of a conference call that involved Leslie Cagan, who is the de facto leader of what is now UFPJ. During this conference call, Cagan made it clear to her comrades in D.C. that they were to do what they could to “kill off” the anti-globalization movement, which was still organizing large protests in D.C. later that month. These insiders manipulated a subsequent meeting of the Mobilization for Global Justice so that it called off the anti-globalization protests. They managed to do this over the objections of a majority within the MGJ group.

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