Hillary: This special issue reflects on the significance of Seattle and how that catalytic moment and period during the alter-globalization mobilizing have informed the last two decades of struggle. You were in Seattle, Katrina, Occupy, Standing Rock, Ferguson, now Extinction Rebellion (XR), essentially all the major U.S. mobilizations of the twenty-first century. Given this, it would be terrific to hear about your own experiences on the ground, your insights on the connections across these fronts of struggle and Seattle’s influence on them as well as what lessons we can draw from them today. So, let’s begin with your political origin story, including how you got started, eventually bringing you to Seattle.
Lisa: It's interesting, because I don't come from a political family and so I always wonder, "How did I get here?" I sometimes feel like this is why I'm on this planet; to carry forward warrior energy. I was actually a somewhat self-destructive, juvenile delinquent who learned to channel my energies more constructively. In high school, people started to notice this change, which led to some leadership training. Eventually, I became president of my student government. And what I was learning throughout these experiences, is that injustice exists and that people working together could make a difference. I feel like those two lessons just fueled me to keep going. Then, as I got older and could look back, I came to understand mainstream culture—the culture of death—more deeply. Now I often talk about the work of resistance, civil disobedience, and strategic nonviolent direct action as how we reclaim our humanity and stay alive.
In fact, I’ve realized that this work has kept me alive in so many ways, by helping me to see that when we come together with a vision for something better, there's just so much possibility and life force there. Think about when you were out in the streets or you're in one of those moments of struggle and you look into someone else’s eyes. There's this deep understanding and connection over knowing that together we are that counter force pushing for change. I just feel really lucky that I fell into this.
It's also interesting because, yes, I was president of my student government in high school and then in college. Everyone always said, "Oh Lisa, you're going to be the first woman president." And I did end up doing a little bit of legislative work in the early 80s, but I realized that although there’s power there, it's abusive power. We're not really making change in that way. So, it was in the early 80s when I began to get involved in grassroots organizing when I first started working with Abby Hoffman. He came to my college to speak and then I spent a year up on the Saint Lawrence river with him. It was still a grassroots struggle to create a legislative change—and we won—but it was during a time when the revolution in Nicaragua was building steam as was US war against them. And as I learned more about our foreign policy and how evil extended to the highest reaches of our government, it was like my world opened. Then when I started to do on-the-ground civil disobedience and using network structures, it was like the light bulb went off. I knew, our power's in the streets. It's when we raise a ruckus that the politicians or the corporate leaders have no choice but to make a change. So, I just shifted to the streets and I have stayed there ever since.
Hillary: How did that ultimately lead you to Seattle? And what were some of your experiences on the ground during the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests?
Lisa: I had been doing grassroots anti-war and multi-issue organizing. Then at some point I knew I had to make a little more money. So, I went into the labor movement and that's where I also started really learning about strategic campaigns at a whole other level. I was very involved with the Justice for Janitors campaigns and other labor struggles like the Detroit newspaper strike as well as with the auto workers and hotel workers. I also ended up in Los Angeles working on a big hospital campaign and, eventually, I joined the staff at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to build their street heat program. But I had preexisting relationships with grassroots direct “actionists” and I was learning more and more about the Direct Action Network in Seattle.
It was during that time, in June, that the People's Global Action Network happened, which grew out of the Zapatistas and came to be the basis of creative direct action against neoliberalism throughout the world. I participated in the June actions in the streets, which led me to decide that I needed to go to Seattle. As labor was already involved, it was easy for me to say to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, "I'm going to go and be a part of this." Again, my real connections were grassroots organizers the Direct Action Network though. I'd been doing these actions for a long time at this point and so that was a natural fit for me when coming into these spaces. I also knew that training is essential for people who are going to take risks and potentially go to jail. And on my first day in the convergence space, I remember thinking, “You know, there's going to be a lot of other people." There was already a strategic framework for the action with affinity groups and blockades, but there wasn’t one for plugging other people into this. So, I got involved with doing trainings.
I always call myself an in-betweener because I've had the privilege of working in so many different movements, learning lessons from each. It was during the Justice for Janitors campaigns, when we did these “weeks of rage” that shut down the centers of power in DC and used a structure called flying squads. These squads dated back to the auto workers during the occupations of the auto plants, where people outside the plants would mobilize very quickly and go to wherever was needed to set up defensive lines. We used that model with the janitors—we had people organized through mobile teams that would go from location to location to disrupt, sit down in the street, shut it down until the police would come, then they’d get up and move again.
In Seattle, we realized we could use this model. We could organize some public assembly sites, do some brief training, and then get people into flying squads that could then move in towards the convention center and reinforce the blockades that were there. So, we did that. Again, part of my role was not only to help train and facilitate the spokes councils, but was also to help figure out a plan for these flying squads. Part of that work ultimately became some of the tactical communication going from site to site to just support people, cheer them on, help make sure that people understood what was happening in different locations.
That first day was amazing. Then as the week unfolded, after the curfew and the no protest zones were put in, part of my role was working a lot with David Solnit, who was really a key organizer behind all of that. We knew that we were going to take people down into this no protest zone. The idea was to use a kind of snake march to enter that zone and attempt to get to the convention center, despite hitting line after line of police, knowing that our tie with the streets was going to be limited. So, we all converged on Westlake Park in a shopping zone of downtown Seattle, which we held with a mass sit in. I always say we don't really want to go to jail, but we're willing to go to jail. And it’s important to recognize that when a lot of people are willing to go to jail, that helps other people understand the degree of urgency that we feel and are willing to sacrifice for. A lot of us went to jail that day. And then I spent most of the rest of the week in Seattle jail doing non-cooperation, which was another huge piece.
Hillary: Can you build a little bit more on the strategic importance and power of non-cooperation and civil disobedience? And, more specifically, how this came to be a key strategic framework for you?
Lisa: Well, I actually first learned about non-cooperation during the 1980s, during the work with the Pledge of Resistance. Part of that is a foundational understanding that systems of oppression remain in place because we cooperate and are afraid of what will happen if we don't. If we understand this, then we know that non-cooperation is how to take our power back. Part of the teaching I do in trainings is that our job as organizers is not to make decisions for people, but to make sure that people have the information they need, understand the choices that they face, the potential consequences of those choices, and then decide for themselves what to think and do. Afterall, fundamentally, this work is about people reclaiming their power. That's also why I think that I've always stayed with direct action and civil disobedience because those are strategies and tactics that force us to consciously exercise our power.
I often say that the most radical, and rapidly transformative strategy is this type of non-cooperation and direct action. Direct action is when we, individually and collectively, hold the greatest power. When people are willing to put their bodies on the line and to risk their freedom and potentially face harm, it forces us not only to embrace our own power, but to come to terms with our own humanity. When we do this—which we saw a lot of in Seattle, like when people were linking arms and forming human perimeters, physically linked together, dependent on each other—there is this connection between us all. It also exposes the state for its own violence, injustice, and oppression. Ultimately, it is a kind of sacred act. In fact, in many ways, I have come to see direct action as my spiritual practice.
People are also drawn to this kind of power. This is certainly something we saw in Seattle. A lot of people there were unhappy with the battle that took place and the strategies of property destruction. But when the police turned their guns and their chemical weapons on the neighborhoods and passersby, people knew this was wrong. It became a battle of hearts and minds that drew more and more in. Up until that point, the labor unions had been fundamentally distancing themselves from the direct action and gaggle of anarchist types. But when they saw what the police did and all these people going to jail, they realized they needed to step up their solidarity. Once they did that and came to forefront and started leveraging their power, it made all the difference to those of us that were in jail. This further fueled the protests as more people and community-based organizations were drawn in and the power just grew and spread until it had the world’s attention.
What we learned in Seattle is that we need everybody and we need all the strategies, but if we're not doing the direct action work and taking those risks, we don't really get very far. We might mitigate damage here and there, get a little reform here and there, but then we also see these systems snap back and take it all away.
Hillary: Based on your on-the-ground perspective, were there trends or tendencies that emerged during the Seattle moment, or circa that period, that have carried forward over the decades? And by contrast, what have been some of the biggest changes you’ve seen?
Lisa: I think a lot about movement lineage. I did an event two weeks ago in Austin with about 120 students from Austin community college. I asked them, "The WTO anniversary is coming up, how many people know about what happened?" Only two people out of about 120 raise their hand. It's amazing to me how much people don't know about resistance movements and how they relate to each other. Seattle laid down a template for organizing that actually went global, and was repeated in many other countries as we were going after the capitalists. It was just huge. We were building incredible momentum. Then, of course, 9/11 happened, and there was the shift to the anti-war efforts, Essentially, though, we would come together for these big summits. Then when Hurricane Katrina happened, it fundamentally shifted from this type of summit-hopping to developing our movement capacity.
I don't know if we did it consciously, but after Katrina, we all converged in New Orleans to help re-build infrastructure in a place where the State had not only collapsed, but where its only real presence was a militarized response. The legal collective folks came and started helping to get people out of jail. The food collectives came and started doing community kitchens. The medical collectives came and started the first civilian clinic. And we didn't just come and go. We came and built this parallel society that was trying to meet all of the needs that existed—from pirate radios to get information, to computer banks where people could fill out forms, to gutting homes and schools. One of the important pieces that I learned from that, and that we've seen translate again and again—like with in Occupy Sandy and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief—is that we have the capacity to get ahead of disasters and to figure out how to better recover from them. Common Ground didn’t exactly show us a blueprint, but was an example of how to go about doing this. It ran circles around Homeland Security and the Red Cross, proving that these network structures are some of the most flexible, resilient, nimble ways to organize.
All that being said, those movements then morphed into what's now the climate movement, though a lot of that has become dominated by non-profits and lost some of the direct action piece. Occupy is also in this lineage in terms of ideas about networked structures and how to develop on-the-ground infrastructure that can sustain us in an ongoing way. Certainly, this wasn't the first time it had ever happened, but it was another moment and generation. And another thing Occupy taught me is that we have to start paying more attention to the political environment when determining how to poise ourselves. Occupy came out of the 2008 financial crash, bailout of the banks, and subprime housing loan crisis. A lot of people were hurting and angry, while millionaires continued to make bank. This all led to an energetic moment that made Occupy possible, which is why it grew and replicated so quickly. With this in mind, I think that we have to start paying more attention to these political moments, and where we can actually insert ourselves to make big differences.
Certainly, we had hoped for Occupy to go longer. In fact, by the one-year anniversary we had finally got the affinity group and spokes council model functioning in a solid way. Occupy felt poised to expand and grow, but Hurricane Sandy hit and the whole thing had to reorient to disaster relief. Along with climate organizing, Occupy and this relief work then fed into bringing that energy into many labor struggles. And some of that energy also went into Ferguson and Standing Rock and, eventually, the Bernie campaign. Every movement is laying the foundation for what's to come.
Ferguson was certainly a different kind of political moment and uprising. Even so, it still ties into earlier mobilizations, particularly, in the way it raised the question as to whether or not non-violent direct action movements are truly movements of liberation that all people have a place in. This same question was raised after Seattle in the critique that there was a lack of people of color in those protests. Ferguson, which was a Black, youth-led uprising, brought this historic debate about race and how we organize back to the foreground. Ultimately, it also had a similar network structure— there was a process of mass meetings, building of affinity groups, and formation of an action council. We did a lot of trainings there and this structure helped people to build the networks necessary to become self-organized. And we did similar work around self-organizing and community defense in Standing Rock, which was perhaps the most recent example of a holistic way of us building liberation in the world.
Another thing I think about is how all of these moments change national discussions. The Ferguson uprising put racism, police brutality and violence at that center of the national debate. WTO centered capitalism and neo-liberalism in the popular vernacular. Occupy centered greed and the 1%. Charlottesville centered White supremacy. Then, Standing Rock, you know, centered the knowledge that settler colonialism is ongoing and that genocidal practices are still operative. And, finally, another pattern that we saw in all these movements, and very clearly during Standing Rock, is that racism too often rips them apart. When people come into movements, we're bringing with us the baggage of a culture rooted in superiority—whether its human superiority, wealth superiority, male superiority, white superiority. We have a real need to think deeply and re-evaluate what the foundations are for building healthy movements and a culture of liberation.
Hillary: Throughout this lineage of movements, you have pointed to themes of self-organization, networked structures, power in direction action as well as a tendency to re-inscribe unequal dynamics of power. What steps are needed to create liberatory, resilient communities, that can more effectively mount challenges to structures of domination?
Lisa: I've always said we have two fundamental strategies for change; dismantling the ideologies, beliefs, structures of oppression, while simultaneously building beliefs, ideologies, and structures of liberation. I do both. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how until those of us who are White truly do our work to understand the dominant culture of White supremacy— how it lives through us, how it has traumatized us, how it has prevented us from being fully human—then we will never really be safe to work with for other communities. The thing about White culture is that we’ve all been socialized in it and it affects everybody negatively. It literally makes us all sick and traumatized.
I'm coming to see a nexus between understanding dynamics of power and these oppressive systems and understanding dynamics of trauma, healing, and our neurology. There are three states of regulation in our limbic system, which controls our fight or flight responses; hyper-regulated or reactive and anxious; regulated, which is calm; and hypo-regulated, which is more lethargic and depressed. Mostly, we should be in that center place of calm and only go hyper or hypo when threatened with danger. We are also wired to be in community, to be social animals, to be connected, to be interdependent. Yet, we are socialized to be othering, distancing, and individualized. It's no wonder that all of us are walking around with cognitive dissonance and feeling dysregulated in such an atomized, harmful society. This includes White folks who don’t even understand that they’re also traumatized and damaged from this dis-regulation. Yet, their fear presents as irrational fears and anxieties, while anybody outside the dominant culture, like Indigenous, Latinx, Black, trans, and poor folks, know that they're lives are literally on the line every day.
To heal this trauma and restore regulation to ourselves and our society, we have to undo these ideologies, institutions, and practices of supremacy. We are so busy judging, competing, comparing, and contrasting ourselves to each other that it leads to a culture of individualism and transaction. These things prevent us from building authentic relationships. It also prevents us from healing our nervous system and from learning to regulate ourselves into that state of calm. We need to learn to stop reacting in every moment from that place of trauma and to slow ourselves down enough so that we can make grounded, conscious choices about how we're going to respond. This is actually a huge part of what I teach when I train people—to integrate techniques for finding that grounded feeling of calm into their organizing. I think this is deeply essential if we're going to build healthier movements. I credit Black Lives Matter, after Ferguson, for bringing this language of healing and trauma more into our movements.
Hillary: One of the things we're looking at in this special issue are the overarching frameworks that have informed mobilizations over the last two decades. A lot of people look at the Zapatista Uprising and subsequent Seattle moment as the emergence of anarchism as a central organizing logic. What is your perspective on this?
Lisa: I don't like labels, but I am really clear that the models that I choose to organize in have their roots in anarchism. A lot of the principles of anarchism—mutual aid, volunteerism, and self-organizing—are essential lessons and practices that I believe are the foundation of a new world, rooted in liberation. The movements that I’m part of though, are often interconnected to other movements which may not identify with that ideology and may not even know some of these principles and practices. This raises the question as to how to model examples of their power? That's what Katrina was about. When we are able to actually put these types of ethics into practice in a good way, people are attracted to them because they realize that there's power there. It helps people to see that there are ways to be in relationship with one another that are not based in a capitalist model.
That said, I feel like there's been practices in some sectors of the anarchist movement, which has led them to marginalize themselves. After Seattle, there was a lot of confusion over how movements and peoples with different ideologies and practices need to be in relationship with each other. I think this is still the case today. We all need to understand that change happens when we are connected and taking care of each other, and not creating more fear—intentionally or otherwise. Fear is the tool of the state, and if we're organizing in ways that are going to create more fear, we may get something done, but we're not going to actually consolidate a new way of being together. I think there's a lot of unexamined white supremacy and male supremacy. And there’s a lot of work that needs to be done within our community, to get into a place where we actually can be more welcoming, and open, and interconnected with others.
Hillary: What do you see as the most critical issues in our current moment and what are some ways we should be addressing them?
I feel like as we go forward into this next decade, there's two primary threats; the rise of White Supremacists and disasters, both natural and human. I've been talking more and more about the importance about starting to organize now, in our communities, to prepare for what could be ahead.
A lot of new movements are coming out of the school of thought of momentum training and the work by Erica Chenoweth, which foregrounds mass, non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience as key to political transformation. I believe that strategic organizing is critical and requires us to do the research and to figure out who's promoting and profiting from the harm that's being done. It requires us to identify how to go after them in a way that creates this crisis and social disruption. Part of our resistance work has to be willing to embrace this kind of social crisis. This relates to the idea that at the edge of chaos something new will emerge from the foundations you’ve laid. That’s the prefigurative work, that is often emphasized in anarchist practices. But I do feel like a lot of our movement misses this component and simply aims to polarize the public without providing an alternative model. Take Extinction Rebellion, for example, which is based on this notion that we just have to shut the cities down and that's going to be enough to get the government to do the right thing. My question is, "Do you create social disruption to polarize and polarization is your goal?” I just feel like our movements can always benefit more from being more strategic and targeted in how we're doing our work if we’re to be ready to address these threats.
Meanwhile, something I’ve been excited about and experimenting with is to stop doing issue based organizing and instead to tackle oppression more systemically. In 2012, we started to do these trainings in Austin with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Austin was a pretty divided community, and there were not a lot of people of color-led groups that were currently operative at that time. Over the next five years we trained thousands of people who then had the same language, analysis, and understanding of history. Out of this, all of a sudden, all these new groups began to emerge. We were building relationships. And, so, while some groups took the lead on different specific issues, everybody would show up. This enabled us to literally defeat a police contract and get one with all the community demands. We also defeated a land gentrification code and legislation to criminalize homeless folks. We got an equity office that's now holding Undoing Racism trainings and they even got the city to fund $880,000 to do eleven trainings a year for five years, which all the city staff has to go through. Examples like this make me think, that so much is possible for us in our future. I am actually very hopeful for what might happen in this upcoming decade, but we've definitely got to make some radical changes if we’re to build a more transformative, better world.
