PROTESTS ROCK D.C.
IMF exposed by militant resistance
By Fred Goldstein
Washington
The April 16-17 days of struggle in Washington, D.C.,
against a meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank were a major success-for the demonstrators and for
the cause of the majority of the world's people.
Bankers and finance ministers are not accustomed to
answering to the people. But since the protests they have had
to go on television over and over again. This time it was not
to talk about "macroeconomic reforms," "strengthening the world
financial system," "greater transparency," or other bankers'
double talk they are accustomed to giving out.
Instead they have had to answer charges by the April 16
movement that they are impoverishing the people of the world
with usurious debt, destroying the environment, funding the
global sweatshop economy, destroying the social safety net of
the Third World, vastly expanding world unemployment, and in
general acting as instruments of exploitative capitalist
globalization.
To add to their humiliation, on April 16 they had to sneak
into their own meeting at 5 a.m. under police escort, and then
sit for four hours waiting for it to begin. Several finance
ministers--including the French, Brazilian and
Portuguese--could not overcome the habit of keeping bankers'
hours. They slept late, missed the police escort and had to
hole up in the Watergate Hotel for six hours until the cops
could finally secure safe passage for them.
This is a first. None of it would have happened without
thousands of young people conducting militant resistance in the
streets. They heroically put their bodies on the line in their
determination to obstruct the meetings of these high and mighty
bankers and ministers of finance-the exploiters of the
world.
The capitalist media have worked overtime to portray the
demonstrations as a failure, on the grounds that the protesters
were unable to stop the meeting from taking place. But while
the tactical objective of the demonstration was not technically
fulfilled, the political objective was met quite
successfully.
Protests throw bankers
on defensive
Under protection of hordes of police, the bankers may have
escaped the ultimate humiliation of being locked out. But the
IMF and the World Bank have been thrown onto the defensive and
exposed on the world stage as a fundamental source of world
poverty and misery.
In this sense, the demonstration was every bit as successful
politically as the Seattle demonstrations last November/
December.
The goal in Seattle was to expose how the World Trade
Organization is the enemy of the oppressed countries and of the
working class. Seattle showed that the WTO uses the "free
market" as a cover to help transnational corporations take over
national economies in the Third World through ruthless trade
policies.
In the same way the IMF and World Bank have now been exposed
as hypocrites that create poverty and destroy the environment
under the cover of "structural adjustment" and "development
aid."
The media's take on the Washington demonstrations--that they
failed to stop the meeting--is faulty. There are many reasons
this was accomplished in Seattle and not in Washington. In
Seattle the movement's energy and determination took the local
authorities by surprise. That element was lost in Washington;
the police there had five months to prepare.
Second, downtown Seattle has narrow streets and populated
neighborhoods from which to get sympathy and reinforcements.
This made it easier to concentrate protest forces and keep them
moving around.
In Washington the demonstrators had to cope with vast
unpopulated boulevards and few witnesses to the repeated acts
of police brutality. The demonstrators were basically on their
own. Because of how the capital's streets are laid out, many
widely separated points had to be secured.
In fact, the demonstrators barricaded 18 intersections using
an ingenious web structure. They used mobile tactical-support
units and complex field communications that combined bicycles
and electronics. All this worked very well to overcome problems
inherent in the terrain. But the Washington protests were still
a lot more difficult tactically than Seattle.
Most of all, of course, the federal government has vast
police resources at its disposal compared to Seattle. And it
used these forces violently against the unarmed
demonstrators.
Another important factor was that the AFL-CIO leadership
chose to hold a reactionary, irrelevant, anti-China rally on
April 12 and then was totally and ignominiously absent from the
field on the days of battle. This is not what happened in
Seattle. There, thousands of workers came into close proximity
with the youth demonstrations. Many workers were enthused by
the struggle and joined in, as they undoubtedly would have done
on April 16-17 had labor mobilized for those days.
The labor movement as a whole was a source of encouragement
to the demonstration in Seattle. The union leadership must be
called to task for abandoning the important April 16-17
demonstrations in Washington, which spoke to the needs of
millions of workers all over the world.
Truly remarkable resistance
Despite all these drawbacks the April 16-17 demonstrators
blocked vans, police cars, buses with media, delegates and
government officials. They braved beatings and pepper
spray.
They held their ground against advancing lines of foot cops,
mounted police, and even police cars and vans that were trying
to plow through the human barricades.
If the police had to contain themselves to isolated beatings
on Sunday, April 16, it was only for fear of igniting an even
greater struggle with the thousands in the streets. The
demonstration's accomplishments, given the relationship of
forces, were truly remarkable.
Indeed, if there was any strategic failure in Washington on
April 16-17, it was the failure of the government and the banks
to stop the demonstrations and the onslaught of political
exposure that targeted the IMF and World Bank.
For weeks television news shows ran stories about how the
Washington cops were studying Seattle. The media showed many
clips of cops training in riot gear, preparing for the
demonstrations. But this did not intimidate the thousands who
came.
At the last minute the government tried to undermine the
demonstration with an illegal raid on Saturday, April 15. They
shut down the Convergence Center--the headquarters of the April
16 mobilization--and raided people's homes on trumped-up
charges.
Later that afternoon the police carried out one of the
biggest mass arrests since May Day 1971. In a pre-emptive
strike, they jailed more than 600 militants who were marching
under the banners of the International Action Center and
Millions for Mumia.
The protest, which had started at the In-Justice Department,
linked the IMF's international policies to the
prison-industrial complex, the case of political prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal and racist repression at home.
Despite their best efforts to disrupt the organizers by
arresting hundreds of militants, the police failed to hamper
the demonstrations.
Having failed to stop them through repression and
intimidation, the government and the media have now begun a
campaign to demoralize and undermine the movement. They are
using a multi-layered approach.
They want to convince the movement that it is ineffectual
through false comparisons to Seattle. They say the movement is
barking up the wrong tree because the bankers are the only ones
with the resources to deal with poverty.
What it all boils down to is that the government wants this
movement to fail--and, together with its kept, big business
media, will do whatever it can to try to undermine it.
Social change through
direct action
They want the movement to fail because the ranks of this
movement base themselves on the concept of direct
action--resistance--as the primary instrument to bring about
social change. The movement is struggle-oriented. It has shown
a remarkable heroism and willingness to sacrifice in pursuit of
its goals.
The government wants it to fail because the vast majority of
the youths now in motion are directing their hatred at the most
disgusting features of triumphal capitalism: its sacred global
instruments of exploitation like the IMF, the World Bank and
the WTO.
This movement is revolted by ruling-class society, which
revels in obscene wealth and luxury born out of the poverty of
the world's masses. The movement despises this society's
worship of the stock market, its repres sion and racism, as
well as its sexism and oppres sion of lesbian, gay, trans and
bi people.
The government wants the movement to fail because this new
generation of activists sees through the fraud of capitalist
democracy. It is orienting away from the trap of the two
big-business parties and capitalist electoral politics in
general and moving toward some formation based on the
people.
The government wants it to fail because it knows that even
though the movement now is overwhelmingly composed of white
students, the most progressive forces within it will inevitably
make the transition to the struggle against racism, national
oppression and exploitation in the United States, just as they
went from fighting sweatshops and environmental devastation to
fighting global capitalism.
And above all, the U.S. government knows history. The rulers
do not want a movement of resistance against capitalism to grow
and flourish at a moment when capitalist stability is more and
more in doubt with every gyration of the stock market.
Such fiery resistance now, in a period of capitalist
prosperity, can light a prairie fire in a later period of
capitalist crisis. The bosses know that.
For all these reasons it is the obligation of all
progressive and revolutionary forces to support the movement
and see that it broadens, deepens and intensifies in the spirit
of struggle against capitalism.
To attain its goals, this movement will have to engage the
workers and the oppressed in the struggle to overturn the
entire capitalist profit system, which is the ultimate source
of all the evils it is fighting.
For now the movement, as it is coming together, is at an
early stage. It is ideologically diverse. It contains liberals,
pacifists, anarchists, social democrats, religious forces,
communists and environmentalists, among others.
But the capitalist government is not concerned right now
with anything except trying to stop this movement before it
really gets started, regardless of its ideological makeup. It's
a movement of resistance to capitalism, and that's enough to
make them want to stop it.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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