Aid & Abet

David Solnit - Photo by Brihannala Morgan

I first met David Solnit in 1996, during the Active Resistance conference in Chicago. We became close after I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and I’ve really learned a lot from him.

He’s spent the last 25 years organizing in a variety of movements, from anti-nuclear to anti-war, and I’ve come to really respect him as someone who has a wide and long-term vision for how change happens, directly influencing the nature and style of social change organizing in the U.S.

I interviewed him in November 2008. Because David was involved in the organizing of the 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle, I had originally conceived of this interview as a reflection to be published in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of that moment. But the interview is much more wide ranging than that, covering, more generally, art and protest in the United States.

The interview has just been published online by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and you can read the full length version here.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

JA: Seattle was such a flashpoint for a lot of people, but it didn’t happen over night. Can you talk about the process of leading up to the ‘99 WTO protests and battling the myths that have come up about that organizing?

DS: Seattle brought together many of the movements that had been simmering; forest activism, sweat shop organizing, housing and homeless, environmental, workers, solidarity–all different kinds of movements– and it created a systemic framework in which people could converge and act in concert. There is a widespread activist myth that It was a spontaneous rebellion, which has led to a lot of badly organized mass mobilizations where people think that the Seattle recipe is you put out a call to action, set up a website, rent a convergence center, you know and people will miraculously come. Instead it was six months of creating organizational structures and building and strengthening networks, doing mobilizing which means face to face meetings and events, getting lists of people who are going, helping them get on busses and carpools, training people and preparing them for direct action and massive infrastructure, mass trainings and building alliances between movements. The mobilizations this year around the Democratic and Republican Conventions, while amazingly audacious and courageous, they lacked broad-based organizing and basic what and why strategy and the hardcore of activists who did step up got pretty beaten up.

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JA: Can protests that are focused on art and theatre be more than just symbolic protests?

DS: Yes. Art and culture was core to the organizing of the Direct Action Network in shutting down the WTO in Seattle; doing art making workshops with locked out steel workers in their union halls, and traveling up and down the West Coast with Art and Revolution explaining the WTO using music and dance and puppetry and traveling with a locked out steel worker David Reid and former sweatshop worker Chi Abad. In the streets, the widespread use of arts and culture actually gave us power in the situation be cause the police were on unfamiliar terrain. People were doing lock downs with people dancing next to them and giant puppets mixed with blockades, so it became that clear that we were about life and celebration. The police had their own theatre of dressing like Darth Vaders with projectile weapons, clubs and tear gas canisters and pepper spray.

JA: So how do you respond to critics who say that elements of art or theatre or dance just distract from the real message?

DS: Corporate advertising, which we don’t want to emulate but we need to combat and learn some things from, you know, is all images and stories. We have to be able to combat their stories and images, not through manipulative ad executive style propaganda, but through the truth of our own experiences and stories and using art and theatre and culture to amplify them and create compelling counter messages. They use basic principles of propaganda to manipulate our’ emotions, hopes, and desires into doing what they want. We can respond with what Stephen Duncombe calls ethical spectacles from real lived experiences.

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JA: Another barrier to protest in the last couple years has been police repression. I know, for example, that you’ve been arrested a lot. But now, it seems like the penalties for being arrested are increasingly more repressive. For example, the protests at the RNC last summer, several of the organizers in Minneapolis have been charged with conspiracy and terrorism charges. And those carry sentences, if they are convicted, of 7 or 8 years. And in terms of convictions we’ve seen recently, those are some of the lighter ones. Do you feel like that’s changing the way that you organize?

DS: Seattle was every authority’s worst nightmare. They have been hell-bent on preventing us from be effective, and that only increased after September 11. But what it means is that we have to do what I call political self-defense. This is another way of saying that we have to organize really smartly, by building public support and making repression so politically expensive that they’re in a dilemma; if they repress us it will backfire and there will be mass public opposition because we framed the issues, built alliances with all the different sectors of the movement and community, built a track record and reached the public. The US is still much less repressive than most countries in the world or than the US has been at previous times in this country. The disruption, infiltration, and repression that we saw in Denver and St. Paul are not new, it’s comparable other parts of the last century. And folks have figured out ways of organizing that are less vulnerable to this, but our lack of continuity and memory has made folks vulnerable, or maybe every generation has to figure it out themselves.

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Continue reading the interview the full length version here.

Photos of David’s work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are here.