The “Battle of Seattle,” 25 Years Later
Anti-WTO protesters take control of an intersection in downtown Seattle on Nov. 30, 1999. Photo: Stephanie Greenwood.
Twenty-five years ago yesterday, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of downtown Seattle and shut down a World Trade Organization summit meeting.
At stake was whether the WTO would be allowed to continue its drive to further concentrate power over the global economy in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and the natural world. The Battle of Seattle was a spectacular victory for progressive social movements that ignited a wave of mass protests around the world wherever political and corporate elites gathered to meet behind closed doors. It also birthed Indymedia, a decentralized, global network of radical media collectives, which The Indypendent has its roots in.
The Indypendent’s future Editor-in-Chief John Tarleton participated in the human blockades that shut down the WTO. He recently wrote for Jacobin about the legacy of the Battle of Seattle, what the movements of that era got right and wrong and the evolution of the American Left over the past quarter of a century. He also reflects on how the growth and evolution of The Indypendent was a part of that history. If there’s one thing that’s certain, he writes, is that, like Seattle, there will be more moments of radical upsurge when we least expect it and they will very likely be ignited by those on the margins of respectable activism.
Early on a cold, gray morning twenty-five years ago this month, a modest procession of about eighty left a church in downtown Seattle heading for the nearby convention center. They walked quietly, each lost in a moment of personal reflection. Above them bobbed several brightly painted paper-mache monarch butterflies attached to long metal wires, a visual cue for anyone who became separated from the group.
The rain-soaked streets were empty, yet everyone waited for the lights to turn green so they could cross together. When they reached the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Union Street, they came upon a line of police passively standing on the far side of the intersection. The activists filled the intersection. Some sat down on the wet pavement and locked arms. Others began dancing and drumming. The paper-mache butterflies hovered high overhead.
I was one of the people sitting down and locking arms. Other similarly organized groups of protesters seized twelve other intersections around the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. We were intent on shutting down the opening session of a World Trade Organization (WTO) summit, in protest of the WTO’s drive to further concentrate power over the global economy in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and the natural world.
An hour later, thousands more marchers arrived en masse from the north and west. Downtown Seattle was now clogged with protesters who were chanting, dancing and singing. Giant paper-mache puppets hovered above the festive crowd. When WTO delegates tried to enter the Washington State Convention Center, they were met with a wall of people who would not budge.
This surreal carnival of resistance was interrupted by stun grenades, rubber bullets, pepper spray and clouds of tear gas as the police unleashed their “less-than-lethal” arsenal upon us. But it was too late to salvage the summit’s opening day — it was soon shut down. Demonstrations would continue throughout the week while more than five hundred protesters were arrested.
The Seattle Police attack a crowd of peaceful protesters in downtown Seattle on Nov. 30, 1999. Photo: Steve Kaiser.
Launched with little fanfare in 1994 as a Geneva-based international body tasked with synchronizing global trade rules, the WTO’s overreach quickly made it the perfect foil for a broad coalition of protest groups. For supporters of corporate globalization, the protests were an outrage. Writing in his New York Times column, Thomas Friedman denounced us as a “Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix.”
Late on the final night of the WTO summit, hundreds of us “flat-earthers” were holding a vigil outside the King County Jail for our detained comrades when we received stunning news. Incredibly, talks on launching a new round of global trade negotiations had collapsed. Delegates from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean had united and refused to be strong-armed into a bad deal by the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan. Some of them cited the protests in the streets to underscore how unpopular the WTO’s agenda was, even in the United States. Outside the jail, a huge roar went up in the air.
Using the call-and-response of the people’s microphone that would later be put to use by Occupy Wall Street, pausing to allow the crowd to shout his words back to him, longtime New Left activist Tom Hayden congratulated us — and urged us to do more.
“I never thought,” he called out, “...the time would come… that a new generation of activists… would part the waters… the waters in which your idealism is supposed to be drowned… and come to the surface smiling!… Fighting!… Laughing!… Dancing! … Marching!… Committing civil disobedience! … Renewing American democracy! … Concretely… expressing solidarity… not only here in the United States… but in the far corners of the Earth… beyond the eye of the media… So you have… slowed the machinery of destruction down… but it can’t be about… slowing the rate of destruction… It has to be about… speeding the rate of creation… of a new world!... A better place!”
A Changed Sense of the Possible
The Left’s greatest moments occur when it taps into a deep longing for change and alters our sense of what’s possible. Think of the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie 2016, the George Floyd uprising. The Battle of Seattle was one of those moments. It seemed to come out of nowhere at the end of a politically placid decade. It was the first mass protest in which organizers wielded the Internet and cell phones to their advantage. It sparked a wave of colorful and confrontational mass protests over the next twenty-one months wherever global and corporate leaders met.
And then, in the blink of an eye, the movement vanished.
While the specific issues that animated the WTO protests — the race to the bottom in environmental and labor standards, the upending of consumer protection laws, and the expansion of corporate patent rights, to name a few — were important, the showdown in Seattle ultimately revolved around a larger question: Could our already deeply flawed democracy still serve the common good? Or was it going to be fully captured by corporate interests.
For the forces of neoliberal greed, the Battle of Seattle was a humiliating, though hardly definitive, defeat. For progressive social movements, it was a spectacular victory. While each faction in the anti-WTO coalition tended to center itself in the post-protest narrative, in the end, the sum of all the main groups in Seattle was greater than the individual parts.
NGOs like the International Forum on Globalization and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen provided the intellectual clarity and sound arguments for why the protests were necessary. The unions were plodding and cautious, as unions usually are. But they brought the most people, and they gave the raucous protests a working-class face that Middle America could relate to. The anarchist Direct Action Network (DAN) organized and trained thousands of people — including this author — to participate in the human blockades that paralyzed Downtown Seattle.
DAN emerged from Arts & Revolution, a network of radical collectives on the West Coast that sought to make your average protest march more festive and visually compelling. The giant paper-mache puppets were one of their signature props. DAN came out of a tradition of decentralized mass nonviolent direct action that can be traced back to the waning days of the anti-Vietnam War movement and on through the anti-nuclear power, Central America solidarity, and other radical movements from the 1970s and ’80s.
The basic units in this kind of protest are affinity groups (small groups of five to twenty people who know and trust each other) who coordinate through a spokes council (composed of representatives from affinity groups). Various working groups — food, medical care, communications — formed to assist with the protest also worked on the affinity group model. Decision-making at all levels was done by consensus process. This approach, when it works well, allows everyone’s concerns to be addressed before a group moves forward with a decision, creating deeper commitment and a sense of solidarity among participants.
In addition to DAN, there was the black bloc, a renegade group of about fifty black-clad anarchists, many of whom were from Eugene, Oregon, many of whom had been active in tree sits and other direct-action campaigns to preserve old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. They operated independently of DAN and disregarded its action guidelines against property destruction. Instead, they used the larger protest as a shield from which to hide behind as they shattered the storefront windows of Starbucks, Old Navy, Nordstrom and numerous other iconic corporate brands.
This angered many protesters, who were concerned that the black bloc’s actions would tarnish how the broader public perceived the WTO protests. Given that most protesters believed in the necessity of winning over that broader public rather than needlessly alienating them, such heedless actions posed a problem for the broader movement. The black bloc was a small sideshow in a much larger event, but it would garner a disproportionate amount of attention from a sensation-seeking corporate media.
The Seattle Model Goes Global, Then Disappears
Two days after we shut down the WTO’s opening meeting, I joined several thousand people who marched through downtown Seattle and blockaded the entrance to the county jail, locking arms and risking arrest to demand that movement lawyers be allowed inside to visit our jailed comrades. The standoff would last for several hours before the authorities relented to our demands.
The mood in the air was electric. For the first time in days, I had a chance to catch my breath and reflect. In that instant, I knew that what had exploded in Seattle would not stop there. Thousands of people who had been transformed by their experience would go back home and inspire and organize others to join this movement against corporate domination. Many others who watched from afar would be moved to act as well.
Over the next twenty-one months, similar mass protests and attempted Seattle-style shutdowns would be organized wherever global elites gathered — the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank first in Washington, D.C., and then Prague, the Organization of American States in Windsor, Ontario, the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City, the G8 in Genoa, Italy, as well as the Republican (Philadelphia) and Democratic (Los Angeles) national conventions in 2000.
The corporate media tagged the movement as “anti-globalization,” but we were anything but narrow-minded nationalists. In reality, it was a contest between two visions of globalization: one from above dedicated to strengthening corporate power and eroding the already meager living standards of the international working class, the other from below rooted in grassroots democracy and international solidarity.
This surging “movement of movements” was accompanied by the rise of Indymedia, a network of radical media collectives in more than two hundred cities around the world. Indymedia pioneered citizen journalism. Before there were blogs or social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there was Indymedia’s open publishing newswire which made it easy for “citizen journalists” to publish their reporting — be it in print, video, audio or photos — without having to go through corporate media gatekeepers. At a time when publishing on the Internet had previously required knowledge of computer code, this was a historic breakthrough, though the quality and reliability of this kind of journalism varied greatly.
Originally envisioned as a one-week project for the WTO protests, Indymedia’s coverage proved so popular that media activists around the world quickly began setting up their own locally themed Indymedia websites. These sites had the same basic format as the original: open publishing newswire on the right, a curated center column where the site’s editors featured the most important stories from the newswire and a left column with a hyperlinked scroll of cities where Indymedia collectives were active. If radical protests were happening in another city or country, Indymedia was often the first place you went for the news.
Marchers protest against the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, on July 21, 2001. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 drew as many as 300,000 protesters and saw the first fatal police shooting of a protester. In the United States, organizers were gearing up for the semiannual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington, DC. The World Bank was notorious for steering developing nations into unsustainable forms of development. And the IMF had a terrible reputation for imposing onerous structural adjustment programs on those countries in return for emergency loans when their economies inevitably faltered.
Crowds of 100,000 or more were expected, and for the first time leaders of the AFL-CIO were going to join in civil disobedience actions. The “Teamsters & Turtles” alliance of labor and environmentalists that first appeared in Seattle was still going strong.
Then September 11 happened.
It was the story for weeks. In the aftermath of 9/11, political and media elites stoked the public’s grief and fear with calls for war. President George W. Bush vowed to exact revenge from the “evildoers” who masterminded the attack. His public approval ratings climbed to a stratospheric 92 percent. Instantly, protests from the Left became deeply suspect.
For the US wing of the global justice movement, 9/11 was a nuclear winter level event. Labor unions and major NGOs pulled out of IMF/World Bank protests. The demonstration went forward, but the turnout was small and easily contained. Other attempts were made to rekindle the “spirit of Seattle” in the following years but didn’t get very far. The largest and most vibrant protest movement in the United States since the end of the Vietnam War disappeared from public view almost overnight.
Shutting It Down Isn’t Enough
Even before 9/11, though, the movement was facing headwinds.
Post-Seattle, protest organizers continued to call on their fellow activists to “shut it down.” But law enforcement agencies were now fully prepared and would not be caught off guard, unlike the Seattle Police Department, which vastly underestimated the protests. Also, local media outlets in the next soon-to-be impacted city would replay footage of the black bloc’s window smashing and warn that this menace was about to descend upon their fair city. What had been an extraordinary act of mass nonviolent civil disobedience in Seattle was now being repackaged as the nihilistic rampage of disgruntled malcontents.