 The
now infamous actions against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Seattle
in November 1999 have taken on mythological status, with very little actual
information existing on what happened, and how. Most of the published
‘information’ about the actions has come from such “experts”
as the editor of Spa magazine (and no, Spa isn't an acronym for anything…),
NGO wonks and lefty journalists. Although there are a handful of excellent
stories and articles by organizers and participants in the direct actions,
these have not received widespread attention or distribution, and for
the most part are somewhat narrow in scope. At the same time, liberals
and organized labor - who spent much of December 1999 falling all over
each other trying to disassociate themselves from the “illegal actions”
(yes, the ones which succeeded in shutting down the Meetings) have since
decided that in fact, it was they who shut down the WTO Meetings, presumably
with their mock tribunals, letter-writing campaigns, and impassioned speeches
to the masses from distant podiums…
When I travel among activist circles in other regions and countries, there
are two common responses I receive when I tell people I'm from Seattle
- misty-eyed nostalgia, or an intensely angry bitterness, usually expressed
through phrases like “Well, that won’t ever happen again,”
or “You lot were lucky that you caught them by surprise, that’s
the only reason you got away with it.”
Though I believe that it is clear that some of the tactics which exploded
onto the US (and global) activist scene in Seattle have outlived their
usefulness, I think there are still important lessons not yet learned
from those actions, and I believe that the popular dismissal of Seattle-as-success
solely because of the surprise element is fallacious.
I got involved in the WTO organizing in August 1999, as soon as I returned
from traveling. At my first meeting, I found about 50 people discussing
logistics for the week-long ‘convergence’ which would lead
up to the direct action - shutting down the WTO's opening ceremony. I
believed from that moment on that we would succeed in this - never once
doubted it. In retrospect, it seems to me that most of us believed in
that vision, whereas at many mass mobilizations since, most people sort
of snickered behind the scenes at the plans to ‘shut down’
or ‘besiege’ or ‘invade’ other ministerials and
summits. We, of course, had all been hugely inspired by the London J18
actions, which added to our confidence and our audacity. That confidence,
I believe now, was a major factor in our success - it was contagious,
inspiring countless thousands to make the journey to Seattle, or to get
off work/school for the week and come downtown from their local neighborhoods.
But confidence is too elusive to replicate, so I’ll try to give
more tangible reasons for our success…
Building
Networks, Generating Momentum
Trying to concisely describe all the networks we developed and the outreach
and planning we did in those frantic months leading up to N30 is an impossibility
- no single one of us was involved in every aspect, and years later I’m
still meeting people who were a part of a community center, student group,
or senior citizens’ coalition which organized against the WTO, and
which I’d never heard of. It’s very much like the parable
of the blind men describing the elephant based on which part was within
their grasp - the WTO organizing looks like many different, often fearsome
animals, depending on who you ask.
So, with that disclaimer, my personal experience was this:
A few weeks after I got back to town, an action camp was held north of
Seattle, organized by the Ruckus Society, and attended by about 150 people
from across the West Coast. I didn’t go, but from what I’ve
gathered, this particular camp was crucial to the confidence and the coalescing
of our organizing crew. There were intensive trainings in jail solidarity,
basic legal rights, urban climbing, blockades with varying degrees of
technical skill, and inspiring presentations from national and international
activists about other actions (including a slideshow about London RTS,
which had people talking for weeks afterwards). Not only did the camp
provide people with very practical and tangible skills - it built trust
among the folks in attendance, which allowed us to persevere together
later on.
Back in Seattle, we held weekly public meetings to plan the actions and
the convergence, and in those meetings, we encouraged newcomers to get
involved in the various working groups, which met separately in order
to focus in depth on various details. Working groups included: housing,
legal, medical, scenario (which was planning the details and logistics
of involving thousands of people in a co-ordinated action), convergence
space, fundraising, media, food, scheduling (of trainings and workshops)
etc. In addition to the weekly Seattle meetings, there were regular regional
meetings where people came together from across the Pacific Northwest
(including Vancouver, BC). There were also telephone conference calls
which included spokespeople from around the country, giving updates, offering
and requesting resources, and confirming our sense that this was going
to be really big.
The propaganda that was produced by the Direct Action Network was a key
element to making things happen. DAN produced 50,000 newspapers, and a
comparable number of postcards, beginning at least four months before
the actions. They had a slick, contemporary design, which now seems very
familiar, but at the time was quite innovative. The newspapers had a brief
description of direct action and affinity groups, a bit about the WTO,
and the infamously controversial action guidelines. They were updated
twice to include new information as we created it, and distribution (always
the key conundrum) was nationwide, although certainly more thorough on
the West Coast.
The notion of carnival ran deep in our plans - carnival as the irresistible
blend of party and protest, of revelry and revolution, of reclaiming public
space and creating something memorable. Our objective of shutting down
the Summit was inextricably linked to our vision of a massive street festival
which would create an alternative vision of the world we wanted. Art workshops
were taking place steadily throughout this crazy time, and in several
public locations around town. We were stockpiling banners, flags, and
puppets, and eventually taking them out on test runs in a series of three
neighborhood parades. Designed as outreach tools and serving as morale
boosters, the parades grew larger and more colorful each time.
One of these parades began on the university campus, and helped solidify
many links we had with university groups. There were many student organizers
in DAN, and DAN folks went to lots of university and community college
meetings. 
Throughout this whole time, many high school and college students were
organizing autonomously - planning everything from teach-ins, to walkouts
on November 30th, to direct actions against corporate involvement in university
policy and curricula.
We also were meeting with the King County Labor Council, and with the
local leadership of the AFL/CIO, while developing relationships with rank-and-file
Steelworkers, Longshoreworkers and Teamsters. In addition to attending
meetings, a few people from Art and Revolution went five hours east to
Spokane, where the Steelworkers had been locked out of their workplace
for over a year. Art & Rev did workshops with them, making signs and
banners, and talking with them about what impacts the WTO was having on
the steel industry and their jobs.
All of this didn’t make our relationship with organized labor smooth
or easy; in fact there was a crucial meeting the week before the action
in which they told us that we simply couldn’t do our action before
their big march (scheduled to start about seven hours after ours) if we
were to be acting in solidarity with them. However, we held our ground,
and on the day of action, we had a large contingent of Steelworkers join
us at 7am to do direct action, rather than going to the labor rally which
took place miles away. Later that afternoon, many Steelworkers and other
radical labor folks disobeyed their marshals, breaking through their cordon
and abandoning their permitted march to join us right when they were most
needed to reinforce our blockades, in the height of the tear gas and repression.
Many of those relationships are still proving to be mutually beneficial;
it was largely due to contacts made during Seattle organizing that union
participation in Miami (against the November 2003 Free Trade of the Americas
Agreement (FTAA) Meetings) was as productive and as trusting as it was.
Having John Sweeney, the president of the AFL/CIO, visit the Convergence
Center and do an interview for our free radio station was unprecedented,
and currently, unions are heavily involved in pressuring the city of Miami,
demanding the resignation of the police chief, and that all charges be
dropped, among other things.
Some people organized a West Coast caravan which consisted of a member
of the Steelworkers’ union, some students, and some folks from Art
and Revolution who did teach-ins, puppet-making workshops, singing and
dance workshops, and general mobilization work.
As all of this was going on with DAN, a parallel mobilization was going
on with the birth of Indymedia. The IMC (Independent Media Center) was
organized completely autonomously (in terms of meetings, funding, physical
location, organizers) but there was some fairly close co-ordination with
DAN. The creation of this completely radical and unprecedented network
magnified and amplified our organizing efforts. Media activists around
the world learned about the IMC and put the word out to all of their networks
- not only was there a serious direct action being planned, but also an
innovative proposal for building a radical participatory media outlet.
As a result, countless more people came to Seattle.
There were also several other groups working in parallel - the People
For Fair Trade, which was a coalition formed by Ralph Nader’s Public
Citizen; the People’s Assembly, which was a radical grassroots Philipino-led
organization, who held a separate march - the only march which had been
refused a permit (DAN didn’t try for a permit); Seattle Anarchist
Response, which helped pull together a black bloc action; and several
student groups. We had links to each of these organizations, and participated
in each others’ meetings, but for the most part, we were not closely
working together.
Structures
and Logistics
Many of the working groups were comprised of a core of pre-existing groups
(notably - food, art and propaganda, medical, and trainings) and this
was a huge asset, as we were able to benefit from years and years of experience
without having to start everything from scratch. Initially the working
groups reported back at each weekly meeting, but this gradually became
unwieldy. Each group was making so much progress every week and had so
many things to report, that half of each meeting consisted simply of reporting
what had already been done, leaving very little time to discuss proposals,
plan new projects or make decisions.
So we formed a new group, which we called the ‘organizing collective.’
These meetings also took place once a week, and were open to anyone, although
decision making was limited to one representative from each working group,
who would report on what their group was doing, and then report back to
their group what others were doing. These representatives could rotate
as long as any new attendees were somewhat briefed beforehand to maintain
some continuity. In reality, most representatives did not rotate, and
there was little attendance by anyone outside of the working groups. It’s
unclear to me now if people were just not interested in going to yet another
meeting each week, or if the word did not get sufficiently spread that
the meetings were open and public - in any case, the organizing collective
faced a strong critique of being a hierarchical and unaccountable inner
circle, and in the urgency of the moment, I don’t think we ever
addressed that critique sufficiently.
Another working group was known as the ‘scenario’ group, (what
I think in the UK might have been called ‘logistics’). This
group was convened to work out a framework for the action: we pored over
maps, divided the city into 13 sections, tried to assess which would be
the most risky so we could communicate that to affinity groups from out
of town, decided on gathering sites and march routes, and coordinated
with other working groups to provide support to the actions (such as food,
water and first aid). Participation in the group was open to anyone, though
in the final week of planning, it became invite-only, primarily to avoid
having to spend an hour at the beginning of each meeting summarizing the
previous three months’ work for newcomers.
Converging
and Coordinating
In addition to the mass action, what most of these groups were gearing
up towards was a ten day convergence, with trainings, workshops, performances,
art-making, and endless meetings to hone and refine the actions themselves.
The convergence center was the hub of this ambitious project, and contained
sufficient space for multiple simultaneous trainings, a large kitchen
where two free meals a day were cranked out for up to 3,000 people, a
free comprehensive health clinic and dispensary which saw up to 500 people
per day, a tea house and reading room (if anyone could concentrate amidst
the surrounding ruckus), and a bicycle lending library.
One of the most important components of the convergence was the trainings.
All day every day were trainings in legal rights, jail solidarity, first
aid, direct action techniques and tactics (ranging from the technical
- how to build lock-boxes or tripods; to the philosophical - why to do
it, when to do it, what range of options exist; to the synthesis - how
to escalate tactics to match needs or desires or situations; to the pragmatic
- what to do when you’re locked to eight other people and the cops
try to remove your goggles or arrest your support crew…).
The importance of the trainings cannot be emphasized enough. Dozens of
affinity groups formed spontaneously during trainings; people planned
actions with folks they’d known only a few hours or days. Thousands
of people went into the actions on November 30th having already practiced
how they would set up their blockade, what they would do when the police
came, how they would respond to tear gas or pepper spray, how they would
behave during arrest, transport, booking, etc. It really demystified the
process for people who had never been arrested before; for them, it was
a revelation not only to have the entire scenario spelled out step-by-step,
but actually to be ‘arrested’ by activists in cop costumes,
and to act out the entire process, including interrogation scenes where
the ‘cops’ used different lies and manipulations to try and
extract information.
Trainings built confidence as well, not only in ourselves but in our community.
The knowledge that hundreds of people would be on the street to give you
first aid if you were hurt, and to observe and document any police action
against you, and to track you through the jail and court system, inspired
people to push their limits, to test their endurance, to imagine what
was possible and then to go one step further. Perhaps most importantly,
the trainings helped dispel fear. By creating an open space in which people
could share their experiences of arrests, of locking their necks to bulldozers,
of the intense but temporary pain of pepper spray, the fear of the unknown
was banished - certainly there were still many unknowns, but shining light
onto them diminished their power.
Each night we held large public meetings, called ‘spokescouncils.’
The spokescouncil was the coordinating and decision-making body of the
actions, and was a rather unwieldy and ambitious attempt at direct democracy.
The meetings began eight days before the action, and then continued throughout
the week of action, organizing jail solidarity actions and legal support.
We made decisions through a formal consensus process, with a few provisions
built-in to prevent total collapse if the meetings were infiltrated by
cops or other authoritarian trouble-makers, but we rarely (if ever) operated
by anything other than consensus.
The spokescouncil was comprised of affinity groups - groups of 5-15 people
who plan actions together. Affinity groups were the fundamental unit of
our actions; by organizing this way, power remained decentralized, no
single person knew the entire plan (or even half of it). Many affinity
groups linked up and formed a larger network, or ‘cluster’,
in order to take on a more ambitious project, or to take over an entire
section of town themselves. During the spokescouncil meetings, affinity
group spokespeople committed to occupy and hold particular intersections,
or to provide support to others. In this way, thousands of people in hundreds
of affinity groups filled in our giant map on the wall, until we had commitments
from everyone to completely blockade the site of the opening ceremonies.
We heavily encouraged each affinity group to be autonomous - to provide
basic legal, medical, communications, and any other support for themselves,
not to mention to plan their own action.
Being organized in this way left things pretty spontaneous and organic,
and completely autonomous. No centralized leadership could have compelled
people to hold their blockades while they were being tear-gassed and beaten,
but because each group had made its own plan, there was a sense of ownership
of the action, which deepened everyone’s commitment and endurance.
As one woman said a few weeks after the action, “Everyone left Seattle
feeling they did it” - that each one of us was responsible for the
success of the action. And it was that sense of personal responsibility
and shared ownership that changed the lives of so many of us who participated.
Organized
Endurance
In the years since those now historic and often mythologized actions in
Seattle, I’ve heard incredible re-writings of history, ranging from
various groups or individuals who at the time did their best to distance
themselves from the direct action, now claiming to have been responsible
for its success, to the strange idea that Seattle somehow just spontaneously
occurred, that it was some sort of miracle that came out of the blue,
and accidentally succeeded due to the element of surprise, which can never
be replicated.
Yet, nothing came from out of the blue - we organized, and it paid off.
We weren’t just freaks and artists and full-time activists on the
streets; we went into high schools and churches, labor councils and neighborhood
associations, workplaces and universities. Those people were on the streets
with us; those people flooded the city council meetings afterwards, damning
the police and the city, not only for their illustrious abuses and constitutional
violations, but also for having invited the WTO to meet in our city in
the first place. The teach-ins, workshops, and presentations, which took
place across town for months in advance, ignited the population’s
anger and propelled them into the streets, more than a single flyer or
workshop ever could have. Once they were in the streets - tasting the
freedom of reclaiming their city (even for only a day), experiencing the
joy of the streets filled with music and festivity rather than traffic,
and feeling the pride at the end of the week of having won, they were
not ready to give it up, nor would they ever forget it.
On the day of the action, the blending of art and action, carnival and
revolution manifested itself in breathtaking ways. A stage was built across
an entire intersection, and people locked themselves to it, creating an
interactive blockade, on which innumerable performances took place throughout
the day. Other intersections were blocked with things ranging from a four-lane-wide
puppet, to a giant inflatable whale, to a huge mural stretching between
the sidewalks with paint available to anyone who wished to add to it.
Additionally, people were prepared to be out all day. There were groups
roaming the streets distributing food and water, bringing first aid materials
and medical skills where needed, and providing entertainment to folks
locked-down and unable to see the breadth of the take-over of the city.
There was a butoh dance troupe, a marching band, and independent media
makers spreading news from one part of town to the next, and all over
the world; there were innumerable performers - puppeteers and hip-hop
rhymers, unicyclists and acrobats, fire-breathers and choral groups. Because
of this preparation, this attention to detail - not only providing for
our physical needs, but our need for joy and laughter - the blockades
were maintained long after the opening ceremonies were cancelled. The
capacity for endurance was phenomenal. As Rowena Kennedy Epstein wrote
later, “I remember thinking I would never stop. My body was caving
in on me, my eyes were swollen, my feet were bleeding, and I never anticipated
stopping. I would like to think that a generation never anticipated stopping.”
There was a level of ingenuity, autonomy, and creativity that I haven’t
seen at US (or any other) actions since. These various blockades were
organized entirely by affinity groups, and no one knew in advance the
sum total of what was being planned. This is something that is often forgotten,
in the myth-making during the years since Seattle - sure, it’s true
that we succeeded in part because we caught them by surprise. But the
element of surprise was nothing compared to the innovation and creativity
that thousands of people demonstrated. I have been to numerous actions
since, in many parts of the world, and I have not yet seen the level of
autonomous participation by affinity groups that we had in Seattle, nor
have I seen such a solid structure and framework for an action, backed
by solid organizing for months in advance.
 Failure
to Learn, Failure to Innovate
What I see these days is that affinity groups turn up with no particular
plan, and then spend a week complaining that there is nothing to do, as
if local organizers are supposed to brainstorm hundreds of ideas from
which people can choose. Somehow, many activists have gone from being
creative and active participants to being in a more passive, spectator
role, waiting for someone else to come up with the ideas, and then - more
often than not - shooting down each idea as being impractical, oppressive,
reformist, etc. This passivity and enthusiasm for criticizing from one’s
comfort zone (in which one does nothing at all, so as not to be criticized…)
is but one element in the fizzling out and current failures of this particular
movement in the US.
Another factor in our weakened position is that frequently, actions are
planned with no clear goal. Advancing on a fence is not a useful goal
around which people can organize creative actions. Even if you reach the
fence, and even if you tear it down, then what, apart from getting beaten,
gassed, arrested, or dispersed? In Seattle, our goals were explicit, and
well publicized months in advance. We were going to shut down the Meeting,
prevent it from even starting, and our tactics were to use various blockade
techniques while having a street festival which occupied the entire city
center. Within those goals are endless possibilities for creative participation
that go well beyond making a clever banner or chanting a new slogan. Another
example of an action with a clear goal was in Prague, where organizers
decided to blockade the International Monetary Fund and World Bank delegates
inside their Conference Center. Unfortunately, many people who came from
other countries (especially the UK) at the last minute never knew about
this goal, and assumed that the intent was the same as in Seattle, to
prevent them from entering. So this is another problem - the Prague organizers
could have had better links and better information dispersal to internationals
arriving in the final days, and traveling activists would do well to make
a greater effort to learn what is actually being planned and find a way
to contribute to the existing action, rather than assuming that they know
better than those who have been working locally for months.
Ultimately, it is the process which is key, not the triumph of ideology,
but the constant re-invention of what ‘revolution’ looks like,
the refusal to accept a static definition, the commitment to evolving
the idea of revolution, to innovating our tactics, and to looking beyond
the next action, the next summit, the next fence against which we will
throw our bodies….
Audacity Gets
the Goods
There are many ideas floating around of where to go from here. Many people
are saying that we need to stop always defining ourselves by what we are
against and start showing what we are for. Obviously, this is a good idea,
but makes for a difficult action plan. Setting up autonomous zones outside
summit meetings without posing any particular threat to the power structure
seems like a retreat to me, a retreat into a temporary commune, a comfort
zone, into which few people outside our limited and subculture-based circles
will enter.
Retreating from direct action at this point in time, when there is so
much at stake, and when we have them on the run more than ever before,
I believe, is a mistake. But it is also a mistake to continue moving forward
with vague notions of ‘direct action’ which are ill-prepared
and have little ‘action’ involved. It is useful to take a
look at the old IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) slogan - “Direct
action gets the goods” because it begs the immediate question -
what constitutes ‘the goods’ these days? What is it, exactly,
that we are after?
If we don’t have clearly identifiable goals, how can people commit
to put their bodies on the line to meet them? How can we know if we have
succeeded if we don’t know what we set out to achieve? The goals
don’t have to be obviously attainable (i.e. shutting down the City
of London, or the WTO Meeting), but they must be audacious, ambitious,
and challenging enough to inspire folks to work towards them, to dare
to dream beyond the probable, to expand the definition of the possible.
Revolutionary social change has never been won by people who thought,
“Well, we should be really careful because they’ll just fuck
us over if we are too successful,” or “They’ve got us
totally outnumbered, we better just apply for a permit and stop pretending
like we’ll ever really make a difference.”
Our actions have become almost exclusively symbolic and spectacular, and
although symbolism can be useful in triggering imaginations and challenging
institutions, we need to have some concrete and tangible successes to
balance out the symbolic ones; otherwise we end up alienating ourselves
from our own actions, our numbers dwindle, we come away from each action
less inspired and more damaged, injured, and burned out. Meanwhile, that
which we call ‘action’ grows less and less active, less and
less direct.
But, as Mike Prokosch and Tony LoPresti wrote in their January 2004 article,
‘Next Steps in the US Global Justice Movement’:
“Direct action
doesn’t have to be this way. When it has clear goals, it can organize
focused, disciplined, extremely effective actions. Seattle is the example.
Before it came a quarter-century of actions, learning, and refinement
starting in the anti-nuclear movement. In preparation for it, Northwest
activists built affinity groups and did community education for a year.
The myth that Seattle was a spontaneous coming-together is one of the
most destructive myths among many in direct action circles.”
It’s time to
shatter the myth.
By Jennifer
Whitney
BACK
TO TOP
|
