“This isn’t a book, it’s a brick with which to shatter cynicism,” said Luther Blisset, a group of Italian anarchists. They could not have been more right: at five by seven inches and 320 pages, this book could do some serious damage to the idea that humans are primarily motivated by self-interest.
We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003) includes 55 stories from 26 countries—several in Latin America—“written by activists from the front lines of resistance against capitalism and economic globalization, tales of struggle and rebellion from participants” of what the book’s editors prefer to call the “movement of movements.” The stories are chronological and range from collective declarations by say, the Zapatistas, to personalized accounts.
The editors chose the selections “not only for their ability to document key issues and events of the movement, but also for the quality of their writing.” The editors—Katherine Ainger, Graeme Chesters, Tony Creland, John Jordan, Andrew Stern and Jennifer Whitney, known as the Notes from Nowhere collective, and participants in the movement themselves—show their own flare for the written word in seven insightful collectively written essays that frame each section of stories.
The sections are: “Emergence: An Irresistible Global Uprising”; “Networks: The Ecology of the Movements”; “Autonomy: Creating Spaces for Freedom”; “Carnival: Resistance is the Secret of Joy”; “Clandestinity: Resisting State Repression”; “Power: Building It Without Taking It”; and “Walking: We Ask Questions.”
As the movement was building, write the editors, “Capital’s dream of super fast networks that will spread consumerism across the planet was turned on its head. For while the networked money markets were tearing the planet apart, our grassroots networks were bringing us together.” And add, “The movement was learning it was as important to capture imaginations as to command actions.”
In this sense, the editors stuck to their guns: besides the creative choice of selections, the book also contains more than 150 brilliant photographs that are at once inspiring, uplifting and demand of the reader to imagine what’s possible.
We Are Everywhere also addresses some of the misconceptions put forth by the commercial media regarding what they wrongly named the “anti-globalization” movement—namely, that it lacks a political project or vision. Throughout the book one is implicitly reminded that “one of the great strengths of this movement of movements has been its capacity to rekindle the idea of a global political project defined by notions of diversity, autonomy, ecology, democracy, self-organization, and direct action.” In several places the writers recall that this is not a movement that seeks to seize power for itself, as the editors note in describing the Zapatista movement, but one that wants to “break it into small pieces that everyone can hold.”
The breadth of selections—from Argentina, France, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and the United States to name but a few of the countries of origin—convey that the movement is highly developed and networked, and that it consists of much more than holding protests at international summit meetings, although that is one of many strategies it employs. Author Naomi Klein described We Are Everywhere as “the first book to truly capture and embody the exuberant creativity and radical intellect of the protest movements.”
In one essay the editors conclude, “Resisting together, our hope is reignited: hope because we have the power to reclaim memory from those who would impose oblivion, hope because we are more powerful than they can possibly imagine, hope because history is ours when we make it with our own hands.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teo Ballvé is NACLA’s associate editor and contributing news editor for the Resource Center of the Americas http://www.americas.org.
