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The Global Activists Manual
Edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond 2002
Thunder’s Moth Press/Nation Books
Book Review
My primary interest in this collection of essays relates to its extensive coverage of the “Battle of Seattle,”* protests in which 50,000+ people shut down the 1999 WTO ministerial conference by blocking delegates’ access to the Seattle Convention Center.
In my view, the absence Unfortunately it contains no essays by the Seattle protest organizers. With the help of Ralph Nader and Public Citizen, the latter began preparing a year in advance to enable meaningful participation by tens of thousands of activists from around the world – in puppet and banner making workshops, civil disobedience training and a two-day teach-in (in Seattle’s Benaroya Symphony Hall) by San Francisco’s International forum on globalization. affinity group formation.
Thanks to this preparation, organizers already had 13 affinity groups surrounding the Convention Center at sunrise, when Seattle police arrived to cordon off the street. The book also fails to mention the hundreds of Seattleites who hosted out-of-state activists in their homes once the hotels were fully booked.
I agreed with the common theme expressed in several essays that the anti-WTO protests, like anti-globalizaton protests that followed, tended to be mainly white and middle class. I particularly appreciated the analyses by Fred Rose in his essay “Coalitions Across the Class Divide,” about middle class activists’ individual relationship with authority based on their skills and knowledge. For this reason, they tend to think change happens by getting the right truth out and pressuring those in authority to change their views. In contrast, working class campaigns nearly always arise from urgent local problems bringing victims together to demand a solution.
Otherwise I was disappointed The Global Activists Manual spent so little time addressing the impact of class issues in organizing and the abandonment of minimum wage workers by the Democratic party.
This is not terribly surprising, given the publisher. The Nation magazine is notorious for its dismissal of both class politics and intelligence crimes, such as the JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm assassinations and 9-11, as right wing conspiracy theories.
*In which I participated in early organizing meetings
The Most Revolutionary Act 
This book manual was edited in 2002. In one of the essays this book by Fred Rose is mentioned: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801436055/coalitions-across-the-class-divide/#bookTabs=1
Ralph Nader says about this book: “Fred Rose provides the practical experience and conceptual framework to counteract the major democracy-suppressing strategy of Big Business—which is to divide and rule the people. For activistswould-be activists, and other citizens looking for civic motivation, Coalitions Across the Class Divide is an uplift with its feet on the ground.”
What can we learn from this?
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I think the US women’s movement had the best solution (in the 70s and 80s) to organizing across the class divide. They quickly found that when working class and professional women tried to work together the educated women always dominated the meetings and refused to let working class women get a word in edgewise. They resolved the problem by breaking into fishbowls whenever they saw it happening. In this exercise, they put the working class women in the center of the circle and made the educated women watch them without speaking.
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