The current #Occupy Wall Street action has its most immediate inspiration and roots in the democratically organized Spanish occupations of last May, similar widespread protests this year in Greece, and Arab Spring. But the clearest modern American antecedent in terms of spirit and many of the logistics was the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999.
In 1999, as the political columnist for Seattle Weekly, I covered the organizing for months leading up to the protests. I went to Eugene to profile some obscure anarchists who said they were going to come to Seattle and fuck shit up. It made me as a national journalist. But I had an unfair advantage: my day job was as director of something called the Nonviolent Action Communication of Cascadia, and as such I had a front row seat, because the coalition planning the blockade of downtown Seattle during the WTO meetings was organizing it out of our office. And I’d already had a lot of experience, throughout the ’80s and ’90s, organizing mass demonstrations and direct actions, in D.C. and around the country, on a variety of issues. So while my memories are pretty subjective, I had a lot of opportunity to see what worked, what didn’t work, and to make the connection to what a new generation of protesters is attempting this month in lower Manhattan.
First, the overview: the WTO protests were spectacularly frustrating, because it was the biggest missed opportunity in grass roots organizing I’ve ever witnessed. Even so, it was also the most successful protest in a generation. It shut down the first day of talks, in the process barricading a war criminal (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) in her hotel room. It inspired African and other Third-World delegates in find a way to block the U.S.-planned expansion of WTO powers (the so-called “Seattle Round,” later renamed the “Doha Round” and still stalled a decade later). That included an expansion of global deregulation into the financial sector, a move that, if it had happened, would have made the 2008 global economic meltdown exponentially worse.
The protest also made trade policy an issue a lot more people cared about. It succeeded in inspiring anti-globalization movements around the world (even as they subsequently withered in the U.S.). It permanently crippled the power of the WTO, and turned U.S. policy from multilateral trade agreements to bilateral ones. And it was the debut of new technologies in democratically disseminating protest information that we take for granted today.
It took months of planning, and it was anything but easy. We literally sent teams of people door-to-door in Seattle neighborhoods, as well as talking with every community group that would listen, to explain why something as arcane and yawn-inducing as trade policy mattered so much. The fragile coalition between labor, environmentalits, and social justice advocates was constantly threatened, because they all wanted different things. The AFL-CIO and mainline green groups wanted nothing more than a seat at the table in trade talks, to try to include in trade agreements protections for workers. Younger folks wanted the table itself overturned and the WTO abolished. The decision-making process involved affinity groups and spokescouncils, a democratic, decentralized model used in 1990s anti-logging occupations in the Pacific Northwest; it was slow, unwieldy, and resistant to efforts by both law enforcement and older activists to anoint leaders (or coopt them).
In the end, the media determined how the world saw Seattle. AFL-CIO watched, apoplectic, as its carefully organized (and very polite) 50,000 person rally and march was all but forgotten due to the blockade of downtown (which many labor activists joined, even as march marshalls tried to reroute the labor march away from downtown). Blockade organizers, in turn, saw their entire action, in which maybe 20,000 people were trained in and responded with nonviolence even in the face of extensive police violence, overshadowed by a few dozen anarchists who wanted to break windows, and some additional youth who came downtown to loot when they saw the excitement on teevee. And the police (and Army and Secret Service, though we didn’t know it until later) overreaction overshadowed everything. The media-fueled hysteria meant that tear gas, pepper spray and a few dumpster fires got transformed, outside Seattle, into our downtown burning to the ground. In the US, this turned almost all of the public against the protesters; ironically, in the Third World, where the protesters’ violence looked a lot more extensive than it actually was, this impressed people. They didn’t know Americans had it in us. We didn’t.
The point of this brief overview is to put the Wall Street protests in context. Seattle was, by almost every measure, influential all out of proportion to actual events. But one of the most extensive criticisms of the WTO protests was that aside from the defined scope (the week of meetings) and the immediate goal of the blockade (shut the meetings down), there was no broad agreement on what the complaint was, let alone the demands. Labor had specific compliaints it wanted addressed; they were very different from what environmentalists or poverty advocates wanted. And every other cause of the time, from organic produce to Free Mumia to the socialist alphabet soup, attached itself to the excitement. Media interviews of protesters would get dozens of wildly inconsistent answers to the question “Why are you here?,” and it helped fuel a media narrative that protesters (many of whom were extremely well-informed) were ignorant, muddled, and unfocused. Sound familiar?
The lack of “leaders,” champions among prominent elected officials, or any kind of hierarchy made for a fluid protest, readily adaptable to changed conditions, but also reinforced narratives that the protesters were both disorganized and irrelevant to the political process. Sound familiar?
While the largest crowds and biggest single accomplishment was on the first day (the day the heads of state were successfully prevented from meeting), the fact that the protests went on all week, with the additional drama of President Clinton’s arrival, the imposition of a security zone, and various mass arrests, kept the protests in the news cycle long enough to get people’s sustained attention. It made the protests far more effective than a single gathering of a few hours. Again, sound familiar?
The property violence of the Eugene anarchists and their allies might as well have been paid for by the state. (It wasn’t, which just shows how poor a business sense they had.) It effectively prevented protesters from presenting themselves as representative of the concerns of ordinary Americans, especially given that trade policy wasn’t a mainstream concern. All the pageantry (the giant puppets, dancing in the streets, etc.) was highly creative but had the same alienating effect. That was an enormous missed opportunity.
The police violence was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the strategic incompetence of the police is why we remember the protest today – if they’d had their act together, protesters would never have been able to shut down the meetings, and the overuse of force in trying to break up the demonstration amplified the protest far and wide. On the other hand, a lot of people got sidetracked into protesting the police violence itself, which, while serious, was a diversion from the unique opportunity a gathering of world leaders presented. Both dynamics are cropping up again in New York.
The U.S. and European followup to Seattle emphasized summit-hopping and street confrontations that grew ever more heated: Washington, Genoa, Quebec City, and a whole world atlas of summits, security zones, and heavy-handed law enforcement that was only preempted by 9-11. It was appalling to media and the public, and another missed opportunity to do far more constructive follow-up to Seattle. The original issues were lost in a general frustration with elite political leaders’ lack of accountability to ordinary people, and the itchiness of some protesters (almost always young and male) to engage in the adrenaline rush of cat-and-mouse games with the cops. What made the Arab, Greek, and Spanish protests this year far more effective was a sustained effort over weeks and a widespread emphasis on nonviolence by the protesters (in contrast to the police), and so far the Wall Street occupiers have mostly stuck to that.
Seattle had several important differences from Wall Street. The international media was all gathered, and had nothing to do other than cover a boring international summit. The downtown blockade was catnip for them. New York has international media, sure, but there’s no other focusing event and they’re under no obligation to cover the protests. However, if there’s enough police violence, they will.
Unlike Seattle, where most of the American public was clueless about trade policy, resentment of Wall Street by left and right alike is at an all-time high. Protesters in New York don’t have to convince anyone that our political and economic system is broken, or that they have a right to be angry, Like Seattle, actual power has no obligation at all to respond to them or to make any changes. But that’s not how a protest like this becomes successful.
In the end, Seattle would never have become significant without luck – the strategic incompetence of Seattle’s police in preventing the blockade – as well as planning and the courage and determination of the protesters in facing the inevitable police violence. For the mostly young participants, it was a life-changing experience, as I’m sure it is for folks in New York. #OccupyWallStreet doesn’t need to be focused, or engaged with specific policies or politicians, to be effective. Seattle was none of these things, but it worked both because specific politicians (the African delegates in the WTO meeting) were inspired to take up their cause, and because the global perception of the legitimacy of the WTO as an institution, fairly or not, was irrevocably altered. That’s how a protest like this works. The jury is out on whether the folks in New York will be successful in undermining the public perception of the legitimacy of Wall Street (and London, Tokyo, and every other global financial center) in dominating our political process. The odds are against it. But ultimately, that’s what they’re trying to do.