Confronting Capitalism examines the world wide movement against globalization. The uprising against the World Trade Organization in 1999 was the most visible and dramatic protest in the United States since the Vietnam War. Subsequent protests in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Prague, Cancun and many others, have shown that there is a growing movement opposing globalization. The book roots these events globally in an anti-capitalist history that includes the resistance to the IMF and the neo-liberal project in Venezuela, Korea and Chiapas, the mass organizing campaigns of the nuclear-freeze movement in the 1980s and the innovative direct action tactics of environmentalists in the United States.

Confronting Capitalism is an updated and expanded edition of The Battle of Seattle, originally published in Spring 2002. The new edition offers updated articles, a new piece by Michael Hardt and reports and theory from the global South, including Nigeria and South Africa. The book features contributions from Naomi Klein, Stanley Aronowitz, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Drooker, Barbara Epstein, Alexander Cockburn and many more. An important handbook for in the classroom or on the streets, Confronting Capitalism invites readers to join the intensive debates within the anti-globalization movement and to make some history of their own.

Eddie Yuen is a PHD candidate in the Sociology program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He teaches at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

George Katsiaficas is the editor of New Political Science. He is the author of The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (South End Press 1987) and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Humanities Press 1997). He also co-edited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (Routledge 2001).

Daniel Burton-Rose is an activist and writer based in the East Bay. His is the co-editor of The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry (Common Courage Press 1998). An award winning journalist, he has written for Vibe, Z Magazine, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dollars and Sense, Middle East Report, and The Multinational Monitor, among other publications.

Editor Tour (LA, San Francisco, Eugene, Or, Portland, Or, Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, Providence, RI, Amherst, MA, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Chapel Hill, NC)

Details to come.

(From the introduction)

Much greater unity may be found around the theory and practice of direct democracy within the new movement. This may in large part be due to its astonishing success as an organizing strategy; even Time, Newsweek and The Economist have grudgingly acknowledged how the "ostentatiously nonhierarchical" activists have run rings around the compulsively hierarchical police forces of London, Seattle, Melbourne, Prague, Quebec City, Gothenburg and several other cities. This recognition has not stopped the corporate media from resorting to their familiar strategy of elevating certain street activists as "leaders" (for example David Solnit of Direct Action Network and John Sellers of Ruckus Society) and certain intellectuals (notably Noam Chomsky and John Zerzan) as "gurus". Fortunately, most everyone in the movement knows the game here, and has declined the honor, with its inevitable subsequent discrediting, character assassination or co-optation. On a more comical, though sinister, note, during the Republican National Convention protests in July 2000, the Philadelphia Police Department was apparently operating with the "intelligence" (offered by a right wing thinktank) that the demonstrations were masterminded by Russian communists. On the whole, though, it is one of the great successes of the new movement that its decentralized and radically democratic nature has been undeniable, and utterly distinct from the economic institutions and civil authorities that it challenges. In this book, the pieces by Klein and Stephanie Guilloud provide the most detailed accounts of how direct democracy works within the movement.

This extraordinary emphasis on democratic process has its roots in the direct democracy of the Civil Rights Movement and the early New Left, and was kept alive principally by radical counter-culturalists and feminists in the late '60s and '70s. It also resonates with much older currents of anarchism and council communism, particularly the workers' and soldiers' soviets of Petrograd and Kronstadt in the Russian revolution, the affinity groups of the Spanish revolution of the '30s, and the worker and student councils of Paris in 1968 and Italy in 1969—traditions which have been rediscovered by many activists in recent years. Elements of radically democratic self-organization have also been present in more recent struggles, notably the Kwangju uprising in South Korea in 1980, the Chinese student movement of 1989 and the South African township uprisings in the '80s. Finally, the turn towards radical democracy owes much to the influence of neopaganism and nonwestern political theory (particularly that of indigenous people), although at times these elements are thrown together in problematic or even culturally imperialist ways. More than anything, though, the increasing appeal of participatory democracy has to do with the failure of the alternative. Bitter experience with the channeling of movement energies into centralized and undemocratic structures and leaders, ranging from the dismantling of the Rainbow Coalition by Jesse Jackson in 1988 to the corporate restructuring of the anarchist-founded Pacifica Radio Network by Democratic Party operatives in the '90s, has led many activists to realize that popular power is too important to be delegated or surrendered.

Nevertheless, although it is empowering, prefigurative and effective, radical democracy is not without its problems. Before activists become too self-satisfied with their antiauthoritarian process, they should consider the fact that much of the rhetoric of radical democracy and decentralization is being utilized by decidedly nonradical political and social forces. This is most evident amongst über-capitalist cyber-libertarians such as Wired Magazine, but can also be seen in the proliferation of management books invoking Taoism and, most perniciously, the adoption by some neonazi groups of anarchist inspired "leaderless resistance". Empowering though it may be, it is sheer reification to think that decentralization and democratic process always carries within it an inherently liberatory politics. Just as the new radicals must be careful not to merely replace the fetishism of nonviolence with a cult of militancy (specialized, theatrical and a mirror of the state), so too must they beware the fetishization of process. After all, prefigurative politics must mean something more than a vision of life as an endless meeting.

An even more serious problem facing the direct action movement and its process of radical democracy is that of "the tyranny of structurelessness". Since at least the '70s consensus process has been criticized as being tacitly exclusionary towards working class people due to the fact that it is excessively time consuming and privileges bourgeois oratorical conventions. For many of the same reasons, consensus process as it is currently practiced in the US movement is also overwhelmingly white and "countercultural," although this is also connected to the question of which issues are politically prioritized. Just as the vaunted "cyber-democracy" of the new movement often looks more like a "geek adhocracy," the practice of direct democracy in the new movement often appears to outsiders to be insular. These problems may not be as intractable as they seem, however, since many young activists of color are increasingly interested in reclaiming their legacy of direct, participatory democracy.