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Week of Wonders

Twenty-five years after Seattle WTO protests in Seattle, J. Narrin. | Wikimedia Commons

One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protestsby D.W. Gibson. Simon & Schuster, 368 pages. 2024.

We’re coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Seattle, the confrontation between police and demonstrators at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 1999 that shut the conference down. Diplomats from around the world went home having accomplished nothing. Biennial summits of trade ministers go on, disputes are adjudicated, negotiations undertaken, but nothing has happened in the way of a major rewrite of global trade rules since.

I’ve been an active producer of punditry around the event for the full quarter-century. I was there, wrote a daily journal, reported with The Nationcrew, for both print and radio. And I wrote about its twentieth anniversary for Jacobin. At the time, it seemed very important, and continued to for some years. Is it now? Almost a third of the U.S. population hadn’t been born when it happened, and only half had reached the age of political consciousness, which I’m arbitrarily setting at fifteen. An informal survey of my social media universe found mixed views, ranging from variations on “still vivid and important” to “huh, what?” The great radical activist and writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said on Facebook, “It seems so long ago, another century, so hopeful, seems like a dream, leaving no footprint, quaint and innocent.”

One Week to Change the World is an ambitious attempt to gather perspectives from across this spectrum. Thinking about it involves considering not only the politics of Seattle but the adequacy of the book to the task. Its form is unusual—an oral history consisting of short passages drawn from interviews with actors both major and minor. I’m not convinced it’s the best form for this story. But more on that later.

The political environment in which the Seattle event unfolded was markedly different from today: neoliberalism was at its peak, a time when trade barriers were coming down, unregulated financial markets were booming, tech was revolutionizing everything in a utopian direction, and prosperity seemed eternal. In politics, it was the time of the Third Way, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—Big Government was “over,” as Clinton averred in his 1996 State of the Union Address, but it was all burnished with a sheen of “progressivism” that aimed to differentiate itself from the vulgarities of the 1980s, the era of hardline free marketeers like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The target, the WTO, had opened less than five years before the conference, succeeding a post-World War II arrangement called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). There was an attempt in the 1940s to set up a trade organization alongside the World Bank and IMF—collectively known as the Bretton Woods Institutions—but the United States and other countries objected, so the looser GATT arrangement prevailed. GATT operated through periodic conferences that worked out new international trade regulations, which moved generally in the direction of lowering tariffs and barriers to trade, but it wasn’t a formal organization. With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and early 1990s, the WTO was finally launched as one with a permanent staff and resources in 1995. It continued GATT’s tradition of periodic global conferences to rewrite trade regulations, but it was also given a permanent office in Geneva and the power to adjudicate trade disputes between countries. Together, these institutions advanced what would become known as the Washington Consensus—free trade, free markets, reductions in social spending.

It’s easy to oppose global capitalism as a concept but harder in practice. These organizations gave it a home address. The annual meetings of the Bretton Woods Institutions became regular sites of protest from the mid-1990s onward, especially in the one year out of three when they were held outside the United States, but the announcement of the WTO summit in Seattle, amped up the protest planning.

There was quite an array of dissident actors in the Seattle convocation: big environmental groups, more left NGOs like Global Exchange, labor unions, a contingent of anarchists who formed the Direct Action Network (DAN), and the infamous black bloc, who by most accounts numbered around thirty or forty but garnered a lot of attention for smashing windows. The event was often described in the media as violent, and still is in retrospect, but aside from that small group of dedicated window-breakers, most of the violence came from the cops. It was “a police riot,” the police chief at the time, Norm Stamper, says in One Week. But, as Mike Dolan of the Citizens Trade Campaign, who spent months doing absolutely crucial organizing, observes in the book, “There was . . . exactly the right amount of property destruction. Any less, and the international press would not have picked it up. That was a sweet spot.”

This was a time when left activists spoke of networks and networks of networks, movements and movements of movements. Everything seemed provisional. That, rather than formal organization, was supposed to preserve autonomy. Affinity groups were held in high regard, small circles who knew and trusted each other and ran things by consensus, a model that persisted into Occupy Wall Street and associated happenings. The model proved very effective in organizing the shutdown of the conference. It was less effective at developing an agenda and a long-term plan out of that success. As the anarchist Murray Bookchin writes, when large groups “try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted—precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue.” In other words, consensus may work well for small groups that know each other well, but it’s no model for running a larger movement, much less a society.

Larger organizations in the Seattle coalition had their own problems. Unions, which emerged from fierce and often violent class struggle, shied away from anything that seemed too confrontational. And many of the NGOs suffered from structural problems, like the difficulties of merging their concept of civil society with the broader popular movement that would have been essential to any broadening of the fight. Civil society was quite the rage in the 1990s. It was a label applied to non-state actors, but only certain kinds. Friends of the Earth qualified but not the Heritage Foundation. They were designated as representatives of popular interest and opinions, but most were answerable to their funders, not even to members, much less the People. It was the progressive version of neoliberal development policy of the time, where the meliorative work previously done by the state was farmed out to NGOs, only with less money and more market discipline. How these instruments of civil society were supposed to be legitimated as genuine representatives of the people was never clear (nor, to be honest, was it ever clear that the masses cared that much about the WTO). But what can be said of the NGO class can be said of DAN—exactly whom did they speak for? At least labor leaders, or some of them, face elections, or something like them.

It was never clear what the Seattle movement wanted. Anti-capitalistwas a popular term at the time, but anything more ambitious or forceful than the negative was rarely mentioned. Some participants wanted a more nationally oriented capitalism, with tariffs and other protectionist policies but with no serious alterations to the structures of ownership and production. Others, appealing to sentimentalized histories of the good old days, imagined a more localized model, geographically contained and run by beneficent entrepreneurs, like, you know, way back when. It was not an intellectually rich environment.

But this is to get excessively hung up on the shortcomings. It was in many ways a glorious and exhilarating week, not least for the extraordinary meetings of worlds. Labor had a big rally on Tuesday, November 30. Quoting my own report at the time, “Unionists from all over the world spoke, some of them quite heatedly. A Mexican unionist cheered the Zapatistas, and a South African mineworker quoted Marx by name, urging the workers of the world to unite—to a great cheer from the crowd.” There was a touch of that old labor nationalism—the Teamsters denounced the threat of Mexican trucks—but there was some labor internationalism as well, though in very short supply.

And there was the meeting of labor and environmentalists, groups that were historically, if not at odds, certainly not allies in the 1990s. The odd coupling was celebrated as the meeting of Teamsters and turtles (turtles were foregrounded by protesters because the WTO had invalidated a U.S. rule that required fishing boats to use nets that allowed them to escape). Perhaps more niche, at the end of the week, I saw a moving solidarity between some Steelworkers and the Lesbian Avengers in front of Seattle’s grand old Labor Temple (once a union sanctuary that is now, sad to say, a coworking and event space). Again quoting my report at the time: “When we got here, the Steelworkers weren’t very queer-friendly,” a topless Avenger said. “As the week wore on, they got more comfortable with us. My nipples stand in solidarity with the Steelworkers and Teamsters and all the laboring people.” And a nearby locked-out Kaiser Aluminum worker responded: “A year ago I thought a redwood deck was the most beautiful thing in the world. Now I understand the importance of sustainability. I guess I’m an environmentalist now.” Another nearby union worker added, “When you’re gassed together, that forms a bond that’s hard to break.”

After the labor rally on Tuesday, there was a march downtown and things started heating up. The union leadership, wary of confrontation, bailed, but many rank-and-file members joined the troublemakers in the streets. The confrontation deepened, and the Seattle cops lost control of the streets. From then on, the street action intensified, and the WTO meeting was doomed.

There are two issues to be considered here—the politics of Seattle and One Week to Change the World as a book. Even for someone immersed in the story, there’s lots here to learn, or be reminded of after all these years. It’s fascinating to read about the cops’ loss of control. To a New Yorker, Stamper and Seattle mayor Paul Schell were about as unlike then-mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-police commissioner William Bratton as could be imagined. Gibson’s history is full of detail about how neither had any desire to repress the protest. That endlessly annoyed more bellicose forces like the sheriff of King County (separate from the Seattle police), the state police, and the governor, who called in the national guard to gas and beat the protesters. Other jurisdictions learned from Seattle’s response and, as several interviewees say, it became a milestone in the militarization of American policing.

Another interesting angle was the performance by Bill Clinton. Clinton, clever politician that he was, responded to the ruckus by proposing that environmental considerations be brought into the WTO process. No doubt those considerations would have been weak and largely cosmetic, but even that was too much for his trade representative, Charlene Barshefsky. Pat Davis, chair of the Seattle Host Committee, a group that represented the city’s business interests, is quoted in the book as saying she was unable to continue negotiating after that—at her hotel, Davis recalled, “you could hear her scream and hit the walls.” Barshefsky soon found a more congenial line of work as an international corporate lawyer.

There are also some interesting theoretical threads in the book. One is a discussion of network theory by David Solnit, the artist and organizer, who touts an essay by Paul de Armond describing the action in Seattle as an early “netwar.”

Netwars are fought by networks; collections of groups and organizations guided by non-hierarchical command structures which communicate through “all-points” communications channels of considerable bandwidth and complexity which had global reach via the internet. Institutions, such as police and the AFL-CIO, tend to depend on narrow communications channels which are highly centralized and hierarchical.

This is a theory of resistance and resilience, one of tactics more than strategy, and a position that’s hard to translate into a theory of social change. David Taylor, then an organizer with DAN, makes that point late in A Week: “One thing I really wanted to do after Seattle was form a more consistent infrastructure across the national Direct Action Network, but the people that were involved did not want to because they were so antihierarchy. . . . Anarchist, direct action organizing is not capable of building power; they’re capable of executing tactics.” It would have been good to develop that point, but it was dropped.

De Armond says the Black Blocs’ [plural in the original] strategy was “to radicalize the Direct Action Network protesters and discredit the AFL-CIO.” He claims victory in that struggle, but it’s hard to say what lasting effect there was to that victory; it’s not like there was an immediate renewal of labor insurgency. De Armond concludes, “Like the Zapatista netwar, the conflict was one of networks versus markets.” That sounds like a distinction with not as much difference as de Armond thought. I was reminded of Hayekian market theory, very much anchored on the right, which celebrates decentralized vectors of information, a spontaneous order without any visible hierarchy. That thinking is an obstacle to collective action, which is fine with the Hayekians, but collective action is the only thing that could subdue the globalizing juggernaut Seattleites saw as the problem.

Another link to the right—organizational as well as ideological—was the alliance with Pat Buchanan-style nationalists. (This wasn’t just a coalition of convenience for the Seattle organizers—a friend who worked with the 2000 Nader campaign quit when he found out they were having back-channel communications with Buchanan.) In the book, Mike Dolan (whom I admire, but nobody’s perfect) and Lori Wallach (a founder of the Citizens Trade Campaign who once told an editor I know that “Henwood isn’t very progressive on trade”) speak openly about working with the nationalists, in part for practical political reasons and in part because they’re nationalists too. If you weren’t a nationalist in that world, you were a localist. For what was in practice an international movement in its organizations and personnel, there was little political articulation of a progressive globalism. The lack of any thought or conversation about that left the left politically unarmed to fight the rise of right-wing nationalism.

In One Week, one is left feeling a bit dizzy from the rush of chopped-up accounts from scores of perspectives: the book jumps all over; interesting points are raised only to be dropped. The Battle of Seattle would have been better served by a more conventional structure—a single author, not only recounting those testimonies but weighing them, melding them together into a story, bringing a political analysis into the fold. But that sort of narrative, and the more authoritative if not omniscient single author genre doesn’t sit well with the direct action, anti-hierarchical worldview that prevailed in Seattle. In accordance with the spirit of that age, it’s a testimony of testimonies. No doubt unreconstructed Seattle partisans will see that as a positive: the decentering of the omniscient author is of a piece with loosely structured movements and vaguely articulated agendas.

If you want to learn about Seattle, this is a good place to start, and if you’re a veteran, it’s a nice trip down memory lane. For those who remember it, the thrill inspires nostalgic return, and for those who are too young, in can inspire a vicarious fascination, and there’s nothing like a quarter-century anniversary to stimulate backward glances. After reading and thinking about the Seattle week, though, I’m not persuaded that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was wrong to call it “a dream, leaving no footprint, quaint and innocent.” I suppose you could argue that it was the ancestor of Occupy Wall Street, which itself was the ancestor of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the subsequent growth of an American left, but that growth depended on eventually renouncing horizontality and structurelessness in favor of institutional organization and agendas. I can say from personal experience that one felt very unwelcome in the Seattle environment as a socialist, and I don’t feel that way in contemporary radical politics in the United States. There seems to be, at least in some quarters, more interest in both understanding capitalism as a system and in the often tedious work required to fight it.

But it really was a fun week.