A Shift in Organizing: Rochester Antiwar Activists Utilize the “Spokescouncil” Model

Antiwar activists in Rochester are experimenting with a different model of organizing for March 19, 2009, the sixth anniversary of the illegal war and occupation of Iraq (1, 2, 3, 4). It’s called a spokescouncil and it’s been around since at least the start of the global justice movement in Seattle in 1999 (1, 2).

According to Wikipedia, a spokescouncil is a “…collection of affinity groups and clusters (a collection of affinity groups), who meet together for a common purpose, often civil disobedience. A ‘spoke’ is short for a ‘spokesperson’, selected by each affinity group or cluster to represent them in the spokescouncil. The council usually makes decisions via a consensus decision making process.”

In recent years of organizing for March 19, activists and other concerned individuals have generally come to meetings hosted by larger, antiwar organizations such as Rochester Against War (RAW) or Metro Justice (MJ). Decision-making processes, goal setting, and strategy and tactics for March 19 were usually directed by those organizations while other organizations were asked to join the effort. Those that had alternative ideas were asked to subsume their goals for the larger organization’s goals in the spirit of unity in order to maintain a consistent message and accompanying action(s). This year could be a break from that type decision-making and organizing model for something different and as of yet, untried in Rochester.

I asked some local activists what they saw as problems with previous years of organizing around the anniversary of the war.

Louise Wu, a contributor to Indymedia, stated that, “One of biggest setbacks to [the] anniversary of the war planning has traditionally been not taking enough time…to think about what should happen. Folks need time to brainstorm, gather their tangible resources, work out differences of opinion, and figure out how to contact and bring in/fully enfranchise their allies.”

Ben Dean-Kawamura, a member of the newly formed Activists Against Racism Movement (AARM), said, “The [antiwar] events seem mostly [to] copy forms of protest that don't seem to be working. People have been marching against the war for years now without much effect; it seems to me that new tactics are needed if we really want to have an impact.”

And it appears that new tactics, along with strategies and goals, are on the table for discussion this year.

“When RAW was first formed it was intended to be a coalition of groups, a way of pulling the movement together. … I envisioned RAW in the spokescouncil position. However, recently it seems, especially to other groups I'm active in, that RAW is just another group doing their own thing—one of the [affinity groups] in the [spokescouncil]. … I think the movie opened up some important discussion. I hope it continues. I think my insistence that people watch it paid off very well,” said Al Brundage, a local antiwar activist.

The film Brundage talked about was called Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of DASW and Rochester Indymedia hosted a screening of it with filmmakers Helia Rasti and Jonathan Stribling-Uss this past summer. From that point on, Shutdown preoccupied consciousnesses in Rochester, which lead to the film being screened for other antiwar groups in town—groups that wanted more than a permitted and police-monitored rally and sidewalk march on March 19.

According to the film’s website, Shutdown, “documents a piece of the continuous struggle towards social justice. Using the March 20, 2003 occupation and disruption of the San Francisco Financial District as a case study, the film casts a thoughtful eye on one of the most successful actions of the current anti-war movement, facilitated by Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW). Created to gain insight, inspire, and draw lessons the movie tells the story of how social justice organizers and everyday people came together to plan and shut down the financial district of a major US city.”

But it wasn’t just Shutdown that’s injected a new way of looking at strategy and tactics in Rochester. Our area was a bustling center of activity in 2008 as suggested by R-IMC’s end of year review—with its 76 compiled articles. For example, a couple of carloads of activists and community organizers drove out to Denver and St. Paul for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions where they got to see and experience, first-hand, the potential of spokescouncils and mass mobilizations based on group autonomy, direct action, and mutual aid.

Emily was one person who directly experienced the use of a spokescouncil at the RNC. “In St Paul I attended a spokescouncil meeting on the fourth day of the RNC, when many of our own were in jail and spirits were remarkably low. An excellent facilitator drew out creative ideas and the groups gathered empathy, energy, and solidarity from one another. We coalesced around a set of plans for the day and night, and got to work making things happen,” she said.

Wu, who worked with the medical affinity group at the Democratic National Convention, reflected on the power of the spokescouncil model. “Denver medics didn't know who was going to show up or when, and had zero-to-none tangible resources at the beginning. They were able to pull it all together at lighting speed because, I feel, it was a very fair and empowering working process. People were able to work at the peak of their energy because they felt supported. The horizontal nature of the organizing and working responsibilities was constantly stressed. This really kept a diverse collection of volunteers, ranging from people with multiple medical degrees to naturopaths to street medics, working cooperatively in very tense and outright dangerous circumstances,” she said.

With all this praise, one might wonder if there are any problems with spokescouncils. Spokescouncils, like hammers, are tools that can be effective or ineffective depending on how they are used.

In his essay titled Fetishizing Process, Mark Lance argues that regardless of what tool you’re using (consensus, direct-democracy, spokescouncils, coalitions, and any other number of tools) it’s the social relationships that make the difference. Drawing upon his experiences with the global justice movement after September 11, 2001 which utilized consensus and his academic career as a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University where his department used direct democracy, he talked about the differences between the two groups of people and how it wasn’t really the process of decision-making at all, but rather the good-will of the group—what he called “virtuous practice”—that either enabled the group to make wise decisions or not.

What Lance argues for is a “well stocked tool kit” for people to handle difficult situations within “well-functioning, but fallible groups.”

“Any procedure you try to legislate is as likely to be abused, as likely to give people a crutch to lean on, or an excuse to avoid careful thinking, discussion, and inclusive labor. No procedure guarantees wise decision making, and a wide variety of procedures can be useful in arriving at wise decisions. So do not privilege one over another in the abstract. If you must have a constitution, say ‘our group will attempt to take each other seriously, to look at issues rationally, to engage in careful, respectful, critical, rigorous analysis and argument, and to arrive at the wisest and most just decisions on all issues before us,’” wrote Lance.

And maybe that’s the most important thing about this process as we, as a community, move forward: spokescouncils are one tool of many to be used by the community and are only as effective as the community that uses them.

Want to get involved with this experiment? Come to the next Rochester Area-wide Organizing Spokescouncil for March 19, 2009, on Sunday, March 1st, 4PM, at the Antiwar Storefront, 658 Monroe Ave.