Zack Finch (second from left) with others from
Asheville, NC, at the IMF/World Bank protest
in Washington D.C. in April

In Light of the D.C. Demonstrations

by Zack Finch
Asheville, NC

Note: Activist Zack Finch traveled with seven others to Washington, DC, in late April to protest the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Monday morning in the nation's capitol felt post-apocalyptic. No cars, no pedestrians on their way to work. Only groups of protesters weaving through the wet streets in brightly colored ponchos, and the police who had sealed off ninety city blocks with a fortress of metal barricades.

Otherwise, the streets downtown lay fallow. This was in stark contrast to Sunday's sunny festival of resistance, when an estimated 20,000 people lay siege to the World Bank's international headquarters, paraded through the streets with puppets and banners, and spoke out with the strength of a single voice against economic development policies which favor corporations over communities.

But on Monday morning, our affinity group of eight people from Asheville, North Carolina, found ourselves standing in a small circle in the rain, deciding a course of action. For most of us, this was our fifth day in D.C. We had been sleeping only a few hours each night on the floor of a crowded hotel room, subsisting on miso soup and granola bars. But our exhaustion was giddy and proud. Let it rain on our parade. At least there was a parade in the first place. Only a year ago, the World Bank and IMF meetings attracted less than twenty demonstrators and no media coverage to speak of.

Arriving at our decision by consensus, we agreed to walk toward an intersection where it was rumored hundreds of other protesters had gathered. I held hands with Rufina, my friend since the age of ten, and we hopscotched through puddles and politely greeted the cops we passed along our way. We flowed into other small tributaries of protesters, some with drums and tambourines. A cowbell played an Afro-Cuban cabiltos beat.

As we splashed along, we encountered a few protesters who looked bedraggled and downtrodden, as if they had slept out in the rain, or else in prison. We passed an enormous pile of cardboard signs and soggy puppets melting into the grass of the Ellipse, behind the White House. I overheard a woman muttering to her friend that Seattle was so much more fun than this. If April 16 had been a miracle of grass-roots coordination, Monday morning was "the day after" - like waking up in a strange city with a hangover.

Coming on the heels of the now-mythic "Battle of Seattle," I had prepared for a little air to be let out of our tires in D.C. Surely the federal authorities had something to prove, would be better prepared. All week long, Police Chief Ramsey looked down on the city's grid like a chessboard. He moved his pieces swiftly and to great effect. Saturday morning's decision to close down the protesters' convergence space was like bringing out the queen early on. Although we were able to relocate our meetings and trainings, the psychological decentralization that ensued was significant. Later that evening, police arrested six hundred peaceful paraders (who were not attempting to risk arrest), while on Sunday, during the highly orchestrated direct action, in which thousands of people declared themselves "arrest-able," the police used only twenty pairs of plastic handcuffs. Now, on Monday it seemed like Ramsey had co-opted the rain as a secret weapon to hose down the spirits of the already-exhausted protesters.

Although the D.C. authorities had clearly learned something from the mistakes of Seattle, the protesters were better prepared and far more disciplined than we had been during the WTO demonstrations last November. In the weeks leading up to April 16, thousands of protesters had attended legal trainings and jail solidarity workshops; everyone understood that our power was collective. The more that we functioned as a unified force, the more effective we would be.

The intimidating police presence forced us to adopt a more tactical, approach to the demonstrations than I would have preferred. We sat through many hours of large spokescouncil meetings, in which we divided the city into "pie slices," to which autonomous groups and clusters would commit themselves. On Sunday, one of our most common chants was "Whose Streets? Our streets!" - a message which fixated on the police rather than on the policies of the World Bank and the IMF.

The necessary tactical choreography of our civil disobedience made it easy to forget, in the heat of the Sunday's protests, that we had come to D.C. to advocate not so much for our own liberties, but for the rights of an invisible, global majority who could not be present with us.

It was challenging to retain this focus. During a threatening moment on Sunday morning, when police donned their gas masks in preparation for a treatment of pepper spray, I closed my eyes in order to conjure strength from the toothless grin of Amai Kadoma, my "African mother," with whom I lived for six months when I was a solidarity worker in northern Zimbabwe, teaching at a school for street children. A woman with six children, Amai Kadoma could not afford to send them to school because the World Bank's structural adjustment policies so severely limit the public financing of education. Amai earns forty U.S. dollars per month - enough for food, but not for shoes, medicine, or school fees.

Zimbabwe provides a good example of how World Bank loans often negatively affect the people they're theoretically intended to benefit. More and more Zimbabwean farmers have been forced to grow tobacco and cotton for export, rather than food for domestic consumption. Whereas Zimbabwe has always been the "bread basket" of southern Africa, food production has dropped so dramatically that now the country must import corn, their staple crop. The current "development" model, mandated by the World Bank and the IMF, undermines the integrity and self-sufficiency of the domestic economies by forcing them to produce commodities for the global marketplace.

Another unfair condition of World Bank loans is that the government must repay all of the interest before any social services may be funded. This includes health care in a country where it's estimated a third of the population is HIV positive. The infant mortality rate, not surprisingly, has doubled since the implementation of structural adjustment policies in Zimbabwe.

So I tried to keep everything in perspective by imagining it was Amai and her sons and daughters with whom I was locking arms. The truth is, I was locking arms with people who were mostly young, middle class, and of Caucasian descent.

Much has been made of the lack of ethnic diversity at the D.C. protests. But instead of dwelling on this fact as a failure of outreach or coalition-building, perhaps we can appreciate the importance of white twenty-somethings claiming a political identity in the face of that unfortunate "black-hole" of a label, Generation X. After all the non--violent resistance trainings and teach-ins on the effects of corporate globalism, who is to say we're not witnessing the informal unionizing of young, white adults who are forsaking their inherited privileges for a more common good?

What happened in Seattle and again in D.C. is more fundamental than a matter of lightning striking twice. A better analogy might be a series of concerted waves building far out in the ocean. The first one surprised the calm waters of the Puget Sound. The second lapped against the windows of the World Bank. When a television reporter stopped to ask our group if we were disappointed that Monday's IMF meetings were going on despite the demonstrations, Rufina reminded us all that these protests are motivated by a much longer-term vision than the disruption of a couple of meetings.

Change, I could have added, seldom happens in the form of an asteroid colliding with the earth. More often, it happens gradually - waves hewing a new shape to the coastline, small birds carrying small seeds inside their bodies. Our attitudes to social change must be a healthy mixture of patience and impatience, idealism and skepticism. We must catalyze the coming of the asteroid while performing the daily duties of the wave.

To anyone who feels frustrated by a comparison of the events in D.C. with the unprecedented success of Seattle, she should remember that our ultimate ambition is to include every voice in the global consensus. This is democracy: nothing less.

In Washington, we saw the cooperation and coexistence of many different attitudes to change. Demonstrators worked as a coalition of revolutionaries; black bloc anarchists and Gandhian-influenced pacifists labored toward consensus in the musky heat of church basements all week long. This didn't have to happen; it was made to happen.

Let me offer an example from Sunday's direct action to suggest how we are taking steps in a good direction: 9 a.m., the corner of 19th and K Streets. Perhaps five hundred protesters had formed a human blockade diagonally across the intersection. Police with granite expressions, dressed in their new line of spring riot-wear, stood behind their barricades, ready to follow orders as soon as they were given. Down the street, a group of about twenty black-clad anarchists appeared, rolling a stolen dumpster. They moved it into the center of the street, then picked up two parked cars and set them down beside. With metal gratings and some old lumber, in a few minutes they had constructed a makeshift barricade against in-coming vehicular traffic.

About this time, protesters from the human chain began to voice their opposition to the barricade. One young woman named Sunflower climbed on top of the dumpster in order to halt its construction. Suddenly, a wildfire controversy erupted. There was screaming among the protesters. Some people were dissembling the barricade while others were adding to it. What happened next is something I'll never forget. Someone called for a meeting of spokespeople in the middle of the street. About thirty individuals, representing their respective affinity groups, formed a circle, and a young woman known as Jesse Helms agreed to facilitate the discussion.

Convincing arguments were made by both sides. A Caribbean man with shoulder-length dreadlocks insisted that the barricade was tactically significant because it provided a first line of defense against in-coming police vehicles. Sunflower argued that the barricade established too much of an Us-Them dichotomy and was contrary to our messages of love and unity.

This ball was beaten back and forth with great passion until Starhawk, brought almost to tears, expressed how beautiful she thought it was that in a moment of such partisan, emotional intensity, we were able to seek consensus in the first place.

The group was visibly moved by this observation, and within the next ten minutes, the spokescouncil had arrived at the consensus that nothing more would be added to the barricade, and only flammable objects would be removed.

As it turned out, the fate of the barricade was much less important than the process by which the group made an agreement that seemed fair to everyone at the intersection. The consensus process defused the turbulence that had threatened to divide the group. If they had voted "democratically," it is doubtful this level of unity could have been achieved. After all, what does it mean if 49 people out of 100 are unhappy with a decision? Does that constitute a healthy society?

Our challenge, now, is to discover new ways to cooperate with each other. An estimated 20,000 people organized a peaceful protest without leaders or hierarchies of power. What does this mean? A political structure, composed of affinity groups and spokescouncil and run by consensus, is nothing less than a model we think works for people who must make difficult decisions regarding everyone's well-being.

It's possible we are organizing not just a resistance movement, but a model that affirms democracy in all the ways it has been denied. It's possible we will be able to build coalitions with other groups of people who share a similar commitment to social change. It's possible that others will laugh and call this dream impossible.

The one thing we know is the strength of the love will be tested. The depth of the dream will be tried. Navigating through the water-logged streets of D.C., exhausted with hope, I realized we would return to our local communities wiser and more experienced. Perhaps after D.C. we have earned a more realistic awareness of the strength it takes to move a mountain.

Zack Finch has worked as an apple-picker, schoolteacher, musician, free-lance writer, advocate for the elderly, and organic vegetable farmer. He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.