After Seattle: The New Anti-Globalists

By William Finnegan

Exploring the psychology of Seattle, Washington and beyond.

FOR JULIETTE BECK, it began with the story of the Ittu Oromo, Ethiopian nomads whose lives were destroyed, in vast numbers, by a dam—a hydroelectric project sponsored by the World Bank. Beck was a sophomore at Berkeley, taking a class in international rural development. The daughter of an orthopedic surgeon, she had gone to college planning to do premed, but environmental science caught her interest, and the story of the Ittu Oromo precipitated a change of major. Beck was a brilliant student—“One of these new Renaissance people, so smart they could be almost anything,” a former professor of hers recalls. She was intellectually insatiable, and her eagerness to understand the dynamics of economic development propelled her into several academic fields, notably the dry, dizzying politics of international finance and trade. By her junior year, she was teaching a class on the North American Free Trade Agreement. “It was one of the most popular student-led classes we’ve had,” her professor says. “I understand it’s been cloned on other campuses.”

Beck had found her strange grand passion—international trade rules—at an auspicious time. Besides the popularity of her class, there were the events last November in Seattle, where fifty thousand demonstrators shut down a major meeting of the World Trade Organization. Beck, who is twenty-seven, was a key organizer of the Seattle protests.

“The Spirit of Seattle,” she says, crinkling her eyes and grinning blissfully. “Your body just tingled with hope, to be around so many people so committed to making a better world.” Beck says things like “tingled with hope” and “making a better world” with no hint of self-consciousness, and in the next breath will launch into a critique of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a set of international trade rules that she and other activists have fought against for the last several years. (The M.A.I. would limit the rights of national governments to regulate currency speculation or set policies regarding investment.) This odd fusion of hardheaded policy analysis and utopian idealism has an exhilarating edge, which may account for some of Beck’s habitual high spirits.

Almost six feet tall, she retains, to a striking degree, both the coltishness of adolescence and the open-faced, all-American social style of the Girl Scout and high-school athlete (volleyball, tennis, basketball) she was. Zooming around the scruffy, loft-style offices of Global Exchange, the human-rights organization in San Francisco where she works, she seems conspicuously lacking the self-décor of the other young activists around the place—piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks. It may be that she’s simply been too busy to get herself properly tatted up. While we were talking in her office on a recent evening, she tried to deal simultaneously with me and with a significant fraction of the seven hundred E-mail messages that had piled up in her in-box—reading, forwarding, filing, trashing, replying, sighing, grumbling, erupting in laughter. She was determined, she said, to have an empty in-box before she left, in a few days’ time, for Washington, D.C., even if it meant pulling consecutive all-nighters.

“Where I grew up, in suburban San Diego, it was so strange,” she said. “Politics didn’t exist. The only political gesture I ever saw there was during the Gulf War. People drove around waving American flags from the backs of pickups. That was it. When we were teen-agers, the consumerism was overwhelming. If you didn’t wear Guess jeans, you didn’t exist. When I got to Berkeley, I was just like a sponge. At one point, I realized that, in my entire education, having gone through good public schools, advanced-placement programs, and all that, I had never learned anything about the American labor movement. Nothing. I don’t think I ever heard the term ‘collective bargaining’ inside a classroom. No wonder we were all so apolitical!”

After college, Beck went to work as an environmental engineer for a small Bay Area firm. The pay was good, and the work was interesting, but she found herself spending most of her time competing with other firms for contracts. “It made me realize I didn’t want to be doing work that was all about money.” So she made the downward financial leap into the non-profit sector (and was recently forced to move from chic, expensive San Francisco to cheaper, inconvenient Oakland, where she lives in a group house with no living room). It’s a step she says she’s never regretted. “I think a lot of people in my generation—not a majority, maybe, but a lot—feel this void,” she told me. “We feel like capitalism and buying things are just not fulfilling. Period.” She became an organizer for Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s consumer group, which was campaigning, along with labor unions and other allies, to stop the Clinton Administration’s effort to get renewed “fast track” authority to negotiate trade agreements with limited congressional oversight. (The problem with such authority, according to its opponents, is its bias, in practice, in favor of industry.) The campaign was successful—the first major defeat in Congress for trade advocates in sixty years. “That was a great victory,” Beck said happily. “We defeated some of the most powerful forces on the planet.”

Those powerful forces, once they had recovered from the shock, responded with a public-relations offensive. William Daley, the Secretary of Commerce, embarked on a National Trade Education Tour, meant to persuade the American people of the wisdom of free trade. Daley was met by protesters at every stop. In Los Angeles, Beck helped coördinate his unofficial reception. “We just dogged him.” Longshoremen refused to coöperate with the Secretary, she said, for what she called “a photo op at the docks.” She went on, “They said, ‘No way, come down to our headquarters and we’ll have an honest discussion on trade.’ He said no. These fat cats only want to talk on their terms. Even the kids at a high school in Long Beach where Daley spoke asked him tough questions. We really caused that tour to flop. Daley had a bus full of C.E.O.s and flacks from the Business Roundtable, but a lot of bigwigs flaked when they saw how hokey the whole thing was.” Six corporate leaders, including the chairmen of Boeing and A.T. & T., had in fact appeared with Daley at the tour’s kickoff, then made themselves scarce when it began to smell of disaster.

Beck’s delight in such disasters is wicked and shameless. I recalled a news story she had circulated by E-mail a few weeks before. The story was about Michel Camdessus, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, getting hit in the face by a fruit-and-cream pie just before he gave a farewell speech to mark his retirement. Beck’s cover note exulted, “The head of I.M.F. got his just desserts this weekend—a parting pie shot!”

Beck likes to call the I.M.F., the W.T.O., and the World Bank “the iron triangle of corporate rule.” In her view, these institutions—their leaders, clients, political allies, and, above all, true bosses, multinational corporations—are frog-marching humanity, along with the rest of the planet, into a toxic, money-maddened, repressive future. And she intends to persuade the rest of us not to go quietly.

In her office at Global Exchange, still crashing through the underbrush of her in-box, she suddenly pulled up short. “Oh, check this out,” she said, and pointed to her computer screen. “Have you seen this?”

I had. It was a report prepared by Burson-Marsteller, the Washington publicity firm, which had been leaked and was making the electronic rounds. It was titled “Guide to the Seattle Meltdown: A Compendium of Activists at the W.T.O. Ministerial.” Burson-Marsteller’s cover letter began, “Dear [Corporate Client],” and characterized the report “not so much as a retrospective on the past, but as an alarming window on the future.” The report offered profiles of dozens of groups that had participated in the Seattle protests—from the Anarchist Action Collective to Consumers International to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.—naming leaders, giving Web-site addresses, and including brief descriptions, usually lifted from the literature of the groups themselves. The cover letter mentioned possible “significant short-term ramifications for the business community” because of the “perceived success of these groups in disrupting Seattle” and, more portentously, warned of “the potential ability of the emerging coali-tion of these groups to seriously impact broader, longer-term corporate interests.”

Burson-Marsteller was at least trying to reckon with what had been revealed in Seattle. The press, the Seattle authorities, the Clinton Administration, the W.T.O., and many other interested parties had largely been ignorant of the popular movement being built around them. Suddenly challenged, everyone had scrambled to respond, some (the police) attacking the protesters, others (Bill Clinton) rhetorically embracing them (while his negotiators continued to pursue in private the controversial policies he was renouncing in public), but all basically hoping that the problem—this nightmare of an aroused, mysteriously well-organized citizenry—would just go away. Burson-Marsteller knew better. Its “compendium” had even picked up on demonstrations being planned for April against the World Bank and the I.M.F. during meetings in Washington, D.C. This was before anything about those demonstrations had appeared in what movement activists insist on calling the corporate press.

I say “movement activists” because nobody has yet figured out what to call them. Sympathetic observers refer to them as “the Seattle coalition,” but this title reflects little of the movement’s international scope. In the United States, the movement is dramatically—even, one could say, deliberately—lacking in national leaders. It is largely coördinated on-line. I picked Juliette Beck almost at random as a bright thread to follow through this roiling fabric of rising, mostly youthful American resistance to corporate-led globalization.

Global free trade promotes global economic growth. It creates jobs, makes companies more competitive, and lowers prices for consumers. It also provides poor countries, through infusions of foreign capital and technology, with the chance to develop economically and, by spreading prosperity, creates the conditions in which democracy and respect for human rights may flourish.

This is the animating vision of the Clinton Administration, and it is a view widely shared by political leaders, economic decision-makers, and opinion-makers throughout the West. It is also accepted, at least in its outlines, by many important figures in business and government in Third World countries, where it is known as “the Washington consensus.”

Critics of this consensus dispute most, if not all, of its claims. Growth, they argue, can be wasteful, destructive, unjust. The jobs created by globalization are often less sustaining and secure than the livelihoods abolished by it. Weak economies abruptly integrated into the global system do not become stronger, or develop a sustainable base; they just become more dependent, more vulnerable to the ructions of ultravolatile, deregulated international capital. In many countries, the benefits of economic growth are so unequally distributed that they intensify social and political tensions, leading to increased repression rather than to greater democracy. To the hoary trope that a rising tide lifts all boats, critics of corporate-led globalization retort that in this case it lifts only yachts.

Nearly everyone, though, on both sides of the globalization debate, accepts that the process creates winners and losers. And it is globalization’s losers and potential losers—and all those with doubts about the wisdom of unchecked, unequal growth—who propel the backlash that found such vivid expression in Seattle. One odd aspect of that backlash is the ideological opposites it contains. American right-wing isolationists of the Patrick Buchanan variety are as hostile to the international bodies that promote economic globalization as they are to the United Nations. In Britain, unreconstructed Tories continue to loathe and oppose the European Union, a prime mover of globalization. Meanwhile, young British anarchists also hate the E.U., and the bulk of the Seattle coalition is being drawn from the American liberal and radical Left.

The booming popularity of the movement on college campuses is another odd aspect of its makeup, since American college graduates are unlikely to find themselves, even in the short term, on the losing side of the great globalization ledger. And yet students, whether fired up by their coursework, like Beck, or simply sensing that this is where the subcultural action is now, have been turning out in surprising numbers for mass “teach-ins” on the W.T.O., the I.M.F., and the World Bank—even eagerly swallowing solid doses of the economic history and international financial arcana that come unavoidably with these topics.

Kevin Danaher, a co-founder of Global Exchange, sees nothing incongruous about young people getting excited about the dismal science. “Economics and politics have been kept falsely separate, traditionally,” he says. “We’re just trying to drag capital-investment decision-making out into the public realm. That’s the terrain of struggle now. The anti-apartheid divestment campaign set the precedent.”

Danaher, who in a doctoral dissertation examined the political economy of United States policy toward South Africa, was one of the leaders of the American divestment campaign. Since that campaign’s contribution to ending apartheid and bringing democracy to South Africa can scarcely be overstated, his bullishness about the prospects for democratizing the rules of the new global economy may be understandable. He talks, somewhat messianically, about replacing the “money cycle” with the “life cycle,” but then puts his ideas to the test by running a bustling non-profit business. Global Exchange, besides its human-rights research and activism—it has mounted corporate-accountability campaigns, targeting Nike, the Gap, and, starting this month, Starbucks for their international labor practices—operates two stores in the Bay Area, plus an on-line store, selling crafts and coffee and other goods bought directly, on demonstrably fair terms, from small producers in poor countries; it also offers “reality tours” of such countries as Cuba, Haiti, and Iran to high-disposable-income travellers not yet ready for cruise ships.

Addressing young audiences, Danaher—who is forty-nine, has a shaved head and a white goatee, and retains enough of the speech patterns of a working- class New Jersey youth to carry off the most populist harangue—makes a cross- generational pitch. He acknowledges the difficulty of understanding what it is that an institution like the World Bank even does, but then urges people to educate themselves and, in recent speeches, to come to Washington in April. “It’s going to be Woodstock times ten,” he told one college class, pulling out the stops. “I was at Woodstock, I was at Seattle, and Seattle changed my butt.”

The World Bank lends money to the governments of poor countries. It was founded, along with the International Monetary Fund, after the Second World War to help finance the reconstruction of Europe. When the Marshall Plan usurped its original purpose, the Bank had to reinvent itself, shifting its focus to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where the elimination of poverty became its declared mission. This was the first in a long series of institutional costume changes. Today, the Bank, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., has more than ten thousand employees, a hundred and eighty member states, and offices in sixty-seven of those countries, and lends nearly thirty billion dollars a year. It ventures into fields far beyond its original mandate, including conflict resolution—demobilizing troops in Uganda, clearing land mines in Bosnia. The I.M.F., whose founding purpose was to make short-term loans to stabilize currencies, has similarly had to shape-shift with the times. Also headquartered in Washington, it now makes long-term loans as well and tries to manage the economies of many of its poorer member states.

Both institutions have always been dominated by the world’s rich countries, particularly the United States. During the Cold War, this meant that loans were often granted on a crudely political basis. Indeed, the World Bank’s first loan—two hundred and fifty million dollars to France, in 1947—was withheld until the French government purged its Cabinet of Communists. In the Third World, friendly dictators were propped up by loans. Robert McNamara, after presiding over the Vietnam War, became president of the World Bank in 1968, and he expanded its operations aggressively, pushing poor countries to transform their economies by promoting industrialized agriculture and export production. There were fundamental problems with this development model. By the time McNamara retired, in 1981, his legacy consisted largely of failed megaprojects, populations no longer able to feed themselves, devastated forests and watersheds, and a sea of hopeless debt.

Bank officials have consistently vowed to improve this record, to start funding projects that benefit not only big business and Third World élites but also the world’s poor. Accordingly, projects with non-governmental organizations and other “civil society” groups, along with efforts to promote access to health care and education, have increased. But Bank contracts are worth millions, and multinational corporations have remained major beneficiaries. In 1995, Lawrence Summers, then an under-secretary at the Treasury Department—he is now its Secretary—told Congress that for each dollar the American government contributed to the World Bank, American corporations received $1.35 in procurement contracts. One of the Bank’s major proposals at the moment is for the development of oilfields in Chad, in central Africa, and the construction of an oil pipeline running more than six hundred miles to the coast at Cameroon. The environmental impact of this pipeline is predicted by many to be dire, the benefits to the people in the area minimal. The big winners will, in all likelihood, be the Bank’s major partners in the project—Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

More onerous than ill-advised projects, however, for the people of the global South has been the crushing accumulation of debt by their governments. This debt now totals more than two trillion dollars, and servicing it—simply paying the interest—has become the single largest budget item for scores of poor countries. About twenty years ago, the World Bank and the I.M.F. began attaching stricter conditions to the loans they made to debtor countries to help them avoid outright default. More than ninety countries have now been subjected to I.M.F.-imposed austerity schemes, also known as structural-adjustment programs. Typically, these force a nation to cut spending in health, education, and welfare programs; reduce or eliminate food, energy, and transport subsidies; devalue its local currency; raise interest rates to attract foreign capital; privatize state property; and lower barriers to foreign ownership of local industries, land, and assets.

This is where the World Trade Organization comes in—or, rather, where its agenda dovetails with the work of the Bank and the I.M.F. All three institutions have always sought to increase world trade. (The W.T.O. is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which began in 1947 and was folded into the W.T.O. in 1995.) But the W.T.O. is the spearhead of the present surge toward economic globalization. It is a huge bureaucracy that makes binding rules intended to remove obstacles to the expansion of commercial activity among the hundred and thirty-five countries that constitute its membership. This means, in practice, an incremental transfer of power from local and national governments (the bodies likely to erect such obstacles) to the W.T.O., which acts as a trade court, hearing, behind closed doors, disputes among members accusing one another of creating barriers to trade. These “barriers” may be health, safety, or environmental laws, and a W.T.O. ruling takes precedence over all other international agreements. A country found to be impeding trade must change the offending law or suffer harsh sanctions. The effect is to deregulate international commerce, freeing the largest corporations—which, measured as economic entities, already dwarf most of the world’s countries—to enter any market, extract any resource, without constraint by citizenries. Speaking anonymously, a former W.T.O. official recently told the Financial Times, “This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups.”

There is, in other words, little mystery about why the W.T.O. and its partners in free-trade promotion, the World Bank and the I.M.F., have become the protest targets of choice for environmentalists, labor unions, economic nationalists, small farmers and small-business people, and their allies. Trade rules among countries are obviously needed. The question is whom those rules will benefit, whose rights they will protect.

The fifty thousand people who took to the streets of Seattle chanting “No new round—turn around!” had clearly decided that the W.T.O. was not on their side when it came to steering the direction of global trade. But even that might be too broad a statement—for the coalition that gathered there was wildly diverse, its collective critique nothing if not eclectic. Many of its members would probably not agree, for instance, that trade rules are “obviously” needed. That’s my view, but the movement against corporate-led globalization contains many people who accept fewer rules of the capitalist game than I do.

The Direct Action Network (DAN) probably belongs in the deeply anti-capitalist category. But the group is less than a year old and extremely loosely structured, so its ideology isn’t easy to get a fix on. What does seem certain is that the shutdown (or “meltdown,” as Burson-Marsteller has it) of the Seattle Ministerial would never have happened without the emergence and furious efforts of the Direct Action Network.

Juliette Beck was present at DAN’s creation. Late last spring, a young organizer named David Solnit, who was well known in the movement for his dedication and ingenuity, and for his giant homemade puppets—Solnit’s allegorical figures have appeared in demonstrations from coast to coast—approached Beck with a plan to shut down the Seattle meeting. Dozens of groups, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Global Trade Watch, a leading branch of Nader’s Public Citizen, were already planning for Seattle. But no one was talking shutdown. Solnit thought it could be done, and he figured that Global Exchange could help. Beck and Kevin Danaher called in the Rainforest Action Network and a Berkeley-based group called the Ruckus Society, which specializes in nonviolent guerrilla action, and DAN was hatched.

Solnit was the dynamo but not the leader. “DAN is lots of lieutenants, no generals,” Danaher says. The word went out, largely over the Internet, about DAN’s plans, and dozens of groups and countless individuals expressed interest. The DAN coalition developed along what is known as the “affinity-group model.” Affinity groups are small, semi-independent units, pledged to coalition goals, tactics, and principles—including, in DAN’s case, nonviolent action—but free to make their own plans. Members look out for one another during protests, and some have designated roles: medic, legal support (avoids arrest), “spoke” (confers with other affinity groups through affinity “clusters”), “action elf” (looks after food, water, and people’s spirits). Thousands signed up for training, and for “camps” organized by the Ruckus Society, where they could learn not only the techniques of classic civil disobedience but specialized skills like urban rappelling (for hanging banners on buildings), forming human blockades, and how to “lock down” in groups (arms linked through specially constructed plastic tubes). Solnit coördinated a road show that toured the West in the months before the W.T.O. Ministerial, presenting music and speakers and street theatre, urging people to get involved and come to Seattle.

They came, of course, and the combination of strict civil-disobedience discipline (the only way that the lines around the hotels and meeting places and across key intersections could have held, preventing W.T.O. delegates from gathering) and polymorphous protest (dancers on vans, hundreds of children dressed as sea turtles and monarch butterflies, Korean priests in white robes playing flutes and drums to protest genetically modified food) could never have been centrally planned.

The affinity-group model proved extremely effective in dealing with police actions. Downtown Seattle had been divided by a DAN “spokescouncil” into thirteen sectors, with an affinity cluster responsible for each sector. There were also flying squads—mobile affinity groups that could quickly take the place of groups that had been arrested or beaten or gassed from the positions they were trying to hold. The structure was flexible, and tactically powerful, and the police, trying to clear the streets, resorted to increasingly brutal methods, firing concussion grenades, mashing pepper spray into the eyes of protesters, shooting rubber bullets into bodies at short range. By the afternoon of November 30th (the first day of the meeting), the police had run low on ammunition, and that evening the mayor of Seattle called out the National Guard.

There were hundreds of arrests. Beck, who was teargassed on a line blocking the entrance to the convention center, had credentials, through Global Exchange, to enter the theatre where the W.T.O. was supposed to be having its opening session. She went inside, found a few delegates milling, and an open microphone. She and Danaher and Medea Benjamin—another co-founder of Global Exchange—took the stage, uninvited, and suggested that delegates join them in a discussion. The interlopers were hustled off the stage. Beck elected not to go quietly. Marshals put her in a pain hold—her arm twisted behind her back—and dragged her through the theatre. A news camera recorded the event. “Then CNN kept showing it, over and over, them carrying me off, whenever they talked about the arrests,” she says. “My claim to fame. Except I wasn’t arrested! They just threw me out.”

Ironically, the only protesters not following the nonviolence guidelines—a hundred or so “black bloc” anarchists, who started smashing shopwindows—were hardly bothered by the police. The black-bloc crews, whose graffiti and occasional “communiqués” run to nihilist slogans (“Civilization Is Collapsing—Let’s Give It a Push!”), were masked, well organized, young and fleet of foot, and armed with crowbars and acid-filled eggs. The police in their heavy riot gear could not have caught them if they’d tried. The targeted shops belonged to big corporations: Nike, the Gap, Fidelity Investments, Starbucks, Levi’s, Planet Hollywood. Still, other protesters chanted “Shame! Shame!” Some even tried to stop the attacks. There were scuffles, and suggestions that the black blocs contained police agents provocateurs—hence the masks. Medea Benjamin, who had helped produce the original exposé of Nike’s sweatshops in Asia, found herself in the absurd position of siding with protesters who were defending a Niketown. And her fear (shared by many) that a few broken windows might snatch away the headlines in the national press proved justified.

The political spectrum represented in the protests was improbably wide, ranging from, on the right, James Hoffa’s Teamsters and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. (who fielded tens of thousands of members for a march) to, on the left, a dozen or more anarchist factions (the black blocs were a rowdy minority within a generally less aggressive minority), including the ancient Industrial Workers of the World. All these groups had found, if not a common cause, at least a common foe. Some unlikely alliances were cemented. The United Steelworkers union and Earth First!, for example, had a common enemy in the Maxxam Corporation, which logs old-growth forests and owns steel mills, and the two groups are currently working together to end a bitter lockout at a Kaiser Aluminum plant in Tacoma.

Inside the besieged W.T.O. Ministerial, there was a rebellion among countries from the global South, which raised the possibility of another, truly formidable alliance with some of the forces out in the streets. The leaders of the poorer countries, though often depicted as pawns of the major powers, content to offer their countries’ workers to the world market at the lowest possible wages—and to pollute their air and water and strip-mine their natural resources, in exchange for their own commissions on the innumerable deals that come with corporate globalization—in reality have to answer, in many cases, to complex constituencies at home, many of whom are alarmed about their own economic recolonization. In Seattle, delegations from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America—rattled by the total disruption of the Ministerial’s schedule, and furious about being excluded from key meetings held privately by the rich countries—issued statements announcing their refusal to sign “agreements” produced at such meetings. In the end, no agreements were signed, no new round launched, and the Ministerial finished in disarray. This insurgency was often depicted in the American press as a refusal by the representatives of the poor countries to accept higher labor and environmental standards being imposed on them by the West, but that was not the gist of the revolt, which ran deeper and echoed the fundamental questions being asked outside in the streets about the mandate of the W.T.O.

“Coalition-building is hard,” Juliette Beck said. “There’s no doubt about it. But it’s what we do.” We were sitting in a deserted café in some sort of Latino community center one Sunday night in Berkeley, sipping beers. “At Global Exchange, we try to think of campaigns that will appeal to the average Joe on the street. We’re really not interested in just organizing other leftists. Big corporations are a great target, because they do things that hurt virtually everybody. My dad, who’s very right-wing, but libertarian, hates corporations. The H.M.O.s have practically ruined his medical practice, mainly because he insists on spending as much time with his patients as he thinks they need. After Seattle, he read a column by the economist Robert Kuttner, and suddenly, he said, he got what we’re trying to do. Kuttner apparently explained that corporations just naturally grab all the power they can, and when they’ve grabbed too much there has to be a backlash. That’s what led, a hundred years ago, to trust-busting and federal regulation after the robber barons did their thing, and that’s what’s causing this movement now. It was nice to hear my dad say that.”

Across the street was a café/bookshop/community center, this one run by an anarchist collective (we were, remember, in Berkeley) called Long Haul Infoshop, which distributes a radical journal called Slingshot. In a special W.T.O. edition, Slingshot had derided Global Exchange and “other despicable examples of the corporate left”; another column slammed Medea Benjamin for her defense of Nike. I asked Beck about the attacks from the left. She sighed. “Yeah, there’s been a lot of fallout. A lot of people believe property destruction isn’t violence. But that wasn’t really the issue in Seattle. The issue was what message, what images, we were sending out to the world. There’s always going to be disagreement. When it comes to these institutions—the W.T.O., the I.M.F., the World Bank—we have reformists and abolitionists. If we’re talking about the World Bank, I, for instance, am an abolitionist.”

I asked Beck if she considered herself an anarchist.

She shrugged, as if the question were obtuse.

DAN seemed, at a glance, to be an anarchist organization, or at least organized on anarchist principles, I said.

“Sure,” Beck said, still looking nonplussed. Finally, she said, “Well, I definitely respect anarchist ways of organizing. I guess I’m still learning what it means to be an anarchist. But the real question is: Can this anarchist model that’s working so well now for organizing protests be applied on an international scale to create the democratic decision-making structures that we need to eliminate poverty?”

I took this opportunity to float a theory, somewhat grander and iffier than Kuttner’s, about the historical forces that cause anarchism to flourish. Anarchism, I said, first arose in Europe as a response to the disruptions of peasant and artisanal life caused by industrialization and the rapid concentration of power among new business élites. After a good long fight, anarchism basically lost out to socialism as an organizing vision among workers—and lost again, after a heady late run, in Republican Spain, to Communism (which then lost to fascism). But anarchism was obviously enjoying some kind of small-time comeback, and, if today’s Information Revolution was even half as significant as both its critics and its cheerleaders like to claim—the most important economic development since the Industrial Revolution, and so on—then perhaps the time was ripening, socialism having been disgraced as an alternative to capitalism, for another great wave of anarchist protest against this latest, alarmingly swift amassing of power in the hands of a few hundred billionaires. Did Beck know that the term “direct action” was used by anarcho-syndicalists in France at the turn of the last century?

She did. She also knew, it seemed, that anarchism has become wildly popular among Latin American students who are fed up with what they call neoliberalismo (their term for corporate-led globalization) but disenchanted, also, with the traditional left. And she knew that the students who went on strike and took over the National University in Mexico City for nine months recently were mostly anarchists. But did I know (I didn’t) that it had been a structural-adjustment edict from the World Bank that led the Mexican government to raise student fees, which sparked the strike and the takeover?

Beck drained her beer. DAN, whatever its historical analogues, had been thriving since its triumph in Seattle, she said. The network was now directing most of its considerable energies toward the April action in Washington, D.C., which people were calling “A16,” for April 16th, the day the I.M.F. planned to meet. She was going to Washington herself in a couple of days, and then joining a road show, which would start making its way up the East Coast, beating the drums for the big event.

"I Am Funkier Than You,” the bumper sticker said, and it was almost certainly true. But the Mango Affinity Group, as the road-show crew had taken to call- ing themselves, had scored this big, extremely grubby van free from a woman in Virginia simply by asking for a vehicle on the A16 E-mail list serve, so they were not complaining. Liz Guy, an efficient DAN stalwart usually known as Sprout, had pulled together both the crew—eight or nine activists, aged nineteen to thirty-two, including Juliette Beck—and a tight, three-week, show-a-day itinerary that ran from Florida to Montreal before looping back to Washington. I found them in St. Petersburg, bivouacked under a shade tree on the campus of Eckerd College, working on a song.

Beck introduced me. They were a sweet-voiced, ragamuffin group, drawn from Connecticut, Atlanta, Seattle (Sprout), and the mountains of British Columbia. This afternoon was going to be their first performance together, and, judging from the situation as showtime approached and they began lugging their gear into a low-roofed, brutally air-conditioned hall, somebody had blown the publicity. There was virtually no one around except their hosts—two young DAN guys, Peter and Josh, who were hopefully laying out anarchist and vegan pamphlets and books on a table. Peter and Josh, embarrassed, said they had just returned from a Ruckus Society camp. Evidently, they had left arrangements in the wrong hands. “Let’s do a skate-by, see where people are,” one of them said, and both jumped on skateboards and shot off.

“Woodstock times ten,” Kevin Danaher had said. Pure hooey, I now thought. In truth, A16 did not have going for it many of the things that had converged so resoundingly in Seattle. The planning for the protest was far more rushed. The W.T.O.’s Seattle Ministerial had been, moreover, a momentous gathering, meant to kick off a so-called Millennial Round, whereas the World Bank/I.M.F. spring meetings were strictly routine, and scheduled to be brief. Big labor, finally, had no special interest in the World Bank and the I.M.F., and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., while endorsing the A16 protest, had decided to concentrate its energies this political season on preventing the permanent normalization of United States trade relations with China. A demonstration by union members to press these issues was scheduled to take place in Washington on April 12th. And it wasn’t the only event threatening to disperse attention from A16. There was a big protest planned for April 9th, also in Washington, organized by a movement called Jubilee 2000, to demand debt cancellation for the poorest countries.

The hope, of course, was that all these protests would produce some sort of anti-globalization synergy that might just culminate, on A16, in the type of massive turnout that would certainly be needed to have any chance of shutting down the World Bank and the I.M.F. meetings. On the Internet, as always, anything looked possible. Caravans were being organized all over the country, reconnaissance was being conducted on “targets” in Washington, anti-capitalist revolutionary blocs were breaking away from the DAN-centered action with furious objections to mealymouthed talk of “fair trade” and alleged “collaboration with the enemy at large”—to, that is, meetings being held by organizers with the D.C. police to try to prevent bloodshed. (In fact, the D.C. police had gone to Seattle to observe the demonstrations, and had spent a million dollars on new riot gear for A16.) Beck had told me, back in San Francisco, “I get so tired of the Internet and E-mail. We couldn’t do this work without it, but, really, it’s not organizing. There’s nothing like face to face.”

Now in Florida, Beck, perhaps getting desperate for some F2F, approached two young women who had wandered into the frigid hall, possibly just to get out of the afternoon heat, and started regaling them with a spiel about how the World Bank and the I.M.F. are “partners in crime.” The young women, who wore tank tops and looked as if they belonged on a beach somewhere, nodded politely but said nothing. In the background, Damon, a tall, dark-skinned, curly-haired musician from British Columbia, strummed a guitar, and the rest of the Mango Affinity Group busied themselves making posters denouncing exploitation.

Blessedly, between the skate-by and Damon’s guitar, people began to trickle into the hall. Soon there was an audi- ence of thirty or so, and the show began. Damon disappeared inside a towering, black-suited puppet with a huge papier-mâché head, sloping skull, and cigar stuck between his lips, Beck slapped a “World Bank/I.M.F.” sign on his chest, and he began to roar, “You are all un- der my power!” The crowd laughed, and he roared, “It’s not funny, it’s true!” They laughed harder. A political skit followed, with a series of fresh-faced young women getting thrashed by an I.M.F. hench- man for demanding health and safety standards, then put to work in a Gap sweatshop. “Right to Organize” also got pounded. Afterward, Beck led a teach- in called Globalization 101, with pop quizzes on the meaning of various trade and finance acronyms, and Hershey’s Kisses tossed to those who got the answers right. One middle-aged trio—Eckerd faculty, from the look of them—seemed well versed on the topic. Then the Mango members introduced themselves individually—Leigh, from an “intentional community” in Atlanta, Ricardo, from a Canadian “solar-powered coöperative” where people grew much of their own food. Sprout took the opportunity to encourage people to form affinity groups, explaining what they were and how they worked.

I was struck by Sprout’s poise. Talking to dozens of strangers, she somehow made her presentation seem like an intimate conversation, with pauses, eye contact, murmurs back and forth, little encouraging interjections (“Awesome!” “Cool!”) when she felt she’d been understood. Twenty-five, physically small, and dressed with utter simplicity—loose shirt, cargo pants, no shoes—she achieved, with no theatricality, an effect of tremendous presence. It occurred to me that Sprout, with her neighborly voice and unerring choice of words, could easily be very successful in a completely different arena. On another sort of road show, for instance—the sort that dot-com startups mount, touring and performing for investors and analysts, before taking their companies public. The same was true for Beck. And both women came from cities (Seattle, San Francisco) that were crawling with rich dot-commers more or less their age. What was it that made them choose this raggedy, low-status, activist’s path instead? While the rest of the country obsessed over its stock portfolio, these brainy young people were working killer hours for little, if any, pay—quixotically trying, as they sometimes put it, to globalize the world from below.

Next on the program was a rousing folk song, with Damon on guitar and Sage, his regular bandmate from B.C., on drums. Their vocal harmonies sounded fairly polished. Then Sprout produced a viola, slipping without fanfare into the tune, and began improvising fiddle breaks of steadily increasing warmth and precision. I caught Beck’s eye. Who was this woman? Beck could not stop grinning. The Mango group then ruined the soaring mood, as far as Iwas concerned, by leading the crowd in some mortifyingly corny chants—“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, cuz the power of the people don’t stop!”

Beck asked for a show of hands. How many people thought they might go to Washington for A16? Fifteen or twenty hands shot up, including those of the two women in tank tops. I was amazed that they had even stayed for the show. A signup sheet was circulated.

Next came nonviolence training, for which ten or twelve people stuck around. Leigh and Sprout led the training, which lasted into the evening and included a lot of “role-playing”—people pretending to be protesters, police, I.M.F. officials, workers trying to get to work. There were drills in quick decision-making among affinity groups: shall we stay locked down or move when threatened with arrest and felony charges? Group dynamics were dissected after each scene. Sprout dem- onstrated unthreatening body language. Hand signals for swift, clear communication were suggested. Peter and Josh, the two local DAN guys, joined in the training, and it was soon obvious that they had a lot of experience. Peter, who was wiry, bushy-bearded, and soft-spoken, firmly refused to be bullied by some of the bigger, more aggressive men in the group. It became clear that effective nonviolent protest needed a cool head, and that bluster wasn’t helpful. Toward the end of the evening, Leigh presented a list of things to bring to an action. Most were common-sense items like food, water, and herbal remedies for tear gas. The rationale for others was less self-evident. Maxi pads?

Leigh and Sprout glanced at one another. “If the cops start using chemical warfare, some women start bleeding very heavily,” Leigh said. There was a brief, shocked silence. “They’re good as bandages, too,” she added.

What about gas masks?

“They can become targets,” Josh said. “In Seattle, the cops tried to tear them off, and if they couldn’t reach them they fired rubber bullets, or wooden bullets, or these wooden dowel rods they had, at the masks. Some people got a lot of glass in their faces. Masks can be dangerous.”

The trainees stared.

“One thing that’s good to have is big toenail clippers,” Peter said cheerfully. “Put ’em in your pocket, and if you’re arrested, and just left in a cell or a paddy wagon, somebody can fish them out of your pocket and cut off your cuffs with ’em. They use cheap plastic cuffs when they arrest a lot of people, and if they leave you sitting for ten or fifteen hours it’s a lot more comfortable if your hands aren’t tied behind you.”

Ten or fifteen hours?

“It happens. It happened to me in Seattle.”

It had happened to Sprout, too—seventeen hours in an unheated cell alone, doing jumping jacks to try to stay warm.

The tone of the gathering was entirely sober now. Somebody asked about carrying I.D. during an action.

“It depends whether you want to practice jail solidarity,” Beck said. “That’s something you need to decide with your affinity group.”

None of the trainees knew what jail solidarity was.

“Noncoöperation with the system,” they were told. It might be widely used in Washington—to clog the jails and courts and try to force mass dismissals of charges.

But the details of jail solidarity could wait for another session, Beck said. It was late. People were tired. DAN would be offering more nonviolence training locally in the weeks ahead, and everybody going to Washington for A16 should get as much training as possible.

We stayed that night with Peter and Josh. They lived in a mobile home near a strip mall in Clearwater. People slept on couches and chairs and on the floor, in the van, on a back porch, and on a tiny plywood dock on a fetid canal behind the trailer. I tried to sleep on the dock, but mosquitoes kept me awake. There was a full moon, and low, cotton-puff clouds streaming across it at an unusual speed. The clouds were glowing a sort of radioactive mauve from all the strip-mall lights.

At some point, the mosquitoes woke Beck, who was also on the dock. Out of the darkness, a restless voice: “We need a name. For the movement as a whole. Anti-Corporate Globalization isn’t good enough. What do you think of Global Citizen Movement?”

I thought it needed work.

Beck started talking about plans she had for disrupting the Democratic Party’s national Convention this summer, in Los Angeles. She mentioned a Millennium Youth March.

“You’re thinking big.”

“That’s my job.”

I wanted to know what would happen in Washington on A16.

“Me, too,” she said, and I thought I heard her sigh. “For now, crowd-building is the main thing. That’s why I’m really glad I’m on this road show. I kind of feel like I should be in D.C., walking the site, doing messaging, doing logistics, but I’m going to stay with this as long as I can.”

“Messaging” meant press releases, banners, slogans—even sound bites for protesters to give to reporters, should the opportunity arise. I had begun to think that for the American public effective messaging about the I.M.F. and the World Bank was a hopeless task. In Nigeria and Venezuela, yes, everybody knew and had strong opinions about structural adjustment and I.M.F. debt. That was never going to be true in this country. People might turn out in large numbers, for many different reasons, on A16, but it would basically be Americans expressing solidarity with people in poor countries who are on the receiving end of bad policies. That wasn’t a formula for real political leverage. The plight of, say, the Ittu Oromo would never move more than a few faraway hearts. In the great shakeout of economic globalization, most Americans probably believe, not unreasonably, that they will be among the revolution’s winners. As for the big goal—democratizing international decision-making, in order to eliminate poverty—it seemed to me impossibly abstract.

I was loath to tell Beck that. While she seemed quite dauntless, her identification with her work seemed, at the same time, perilously deep. She once told me that she thought it was significant that she had been born in 1973, the same year that Richard Nixon allowed the dollar to float—“and the I.M.F. should have been allowed to die!” On another occasion, she’d said, “I really feel lucky to be doing this work. When I started studying the World Bank in college, I couldn’t believe how evil it was, even while it’s supposedly all about fighting poverty. I thought, you know, it would really be an honor to dedicate my life to fighting this evil institution. And that’s all we’re asking peo- ple to do: help us drag these institutions out into the sunlight of public scrutiny, where they belong. They’ll shrivel up like Dracula!”

While I tried to doze, Beck reminded me that the World Bank and I.M.F. had pressured Haiti to freeze its minimum wage, that NAFTA was a failure from beginning to end—details available if I needed them—and that the United States Supreme Court was hearing a crucial case, which I should watch closely when I got back to New York. It seemed that the federal government was trying to stop the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from boycotting companies that did business in Burma, which uses forced labor.

At dawn, finally agreeing that sleep was hopeless, Beck and I took a canoe that was tied to the dock and paddled off down the stinking canal, gliding past the battered, moldy back doors of mobile homes. It was a Sunday morning. Everybody in the trailers seemed to be asleep—probably dreaming about their stock portfolios. The mangroves on the banks slowly closed over our heads. We tried to push through. There seemed to be wider, brighter water ahead. Beck was happy to keep going, but I was in the bow, catching spider webs with my face. In the end, we turned back.

The Mango Affinity Group held a morning meeting on the little dock. While trying to decide who would be responsible for grocery shopping, they started goofing on the hand signals developed by DAN for anarchist consensus decision-making, cracking each other up. Beck was supposed to be guiding the discussion—facilitating, they called it—but she had the giggles, too. Group morale seemed high.

Bushy-bearded Peter came out of the trailer, yawning and stretching. He started filling a plastic bag with grapefruit from a low, gnarled dwarf of a tree. The fruit looked awful, with upper halves all blackened as if by grime falling from the sky, but Peter assured me they were fine. I cut one open. It was the best grapefruit I had ever tasted.

Inside the trailer, there was a small room devoted to Josh and Peter’s book and periodical distribution business. They had a dense, nondoctrinaire selection, with sections on Organizing, Anarchism/Social Theory, Animal Liberation, Punk, Direct Action, Media, Globalization, Feminism/Sexuality, and Youth Oppression/Radical Education. They had ten Noam Chomsky titles, lots of Emma Goldman, a guide to “understanding and attacking mainstream media,” arguments against compulsory schooling, even a collection of Digger tracts (seventeenth-century free-love proto-anarchists). Josh and Peter’s catalogue included an introduction that traced their own political development from 1996, when “we were straightedge as fuck,” to more recent days, when “our distro grew greener and more anarchistic.”

Elsewhere in the trailer, somebody had put on a Delta blues tape. Out in the living room, I found Josh sprawled on a couch. He was a quiet guy, in his early twenties, with sparse blond muttonchops and small blue eyes. He was wearing a baseball cap and talking to a glum-looking young woman with an elaborately pierced nose. I started asking Josh about himself. He wasn’t a student, he said pleasantly. He had realized he could learn more outside school. He didn’t have a job. “But I need to get one, just to make money. The problem is, I’m really too busy to work.”

Through a window, I could see the Mango Affinity Group loading up the van. Beck and Sprout, the lanky, tireless trade wonk and the barefoot fiddler, had their heads bent together over a map. Today, the road show went to Gainesville. Tomorrow, Valdosta, Georgia.