PREFACE
I began this project because I didn’t know what to do with myself. The year was 2002 and I’d just been laid off from my job. I applied to do a doctorate but got blacklisted. And I was broke. A friend of mine, ever resourceful, pestered me: “why don’t you write a book?” It wasn’t a bad idea. But there were some problems. For one, I’d never written a book before. And I didn’t have a clue what I would tackle. At the time, I could barely keep my own shit together and the thought of telling other people what to think seemed daunting. Better to do it at the bar where people might forget the details than to commit it to paper. I was in distress. I ran away to the Bronx and holed up in a lover’s apartment where I stayed for a month.
While I was there, a friend from back home emailed me. He was preparing his application for a prestigious academic grant and needed to pad it. “Can you remind me of the title of the collection we’re co-editing on the politics of the anti-globalization movement,” he asked. I responded with a list of half a dozen handles for books that could easily be judged by their cover. Black Bloc, White Riot was the last of them. I was about to hit send when I stopped to add one more sentence in parentheses. “(We should actually do this),” I said.
In 2002, writing a book about the anti-globalization movement seemed obvious. By the time I finished the first draft in the fall of 2004, it seemed anachronistic. I tried to persuade my friends that the movement was not actually dead—just resting, like the parrot in the Monthy Python skit. But it was useless; I couldn’t even convince myself. I half-heartedly sent the manuscript to a few publishers who replied by sending me a few half-hearted rejections. Like the movement, I moved on to other things and the manuscript sat on the corner of my desk for a year.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a reference to the book in a communiqué released by a group of activists reflecting on the anti-G8 demonstrations in Germany in the summer of 2007. The tone of their communiqué was urgent. It suggested that a new window was opening and that we needed to be ready to squeeze our way through. Since then, that opening seems to have gotten bigger. The uprising in Greece, the student and worker mobilizations in Italy and Spain, the university occupations in New York and California, and the anticipation that now marks so many discussions about the possibility of generalized revolt against constituted power: these have all conspired to revitalize a sentiment that was effectively smothered by the painful anti-war years that stretched between 2003 and 2007.
Improbable as it seemed, I began to feel once again that there was an audience for a book such as this one. I reviewed what I’d written and realized that it might be of use to activists who never went through the ups and downs of the moment I was describing. Moreover, it seemed that there were many important lessons to be learned from this period of struggle and that these lessons weren’t always effectively communicated. To be sure, my understanding of what these lessons are is different from what others believe and have written. But this is the point: from today’s perspective, the anti-globalization movement is at its best when approached as an open question. The goal should not be to settle the matter by relegating the event to a bounded epochal container (as often happens when the concept of the “cycle of struggle” is mechanically applied), or by defining ourselves negatively against all the evident shortcomings of our past efforts. Instead, we should look for the unrealized promise of those demonstrations and that sensibility to determine what we can do—this time—so that they are realized.
It is this desire to realize the promise of the past that guides my reflections across the following pages. Primarily, it means looking at old events in new ways. It means considering these events as they are reflected in the mirror of an “ought” they never stood a chance of being; it means locating their promise and determining what prevented that promise from being realized; finally, it means finding the point where ruthless criticism and sympathetic understanding converge. In this respect, I’ve been guided in equal measure by the work of Dorothy Smith and Walter Benjamin—thinkers who find their own point of convergence in the writing of my friend, comrade, and teacher Himani Bannerji.
Like so many others, I now feel that the window is opening once again. And I would like to squeeze myself through it. But we must be careful; the gap is still narrow, and if we look closely, we can see that the window frame itself is more like a mouth of shards. By moving carefully and with deliberation, we can make it to the other side. But what will we find there? And how will we show those who follow how to get through without amassing the injuries that marred our own passage? I will judge this book a success if at least some consider it a useful guide in these endeavors.