December 9, 1999
“The ugliness in the afternoon”
A couple of us from the national offices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation went to Seattle to participate in the protests against the World Trade Organization ministerial Summit. We visited with Western Washington FOR folks with whom we co-sponsored an event on the Global War System. For the four full days we were there we practically lived in the streets, marching in peaceful demonstrations, attending educational fora and assemblies, as well as facing tear gas attacks, anti-riot police pursuit on foot, and dealing with the threat of being arrested, getting hit by rubber pellets, riot sticks, or pepper spray. By mid-day on November 30th, the first day of the WTO meeting, it became clear that police, while arresting demonstrators, were mostly intent on dispersing people with force and weapons. That evening a state of emergency was declared with a 7pm curfew; as night approached armed National Guard soldiers dressed in fatigues were rolled in. Most have seen media images of the street actions that night and the following days. There has been a universal condemnation of the destructive acts of black clad youth who trashed businesses in the 15 to 20 square block downtown area. The WTO, business people, government officials, and the TV and print media, from the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to national dailies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, all excoriated the rioters, describing them as criminals, hooligans, thugs. And progressive activists—clergy, environmentalists, unions—lined up in a similar chorus. “We certainly don’t support violence or property destruction,” said Naomi Walker, a spokeswoman for John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO. Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “…We deplore the violence exhibited in downtown Seattle, and it is usurping the real story of 50,000 people who stood together to demand respect for workers and the environment…Violence only obscures our message. A handful of anarchists should not drown out the message of thousands of peaceful marchers.” Others were more vehement in their feelings towards the “violence” against property: Medea Benjamin, a leader with Global Exchange, a San Francisco based group said,“Here we are protecting Nike, McDonald’s, the Gap and all the while I’m thinking, ‘Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested,’” (New York Times, December 2, 1999). Mike Dolan of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen joined in with these observations: “…These nonviolent direct actions were early disrupted and corrupted by small bands of vandals who turned over some newspaper boxes and apparently smashed a couple of windows downtown. The police failed to identify and arrest these few anti-social individuals…Why didn’t the police identify and arrest the vandals early on? If they had, the ugliness in the afternoon and my own substantial discomfort would have been avoided. We didn’t come to trash Seattle, we came here to expose the trashy reputation of the WTO.” (World Trade Observer, Dec.1,1999). In the days since there have been further accusations and speculations as to the anarchists being government agent provocateurs. Will no one defend the anarchists? Were their actions as reprehensible and anti-social as their critics claim? Or are these young rebels our brothers and sisters, not saboteurs of the movement but revolutionary spirits who we should embrace for their willingness to express a righteous anger and repudiation of a social order based on greed, systemic violence and oppression of a global majority?
Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive. Finally, it is a device of social action that is more difficult for the government to quell by superior force. –Dr. Martin Luther King, “Where do we go from here?”
There were three major groupings and accompanying actions in the Seattle protests, constituencies and events which overlapped.One was a huge coalition of labor, peace activists, environmentalists and church and religious folks. These groups made up the bulk of the protesters, especially on the day of labor’s officially sanctioned march when some 30,000 plus participants walked down from Seattle Center to the downtown area near the WTO meeting site. Prominent among the unions were the International Longshore Workers, Service Employees Industrial Union, and Steelworkers.Secondly, there was the Direct Action Network (DAN) with far fewer people, a mostly young crowd, but with the mission of going from symbolic protest to nonviolently gumming up the ministerial works, that is, monkey wrenching the WTO.Lastly, there was the small core of anarchists, reportedly from Oregon, who’s aim was to assault the sacred cow of American corporate culture. Because at this point in history no citizens group can actually directly affect the decision-making of the powerful and mighty, nearly everyone in the political movements relies to a certain extent upon symbolism as the expression of protest. The rich and the powerful pull the strings while we bear witness and issue JeremiadsYet while one large grouping in Seattle was for the symbolism of moral protest, of dissent and policy disapproval (labor, churches, the fair traders, the enviros), and while another was for the symbolism inherent in actually interrupting the ministerial wrong doers with nonviolent civil disobedience (even if only for a day), the anarchists were about the symbolism of confronting and challenging capitalism first hand, the economy based on profit-making and run by multinational corporations. Theirs was a call for countercultural change, for radically altering our very way of life. They seek this partly by destroying oppressive symbols, the corporate logo. Their watchword is direct action versus solely symbolic gestures of dissent. In a sense, their rhetoric anticipates the society captured by the title of David Korten’s latest book, “the Post-Corporate world: Life After Capitalism”.This is why groups of committed anarchists in affinity groups went for the retail shopping mall, for Nike Town, the Radisson, Sheraton, Starbucks, the Gap, FAO Schwarz-Barbie Center, McDonalds, the places where commodities are displayed and sold, the sites where we all participate in the culture of consumption (unfortunately the Microsoft campus was far away on the other side of Lake Washington). I’ll remember for a long time to come a drizzling December afternoon in downtown Seattle, close to the Pike Place market, getting tear gassed and chased by the police moments after having been read the riot act. Scary and terrifying and yet exhilarating, it was a moment when average people held the streets, reclaiming public space for hours—normally, most urban space is run by commercial interests or the state but for a few days in Seattle it was contested ground, the res publica. Thanks to DAN and the anarchists, democracy was in the streets. Were the anarchists in Seattle ultra-extremist adventurers endangering the success of the anti-WTO protests or were they prophets? Quite arguably their actions defined the outer parameters of the anti-WTO week in Seattle.For many years the peace and justice and religious based movements have issued pronouncements calling for social justice and rejecting materialism and greed, statements against the soullessness of consumer society and for equitable human relations. These are prophetic claims. It could be argued that the secular anarchists took these pronouncements to heart, making literal assaults on the sites of consumerism and alienated living, direct acts against the commodity culture. Ironically, their practice, their actions, jibe with a repudiation of consumerism, materialism, the valuing of things over people, the marketplace as God. That nearly everyone else disavows the attacks on property, some even calling for the state to arrest rebellious youth, is revealing, suggesting an agreement or consensus on the sanctity of corporate property (Some critics of the rebels even devoted themselves to cleaning up the graffiti left on the storefronts).The anarchists went beyond the liberal call for reforming capitalism a-la-Clinton; acting as maximalists, they made a symbolic bid for a total, not a partial change. The anti-corporate symbolism prefigures the future many of us want: one with no more exploitation in both the south and northern hemispheres, without concentrated economic power, without CEO’s or bosses, without classes or wage slavery, and environmentally rational. Theirs is a criticism against not just of the WTO or the reigning governments but of the system of markets and profit-making as a whole. For many of us their symbolism was more appealing than the “legitimate” protests; their imagination grander than the reforming of one corporate entity or blocking the proceedings of one bad institution. Young, daring, courageous, pure, almost beautiful in their sinister black garb, the anarchist youth took their gamble without asking for any help or even solidarity from the rest of us (on the contrary, they are universally reproached). They brought to mind the spirit of theWatts rebellion of 1965, the Detroit fires of ’67, Paris and Chicago ’68, South Central Los Angeles ’92, and, also of course, the widespread disapproval these earlier street actions also garnered.The Seattle anarchists raise certain questions for pacifists which could be couched in this way: when Civil Rights desegregationists broke Jim Crow laws which many Southerners revered or believed in fervently, were they being anti-social? When anti-Vietnam war resisters spilled blood on government documents such as selective service records or when they burnt draft cards, were these actions violent? When peacemakers take a hammer to a warhead of a nuclear missile, is this vandalism or thuggery? Should we condemn the destruction of an outlet for a corporate chain such as Starbucks, Nike, the Gap, etc.? Are we implicitly supporting an unjust international economic arrangement based on super-exploitation abroad and exploitation at home by calling for the arrests of anti-authoritarian youths?
Methods and Motivations There was marked contrast between the atmosphere and attitude at the established peace churches in downtown Seattle and the DAN gathering point at Capitol Hill, between the middle-aged, middle-class “reasonable, practical” voices—unions, churches, peace movement, environmentalists, etc.—and the anarchic (self-directed, autonomous) groups of youth defying the procedures of the WTO, private property and social proprieties (upon which unjust orders rest). To its credit the Direct Action Network skillfully employed a tactic of interrupting business as usual by breaking with the safe choreography of orchestrated or pre-arranged protests sanctioned by the powers that be, the officially approved etiquette of routinized protests. The actions were refreshing, invigorating, insofar as they subverted the usual types of demos where often everything’s worked out with the police chief down to the last busload of arrestees. The inadequacy of mainstream pacifist response to the police brutality was illustrated by a particularly disappointing scene which unfolded on Wednesday morning at Seneca and Fifth streets on the day after the major street actions. A silent religious procession which stopped just opposite the phalanx of police came across as acquiescent, if not submissive. Perhaps this is all we can do at this time…yet, maybe those of us who are more invested in the system, more “institutional”, can still support the actions of youth willing to confront core systemic values. It may be that our organizational commitments to things such as the 501C3 status, stock porfolios, endowment funding, mortgages, internal hierarchical structures, and the like may prevent us from acting directly on behalf of justice; it may not necessarily compel us to hold back from supporting those who are ready to take on the struggle more militantly. Ultimately, the demonstrations belonged exclusively to neither the peacemakers, environmentalists, labor unions, the religious OR the anarchists—no one has a copyright or monopoly on the streets. In Seattle there was lots of organization but minimal orchestration, or pre-programmed ritual; there was no predictable outcome to the moments when protesters held the line. Public Citizen put out the call to come to Seattle to protest the WTO but it was the masses of people acting on their own, spontaneously, who opened up the public spaces for real. At certain points it seemed that there were no official leaders only crowds.
In the final analysis there are only three ways of effecting social change: through persuasion of the men who hold power in the existing system, through a conspiratorial coup d’etat, or through the open mobilization of the people against the prevailing order. The first is the technique of liberals, the second of one type of anarchist, the third of most other radicals.—Sidney Lens, “Radicalism in America”
And to the anarchists—Is rioting all you can do? Is this your sole tactic and method? Are you a “one trick” pony?On the night that of the trashing of the Starbucks on Stewart street one of thousands of arguments between individuals was heard. A woman carpenter, wearing her hardhat and boots, decried the store bashing. “That store could’ve been one I built! All of Seattle was built by labor!” Seattle is as unionist a town as they come. In 1919 some 60,000 workers went out on a general strike over labor rights, bringing everything to a standstill. It was also the site for big battles with Boeing corporation. In the future, if the movement is able to build and grow, it’ll take the mighty arm of organized labor to make a real revolution against corporate capital, not just the street actions of a minority opinion within a minority counterculture. The riddle is how to make that equation change.Can you be anarchists of the Spanish type, the 1930’s National Confederation of Labor of Catalonia, or America’s own Industrial Workers of the World, who were inextricably involved with wage workers? (“Labor is entitled to the value it creates-Abolish wage slavery”—IWW slogan seen in the big march) It’s necessary to explain your actions more, the whys to your actions.The challenge to the anarchists (actually to all of us) is how you make your message legible to average folk. If you hold no dialogue with others and do no or little outreach to average working people, you will be beating your arms helplessly against the walls of our common prison.
Finally, RACE MATTERS.Like the rest of the Seattle protests, the direct action and anarchist contingents were mostly white, pointing out yet again the polarized state of the progressive movements. It’s clear to me that if the participants in the battle of Seattle had been tortilla, rice and bean eaters, or of African descent, there would have been deaths; there is ample historical precedent that points to the lethalness for people of color acting in large groups on their own behalf. White skin remains a privilege. And yet, it was still an honor for me as a working class, man of color to have been there those rainy days in Seattle side by side with valiant idealistic rebels who understood the meaning of this gathering of international officials setting up the economic agenda for you and me for the next period. The battle in Seattle was a great way to end this year and this century, to close the millenium; it represents definite hope for the future.
