All historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one tray of which is weighted with what has been and the other with knowledge of what is present. Whereas on the first the facts assembled can never be too humble or too numerous, on the second there can only be a few heavy, massive weights.
This paper is a personal testimonial of the Battle of Seattle and the sense of political possibility it opened up. I was born and raised in Seattle, in pre-gentrification Ballard. This was before the walls of condos on the waterfront showed up, back when being from Ballard was a putdown, not a sign of status. Though perhaps atypical for Seattle, my childhood in certain ways reflects the convergence and polarization of different social currents that reflect the social tensions, challenges and polarization in the country, if not the world, today.
Twenty years ago a movement of movements came together in the streets of the largest city of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and defeated the WTO, the central state building project of global capitalism. The “Battle in Seattle” was an exclamation punctuating a larger period of struggle. What is the relevance of that last period to the current one? What produced it, and what in turn have the movements of that period left for us today?