Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement

Anti-globalization forces came of age in Seattle, sweeping like a tsunami through the city during the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings. This evolving""movement of movements"" gets fresh treatment in this revised and updated collection of essays, which was first published as The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization (2002). Described by Yuen as a""series of snapshots and critiques from an unfinished history,"" the book mixes first-person accounts of defining moments in Seattle, Prague and Genoa with chronicles of lesser-known confrontations in the""global South"" and potent analyses of current trends in the struggle between activism and capitalism. Aside from its star-studded roster--contributors include Hakim Bey, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Arundhati Roy and Jeffrey St. Clair--the book's strongest feature is its incorporation of diverse voices and under-documented issues. Katsiaficas, Manuel Callahan, and David Kubrin upend Americans'""historical amnesia"" with appraisals of pre-Seattle protest; Kristine Wong indicts the movement's marginalization of people of color; Sophie Style identifies a shift toward regional activism and away from mass protests (which can invite violent police reprisals and provoke targeted organizations to retreat to inaccessible locales). The volume concludes with cogent reflections on""theory and practice in the movement."" Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti, in particular, decry the movement's descent into inarticulate protest""carnivals"" and appeal to the American activist left to replace antiquated worldviews with frameworks that supply greater ideological coherence. Readers who enjoy wide-ranging arguments, and who can bear with the volume's loose organization, will find plenty to mull over here.