Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

States fight back 71
dynamic, expansionist economy within global markets stimulating demand,
reducing production costs and intensifying the creation of global labour
markets (Obando-Rojas et al. 2004). Capital restructuring, union and
labour rights issues were combined with prominent environmental concerns
including the threatened extinction of sea turtles and Monarch butterflies.
The resultant slogan ‘Teamsters and Turtles Unite and Fight’ rapidly
established itself as the leit-motif of the event acquiring far more meaning
outside the AGM than within (Tabb 2000).
The long traditions of the American movement milieus associated with
labour, anti-war, peace and environmental activism interacted with European
direct action repertoires communicated by ‘free radicals’ and disseminated
through workshops in co-operation with US trainers. The RTS experience of
carnival resonated positively with elements of the ‘domestic mix’ and the convergence
of global networks in Seattle. Other actors, particularly those associated
with organised labour movements were less comfortable with these
new repertoires. Accommodating the ‘new movements’ within an action
structured and funded by organisations with a ‘traditional’ American ‘new
left’ orientation resulted in significant tensions and widely competing
interpretations of the event (Hardt-Landsberg 2000, Yuen et al. 2001).
Irrespective of this ‘diversity’, a number of common themes consistent
with recognition of accumulating ‘social force’ are evident within these
accounts. These include:
● The diverse range of people on the street.
● The significance of street presence in bolstering the resolve of delegates
from ‘the South’.
● The growing recognition of common experience and common cause
between workers and citizens in North and South.
● The simultaneous expression of economic and environmental concerns.
● The relationship between formal labour organisations and vibrant
social movements as mutually dependent conflictual actors.
The result was a ‘global social force’ deploying a range of repertoires to
declare the stakes through occupying ‘the street’ in a manor analogous to
events in East and Central Europe during the transitions. The valency
of these concerns resulted in encounters that exceeded the experience of
both local organisers and police authorities (St. Clair 1999, Tabb 2000,
Yuen et al., 2001).
Event novelty confounds established habits of mind leaving engaged
actors confronted by the ‘unknown’ associated with heightened complexity
within the point of emergence. Some sense of this in terms of operational
policing can be gleaned from a police radio transmission in Toronto during
the first ‘Global Street Party’ on 16 May 1998. ‘This is not a protest. Repeat.
This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over’ (Klein
2000: 311). In Seattle, a carnivalesque event that virtually controlled the