And just as obviously, authors that title the final essay in their book "Walking: We Ask Questions" wrote their words to both ask and provoke questions.

In that essay (coming to Narco News on November 11th), they write:

"When a movement stops asking questions of itself, of the world, it becomes an orthodoxy - an idea that has run out of ideas. It becomes fixed, brittle, rather than fluid. Water can resist the most savage of blows, ice shatters. It is only armed with our questions that we can change history."

The book charts, very well, the growth of autonomy movements (what the media calls "anti-globalization") over the past ten years.

Let me toss a Molotov of words into the mix: I personally think that the North American and European flanks of that movement have, to a big extent, become "fixed, brittle, rather than fluid," as they've gone from city to city, during the big meetings of the powerful (World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, the Group of Eight, etcetera), and more or less have reduced themselves to trying to repeat the undeniable glories of the Seattle actions of 1999, with diminishing results each time - the exception being the September 2003 actions in Cancún, which, like in Seattle, turned over the game board inside the hall, too.

But here is part of the "Wealthy World" bias that infects Wealthy World social movements: The work of the negotiators from "developing nations" in Cancún, from Brazil to India, at these international trade meetings is too often, I think, seen by some protestors as effects caused by their own actions in the streets, as if the poor country players are mere "objects" acted upon by activists. Conversely, I see these nations, and increasingly their leaders, as their own unique protagonists, or "subjects,"  and their actions a consequence of the realities that those lands have endured for too long, and the growing consciousness in those lands.

I prefer to give credit, always, not merely to those "from below" but to those from the most belowest places in any equation.

I know that the authors of the book don't suffer from that complex: It's obvious reading the pages that credit is given where due, again and again, to the "third world" protagonists of autonomy movements on the different continents, many of whom are translated into English and have strong voice in the book to present themselves, and not merely be represented through some Wealthy World lens.

I do observe, though, that many of the "first world" protagonists of these movements - perhaps no small number of those who read the book in English from Britain to British Columbia to Boston - see themselves at center stage (a consequence of years of social conditioning), and to some extent the symbols and images from below are appropriated by activists from the wealthy nations as if to project themselves as the moral and political equivalent of, say, the Zapatistas, or others from South of the Borders. That's not only bad form: It's weak politics.

And I think, as I will try to explain, that this kind of self-aggrandizement by the "Wealthy World Activists" leads to denial of certain realities and privileges that, alone, would not be problems (because everyone has the right to be wrong, too), but the denial becomes a problem because such thinking leads to bad strategic and tactical calls in their movements.

This is a complicated matter. Let me try to explain...

This first essay, "Emergence: An Irresistible Global Uprising," walks the reader through the history of many resistance movements, including that occured prior to 1994. And in explaining why the work begins with events of that year, the authors say:

"Depending on who you ask, the resistance began 510 years ago when the indigenous of the Américas fought Columbus, or 700 years ago when Robin Hood rode through the forests of England to protect the rights of commoners, or a little over 100 years ago when slavery was abolished throughout the Américas, or 150 years ago when working people became an international revolutionary movement, or 50 years ago when colonized countries gained their independence, or 30 years ago when populations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America started rioting over the price of bread as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began restructuring their economies..."

But then focuses in, noting...

"...as the Mexican economy crashed and burned, the Zapatista uprising took the world by storm. For simplicity’s sake, let us start the story there."

Now, I am one of those people who likes simplicity. I believe, outright, that this movement, or collection of autonomy movements, really did "begin" - in a big way - in Chiapas in 1994. And I see no tactical reason to deny it. And I see many tactical reasons to admit it.

More than that, I think simplicity is related to coherence, which, as Guy Debord wrote, "the first duty of a revolutionary is coherence." To move masses of people, we have to keep it simple: that is, we have to be coherent in how we communicate to others. The book says that the era of "grand narratives" is over and yet - irony being a theme of our era - it relays a grand narrative: On New Year's morning, 1994, the Zapatista indigenous rebels rose up in Chiapas, México, and a grand narrative really did begin there.

I remember, a couple of years later, in New York City, talking with author Peter Lamborne Wilson, one of the best anarchist thinkers alive, who wondered aloud when an "urban Zapatismo" would spring up from somewhere in the world, making the Chiapas rebellion - primarily of peasant farmers - applicable to the grand urban metropoli where so much of the global population lives. Suffering myself from the kind of "the world revolves around us" thinking we are taught to believe in the "first world," I suggested to Peter that this could be done in New York. He very nearly mocked me (and he turned out to be correct on this point) saying, "oh, no, no... the control systems are in place here... I was thinking more of some place like Tijuana!"

I returned to Peter's question in 2002, during an interview that an Indymedia journalist conducted with me about Venezuela, the Media, and Anarchism, saying:

"Consider this: The 1998 election of Chávez in Venezuela would not have been possible without Mexico's Zapatismo. Marcos - with his belts of bullets, his uniform, and often photographed with a gun - showed through his actions and behavior that being a soldier does not always equal being 'bad' or authoritarian. His communiqués - remember, it's not just him, he is the talented and humorous pen and voice of a group - over the past eight, coming on nine, years have been the spear of an educational process. Suddenly, four years into that process, in 1998, Chávez pops up with his red beret and uniform in Venezuela and, wham!, in Caracas and other cities we begin to see the manifestation of what Peter Lamborne Wilson predicted, back in 1996, would be an 'urban Zapatismo.'"

So, yes, I draw a straight line between the eruption of the Zapatistas and their unique way of seeing political struggle (the We Are Everywhere book does a great job of explaining how the Zapatista theories are different from the dominant radical theories prior to them, in words that even North Americans who never heard of "neoliberalism" can understand), and the rebellions that came since then.

The electoral rebellion by the Venezuelan people in 1998 is, in my view, and the coup, and counter-coup, of 2002 in that country, are among the only major gaps in the book. It is also a hard nut to swallow for some activists who, like me, consider themselves as anarchists (or, the term I prefer, anarcho-syndicalists, not only for being more specific but because it can't be confused with, say, some mere enjoyers of the music of Johnny Rotten who seem to think being an anarchist is about wearing the right tattoos or hair styles): How do anarchists come to terms with the hard reality that "The State" is no longer mere governments? Or that, in some cases, like in Venezuela, governments can be turned into tools against the tyrannical Global State?

So there, in Venezuela, and its megalopolis of Caracas among other cities, we have what I think is the first authentic manifestation of "Urban Zapatismo" - and it predates the Seattle demonstrations by a year. Yet, because the Venezuelan autonomy model involves "inconvenient facts" - the use of elections for social change, a strong and charismatic leader (Hugo Chávez) whose existence disproves the "we have no leaders" ideology, the fact that the leader is also a military leader and often wears uniforms and other such decorations, and, I add, the reality that the first display of "Urban Zapatismo" really did not come from the First World (more of my thoughts on these factors can be found in that Indymedia interview - the Venezuelan process doesn't often get its due when looking at the timeline of autonomy movements of the past ten years.

Which brings me back to my point about too many of today's activists trying to repeat the glories of Seattle. Let me state that I'm not disqualifying Seattle 1999 just because it occured in the United States. To the contrary, it can accurately be described as a landmark in the development of "Urban Zapatismo" for the developed world, and that is nothing to shake a stick at. I just wish that today's Wealthy World activists would spend less time trying to repeat what occured in Seattle (which had the element of surprise - even many of the activists involved didn't believe, until it happened, that they would be able to shut down the World Trade Organization there!), and would spend more time analyzing how the Venezuelan model can be applied in urban landscapes.

The Venezuelan model, of course, is distinct from the nomadic activism that roams from city to city for protests, in that it necessarily involves people organizing and fighting from their own homes and neighborhoods: Something more difficult in lands where there is less "sense of place" than ever before in human history. And yet isn't that a big part of what we fight for when we confront the Global Economic State? We want the place and space that it stole from us in recent generations: a place to stand, to be (in the sense of the Spanish verb estar more than ser), to exist, on this earth.

The decay and decomposition involved in the kind of "automatic pilot" form of trying to replicate the Seattle 1999 victory elsewhere could be seen recently, in New York City, as copublisher Ben Melançon pointed out right here on The Narcosphere in his September 19 essay, RNC Protests Not a Success for Freedom, based on his eyewitness accounts.

Let's face the music: It is easier to roam from protest to protest, from World Social Forum to World Social Forum, from conference to conference, from city to city, than to dig in and do the hard work of fighting to take back, and hold, our own local place in this world. When I see these big demonstrations or World Social Forums, I also see the eyes of the stockholders of the grand airlines, and hear them shouting "Ka-Ching!" at the millions of dollars allocated by activists traveling such vast distances to go to these demonstrations, which also - and there is nothing wrong with it - serve as great parties.

This is entirely related to my own known preference for practicing Authentic Journalism over the forms of activism that involve attending endless meetings or "organizations" or "affinity groups" etcetera, and all the inherent humiliations and bullshit involved by subjecting oneself to such ventures.

Another example of the decay involved in the constant efforts to relive and repeat Seattle in other places can be seen on the Indymedia sites where the big demonstrations are held: Indymedia emerged from Seattle and there it kicked ass. There was real reporting going on back then in the medium's salad days!

But during the aforesaid RNC demonstrations in NYC, it was pure drudgery to have to scour IMC-NY for real news reports about what was going on there. When our reporter (the very same We Are Everywhere coauthor Jennifer Whitney) finally got out of jail after being arrested there, I was primarily happy for her freedom. But a very close second was "oh, thank gods I don't have to read Indymedia today!" And, again, the better mousetrap - you can see it if you read Spanish - for "citizens online media" has been built in Venezuela: I never tire of reading Aporrea.org, where real people do the heavy lifting of real reporting about the events and news that happens in their own communities during moments of crisis and history.

There are reasons why Indymedia, like the post-Seattle protests in other cities, suffers from these kinds of decay: the "open publishing" dogma (in which a confused sense of egalitarianism promotes a kind of mediocrity), the "we have no leaders" ideology, the culture of unnecessary anonymity that has developed among privileged people who don't really need to wear kerchiefs or ski-masks or make ups silly names for themselves for their personal safety...

But mainly, I think, the problem is that old First World character flaw of laziness...

To wit: In the U.S. they have Mexicans pick their crops and cook their restaurant food, but when they say grace they don't give credit to those who did the hard work: It may be rude, but nonetheless thought-provoking, to ask aloud whether the same dynamic has sadly penetrated too many sectors of protest movements up North... You can wave Zapatista symbols, as many do, without "getting" the things that make them so effective. The Zapatistas, for example, don't ever protest without publishing coherent communiques, and fostering their own media reports, about what is going on, and then making sure those communications are central to any action. Why haven't more Wealthy World activists figured that out? Is it because it involves too much hard work?

That self-media was done in Seattle 1999, and done splendidly. But it's not happening anymore. Or, better said, it is happening less and less during these grand protest mobilizations, and it is being crowded out by a certain kind of protestor that I like to call "trauma junkies" - those who go for the most traumatic gesture (physical confrontation with cops, setting of fires, obsession with fences and physical objects, and, of course, creating the circumstances for greater violence, which is more cowardly, in my view, than acting directly with violence).

The trauma junkies go for the most traumatic gesture knowing full well that the Commercial Media will always cover their skirmishes more sensationally than other aspects of the mass demonstrations. In that sense, I see the members of this tendency as nothing more or less than media whores: taking their orders from the Commercial Media, by following the "if it bleeds, it leads" axiom of TV news - while claiming that "the most traumatic gesture" is "the most radical gesture" when it is simply an act of allowing the Commercial Media to be one's pimp, john, and muse all at once!

That said, I don't favor, as some more rigid tendencies in protest movements favor, turning such people into the cops, or trying to police them ourselves, gods forbid! Rather, I believe that by merely discussing this taboo question that reason can prevail.

I do feel the discussion is generally censored, though, by the oft-stated axiom of "we don't want to declare that there are good protestors and bad protestors," and the reasoning behind it that police agencies and others will create more repression against "bad protestors" when that dialectic is emphasized.

But there are - make no mistake about it - "effective protestors and ineffective protestors." And there are even "counter-productive protestors." And the "trauma junkies" have, increasingly, elbowed so many other good people out of the camera angle.

The We Are Everywhere authors certainly grapple with these sorts of questions. In the aforementioned final essay, coming soon to a computer screen near you, they write:

"The second stage of the movement will be harder than the first. It's a stage of working closer to home, a stage where mass action on the streets is balanced (but not entirely replaced) with creating alternatives to capitalism in our neighborhoods, our towns and cities. A politics which moves between construction and conflict, based on longer-term visions, where we seek to construct alternatives that will sustain us into the future - and yet remembers that any true alternatives to capital will throw us into conflict with the system and that we need to strategize continually to defend ourselves against it."

To that I would add the following point: that "our own neighborhoods, our towns and cities" are not just geographic places. In the end - and here comes the "syndicalist" part of my anarchism - everything begins and ends with work, with labor. My "neighborhood" - New York City - was stolen from me and millions of others. It no longer exists. It's over, stick a fork in it, for me anyway (at least until the Stock Exchange crashes and all those awful yuppies that displaced us go crying home to somewhere else). I know the same has happened to many, many others. It's the main factor that creates migrants in this world. And most of us migrants will never enjoy the "sense of place" we were born into.

But my workplace or factory - journalism - still exists (albeit, subjected to the same displacement process in which a mutant class of mercenary and mediocre scum has displaced most auténticos from the newsrooms where we were once the workers... and this is just as much true about self-proclaimed "alternative" media, in many cases moreso, because they often become the biggest abusers of workers justifying it on their so-called alternativity!)

And so we have created, in less than five years at Narco News, a new factory of journalism... of Authentic Journalism... our own autonomy movement within journalism... what I like to call the Authentic Journalism renaissance.

Maybe I'm conservative, but I'm not seeking "alternatives." I hate that fucking word! I'm seeking to take authenticity back, to get, from a labor perspective, our home, our land, our factory, our means of production, back into our own hands.

Authentic Journalism, as I view it, is very key to what the We Are Everywhere authors refer to as "the second stage of the movement," where "working closer to home" puts emphasis on the verb "to work" and fights against the First World laziness that leads to the decomposition of most movements North of the Border.

And part of what we've created here is that every participant who has put his and her labor or resources into the Narco News project can be part of the discussion, can openly disagree, can raise "inconvenient facts" without censorship by one or by a committee... So if anything I've written here bugs ya, or seems wrongheaded, well, you have the microphone and the keypad too.

It was work to write it. And it will be work to respond. But work is the mother's milk of revolution!