“We Are Winning”– Ten Theses on Politics After Seattle

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.

– Walter Benjamin

I

Sometimes the writing is on the wall, and in Seattle the writing said “we are winning.” Although I was not present to see it firsthand, I learned about what had transpired from a snapshot posted online. And as Sartre had described when recounting the intersubjective formation of a fused group, it made me feel like I was part of it too.¹ Reading the writing on the wall felt like awakening from a dream, and it left me with little doubt about either the meaning of political struggle or the means by which that struggle would unfold. The germinal form of politics wasn’t dialogue or negotiation, as our bourgeois rulers had maintained; instead, it was war. No assurance of representation would change it. No smile, however winning, could conceal it. Not any more. Both concrete and inspirational, it was not surprising that the snapshot that had captured the writing on the wall went on to become iconic.

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In 2007, the Turbulence Collective recirculated the Seattle snapshot in the first issue of their eponymous newsprint periodical, where it served as a prompt to a series of critical reflections in the lead up to that year's anti-G8 protests in Germany. Struggling to capture the photo’s enduring significance, they concluded that it was “one of the most iconic images of the protests against the Third Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).” As far as Turbulence was concerned, this owed to the fact that, somehow, the depicted scene “captured the sentiment of … that crazy rainy winter morning perfectly.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, a decade after the supposed ‘end of history’, a coalition of anarchists and communists, environmentalists and trade unionists, nuns and queers, and thousands of others had taken to the streets, and actually shut down the WTO conference in Microsoft’s and Starbucks’ home town.²

By the authors’ own admission, movements “at the end of the 20th century … had the sense that we were winning.” By 2007, however, things seemed “much more complicated.” The question was therefore inevitable: “What would it actually mean to win?”³ Acknowledging that it was now both possible and necessary to move beyond the anti-summit paradigm, Turbulence nevertheless maintained that such convergences had been important for prompting us to consider what “winning” might mean. And if the writing on the wall compelled us to imagine the beloved community lying in wait beyond the neoliberal nightmare, the snapshot’s composition also made clear that such a state could not be won without a fight.

By recalling this thread of evocative citations, we discover that we are in a position to contribute to it as well. Moreover, by putting the snapshot back into circulation and grappling with its implications as we contemplate the meaning of N30 on its twentieth anniversary, we may discover that—even within the image’s tight borders—it is possible to discern the meaning of politics as such. Coming to terms with this knowledge cannot help but alert us to the tasks that befall us today. Following the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, we must therefore approach this image with the aim of making “the past to bring the present into a critical state.”⁴

II

According to Benjamin, images that burst forth within the “now of a particular recognizability” had the power to make the tasks befalling the contemporaries of that “now” more evident.⁵ Indeed, from his perspective, history itself decayed into images and could therefore be activated to reveal the contradictions (but also the opportunities) that saturated the social field.⁶ Thus it was that, for Robespierre, Ancient Rome became a “past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.”⁷ By collapsing the interval between the incomplete past and the promise inherent in a present saturated with tension, the bourgeoisie discovered the revolutionary possibility inherent in the social conditions of their age. 

Transposing this insight from the register of history to that of strategy, Benjamin enjoined his readers to follow the lead of the surrealists and cultivate a space in politics “reserved one hundred percent for images.”⁸ Similarly, in his famous essay on the concept of history, he proposed that the struggle to “articulate the past historically” was not so much one of recognizing it “‘the way it really was’” as it was of seizing hold of the image through which it found expression as it flashed up “at a moment of danger.”⁹

If we accept these premises, it follows that we might find the spirit of Seattle and the cycle of struggle it unleashed somehow encapsulated within the snapshot and the writing on the wall that put “winning” on the agenda. Looking back on this image and seeking to activate it from our position in the present (from the standpoint of fascist resurgence and the eco-devastation we now confront), we may even discover that we’ve been entrusted with a debt that, as Benjamin once observed, “cannot be settled cheaply.”¹⁰ What claim, then, does this past make, and how does it affect our conception of the tasks that befall us today?

More than anything, answering these questions demands that we come to terms with what “winning” might mean. When considered from the standpoint of the Seattle snapshot, it becomes clear that the movement’s conception of victory had been something like a projectile launched from a sling pulled taut between the utopian and the concrete. Indeed, our success on N30 owed both to the fact that blockades and street fighting had shut down the millennial-round meetings of the WTO and to the fact that the mobilization’s exuberance would eventually lead adherents to profess that “Another World Is Possible.”

By struggling to synthesize the utopian and the concrete as we clamored for victory, the movement did more than build its élan. At its threshold, it also suggested how the impasse that had stalled the bourgeois revolutions of Robespierre’s era (an impasse that found epistemological expression in the split between abstract idealism and an equally abstract “objective” materialism) might finally be overcome.¹¹ In contrast to bourgeois managerial efforts to achieve balance by juggling conceptual antinomies, the global justice movement’s orientation to “winning” suggested that, through struggle, we might achieve in practice that synthesis which—for Marx—was nothing less than “sensuous human activity,” both utopian and concrete.¹²

III

Like the Bread and Roses strike before it, the Seattle cycle fused seemingly antithetical propositions together through practical activity, conjoining them where their dialectical tension was greatest.¹³ For Benjamin, moments such as these (though there were no guarantees) suggested that people were on the verge of making the continuum of history explode.¹⁴ In his essay on surrealism, he therefore encouraged those in struggle to marry intoxication with dead reckoning by welding the “experience of freedom to … the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution.”¹⁵ This was because, “it is not enough that, as we know, an ecstatic component lives in every revolutionary act.” Indeed, for Benjamin, “this component is identical with the anarchic.”

But to place the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance.¹⁶

Although the movement that had its coming out party in Seattle would never fulfill its revolutionary promise, it was precisely at the crossroads of intoxication and dead reckoning that one could find the writing on the wall.

Considered concretely, “winning” is a zero-sum game that accords with decision. From this perspective, and in contrast to those theories of political representation promulgated by the bourgeoisie during its period of revolutionary ascent, it becomes clear that the very substance of politics is sovereign usurpation and—at its threshold—regicide. Little wonder, then, that the Seattle snapshot finds our aspirational declaration coming into conflict with the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Conjoined in a spontaneous montage of intractable tensions, the juxtaposition of slogan-and-cops makes the situation plain. And the protagonist (who appears nowhere within the image frame and must therefore be the viewer herself) is enjoined to resolve the conflict by realizing the slogan’s truth through decisive action. 

But this very same scene, burdened though it may be by the decision it demands, is also made light by utopia’s grace. To be sure, the positive content of our victory remains unspecified; but how could it be otherwise? Recall that, for Zapatista chronicler Gustavo Esteva, the movement of movements was best understood as a composite of “one no, and many yeses.”¹⁷ Under conditions such as these, the particular “yes” (the particular “we”) must be brought to the image by the viewer-protagonist who draws from the well of resonant themes to fill the scene with consolidating meaning. In such moments, the utopian longing for future liberation begins forging an accord with the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution. Victory, yes! But what does that mean? And how, concretely, shall it be achieved?

IV

Professing a desire to win (declaring that one is in the process of “winning”) will always be easier than emerging victorious. As we have seen, the Seattle snapshot demands nothing less than sovereign usurpation, a movement-based disruption of the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The sharp edges of such a conflict can never be smoothed by wishful thinking; nevertheless, “winning” also harbors an aspirational dimension that recalls the role Marx assigned to imagination in the human labor process. Here, the image of the thing to be produced must exist in the mind of the creator before it can be realized concretely.¹⁸ An obvious source of seduction and incitement, images conjured in this way are also an irritant. Even as they urge us on, they alert us to the demands that befall us when we declare our commitment to the future they foretell.

Throughout the Seattle cycle, the utopian and the concrete, intoxication and dead reckoning, coincided to a remarkable degree. Subsequent movements have not fared so well, and those who recall the writing on the wall (those who remain committed to winning) will want to know why.

Indeed, the past two decades of struggle have made clear that the victorious combination of the anarchic and the dictatorial is anything but inevitable. To get a sense of this disconnect, one might recall how, during Occupy, the utopian seemed to flourish at the expense of the concrete while, in response to Trump’s ascendency, movements have prioritized concrete victories while utopian visions have atrophied. If, in Seattle, intoxication and dead reckoning partook in some explosive convergence, retrospection makes plain that Occupy was made lopsided by a utopian surplus. More recently, the resistance to Trump has demanded that victories be as concrete as the dangers we confront, and this has resulted in a utopian deficit. How did this balance shift, and how might some new synthesis be attained? How might “winning” come once again to emblazon the wall at the crossroads of intoxication and dead reckoning?

V

Between 1999 and 2001, it was easy to believe that we were winning. Even as efforts to replicate a Seattle-style victory in D.C. and Quebec City went unfulfilled, the feeling that we were setting the tempo (that we had somehow become privileged actors on the world stage) was palpable. It was barely hyperbole when, amid the flames engulfing Genoa during the anti-G8 protests of 2001, the writing on the wall declared: “you make plans, we make history!” For a minute, proclamations such as these stopped seeming like statements that could be proven true or false. Instead, they had become what J.L. Austin would have called a performative, an enunciation that coincided with the realization of the act to which it referred. “This is what democracy looks like,” chanted the children of Seattle as en masse they took to the streets and made their performative felicitous.¹⁹

It was therefore not surprising when, immediately following Seattle, the language of “winning” began to spread. Through a process of diffusion that pertained not so much to action repertoires as to political conceptions, “winning” became a resonant theme, both utopian and concrete.²⁰ Its intoxicating allure owed to the repolarization of the political sphere that arose from its emphasis on decision and sovereign usurpation. The significance of this turn, both for protest movements and the researchers who study them, cannot be overstated.

For scholars indebted to the insights of political process theory, for instance, modern social movements are bound to (and in some sense defined by) a repertoire that takes the state to be both a target and a mediating force with the power to implement movement aims.²¹ In contrast to the bifurcated and more directly violent conflicts of previous eras, the popular politics that developed at the end of the eighteenth century seemed to emphasize persuasion.²² By the end of the twentieth century, the standardization of protest rituals had advanced to such a degree that some scholars declared the advent of a “social movement society,” in which barriers to participation declined along with contention’s impact.²³ It did not take long, however, for events to upset the theory’s veracity. Indeed, the return to direct action, property destruction, and rioting on N30 all indicated that earlier modes of bifurcated contention were becoming a political reality once again.

It was hardly surprising, then, that, for many comrades of my political generation, developing an awareness of our power coincided with a disavowal of the demand-based repertoire through which the modern social movement came into being. The victory in Seattle confirmed our hunch, and we were not surprised to see our successes spread as the new cycle gained momentum. Along with the collapse of global trade deals for which we (too hastily) took credit, we watched elite summits retreat from world cities to remote zones less hospitable to protest (the deserts of Qatar, the mountains of Alberta). London saw May Day riots in 2000, and anti-globalization activists swelled the ranks of the Palestine solidarity movement that rose on the crest of the Second Intifada.

During the summer of 2000, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) began mobilizing under banners that read: “fight to win.” Marching on the provincial legislature in Toronto to insist that seated officials receive a delegation of homeless people demanding redress for the emergency conditions in which they lived, the demonstration was met by mounted police brandishing batons. A riot ensued, but the repression galvanized movement forces. More than anything, it legitimated confrontation and pushed the movement further in the direction of bifurcated contention.

Later that fall, members of Local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (many of whom had been active participants in the OCAP melee a few months prior) helped spearhead a strike at Toronto’s York University. The picket lines and demonstrations would last nearly three months and, through it all, union members chanted: “strike to win!” In the end they did win, and not least because the local’s sensibilities had begun to reflect a growing distrust of established channels.²⁴ Wherever one turned, the convergence of intoxication and dead reckoning fostered by “winning” pushed us ever closer to the meaning of politics as such.

VI

But this convergence did not (could not) last forever, and the onset of military violence following September 11 put an end to our winning streak. Correspondingly, the language of “winning” and the repertoire with which it had come to be associated began to recede. According to Turbulence, “Some say that the last time they saw the ‘We Are Winning’ slogan, it was sprayed on the side of a burning police van in Genoa.” Given the political transformations brought on by the war on terror, however, they were compelled to ask: “Has it seemed appropriate since?” Indeed, Genoa marked a turning point, and the Seattle-cycle cohort’s optimism would collapse in the face of what Turbulence called “a global, open-ended police-war.”

This war was declared with a series of violent attacks upon both the flesh and bones of those considered somehow ‘militant’, but also … against the whole of the social body… [Consequently,] the affects of winning—bound up with the joyful experience of desire creating another world—are replaced by those of fear.²⁵ 

The mass confrontations we’d once staged at trade summits began to seem reckless in the wreckage of the collapsed World Trade Center. We soon learned that commitment was not enough to keep us from folding in the face of US military advances. Even the scale of our resistance to the invasion of Iraq, which yielded the largest street protests in human history, was not enough to keep the bombs at bay.

Trading direct consequences for mass numbers, the anti-war mobilizations returned us to a “modern repertoire” that had become increasingly disconnected from conditions on the ground.²⁶ Bifurcated conflict was sidelined while demand-based claim making and performances of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment took center stage.²⁷ Meanwhile, a growing chorus of repudiations of the Seattle cycle’s inadequacies advanced by Left forces began gaining traction, with the result that mass convergences like N30 were pitted against “local” initiatives.²⁸ As the space to debate what winning might mean grew smaller, many activists concluded that there was little to do but move on.

VII

When Occupy burst onto the scene in 2011, there were signs that its architects (some of them veterans of the Seattle cycle) had picked up the thread once again. The circular form adopted by the general assemblies echoed the spokescouncils of the previous decade, and (like a lightning rod, and as the WTO had been a decade earlier) Zuccotti Park became a point of convergence for insurgent energies. When coupled with its inclination to build a culture of direct democracy, the nascent movement’s stated aim of shutting down the financial district suggested that, despite their estrangement during the painful anti-war years, the utopian and the concrete were in a state of rapprochement. It was therefore not surprising that, at Occupy actions across the country, protestors began to chant: “I believe that we will win!”

But while the movement’s objectives could not have been more clear and concrete than the name “Occupy Wall Street” itself, the new cohort had difficulty embracing the profane demands this aim implied. And when it became clear that putting an end to kleptocracy would prove too costly in concrete terms, the movement began redefining what “winning” might mean.²⁹ In short, we moved the goal posts, and consoled ourselves with the assurance that we had “changed the conversation.”³⁰ A useful reframing, perhaps, but Occupy’s inability to resolve the tension between the embellished utopian and the frightening implications of the concrete could already be detected in the movement’s general assemblies, where (despite their superficial resemblance to Seattle-era spokescouncils) talking often took precedence over doing.³¹ 

Since Trump’s election, movement conceptions of victory have once again become concrete—but this shift has often come at utopia’s expense. On the one hand, “winning” has become an electoral feat in which Republicans and machine Democrats are replaced by progressive challengers (and this is one of the means by which Occupy endures: the left-populist proclamations minted at general assemblies have become the coin of maverick candidates bidding for electoral power). On the other hand, we tabulate our victories by counting the Nazi rallies and Alt Right speaking engagements we’ve shut down through direct, violent confrontation. 

But while victories of the latter sort are indispensable, we cannot pretend that they are more than defensive maneuvers, or that their effects are more than provisional. Indeed, even as visions of a redeemed humanity compel us to meet the threats we face head on, the confrontations themselves leave little room for the elaboration of such dreams. Defensive postures adopted to address emergency conditions blunt the utopian reflex, and we should not be surprised that movement efforts to conjure visions of future liberation have been overtaken (domesticated) by the electoral candidates to which Occupy gave birth. How, then, shall we find our way back to that crossroads where the utopian and the concrete converge? How do we plot a course back to Seattle so that we might declare (despite all that’s changed and all that we’ve learned) that “we are winning” once again?

VIII

Any answer to this question must confront the problem of temporality. From the standpoint of clock time, which accrues in empty, metered succession, 1999 can’t help but seem distant from the demands of our present. At the same time, and especially for those who recognize it, the twentieth anniversary of N30 prompts an encounter with the event and its implications. Two temporal modes are thus brought into conflict, and their irreconcilability demands that we consider the workings of calendrical consciousness. In concert with the temporality to which it is bound, such consciousness has the power to deposit us before familiar moments but under new conditions.³² For Benjamin, it shared an affinity with the aspirational force subtending life itself, which he viewed as “a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time.”³³

In opposition to the 24/7 clock-time that began reshaping consciousness during the rise of industrial capitalism but that now flattens everything to the same indistinction,³⁴ the period of crisis through which we now live has prompted a resurgence of interest in the calendrical mode. Nowhere is this more evident than in meme culture, where a growing catalogue of political montages exploits the power of juxtaposition to truncate the interval between past and present in order to clarify our political tasks.

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Historically, calendrical consciousness served as a point of mediation between human history and natural history. It oversaw agrarian production and tended its own plot of useful metaphors, which served as a balm to bruised human aspirations when nature proved intransigent. With the rise of industrial capitalism, this consciousness was supplanted by clock time, which imposed a new rhythm on existence.³⁵ By the middle of the twentieth century (with the advent of “consumer society” and the Green Revolution’s audacious reorganization of the biosphere), calendar time was effectively banished from the field of production.³⁶ However, it did not (could not) disappear.

Instead, it migrated to consumption’s refracted hall of mirrors and became a compensatory supplement to capitalism’s deadening culture, in which “personal worth” is “resolved” into exchange value.³⁷ Shortly thereafter, consumerist frenzies exploded upon the barren clearings where (once upon a time) humans still conscious of their vestigial bond to natural history gathered to mark birth, death, renewal. Today, seasonal holidays play an outsize role in the organization of consumption. But while capital has subordinated calendrical consciousness to the project of profit realization, the arrangement is extremely unstable. 

To understand why, it’s useful to consider how (despite its “news feed” format, which actively promotes a vertiginous slide into clock time’s qualitative indistinguishability) Facebook has effectively become both the default and the most reliable steward of calendrical consciousness today. Between its gentle prompts to wish “friends” all the best on their birthday and the barrage of reminders cataloguing “memories” that reappear on the date they were first published, Facebook also keeps track of seasonal holidays. 

In this way, the platform has revitalized calendrical consciousness to cover for its own cat/catastrophe, 24/7 indistinction. But while capitalist clock time has been saved by the calendar, the consciousness coinciding with the latter mode continues to foster forms of reckoning that had been the very heart of religion, production, and (as Benjamin once noted) of revolution too.³⁸ And while Facebook might remind you of your holiday, it also recalls the murder of Mike Brown. Against the endless serialization of police shootings, capitalism’s reliance on the calendrical pulls the memory from the continuum and pushes it into the “now of a particular recognizability.” 

Normally, the process goes unperceived. In moments of crisis such as our own, however, the inclination to circle back becomes acute. As with the calendar, which periodically deposits us before scenes in which past and present are forced to coincide, anniversaries alert us to the secret alliance between our time and the cited one. Nevertheless, as Benjamin maintained, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”³⁹ Today, we must recognize Seattle as our concern—and not least because of the inadequacy of our past claims to victory.

IX

Calendrical consciousness alerts us to the promise of the past, but it also reveals the past’s incomplete character. This is especially true when we contemplate declarations of victory. Winning demands that winners prioritize the realization of their aims, and this means selecting appropriate means. Confronted by ruin, activists want badly to win; but this has not kept us from recoiling before the arsenal of means, or of limiting our deliberations to those tactics that conform most readily to the inherited movement repertoire. In part, this owes to the correlation between a repertoire’s effectiveness and its cultural intelligibility.⁴⁰ Still, our collective anxiety regarding means leaves us ill equipped to rise to the level of our winning aspirations. And even as Malcolm X continues to be invoked in movement contexts, the implications of his consequentialist injunction to pursue freedom “by any means necessary” have for the most part gone unheeded. 

From the standpoint of human history, which, for Marx, has hitherto been the history of class struggle,⁴¹ declarations of victory have tended to be provisional. Conflicts that give rise to victors in one moment tend to bring usurpers in their wake. In other cases, the very act of declaring victory can become the means by which the aim is achieved. In moments such as these, “winning” becomes a performative. Still, the enunciation must prove felicitous, lest the scene unravel in demoralization and defeat. Thus it was that, during the armed struggle against colonial domination, Amílcar Cabral demanded that his compatriots “claim no easy victories.” 

Along with the distinction between victory as statement and winning as performative act, then, the concept discloses an important temporal division. This schism coincides with the tension between battles and wars, reform and revolution. In each case, the division might be resolved through a convergence of the utopian and the concrete—but this outcome is far from inevitable. In Seattle, the assertion that “we are winning” was both strategically useful and premature. It emboldened the assembled to rise to new heights, but it also posed a question that continues to plague us today: what would it mean to win? 

When subjected to interrogation, this question confesses to have smuggled both form and content—both means and ends—within its slender form. In a single enunciation, it asks both “what (utopia) will we win” and “how (concretely) shall this victory be assured?” For a time after N30, it was impossible to declare support for a struggle or opposition to an enemy without also committing to a corresponding act. Statements of political alignment were either concrete and tangible or ridiculed as meaningless. At its threshold, our preoccupation with “winning” wrested politics from representation and guided us back to the founding regicide. Intimations of this can still be detected in movement-based invocations of the guillotine, though these continue to operate at the level of wish fulfillment. 

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X

When thinking about N30 today, the uncertainties raised by our winning proclamations must be given pride of place. Indeed, Seattle posed a question that has become increasingly relevant under conditions of eco-devastation and fascist ascent.

When considered from the standpoint of the dangers we now confront, the slogans of Seattle can’t help but sound naïve. Still, for those capable of remembering, the writing on the wall pulls everything into focus. Both the situation and the response it requires become clear. In Seattle, the effect was this: what happened next no longer seemed bound by teleological fiat, and Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no alternative” began to seem less certain. I could almost feel it as we were drawn toward decision. What we did next would underscore our fidelity to (our betrayal of) a possibility that had flashed up briefly but, if not seized, might never be seen again.

Today, the utopian and the concrete are estranged. Still, there are suggestions that they might converge anew, and this would improve our chances in the fight against ruin. The outcome, however, is not guaranteed. By reclaiming the calendrical mode and returning to the streets of Seattle (by revisiting that spot where the anarchic and the dictatorial once conspired to scrawl our profession of faith on the wall), we might recall what “winning” once was—and what it must now be again. In this way, we might yet bring the present into a critical state.