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Making Movements
at the Millennium:
Cybermobilizing for Social Justice
Against Global Capitalism
1999-2000
Senior Honors Thesis for
the Law and Society Program
at the University of California at Santa Barbara
2000-2001
Professor Mary E. Vogel, Advisor
by Deborah L.
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................. II
LIST OF ACRONYMS......................................................................................................... IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................... v
MAKING
MOVEMENTS AT THE MILLENIUM:
CYBER-MOBILIZING
FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AGAINST
GLOBAL
CAPITALISM, 1999-2000
The demonstrations in Seattle in November 1999
against the World Trade Organization Millennial meeting took the world by
surprise. People began to wonder what
the WTO was, and how people dressed up as turtles found common ground with
steelworkers as they tried to shut down the WTO summit.
Protest begins with sense of unfairness. How does this arise? NYU’s Tom R. Tyler suggests that if
decisionmaking procedures are fair, people will accept the outcomes even if
they disagree with them substantively.
Fair process then maintains a belief in the legitimacy of political
institutions even when we oppose what they do.
My study is a deviant case analysis that replicates many questions from
Tyler's work with this unique group, the citizens who found common ground in
dissent at Seattle, and at subsequent actions. I probe their social
characteristics, experiences and background to search systematically to see if
Tyler's theory holds true for protesters -- and, if not, how they differ. Specifically, I examine whether they differ
from Tyler’s results in their response to political decisions they view as substantively
unacceptable. Perhaps they are unlikely
to accept procedural fairness as a substitute for just outcomes.
It seemed to me that maybe this was what made
protesters more likely to question the legitimacy of political
institutions. I drew on the rich data
on the 1999-2000 protests from Seattle to D2K at the Democratic National
Convention in Los Angeles. I explore
some of the main characteristics of these recent protests against the backdrop
of the Civil Rights movement, specifically, SNCC, the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee, the women's movement and the anti-War movement of the
1960s and 1970s.
Using participant observation of D2K organizing
and protests, in-depth interviews with protesters and leaders of D2K and three
participating groups, with more limited surveys of protestors, I used this
mobilization as a laboratory to explore both the motivations of those who join
protests and the structure and dynamics of movements today.
A16—The protests held in Washington DC on April 15,16, and 17, 2000
ACLU—American Civil Liberties Union
BRU—Bus Rider’s Union (El Sindicato de Pasajeros)
CISPES—Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
D2K—the organizing group for the Los Angeles protests
DLC—Democratic Leadership Council
DAN—Direct Action Network
DNC—The “DNC” affinity group respondents
DNC—Democratic National Committee
DNCC—Democratic National Convention Committee
ENV— environmental activist respondents
FBI—Federal Bureau of Investigation
FTAA—Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (currently in negotiation)
GATT—General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GATS—General Agreement on Technology and Services
GSS—General Social Survey
IMF—International Monetary Fund
LAPD—Los Angeles Police Department
LAT—Los Angeles Times
LDF—Legal Defense Fund
LGBT—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered
LU—Labor union respondents
MC—Free Mumia Coalition
MTA—Metropolitan Transit District
N30—The Seattle Protests against the WTO November 30, 1999
NICs—Newly Industrialized Countries
NIRA—National Industrial Recovery Act
NLG—National Lawyers Guild
NWRO—National Welfare Rights Organization
OSHA—Occupational Safety and Health Administration
NAFTA—North American Free Trade Agreement
SCADA—Southern California Americans for Democratic Action
SCFTN—Southern California Fair Trade Network
SDS—Students for a Democratic Society
SNCC—Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
TNC—Transnational Corporation
WTO—World Trade Organization
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Reification of Capitalism:
Imprinting a Social System Based on Private Interest
Law’s Role in the Justification and Structure of
Capitalist Globalization
The Role of the Media in Reification
The WTO: A Flashpoint for
Consciousness-Raising
Social Movement mobilization models
Tyler’s Procedural Fairness Model
The Structure and Dynamics of
Social Movements
The Faces of Activism: composition
of social movements
Women’s Roles in Social Movements
The Role of People of Color in Social Movements
Institutional Response to Dissent
The Qualitative Method of Data Collection
Operationalizing and Data
Collection
Interview and Survey Protocols
Mobilizing Disparate Social Groups into a Movement
V. MEDIA’S CHANGING ROLE IN TODAY’S mOVEMENTS
The Role of the New Media in Today’s Movement
Media Framing and Radicalization
VI. The Structure and Dynamics of
Counter-Hegemonic Groups
Racial Dynamics in Today’s Movement
VII. Institutional Response to Dissent
MAKING
MOVEMENTS AT THE MILLENNIUM:
CYBER-MOBILIZING
FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AGAINST
GLOBAL
CAPITALISM, 1999-2000
According to the seventeenth-century
philosopher John Locke, governments exist via the tacit consent of the
governed. The idea of tacit consent
means that members of a polity accept both the benefits and obligations of that
polity.
The
difficulty is, what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent, and how far it
binds, i.e., how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby
submitted to any government, where he has made no expressions of it at
all.
And
to this I say, that every man, that hath any possessions, or enjoyment, of any
part of the dominions of any government, doth thereby give his tacit consent,
and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during
such enjoyment, as any one under it; whether this his possession be of land, to
him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be
barely travelling freely on the highway; and in effect, it reaches as far as
the very being of any one within the territories of that government (Locke,
Second Treatise, Section 119).
Thus, tacit consent is subjective acceptance that legitimates government. In the view of those who work for social justice in our own millennial era, government allows those who exploit society to exercise control over it and fail in their obligations. This leads some social justice activists to view government itself as illegitimate, as it has abdicated state power to corporate influence. These activists withdraw their subjective acceptance of a government controlled by those who fail to fulfill the obligations they incur while enriching themselves. As this consciousness grows, activists begin to mobilize. The most visible manifestation of this mobilization is protest.
How might these activists come to
conclude that such abdication of power or undue influence on state decisions
was unfair? In 1994, social
psychologist Tom R. Tyler, then at UC Berkeley, concluded from one of his studies
that societal dynamics existed that prevented such radical critique. He found
that citizens accept governmental outcomes they viewed as unfair if they
considered the procedures under which they were decided to be fair and
balanced. A majority of Tyler’s
respondents concluded that if fair processes were observed, laws should be
followed and government should be considered legitimate. The central question I
asked in this paper is: how do activists conclude that outcomes are not fair,
refuse to give tacit consent, and move to proactive mobilization and protest?
One concrete expression of the
refusal of tactic consent manifested at the protests against the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington in late November of 1999, which took
the world by surprise. Beforehand,
Americans knew little or nothing about the WTO, formed in 1995 to lower
barriers to international trade. When
50,000 people appeared on the streets of Seattle to disrupt the WTO summit,
America began paying attention. The
seriousness of the activists’ commitment was tested as tear gas, beatings, and
arrests ensued. Then, on April 16,
2000, 30,000 people arrived in Washington, D.C. to disrupt a meeting of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
United States had not seen protests on this scale, with a comparable use of
police force, since the 1960s. The
discovery that a group was planning a protest of similar scale at the
Democratic Party National Convention in Los Angeles, during August of 2000,
prompted my research project on this new wave of protest. “D2K” signifies the
action planned at the Democratic National Convention held during August 14 to
August 18, 2000, in downtown Los Angeles.
D2K is a play on the ubiquitous term used to describe the Millennium,
Y2K. For a year and a half, the
contours of this new activism were probed via participant-observation,
interviews, and surveys.
In spirit, the movement echoed observations of
Herbert Marcuse in Repressive Tolerance. If we believe that
objective truth exists, history is an inconstant struggle toward that
truth. One message of this truth, borne
out by the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, taught us that we, as a
society, are rewarded with a higher quality of life when more of us achieve
equality. As life chances for people
of color improve, their cultural and scholarly contributions, invisible earlier
in our history, enrich our lives. In this way, social progress and increasing
human rights benefit society on a broad level.
In recent years, the dominant modes of corporate
globalization, including privatization and the lending requirements of the
World Bank and the IMF, have produced many unfortunate setbacks to social
progress. Capitalist globalization, in
weakening national sovereignty by imposed privatization requirements, also
lowers the living standard of significant segments of the world population.[1] Until recently, the effects went largely
unnoticed here in America except by the victims and their families. Movements against capitalist globalization
expanded, however, in other countries.
The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, is one recent example.
To a large extent, the Zapatista uprising is simply the latest in a centuries-long series of violent confrontations between the indigenous peoples of the region and the expanding economic appetites of Mexican elites. [A]s the population grows, wages drop and multinationals gain access to Chiapas, so the PRI's ability to play the middleman has diminished. The final straw for Chiapas was the NAFTA accord, which flooded the Mexican market with cheap American corn, destroying one of the last sources of cash available to poor farmers. On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation took the world stage.[2]
The Zapatistas, suffering the effects of the
global capitalist enterprise in their homeland, served as a rallying point for
a growing international movement against the mythology of the neo-liberal idea
that globalization raises the living standards of all who participate. A sociopolitical event with a similar
trigger, the Sandinista uprising in El Salvador circa 1980s, proved to be a
consciousness-raising event with profound implications for this new
movement.
The difficulty of developing a critique of
corporate globalization becomes apparent when one considers that capitalism as
a self-justifying ideology has become reified in American consciousness. In contrast to the political structures of
many developing countries, the idea that prosperous corporations benefit the
average person has become a dominant ideological tenet in the United
States. Beginning with Supreme Court
rulings early in this century, law has endowed corporations with the same
rights as natural persons. Corporations
also benefit from legal protections that allow them latitude to operate in an
amoral manner if they so choose. Corporations
are accorded great leeway in pursuing profit by the legal fiction of the corporate
body, bearing the rights of natural persons, with additional protections that
assure near-immortality while insulating management from criminal acts. As the members of movements such as the
Zapatistas have done, dissidents here in the U.S have grown to view the
unchecked power of transnational corporations as injurious to the public
good. This level of consciousness often
leads to the opinion that government policies and laws that favor corporations
over other human concerns brings governmental legitimacy into question. Further, dissidents query the role of “the
media” as purveyors of the dominant rhetoric rather than neutral observers and
reporters of events.
In analyzing the genesis of the reification of
capitalism, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun described
the primary contribution of capitalism to the development of the bourgeois
public sphere. During the eighteenth century, private property rights became
conflated with the right to privacy (Calhoun 15). The public good in this way
becomes the private, subordinate to private property interests. In this manner, people who control means of
production have obtained a “natural” right to use this property as they see fit
to enrich themselves, and any affiliated stakeholders. “Conceptually, it was crucial that the laws
of the market were seen as a natural order.”
He maintained that the constitutional states emphasized civil rights
that appeared to subjugate the public sphere to the private sphere, so that the
public sphere was neutralized in regard to power and domination. (Calhoun
16). This naturalistic image of civil
society belied the key role of government in its own creation. In other words, the views of capitalist
elites reinforced the rights of property over the rights of human beings to the
degree that human rights never gained ideological credibility. Thus, property rights are viewed as “more
equal” than human rights, and thus more natural.
If the laws of the market are viewed as natural,
it does not seem surprising that Americans on the whole have decided that
private markets, mythological and naturalized, are the solutions to all public
problems. As a bystander at D2K who
opposed the new social movements stated, “Capitalism is just common sense.”[3] The legal system maintains this view with
the support of “the media,” who enjoy projecting the image of fairness and
balance while working within a system that works against both of these
concepts. If capitalism were indeed a
beneficial social system this media support of reification could be considered
support of the public good. Evidence
exists that argues against this idea.
Law naturalizes corporate power. Art Wolfe, a legal scholar, described the
inequality of power between the corporation and the individual. The corporation is treated as an individual
in law when convenient, but the similarity ends there.[4] For example, corporations are essentially
immortal. Corporations cannot be jailed
for violations of the law. No “Three
Strikes” laws apply to corporations.
Seldom do executives of corporations serve prison time for even the most
heinous crimes. Wolfe uses the term the
“capitalist paradigm” to describe “the fundamental beliefs that teachers,
scholars, public policy commentators, politicians, and others who speak and
write about our American brand of economics and law espouse. It also refers to the training process
through which most of us who participate in our economic and legal system gain
our place in the economy (Wolfe 31).”
For Wolfe and many others, the Lockean tenet of individual self-interest
leading to the public good has evolved into the capitalist paradigm.
The limits set by individualism are clear: events that escape the control of individual choice and will cannot coherently be encompassed in moral calculation. But, that means that much, if not most, of the workings of the independent American political economy, through which individuals achieve or are assigned their places and relative power in this society, cannot be understood in terms that make coherent sense (Wolfe 596).
Due to this definition of self-interest as a
public good, corporations have evolved without a sense of community. This means that on the broadest level, these
institutions that have been legally endowed with more rights and privileges
than natural human beings have no civic responsibility. A commitment to the best possible quarterly
per-share earnings figures precludes such responsibility. Nevertheless, under pressure from citizens,
corporations now attempt to project a friendlier image. For example, a new phenomenon in public
relations, greenwashing, aggressively conveys the image that corporations do in
fact care about people and our environment.[5]
Michael Moore, the labor activist and pundit,
maintains in his book, Downsize This,
that nowhere in the American constitution are stockholders given rights. Gabel and Feinman, two legal scholars,
disagree, stating that in the Supreme Court decision Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905) [6]
and its progeny, that contract law in relation to the purchase of the labor of
human beings was imbedded in our legal structure as a Fourteenth Amendment
right. The purchase of labor became a
protected right under that ruling.
The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and this includes the right to purchase and sell labor, except as controlled by the State in the legitimate exercise of its police power (Lochner).
Gabel and Feinman assert that this ruling transformed the work of human beings into a commodity. It follows that human beings themselves become commodified. We are “consumers,” “costs of production,” and “dead wood.[7]” The results of this commodification have had powerful consequences for society, contributory to the reification of the interests of private individuals as commensurate with public good. “Contemporary capitalism is a coercive system of relationships… with contract law as a legitimating ideology… The central point to understand is that contract law today constitutes in large part an elaborate attempt to conceal what is going on in the world.”[8]
How is this accomplished by legal
structures? Gabel and Feinman argue
that contract law in the twentieth century has evolved from its original
purpose, the regulation of agreements between individuals, to an instrument
that “retains the legitimating features of private agreement while effectuating
the regulatory and stabilizing component that is a central principle of the
contemporary economy (505).”[9] The regulatory coordination that supports
capitalism in the United States, and the continued pressure to lower the social
safety net, is exemplified by the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for the
Workplace Preservation Act, House Bill HR 987.[10] Susan Hall Fleming, an OSHA spokeswoman,
said she knew of no business group that has endorsed the proposed ergonomic
standards. But she said that is not surprising. “They prefer no regulations to
any regulations at all.” Businesses
take a stand that government regulation of any sort impinges on their
rights. One of the subjects of this
study pointed out that the argument against business regulation might be
countered with the example that people are not allowed to set up storefronts to
sell cocaine by government law. He also
observed that the structure of capital has been unable to survive without
government aid and protection.[11] Although outside the scope of this study, an
investigation by Time Magazine in 1998 showed the effects of corporate welfare.[12] The study concluded that corporate welfare
insures corporate profit while subsidizing job flight.
The rise of this coordinated capital economy is
supported by law’s ability to transform the ideals of “freedom and equality”
and “freedom of contract” into a new image.
This new view, while retaining the legitimating power of the older
image, translates into ideological engines that accustom the public to view the
goals of corporations as similar to their own.
As an example, millions of Americans consider the Dow Jones average[13]
an indicator of their own financial well being. Rather, stock market gains benefit few. The top one percent received 42 percent of the gains in the
market in 1997.[14] The advantages of broadened stock ownership
to the dominant interests in society are touted in a report to Congress from
the Joint Economic Committee Study. “[I]t is suggested that broadened stock
ownership can erode class conflict, for as capitalism expands, a lot of ‘them’
can become ‘us.’ It [stock ownership]
brings us all together as stakeholders-in-common.”[15]
The report further notes that this increases self-interest. The cynical observer might note that this
increase in self-interest has no substantive benefit to those in lower
socioeconomic classes. It takes
disposable income to enter the stock market, and a considerable investment in
time to develop the skills necessary to make good stock transaction
choices. Educated people are far more
likely to successfully trade in stocks[16]. This becomes another mechanism to widen the
income gap, while providing chimerical hopes of riches to the less
fortunate. Thus, stock market
investment becomes a tool to increase the hegemonic percolation of the values
of elites through the layers of class.
This attenuates the interests of people in collective well-being and
collective action. It enhances a system
where self-interest becomes paramount.
If a corporation that one invests in conducts business in an amoral or
unethical manner, it is easy for a stockholder with no management connection to
claim a lack of knowledge or interest in such amoral or unethical
behavior. This mode of thought serves
the interests of transnational corporations.
They remain free to exploit people and natural resources with no effective legal hindrance as long as
they remain profitable.
Corporate disasters that linger in the collective
mind of society include the Challenger space shuttle, Bhopal, and the Exxon
Valdez, for which no corporate executive served prison time. Many significant but less publicly traumatic
acts occur too regularly for the comfort of social justice activists. Although collections of this information
have been difficult to obtain in the past, as the Justice Department does not
appear to keep statistics on economic crime as it does for street crime,
sources have become available on the Internet.
The Corporate Predators website documents what they title “the
top 100 corporate criminals of the 1990s.” Many corporations respected by Wall
Street, and thus by the American public, pay tens or hundreds of millions of
dollars in criminal fines yet still continue to violate laws. The Corporate Predators site calls
these “recidivist” corporations.[17] Violating the same laws repeatedly, and
paying huge fines, must be profitable enough that behaviors are not
changed. The legal paradigms that that
allows this gross criminality provide a basis to analyze the growing power of
transnational corporations in capitalist globalization. As policies that favor privatization of
services and goods grow in favor, members of the middle class as well as those
members of society whose life chances condemn them to poverty are increasingly in
agreement regarding the illegitimacy of government. Much of this growing consciousness has arisen from the massive
layoffs and job flight that began to occur in the late 1970s and 1980s
(Newman).
The corporate operational mode consists of meetings of boards of directors behind closed doors. In the same manner, the World Trade Organization has administered its charter in a manner that appears undemocratic, via closed sessions and autocratic decisionmaking processes, since its inception in 1995. This undemocratic process has increased the concerns of those who are convinced that the ideology of free-market capitalism dominates governmental policy at all levels. In the background, governmental policy serves to promote corporate interests against those of unions, unorganized workers, and average citizens. Rather than the economics construct of the “invisible hand” regulating supply and demand, anti-corporate activists see an “invisible 800-pound gorilla” controlling supply and manipulating demand. The WTO appears to use its mandate to impose corporate will upon the citizens of nations.
According to
Ralph Nader, “the philosophy allegedly behind the globalization agenda is that
maximizing global economic deregulation will in itself result in broad economic
and social benefits.” The case of China-U.S.
relations shows that the real goal of international policy is maximizing
short-term profit. When, in 1994,
human-rights issues were at stake, China’s most-favored-nation trade status
continued. However, in 1995, when
property rights were endangered, “McDonald’s lease and Mickey Mouse’s royalties
were cause for $1 billion in threatened U.S. trade restrictions against China”
(Wallace and Sforza 9). In the view of
Nader and important scholars such as Noam Chomsky, the moral stance of the
United States in relation to other nations seems uncannily tied to its economic
interests. Chomsky wrote in a pamphlet
entitled The Umbrella of U.S. Power: The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy, that the U.S. government
makes a practice of condemning countries who adhere to portions of the
Universal Declaration (UD) while eschewing others. He documented, throughout this work, that the U.S. does the same
thing, eschewing portions of the UD that do not conform to the individualist
ideology that supports a capitalistic globalizing system. The UD condemns slavery and involuntary
servitude, as one example. The use of
prisoners to perform labor for corporations here in America has resulted in
little outcry. As a matter of fact, the
United States is allowed to export prison-made goods, while China received
sanctions for the same action (Chomsky 48).[18]
This situational morality leads
observers such as Chomsky to see the government as illegitimate in its
equivocal positions on human rights and its emphatic support of corporate
demands as exemplified by most of the rulings of the WTO and similar trade
organizations.
Despite the media posture of neutrality, all media
in the United States is controlled by the elite owners of media corporations.
This contrasts to the situation in most other Western countries, wherein some
media continues to be operated or supported by the state, such as the BBC in
England, which allows for a degree of independence from programming decisions
that do not depend on a view to the “bottom line.” Such independence is difficult to maintain in a global corporate
media world. The increasingly transnational
media supports the naturalistic view of markets, which helps explain the
reification of capitalism. As of 1997,
nine transnational corporations controlled most major media.[19] In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and
Chomsky developed the construct of successive filters that prevent important
news from reaching the public. These
filters allow the views of the nine owners of major media to shape the
news. This allows establishmentarian
views to exert extraordinary influence that shape the public understanding and
evaluation of events.[20] Following Gramsci, in this way views of the
elites percolate through layers of class due to this media concentration, so
that narrow ideology assumes hegemonic power.
Examples of this media filtering abound, especially in relation to and
accelerating with political dissent, beginning with Seattle and continuing
through the protest cycle. The effect
of media filtering has multi-faceted consequences for protest movements.
Additional media theory
may help clarify this issue.
“Gatekeeping” describes the function of corporate media in “mediating
the world” for our consumption, rather than our critical reflection. W. L. Bennett’s 1988 book News, the Politics of Illusion agrees with Herman and Chomsky that
the American mass media “to an important extent, regulate the content of public
information and communication in the U.S. system.” [21] News events are “framed” and predigested for
the public, rather than presented in the context of a balanced view of the
facts that would allow evaluation of the meaning of the news by citizens.
As well as regulating
content, news is shaped by situating in selective context. Gregory Bateson coined the term “frame
analysis” to identify a method by which the shaping of a news item may be
determined. Reporters search for frames
to situate a story in an easily-assimilated context, generally conforming to
dominant cultural viewpoints. Erving
Goffman applied the concept of frame analysis to segments of information he
called “strips.” These “strips,” taken
out of context, provide rich material for distortion (Bennett). As a reporter applies a frame, an analysis
or judgment of a news item occurs.
Further judgment occurs when an editor reviews the item.[22] This is important to the reification of
capital as well as shaping institutional response to dissent. Media framing, strips, and editorial
decisions may heighten tensions and even justify the use of force against
citizens engaged in legal protest activities.
The coverage of the protestors in Los Angeles followed a pattern seen in the past. According to Chip Berlet, an author who writes on the politics of the extreme right-wing in America, “countersubvers