Talking Seattle!

Socialist Review, 2001 by Charlton, J D

"This is not only a great honor for our city and our state, but a testimony to our region's dependence on trade and its talented and dedicated leadership. The inherent internationalism of the city, the cooperative spirit among the organizing groups, and the broad community-backing evidenced in Seattle were all factors in the proposal [to give Seattle the WTO conference]."

- Patricia Davis, president of the Washington Council on International Trade, January 1999

"Capitalism? No thanks! We will burn your fucking banks!"

-Chant heard at assembly point

Only a couple of months after the event, the word "Seattle" has acquired a new meaning. It's where "we" kicked the system. The word pops up in India when power and port workers come out on mass strike against privatization. "Is it the Seattle effect?" asks a newspaper. The Internet is replete with articles analyzing its meaning. The meeting of the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in April 2000, is posted as the next "Seattle." At the time of writing, dozens of events across the world are planned for May Day 2000 inspired by the demonstrators in Seattle who stopped the conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the beginning of December 1999.

Life's little Ironies

That a turning point in the struggle against the excesses of world capitalism should take place in Seattle is not without its little ironies. Seattle has been lauded as a hub of the burgeoning economies of the Pacific Rim. A boomtown of the twentieth century's last quarter, "Seattle" is almost a metaphor for high-tech consumption. It is the home of Boeing, the world's biggest aircraft corporation, of Microsoft, and the symbols of galloping consumerism: Starbucks coffeeshop empire and Nike, just down the road. A place to live in grace and comfort. All this explains why the Clinton administration wanted to take the WTO to Seattle.

Yet there is a downside. In the liberalization of the global economy U.S. domination may have increased but millions of American workers have been victims of the shrinkage of basic industry, its relocation, and the intensification of exploitation in the surviving workplace. For some time the cynical and corrupt leaders of the labor unions have been under pressure from their members to organize a fight-back. They chose Seattle because their public profiles would be enhanced in the glare of the international media circus around the WTO meeting.

There is another twist that should not be lost. The new millennium was being ushered in by the system's leaders and its media on an extravagant tide of hype. Millions of new shopping opportunities were being heralded via the cyber supermarket. But their party was ruined in the virtual home of e-commerce.

A fight-back starting in Seattle has yet another lovely resonance. The city was the location of the only "general strike" (so far) in U.S. history. In 1919, in the crisis following the end of World War I with the U.S. government attempting to smash the Russian Revolution, Seattle workers struck. Jeremy Brecher writes:

Anger, hope and militance grew as in a pressure cooker. Nowhere did this radicalization go further than in Seattle. The radical I.W.W. and the A.F.L. Metal Trades Council co-operated in sponsoring a Soldiers, Sailors, and Workingmen's Council, taking the Soviets of the recent Russian Revolution as their model.1

Action!

Seattle hit the international media on Monday 30 November 1999, but events were moving in the previous week. Mitchel C. wrote: "No matter where you turn, rallies, teach-ins, and other events are exploding out of the pavement. I went to the International Forum on Globalization that occurred Friday and Saturday. Tickets were sold by Ticketron. Around 2,500 people participated, the huge auditorium filled to capacity for two days, 9 AM to 9 PM." On Sunday, Mitchel again: "Sunday, 1,500 people took to the streets in a wonderfully colorful, and peaceful (if mucus) procession, hundreds of giant puppets and mass performance theatre, against genetic engineering and the WTO, drummers beating on makeshift instruments, an army of genetically engineered corn, another "army of forested trees, fighting against the evil soldiers of the New World Order."2

Igot on a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh at 3:00 AM, the morning after Thanksgiving, and traveled two-and-a-half days to Seattle to join the protests against the World Trade Oranization. I arrived to see tens of thousands of activists from the widest range of causes I've ever seen in oneplace, united around a common concern - their desite to have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, otherwise known as democray. (Damon, Pittsburgh)

We were up at 5 AM on Tuesday the 30th. We had a big day planned. There were two main marches, one leaving from downtown and one from Capitol Hill. I was in the Capitol Hill march. We loaded up all the puppets into trucks and sent the larger ones up the road. On our side, we had an Earth Mother puppet whose head was eight feet in diameter. Her head and each of her hands were mounted on a wheeled cart and her fabric body stretched across the street. We also had a ten-foot-square rolling "pyramid of corporate power." I was dressed in my full clown ensemble. I wore signs on my front and back that read "WTO - Who elected these Clowns?" I normally refrain from using "clown" as a derogatory term, but I felt justified here somehow. I carried my diabolo with me. (Bill O., Chicago)