Margaret talks about how people confronted trade summit after trade summit, fighting tooth, nail, and pom-pom against unelected world governance.
Sources:
https://crimethinc.com/2021/11/30/epilogue-on-the-movement-against-capitalist-globalization-22-years-after-n30-what-it-can-teach-us-today
http://www.ainfos.ca/99/jun/ainfos00181.html
https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/18/flashback-to-june-18-1999-the-carnival-against-capital-a-retrospective-video-and-comic
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/j18.htm
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to the cool people
who did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that we
come from an infinitely long legacy of rebels and freethinkers
who've stood up against the man made horrors that dominate
the world. That's the tagline, your weekly reminder that we
come from an infinitely long legacy of rebels and freethinkers
that stoo up against the man made horrors that dominate
(00:23):
the world. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week
is another solo episode. I like doing these sometimes because
it lets me be a little bit more free form
in how I like tell these stories. But I'm not
really doing this alone. Even though this is a solo episode.
Even though I'm the only voice you hear, this podcast
(00:44):
exists because of all the help I get, such as
from my producer Sophie and my audio engineer Eva hi Eva.
And the theme music was written for us by Unwoman.
For the past couple months, I've been focusing on movements
that fed into or were heart of the alter globalization
movement that challenged and changed the nature of economic power
(01:07):
in the world at the turn of the millennium. I've
talked a lot about exactly what this is, like, what
neoliberalism is, why people were against it, and how these
protests fundamentally changed the sort of neoliberal consensus, the idea
that every country would want to run along these lines
where predatory loans are used to strip those countries of
(01:30):
their natural resources and things like that. And we call
it the alter globalization movement. At the time, the media
called it the anti globalization movement, and frankly, so did
most of its participants. And that was always an awkward terminology,
and I've heard people give it a lot of different
ideas of a more accurate way to talk about it.
(01:52):
The long form version of it was that we were
the anti corporate globalization movement. We were anti the idea
of creating instead of internationalism that brings people together across nations,
this idea that only corporations can become international right, that
money can move freely across borders and not people. And
(02:15):
so people started conceptualizing it as the alter globalization movement
instead crime thing who will be citing heavily throughout today's
piece makes the argument that it was actually just the
anti capitalist movement. And it's funny to look back at
this like twenty five years later, because at the time
in the West, it was almost impossible to just bluntly
(02:38):
criticize capitalism. The shadow of the Cold War was still
very much upon us, right, and like the idea that
sort of a regular person in this country in the
United States would be critical of capitalism by that name
was sort of unheard of. And so I think that's
(02:58):
why it didn't get called just the anti capitalist movement,
because frankly, that is what it was. But I'll be
calling it the alter globalization movement herein because that's kind
of the one that people sort of picked to not
accidentally come across as like, well, for example, if someone
at the time talked about being anti globalization, we knew
what they meant. But if they talked about being anti globalism,
(03:20):
they're making anti Semitic dog whistles, and those are just
way too close to each other for anyone's comfort. Anyway,
the most famous single protest of the alter globalization movement
was its first protest. I mean, depending we're actually going
to talk about a proto protest today, but the first
big protest that people really knew about, at least in
(03:44):
the US, was the November nineteen ninety nine Battle of Seattle,
in which a loose coalition of scrappy activists from almost
every worthwhile social movement in the US and often the world,
came together to shut down the World Trade Organization's summit
in Seattle. And we did a whole two parter about
those protests, and we've covered some of the movements and
(04:04):
organizations that fed into those protests. We talk about the
easy ln the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, whose grassroots indigenous
democracy and embracive direct action really set the tone for
the protests in the modern era. We talked about how
they formed PGA People's Global Action, which was a coalition
of different grassroots groups throughout the world and especially from
(04:27):
the global self. That are the people who really called
for the alter globalization movement and really laid the framework
about how it would be a movement of movements, people
fighting for a world in which many worlds are possible,
making us decisions through bottom up and decentralized means. And
we can trace a lot of that very directly to
(04:48):
the Zapatistas of Chiapas and their infusion of indigenous ideas
of decision making into traditional leftism, so you can go
back and listen to that. We've also talked about stream
theater and the Black Bloc, about street medics and legal observers.
Last week we talked about indie media who was there
to make sure the story got out. But now we're
(05:09):
going to talk about what the movement did besides the
one big protest in Seattle. I think on some level,
I've been procrastinating by talking about all of these various
pieces of the story, because this story itself is one
of the main things I've wanted to talk about since
I started this show. I mean, it's the movement that
got me into radical politics, right, and so I want
(05:32):
to do it right and I probably won't, but you know,
I'm gonna do the best I can, and I'm gonna
give you my sources in the show notes. Although some
of the sources was I was there and they shot
at me with things and it was frustrating. I don't
want to do the stolen valor thing. However, I was
not at most of the earlier parts of this movement
(05:52):
and its protests. You'll be able to tell. I'll interject
myself into the story. I can't help it. It is
really important to understand the alter globalization movement as a
movement of movements and not as a single piece. Its
strength was its own ideological, strategic, and tactical pluralism. During
that movement, I spent plenty of time in huge spokes
(06:13):
council meetings where all sorts of different people worked through
their differences and figured out strategies that played to everyone's strengths.
Those meetings were sometimes endless, and they were sometimes fruitless,
and sometimes we had to stop because something was happening
with the police outside. But by and large they gave
us the solidarity and the understanding of one another that
we needed to go out and get in trouble together.
(06:37):
It was endless meetings and its resultant solidarity that meant
when I was arrested along seven hundred people in DC
and hogtied overnight in a gymnasium at a police training facility,
I and almost everyone else were eventually released without charges
because we refused to let them single people out. But
that's getting ahead of myself. The most visible part of
(06:59):
the alter globalisation movement were the summit protests. The forces
of capitalism would call for a big old summit of
the world leaders somewhere, and the movement of movements would
call for counter protests to shut those summits down or
at least raise the cost of doing business so high
that fewer cities wanted to host summits and more people
were aware of what capitalists were doing behind closed doors.
(07:22):
This was the era of summit hopping, a phrase often
thrown around pejoratively, basically people hopping from trade meeting summit
to trade meeting summit. People like myself would go from
protest to protest wherever we could, many of us hitchhiking
and riding freight trains, others organizing caravans. Folks would even
(07:42):
walk from city to city, sometimes as a way to
draw attention to what was happening. There was a whole
informal network of us, and I made friends in one
city I'd see a year later on the other side
of the country. Some people went from country to country too,
though personally I didn't have the resources for that. But
these summit protests themselves, they weren't the movement. I want
(08:06):
to quote a write up from Crime Think that the
summits were quote mushrooms emerging from a myceelial network. The
network itself was comprised of a variety of participatory, anti
colonial and countercultural spaces and movements spread all across the world.
Indigenous revolts like the e ZLN in Mexico, Occupation movements
(08:27):
like the Movemento Semptera, the Landless Workers movement which I'll
cover at some point, the MST it's often called, which
was in Brazil, back to the quote, and the network
of squatted social centers around Europe, movements of agricultural workers
from the Indian some continent to South Korea. Ecological movements
like Earth First, grassroots unions like the Industrial Workers of
(08:50):
the World, do it Yourself, underground music mail us like
the rave and punk scenes end quote. And it really
was all of those things and more. And when people
try and sum it up as one thing, they fail.
But do you know what can be summed up really quickly, ads,
they're very good at putting their pitch together tightly and
(09:13):
almost entertainingly to try to hold your attention, for example.
And we're back. So the Summit protests were the fruit
in the way that mushrooms are the fruit of my
celial networks, and the things that undergirded the movement the
(09:33):
individual organizations and movements that came together for this larger movement.
It's not a coincidence that so many of them were
about taking physical space and holding it autonomously. You've got
the Zapatistas that we've talked about extensively, right, and the
short version is that they took held and still hold
a lot of the jungle of the Mexican state of
(09:54):
Chiappas as autonomous territory despite officially being part of Mexico.
A lot of the movements that came out of Europe
were similarly oriented around physical space. We haven't talked about
it a ton yet, but the European parts of the
proto alt globalization movement they grew out of these autonomous
social centers that tried in their way to live outside
(10:16):
the logic of state and capitalism. We've talked a little
bit about this when we talked about a Narco Punk
and the episodes about Crass. We talked about how the
money that they made selling records opened the first anarchist
social center in London, and that in the seventies and
eighties there was this large autonomist movement. Anarchists and autonomists
(10:40):
worked to open all of these social centers and squats
and stuff all around mainland Europe. And if you want
to hear us talk about that, listen to our Black
Bloc episodes. And I'm using our well, I guess I
could include Sophie and my other producers. It's not the
royal we I'm referring to the entire court anyway. The
(11:00):
protests that the European anarchists and autonomous built up were
called things like Reclaim the Streets or the Carnival against Capitalism,
which we'll talk about in a minute, which were attempts
to basically retake public space away from capitalism and put
it back in the hands of people and to hold
that space autonomously. In the US, punks were coming out
(11:23):
of a movement that retook their own social scenes away
from the fascists who had infiltrated them. And it's not
quite as much about like the direct holding of space,
but basically there was this whole thing. You can listen
to our episode about the ar anti racist action to
hear about how countercultural folks and specifically punks in the
eighties and the US basically went into like a kind
(11:43):
of small scale war against fascists within countercultural spaces and
came out on top. And then also primarily in the US,
but also in England and some other places, Earth First
and environmentalists were used to setting up these forest occupations
and free states where they would shut down logging roads
for months or longer and live these free lives and
(12:05):
resistance to the ecological destruction demanded by capitalism. We've talked
about that a little bit. This isn't just the Table
of Contents episode where I talk about other episodes, but
we talked about that a little bit in I think
the Judy Barry episodes just about a woman who is
bombed by almost certainly the FBI for trying to organize
hippies and loggers on the same side and bringing labor
(12:28):
into environmentalism. The state or somebody sure couldn't handle that,
and they surecar bomber. So this is the spirit people
are bringing into the ultra globalization movement. They're coming from
movements that are like scrappier and smaller, but are like
living intensely and doing intense things and getting targeted with
(12:49):
violence for it, and are about taking up space. And
there's a very countercultural vibe to it. Whether it's hippies
or punks or all kinds of other types of folks.
It is a carnival air. A defining chant of the
time was whose streets are streets? About this idea that
we are going to take back this public space. It's
(13:12):
strange to look back on the sort of joy and carnivolishness,
carnivality of the alter Globalization movement. On one hand, this
like fun aspect was a powerful draw and it brought
a ton of people out, especially young people, into the movement.
Things were serious and maybe even dire, but people dressed
(13:33):
up like clowns and cheerleaders to out maneuver police and
try to shut cities down. We still haven't talked about
the whole radical cheerleader movement and these like clown blocks
of people pranking the police and it's cool. It's interesting.
I'm going to quote from crimethink again because frankly, I
think they have some of the best write ups about
this time and movement that I've found. Here is them
(13:55):
talking about to Reclaim the Streets. Protest in nineteen ninety
six in England is one of the movements that's the
proto alter globalization movement, and this is part of the
fight against the expansion of the roads system in England
that was destroying forests. Quote the sight of thousands of
people running onto an empty motorway shut off by large
(14:16):
tripods is an image that stays with you. Pulling out
of the quote for a second. Tripods in this context,
I mean like literal tripods, very large tripods. It'd be
like thirty feet tall that people lock themselves to the
top of and sometimes also the bottom of, making it
hard for the police to like move these tripods, and
therefore vehicles can't move through the area. Okay, back to
(14:37):
the quote, thirty foot pantomime dames glided through the party,
throwing confetti. Food stalls gave away free stew and sandwiches.
Graffiti artists added color to the tarmac. Poets ranted from
the railings, acoustic bands played, and strolling players performed. Some
(14:57):
seven thousand turned up the height of festivities. Beneath the
tall panto dame figures dressed in huge farthing Gale Marie
antoinette skirts. People were at work with jackhammers, hacking in
time to the techno to mask the sound from the
officers standing inches away, digging up the surface of the
Road until large craters littered the fast lane to plant
(15:21):
seedlings from the gardens smashed by the bulldozers at Claremont Road,
and so the image isn't clear. It's like literally, you know,
these giant people on hoop skirts, possibly built out of
the tripods, so it creates like kind of a tent underneath,
and people would go in with jackhammers and then jackhammer
in time to the techno. Just pretty fun. We don't
(15:42):
really do that festival thing anymore, at least nowhere that
I have been, not to the same degree. And part
of me thinks that we've lost something, but most of me,
honestly thinks we've kind of just adapted to the times.
I Am not going to sit on my rocking chair
on my porch. I did myself a rocking chair for
my birthday last year and say that the youth aren't
(16:04):
protesting right anymore, because the thing is, things are worse now.
The stakes were high at the time, but the stakes
were highest for the people in the global South, in
the countries that neoliberalism was stripping for resources. And while
alter globalization was a worldwide movement, most of its direct participants,
(16:24):
at least at these big summit protests that I'm describing
were in the colonial core where these summit meetings were happening,
the US, Canada, Europe. Some European and Western countries like
Greece suffered directly and extensively under neoliberal policies, but by
and large Western nations were the ones profiting off of
the exploitation, and things simply weren't as dire to many
(16:47):
of the movement's participants. But do you know what isn't dire. No,
what is dire is your need, your absolute burning need
to take advantage of the sweet, sweet deals offered to
you by the sponsors of this show. I say, as
if there's like ever deals, there's like almost never deals
(17:09):
in these ads. They're just ads. You can listen to
them or not. I don't care. Do whatever you want
and we're back. So myself, in the midst of all
of this, I was a middle class dropout. I joined
the movement because it felt like an ethical imperative and because, frankly,
it was more exciting than humdrum life in early Auts America.
(17:32):
A lot of the radical culture of the nineties, in
particular before nine to eleven, basically was built around the
idea that the problem with capitalism was that it was boring.
I'm oversimplifying things. People understood the way it was destroying
lives and all of these things, and people's lives were
being destroyed by it, but there was still this like,
aren't we all so bored? And a lot of the
(17:53):
participants in the alter globalization movement were throwing down because
fighting the cops on behalf of the developing world appears
to be an ethical and exciting way to live. And
that's just not our problem anymore. It's not what we're
dealing with. As much neoliberalism has transitioned to fascism and
more of the colonial core is also fucked, and more
(18:15):
of us are literally and less figuratively fighting for our lives,
not just fighting for our lives to have meaning and beauty,
but fighting for our lives to continue, fighting for the
ability for not just the next generation to live to
be old, but for ourselves as well. And again I
am oversimplifying here. There were absolutely people who were directly
(18:38):
fighting for their own lives and their families' lives during
the alter Globalization movement, and people died in that fight.
So I'm not trying to be like Ahaha, everything was
silly and lighthearted. It's something that I just like think
about a lot, right, because the thing that I've learned
over time is that things can always get worse, and
so things were really bad and now things are worse.
(19:01):
And so that's not to say that things weren't bad before,
just to say that things are worse now, and we're
going to have different attitudes about things. There's a real
beauty to when we manage a sort of carnival air,
and maybe that's something we should look to reclaim. But
I also understand why that's not the tone we've got
going on these days. That's all I'm saying. The specific
(19:22):
protest I'm going to talk about today before we talk
about a lot more of them, is I'm going to
use a proto alter globalization movement protest. It's not even
really proto. It's actually probably one of the first ones,
but it's like people talk about the movement kicking off
at the Battle of Seattle, and this is before then,
so therefore it's proto, and it has got the word
carnival right in its name. It also has anti capitalism
(19:46):
pretty directly said, and that's because it doesn't happen in
the US. It is the Carnival against Capitalism June eighteenth,
nineteen ninety nine, so before the Battle of Seattle. This
is when people shut down the financial district of London.
It gets called a carnival. It's in the name, as
we mentioned, but it's also a riot. A report back
(20:09):
a few days later on a list Serve put it bluntly,
quote the June eighteenth demo against the G eight summit
in the city of London was amazing. It was possibly
the best riot in London since the poll tax won.
The cops totally lost control of the situation and got
a good beating in Various businesses like McDonald's car show rooms, banks,
(20:31):
the Future Exchange were trashed. According to the press, four
cops were hospitalized. The city was also covered in anarchist graffiti.
Every time you were with a large mob, thinking this
is great, all these people, you turn the corner and
there be an even larger crowd there, creating mayhem. So
that's obviously an enthusiastic report about it being a riot.
(20:53):
What it doesn't mention is that another report I found
says that a total of six cops were hospitalized and
a total of forty protest were hospitalized. So it wasn't
just this like ha ha, we just won or I
don't know whatever. The story is always more complicated than
any one position on it, including my one position on it.
But having a carnival be a riot. The history of
(21:15):
carnivals and holidays and history, at least European history, is
the history of riots in public mayhem. In a strange way,
the crowd taking over the city and driving back the
cops is just about the most carnival thing you can do.
Historically speaking, the carnival against capitalism was time to happen
at the same time as the G eight, the Group
(21:37):
of Eight, which is basically an economic council of the
leaders of eight powerful wealthy nations. And it's not just
the eight richest nations, but rather the ones who are
willing to work together in this context, and specifically people
with like certain kinds of power. Russia was added to
the G eight nineteen ninety seven. I've always assumed it
wasn't because they were wealthy, because they weren't, but because
(21:59):
they had a nuclear stockpile. Later they did get kicked
out of the G eight in twenty fourteen when they
annex Crimea. So the Gaight gets together to plan how
the world is going to work economically, which is not
very democratic of them. So people protest the G eight
and I think that is a fair thing to do.
So the ga was meeting. I have read a couple
(22:21):
different reportbacks about where but I'm going to go with Birmingham,
England and forty different countries through protests at the same
time against the G eight organized by People's Global Action,
which was that network we were talking about that came
together from the Zapatistas. You can't just call for big
demonstration and expected to accomplish anything. You've got to do outreach.
(22:42):
You've got to talk to people about your goals and
your tactics. And so organizers of the carnival put together
a bunch of pamphlets and shit did a ton of
outreach and they talked about their goals and their hopes.
They also made one pamphlet called Squaring Up the Square Mile,
which was basically a map and description of all the
financial institutions in London and what they did with the
(23:03):
sort of inference that one could make that this is
a map of targets that you could go and disrupt.
When protesters met up in the morning, organizers handed out
four different colors of masks so that people could break
into four different marches. It is much easier for the
police to contain one big protest march than lots of
(23:25):
small ones, and then a fifth march sprung up spontaneously.
Hundreds of bicyclists formed a critical mass, as like a
sixth column, and critical mass was a popular style of
bike protest where you just get a lot of bicyclists together.
A lot of cities held regular critical mass protests to
choke up city streets in order to demand better bicycle infrastructure,
(23:47):
basically saying, like you say that, as bicyclists, we have
to use the road, Okay, we're going to use the road.
Oh what happens when we all use the road? Don't
you sure wish we had bike lanes? But the same
tactic could be used other demonstrations. The marches all came
together on the Futures Exchange, which I think is their
stock market. I just assume, and then forgot to look
(24:08):
it up. And there it got all carnival esque by
smashing surveillance cameras and opening fire hydrants and letting DJs
and punk bands perform. Most accounts I've read focus on
how the police attacked with tear gas and horse mounted cops,
and that one woman was run over by a police
van which broke her leg. The first hand account that
(24:29):
I read, though, cheered on how the protesters fought back
or maybe even initiated the violence. I honestly couldn't tell
you Hans Solo did he shoot first? I don't know.
This first hand account talks about how the brew crew
of drunk punks basically pelted the cops with beer bottles,
and that the police were forced to hide in their
(24:49):
vehicles while people danced atop the police fans and ripped
off the police bumpers and license plates. And after that
the police retreated, and theoretically it was in this retreat
that they ran over this person's leg. But I will
say that if you've ever seen the police retreat, it
is not something that you'll forget. According to one right
(25:11):
wing report I found, there were at least sixteen arrests,
and those arrests were called The people were called terrorists
by the Lord Mayor of London. As if London didn't
already sound like a fake place, they have a Lord mayor.
Apparently forty six people total were hospitalized from the fighting,
including six police officers. Then, after JA eighteen, as it's called,
(25:34):
processors at the time had this annoying habit of naming
protests a month initial and then a number like J
twenty and N thirty and shit like that, which not
only makes them hard to keep track of for people
who aren't in the in crowd because they're like nonsensical.
No one wants to remember a string of numbers and
letters as a way to actually remember what something means,
(25:55):
but also it makes them like grand, overly important events,
like almost like a bingo card, like oh were you
at J eighteen? Like oh, you weren't at A sixteen?
Like oh, I thought you were cool. This is me
being snotty about it. After Jay eighteen, you have N thirty.
November thirtieth, nineteen ninety nine the Battle of Seattle, which
(26:19):
again I've covered at length, but the short version is
that protesters converged in Seattle with puppets and lock boxes.
Lock Boxes are like things to lock yourself to to
make it harder for the police to move you. This
could be a barrel of cement with like a tube
in the middle that you can reach into and clip
onto something. It could be just like a steel tube
wrapped in duct tape, so it gums up the cutting
(26:40):
wheels of the tools that they try to use to
get you out. There's all kinds of ways that people
do this. People showed up in Seattle with puppets and
lock boxes and street medics and livestream video and masks,
and I want to reiterate puppets again, because there were
so many puppets. People converged and managed to shut down
the World Trade Organization meeting despite or because of an
intense police response. But people look to Seattle as the
(27:05):
high point, and that's a mistake. It was certainly the
most tactically effective demonstration of the movement as best as
I can tell, but that's because the police were caught
off guard. There were like four hundred cops trying to
deal with tens of thousands of protesters who were there
prepared for direct action these days, and pretty shortly after Seattle,
(27:26):
the state regularly marshals tens of thousands of police for
every major demonstration, and out maneuvering them or out fighting
them or whatever just looks really different. And we can't
expect the same things to work over and over again.
So the police got their shit together after that, but
(27:47):
people kept fighting, and even if we lost tactically a
bit more often some of the larger strategic goals, we
managed to win something that I talk about a lot
actually on a recent substack called revolutions are built on failure,
which is the idea that the way we win is
we fight more than them, and we want it more,
(28:10):
and often just by fighting, we win our strategic goals
even if we lose tactically in the streets. This isn't
to say we should just fight for the fun of
it and lose tactically or whatever. We should try to win,
but we just need to remember that our win conditions
are different than theirs. And how people kept fighting and
(28:32):
what they did at A sixteen and some other demonstrations
we are going to talk about on Wednesday, But in
the meantime, I don't know what the hell to plug.
I guess my substack, right. I wrote a recent essay
called Revolutions are Built on Failure, where I talk about
exactly this concept at greater length, And don't worry, you know,
(28:53):
I bringing the TV show and or into it also,
I guess while I'm plugging things like and Or. I
don't know when it's going to come out, but at
some point. There's another podcast called The Spectacle that's an
anarchistic view of pop culture specifically, I think the tagline
is a podcast for people who love movies and hate cops.
(29:14):
And I am on it with some other people in
the near future. I'm not the host of it, but
I'm guesting on it. I recorded earlier this week about
and Or season two, and so you can listen to
that at some point. But in the meantime, you can
listen to The Spectacle. It's a good show. You should
listen to it. All right, We'll see you all Wednesday.
(29:36):
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Visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out
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Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to the cool people
who did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that we
come from an infinitely long legacy of rebels and freethinkers
who've stood up against the man made horrors that dominate
the world. That's the tagline, your weekly reminder that we
come from an infinitely long legacy of rebels and freethinkers
that stoo up against the man made horrors that dominate
(00:23):
the world. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week
is another solo episode. I like doing these sometimes because
it lets me be a little bit more free form
in how I like tell these stories. But I'm not
really doing this alone. Even though this is a solo episode.
Even though I'm the only voice you hear, this podcast
(00:44):
exists because of all the help I get, such as
from my producer Sophie and my audio engineer Eva hi Eva.
And the theme music was written for us by Unwoman.
For the past couple months, I've been focusing on movements
that fed into or were heart of the alter globalization
movement that challenged and changed the nature of economic power
(01:07):
in the world at the turn of the millennium. I've
talked a lot about exactly what this is, like, what
neoliberalism is, why people were against it, and how these
protests fundamentally changed the sort of neoliberal consensus, the idea
that every country would want to run along these lines
where predatory loans are used to strip those countries of
(01:30):
their natural resources and things like that. And we call
it the alter globalization movement. At the time, the media
called it the anti globalization movement, and frankly, so did
most of its participants. And that was always an awkward terminology,
and I've heard people give it a lot of different
ideas of a more accurate way to talk about it.
(01:52):
The long form version of it was that we were
the anti corporate globalization movement. We were anti the idea
of creating instead of internationalism that brings people together across nations,
this idea that only corporations can become international right, that
money can move freely across borders and not people. And
(02:15):
so people started conceptualizing it as the alter globalization movement
instead crime thing who will be citing heavily throughout today's
piece makes the argument that it was actually just the
anti capitalist movement. And it's funny to look back at
this like twenty five years later, because at the time
in the West, it was almost impossible to just bluntly
(02:38):
criticize capitalism. The shadow of the Cold War was still
very much upon us, right, and like the idea that
sort of a regular person in this country in the
United States would be critical of capitalism by that name
was sort of unheard of. And so I think that's
(02:58):
why it didn't get called just the anti capitalist movement,
because frankly, that is what it was. But I'll be
calling it the alter globalization movement herein because that's kind
of the one that people sort of picked to not
accidentally come across as like, well, for example, if someone
at the time talked about being anti globalization, we knew
what they meant. But if they talked about being anti globalism,
(03:20):
they're making anti Semitic dog whistles, and those are just
way too close to each other for anyone's comfort. Anyway,
the most famous single protest of the alter globalization movement
was its first protest. I mean, depending we're actually going
to talk about a proto protest today, but the first
big protest that people really knew about, at least in
(03:44):
the US, was the November nineteen ninety nine Battle of Seattle,
in which a loose coalition of scrappy activists from almost
every worthwhile social movement in the US and often the world,
came together to shut down the World Trade Organization's summit
in Seattle. And we did a whole two parter about
those protests, and we've covered some of the movements and
(04:04):
organizations that fed into those protests. We talk about the
easy ln the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, whose grassroots indigenous
democracy and embracive direct action really set the tone for
the protests in the modern era. We talked about how
they formed PGA People's Global Action, which was a coalition
of different grassroots groups throughout the world and especially from
(04:27):
the global self. That are the people who really called
for the alter globalization movement and really laid the framework
about how it would be a movement of movements, people
fighting for a world in which many worlds are possible,
making us decisions through bottom up and decentralized means. And
we can trace a lot of that very directly to
(04:48):
the Zapatistas of Chiapas and their infusion of indigenous ideas
of decision making into traditional leftism, so you can go
back and listen to that. We've also talked about stream
theater and the Black Bloc, about street medics and legal observers.
Last week we talked about indie media who was there
to make sure the story got out. But now we're
(05:09):
going to talk about what the movement did besides the
one big protest in Seattle. I think on some level,
I've been procrastinating by talking about all of these various
pieces of the story, because this story itself is one
of the main things I've wanted to talk about since
I started this show. I mean, it's the movement that
got me into radical politics, right, and so I want
(05:32):
to do it right and I probably won't, but you know,
I'm gonna do the best I can, and I'm gonna
give you my sources in the show notes. Although some
of the sources was I was there and they shot
at me with things and it was frustrating. I don't
want to do the stolen valor thing. However, I was
not at most of the earlier parts of this movement
(05:52):
and its protests. You'll be able to tell. I'll interject
myself into the story. I can't help it. It is
really important to understand the alter globalization movement as a
movement of movements and not as a single piece. Its
strength was its own ideological, strategic, and tactical pluralism. During
that movement, I spent plenty of time in huge spokes
(06:13):
council meetings where all sorts of different people worked through
their differences and figured out strategies that played to everyone's strengths.
Those meetings were sometimes endless, and they were sometimes fruitless,
and sometimes we had to stop because something was happening
with the police outside. But by and large they gave
us the solidarity and the understanding of one another that
we needed to go out and get in trouble together.
(06:37):
It was endless meetings and its resultant solidarity that meant
when I was arrested along seven hundred people in DC
and hogtied overnight in a gymnasium at a police training facility,
I and almost everyone else were eventually released without charges
because we refused to let them single people out. But
that's getting ahead of myself. The most visible part of
(06:59):
the alter globalisation movement were the summit protests. The forces
of capitalism would call for a big old summit of
the world leaders somewhere, and the movement of movements would
call for counter protests to shut those summits down or
at least raise the cost of doing business so high
that fewer cities wanted to host summits and more people
were aware of what capitalists were doing behind closed doors.
(07:22):
This was the era of summit hopping, a phrase often
thrown around pejoratively, basically people hopping from trade meeting summit
to trade meeting summit. People like myself would go from
protest to protest wherever we could, many of us hitchhiking
and riding freight trains, others organizing caravans. Folks would even
(07:42):
walk from city to city, sometimes as a way to
draw attention to what was happening. There was a whole
informal network of us, and I made friends in one
city I'd see a year later on the other side
of the country. Some people went from country to country too,
though personally I didn't have the resources for that. But
these summit protests themselves, they weren't the movement. I want
(08:06):
to quote a write up from Crime Think that the
summits were quote mushrooms emerging from a myceelial network. The
network itself was comprised of a variety of participatory, anti
colonial and countercultural spaces and movements spread all across the world.
Indigenous revolts like the e ZLN in Mexico, Occupation movements
(08:27):
like the Movemento Semptera, the Landless Workers movement which I'll
cover at some point, the MST it's often called, which
was in Brazil, back to the quote, and the network
of squatted social centers around Europe, movements of agricultural workers
from the Indian some continent to South Korea. Ecological movements
like Earth First, grassroots unions like the Industrial Workers of
(08:50):
the World, do it Yourself, underground music mail us like
the rave and punk scenes end quote. And it really
was all of those things and more. And when people
try and sum it up as one thing, they fail.
But do you know what can be summed up really quickly, ads,
they're very good at putting their pitch together tightly and
(09:13):
almost entertainingly to try to hold your attention, for example.
And we're back. So the Summit protests were the fruit
in the way that mushrooms are the fruit of my
celial networks, and the things that undergirded the movement the
(09:33):
individual organizations and movements that came together for this larger movement.
It's not a coincidence that so many of them were
about taking physical space and holding it autonomously. You've got
the Zapatistas that we've talked about extensively, right, and the
short version is that they took held and still hold
a lot of the jungle of the Mexican state of
(09:54):
Chiappas as autonomous territory despite officially being part of Mexico.
A lot of the movements that came out of Europe
were similarly oriented around physical space. We haven't talked about
it a ton yet, but the European parts of the
proto alt globalization movement they grew out of these autonomous
social centers that tried in their way to live outside
(10:16):
the logic of state and capitalism. We've talked a little
bit about this when we talked about a Narco Punk
and the episodes about Crass. We talked about how the
money that they made selling records opened the first anarchist
social center in London, and that in the seventies and
eighties there was this large autonomist movement. Anarchists and autonomists
(10:40):
worked to open all of these social centers and squats
and stuff all around mainland Europe. And if you want
to hear us talk about that, listen to our Black
Bloc episodes. And I'm using our well, I guess I
could include Sophie and my other producers. It's not the
royal we I'm referring to the entire court anyway. The
(11:00):
protests that the European anarchists and autonomous built up were
called things like Reclaim the Streets or the Carnival against Capitalism,
which we'll talk about in a minute, which were attempts
to basically retake public space away from capitalism and put
it back in the hands of people and to hold
that space autonomously. In the US, punks were coming out
(11:23):
of a movement that retook their own social scenes away
from the fascists who had infiltrated them. And it's not
quite as much about like the direct holding of space,
but basically there was this whole thing. You can listen
to our episode about the ar anti racist action to
hear about how countercultural folks and specifically punks in the
eighties and the US basically went into like a kind
(11:43):
of small scale war against fascists within countercultural spaces and
came out on top. And then also primarily in the US,
but also in England and some other places, Earth First
and environmentalists were used to setting up these forest occupations
and free states where they would shut down logging roads
for months or longer and live these free lives and
(12:05):
resistance to the ecological destruction demanded by capitalism. We've talked
about that a little bit. This isn't just the Table
of Contents episode where I talk about other episodes, but
we talked about that a little bit in I think
the Judy Barry episodes just about a woman who is
bombed by almost certainly the FBI for trying to organize
hippies and loggers on the same side and bringing labor
(12:28):
into environmentalism. The state or somebody sure couldn't handle that,
and they surecar bomber. So this is the spirit people
are bringing into the ultra globalization movement. They're coming from
movements that are like scrappier and smaller, but are like
living intensely and doing intense things and getting targeted with
(12:49):
violence for it, and are about taking up space. And
there's a very countercultural vibe to it. Whether it's hippies
or punks or all kinds of other types of folks.
It is a carnival air. A defining chant of the
time was whose streets are streets? About this idea that
we are going to take back this public space. It's
(13:12):
strange to look back on the sort of joy and carnivolishness,
carnivality of the alter Globalization movement. On one hand, this
like fun aspect was a powerful draw and it brought
a ton of people out, especially young people, into the movement.
Things were serious and maybe even dire, but people dressed
(13:33):
up like clowns and cheerleaders to out maneuver police and
try to shut cities down. We still haven't talked about
the whole radical cheerleader movement and these like clown blocks
of people pranking the police and it's cool. It's interesting.
I'm going to quote from crimethink again because frankly, I
think they have some of the best write ups about
this time and movement that I've found. Here is them
(13:55):
talking about to Reclaim the Streets. Protest in nineteen ninety
six in England is one of the movements that's the
proto alter globalization movement, and this is part of the
fight against the expansion of the roads system in England
that was destroying forests. Quote the sight of thousands of
people running onto an empty motorway shut off by large
(14:16):
tripods is an image that stays with you. Pulling out
of the quote for a second. Tripods in this context,
I mean like literal tripods, very large tripods. It'd be
like thirty feet tall that people lock themselves to the
top of and sometimes also the bottom of, making it
hard for the police to like move these tripods, and
therefore vehicles can't move through the area. Okay, back to
(14:37):
the quote, thirty foot pantomime dames glided through the party,
throwing confetti. Food stalls gave away free stew and sandwiches.
Graffiti artists added color to the tarmac. Poets ranted from
the railings, acoustic bands played, and strolling players performed. Some
(14:57):
seven thousand turned up the height of festivities. Beneath the
tall panto dame figures dressed in huge farthing Gale Marie
antoinette skirts. People were at work with jackhammers, hacking in
time to the techno to mask the sound from the
officers standing inches away, digging up the surface of the
Road until large craters littered the fast lane to plant
(15:21):
seedlings from the gardens smashed by the bulldozers at Claremont Road,
and so the image isn't clear. It's like literally, you know,
these giant people on hoop skirts, possibly built out of
the tripods, so it creates like kind of a tent underneath,
and people would go in with jackhammers and then jackhammer
in time to the techno. Just pretty fun. We don't
(15:42):
really do that festival thing anymore, at least nowhere that
I have been, not to the same degree. And part
of me thinks that we've lost something, but most of me,
honestly thinks we've kind of just adapted to the times.
I Am not going to sit on my rocking chair
on my porch. I did myself a rocking chair for
my birthday last year and say that the youth aren't
(16:04):
protesting right anymore, because the thing is, things are worse now.
The stakes were high at the time, but the stakes
were highest for the people in the global South, in
the countries that neoliberalism was stripping for resources. And while
alter globalization was a worldwide movement, most of its direct participants,
(16:24):
at least at these big summit protests that I'm describing
were in the colonial core where these summit meetings were happening,
the US, Canada, Europe. Some European and Western countries like
Greece suffered directly and extensively under neoliberal policies, but by
and large Western nations were the ones profiting off of
the exploitation, and things simply weren't as dire to many
(16:47):
of the movement's participants. But do you know what isn't dire. No,
what is dire is your need, your absolute burning need
to take advantage of the sweet, sweet deals offered to
you by the sponsors of this show. I say, as
if there's like ever deals, there's like almost never deals
(17:09):
in these ads. They're just ads. You can listen to
them or not. I don't care. Do whatever you want
and we're back. So myself, in the midst of all
of this, I was a middle class dropout. I joined
the movement because it felt like an ethical imperative and because, frankly,
it was more exciting than humdrum life in early Auts America.
(17:32):
A lot of the radical culture of the nineties, in
particular before nine to eleven, basically was built around the
idea that the problem with capitalism was that it was boring.
I'm oversimplifying things. People understood the way it was destroying
lives and all of these things, and people's lives were
being destroyed by it, but there was still this like,
aren't we all so bored? And a lot of the
(17:53):
participants in the alter globalization movement were throwing down because
fighting the cops on behalf of the developing world appears
to be an ethical and exciting way to live. And
that's just not our problem anymore. It's not what we're
dealing with. As much neoliberalism has transitioned to fascism and
more of the colonial core is also fucked, and more
(18:15):
of us are literally and less figuratively fighting for our lives,
not just fighting for our lives to have meaning and beauty,
but fighting for our lives to continue, fighting for the
ability for not just the next generation to live to
be old, but for ourselves as well. And again I
am oversimplifying here. There were absolutely people who were directly
(18:38):
fighting for their own lives and their families' lives during
the alter Globalization movement, and people died in that fight.
So I'm not trying to be like Ahaha, everything was
silly and lighthearted. It's something that I just like think
about a lot, right, because the thing that I've learned
over time is that things can always get worse, and
so things were really bad and now things are worse.
(19:01):
And so that's not to say that things weren't bad before,
just to say that things are worse now, and we're
going to have different attitudes about things. There's a real
beauty to when we manage a sort of carnival air,
and maybe that's something we should look to reclaim. But
I also understand why that's not the tone we've got
going on these days. That's all I'm saying. The specific
(19:22):
protest I'm going to talk about today before we talk
about a lot more of them, is I'm going to
use a proto alter globalization movement protest. It's not even
really proto. It's actually probably one of the first ones,
but it's like people talk about the movement kicking off
at the Battle of Seattle, and this is before then,
so therefore it's proto, and it has got the word
carnival right in its name. It also has anti capitalism
(19:46):
pretty directly said, and that's because it doesn't happen in
the US. It is the Carnival against Capitalism June eighteenth,
nineteen ninety nine, so before the Battle of Seattle. This
is when people shut down the financial district of London.
It gets called a carnival. It's in the name, as
we mentioned, but it's also a riot. A report back
(20:09):
a few days later on a list Serve put it bluntly,
quote the June eighteenth demo against the G eight summit
in the city of London was amazing. It was possibly
the best riot in London since the poll tax won.
The cops totally lost control of the situation and got
a good beating in Various businesses like McDonald's car show rooms, banks,
(20:31):
the Future Exchange were trashed. According to the press, four
cops were hospitalized. The city was also covered in anarchist graffiti.
Every time you were with a large mob, thinking this
is great, all these people, you turn the corner and
there be an even larger crowd there, creating mayhem. So
that's obviously an enthusiastic report about it being a riot.
(20:53):
What it doesn't mention is that another report I found
says that a total of six cops were hospitalized and
a total of forty protest were hospitalized. So it wasn't
just this like ha ha, we just won or I
don't know whatever. The story is always more complicated than
any one position on it, including my one position on it.
But having a carnival be a riot. The history of
(21:15):
carnivals and holidays and history, at least European history, is
the history of riots in public mayhem. In a strange way,
the crowd taking over the city and driving back the
cops is just about the most carnival thing you can do.
Historically speaking, the carnival against capitalism was time to happen
at the same time as the G eight, the Group
(21:37):
of Eight, which is basically an economic council of the
leaders of eight powerful wealthy nations. And it's not just
the eight richest nations, but rather the ones who are
willing to work together in this context, and specifically people
with like certain kinds of power. Russia was added to
the G eight nineteen ninety seven. I've always assumed it
wasn't because they were wealthy, because they weren't, but because
(21:59):
they had a nuclear stockpile. Later they did get kicked
out of the G eight in twenty fourteen when they
annex Crimea. So the Gaight gets together to plan how
the world is going to work economically, which is not
very democratic of them. So people protest the G eight
and I think that is a fair thing to do.
So the ga was meeting. I have read a couple
(22:21):
different reportbacks about where but I'm going to go with Birmingham,
England and forty different countries through protests at the same
time against the G eight organized by People's Global Action,
which was that network we were talking about that came
together from the Zapatistas. You can't just call for big
demonstration and expected to accomplish anything. You've got to do outreach.
(22:42):
You've got to talk to people about your goals and
your tactics. And so organizers of the carnival put together
a bunch of pamphlets and shit did a ton of
outreach and they talked about their goals and their hopes.
They also made one pamphlet called Squaring Up the Square Mile,
which was basically a map and description of all the
financial institutions in London and what they did with the
(23:03):
sort of inference that one could make that this is
a map of targets that you could go and disrupt.
When protesters met up in the morning, organizers handed out
four different colors of masks so that people could break
into four different marches. It is much easier for the
police to contain one big protest march than lots of
(23:25):
small ones, and then a fifth march sprung up spontaneously.
Hundreds of bicyclists formed a critical mass, as like a
sixth column, and critical mass was a popular style of
bike protest where you just get a lot of bicyclists together.
A lot of cities held regular critical mass protests to
choke up city streets in order to demand better bicycle infrastructure,
(23:47):
basically saying, like you say that, as bicyclists, we have
to use the road, Okay, we're going to use the road.
Oh what happens when we all use the road? Don't
you sure wish we had bike lanes? But the same
tactic could be used other demonstrations. The marches all came
together on the Futures Exchange, which I think is their
stock market. I just assume, and then forgot to look
(24:08):
it up. And there it got all carnival esque by
smashing surveillance cameras and opening fire hydrants and letting DJs
and punk bands perform. Most accounts I've read focus on
how the police attacked with tear gas and horse mounted cops,
and that one woman was run over by a police
van which broke her leg. The first hand account that
(24:29):
I read, though, cheered on how the protesters fought back
or maybe even initiated the violence. I honestly couldn't tell
you Hans Solo did he shoot first? I don't know.
This first hand account talks about how the brew crew
of drunk punks basically pelted the cops with beer bottles,
and that the police were forced to hide in their
(24:49):
vehicles while people danced atop the police fans and ripped
off the police bumpers and license plates. And after that
the police retreated, and theoretically it was in this retreat
that they ran over this person's leg. But I will
say that if you've ever seen the police retreat, it
is not something that you'll forget. According to one right
(25:11):
wing report I found, there were at least sixteen arrests,
and those arrests were called The people were called terrorists
by the Lord Mayor of London. As if London didn't
already sound like a fake place, they have a Lord mayor.
Apparently forty six people total were hospitalized from the fighting,
including six police officers. Then, after JA eighteen, as it's called,
(25:34):
processors at the time had this annoying habit of naming
protests a month initial and then a number like J
twenty and N thirty and shit like that, which not
only makes them hard to keep track of for people
who aren't in the in crowd because they're like nonsensical.
No one wants to remember a string of numbers and
letters as a way to actually remember what something means,
(25:55):
but also it makes them like grand, overly important events,
like almost like a bingo card, like oh were you
at J eighteen? Like oh, you weren't at A sixteen?
Like oh, I thought you were cool. This is me
being snotty about it. After Jay eighteen, you have N thirty.
November thirtieth, nineteen ninety nine the Battle of Seattle, which
(26:19):
again I've covered at length, but the short version is
that protesters converged in Seattle with puppets and lock boxes.
Lock Boxes are like things to lock yourself to to
make it harder for the police to move you. This
could be a barrel of cement with like a tube
in the middle that you can reach into and clip
onto something. It could be just like a steel tube
wrapped in duct tape, so it gums up the cutting
(26:40):
wheels of the tools that they try to use to
get you out. There's all kinds of ways that people
do this. People showed up in Seattle with puppets and
lock boxes and street medics and livestream video and masks,
and I want to reiterate puppets again, because there were
so many puppets. People converged and managed to shut down
the World Trade Organization meeting despite or because of an
intense police response. But people look to Seattle as the
(27:05):
high point, and that's a mistake. It was certainly the
most tactically effective demonstration of the movement as best as
I can tell, but that's because the police were caught
off guard. There were like four hundred cops trying to
deal with tens of thousands of protesters who were there
prepared for direct action these days, and pretty shortly after Seattle,
(27:26):
the state regularly marshals tens of thousands of police for
every major demonstration, and out maneuvering them or out fighting
them or whatever just looks really different. And we can't
expect the same things to work over and over again.
So the police got their shit together after that, but
(27:47):
people kept fighting, and even if we lost tactically a
bit more often some of the larger strategic goals, we
managed to win something that I talk about a lot
actually on a recent substack called revolutions are built on failure,
which is the idea that the way we win is
we fight more than them, and we want it more,
(28:10):
and often just by fighting, we win our strategic goals
even if we lose tactically in the streets. This isn't
to say we should just fight for the fun of
it and lose tactically or whatever. We should try to win,
but we just need to remember that our win conditions
are different than theirs. And how people kept fighting and
(28:32):
what they did at A sixteen and some other demonstrations
we are going to talk about on Wednesday, But in
the meantime, I don't know what the hell to plug.
I guess my substack, right. I wrote a recent essay
called Revolutions are Built on Failure, where I talk about
exactly this concept at greater length, And don't worry, you know,
(28:53):
I bringing the TV show and or into it also,
I guess while I'm plugging things like and Or. I
don't know when it's going to come out, but at
some point. There's another podcast called The Spectacle that's an
anarchistic view of pop culture specifically, I think the tagline
is a podcast for people who love movies and hate cops.
(29:14):
And I am on it with some other people in
the near future. I'm not the host of it, but
I'm guesting on it. I recorded earlier this week about
and Or season two, and so you can listen to
that at some point. But in the meantime, you can
listen to The Spectacle. It's a good show. You should
listen to it. All right, We'll see you all Wednesday.
(29:36):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
wool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media.
Visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com, or check us out
on her radio app I'm a Podcast, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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