The Prefiguration of Seattle: A Battle Many Years in the Making

“This is what democracy looks like!” - that was but one of the many chants heard among the 250,000 people on the streets of New York City for the recent September 20th 2019 Global Climate Strike – a protest chant that originated on the streets of Seattle almost two decades ago. When the powerful images of 50,000+ protestors confronting police and effectively shutting down an international gathering of wealthy technocrats ricocheted across the globe in late November 1999, the incident caught many political observers by surprise. Apologists for “free market” corporatized neoliberalism were quick to brand protesters as part of a misguided “anti-globalization” movement. “These anti-W.T.O. protesters—who are a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960’s fix—are protesting against the wrong target with the wrong tools,” quipped Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.¹

For most participants, though, this historic episode was a calculated culmination of years of grassroots organizing and international solidarity. Deriding their struggle as “anti-global” was a particularly ignorant rhetorical misnomer since it flipped reality on its very head. Those in the streets of Seattle were there precisely because they had built meaningful relationships across the many cultural, economic, and political divides that have long been used to divide and oppress the many in order to ingratiate and maintain a few. In my case, and for many others, the “Battle of Seattle” was a real-time activist reunion, a critical praxis moment to lock arms with others whom we had come to know and respect from many previous struggles – an effective manifestation of the grassroots resistance and international globalization from below.

As one of the street protesters in November 1999 and a longtime activist since my own political awareness emerged in the 1980s, I would like to use this retrospective article to explore how creative synergy across different movements not only caught the state off guard, but also ensured a grassroots victory in Seattle. This historic episode was itself built upon decades of earlier protest action, collaborative organizing, and strategy refinement. The four seemingly distinctive movements I will consider in this article - militant labor, radical environmentalism, food sovereignty, and insurrectionary anarchism - actually knew each other before they came together in November 1999 to challenge the World Trade Organization (WTO). This prefigurative solidarity was quite intentional, and the joint praxis that emerged - the “Spirit of Seattle” - continues to stimulate and empower grassroots movements worldwide.

The Battle of Seattle also revealed the pitfalls of current movement building theory. Throughout human history there have been many different perspectives on just how social change occurs: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed dialectical materialism and class struggle; John R. Commons, Mancur Olson, and Elinor Ostrom focused on collective action and mutual aid where cooperative structures eclipse competitive ones; James Davies posited relative deprivation as the source of revolutionary action; while others such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp have promoted grassroots community organizing and non-violent direct action as the best means to topple elites and transform societies. What consensus does exist revolves around social change as a historical process, the prerequisite of cultural identity for effective participation, and the critical role of praxis. While a few analysts had an inkling that something new was on the activist horizon in the 1990s, the symbiotic coevolution of organizing tactics and transformative coalescence of social movements in Seattle crossed an unexpected threshold and this amazing success still lacks an adequate explanation today. Some scholars behind this Seattle+20 retrospective are now exploring the concept of rising and falling waves of protest across different contested terrains and how they can amplify each other over the course of broader struggle. In this sense, the Battle of Seattle was a veritable movement tsunami.

Labor Militancy Rediscovers its Historic Muscle in Seattle

The free trade advocates of the WTO have come to Seattle to further their strategic takeover of the global economy. We in the ILWU want to give them the welcome they deserve and let them know what we think of their plans. So we've closed the port of Seattle and the other ports on the West Coast. In closing these ports the ILWU is demonstrating to the corporate CEOs and their agents here in Seattle that the global economy will not run without the consent of the workers. And we don't just mean longshore workers, but workers every where in this country and around the world. When the ILWU boycotted cargo from El Salvador and apartheid South Africa, when we would not work scab grapes from the California valley or cross picket lines in support of the fired Liverpool Dockers, these were concrete expressions of our understanding that the interests of working people transcend national and local boundaries, and that labor solidarity truly means that when necessary we will engage in concrete action. That is why the ILWU is here today, with all of you -- to tell the agents of global capital that we, the workers, those who care about social justice and protecting our rights and our planet, will not sit quietly by while they meet behind closed doors to carve up our world.”

Brian McWilliams, President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), speaking at the Labor Rally in Seattle's Memorial Stadium on November 30, 1999, opening day of the WTO ministerial.²

Long before the WTO officially arrived in Seattle, top brass with the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) had already cut a deal with the political establishment. They could express their concerns in a “peaceful” manner with a rally and parade through the downtown as long as it siphoned off media attention and protest participation from the much more disruptive and threatening shut down scenario that was being organized by the Direct Action Network (DAN). When President Clinton then appeared in Seattle later in the week to christen and launch the latest “free trade” juggernaut, he would be able to placate his critics by pointing to the “good” reformist protesters whose voices had been heard (and eventually ignored), and the “bad” radical protesters who were just there to cause an uproar and stymie progress. Corporate sponsors of the WTO meeting had also invested millions to craft their own glitzy version of a globalization utopia which they hoped would be major public relations coup. But this fantasy soon unraveled.

Over 20,000 energized union activists and labor supporters across all sectors of the increasingly exploitative globalized economy had packed into Memorial Stadium for the sanctioned event. While some union bosses such as Teamsters President, James Hoffa Jr., urged followers to support Pat Buchanan in the next election as the only true populist critic of global free trade (sound familiar?), others such as the ILWU's Brian McWilliams, stepped outside the prescribed script. Thanks to ready access to cellphones and scores of citizen journalists, those inside the stadium already knew what was unfolding on the streets not that far away. The Speak Easy Café’s conversion into a fully wired Indymedia center enabled “real time” updates bypassing the corporate networks. Since 6:00 am thousands had already been clogging the approaches to the Convention Center, surrounding the Westin Hotel, and preventing official WTO delegates from even reaching the meeting. Around 10:00 am – and without any provocation - police had already launched their first attacks: pepper spraying, teargassing, and baton beating peaceful protesters occupying 6^th Avenue. The “Battle for Seattle” had begun.

Behind the scenes, labor leaders and city officials debated whether to let the scheduled march proceed once the sanctioned rally wrapped up – they gambled that their original plan to undermine the growing street confrontation with a diversionary parade would still work. In fact, when directly asked by CNN’s Bernard Shaw if the goal of labor was to kill the WTO in Seattle, James Hoffa Jr. replied “No. We want to get labor a seat at the table.”³ While some iconic parade images of “Teamsters and Turtles Together” did find their way into mainstream press coverage, much more important was the fact that thousands of labor activists defied their “pie card” union bosses and broke through the peace marshals to rediscover the strength of direct action. Many of these more militant labor folks – steel workers, dock workers, farm workers – knew this was their moment to make a difference. By then the Seattle police had already exhausted their limited supply of tear gas and pepper spray (one captain was quickly dispatched by plane to a weapons depot in Casper, WY to get more supplies), and the Seattle Fire Department had refused to deploy water hoses on the protesters whose ranks were now bolstered by so many union sisters and brothers. Similar strategic solidarity would play out during the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising when firefighters, local police, and even National Guard members joined protestors occupying the State Capitol.

The ILWU itself was born out of the Great Depression after decades of strike actions along the West Coast and steadfast dockyard resistance to industry abuse and state repression. In adopting the “An Injury to One is an Injury to All” slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the ILWU also shared their belief in rank and file democracy, as well as international solidarity. In the early 1990s the ILWU had made headlines by working with environmentalists to challenge the anti-union pro-pollution practices of USS-POSCO (a joint venture between U.S. Steel Corporation and POSCO, a Korean conglomerate) near Pittsburgh, and had also exposed the corporate malpractice of Peavey (a Cargill subsidiary) shipping water soaked grain out of the port of Kalama, WA, which won them accolades from family farmer and consumer advocates alike. On April 22, 1999 – Earth Day – just months before the Seattle protest– the ILWU had also won an election to represent 300+ workers at one of the nation's largest bookstores, Powell's in Portland, OR – just down the road from Seattle...

Also feeling the wind behind their sails in Seattle that day were the contemporary comrades of Joe Hill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Ben Fletcher. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – often known as the Wobblies – had been formed in Chicago back in 1905, but also played a major role in the historic Seattle General Strike of 1919. With their characteristic anarcho-syndicalist flags (the red and black now augmented by green thanks to their successful alliance with Earth First! born out of Red Wood Summer), were a visible presence on the same Seattle streets that they had fought to control not quite a century earlier. Wobbly “flying squads” were soon darting across downtown in 1999, bolstering the ranks of locked down protesters and harrying police riot lines as they formed. The Bay Area IWW had even hosted an anarcho-syndicalist “summit” called I-99 earlier in the spring, with an explicit goal of bringing radical labor and environmental groups together for the anti-WTO protest. This effort worked.

Earth First! and Friends Take Their Struggle to the Streets of Seattle

People all over the world were so inspired by Seattle, partly because it was the most heavily televised protest in history—there is probably more celluloid on that week than on any political action of all time—but also because most people had no idea that there was real dissent here in the United States. But when they saw tens of thousands of people in the streets, and the façade of democracy peel away to reveal armed storm troopers with shields, grenades and gas, wielding chemical weapons against unarmed crowds, it really drove home the fact that there are all kinds of different opinions in this country, and that there can be a true, sweeping social movement in the United States.”

John Sellers, Ruckus Society⁴ 

Much has been made of the activist friendship between David Brower, famous “arch druid” of the environmental movement and cofounder of Friends of the Earth, and David Foster, director of District 11 of the United Steelworkers of America, in the lead-up to the Seattle protest. Together they had formed the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, stemming from mutual opposition to the clear cutting and job slashing tactics of Charles Hurwitz, owner of Maxxam, who was hellbent to liquidate any assets he could of Pacific Lumber and Kaiser Aluminum, and they brought this shared anathema to bear against the WTO. In terms of mobilizing hardcore environmental activists, though, probably the more important players were veterans of recent Earth First! (EF!) campaigns. John Sellers did much heavy lifting in Seattle as a protege of EF! founder, Mike Roselle, who channeled his experiences from Greenpeace and the Headwaters EF! Forest Campaign through the Ruckus Society and the Direct Action Network (which actually came out of a Ruckus Society camp two months before the WTO meeting) to train many activists on the eve of the Battle of Seattle.

Judi Bari was not in Seattle (she had passed away in 1997 from a long struggle with cancer), but the fruits of her organizing from the Redwoods Summer Campaign a decade earlier was also evident among many of the EF! and IWW activists who did show up to protest against the WTO. On May 21, 1990 in Oakland, CA a car bomb nearly killed Judi Bari and fellow EF! activist, Darryl Cherney - the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was later successfully sued for numerous violations of their First Amendment rights and for falsely claiming the activists had bombed themselves! Many still believe the state itself was responsible for this act of domestic terrorism.⁵ In 1995 EF! protesters converged on Oregon’s Warner Creek watershed to protest another federal selloff of the public’s old growth heritage and the resulting “Cascadia Free State” lasted for almost a year as a veritable anarchist temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). Thanks to such hands-on training, EF! activists had no problem in the Denny St. warehouse activist maker space in Seattle, creating a giant siege tower from scrap lumber, dubbed the “Trojan House,” to be rolled down to the barricade of Metro Buses the City of Seattle had parked around the convention center to thwart protesters. This was also the first time that EF! lock-down “experts” modified their original clunky metal designs for more easily reproduced PVC pipe versions.

Throughout the 1990s Earth First! had also proven its mettle outside the Pacific Northwest, building direct action coalitions with family farmers, indigenous communities, and even urban activists. The 1997 EF! Rendezvous from June 30th – July 8^th drew over 500 activists to the North Woods of WI, bolstering opposition to the proposed Crandon Mine near the Mole Lake Reservation. An EF! direct action protest resulted in 27 arrests, which overwhelmed local law enforcement agencies and triggered hard fought legal defense cases that dragged on for months. This convergence was only possible thanks to decades of solidarity relationships in the Midwest, hearkening back to earlier self-defense struggles over local – often indigenous - control of vital natural resources.⁶ The protest goal of keeping the real issues of corporate resource grabbing, biodiversity loss, and violated treaty rights in the limelight was successful and ultimately tribal entities were able to buy out the mining lease. In 1998 EF! members also joined indigenous rights activists with American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota, to support homeowners in Minneapolis, MN resisting eviction by MnDOT to make way for the Highway 55 Bypass. A late night police raid on December 20, 1998 the largest combined law enforcement action in MN history to date, involved over 600 officers storming the site and led to 33 arrests, including one protester snatched from a rooftop wearing a Santa outfit.⁷ These rude reality checks of unbridled state power not only honed direct action skills, but also hardened the resolve of many eco-activists – useful experience they would bring bring with them straight to the streets of Seattle.

The Seattle anti-WTO protest also showcased the growing international solidarity between radical environmentalists and indigenous activists. While Elizabeth Betita Martinez rightly questioned “Where was the color in Seattle?”⁸ anyone who was there could not have missed the powerful participation by First Nations and the Global South. Throughout the week, the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) led by Tom Goldtooth organized a whole series of events for native activists and allies from across the globe. The struggle of the U’Wa in Colombia against ecocide at the hands of the militarized fossil fuel industrial complex was on clear display during the anti-WTO protest in Seattle. Their chosen representative to the outside world, Berito Kuwaru'wa, had won the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize just the year before, and grassroots boycott/divestment campaigns against Occidental Petroleum were quickly growing. Royal Dutch Shell had pulled out of the project in 1998, saying it did not want “another Nigeria,” in clear reference to its complicity in the 1995 execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and other Ogoni environmental activists that had led to another ongoing worldwide activist backlash. The U’wa threat of collective suicide (the tribe numbers between 5,000-6,000 people) if the project occurred only added more urgency to the WTO protest.

Food Sovereignty Finds Fertile Ground Through the Battle of Seattle

The entire language of free trade has been shaped by changing the meaning of basic concepts that are understandable by ordinary people, couching them in a new language that makes some things that are good from the perspective of people look like nasty things. They are only nasty from the perspective of the market. Take "protection." Protecting your community, making sure that your children have enough food; ensuring that your small farmers are not robbed of their livelihood; ensuring that your old growth forests are protected, your rivers are protected, your soils are protected, your biodiversity is protected. That is not just legitimate protection; it is obligation. It is absolutely essential that we protect our families, our communities, our environment, our livelihoods. But that "protection"--which comes from a political and social imperative and I would even go so far as to say moral imperative--has been redefined by the corporate culture as an economic category called "protectionism," which is to be opposed and dismantled. Protection is not protection, because protection cannot be reduced to a phenomenon of the market place.

Vandana Shiva, Indian activist⁹

On Monday, November 29^th, another powerful offshoot of the international solidarity movement was taking root in front of a downtown Seattle McDonalds. A lunch time “slow food” picnic protest was unfolding on the doorstep of the fast food giant, involving leaders of La Via Campesina - the world's largest umbrella organization for peasant farmers, fishing folk, hunters/gatherers/herders, and indigenous peoples – along with a number of U.S. allies from the National Family Farm Coalition, Family Farm Defenders, the Pure Food Campaign (which later became the Organic Consumers Association), and the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, to name but a few. La Via Campesina (LVC) had been formed in 1992 in Managua, Nicaragua by groups spanning the global south and north, and had already held its Second International Gathering in Cuba in 1996. In contrast to the post WWII International Federation of Agriculture Producers (IFAP), which had become notorious for coopting farmers to serve agribusiness interests, the explicit goal of LVC was to offer a grassroots alternative to neoliberal capitalism. One prominent LVC leader - sheep farmer and artisanal cheesemaker, Jose Bove - was in Seattle for the WTO protest, having been arrested just months earlier for using his tractor to “dismantle” another McDonalds under construction in his native France. He somehow managed to smuggle several blocks of his own Rocquefort cheese through U.S. Customs for the picnic and shared it with the crowd – a wholesome alternative to the junk food or “la malbouffe” as Bove called it being served inside. Activists with LVC had joined their colleagues with the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) earlier in the day to plant trees in a Seattle park, and farmer delegates from over 30 countries met for various teach-ins and protest actions throughout the rest of the week. At each such event the pungent smell of smuggled Rocquefort would linger.¹⁰

Notable among the U.S. farmer protesters in Seattle was John Kinsman, founder of WI-based Family Farm Defenders (FFD) – World War Two veteran, longtime civil rights activist, organic dairy pioneer, and early critic of Monsanto's GMOs rubberstamped by Clinton's Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FFD had been formed by disgruntled WI dairy farmers in the early 1990s initially to challenge the introduction of rBGH (a technological harbinger of factory farm expansion and the extinction of smaller family farms) and the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) dairy check-off program (mandated garnishing of milk checks by corporate processors – classic taxation without representation). Within short order, FFD’s mission grew as rural folks realized they had other allies across the food/farm system (farmworkers, food service workers, fisher folk, forest workers, indigenous hunters/gatherers, consumer advocates) and that the real enemy was runaway industrialization and neoliberal capitalism. This populist anti-corporate critique with a strong direct-action component also had deep historic roots, like the tallgrass prairies and old growth forests that predated settler colonialism. The robber barons of the late 19^th century met immense resistance from a coalition of workers and farmers, and this alliance would persist well into the 1930s and eventually pushed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to craft the New Deal.

In fact, John Kinsman (who was born in 1924 and passed away on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2014) grew up amidst huge farmer revolts of the Great Depression, including massive protests by the Farm Holiday Association¹¹ and the violent Wisconsin Milk Strike of 1933 that gained the attention of the White House and led to the first federal supply management and parity price programs.¹² The 1970s witnessed another farm crisis sweeping across America’s Heartland, and family farmers publicly vowed to “raise less corn and more hell,” invoking the historic words of Kansas Populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease.¹³ The American Agriculture Movement (AAM) launched in 1977 hosted numerous tractorcades demanding an end to foreclosures and a return to parity – not charity. One such AAM tractor protest in 1979 thoroughly clogged the streets of Washington DC. When it was revealed that flagrant price rigging and anti-trust violations by the dairy giants – most notably Kraft Foods at the Green Bay Cheese Exchange - were largely responsible for farmers’ woes, this knowledge triggered a fresh round of milk dumps and rural protests in the early 1990s, including farmers stomping on blocks of Kraft Velveeta outside Governor Tommy Thompson’s office in the WI State Capitol.¹⁴

Rural unrest was also brewing in relation to state sponsored land grabbing for infrastructure development such as high voltage powerlines. In MN in the late 1970s the “Bolt Weevils” became quite proficient at sabotage, causing millions of dollars in damage. The General Assembly to Stop the Powerline (GASP) newsletter, “Hold That Line,” explained, “It is a mistake to label these as acts of vandalism. Vandalism means ‘ignorant destruction of property,’ and it would be a big misunderstanding to think that these acts are creatures of ignorance.” Beyond toppling towers and shooting out insulators, family farmers used what other “weapons” they had on hand – such as manure, baseball bats, and ammonia - to deter mass arrest by state troopers, and they were often bolstered in these actions by college students and more urban-based environmentalists.¹⁵ The resistance tactics of the Bolt Weevil inspired radical folksinger Dana Lyons’ 1992 “Turn of the Wrench” song which was popular among many EF! activists. These solidarity experiences helped agrarian activists to hold their rightful place in the ranks of the 1999 Seattle protest and subsequent protests against the World Bank in Washington DC, and the FTAA in Miami, and Quebec. More recent rural “valve turner” actions, shutting down tar sands pipelines across the Great Plains, comes out of this long proud legacy.

Vandana Shiva, environmental activist and biotechnology critic from India, was another familiar figure in Seattle who joined thousands of other protesters Monday night, November 29^th, to shut down the corporate-sponsored WTO welcome celebration. This action was in part organized by Jubilee 2000, a largely faith-based grassroots campaign to expose and eliminate odious debts that had come onto the protest scene at the huge protest surrounding the G8 Summit in Birmingham, Scotland in 1998 and would go on to launch “Drop the Debt” with musical celebrities in time for the G8 Summit protest in Genoa, Italy in 2001. In Seattle, the successful blockade meant all those fancy hors d'ouevres uneaten be elites were later dumpster dived to feed hungry anti-WTO protesters – food justice comes full circle. On Thursday, December 1, 1999, food sovereignty and anti-biotechnology groups took to the streets again in one of the more “peaceful” marches of the whole WTO protest with hardly any police in sight. Protesters gathered at a farmers market to distribute organic apples and then marched to a rally outside the Seattle headquarters of Cargill. The political concept of “re-peasantization” as a form of rural resistance to state authority informed and empowered many of these activists,¹⁶ and this new “solidarity in struggle” identity even led John Kinsman of FFD to proudly proclaim he was a peasant, too, marching on the streets of Seattle with colleagues from Mexico, South Korea, South Africa, and India.

The overriding LVC demand in Seattle was a moratorium on WTO negotiations. As a post-WWII creation, the WTO itself was built upon neoliberal principles that simply could not be reformed and which violated food sovereignty in so many ways – from forcing countries to trade food against their will, privatizing the commons (water, seeds, land), and denying eaters the right to know where their food came from and how it was produced, as well as deploying hunger as a weapon. As one LVC protester from the Global South remarked, “you cannot put sugar coating on a rotten pie.” Once the Seattle protests succeeded in shutting down the WTO negotiations, LVC sent a tongue and cheek “thank you” to the WTO organizers for helping to unify small farmers worldwide: “During the weeklong work in Seattle, we have now succeeded in globalizing the struggle and globalizing our hopes.”¹⁷ It was arguable the “Battle of Seattle” that first popularized the concept of food sovereignty among grassroots activists in the U.S., and this “trickle up” revelation has now thoroughly – and radically – transformed domestic debates about food/farm issues.

Insurrectionary Anarchists Help Tip the Protest Scales on Seattle’s Streets

The premise of private property is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves. Advocates of "free trade" would like to see this process to its logical conclusion: a network of a few industry monopolists with ultimate control over the lives of everyone else. Advocates of "fair trade" would like to see this process mitigated by government regulations meant to superficially impose basic humanitarian standards. As anarchists, we despise both positions. Private property--and capitalism, by extension--is intrinsically violent and repressive and cannot be reformed or mitigated. Whether the power of everyone is concentrated into the hands of a few corporate heads or diverted into a regulatory apparatus charged with mitigating the disasters of the latter, no one can be as free or as powerful as they could be in a non-hierarchical society. When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcize that set of violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything around us. By "destroying" private property, we convert its limited exchange value into an expanded use value.... After N30, many people will never see a shop window or a hammer the same way again. The potential uses of an entire cityscape have increased a thousand-fold. The number of broken windows pales in comparison to the number of broken spells--spells cast by a corporate hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence committed in the name of private property rights and of all the potential of a society without them. Broken windows can be boarded up (with yet more waste of our forests) and eventually replaced, but the shattering of assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come.”

ACME Collective¹

One of the most popular memes coming out of the anti-WTO protest was a spoof on the trailer for the new Lord of the Rings movie with Seattle Police as evil orcs and the Black Bloc as the good defenders of Middle Earth. The “Battle of Seattle” highlighted the emerging capacity of anarchists to strategically attack corporate targets, resist police and other enforcers of state control, as well as empowering other protesters. In fact, the very McDonald's where La Via Campesina had held its “slow food” picnic protest on the morning of November 30^th was totally trashed by the Black Bloc less than an hour later (along with Bank of America, Starbucks, Warner Bros. Niketown, Gap, Old Navy, to name but a few, in the coming days) For those force fed corporate mass media coverage, such property destruction was portrayed as horribly “violent” and vapidly attributed to “disaffected” Eugene-based anarchists. While there certainly were folks from Eugene in Seattle, the protest actually tapped into a much wider and deeper pool of radical anarchist thought and direct-action experience that had been percolating for decades.

The swarming offense/defense strategy based upon non-hierarchical decentralized decision-making that manifested itself in Seattle was a relatively new phenomena for many activists, though it has long been used at various points throughout U.S. protest history (think the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, 1890s populist uprisings, turn of the 20^th century general strikes, and 1960’s anti-war and civil rights struggles). This form of direct action protest was widely popular in Europe in the 1980s – for instance, in France with SOS Racisme and other Antifa groups challenging the Chirac government and the fascist Front Nacionale – and quickly jumped the Atlantic as witnessed by the squatter response to the Tompkins Square “Riot” in 1988 in New York City and the 1990 Shut Down Wall Street action that preceded the 20^th Anniversary of Earth Day – both of which sent shockwaves across the establishment (and became historic touchstones for the Sept. 2011 takeover of Zucotti Park and the Occupy Movement). Other U.S. activists in Seattle had experienced the powerful potential of direct action with the 1994 Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as through organizing the “Festival of the Oppressed” to welcome the 1996 Democratic National Convention to Chicago. Publications such as Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed, Fifth Estate, and Green Anarchy were widely circulating and served as a forum for sharing ideas and tactics, while ongoing projects such as radical infoshops, punk tours, and squatter communities - along with continental federations like Love and Rage and episodic anarchist gatherings such as Active Resistance in Chicago in 1996 and Toronto in 1998 - forged stronger organizing relationships and a broader sense of anarchist identity and politics. Anti Racist Action (ARA) had also been organizing throughout the 1990s to resist creeping fascism, along with radical campus-based anti-corporate formations such as the Progressive Student Network and the Alliance for Democracy. The notion of the state as a predatory structure that was able to manipulate the masses to work its will was really nothing new¹⁹

Of course, this gradual evolution in radical politics had been perceived by the establishment, which began to develop its own countermeasures. Those who chose to be part of the Black Block in Seattle were quite aware that provocateurs from the FBI and the U.S. Army's Delta Force were among their ranks, seeking to transmogrify their targeted sabotage into primetime hooliganism. Traditional state notions of waging a low intensity conflict and winning hearts and minds were no longer working in a political landscape that was increasingly nonlinear and creatively chaotic. As early as 1996 the RAND Corporation had published a 120 page report for consumption by various law and order agencies, titled the Advent of Netwar.²⁰ Defined by RAND, netwar “refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling "leaderless" networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging, with new doctrines, strategies, and technologies that support their reliance on network forms of organization. Netwar may be the dominant mode of societal conflict in the 21st century.” Based upon the bungled behavior of the Seattle police, it is clear they had not yet properly digested the RAND Corporation analysis – by the time of the 2001 FTAA meeting and counter protest in Miami the police clearly had learned their lesson, and this “Miami Model” has now become the new normal in protest policing.²¹

Using an analogy from biology, the basic idea behind the swarming tactic is that of a coordinated auto-immune response to a disease - the disease in this case being the WTO meeting. Rather than fleeing the site of infection, the goal was to rally forces using a diversity of tactics to block, surround, overwhelm, and – hopefully – evict the intruder. Having anonymous spokespeople (Zapatistas wearing balaclavas), accessible copyleft materials (CrimethInc's popular zines), and multifaceted communication (Indymedia networks) makes it extremely difficult for the state to muzzle or decapitate a grassroots movement. Police “snatch and grab” squads tried to remove those who they saw as protest ringleaders throughout the Battle of Seattle, but there were just too many others empowered to take their place and pick up a bullhorn or operate a puppet. In one case they even nabbed a credentialed WTO observer, Victor Menotti, with the International Forum on Globalization, who was just sharing details outside the meeting on the latest White House shenanigans related to deforestation when the Big Blue Blanket swept in. He spent the night in the King County jail with another “protester” cellmate who was actually just a Seattle taxi driver from Eritrea, Gezai Yihdego, swept up by police after dropping off another WTO delegate - both were released the next day without charge.²² Seattle workers getting off the ferry and promptly getting teargassed by police (which even led to one woman’s miscarriage) is hardly a recipe for “winning hearts and minds” - similar dumb police tactics during the FTAA protest in Quebec in 2001 drove elite restaurant patrons and retirement home residents into the streets only to bolster the ranks of protesters. There’s nothing quite like feckless state oppression when it comes to building grassroots solidarity!

Anarchist-inspired performance, agitprop, and mutual aid are hardly new organizing tools within grassroots movements worldwide, but their visible presence in Seattle did much to capture a wider audience and entice “apolitical” bystanders to support and engage in the protest. Graffiti artists decorated Seattle streetscapes all week with profoundly bold messages, while dramatic banner drops captured other media attention. Hip Hop artists from South Central LA were among those reclaiming public space outside the WTO venue, blasting “TKO the WTO” from a mobile sound vehicle courtesy of Alli Chaggi-Starr with the San Francisco-based Art and Revolution. Radical cheerleader squads and infernal noise brigades traveled between street blockades and skirmish lines, boosting protester morale. Food Not Bombs had roving food units to nourish hungry protesters, while Seattle-based Anarchist Response (SAR) handed out copies of Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as food for thought. As Starhawk notes in her “Battle of Seattle” retrospective, the police state in Seattle failed not because it was unprepared for violence, but because it was unprepared for nonviolence. “It was more than protest, it was an uprising of a vision of true abundance, a celebration of life and creativity and connection, that remained joyful in in the face of brutality and brought alive the creative forces that can truly counter those of injustice and control.”²³

Most importantly, this “street heat” was palpable inside the WTO meeting itself. Official delegates from the Global South were able to look outside their very windows and see for themselves that public opinion in the U.S. was not as monolithic in favor of the “free market” as they had been told by neoliberal cheerleaders. In particular, the street protests in Seattle bolstered the intestinal fortitude of the African attendees, who ultimately refused to buckle to neocolonial demands. Thinly veiled threats of economic retaliation from U.S. Sec. of State Madeline Albright and U.S. Trade Rep. Charlene Barshefsky failed to make a difference, and ultimately officials from many parts of Global South simply walked out of the negotiations. As a post collapse press release from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) stated, the delegates had had enough of "being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance for our peoples and their future."²⁴ While the Hollywood portrayal of this transformative experience is rather trite and sensationally simplistic²⁵, the impact was truly profound and global. Never again will a peasant farmer in Brazil or an indigenous fisher in Alaska be able to say they did not know about the impact of the WTO on their lives or the future of their own communities. Nor will they ever forget who their true allies are in this ongoing struggle.

Conclusion

The Battle of Seattle underlines in my view the very critical, if not decisive role of collective mass action in displacing knowledge systems. Let me explain. It is now generally accepted that globalization has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The ongoing global economic crisis, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalization and financial liberalization, has driven the last nail into the ideology of neoliberalism. But things were very different over two decades ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalization was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more “coherent” in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy… Seattle was what Hegel called a “world-historic event.” Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that discredited an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

Filipino academic and activist, Walden Bello, speaking as part of the 2016 opening plenary session of the 111th Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Washington DC.¹

In 2019 powerful young activists - such as Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier - lectured heads of state at the United Nations about the need for real action to address the climate emergency. Their voices actually echo those of earlier young activists - such as Severn Cullis-Suzuki and Michael Dorsey - who decried the real-life dangers of unfettered capitalism back in 1992 at the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In many ways, the Battle of Seattle in 1999 was a critical inflection point in a growing global grassroots movement, bridging generations of seasoned activists and weaving together diverse resistance struggles. When ILWU activists from the West Coast arrived in Madison, WI in March 2011 to support the “Cheddar Revolution” against Gov. Scott Walker’s union busting austerity budget this was no accident – such class struggle was built in Seattle back in November 1999. When environmentalists in the U.S. support their counterparts at the ZAD (Zone à Défendre) in France or the Hambach Forest (Hambacher Wald) in Germany this is no accident – such biocentric connections were sprouted in Seattle back in November 1999. When Family Farm Defenders members from Wisconsin and Sami reindeer herders from Norway travel to Standing Rock, ND in 2016 to support indigenous allies in their peaceful protest against tar sands pipelines and extreme fossil fuel extraction this was no accident– such solidarity relationships were cultivated in Seattle back in November 1999. When black clad Antifa activists challenge racist white supremacists in Charlottesville, NC or Portland, OR²⁷ this is no accident – such community self-defense was forged in Seattle back in November 1999. 

As Chris Dixon notes, the “WTO protests, although significant, were part of a much longer arc of resistance to colonialism and capitalism.”²⁸ Far from being “global village idiots,”²⁹ or a “carnival of derision,”³⁰ those protesting in the streets back in 1999 were informed and empowered by a common history of resistance struggles and multicultural cross-border relationships going back decades. Twenty years later, the “Spirit of Seattle” can still inform and inspire a new generation of grassroots activists today as they challenge similar forces of neoliberal global capitalism. In the words of La Via Campesina: “Globalizar la lucha, Globalizar la Esperanza - Globalize the struggle, globalize hope.”

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