on this article.

Maybe the job of the reporter is to ask people what they are doing, not to say how someone "comes across".

Anarchists use larger protest convergences as the means of building their scene. The don't have demands, but use these contests to build identification and morale.

The "laundry list" you mention can be boiled down to one word: internationalism. Countries aren't issues to be checked off on a list, these are places the US government, with bi-partisan support, has marked as hot wars in their quest for global domination.

Perhaps its less a laundry list than a call for a society not governed by the imperatives of empire, regulated by war and on the way down.

Just a thought.

Tarleton misses what the original Featherstone-Henwood article was about and even that essay missed its target. It's not that difficult to find out why people were protesting the RNC and DNC conventions. Tarleton should visit the websites run by the organizers or the many alternative media sites which published statements and call for action by participants.

To me, this essay just smells like a jealous dig at anarchists who rocked Denver and St. Paul.

"Anarchists use larger protest convergences as the means of building their scene. The don't have demands, but use these contests to build identification and morale. "


that's kind of what he's saying and thats kind of why no cared about the DNC protests... you don't care what people think of you, if it effects anyone, or does anything, so long as you feel cool doign it. But you still get self righteous when other people aren't blown away by how revolutionary you are.

the longer you live in a parallel universe where things like whether or not you get health insurance or the US stops using most of the worlds energy, the less relevant you get... I swear it just needs a couple of charismatic leaders and bam- Cult! Identification and morale indeed...

The rant of an ignorant liberal.

I can't help but suspect that the term "Activistism" is a perjorative, an attempt to slander the people who stand up for constitutional rights such as the First Amendment.

To be fair, the article improves somewhat in the longer (linked) version. The tone changes abruptly in the section that was cut off and posted on this page.

But even there, the conclusion is faulty:

"...creating a parallel universe dedicated to social protest is not enough in itself if its inhabitants are unwilling to engage with the larger society they seek to change..."

If protesters were unwilling to engage with the larger society, then what were they doing organizing, publicizing, and encouraging participation in protest events? It seems that John Tarleton has chosen to report from a surrounding bubble as impervious to reality as that occupied by president bush.

Thanks to everyone for their comments. It's always heartening to see this site used for productive debate and discussion.

My article was not a "jealous dig" at the anarchists who protested the DNC. More like a sigh of despair. Nobody (anarchists, communists, socialists, greens, left-liberal Dems, etc.) has the magic answer for how to get us out of the mess we're in. If they did, we wouldn't be in the position we are. But, the first principle of good organizing is that your messaging should be intelligible to those who are not already 100 percent converted to your cause. How else do you grow a movement? I've written about this theme before. For instance in this article about a protest in the South Bronx several years ago that went awry:
 http://www.newyork.indymedia.org/en/2004/12/54149.shtml

Also, I very much know what the overarching protest message was intended to be at the DNC (oppostion to corrupt two-party duopoly and the police state that enforces it) and I am also familiar with each of the issues on the "laundry list" but again I follow leftist politics closely. Most people don't and in Denver people had no way of making sense of what the protesters were saying.

Richard Myers asks. "If protesters were unwilling to engage with the larger society, then what were they doing organizing, publicizing, and encouraging participation in protest events?" My question again would be who were they organizing and encouraging to participate? The scare tactics of the police, the media and the politicians created a very difficult environment for organizers to organize in. But let's be honest. Groups on the left often are prone to doing "in-reach" instead of "outreach" i.e. focusing on getting other lefties to come to their events instead of connecting with and engaging a broader audience.

Lastly, I think we need to re-examine how independent media covers these kind of protests. It's great that we give a voice (or provide a platform for people to express their own voice) to people who are locked out of the political system and that we shine a light on police abuses. But, we also become a part of the parallel bubble world when we get caught up in the excitement and the justness of these protests and don't ask critical questions about whether a demonstation is resonating with its intended audience and how it fits into a larger movement-building strategy.

When are you going to tell us the fee schedule for your messaging management consultancy service?

What matters is program. You don't have it, neither do the liberal brainfarts who came to Denver to plead with the Democrats to be nice to "the people." Luckily for the proletariat, the bvest things in life are free. Read What Is To Be Done by my homeboy Lenin.

What is Tarleton trying to argue here? His essays complains about the poor "messaging" coming from the protesters, but in a comment he says that he knows what the "overarching" message was. Are protesters supposed to sharpen their messages for Tarleton, who already gets it? Is he really criticizing what protesters were saying or is he critical of protest for the sake of protest?

The messaging from protesters was out there, on the streets and in the media. I'm not sure that you can expect an overarching message from a diverse, democratic convergence of protesters. And some of the people protesting don't give a damn about messaging the media--they just want to get rid of capitalism and this bogus political system. I'm the type who cares about communicating to people outside of our circles, so I agree with John about that, but we should also respect those who reject massaging the media. Perhaps they are just more realistic--the media again reported on the protests in the same ways it always reports on radical protests.

I am critical of protest for the sake of protest i.e. confrontation without a clear message... If some people want to give up on communicating through the media, so be it. But does that mean they have to give up on communicating to the broader public entirely?

Since Seattle, global financial and trade organizations have been honing up their media image. To get us to bargain with them they have tried to look sympathetic and concerned. The meeting in Prague was full of talk about poverty. During the meeting in Prague a World Bank ad said “the purpose of the World Bank has always been fighting poverty.” Another mentions “justice for all”. The World Bank seems to have learned from the media master—Bill Clinton--how to create a compassionate image. In Seattle Clinton said, “I sympathize with the protestors.” Then Tony Blair (a man famous for copying Clinton’s tricks) made a similar statement during the oil price/tax road blockades in September. He expressed sympathy but said in his public-school accent that he disagrees with their methods and that “they’re not going through the proper channels”. As if he would have conceded to their demands if they’d been more polite. A week later in Prague we hear the same Clintonesque bullshit, a World Bank representative said: “We sympathize with the questions the protestors are proposing but we disagree with their methods. We think they’re going about this in the wrong way. We want dialogue not force.” Then, another World Bank representative said: “These are important meetings, about ending AIDS and poverty; what we want is dialogue not diatribes….We want a globalization that will benefit everybody.” And to top it off, James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank said: “Poverty is in our neighborhood wherever we live.” I’d love to be the poor person that lives in his neighborhood.

The fact that the World Bank wants dialogue is a measure of our success in the streets. They are desperate for us to choose dialogue over direct action because they know that dialogue with them would be ineffective, that they could never really concede to our demands. They can listen to us, politely respond, even make minor adjustments, but they all eventually go home to a gated community of oblivion and have a martini. This is why they want to channel the force of our direct action into appeals, petitions and attempts to manipulate the mainstream media. The first step in this process is sorting out who should be represented; to let us fight amongst ourselves for who gets the best media representation. Even the BBC recognized the recent rise of Direct Action as a tactic in an article about Prague and the September road blockades; of course, they think this is a bad thing. Our enemies recognize the power of our direct action and are taking counter measures. The fact that they beg for dialogue exposes their fear and thus our power. The scraps handed down to us in order to appease us and divert us must be refused. Compromise with any transcendent institution (the State, WTO, WB, IMF, the Party etc.) is always the alienation of our power to the very institutions we supposedly wish to destroy; this sort of compromise results in the forfeiture of our power to act decisively, to make decisions and actions in the time we choose. As such, compromise only makes the state and capital stronger.

These image games are smoke signals sent to lure us into the media den, a place where ideas become opinion that is endlessly produced and reproduced and nothing is actually done. The media den is a place where thought becomes inept; thought is divorced from action when it becomes merely choice of position. To defer action in hope that such representation will lead to a change in WB or IMF policy for example is to give up our own capacity to act when and where action is necessary: to leave the decision to others and resign one's own power. If one opposes capitalism as a whole then such a tactic is especially absurd: the WB or IMF would never dismantle itself. The media den is the master of manipulation, it intoxicates us until we are satisfied to leave matters in other hands. Meanwhile, we lose our most effective weapon, our capacity to act. In acting we create social relations; in practice the struggling multitude self-organizes. But organization always poses the danger of limiting our active power.

On the internet and in several publications some people have begun to call on the ‘direct action’ milieu to move away from confrontation. This points to what is perhaps the biggest danger to the continuing struggle against capitalism, the danger posed by those within ‘the movement’ who are waiting for a chance to represent the movement in a dialogue with the institutions of capital and with the state, those willing to compromise, to end the “deadlock”, to petition for a scrap. Such compromisers usually work within various permanent organizations that have grown up within the movement whose prime focus is the media. But the work of these organizations aims at effecting ‘public opinion’ and getting a back seat at the table of power, and involves a complex process of managing the image of the multitude that rises up against the institutions of capital. Within their heads, these organizers chant the mantra “only that which appears in the media exists,” as they frantically go from one interview to the next, for in the end they are more interested in what is on TV than what is going on in the streets, in the woods, in the night. This involves two steps. First, such organizations attempt to organize and discipline the multitude of active individuals involved in the struggle. Second, they attempt to manage the representation of the action in the media.

The first step involves taking a multitude, an undisciplined conglomeration of individuals and groups with different desires, and shaping them as best as possible into a mass of disciplined bodies. Foremost, this means separating decision from the necessity of its moment and setting rules of behavior that stand above all the participants. This has even meant physically stopping people from acting and turning people into police. The organizers are willing to sacrifice the most active in order to get a seat at the table of power. This attempt to contain the action is usually only partially successful and the media organizations mill us down in their image-factories to produce material for constructing a ‘proper’ representation, cutting off the pieces that don’t conform to their bland tastes. They become the spokespeople, eagerly offering themselves up to the media in easily digestible bite size morsels. The spin-doctors speak for the movement, naming it in their image, always hoping for a bigger slice of the evening, half-hour pie. But those who wish to fight on the terrain of image, base their strategic decisions on an idealized notion of political discourse. In fact, this notion of political discourse is no different from the story that the media and democracy tells about itself. Can the organizers be so naïve?

Of course, contrary to the dominant notion of political discourse to which the organizers subscribe, there is no open terrain of political exchange and participation; what we have is a spectacular apparatus of images that produce and regulate ‘public opinion.’ Public opinion is not something that is first found among the public in general and then afterwards replayed through the media, as a simple reporting of the public mood. An opinion is produced by the media itself; it is a flattened, uniformed idea devoid of all life and connection with desire that is reproduced a million fold through the media. Public opinion is offered up to the passive consumer as one more commodity, as a simple choice: are you for globalization or for national protection? Are you for third-world debt relief or should they pay what they owe? No thinking necessary; we fall right into place, or we are supposed to. Opinions are massified ideas, and offer no hope of communicating our desires for a qualitatively different world. Can the organizers be so naïve? The question that the media organizations constantly pose to us is, should we follow Tony Blair and the World Bank’s advice and leadership and join in a dialogue with power? Should we forgo our active powers and move the struggle from direct action and attack into the struggle over image? Our very strength is the creative use of our active powers of attack; their greatest strength is their control over the technologies of image reproduction, the media. If we want to completely destroy the present order, we can’t win by fighting on TV.

 http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/analysis.html

Protest on the streets provides a visibility to the situation. Right now, people are fuked over from the war, etc. What JT is asking for is fair enough, but fails to reconcile with the current state anymore then the aesthetic of Seattle nostalgia based convergence protest ideology does. The people are not one thing. this person's opinion on the bus: that it was incoherent is no more reliable then any other anecodote. And JT should understand this. If he feels that things are not being clear to the everyday person he should develop that argument rather then pulling up some example of a brief and essentially superficial comment. This becomes just base journalism (anecodatol creating sensation) in its worst form, actually. I suggest that a more fruitful thought process could possibly occur if JT and others actually engaged in arguing out the issues here. Rather then bask in despair. Yes no one sems to know the way forward... But we cant wait for Jesus. We have to think. analyze, etc. Act as a multitude. For one, I think a way forward is towards an emphasis on education of a cultural type. somewhat similar to what the panthers were thinking with education. but this is another topic. i certainly dont think that antagonism towards activity in the street, per se, is useful. rather we have to discuss options and ideas. despair is a sin. ;) or rather perhaps a luxury...